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Sighing, she ducked into a small café situated between the struggling produce market and a fish vendor.

She chose it not because the food was good or plentiful – nothing was plentiful these days unless the shopkeeper had forged an arrangement with the Nazis – but because it was well-suited for her purpose.

Pulling off her cap, she stuffed it into a pocket, then wriggled out of her coat and found a place for it high on the crowded coat rack.

She chose a small table near the kitchen and looked up at the young man waiting to take her order.

He was tall, slim, and fresh-faced, not much older than she, Evi guessed.

He set a glass of water in front of her and smiled in a way that told her he could be interested in more than what she wanted for lunch .

At twenty-four, Zoe knew she was pretty.

She was also one of the youngest veterinarians in Haarlem, if not in all the Netherlands, having graduated from high school at sixteen and finished her veterinary studies just before the rowdy student protests against the Nazi invasion had triggered university shutdowns.

She loved her work, and her work for the Resistance, but it left little time for a social life.

She turned her attention to the paper menu, crossed through with black marker where choices were no longer available.

“I will have a herring sandwich on pumpernickel bread,” she said. “With butter if you have it,” she said. “And coffee.”

The young man looked as though she had given him a gift. “Straightaway, mademoiselle.”

Zoe smiled at his use of the French.

She kept her head down when her food arrived, and ate the sandwich quickly, leaving her guilders on the table before the waiter appeared with the check.

Making her way back to the coat rack, she stood with her back to the café’s diners and fussed about with her left hand as if to adjust the scarf around her neck. All the while, her right hand moved quickly from pocket to pocket among the jumble of outerwear on the rack.

She was stuffing two small leather cases into the pocket of her coat when she heard the call from behind.

“Mademoiselle!”

She felt the blood drain from her face.

“Your earring!” the server called, coming up behind her. “It was on the floor beneath your table.”

Zoe closed her eyes and wrapped her coat close around her. She was not wearing earrings.

“Not mine, I fear,” she turned to face the waiter, touching her naked earlobe. “No earrings today. It must belong to someone else. But thank you,” she managed to smile.

He looked deflated. “Aah…yes, I see…Well…please do come in again.”

On the street outside, perspiring in the cold, she took a deep gulp of air and fingered the leather cases in her pocket. It was what she liked least, of all the duties she had taken on for the Resistance, snooping through other people’s pockets.

It was stealing, really, she knew it was stealing, there was no other word for it. But it was necessary, seizing identification papers that could be altered for Jews and other enemies of the Reich who were forced to run for their lives.

Still, she tried to even her breathing and kept her head down as she walked. Random German checkpoints could turn up anywhere, and SS observers might decide to stop you for no reason at all.

...

In her own small office, Zoe closed the door and slipped the two leather cases out of her coat pocket.

One, she saw, contained a Swiss passport in the name of Josef Huber, born January, 1918 in Geneva.

The other held a Dutch ID card in the name of Johanna Stoepker, born 1909 in Amsterdam.

Altered and fitted with the photos of desperate escapees, they might help to save two lives.

Zoe hated that she needed to do this. But she hated the Nazis more, and the identification papers, she knew, could be replaced without too much fuss by their rightful owners.

She placed the cases in the bottom of her handbag beneath a jumble of keys, make-up, and other paraphernalia, intending to pass them on to Daan Mulder when he returned. She hung the bag and her coat on a peg behind the door, and put her white coat on over her dress.

Straightening, she opened the door.

MILA

Mila Brouwer whirled once before the tailor shop’s three-sided mirror, watched the taffeta skirts of the lavender dinner dress dance against her legs.

“Very good, Gita” she said. “A quick press at the hemline and the dress will be perfect. I can come back for it if you like. ”

“No need , Missen , we will deliver it to your home by five this afternoon.”

“Thank you.”

Mila ran a hand over the smooth bodice with its deep vee-neckline, then slipped out of the dress and handed it to the dressmaker.

Mother will love it, she thought, slipping back into her navy wool – and father will not care how much he paid for it – not so long as she remained a lovely centerpiece for his visiting Nazi dinner guests.

She stepped into her shoes, grabbed up her handbag, and stepped out into the street, a bell tinkling overhead as she peered up and down the cobblestoned street.

She headed north past the white-spired church and veered east through the empty playground, moving with purpose to avoid the roving eye of some German soldier just off duty.

Bad enough she would have to put on the lavender dress and flirt with SS officers at her father’s dinner table this evening.

She had no wish to engage with one of them now.

At the far end of the street sat the old, red brick Dans Hal, once the heart of the city’s social agenda. She did not come here often. Her work for the Resistance was accomplished by other means. But she stepped inside now, closing the door behind her, and surveyed the spacious front room.

Half a dozen children milled about, playing hide and seek among the chairs. At the far end of the room, she saw the girl she was looking for – Evi Strobel, bent over a table with her mother, Lotte, cutting something out of a roll of white paper.

The Dans Hal, and the low-key dans parties held there each Saturday evening, she knew, was one of the underground’s more ingenious ploys.

So long as they kept up the pretense, changed the décor from time to time, and turned out to dance in reasonable numbers, it was an invention the Germans largely passed over as a harmless Dutch custom that kept the local population in check.

How shocked – and how furious they would be to know that right in this hall, under their ugly noses, in a small room blocked off behind the strings of lights and the cut-out paper stars, were the radios and typewriters and mimeograph machines at the heart of the local Resistance .

In another corner, several people Mila did not know, were stringing garlands of small, white Christmas tree lights, although the Yuletide holiday was more than a month away.

“Mila!” a voice called. “Over here.”

Glancing back at the Strobels, she stepped toward the voice, recognized her father’s wine and whiskey vendor.

“It’s good to see you, Mila,” Finn Stoepker said. “This is my wife, Hanna. Hanna, this is Mila Brouwer”

The woman was spreading a cloth across a table. She looked up and waved. “It’s good to meet you, Mila. Thank you.”

Mila was not sure what the thank-you was for. She hoped it was for her father’s patronage, which was liberal, because anything else she did in support of the Resistance was not common knowledge. At least she hoped it was not.

She smiled. “You are most welcome….It looks as though you are preparing for another party.”

“On Saturday evening,” Hanna nodded. “Perhaps you will join us.”

“I will do my best,” Mila nodded, although she knew, even if Hanna did not, that her presence at her father’s table would be far more valuable in the end.

Daan Mulder, the owner of the pet kliniek and second in command of the local Resistance, hailed her as she turned.

“We rarely see you here, Mila,” he said. He put a hand over his heart. “But your presence is deeply felt. Thank you.”

At least she knew what Daan’s thank you was for. She returned the gesture. “No need, Daan. I only wish communications were more consistent.”

“We are lucky to have what we’ve cobbled together,” he said. “At least we are certain that what we do have is secure – and we are working to improve things all the time.”

She held his gaze. “My father is hosting dinner guests tonight.”

“Ah,” Daan’s smile was genuine. “Let us hope the evening is productive. ”

Mila nodded, moving toward the far table where the Strobels bent over their craft. Jars of paint and glue littered the table. Mila had seen Evi here on one of her rare visits – had observed the girl’s confident gestures, the graceful way she held herself, in spite of her youth.

Hallo, Lotte,” she said.

The girl’s mother looked up. “Mila, hallo!”

“I understand your cousin Johann is visiting friends in Belgium,” Mila fingered a painted paper cut-out. What a world , she thought, when even here in the Dans Hal, information was mostly conveyed in a sort of code, lest it find its way to hostile ears.

“But it appears,” she went on, “that his young friend was unable to join him.”

Lotte met her gaze, and Mila knew she understood. An escapee Lotte had recently harbored in the hold of her barge was safe past the Belgium border. But his daughter, a frail university student, had not survived the harrowing last leg of the journey.

Lotte closed her eyes.

“We do what we can,” Mila paused and turned her attention. “This is your daughter, Evi, yes?”

The girl looked up. “Hallo.”

“How old are you, Evi?

“Sixteen. Seventeen in February.”

Mila glanced at her schoolgirl attire. “Yes, I thought as much.”

The girl followed her gaze, brushed at her schoolgirl skirt. “I dress like this and put my hair in pigtails so that I look younger when I am – running errands,” she said. “I mostly manage to escape the notice of the Germans.”

“Ah, clever.” Mila pondered. “You’re a brave girl, Evi.”