The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam (5 page)

She nodded.

“You’d better show me.”

The blonde disappeared into the back room behind the bar again,
leaving me to push any doubts I had about what I was doing to the
deepest, darkest corners of my mind. When she returned, she had on
a padded winter coat and she was carrying a set of keys that she
used to lock the café door with before leading me away across the
canal bridge and along a series of cobbled streets, her heels
echoing in the darkness. It was just starting to drizzle and I
turned my collar up and plunged my hands into my pockets as I paced
along beside her. I didn’t like the way things were shaping up –
first the second monkey not being where it should have been, then
the gun and the intruder, and now this. The whole situation reeked
of trouble and I had a fair idea how it might end, but I also had a
girl who seemed as if she could use a little help and, just maybe,
twenty thousand euros to collect.

The American’s apartment building, Marieke told me, was on St.
Jacobsstraat, not too far from Centraal Station. The street itself
was a second-rate off-shoot of the Red Light District, lined with
squalid bars and coffee houses and peopled by tourists who’d
wandered cluelessly off the Damrak only to be approached by shady
types selling drugs. One of the pushers followed us for a while and
asked me if I wanted to buy some Viagra for the lady. We ignored
him until he left us alone, meanwhile passing street-level windows
lit with coloured fluorescent tubes where the prostitutes behind
the glass seemed bored by the whole charade. One of them was sat on
a wooden chair in a Lycra bikini, legs splayed and high heels
pressed against the glass, texting someone on her mobile phone.

We were half way along the street before Marieke turned and
faced up to an ill-fitting door beside one of the coffee houses.
The door was covered in flyers and graffiti and looked like it had
been forced open one too many times. She fitted a key into the
spring lock and led me inside a communal hallway that was lit by a
bare, wall-mounted light bulb, and that stank of stale reefer
smoke. We went up a floor in silence, me trying not to make too
much noise or attract her attention as I slipped my throwaway
gloves onto my hands, Marieke occupying herself by fumbling with
her keys.

It turned out she needn’t have bothered. The door to the
American’s apartment was ajar.

I moved past her and walked through the door and found myself
inside a cramped, windowless bed-sit. The place was barely
furnished but it was neatly kept. In one corner there was a single
bed with a dark green bedspread and white sheets. On top of the bed
was an open suitcase. I sorted through the case quickly. It was
filled with neatly folded clothes and there were some travel
documents and a small laptop computer inside, but nothing else of
consequence. Beside the bed was a chest of drawers, and all of the
drawers were open and bare. On the opposite side of the room was a
small wooden table and two foldaway chairs, a single burner stove
connected to a gas canister and a free standing sink with a couple
of scratched water glasses draining on it. Ahead of us and just off
to the side was a second door.

Marieke moved towards the door ahead of me but I put my hand on
her arm and went first. I-wasn’t greatly surprised by what I found;
only that he was still alive. He was slumped in the porcelain bath
and covered in a lot of blood. The blood was thick and oxidised and
dark as good ink. His skull had caved in above his left temple and
I could see white flakes of what looked like bone fragments amid
the blood that had matted in his hair. His right hand was hanging
over the edge of the bath, fingers bent right back at a gruesome
angle, but though his eyes were closed and he was clearly
unconscious, his chest rose and fell in a fitful way.

Behind me, Marieke shrieked and dropped her keys to the floor,
which was better than fainting I supposed. I turned to usher her
out of there and back into the other room and it was at that point
I heard the sirens for the first time, followed by the screech of
car brakes. Seconds later, somebody kicked through the front door
of the building and shouted “Police!” up the stairway.

Call me old–fashioned, but I don’t tend to hang around when that
happens. Marieke was glassy-eyed and shaking but I did what I could
in the circumstances.

“You came alone,” I told her. “I wasn’t here. You came up here
and you found him like this and that’s all that you know. Marieke?
Understand?”

She slumped to the floor, head lolling, and I couldn’t be
certain whether she’d got it or not. I didn’t have time to make
sure. The window in the bathroom was a sash and I opened it and
climbed out onto the flat roof below. Then I turned around and
jumped up to pull the window shut behind me and after that I ran
away as fast as I possibly could.

∨
The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam
∧

I
stayed in bed until
late the next morning, then spent the early afternoon printing off
a final copy of my latest novel. Once the pages were all lined up
and ready to go, I stretched an elastic band around the bundle,
added a short handwritten note to the cover page and slipped the
package into a large brown envelope. Then I walked the envelope to
the central post office where I handed over enough euros to
guarantee a next day delivery to London and after that I made my
way to Centraal Station and purchased a return ticket to Leiden,
the nearby university town.

I needed some time away from Amsterdam, if only for a brief
spell, and Leiden seemed as good as any place else. Getting there
involved nothing more strenuous than a thirty minute train ride and
once I’d bought a takeaway coffee and a fresh packet of cigarettes
to smoke during the journey, I was glad to drop my bones into a
window seat on the bottom level of a double-decker train carriage
and gaze sightlessly out through the dirt-streaked glass at the
backs of moving houses and office buildings, and then the
hinterland estates and after them the stretches of bleached highway
tarmac leading towards Schiphol airport. The train stopped on time
at the underground airport station and most of my fellow passengers
left the carriage to wheel plastic suitcases towards the escalators
at the far end of the platform. Once the train pulled away again, I
continued my journey with nothing to distract me other than the
hypnotic drone of wheels on track and the occasional draw of
nicotine.

I don’t remember much of what I did in Leiden. My feet carried
me around the cobbled streets and along the canal pathways, I’m
sure, but my mind was in another realm entirely, zoned out of my
physical surroundings altogether. I often get that way when
something big happens to me. Just to order my thoughts I need a
change of scenery, but the nature of the scenery usually doesn’t
matter a great deal. I could have been in Africa or the Antarctic
and the effect would have been much the same. All I needed was a
little alone time, a feeling of space within which to clear my
mind, and no more than three hours later something had clicked
enough for me to climb back aboard an Amsterdam-bound train and
return to the city.

Two wholly uneventful days later, my agent, Victoria, called me
from London to discuss the book I’d mailed to her.

“It’s wonderful Charlie,” she began, which struck me as a good
sign.

“You’re not just saying that?”

“Of course not. It’s one of your best so far.”

“Because I was kind of worried about the ending.”

“You’re always worried about the ending.”

“This time in particular.”

“What are you worried about? The briefcase? You think anyone’s
going to read back and notice it couldn’t have made its own way to
Nicholson’s apartment?”

“Oh crap,” I said, striking my forehead.

She waited a beat. “Listen, it’s not a huge problem.”

“The hell it isn’t.”

“We’ll work it out.”

“We shouldn’t have to. I should have caught it myself. What
else? If I missed that I must have missed other things too.”

“Nothing big. Really. It just needs a little tidying here and
there.”

“You’re sure? Because this one got way more complicated than I
planned.”

“Complicated is a good thing.”

“Only if I can put all the pieces together,” I said, reaching
for a pen and a nearby pad of paper.

“You will. I know it. And the briefcase is the final piece.”

“Well, it should be,” I agreed, drawing the outline of a
briefcase on my pad and then crossing it through and stabbing it
with my pen for good measure. “But why do I get the feeling that if
I solve that one it’ll just throw up another hitch?”

“It might. But where would we be without hitches?”

“Oh, I don’t know. The bestseller lists? Award ceremonies?
Colour supplements?”

“It’ll happen Charlie.”

“Yeah, right. Just as soon as I work out how to move a briefcase
from a police evidence room to an apartment without giving away the
killer’s identity.”

“Maybe the briefcase has wheels?”

I smiled and threw my pen to one side. “Yeah, or maybe I forgot
to mention in chapter eight how Nicholson made his money by
inventing a teleport machine.”

“I liked my idea better.”

“You always do.”

“Anyway,” Victoria said, treating me to one of her more
theatrical sighs, “how’s Amsterdam?”

I sighed myself. It was a good sigh, as it happened, so I did it
again.

“It’s Dutch,” I told her, when I was done admiring our vocal
ranges.

“Wow,” she said. “You know, I’m pretty sure that’s why I agreed
to represent you – your dazzling powers of description, and
all.”

“You want tulips and clogs and windmills?”

“They have windmills in the city?”

“I’ve seen a few.”

“And Dutch people wearing clogs?”

“Tourists buying clogs. The moment I see a Dutchman wearing
clogs and riding a bicycle, I’m moving on.”

“But for the time being you’re staying put?”

“Well, that kind of depends,” I said.

And it was then that I told her about my most recent caper;
about the American and the monkey figurines and the houseboat and
the apartment and the intruder and the stunning blonde and the
almost-corpse the American had become. And while I explained
everything to her, Victoria listened with barely an interruption,
which is one of the things I like most about her. In fact, her
capacity to listen to the finer details of whatever scrape my
thieving has got me into since we last spoke is only bettered by
her ability to pinpoint plot-holes at a hundred paces and the
tendency she has to ask the right questions at the right time,
which is something she did the moment I reached the end of my
story.

“So this American’s not dead?”

“Not yet, anyway,” I told her. “I called the hospital this
morning. They said he was in a coma.”

“They just told you that?”

“Well no, I had to explain that I was Mr. Michael Park’s
personal physician first.”

“And they believed you?”

“It was a nurse. I don’t think she knew the procedures. And I
guess maybe my accent helped a little.”

“Hmm. Wait though, how did you get the American’s name?”

“It was on the travel papers I found in his suitcase,” I told
her. “And it was in the newspaper report too.”

“You can read Dutch now?”

“The story was covered in the International Herald Tribune.”

“Oh. You think he was someone important?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe it was a slow news day and the
mysterious beating of a Yank in a Dutch brothel house caught the
editor’s attention.”

“They called it a brothel house?”

“They did, although as far as I could tell it was just a lousy
bedsit in a pretty colourful neighbourhood.”

“With the main colour being red.”

“Actually,” I said, glancing up from my desk to the moving
leaves on the tree in front of my window. “I’ve noticed that a lot
of the brothels use plain fluorescent lights. Although electric
blue seems kind of popular too.”

“You’ve carried out a survey?”

“I’m just giving you some of that description you like so
much.”

“Cute,” she said, and I could picture her grinning. “But just
going back to these monkey figurines for a minute – do you still
have them?”

“The two I stole, yes,” I said. “I had a look for the third one
in the American’s suitcase but it wasn’t there.”

“You think the men who beat him took it?”

“That would make sense.”

“And then they went home and found they’d lost their own
figurines.”

“I suppose so.”

She paused, trying to act casual about the question she really
wanted to ask. “Charlie, how much do you think these figurines
might be worth?”

“I have no idea,” I told her. “If I’d seen them in a place I was
robbing, I’d have passed them over as worthless.”

“Which they’re clearly not.”

“So it would appear. I mean, nobody would beat a guy like that
just for fun, I don’t think.”

“Plus you said you thought he’d been tortured.”

“I did? Oh, the broken fingers, you mean. Yes, I’m not sure why
they did that.”

“Well,” Victoria said, “people generally only use torture if
they want information, right? Unless they’re sadists, that is, but
that can’t be the case here because they stopped at the one hand.
Which means either the American told them what they wanted to hear
or they figured he wouldn’t tell them anything at all.”

“Or they got disturbed in some way. Or squeamish. Or any one of
a thousand other explanations. None of which we’ll ever know.”

“Yes,” she said, sounding deflated. “But supposing he did tell
them what they wanted to know, he could have given them your name,
couldn’t he?”

“It’s possible.”