The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam (15 page)

I knocked for a third time and the shouting drew nearer. It
seemed to become more vehement the closer it got, as though the
person doing the shouting was approaching very slowly and their
irritation was increasing with each new step. Before long, the
voice was coming from just the other side of the door and, at last,
I heard the deadlock snick back and then a face with the potential
to knock me clean off my feet appeared in the gap between door and
frame.

The thing is, corning completely clean here, sometimes in my
novels I’ve based characters on people I’ve met in real life. I can
even think of at least two occasions when I’ve lifted entire
physical descriptions and personalities from acquaintances I’ve
made. More often, though, my characters are an amalgam of two or
more people. An older relative perhaps, mixed with a dash of a
train conductor from the previous day and finished off with a
television newsreader. Other times, I’ve based physical
descriptions on a person from a magazine and invested them with
character traits from a historical figure I’ve read about, or
afflicted them with an illness I’ve been researching. But never
before had I been confronted with the real-life incarnation of a
character who’d only ever previously existed in the world of my
imagination. For incredible as it seemed, stood before me now was
the very image of Arthur the butler, and the likeness was so
striking that I can do no better in describing him than by
repeating the very first lines devoted to him in the pages of my
book.

The old man had skin that had worked hard for its
living. It was shrivelled and puckered and folded into fine lines
all across his forehead and at the corners of his eyes. Where it
was stretched, across the bridge of his nose for example, it looked
gossamer thin, while at his neck it had braided itself together
into what looked like frayed lengths of old string. The hair on his
head was thinning and as white and downy as pillow feathers, and on
either side of his head two sprigs of it poked out of his
over-sized ears like the pads of cotton wool you used to find in
pill jar lids. His eyes were grey and watery, like pebbles on a
seashore, and he seemed to look clean through me with them, almost
as if he was blind. His shoulders were rounded and his back bowed
and he walked with the aid of a dark wooden cane. Hanging from his
bony frame was a black butler’s suit, finished off with a white
shirt that was yellowing at the collar and a dickie bow that had
probably last been tied at about the time the Titanic went
down.

So okay, the man who faced me wasn’t wearing a butler’s outfit,
but in every other way the similarity was enough to make me jump.
Oddly enough, he did the same thing, and then he clutched at his
heart with the hand that was holding his walking stick. He steadied
himself against the door frame, lips opening and closing
wordlessly, like those of a beached fish. Then he looked up at me
and shook his head ruefully, his teeth clenched together and eyes
glowering out. All at once, he began yammering away in
confrontational Dutch once more.

“Hang on,” I said, holding up my hands. “I’m English, I’m
afraid. And I didn’t mean to startle you.”

He paused, mid-tirade, then switched to words I could
understand.

“Who are you?” he asked, eyes narrowing.

“My name’s Charlie Howard. Are you Mr. Van Zandt? I’d like to
talk with you, if so.”

“You do not have an appointment?”

“No.”

“Then you must leave. This was a mistake. I thought you were my
housekeeper. I thought she had forgotten her keys.”

“She just left.”

“Then she makes you a good example.”

He started to swing the door closed. Before I could think better
of it, I stuck my foot in the jamb and pressed back against the
door with my palm. Alarm flashed in his eyes. His cheeks trembled.
For a moment, I was pretty sure he thought I was going to attack
him.

“I just want to talk,” I said. “Please. It’s important.”

He shook his head wilfully and pushed against the door again. He
was a strong old goat and if I hadn’t had my foot stuck in the way
he would have caught me out. As it happened, the door bounced back
off of my shoe.

“Move your foot,” he told me, shoulders quaking.

“It won’t take more than a few moments.”

“I will call the police.”

“Listen, it’s about Michael Park.”

The name carried impact. All of a sudden, the force he was
exerting against the door began to ease. He glanced up with a
certain wariness and I knew then what it was I needed to say.

“He’s dead, Mr. Van Zandt. That’s what I came here to tell
you.”

∨
The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam
∧

N
iels Van Zandt
directed me into what looked to be his library. There were floor to
ceiling shelves of books on every wall, many of them leather bound,
almost fake looking, like those dumb book-shaped VHS cassette
holders from the eighties. It was always possible he’d bought the
entire collection just to fill the room and make himself appear
intellectual but I didn’t think so. I got the impression this was a
room where he spent a great deal of his time. The large reading
table over by the front window was covered in piles of books that
had been removed from the shelves, for instance, and several note
pads and a typewriter were positioned among them. If what
Rutherford had said about Van Zandt being a homebody was true, this
was how he occupied himself.

I guess it didn’t hurt that he had a drinks cabinet too and
while he ushered me into a fabric armchair positioned just away
from the imposing central fireplace, he set about fixing us both a
bourbon. He didn’t ask me if bourbon was something I drank – it was
an assumption he made, like trusting me that Michael really was
dead. The news had certainly affected him and I was fairly sure the
palsied tremble in his hand as he grappled with the ice tongs was
not simply because of his age.

“How did he die?” he asked, casting me a hawklike glare as he
held a couple of ice cubes above one of the glasses.

“He was killed,” I said. “Beaten.”

Van Zandt’s brows hitched up, though not in surprise. It was
more as if he was acknowledging that another of his assumptions had
been confirmed.

“This was in prison?”

“No,” I said. “Amsterdam. He was released just over a week
ago.”

Van Zandt dropped the ice cubes into the glass and pursed his
lips.

“I was not told.”

“By the police? That doesn’t surprise me. They don’t seem as
switched on as they might be.”

“Most of them are fools. Have they caught his killer?”

“Not yet.”

“Do they know who it is?”

“You’re asking the wrong person.”

Van Zandt limped over to me with the aid of his cane and handed
me my drink. I nursed it for a time, reluctant to take a sip in
case the burn was more than I could handle. Spirits are not my
thing. Beer, yes. Wine on the right occasion. But whiskey? Bourbon?
I’d never developed the taste for it. I could drink the stuff,
sure, but I had yet to learn to appreciate it.

Very carefully, Van Zandt settled himself in a chair across from
my own and then he reached to the side and grabbed for a fresh log
to toss onto the fire. The lit coal in the grate fizzed with the
impact and a few embers spiralled up into the chimney. He leaned
back in his chair and sipped from his glass.

“You’re probably wondering why I’m here,” I said.

He looked at me blankly, the flames from the fire catching the
light in his drink.

“The truth is I’m a writer,” I went on. “Michael Park wanted to
hire me.”

“Hire you?”

“To write a kind of memoir about him. There’s a market for that
sort of thing nowadays. True crime is a big seller in Europe and
the States. He wanted me to tell his story.”

Van Zandt lowered his drink to his lap and tilted his head on
one side, his stony eyes narrowing.

“It is your habit to write books for murderers?”

“Well, there’s the thing,” I said. “He claimed he was
innocent.”

Van Zandt laughed, but not in a genuine way. It was a showy kind
of laugh, more like a bark really. He wanted me to know how
perverse he found what I’d just said, as if I’d just uttered one of
the oldest and most widely known lies in the universe.

“Innocent,” he said, as though the word was doused in vinegar.
“He was a killer.”

“With respect Sir, I didn’t get that impression.”

“But of course,” he said, waving his free hand. “He was a thief,
yes? A liar. He shot one of our guards. And for what? A few cheap
diamonds? The drink you hold in your hands is worth more. This
glass is worth more.”

I took a mouthful of the bourbon. It sounded like good stuff and
if I was ever to educate my palette, I figured I might as well
start at the top. It stung, like a hundred pin-pricks on my tongue.
I swallowed cautiously and stifled a cough.

“There was talk,” I said, hoarsely, “speculation that he got
more than a few cheap jewels.”

“It is not so,” Van Zandt said, stiffening his shoulders. “If he
told you this it is just another lie.”

“Actually, I read it in the papers. After he was attacked. I was
intrigued, you see.”

“Journalists,” Van Zandt said, with more pantomime distaste.

“It was in a number of papers.”

“And?”

“And if the speculation was false, I thought maybe you could
tell me the truth.”

“You are still writing your book?” he asked, brow raised.

“I’m thinking of it,” I told him. “And the reality is I can go
about it in two ways. I can write with all the facts to hand, or I
can go on what I know right now. It might not be accurate, but I
can only work with what I have.”

Something flickered in Van Zandt’s eyes. A brief smile played
about his lips.

“You appeal to my thirst for truth?”

“To your love of books,” I said, gesturing around me. “To the
written word.”

“Ha. This book of yours will not be Shakespeare, I am
thinking.”

I shrugged. “Granted, it’ll have to be a little more accessible
to the modern reader.”

“It will be trash.”

“It could be. Without your help.”

Van Zandt drained some more of his bourbon, his withered throat
working overtime as he swallowed. When he refocused on me, there
was something new in his eyes. It looked like mirth, as though I
was amusing him greatly. He had the air of a predator toying with
some hapless prey.

“It is not Van Zandt company policy to discuss security matters.
I know this, because I was the director of security.”

“There’s no longer a Van Zandt company. No longer a policy.”

He turned that one over, debating where to go next. The thing
was, I could tell he wanted to talk about it. That’s the problem
with things that should be left unsaid – it’s always so tempting to
say them.

“Put the diamonds aside,” I tried. “Leave all that to
speculation. What I’m interested in is the mechanics of what
happened on the night Robert Wolkers was killed. That’s what my
readers will want to know. How the raid went down.”

“And how the killing happened?”

“Perhaps. But why don’t we start with the simple stuff. There’s
no harm in that, surely? Having met you now, I’m certain you would
have overseen a sophisticated security system. Would you describe
it for me?”

I reached inside my coat pocket and removed a spiral-bound
notepad and a pen. Van Zandt eyed my props carefully, sucking on
his cheeks.

“We had the best security system in Amsterdam,” he declared.

“I don’t doubt it.”

“It was a point of principle to me. I made sure that we invested
heavily. This is why we had so few…incidents.”

“I understand. But how did it work? You had a safe or something
similar?”

Van Zandt bobbed his head non-committaly, as if I was working
along the right lines but not quite there yet.

“A strong room?”

He smiled and rattled the ice in his glass.

“I commissioned it myself,” he said. “Very good steel. The walls
were twenty centimetres thick.”

He held his unsteady hands a short distance apart, as if to
demonstrate the metric system to me.

“And that’s unusual, right?” I said, playing along.

“The door contained five steel bolts. There were at least three
locks.”

“Really? Three?”

He grinned. “It is good for your book, no?”

I smiled. “Yes,” I said, meanwhile jotting down on my pad a note
to the effect that there was probably one lock, at most two. “Where
was this strong room located?”

“In the factory.”

“Whereabouts in the factory?”

“The centre,” he said, straightening in his chair.

“Really? You didn’t want to conceal it?”

He beamed at me, as if I’d asked just the question he’d hoped
for. “It was very secure. We wanted people to know this. At the end
of each day, all of the diamonds were placed inside.”

“Every single one? That sounds a bit risky.”

“There was no risk,” he said. “The concrete floor was many feet
in depth. A cement wall was poured around the strong room. There
was a cage also.”

“A cage?”

“With thick steel rods. Like this,” he said, forming his hand
into a tube and peering through it at me.

“Could the rods be cut?”

He shook his head confidently.

“What about a blow torch?”

“It would take many hours.”

“Really. Wouldn’t the lock be the weak point?”

“Which one?”

“So there were several again.”

“Write five,” he said, gesturing to my pad with a little more
enthusiasm.

“And that was it?”

“It was enough,” he said, puffing his chest.

“Along with the guards, I suppose it would be. How many on duty
by the way?”