The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam (22 page)

“I don’t have it,” I said, and showed her my palms and shrugged
my shoulders by way of explanation.

She pointed to the third lock and said something in Chinese,
then acted out inserting the final key and turning all three locks
and opening the box.

“I know,” I told her. “But I don’t have the third key.-Do you
have a copy?” I asked, pointing at the third lock and then the girl
with a hopeful look on my face.

The girl glanced anxiously over my shoulder towards one of the
sumos and he motioned towards the door we had come in from. She
nodded minutely, then began to remove the two keys she’d
inserted.

“A copy?” I asked. “Don’t you have a copy?”

But it was no good. The girl placed both keys in my hand, rather
dismissively I thought, and then bowed ever so slightly before
walking away in the direction of the door. I didn’t follow her
immediately and the delay was enough for the sumo nearest to me to
place his sizeable palm on my shoulder and usher me after her with
a no-nonsense shove. When we got back to the reception area, the
girl peeled off into a side annex where I glimpsed a low table and
a leather couch and a television set, while the two sumos
accompanied me to the bubble-glass door, handed me my holdall and
watched me climb down the stairs until I was out on the street.

Normally, I might have consoled myself by planning to break back
in at some point in the future but I didn’t rate my chances. I had
no idea how to bypass a fingerprint scanner like the one that
guarded the room and I didn’t possess the kind of high-tech gear
that might enable me to get through the steel door without it. And
that was not to mention that safety deposit boxes are notoriously
difficult to open or that the two sumos could tear me apart like a
sheet of origami paper if I happened to get caught. And I thought
there was a reasonable likelihood of that happening because I was
pretty sure they manned the place on a twenty-four hour basis. That
kind of accessibility would be a major draw to the type of
clientele I guessed they catered for but, more to the point,
Michael had told me he’d planned to leave Amsterdam right after I’d
given him the two monkeys. The building I was stood outside was
just a five-minute stroll from Centraal Station so it didn’t take a
genius to work out where he was headed before leaving the city. It
didn’t take a genius to work out what was inside the deposit box,
either, but knowing where the diamonds were didn’t mean a thing
without the third key. I groaned and shook my head. I was tired and
beaten up and in need of a rest, and I wasn’t keen to hang around
outside a building that I assumed the thin man and the wide man
knew all about. With each passing moment, Rutherford’s apartment
was becoming an ever more appealing place to be.

∨
The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam
∧

R
utherford’s
apartment was on the third floor of a grand old mansion building
with an imposing stone façade. The floor-to-ceiling windows of the
sitting room looked out over the Oosterpark and the distant
outskirts of the city and I imagined Rutherford had spent many an
hour absorbing the expansive view. The decor was English
traditionalist, heavy on the floral patterns and antique furniture
and watercolours. Some of the paintings were originals and had
probably cost him a fair sum. His family money must have been
pretty substantial, I supposed, because the whole shebang would
have dwarfed his government salary.

“Dear boy,” he said, when I walked into the sitting room for the
first time and he caught sight of my head wound. “What on earth
happened?”

“I was jumped,” I told him. “By two of the American’s
associates.”

“The killers?”

“I don’t think so. But they certainly know how to swing a
baseball bat.”

“Sit down,” he said, patting a nearby chair. “I’ll fetch
something.”

He returned a few moments later with a bottle of iodine and some
cotton pads and began to clean my wound, making me wince each time
he applied the iodine to a sore spot or caught an area that had
clotted with my hair. I could smell the musty odour of his
underarms as he reached for my head, pressing his large stomach up
against me. He was wearing his suit trousers and a work shirt with
the sleeves rolled up and every now and then he would pass me a
bloodied pad to hold onto. By the time he was finished, I had quite
a collection of the discoloured rags and Rutherford fetched a waste
bin for me to drop them into.

“You look drained,” he told me.

“I feel it. I haven’t slept at all and I’ve had a busy night.
I’m not sure I needed to impose on you though, Rutherford. I could
have checked into a hotel under a false name, I suppose.”

“And who would have cleaned your wound? The maid? I think you
may need stitches, incidentally.”

“Terrific.”

“You have health insurance?”

I nodded, then yawned.

“Well, I’ve made up the bed in the spare room,” he went on.
“You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, naturally, though I’m
afraid I have to leave for the office shortly. Unless,” he said,
raising a finger to his lips, “I call in and delay for a while. I
suppose I could. Are you concussed at all?”

“I imagine so. In fact, it would explain a hell of a lot. But
you should go. The main thing I need right now is sleep.”

“Very well, let me show you the bed. I’ll fetch you some night
clothes too.”

I didn’t use the night clothes, as it happened. They were more
than a couple of sizes too big for me anyway and as soon as I saw
the neatly made bed all I wanted to do was fall down onto it and
shut my bleary eyes. And once Rutherford had left me to my own
devices, I removed my shoes but left my clothes on and did just
that, collapsing on top of the covers and plummeting into a deep
and fitful sleep.

♦

When I woke, many hours later, my head was stuck to the pillow.
I must have twisted and turned a fair bit in my sleep and that
seemed to have aggravated my wound and started it bleeding some
more. The blood had clotted, binding my hair to the pillow fabric
and making the procedure of lifting my head away a tricky one. Once
I’d negotiated it and I was upright again, I looked down at the
crusted stain on the pillowcase and decided it was a right off. I
turned the pillow over and hid it for the time being.

I hadn’t had time to draw the thick velveteen drapes in my room
before sleep took hold of me and I was relieved to see it was still
light outside when I glanced at the window. Knuckling my gummy
eyes, I checked the bedside clock and saw that it was coming up to
three o’clock in the afternoon. I hadn’t heard any noises in the
rest of the apartment and so I assumed that Rutherford was still at
work. Standing feebly from the bed, I gently tested the area around
my head wound with my fingertips and decided that I would risk a
shower.

The bathroom was ostentatious by Dutch standards, with the
shower positioned over the centre of a claw-foot bath. I shed my
clothes and stepped into the bath and then I positioned the
shower-head so that the hot water hit me on the neck and shoulders
rather than the back of my head. The steamy water sluiced over the
darkening bruise on my ribs and I carefully soaped my chest and let
the suds rinse away. I cupped the water to my face and eased some
of the soreness from my eyes and then I reached down as best I
could to clean the rest of me. When I was done, I dried myself in
one of Rutherford’s soft, downy bath towels and then I tiptoed back
to my bedroom to find a clean change of clothes in my holdall. The
gun was still there when I opened the holdall, resting amid the
clothes I’d managed to grab, but I didn’t pick it up or investigate
it at all. It had done as much of a job as I’d needed it to in
order to get me out of the wide man’s apartment and for that and
the fact I hadn’t needed to fire it I would be forever grateful.
But it didn’t change my mind about owning a gun and I wondered how
long I would have to wait before I could ditch it safely.

Beside the gun was my passport, and since I wasn’t a spy, it
happened to be my real passport, with my real name and my real date
of birth in the back of it. I didn’t pick it up either – it was
just reassuring to know it was there.

I dressed and made my bed, then stood still for a moment, making
a pretence of deciding what to do next before quickly giving in to
the urge to look around Rutherford’s apartment. It was a new space,
after all, and it would have been remiss of me not to familiarise
myself with the layout – imagine the fire risks!

I left the bedroom and faced up to the closed door positioned
next to the sitting room I’d been in earlier. Closed doors are
never quite satisfying enough for me so I tried the handle and
found myself inside a dining room with an oval-shaped, teak dining
table and eight elaborately carved dining chairs. The windows
shared the same park view as the sitting room, and the walls
displayed another pair of quality watercolours that in my non-law
abiding moments I might well have been tempted to snatch.

Interesting.

I moved on through a door on the far wall of the room and found
myself in a functional galley-style kitchen that I paused in just
long enough to find a packet of crisps to eat. The kitchen led back
to the main hallway and the bathroom I’d showered in. Beside the
bathroom was Rutherford’s bedroom and I stuck my head inside for a
quick peek. Almost inevitably, it was dominated by a four-poster
bed, though no offence to Rutherford, you could tell he was a
bachelor. The bed-set he’d chosen was of a dark-grey colour that
did nothing for the room, while a spare pin-stripe suit and several
clean work shirts were hanging from the wardrobe doors. I left the
bedroom and entered the final room in the apartment, which was
sandwiched between Rutherford’s bedroom and my own. It was only a
small room but it was the space I warmed to most of all – his
study.

The walls of Rutherford’s study were lined with row-upon-row of
books, there was a comfy fabric arm chair with an ethnic-style
throw in one corner, a matching rug on the floor and a large
antique writing desk made of a deeply burnished oak across the way.
The desk was covered in loose papers and correspondence and there
was also a green-tinted reading lamp and a touch-tone telephone. I
settled myself in the leather swivel chair that faced the desk and
reached for the phone. While it rang, I idly sorted through the
papers and knick-knacks on top of Rutherford’s desk, not really
paying any attention to what I was looking at.

“You’re a genius,” I said, when Victoria finally answered.

“Mr. President?”

“Close.” I smiled, opening a small personal banking book and
thumbing the pages. “How are you?”

“Just dandy. You?”

“Like a burglar with a sore head.”

“I won’t ask. But tell me, why am I a genius?”

“You don’t know?”

“Well it could be anything, I suppose,” she said, airily.

“Actually, it was something you said the last time we
spoke.”

“About you catching something from the blonde?”

“No,” I told her, sounding more stern than I’d intended. “I’m
going to rise above that one. See, I’m rising as we speak. I’m
helium. I’m a hot air balloon. I’m a fresh loaf of bread.”

“You’re a writer running low on similes. Come on, what was it I
said Charlie?”

I closed the banking book and began flicking through a
loose-leaf pad of paper.

“You said, and I might be paraphrasing a bit here, but it was
something like the monkeys were the key to everything.”

“I did?”

“Yes. And do you know why that was so clever?”

“Surprise me.”

“Because the monkeys
contained
keys. And that’s what all
the fuss has been about.”

“Really? Just keys?”

I turned the pad over, then switched the reading lamp on and
fanned a few pages of the Dutch-English dictionary that was open on
Rutherford’s desk. I lifted the dictionary by the spine and shook
it in case anything interesting fell out but nothing did.

“Just keys to a safety deposit box,” I told Victoria. “With the
stolen diamonds inside of it.”

“Aha.”

“Aha indeed. There’s just one problem.”

“Which is?”

“The box needs three keys to open it.”

“Oh. And you’re still missing a monkey.”

“Exactly. Although, now I think about it, I suppose being
kidnapped last night was something of a problem too.”

“Sorry?”

“Kidnapped. Beaten with a baseball bat. You know how it
goes.”

“No Charlie, I don’t. I think you’d better fill me in.”

And so I did. And while I brought Victoria up to speed, I turned
my attention from the things on the top of Rutherford’s desk to the
contents of his desk drawers. There were seven drawers in all,
three on either side of the desk, and one central drawer situated
just above my knees. The central drawer was the only one that was
locked and, as ever, it tweaked my curiosity. So as I talked, I
wedged the telephone receiver between my neck and my ear, removed a
paper clip from one of Rutherford’s documents, unbent it, and began
to pick at the lock.

“Charlie?” Victoria asked, a few moments later. “What are you
doing?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re breathing rather heavily.”

“Am I? Sorry. I’m just trying to open something while we
talk.”

“As long as that’s all it is.”

“How do you mean?” I asked, pausing.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “But the wide man and the thin
man – you really believe they don’t have the third key?”

“Or even the third monkey,” I said, resuming my task. “If they
did, they wouldn’t have stayed in the apartment with me. They’d
have gone and got the diamonds themselves.”

“Unless they were bluffing.”