The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam (7 page)

Leaning back in my chair, I pulled the central drawer out of my
desk and set it down on the floor by my feet. Then I felt around in
the space where the drawer had been until my fingers found what I
was looking for. I stood the two monkey figurines on my desk in
front of me, the one covering his ears and the other shielding his
mouth, and I held my face in my hands and thought about the third
monkey, the one covering his eyes, and then I thought about how I
was seeing about as little of my current situation as he was. How
much was the complete set of figurines worth? Who even collected
these things? And could they be moved on without too much
difficulty?

I sighed and knocked the monkeys over onto their heels with a
flick of my fingers, then scooped them up in my hand, put on my
overcoat and scarf and stepped outside into a wintry, rain-laced
breeze.

When I reached Café de Brug, it was almost full inside.
Customers in knitted jumpers and woollen hats were warming their
hands around mugs of Koffie Verkeerd and one or two were eating
slices of spicy apple tart with whipped cream. The clientele seemed
almost entirely Dutch and I felt self-conscious as I approached the
young man behind the bar and interrupted the background chatter
with my English.

“Is Marieke here?” I asked him.

The man squinted at me. “Who are you?”

“We’re friends.”

The man squinted at me some more and I resisted the temptation
to warn him against stepping outside the glass door of the café in
case the wind froze his features that way.

“Is she here?” I tried again.

Reluctantly, the man picked up a telephone and, when it was
answered, mumbled some Dutch into it. I caught the word ‘Engelsman’
but it was about all I managed. Some way into his short
conversation, the man paused, looked me over, and seemed to provide
a cautious description. I told him my name was Charlie but he chose
to ignore me and hung up instead.

“She is upstairs,” he said, directing me towards a door marked
‘Prive’ at the far end of the room. “She waits for you.”

I left the man to practise his squinting and walked past the few
remaining tables and on through the door. A flight of wooden stairs
took me to a second floor landing where I found Marieke looking
down at me. She had on a pair of leggings and a baggy sweatshirt,
her hair was unwashed and tied loosely at the back of her head, and
she wore no make-up. But even with the scowl she gave me, which was
far more severe than her friend’s downstairs, she still had the
ability to make me forget what it was I’d been thinking about.

“We need to talk,” I said, not quite meeting her eyes.

Marieke studied me for a moment, then turned and walked through
the doorway behind her. I followed, soon finding myself in a
light-filled room overlooking the front of the building, and beyond
it, the bridge that spanned the Keizersgracht canal and that had
given the café its name. A set of wicker lounge furniture filled
the middle of the room, and there was a double bed and a clothes
rack in the far corner, plus some nearby metal shelving units
containing stock items for the bar: coffee beans, beer nuts,
napkins, that kind of thing. Marieke sat herself down on the wicker
sofa and folded her legs under her and I chose to perch on one of
the armchairs and rested my elbows on my knees and rubbed my hands
together for warmth.

“I need to know what’s going on,” I told her. “You have to tell
me who you’ve spoken to and what you’ve said. Everything, in
fact.”

“Michael is alive,” she told me, after a pause. “I do not think
you care, but he is alive.”

I softened my tone. “Of course I care.”

“In the hospital, a machine breathes for him. He sleeps always.
His fingers…” She shuddered.

“I said I care, Marieke.”

She looked at me hard, clenching and unclenching her hand. I
wasn’t sure what she saw in me then and was even less sure that she
liked it.

“Why did you run?” she asked, finally.

“You know why.”

“Because you are a coward,” she said, jerking her chin at
me.

“Maybe. But if I’d stayed, it wouldn’t have helped Michael. I
don’t know that I could have explained what I was doing there. I
had my burglar tools on me. I didn’t know you, not really.”

“It was wrong.”

“Yeah, well Michael paid me to do things that were wrong. I have
a feeling he did some bad things himself in the past.”

“He may never open his eyes again.”

“I know that. I spoke to someone at the hospital.”

“You have been there?” she asked, scrutinizing me, her lips
pressed together.

“I used the telephone. I didn’t think it was safe to go. I’m not
sure you should go either. I’m not sure about much of anything
right now.”

“Perhaps you should keep running. Coward.”

I sighed. “Look, the police came to see me this morning.”

Her eyes narrowed. I could see I’d at least got her
interest.

“They asked me about Michael. They knew we met. They said they
found out through his computer but I’m not sure I believe
them.”

“How else would they know?”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you.”

“Ha,” she said, throwing her hands up. “You think it was me? You
think I am a coward too?”

“I think you were upset. In shock. You may not have known what
you were saying.”

“I told them nothing.”

“I’m not saying it was deliberate. It’s possible you don’t even
remember. Shock does that. You might have told them about me
meeting Michael. Maybe you didn’t tell them much more than that.
Maybe they filled in the rest.”

“You think I am stupid? I told them nothing.”

“Alright,” I said, making a calming gesture with my hands. “But
they still knew. They didn’t know if it was important but they knew
to come and talk to me.”

“What did you say?”

“That we never met.”

“And they believed you?”

“I’m not sure. Did you tell the police about the two men Michael
was with?”

She glanced towards the floor. “Of course.”

“You know them?”

“No. I described them.”

“Did the police know who they were?”

She shrugged. “I do not think so. They wanted to know if Michael
had met them before.”

“And?”

“I said I did not know. It’s true,” she told me, eyes wide. “I
never met any of Michael’s friends.”

“Some friends.”

“But that is what he called them to me.”

“How about the monkeys?” I tried. “Did you tell the police about
them?”

She shook her head, slowly.

“What is it with them anyway? How much are they worth?”

“They are worth nothing.”

“You’re sure? Because when I showed you one of them the other
night…Your eyes.”

“Yes?”

“They opened up. Like I was holding a bright light in my
hands.”

She began to smile then, as if she might laugh at me, but she
managed to control herself and rested her chin on her hands.

“I had not seen him before,” she said, simply. “The one covering
his eyes, yes. But not the others.”

“But what do they mean, Marieke? To you? To Michael?”

“Do you have them with you?” she asked, peering at me.

I shook my head.

“Where are they?”

“Someplace secure.”

“Take me to them.”

“Not just yet. I don’t know what I’m involved in here. They give
me protection.”

“You will have your money,” she said coldly.

“Maybe. But right now all I want are some answers. Why not tell
me about the second thief? Did you know about him?”

Marieke’s face tangled into a question mark, her lips pursed
together to form the dot at the base of the curve her eyebrows and
nose were describing.

“So you didn’t. I think I believe you. There was a second man,
Marieke. He broke into the apartment in the Jordaan while I was
there. He was looking for the same thing I was.”

“I do not know about this second man,” she said.

“I think Michael hired him. I think he wanted a back-up when I
said no to him.”

“But why would he do this?”

“Because he needed the monkeys on that night in particular. He
was very specific about it. It bothered me at the time, though not
as much as it should have done.”

Marieke unfolded her legs and found her feet, moving to the
window at the front of the room. She wrapped her arms about herself
and stared at her faint reflection in the window glass. I watched
her watching herself, caught up in the circularity of the image.
Those freckles on her neck again. Tiny blemishes. Calling out.

“He only wanted you,” she said. “Nobody else. You were
recommended to him. Someone in Paris. A friend.”

“That can’t be right,” I told her. “I know a man in Paris but he
would have told me about this.”

“Not if Michael did not want him to.”

“Yes. Even then.”

“You think so?”

“Yes,” I said. “The man I’m thinking of passes work my way. It’s
how he makes his money. But I have to trust him for it to work. He
knows that.”

She hitched her shoulders. “Perhaps Michael had to trust him
too.”

“Not in the same way.”

“Of course in the same way,” she said, turning to me, her face
as open as I’d seen it so far.

“No,” I pressed on. “You don’t understand. This man is a
fence.”

“Yes?”

I looked at her expectantly, waiting for my words to register
somewhere inside her thick head. They didn’t though. They began to
register inside mine instead.

“Marieke,” I said, “what is it Michael did for a living?”

“You do not know?”

I shook my head.

“But he is like you, Charlie.”

“Exactly like me?”

“Yes. A burglar, ja?”

∨
The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam
∧

I
sat in my desk
chair, fingers laced together behind my neck, and tried to work out
how to solve the problem I’d run into.

Nicholson was my killer. For once, I’d known it right from the
beginning of my book, and I’d known how to prove he was guilty too.
It was all about the briefcase, one with a grizzly secret inside –
the right hand of his victim, Arthur the butler. I had my hero,
Faulks, figure it all out – how Nicholson wanted Arthur dead so he
could get inside the home of Arthur’s employer and take back the
photograph he was being blackmailed with, how he’d created an alibi
by having his wife believe that he’d spent the evening in his
study, how Nicholson had, in fact, caught a cab across town, talked
his way inside Arthur’s apartment, choked him, cut off his hand,
and then taken his hand back across town in a briefcase he’d found
in Arthur’s apartment, at which point he’d used Arthur’s keys to
get in through the front door and then his cold, dead fingers to
open the electronic safe by means of the fingerprint scanner. What
I hadn’t noticed, until Victoria pointed it out to me, was that I
had Faulks pull the briefcase out from inside Nicholson’s study to
prove his guilt, at which point Nicholson broke down and confessed,
but I hadn’t explained just how the briefcase had moved from
Arthur’s apartment, and then latterly the safe storage complex at
the police evidence room, to the inside of Nicholson’s home.

It was a hitch alright. In the past, I’d solved problems just
like it by having Faulks break into places and move the evidence
about as he wished. I couldn’t do that here, though, because the
briefcase was in the heart of a police station, and no matter how
fanciful I might allow my burglar books to become, I drew the line
at having Faulks burgle the police. One way of sorting it out was
to introduce a new character, say a street-wise cop that Faulks
could talk into helping him. Maybe the cop would get the collar in
return for loaning Faulks the briefcase? It wasn’t a bad idea but I
didn’t like it because it would involve too big a rewrite. If the
cop was to have a role like that, he had to appear early on and I’d
need to develop a few scenes where Faulks could talk to him and
gain his trust and it all sounded like far too much work. Besides,
if things worked that way, where was the surprise for the reader
when Faulks opened the cupboard in Nicholson’s apartment and pulled
out the briefcase?

Just as I was wrestling with that very thought, my telephone
rang and I answered it. It was Pierre, returning my call. Now I’m
pretty sure Pierre isn’t his real name but the truth is you need to
use a name when you talk business with someone, and since he was
French and he lived in Paris, Pierre had always struck me as an
appropriate choice. For his part, Pierre didn’t care what I called
him, so long as he got a share of each job he passed my way and his
cut of any stolen goods I needed him to shift.

“Charlie, you have business for me in Amsterdam?” he began.

“Perhaps,” I said, leaning back in my chair and propping my feet
up onto the surface of my desk, ankles crossed. “Though it really
depends on you, Pierre. On how much I can trust you, to be
exact.”

“Charlie. Please,” he said. “We are friends. We do not talk like
this.”

“Not usually, no,” I said, glancing to my right and
straightening the picture frame that contained my Hammett novel.
“But then I hear things have changed. I hear you give my name to
anybody who wants it.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. I cleared away a
dust spot from the glass of the frame.

“Americans, Pierre,” I prompted. “Admirers of my work. Does that
mean anything to you?”

“Charlie – ”

“Take your time. This had better be good.”

“He is a friend, too,” Pierre said, carefully. “An old friend.
He wanted the best I knew in the Netherlands. You are my best,
Charlie.”

“That’s reassuring. Did he tell you what he was after?”

“Only your name. I said I would contact you, like we agree, but
he did not like this.”