The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam (18 page)

She paused, half expecting me to interrupt with something
flippant, but I controlled myself.

“He would ask me anything – what had I done the day before?
Where was I going at the weekend? What was the weather forecast to
do? What car did I own? Did I visit Amsterdam often? Of course, we
were not supposed to answer such questions. They told us it could
be dangerous.”

“If a prisoner learned too much about you?”

“Or if they liked you. They might ask you to do things for them,
bring them things.”

“Did Michael?”

“Never.”

“But he wrote you letters.”

“Not at first. When I worked there he would just ask me his
questions. But then I lost my job.”

“So how did he get in touch? Had you told him your address?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It was me.”

“You?”

She shrugged. “After I left, I missed his questions. I missed
telling him the things he asked. And I did not know if anyone else
was answering him. It made me sad to think of it. So I went to see
him again.”

“And he just opened up?”

“He felt the same way. He had…developed feelings for me.”

“Useful.”

“And this is when he told me about the diamonds.”

“And I bet you looked surprised. Only, you already knew by then,
didn’t you? I mean, all you would have needed to do was ask someone
at the prison what he was in for, or consult an old newspaper.
Maybe you’d done that before he began talking to you. Like you
said, an American inside a Dutch prison, it is kind of novel.”

She waited me out, neither confirming nor denying it. She didn’t
have to. It made complete sense to me.

“He wouldn’t have told you where they were, he was too careful
for that. Twelve years can teach you a good deal of patience.”

“He told me he had them.” She lowered her voice and leaned
towards me across the counter of the bar. “He said there were many
diamonds,” she whispered. “But they had not been finished.”

“You mean cut?”

“Cut, yes.”

“Which is why he wouldn’t have been able to sell them
immediately. He needed a fence. One in Paris, I’m thinking.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“There is not much else. After I visited him, he wrote me the
letters and I wrote back to him. It was not so long before he was
released by then.”

“No. You wouldn’t want to risk him losing interest.”

“When he was released, he came to Amsterdam.”

“And you gave him the homecoming he’d been waiting for. And
afterwards, he whispered sweet nothings in your ear until he
happened to mention that getting his hands on the diamonds wasn’t
as straightforward as you’d hoped. There were the monkey figurines
to think about, and the other men who had them. That must have been
crushing.”

Her lips thinned. “It was not like this.”

“Oh, I think it was. But you can stick to the Disney version if
you like. The real question is the monkeys, though, isn’t it? Did
he tell you what they meant right then or did you have to work on
him for a while?”

“He told me everything,” she said, straightening. “More than he
told you.”

“No question. But then I was just the hired help. You were his
one and only true love.”

She adopted a prim expression. “You were supposed to bring him
the monkeys. We were to leave Amsterdam.”

“With the diamonds?”

“Of course.”

“So they’re still in the city.”

She nodded, rolling her eyes as if that much was obvious.

“Where?”

Just then, the door to the café opened and the young man I’d
seen working behind the bar earlier in the week walked in. He
clocked me right away and paused, half way through unzipping his
coat. He said something to Marieke in Dutch, his tone hostile, and
it was enough to make the old man turn away from his rum and
question me with his eyes. I didn’t have to respond, though,
because Marieke did it for me. And whatever she said seemed to set
him straight because once he’d given me his best menacing stare he
disappeared through the door at the back of the bar.

“You were saying?” I said, turning on my stool to face Marieke
once again.

“Bring me the monkeys and I will tell you,” she said, glancing
towards the door her colleague had walked through. “Otherwise, how
can I trust you?”

“You want to bring trust into our relationship? Don’t you think
it’s a little late for that?”

“Not if you bring me the monkeys.”

“You make it sound so straightforward.”

She adopted a stern expression. “But if you get them, do not
leave them in your apartment. Bring them here.”

“We’ll see,” I told her. “You never know, I might figure this
all out and keep the diamonds for myself.”

She clamped her teeth together.

“What? You think I’m joking?”

I stood up from my stool at the bar and buttoned my coat. Then I
slipped my hands into my pockets and bowed my head goodbye. It felt
good, in a childish way, talking about the missing figurines and
offering to try to find them while all the time I had two of them
in my pocket, gripped between my fingers. It was almost tempting to
pull them out and wave them at her with a grin on my face but I
didn’t do it. I still didn’t know exactly how much she would
take.

Outside of the café, twilight had begun to descend, lowering the
temperature a few degrees and causing the canal-side streetlamps to
power up. When I checked my watch, I saw that it was almost half
past five, and because I didn’t feel like being crushed in a tram
full of commuters I looked around me for a nearby bicycle rack.
There was one just a short distance away and I walked across to it
and immediately selected a pale blue bike with fitted mud-caps and
a wicker basket affixed to the handlebars. The metal chain that
secured the front wheel to the bike rack was fastened with a modern
padlock and I had my picks out and the lock undone before my
fingers could begin to numb. I relocked the chain to the rack,
freed the bike from the tangle of adjoining pedals and handle bars,
and wheeled it to the side of the road where I prepared to hoist my
leg over the saddle and ride away.

Before I could, though, a white panel van surged out of a nearby
parking space and veered across the road towards me. The driver
didn’t straighten up. Instead, he stamped on his brakes and brought
the van to a halt just in front of me, blocking my way. The front
doors of the van flew open.

I knew all the clichés about white van drivers, sure, but the
recklessness stunned me and it took me a moment to gather my senses
and prepare to confront the driver. As it happened, though, the
confrontation that followed was of a different order to the one I
was expecting because the two men who jumped out of the van were
wearing balaclavas and one of them had a baseball bat over his
shoulder. I opened my mouth to speak but before I could get the
words out the man whipped the bat forwards and buried the sweet
spot deep in my solar plexus. The pain was immediate and disabling.
It exploded from my chest out to my fingertips, making me let go of
the bike and meanwhile robbing me of my breath. My legs buckled and
I fell to my knees on the cobbled roadway as the bike toppled over
beside me. I looked up, gasping for air, to find the masked man
bringing the bat down once again. And this time, when he connected,
I didn’t feel a thing.

∨
The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam
∧

T
he briefcase
wouldn’t shut. I was pushing down hard on the lid, fumbling for the
clasps, but I couldn’t get them to engage. Something was in the
way. I dropped the briefcase onto the floor and stamped on it. When
the obstruction still wouldn’t give, I jumped up and down on the
lid with both feet. There was some flex but not enough. I decided
to open the briefcase and try repositioning Arthur the butler’s
hand but when I threw back the lid there was no hand there at all –
there was a man’s head. The man was pleading with his eyes, his
eyeballs almost crawling out of the slits in the balaclava he was
wearing, and he was groaning. The man’s groaning became more
insistent and his head began to shake, as if he was trying to say
something but couldn’t. I reached down and pushed my fingers past
his lips and felt around inside the moist cavity of his mouth until
I touched something hard. I gripped the object as best I could and
pulled. A monkey figurine slipped out of his mouth, slick with his
drool. I raised the figurine to my nose and sniffed. A sweet,
peppery smell crawled up my sinuses and clawed at my brain. Then my
eyes snapped open and the man who was holding my head upright by my
hair passed the smelling salts beneath my nose once again.

He slapped me for good measure and I mumbled something that my
dry mouth and lips failed to articulate. I worked some saliva with
my cheeks and swallowed and it was then that the nausea hit. Sudden
and unstoppable, a wave of heat rushed from my chest to my scalp,
turning my forehead into a hot plate. My ears popped and my throat
spasmed. I doubled over and let go of a gut-full of vomit.

The man released my hair and jumped clear, grumbling as I spit
the last threads of bile from my mouth. I longed to use my hand to
clean my lips and wipe the sweat from my face and forehead but
found that I couldn’t because my hands were tied to the back of the
plastic chair I was sat on. My feet were bound too, secured to the
metal legs of the chair. The heat was unbearable. I wanted to be
stripped and thrown into an icy pool, longed to be hosed down with
gallons of freezing water. I turned groggily to the man and was
about to ask him for help but as I parted my foul-tasting lips to
shape the words my vision blurred and I found that I was looking
into a long, unfocused tunnel that led only to unconsciousness.

♦

The second time I woke the man was holding my head back and
pouring water down my throat. I gagged and spluttered, nearly
vomiting again. The man tried to give me more water but I shook my
head, moaning, and butted the glass away. He moved back and studied
me for a moment and then he called over his shoulder in Dutch until
his companion walked into the room and joined him. Both men wore
jeans and leather jackets and the hair of the thin man with the
water glass was flattened and tangled from the balaclava he’d had
on. The wide man had no hair. I may have only seen them once
before, in the café with Michael, but I’d thought about them often
enough since then and I knew right away who they were.

Something caught in my nostrils and I looked down to find that
my vomit was still pooled on the floor in front of me. Lifting my
eyes, I scanned the room they were keeping me in. I’d been here
before too. The mattress and bedding were still torn and ruined,
the wooden trunk was positioned just as it had been previously and
the hatch to the attic was right where it should have been,
immediately above the trunk. On the bare floor a short distance in
front of my pooled stomach contents were the two monkey
figurines.

The men saw me looking at the figurines and said something to
one another. Then the thin man bent down and snatched them up,
zipping them into the pocket of his leather jacket and giving me a
wary look, as if I could somehow steal them from before his eyes. I
wasn’t sure how he expected me to manage it. Just the pull on my
chest of having my arms tied behind me was enough to make me wince
each time I breathed. My chest felt raw and tender where I’d been
hit with the baseball bat and I was afraid that at least one of my
ribs might be broken. In a sense, it was good that I couldn’t move
my arms because it meant I couldn’t aggravate my injuries or raise
my hand to discover just how bad a state the back of my skull was
in. Even so, I’d had much better evenings.

“You are English,” the wide man said, finally.

I nodded, then winced as the room lurched to one side.

“Do you know who we are?”

This time I shook my head very carefully.

“We know you. Mr. Charlie Howard. You are a writer.”

“Yes,” I managed.

“And a thief.”

I met his eyes. They were deep-set and very dark. He pulled his
head down into his bulky shoulders and breathed through flared
nostrils, awaiting my response. The thin man looked between us,
like an eager spectator at a blood sport event. I glanced at the
floor, struggling to focus, and the wide man repeated himself.

“You are a thief. You stole from us.”

“It was a mistake,” I croaked.

“You say this now.”

I glanced up. “Actually, I’ve been saying it for over a week.
Ever since you killed Michael.”

The thin man turned to the wide man, about to say something, but
the wide man held up his hand and stopped him. He walked towards me
and dropped to his haunches in front of my chair, his face just
inches from my own. He hoisted his eyebrows and looked deep into my
eyes, stroking his chin with his fingers like a golfer sizing up a
tricky putt. For a moment, I thought he might strike me, but
instead he just crouched there, wordless and breathing slow, trying
to read something from my expression. I wasn’t sure what he was
looking for and I was too weak to put on any kind of an act so I
let him read me in whichever way he chose. In time, he placed his
hands on his thighs and stood upright once more.

“You sleep,” he said, and with that he raised his booted foot
into the air and kicked my chair so that it toppled over and I
crashed down onto my side, a fresh spasm of pain blooming from my
chest.

♦

Somehow, I did sleep, though not for long. I was woken by a
tingling sensation in my arm. The blood had drained right out of it
and it had gone numb and had started to throb. I gritted my teeth
and struggled against the stabs and twinges all around my chest as
I tried to manoeuvre myself upright once again. But I couldn’t do
it. I was on too awkward an angle. I ground my forehead into the
floor and tried to prise myself up a little to let the blood flow
back into my arm. It helped a touch but I wanted badly to stretch
and shake my arm out.