Free Tamar by Mal Peet Page A

only audience I have these days.”
    “No, no,” Dart said, a little too earnestly. “I enjoyed it too. You’re very good, Mr. Grotius. You’ve got the voice perfectly.”
    “Thank you. Call me Pieter, please. And time is passing, yes. Come.”
    Trixie lifted the transceiver from the trailer, then they all filed back into the shop and up a flight of dark and narrow stairs. The walls of the landing were covered in masks from Japan, Africa, Italy, Java. They leered and grimaced at the passersby. Pieter Grotius led the procession into the parlour, where his wife was standing, waiting to greet them.
    Bibi Grotius was a good six inches taller than her husband, with a heavy upper body but slender legs, so that she seemed to have been put together from mismatching parts. Her hair was a smoky blond with no traces of grey. A pair of spectacles hung from a cord around her neck, and Dart wondered how good her eyesight was. She was barefoot. Her left leg below the knee was wrapped in bandages. After she had kissed Rosa and Trixie, she stood in front of Dart and looked at him seriously. He had the strange feeling that he was being assessed, like someone auditioning for a part in a play. He put his bag down on the floor and held out his hand. Bibi ignored it. She placed her hands on his shoulders and kissed him on both cheeks; then, still inspecting him, she said, “Well, we must be grateful they’ve sent us a handsome one, at least.”
    To hide his embarrassment, Dart looked around the room. The walls were almost entirely covered with framed posters, most of them featuring a blue crescent moon with a laughing face. He saw the names of cities: Moscow, Chicago, Berlin, Venice.
    The stairway to the attic was even narrower than the previous one — not much more than a ladder. An oil lamp with a glass chimney sat on the bottom tread, and Pieter lit it and adjusted the flame. Holding the lamp, his wild white hair lit up, he looked to Dart like some creature from a dark fairy tale.
    The walls of the attic sloped steeply, giving the room the shape of a long tent. There was no daylight; the lamp illuminated an infinite jumble of stuff: suitcases, tea chests, bundles of paper, boxes filled with books, empty picture frames, theatrical costumes.
    “I’ve tidied the place up a bit,” Pieter Grotius said. He carried the lamp deeper into the chaos. “Here, see, I’ve made a workplace for you.”
    He had shoved two tea chests apart and bridged them with a door taken from a wardrobe, making a rough desk. The chair had a woven seat and had once been painted bright yellow; it would have looked at home in some sunlit farmhouse bedroom. Dart went to the shuttered window, following a thin shaft of sun in which dust swam. It came from a small peephole in the wood; he had to stoop to put his eye to it. He had a circular view down onto the square. On the far side, Trixie stood in a shop doorway talking to an older woman wearing a headscarf. Then two German soldiers on bicycles crossed his line of vision, and he shrank back from the hole automatically.
    He rubbed his hands together in a businesslike way, forcing a grin. “Excellent, Pieter,” he said.
    “It will do?”
    “Of course.” Dart peered around. “Er, one thing, though. My power supply?”
    “Ah, yes,” Pieter said. “It nearly broke my back, carrying those damned things up. Over here, next to the desk.”
    There were two car batteries inside a cardboard box under a layer of theatre programmes. “I know someone who can recharge them, no questions asked.”
    “Excellent.”
    Dart sat on the yellow chair and unlocked the suitcase. Grotius put the lamp down but made no move to leave. Dart made a show of checking his watch. “Thank you, Pieter. I’d better get on with it.”
    Grotius said, “How scared are you, Ernst?”
    Dart busied himself, fussing with the Morse key, the headphones, the cables. “Pardon?”
    “I was wondering how scared you are. I ask only because I am very