The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam (28 page)

She gripped my wrist tightly, handbag swinging from her forearm,
then grasped for my elbow, and as soon as she was steady Stuart and
I lowered her down onto a palette we’d positioned on top of two
wooden crates for that very purpose. She sat there in quite a
civilised manner, with her handbag on her knees. The only sign that
she was fretting was the way her fingers gripped her bag, the
leather straps wrapped tightly around her hands.

I crouched and looked her right in the eyes, then smiled as
reassuringly as I could and patted her knee. The old lady contorted
her painted features into a graceless parody of my own expression,
the wasted muscles beneath her skin doing their best to hoist her
jowls into something other than a hangdog expression. Not wanting
to prolong this sudden fit of gurning, I found my feet and turned
back to the others once again.

“For the next few minutes,” I said, “you’ll have to forgive me
my awful Dutch and understand that Mrs. Rijker doesn’t speak
English. We thought it best you heard her story in her own words
and in light of that I’ll be quiet now and leave her to tell you
what it is she came here to say.”

And at that point, I nodded to the old dear and, after she’d
hesitated for just a moment, Stuart said something to her in a
gentle tone that prompted her to clear her phlegmy airways and
begin. What she told them didn’t take a great deal of time, but cut
out as I was from the nuances of what she said and the way in which
she said it, her halting speech seemed to take longer than I’d
anticipated. She was nervous and uncertain and every once in a
while her voice would croak or catch and she’d look down at her
fingers kneading away at her handbag. That’s when Stuart would
place a hand on her shoulder and encourage her to go on, speaking
to her as if she was a child in his care and all he wanted was for
her to share what was troubling her before any of us could be in a
position to help.

What was troubling her was simple enough, though that wouldn’t
have made it any less traumatic. She was explaining the very things
she’d resisted saying for years, after all, facts she’d buried deep
in her psyche. Her son, Louis Rijker, she would have told them, had
been a security guard at the Van Zandt factory. He wasn’t a wildly
successful individual but he valued his job and he liked that it
enabled him to support his ageing mother as best he could. The two
of them relied on his wage to keep a roof over their heads and food
in thek cupboards and he was willing to do most everything he could
to keep things that way. So when someone approached him one day and
offered him the chance to make a little extra money on top of his
weekly wage, he was tempted. All he had to do, they said, was
disappear for an hour during one of the night shifts he’d be
working. If he could keep his mouth shut about being absent,
whatever the consequences, there was a good deal of money in it for
him. If, though, he told anyone about the arrangement, the
consequences would be severe. The threat was nothing specific but
he got the distinct impression it was genuine.

Faced with that choice, poor Louis agreed that on the night in
question he’d make himself scarce. When he returned, of course, he
found Robert Wolkers shot dead beside the Van Zandt strong room. In
his police interview, he cobbled together a cover story about being
off on a routine check of the warehouse when his colleague was
shot. The lie was a gut reaction to the situation he’d found
himself thrown into but it was a line he soon found himself
compelled to stick with. The morning after the night of the killing
someone broke into the bungalow he shared with his mother and
pulled her from her bed and made it all too clear to the pair of
them what kind of repercussions they could expect if he ever told
the truth. So he never did. But it was his mother’s firm belief
that the guilt and the fear he’d endured for the best part of a
decade was what led to his increased blood pressure and his
insomnia and his stress and, ultimately, to the all-out failure of
his heart.

As she concluded her tale, the old lady’s words began to
fracture and peter out. Sobs took hold of her and she fished a
tatty rag from the sleeve of her housecoat and dabbed at her eyes.
It was at that point Riemer looked at me and said, “She is
finished. You have heard what she has to say?”

“Yes,” I said. “And for what it’s worth I happen to believe
it.”

“There is no reason to believe otherwise.”

“No,” I said, “there’s not.”

“But what difference does this make?” Kim said, finally looking
up at me, her voice hoarse as she spoke for the first time. “What
does it change?”

“It’s another piece of the puzzle,” I told her, as reassuringly
as I could. “Another clue to what happened that night.”

“But we know what happened,” Van Zandt said.

“Do we? I think we know very little. And that includes one very
important factor – the nature of what exactly Michael Park got away
with on the night Robert Wolkers was killed.”

I met Van Zandt’s gaze and held it. I thought he might look away
but he was a wilful old bastard and arrogant enough to think I
might not pursue it. I’ve been known to be a touch arrogant myself
sometimes, though, and I wasn’t about to relent.

“The popular rumour was that your family lost a small fortune,
Mr. Van Zandt. The theory was Michael got away with a pile of
jewels after killing the only guard brave enough to challenge him.
And the fact Van Zandt never publicly acknowledged this was as good
for many people as a flat-out admission.”

Van Zandt bristled. “We did not talk about company security. You
know this. It was an important rule to us.”

“Important because your security wasn’t good enough. The truth
is you could have ten strong rooms made of reinforced steel, one
inside of the other, but the whole system would still only be as
secure as the men who guarded it. And when there was only one man,
and that man was corrupt, well, the whole thing was a bit of a joke
now, wasn’t it?”

“You should not speak like this,” Van Zandt said, lowering his
voice and casting a sideways glance towards Kim. “Not in front of
her.”

I made myself look at Kim then and what I saw on her face was
enough for me to pause. Her lips had thinned and her eyes were
moist and unfocused, as if she was looking beyond the scene in
front of her right now, back to the scene that had unfolded twelve
years beforehand when her father had been killed. The father she’d
told herself she’d avenge. The father who just happened to be a
crook.

“Forgive me,” I told her, “but it’s true. It had to be. Good
thieves always look for the simplest solution to steal something.
And your father was that solution. He had you to look out for, your
mother too. Suppose Michael offered him a share of what he stole?
Suppose he told himself it would just be that one time, that once
would be enough? Except he didn’t realise what that really meant.
Because men like your father never do. In schemes like this one the
take gets split between as few people as possible. And these two
benefited from that.”

I pointed to the wide man and the thin man. The thin man wheeled
around and checked Riemer’s reaction, a hunted look on his face.
The wide man just leaned back in his chair, crossed his sizeable
arms in front of his chest and stretched his booted feet out onto
the floor in front of him.

“Some thieves work alone,” I went on. “Michael didn’t. He liked
to have back-up. People to help him carry his score. People to help
him store it and move it on. Some muscle if it was necessary. In
Amsterdam, that’s what these two were.”

The wide man gave me a crooked smile, as if I was amusing him
greatly.

“See, one thing always bothered me. Michael had been in prison
for twelve years and he was only out for a matter of days before he
contacted me. But he knew the job he wanted doing inside out. He
knew where you lived and he knew what kind of security you had. He
knew one of you kept your figurine in a safe on a boat. He knew the
other one had been keeping his figurine under his pillow and that
there were three good locks on your front door. He knew there was
no alarm at either property. But how could he know all that? He was
friends with the two of you, he told me as much, but he wouldn’t
know it even if he’d visited you since his release and there’s no
way you would have told him.”

I ignored the wide man’s grin, determined to keep my
composure.

Partly it was for Kim and partly it was for Michael himself.
None of this was a laughing matter. The man had been killed for
Christ’s sake.

“There was only one way he could know,” I said, “and when I
found out he was a thief it made perfect sense to me. The fact is
Michael knew because he’d been inside your homes before me. He’d
already broken in and found the monkeys. Truth is, he’d done more
than simply case the job – he’d carried out a dummy run.”

I paused and looked confidently at the wide man. As I studied
him, I had the sense that a little of his bravado was beginning to
ebb away. I wanted the drip-drip effect to become a flood. I wanted
him to see things the way I did. In some ways, Victoria had been
right – there was a kind of bond between Michael and me. It wasn’t
just that we shared the same profession – it was that we were a
part of the same world, and it wasn’t beyond the realms of
possibility that someday somebody might want to beat the life out
of me for something I’d taken.

“So then the question became,” I went on, the words sounding
faintly robotic to me, “why didn’t he take the monkeys when he
could? They were right there for him. He could have just reached
out and grabbed them and been clean away before you knew anything
about it. But he didn’t.” I paused again, staring at the wide man
with more determination this time, wanting him to get how important
this really was. “Then I remembered something else he told me. He
said that you wouldn’t suspect him of being involved in stealing
the figurines even if you found them missing the moment after I’d
taken them. He said the reason was simple: you trusted him. And I
asked myself, where does trust like that come from? The answer, of
course, is it comes from working together. It comes from being a
part of a unit. And as Inspector Riemer has confirmed now, the
three of you were a gang. Who knows how much you stole together? My
guess is a fair amount. But the real score came here, on the night
Robert Wolkers was murdered.”

I gestured at our surroundings, turned a complete circle and
inhaled deeply, as if something of that time still lingered. I
looked once at Karine Rijker and then I glanced up at the steel
rafters in the ceiling and went on.

“The truth is I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that
night. I even came here and walked around and cast my mind back to
how I imagined things had gone. And do you know what I
decided?”

I met the wide man’s eyes again. There was something different
in them now. Intrigue perhaps, and maybe a touch of
apprehension.

“I decided you’d waited for a night when Robert Wolkers would be
here on his own, at least for a little while. Maybe it was a case
of waiting for him to tell you when it could happen or maybe you
set the date and the time but, however it worked, Robert Wolkers
was here by himself when the three of you turned up and he was the
one who watched over you while Michael tackled the locks on the
strong room. Once you were in, you took as much as you wanted,
maybe even all of it. Then you killed him.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the thin man shaking
his head manically. The wide man just squinted at me and said very
calmly, “It is not true.”

“No?”

“We did not kill him.”

“Hmm. Well,” I said, abruptly lightening my tone and shrugging
my shoulders, “that was only my first idea. Guess I should have
known not to trust it. There’s this book, you see, my latest novel,
and I’ve been stuck on it for a while now. I’ve come up with maybe
six possible solutions of whodunnit and how and none of them work.
So why should solving all this be any different? I mean, I’m not
going to strike lucky first time, am I?” I pointed at the wide man,
then wagged my finger as if the two of us should have known better.
“As it happens, I didn’t really think you did it. Why would you?
What possible motive could you have? It’s not as if Robert Wolkers
was going to give you up – he had as much to lose as anyone else.
And let’s not forget Michael always denied it was him. And besides,
we haven’t even factored in the mystery of the missing murder
weapon, yet – the smoking gun, as it were. So I had a second
theory. And at first, it seemed pretty outlandish, the kind of
thing I might come up with for a book and then discard because it
was just too far fetched. But the more I found out, the more it
began to make sense to me. And then I worked on it some more,
finessed it, removed a bum turn here and there. And guess what? It
started to seem like the only way it could possibly have
happened.”

∨
The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam
∧

T
he way I see it,” I
went on, “Robert Wolkers was the one who contacted Michael, not the
other way around. He told him who he was and what he did for a
living and he told him there might just be a way they could help
each other out. Michael, I’m guessing, didn’t like it at first.
Most professional thieves find their own jobs. That way, they don’t
have to rely on other people getting things right and they don’t
have to share their take either. But, we’re only human, and no
doubt he was tempted by the proposal Robert Wolkers put to him. He
had an in to the Van Zandt strong room and Michael was a diamond
purist. He probably thought about it for a little while and decided
he wanted a piece of it but he didn’t want to take the risks all by
himself. If what he’d heard was true, there’d be more than enough
diamonds to go round and he could do with some back-up. So he found
two local rent-a-goons and before very long he’d formed his very
own gang.”