The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam (20 page)

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The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam
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I
paused in my
apartment for just long enough to stuff a few clothes and my
passport into a holdall and to grab my burglar tools. I packed the
gun into the holdall too and was just about to run out of the
building when I thought to go into the bathroom and check on my
injuries. I lifted my shirt in front of the mirror and saw that I
had a deep purple bruise smack in the centre of my chest, as if
somebody had painted a target on me. Then I lowered my head and
prodded gently at the blood that had clotted in my hair. I ran the
cold tap on the bath and soaked a towel and used the sodden rag to
clear as much of the blood as I safely could without reopening the
wound. Then I changed my top for an unbloodied sweatshirt, put on
the thin man’s leather jacket with the monkey figurines still
zipped in the pocket and made my way back ofitside. There was no
sign of the wide man and the thin man out on the street but I
wasn’t about to hang around for them. Instead, I paced through the
Red Light District to St. Jacobsstraat and readied myself for
something I should have done a long time before.

The front door of the building was just where it had been a
little over a week ago, when Marieke had first led me through it. I
glanced at the door and thought about picking my way inside, but I
had my doubts. A garish crime scene notice had been pasted over the
flyers at eye level and there was the remote possibility the door
was under surveillance. And even if I did press ahead, there was a
risk I might pass one of the building’s other tenants on the short
trip upstairs to Michael Park’s bed-sit. I hovered nearby,
thinking. Dance music pulsed out from the sex booth on one side of
the building and some type of reggae ska was audible from the
coffee house in the opposite direction. Faintly, I could hear the
more distant noise of an emergency siren wailing elsewhere in the
city.

On balance, I didn’t feel comfortable going in through the
front. There was every chance it would be fine but why go against
my instincts? So I backed away from the door and walked off along
St. Jacobsstraat again, then to the nearest cross street and
afterwards to the rear of the building. Once there, I found a dark
nook to stuff my holdall into and a large wheelie bin that I rolled
across the alleyway until it was positioned beneath the roof
overhang I was interested in.

I climbed up onto the wheelie bin and braced one foot against
the side wall and, through a kind of leaping, springing motion that
ripped into the very heart of the sore spot in my chest, managed to
gain enough height to grab onto the curved, felted edge of the flat
roof that extended from just below Michael’s back window.

Without the stimulus of impending death, I made something of a
meal of hauling myself up, swearing and groaning with abandon. Once
the ordeal was over with, I laid flat on my back in complete
silence and stared at the slate grey clouds in the night sky above
me. The clouds were faintly iridescent in the glow of the city’s
sodium bleed, as if the sky was a dark and grisly sea, threaded
with phosphorescent plankton. I took in the queer effect as I
caught my breath, meanwhile fumbling in my pocket and removing a
pair of disposable surgical gloves that I slipped onto my hands.
Then I rolled onto my side and looked up at the bathroom window and
steeled myself for one more effort.

Luckily, there was a cast iron drain pipe positioned just close
enough to the window ledge to give me something to shinny up and
for some reason, the shinnying motion wasn’t as painful as I’d
expected. After hoisting myself several feet into the air, I braced
my right foot against one of the metal brackets securing the pipe
to the wall and reached across for the window ledge. I pushed up
from the ledge as best I could and, suspended diagonally, gripped
one of the cross-slats on the sash window with my spare hand so
that I could force the window slowly open. It took a minute or so
until I had the window high enough to crawl through and by that
stage my legs and arms were beginning to shake and my ribs felt
like a rack of hot knives in my chest but I still somehow managed
to push off from the pipe and grab the inside edge of the window
frame and pull myself in through the window all in one largely
fluid movement.

I dropped down onto the toilet cistern, then the bathroom floor.
The room was in darkness and it took me a few moments of feeling my
way around until I found the light cord and was able to turn on the
low wattage bulb suspended from the ceiling. Right in front of me,
dried blood and bits of hair and possibly skull matter were still
smeared against the white porcelain of the bathtub, soaking into
the yellowing tiles and dark grout on the wall. It was odd, in a
way, that his body wasn’t there too. Other than the bloody residue,
there was no real reason to believe I was in the middle of a crime
scene. I’m not sure what I expected – chalk marks or signs of a
forensics examination perhaps – but it wasn’t there. I wondered how
long it would be before the landlord would be allowed to clean the
bath and then I wondered if the landlord would even bother. Perhaps
the bed-sit would become yet another Amsterdam squat.

Enough of that. I didn’t think I would find what I was looking
for in the bathroom and I didn’t relish the prospect of searching
it too thoroughly, but I did pause just long enough to lift the lid
on the toilet cistern and peer inside. A clear plastic bag
containing an ounce or so of white powder was floating in the
stagnant water, like a listless jellyfish, but there was nothing
else out of the ordinary. I replaced the porcelain lid and moved
into the cramped living area, flicking on the main overhead light
as I entered.

The living area was all just as it had been too, although
Michael’s suitcase was gone, and there was now a printed slip of
yellow paper that looked like a police form on the foldaway kitchen
table. I rested in the middle of the room, hands on my hips, and
scanned the interior, asking myself where I should start and how
long I should take. To some extent, I was trying to put myself in
Michael’s shoes, thinking what I would have done if I’d been
confronted by the same space. What I’d realised I’d overlooked, you
see, was that Michael was a burglar too. And if he was anything
like me, he’d keep his valuables somewhere that most people,
particularly opportunist thieves, wouldn’t think to look. I’d
hidden my burglar tools behind the side-panel of my bath and the
two monkey figurines in a box of washing powder and my theory was
that Michael could have done something similar. If he was as good
as Pierre said, the third monkey might never have left his
apartment, no matter how many thugs and police officers and
forensic teams had been through it.

That was the theory. Now I was back in the bed-sit, though, it
was difficult to imagine where his hiding place could be. It was
such a confined space, with barely any furniture, that the
possibilities were limited. I started with the obvious and slid the
chest of drawers out from beside the bed and removed each of the
drawers and searched the cavities behind them. Then I turned the
chest upside down and checked the underside. There was nothing
there besides clumps of dust and household debris so I put the
drawers back and pulled the bed away from the wall. The bed had a
metal frame and no apparent openings where anything could be
hidden. I felt around the blanket and sheets and then I lifted the
mattress up and searched below that. When I didn’t find anything, I
dropped the mattress, prodded it for a while, much like a surgeon
feeling for a hernia, and then gave up and transferred my
attentions to the kitchen area.

The foldaway kitchen table and chairs were no good but I shook
the gas canister to check there was fuel in it and then I shone my
pocket torch into the back of the single burner stove where I found
a miniature world of burnt crumbs and blackened chunks of who knew
what, but nothing of import. I straightened with my hands on my
hips and looked at the aluminium sink. It was possible he’d hidden
something in the plastic U-bend beneath it but that seemed unlikely
and so I passed it over for the time being. Then I looked up above
my head and spied the faux-marble light fitting. The fitting was
made of an opaque material and there was a possibility there could
be something inside of it so I moved one of the kitchen chairs and
climbed onto it and was just about to unscrew the fitting when I
heard the front door of the building open, then close, and
afterwards the sound of footsteps on the main stairs below.

The footsteps were measured, as if the person they belonged to
was in no hurry to get to where he or she was heading. I glanced
around the room, wondering if I could put it back as I had found it
in time, but I knew I couldn’t without making a great deal of
noise. Instead, I unscrewed the light fitting and untwisted the
scalding bulb a fraction so that the room was plunged into darkness
and the owner of the footsteps wouldn’t see any light shining from
beneath the front door of the bed-sit. As I blinked away the
translucent hexagons that had formed in front of my eyes and tried
to ignore the smell of burning plastic from my disposable gloves, I
felt around blindly inside the casing of the light fitting until I
was sure there was nothing there either.

Meanwhile, the footsteps came ever closer. It was unlikely
anyone from the police would be checking on the apartment so late
at night, I thought, but I couldn’t be certain of that, and there
was always the chance somebody was about to enter in less than
strictly legal circumstances anyway. I tensed and readied myself to
flee at the first sound of the lock being touched, my toes curled
up inside my trainers and my mind already rehearsing my leap
towards the bathroom. The footsteps came closer still and then I
heard the squeak of a loose floorboard on the landing just in front
of the door. There was silence for what seemed like an eternity. It
was so quiet I could hear the creaking of my knee caps. My whole
body went cold, then flushed hot the moment I became aware of it. I
held my breath as best I could but I was afraid the thudding of my
heart might just be loud enough to give me away. It was all getting
a bit too much and I was on the brink of bolting for the window
when finally, and to my considerable relief, the footsteps began
again and I heard the sound of measured footfall on the next flight
of stairs. Either the person the footsteps belonged to was drunk
and weaving slowly upwards, or they were old and needed a rest, or
they were simply curious enough to pause outside of a bed-sit where
someone had recently been killed, but the upshot was they weren’t
about to walk in on me. I waited until the footsteps could no
longer be heard and then I twisted the bulb back into its socket,
looked away from the lighted element and screwed the light fitting
into place once again.

I got down from the chair and removed my micro-screwdriver and
immediately used it to unscrew the light switch on the wall. I
checked the cavity behind the switch and then I did the same thing
with the two power sockets positioned above the floor near the
sink. They were no use either. I popped the screws back into
position and tightened them and then I began to think about lifting
the carpet and checking the floorboards. It didn’t seem a likely
scenario. If Michael needed to access the monkey in a hurry, the
floorboards wouldn’t work. It was still possible, of course, but I
didn’t like it, and I decided to leave it as a last resort. Much as
I’d wanted to avoid it, the bathroom seemed a better bet.

As a first step, I checked the side-panel of the bath, just in
case we really were on exactly the same wavelength. It proved a
tricky panel to remove. One of the screw-heads was mangled and the
panel had been forced in at an awkward angle so I had a real job to
get it out and, quite typically, I needn’t have bothered. All the
panel concealed was the underside of the plastic tub and the metal
pipe work and I wasn’t about to start tackling the plumbing.

There was no towel rail or shower rail in the bathroom and even
if there had been the monkey was probably too big to be fitted
inside something like that. I checked the plastic toilet brush
holder and found only a yellowy-brown sludge in the receptacle
beneath. The light above my head was from a bare bulb and there was
no medicine cabinet or laundry cupboard of any description.

I looked again at the bloody scene around the bath, at the
discoloured porcelain and the tiles, and just then a jolt ran
through me. It was only a small thing, but the metal cover of the
overflow pipe seemed a touch proud. I reached for my screwdriver
again and very carefully used it to prise the metal cover away from
the bath, keeping my wrists and arms clear of the dried blood and
pulped body tissue surrounding me. There was no rubber sealant
holding the cover in place and it popped out into the palm of my
hand with no trouble at all. Something else came with it. Taped to
the back of the cover was the top of a small, clear plastic bag. I
tugged on the bag and the rest of it came up and away from the
overflow pipe all at once. The bag was bone dry, though it smelt
pretty foul. I shook it out and opened it up and then I removed
what was inside. It wasn’t the missing monkey figurine – it was far
more interesting than that.

∨
The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam
∧

B
y the time I’d put
everything back as I’d found it and slipped out of the bathroom
window onto the flat roof once again, it was almost dawn and a
faint, gauzy rain was beginning to fall. I collected my holdall
from the nook where I’d hidden it and ditched my gloves in the
waste bin, then rolled the bin back into position and went in
search of a place where I could collect my thoughts.