The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam (21 page)

I found a café nearby, a few streets over towards the Singel
canal, where the owner who was opening up took one look at my
pallid, sleep-deprived face and ushered me inside for the first
coffee of the day. I drank it sat beside the etched-glass side
window, warming my hands around my mug, thinking about the events
that had transported me to where I was now. On the table in front
of me was the single piece of paper I’d found folded up in
Michael’s overflow pipe. It was a photocopied document and the
reproduction wasn’t perfect but it was good enough to tell me what
it had been intended to. I sipped on the coffee and waited for the
caffeine to trickle into my grey cells and get me thinking around
the implications of what I’d found, listening, in the meantime, to
the clatter of crockery being removed from the dishwasher as the
owner continued to prepare for the day.

A half-hour later, when he’d finished the donkey work and found
time to drink a coffee himself, I asked the owner for some food and
he nodded and disappeared into a back room while I went in search
of the gents and tended some more to the bloody gash on the back of
my skull. I emerged some minutes later, clutching a paper towel to
my wound, to be presented with a plate of just about the best cold
meat and cheese I had ever tasted. I chewed the food, along with my
thoughts, for close to an hour and then I made my way to a
pay-phone at the rear of the café and dialled the number on the
business card Rutherford had given me. I was expecting to leave a
message on his machine but to my surprise Rutherford picked up,
sounding groggy.

“Sleeping at your desk?” I asked, once we’d exchanged
greetings.

“Telephone’s on divert,” he explained, then yawned. “I wondered
if you might be in touch.”

“Considerate of you,” I told him. “Thing is, I need another
favour.”

“Not in the clink again are you, dear boy?”

“Not just yet. But I am in a tight spot Rutherford and the truth
is I was wondering if you might be able to put me up for a day or
two. I could go to a hotel, only…”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he interrupted. “Truly. You’re familiar
with the Oosterpark?”

I told him I was.

“Very good. I live on the western side. You have a pen?”

“And a napkin.”

“Good man,” he said, and then he told me the address and asked
me if I thought I could find it.

“I’m sure I can,” I told him. “Is it okay to come on over?”

“Of course. I’ll fix us some tea.”

I thanked him again and hung up, then paid the café owner,
leaving a few extra euros on his tip tray before bidding him
farewell and walking off in the direction I’d come from earlier
that morning. The chill air was raw against the cut on my head and
I was shivering. I pulled the thin man’s leather jacket tight
around my body for warmth, slipped one hand in my trouser pocket
and drew the hand that was carrying my holdall up inside the jacket
sleeve.

From St. Jacobsstraat, I crossed the tourist strip of the Damrak
and walked past the Oude Kerk into the very heart of the Red Light
District. The scene was drearily familiar. Here and there,
hung-over revellers stumbled out of whore booths and twenty-four
hour sex clubs, their clothes unkempt and their movements limp and
aimless. Meantime, clusters of working girls, their arms linked
together, walked away from the area in plastic overcoats and
knee-high PVC boots, heading for Centraal Station and whichever
homely suburb they hailed from. In their place, other girls were
arriving to begin the less lucrative day shift, layers of heavy
make-up giving their faces an expression of forced optimism.

I lowered my head and avoided their eyes, looking instead at my
feet on the grubby concrete, tuning out of the half-hearted rugby
song a handful of my compatriots were slurring. Soon, I was
near-ing the Nieuwmarkt, passing from the fringes of the Red Light
District into an off-shoot of China Town. East Asian grocery stores
and butchers and restaurants began to surround me in a splash of
bright yellows and reds and a world of symbols and signs I couldn’t
decipher. The rapid-fire yammer of Chinese conversation filled my
ears and strange, meat-based scents caught in my nostrils.

I strolled down Zeedijk street, and was just passing a
newsagents when the owner of the store tottered out into the street
carrying a postcard display unit in front of his face. Because of
all the postcards, he couldn’t see where he was going and he bumped
right into me. The display unit fell from his hands and crashed to
the floor, scattering postcards and pocket-sized maps across the
street. I stooped to pick the goods up, not sure if the man was
cursing himself or me, and while I was reaching for a handful of
the loose cards something in a first floor window above the
newsagents caught my eye. I hesitated, and stared at the window,
and by now I knew that the man was cursing me but I no longer
cared. Adhered to the glass was a familiar motif, no more than a
couple of feet in height, and above it were more Chinese symbols. I
couldn’t read the symbols but the motif was as clear as day. Three
monkeys – one covering his ears, the next covering his mouth and
the final one covering his eyes.

Wordlessly, I found my feet and pressed some of the cards into
the man’s hands. Already, I was walking beyond him towards the
glass and aluminium-framed door beside his shop. There were several
buzzers positioned next to the door but I didn’t delay myself with
them. Instead, I opened the door and walked into an unheated
entrance hall where my breath instantly condensed in the still air
before me.

Ahead was a darkened storage area and a lighted staircase lined
with a threadbare red carpet. I climbed the stairs, walking in a
vaguely dazed fashion like a man who has been hypnotized, and at
the top of the stairs I faced up to a second door with a bubble
glass insert that again contained the monkey insignia, though this
time the insignia was smaller. I tried the handle. It was unlocked.
I opened the door and walked inside.

The room I found myself in was cramped and cheaply furnished. It
was dominated by a waist-high plywood counter that faced three
plastic chairs only a few feet away. The walls were bare and
painted in an off-white colour. The only items on top of the
counter were a cordless telephone and a small brass service bell. I
hovered for a few moments and when nobody appeared I stepped up and
rang the bell.

Let me tell you, I wish there were more bells just like it
because the woman who appeared to answer the chime was just about
the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen. Perhaps five feet tall,
she was dainty as air and she wore a lustrous, peacock-blue kimono
that complimented the dark, glossy hair tied atop her head. Her
face was painted in an almost geisha style and she bowed her head
in the Oriental fashion as she approached.

I bowed my head too but when I looked up the charmed smile I’d
adopted slipped from my face in an instant. Flanking her were two
huge men, with shoulders like boulders and no necks to speak of.
They wore suit jackets and dark shirts but they would have looked
more at home in a sumo ring. Waxed hair scraped back on their
heads, they walked in an odd kind of shuffle, throwing their
considerable weight from one foot to the next, as if their ability
to move depended entirely on a complex form of perpetual motion,
like one of those executive toys with the rows of silver ball
bearings knocking endlessly together.

The Asian goddess waited at the counter, smiling sweetly, until
the two giants were hovering behind her shoulders in a queer visual
echo of the three monkeys. I focused on her dewy eyes and she
nodded in discrete encouragement.

“Hi,” I began, rather brilliantly. “Do you sell monkeys
here?”

The woman shook her head minutely, as if it genuinely troubled
her that she didn’t quite understand.

“Monkeys, like those ones?” I asked, pointing over my shoulder
towards the motif etched into the bubble glass on the door.

She shook her head again and then lowered her eyes, focussing on
a point of unfathomable interest on the bare wooden counter. Very
slowly, one of the goons behind her rolled his neck around his
massive shoulders and I heard the crunch and crackle of his
load-bearing vertebrae as clearly as if I was eating cereal. His
twin inhaled deeply through his nose, looking as if he might vacuum
every last molecule of oxygen from the room just for the thrill of
seeing me pass out.

I got the impression they weren’t in the habit of having their
time wasted, so I fumbled in the pocket of the thin man’s leather
jacket until I found the two monkey figurines and then I placed the
figurines onto the counter in front of me. They lay there
haphazardly, the one covering his ears and the other covering his
mouth, somehow appearing to cower under the quiet gaze of the
beautiful girl. To my great relief, the girl raised her head and
smiled at me easily and the two men either side of her allowed
their massive shoulders to relax just a fraction.

“Do you recognise these?” I asked. “Were they made here?”

The girl just blinked at me, as if waiting for me to rid my
system of such trivial questions.

“I don’t have the third one. Are you able to make it? Or would
you like to buy these?” I asked, gently sliding them across the
counter towards her. “How much would you pay?”

This time, the girl nodded, as if she understood my wishes
completely. Then she reached below the counter for what I imagined
would be some money or a ledger. I was wrong. Her hand emerged
holding a small metal hammer. The hammer was rendered in some dull,
lead-like material, but unlike a normal hammer, both ends of the
striking head were shaped into a point so that, side-on, it looked
like a flattened hexagon.

She reached below the counter a second time and fetched a shammy
cloth and spread it flat across the surface of the counter. Then
she picked up my two monkey figurines and positioned them carefully
on the shammy and, before I could stop her, raised the little
hammer in the air and bought it down hard onto each figurine with a
sharp, deadly tap that instantly reduced the monkeys to a fine and
irretrievable rubble of plaster and dust.

I gasped and reached out, mouth agape, but as my eyes scanned
the destruction properly for the first time my sense of horror was
suddenly replaced by the first glimmerings of understanding. There,
shining amid the mess of plaster debris, was a small metal object.
I stepped closer and brushed the plaster chunks aside with my
fingers and picked it up. The object was a key, no bigger than the
kind that would fit a suitcase, and there was a second one just
like it amid the remnants of the other figurine. Both keys had an
identical Chinese symbol etched into them. I picked the keys up in
my hand and studied them in my palm. So it was true – the monkeys
were worthless – it was what had been inside of them that had been
worth killing for.

As I held the keys aloft and marvelled at how clean and shiny
they were in spite of the plaster they had been housed in, the girl
raised a hatch in the plywood counter and motioned for me to walk
through and join her. I did as she suggested and then she bowed
once more before stepping aside and inviting one of the tailored
sumos to relieve me of my bag and search it while his partner
patted me down. The one who was patting me down didn’t find
anything of interest but his friend who was searching the bag
pulled the handgun out and showed it to him. They studied me
carefully, as if from a new perspective, and I shrugged, as
casually as I could, and then watched as they deftly emptied the
cartridge of bullets, put the gun back inside my holdall and kicked
the holdall to one side. When they were done, the girl motioned for
me to follow her towards a plain white door at the back of the
room. I did just that and the two heavies fell into line behind us
so that we walked towards the door in group formation, looking, I
imagined, a lot like a bizarre delegation from a far flung planet
in a television Sci-Fi series.

On the other side of the white door was a small vestibule and
beyond it was a substantial metal door with a circular wheel fixed
to it. The metal door was wider and taller than a normal door and
looked to be made of a highly polished steel. It was the kind of
door you might expect to find in Fort Knox or at the entrance to a
topflight nuclear bunker. To the side of the door was a flat,
electronic screen and I watched, soundlessly, as the girl pressed
her palm against the screen and the screen flashed a blinding light
against her delicate palm, almost like a photocopier. There
followed a solid clunk and then the door dropped on its hinges just
a shade. The girl nodded to the sumo on my right and he stepped
forwards and turned the wheel on the front of the door, then heaved
the thing wide open.

What I saw beyond the door was enough to take my breath away.
Here, on the first floor of an ordinary looking building in
Amsterdam, was the kind of security facility that a first rate bank
would be proud of. Row upon row of safety deposit boxes stretched
for the entire length of the room, forming a corridor that was
illuminated by the flickering light from a series of suspended
fluorescent tubes. The safety deposit boxes were made of a similar
metal to the door and they gleamed in the light as if they had
never been touched. There were perhaps three hundred in all,
stacked side by side, and there was nothing else beside the boxes
and the lights in the room, not even a window. I turned to look at
the girl and she gently took the keys from my hand and led me into
the heart of the metallic corridor ahead of us.

A little over halfway down the corridor the girl paused and
consulted the Chinese symbol on the front of both keys, then
matched it to one of the safety deposit boxes beside her hip. She
gestured to the box and I saw that it had three locks on the front
of it. The girl inserted the keys she was holding into two of the
locks and then waited for me to produce the third key. I couldn’t,
of course, because the third key was inside the final monkey,
wherever that might be.