The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam (17 page)

I sneezed, and snatched my hand to my face, wafting a fresh dose
of the feline miasma towards my nostrils so that I sneezed
again.

“Alright, dear boy?” Rutherford enquired, while wiping his feet
behind me.

“Uh huh,” I nodded, holding my finger beneath my nose and
squeezing my eyes tight shut.

“You are allergic to cats?” the nurse asked, perceptively.

“Some cats,” I said, and just managed to stifle a second sneeze
before it took hold of me.

“Here,” she said, placing her fork onto the plate and then
gripping me by the bridge of my nose with her spare hand, pinching
hard between her forefinger and thumb.

I winced, then almost sneezed again, but found I couldn’t while
she was holding me in that way. Maybe it was just the pain
distracting me, because she was squeezing pretty damn hard.

“Better?” she asked.

I nodded, carefully, but before I could extract myself from her
grip she led me by the nose into a dimly lit room on our left. I
stumbled after her, nose aloft, unable to tell if there were any
obstacles in my way.

“Here,” she said again, and this time I heard her set the plate
down before guiding my own fingers to my nostrils. “You try.”

“D’alright,” I managed.

“Sit. Please.”

She pushed me down and I fell onto a soft couch covered with a
woollen throw that might as well have been weaved from cat hair.
Rutherford gave me an apologetic look and then dropped his
considerable backside next to me, creating an instant allergy-cloud
that made matters much worse. I whipped out my hanky and got it in
front of my nose just in time for another sneeze and then I held it
there and bit hard on my tongue until I was able to regain some
composure, at which point I looked up and noticed for the first
time that we were not alone.

Across the room from us sat a woman who was well beyond
retirement age. She was overweight, with swollen wrists and ankles,
perhaps eighty years old. She wore a blue floral housecoat, or some
kind of velour dressing gown, and several blankets across her
lap.

On top of the blankets was the direct cause of all my
discomfort, a giant marmalade cat with a torso so distended it
looked as if a tear-away teen had got hold of it on its last
venture out from the bungalow and force fed it helium. The creature
barely lifted its head to survey us before burying its nose back
into its forepaws and closing its eyes, content to just lie there
and emit as many pollutants as it could conjure without moving a
single muscle.

I lowered my hanky and managed to manipulate my face into
something approximating a smile, though my efforts seemed to have
no effect on the old dear and I began to wonder if she could even
see us. Her eyes were pinhead-small, like tiny emerald studs that
had dulled over the years. They seemed to be focused, quite
randomly, on a point on the wall a few feet above Rutherford’s
forehead. I glanced up and Rutherford did the same but neither of
us could see what was there to hold her attention besides a
featureless square of wallpaper. After trading a look, the two of
us returned our attention to the nurse.

“Karine,” the nurse ventured, in a singsong voice, calling to
the old woman as if she were hoping to coax a shy child into
socialising. “Karine,” she repeated, and then looked at us with a
pained expression, wringing her hands.

I looked back at the old lady. She was absently clenching and
kneading at a roll of cat flesh in her fingers. Did she know we
were there? I got the impression I could pop a crisp bag right next
to her ear and she wouldn’t flinch.

“Is she deaf?” I asked.

The nurse shook her head.

“Does she ever talk?”

“Sometimes.”

The nurse forced a smile. “She does not have so many visitors, I
think.”

I thought so too. She clung to the cat as if it was her sole
companion in the entire cosmos, and looked grimly ahead of her,
lips puckered, as though her chair was approaching the tipping off
point of a giant rollercoaster.

“Have you worked here long?” Rutherford asked the nurse, resting
a different approach.

“A month only,” she said, and shrugged.

“Do you know anything about her son? Does she talk about
him?”

“Yes. This is him,” she said, pleased to help at last, and
reached for a teak occasional table set beside the wall where a
single photograph frame was positioned. She handed the frame to
Rutherford and the two of us contemplated the man pictured in
it.

The Louis Rijker in the photograph was of a similar age and
build to Rutherford, although he had more hair, with just a small
coin-shaped patch of it beginning to thin on top of his head. He
had a dark, bushy mono-brow and his teeth were crooked and gapped.
Like his mother, though, what struck me most about him were his
eyes. In the photograph, he was looking straight to camera, but you
got the sense there was something missing. To be blunt, Louis
Rijker didn’t look like the smartest Dutchman who ever lived.

“Does she have other family?” I asked.

“I do not think so,” the nurse said, and cast a mournful glance
towards her patient.

“Is she ill?”

“A little. Her heart,” she said, and patted her own chest.

“And her mind?” I asked, twirling my finger at my temple.

“It is okay. She talks sometimes.”

“About her son?”

“No. The weather maybe. Or Annabelle.”

“Annabelle?”

“The cat.”

I sniffed, as though just the mention of the creature had
stirred something in my nasal passages.

“Maybe if you came back tomorrow she would talk,” the nurse
suggested.

“Yes,” I agreed, nodding and regaining my feet. “You could be
right.”

I smiled reassuringly to the nurse, waiting for Rutherford to
stand too. We were just on our way out when one last thought
occurred to me. Holding up a hand to the nurse, I unzipped my coat
pocket and removed one of the two monkey figurines I was carrying.
Then I stepped over towards the old lady and crouched down, doing
my best not to recoil from the cat.

“Do you recognise this?” I asked softly, lifting the monkey into
her line of sight and turning it before her eyes. “Did Louis ever
have one of these?”

I started to wave the figurine from side to side in front of
her, as if it was a hypnotist’s pocket watch. Left to right, left
to right. Gradually, the movement drew her under its spell and
then, quite suddenly, like a television set tuning into a crystal
clear signal for an instant, the old lady focused directly on the,
figurine. Her eyes brightened, irises opening like tiny flowers
blooming, and she raised a quivering hand from the cat to reach for
the monkey. She grasped at my fingers and went to take the figurine
from me but just as I let go her grip failed her and the monkey
fell to the floor. I reached down for it but when I looked up again
her sightless gaze had returned.

“Do you want to hold it?” I asked, taking her hand and unpicking
her clammy fingers, then placing the figurine in her palm. But her
hand was limp. I tried to shape her fingers around the figurine but
it was no use, there was no life in them at all.

“Does this mean something to you? Do you know what it is?”

There was no response. I may as well have been addressing a
waxwork.

“Come on,” Rutherford said from behind me, resting a hand on my
shoulder. “It’s no good.”

“Perhaps tomorrow,” the nurse suggested again.

“Yes,” I managed. “Perhaps.”

Outside on the street, away from the cat, I took a few deep
breaths to clear my airways, then pocketed the monkey and raised my
eyebrows to Rutherford.

“You think she even knew we were there?” I asked.

“I suspect not.”

“I suspect not too.” I inhaled another lungful of air and
glanced about us, shaking my head disconsolately. “It looks like
I’ve rather wasted your time.”

“No, not at all,” he assured me, placing an arm on my back. “I
happen to know the perfect place for a spot of lunch.”

∨
The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam
∧

A
fter we’d eaten in a
nearby patisserie, we parted company and I went in search of
Marieke once more. I found her working behind the bar in Café de
Brug, her hair tied up in a tortoise-shell clip and a white apron
secured about her trim waist. She seemed skittish when I walked in,
unsure how to react for perhaps the first time since we’d met. It
took her a few moments to decide what attitude to adopt and in the
end she reverted to what seemed to be her default setting –
moody.

There was just one other customer inside the bar, an old man in
a thick horsehair jacket who had a tailored woollen hat and a tot
of rum on the table before him. We shared a nod when I walked in
but he failed to focus his milky eyes upon me. He was licking his
lips and staring at his rum, looking as if he might tempt himself
with a sip for the entire afternoon.

“I’d like a beer,” I told her. “And don’t look at me that way.
I’m not the worst mistake you ever made.”

Wordlessly, she took down a small glass from the shelf above the
bar and began to fill it from the pump. The beer formed a foaming
head and she wiped the froth from the rim of the glass with a
plastic spatula. I took a mouthful and watched her watching me. She
hadn’t expected this and I could tell she wasn’t sure what to make
of it. Was I just some dumb Englishman who’d become infatuated with
her or was I here for something else?

“It’s good beer,” I said. “And the glass is clean and the
service is impeccable. You should be proud of yourself.”

That got a sneer. At least it broke up the scowl for a
while.

“How many years do you figure you have ahead of yourself here?
Two or three, maybe, before you quit and let some rich guy with a
hole for a brain marry you?”

A sneer
and
a scowl. Who’d have thought it.

“I mean, that has to be the plan, doesn’t it? Assuming you
really have missed out on these diamonds.”

Amazing, isn’t it, what just one word can do to a person’s face?
Marieke’s turned utterly blank. The bitterness and distrust just
evaporated, leaving her stunned, as if her face was re-booting
while it waited for the next set of instructions to be transmitted
to the network of muscles beneath her skin. She didn’t stay that
way for long, but it was enough to tell me I was on the right
tracks.

“Michael got away with them, didn’t he? The rumour was he stole
a fortune all those years ago, so who knows what it’s worth now,
right?”

She pouted, and tried glancing out of the window in a carefree
manner, not willing to commit just yet.

“What I don’t get is how the monkeys fit into it all. Or why you
need all three of them. You feel like sharing?”

“Why should I?”

“It could be in your interest.”

“But you do not have the monkeys. You have nothing to interest
me.”

“You have to get high first, is that right?”

Her lip curled. I didn’t mind. I could look at her lips all day
long.

“These monkeys,” I said. “I got them once. I can get them
again.”

“How would you do it?”

“Well, that’s for me to figure out. Question is, how much is it
worth to you? And before you even think it, the twenty thousand
euros won’t do. I want half the diamonds.”

She cast a sudden look towards the old man, then focused back on
me.

“Keep your voice down.”

“By all means,” I said. “But you haven’t answered my
question.”

“I cannot give you half. They are nothing to do with you.”

“But you’re different? Listen, you might have been sleeping with
Michael, but I don’t picture it is a love affair.”

“You do not know,” she said.

“So tell me.”

She stared at me peevishly and took a deep breath, blinking once
or twice. Then she looked at the window once more, without focus
this time, and exhaled with a faint sigh. She was crossing her
fingers on the bar, I noticed, though whether it was a conscious
gesture I wasn’t sure. I didn’t look at her fingers for long; it
was her face that stole my attention. In profile she looked so
elegant, like a young blue-blood monarch on a postage stamp. Wisps
of blonde hair at her sun-kissed temples, a faint scattering of
freckles on her cheeks. And those lips, delicate and upturned, just
waiting to entrance any fool dumb enough to obsess over them.

“How did you meet Michael?” I asked. “He was out of prison,
what, a handful of days?”

“He wrote me letters,” she said, turning to me and speaking in a
disarming monotone. “Sweet letters.”

“And you wrote back?”

“Yes, why not?”

“He was a killer. Didn’t it bother you?”

“We did not talk about that.”

“Did you talk about the diamonds?”

She shook her head.

“Not in the letters. The guards read them.”

“So you met in person?”

Marieke delayed for a moment. She reached up to the shelf above
her head and fetched down another glass. She filled the glass with
tap water from the bar sink and took a sip. Her hands weren’t
shaking, nothing like that, but the water seemed to calm her to
some extent.

“It was where I worked,” she said, finally.

“The prison?”

“For two years. In the kitchens.”

“And what, he told you a piece of history each time you dropped
mashed potato onto his plate?”

“Stupid. You ask me how it happened and then you say these
stupid things.”

“It’s a bad habit, you’re right. Go on.”

She took another sip from her water, then dabbed at her lips
with her finger tips. I sat there waiting while she pinched her
bottom lip between her fingers. Eventually, she continued.

“Michael was…polite. And also he was different, an American in a
Dutch prison. He liked to talk to the cooks and the guards, to
people who lived outside of the building.”