The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam (24 page)

“Among others.”

“Did you ever ask him about it?”

“Sure.”

“And what did he say?”

“Nothing.” He shook his lager can, drank a little more. “But
that changed.”

I waited a beat, trying not to rush things. “Oh?” I said, as
casually as I could manage.

Stuart grinned, aware of what I was trying to do. “Listen,” he
said, “I’m putting some pieces together here myself, okay? But I’m
assuming you’re the English guy he asked to steal the two monkeys
for him. I mean, who else, right?”

“Go on.”

“And you said no. At least, that’s what you said to begin
with.”

He paused, waiting for me to confirm it, but I didn’t oblige
him. It didn’t seem to matter a great deal. A confidence man is a
storyteller at heart and Stuart liked to tell a good story.

“It got Mikey,” he went on. “For whatever reason, he needed
those monkeys. And it was getting late on that Thursday and he
began to think maybe you wouldn’t go through with it. And then he
called me.”

“As back-up.”

“Except he didn’t know for sure it was back-up.”

“Right. And you agreed to break into the houseboat and that
apartment for him.”

He made a whining noise deep in his throat, almost a whimper.
“Not to begin with. Like I said, I’m a scam king, not a B & E
merchant. But…” He raised his eyes to the ceiling and nodded his
head, as if to acknowledge his moral failings. “It was getting late
in the day and it was important to him that he got the monkeys that
night, okay? And I knew about the one he’d had inside with him,
knew how important it always seemed to be. So I played him for a
while, got him so he was almost begging me to help, but being
careful, you know, not wanting to blow it. And I guess I couldn’t
have done it much better in the end because that was when he came
clean about the diamonds.”

“How much did he offer you?”

“Half,” he said, then gulped some lager.

“You’re lying.”

A sly grin crept across Stuart’s face. “What makes you so
sure?”

“Your lips are moving.”

“Jeez,” he said, throwing a hand up, then letting it drop onto
his belly. “That line’s as old as my grandmother. And she’s been
dead almost twenty years.”

“Even so, it’s true, isn’t it? I’d say it was more like ten per
cent.”

“Well guess away, buddy. All’s you need to know is it was enough
to get me on board.”

“So you were the second intruder.”

“Come again?”

“The guy who broke into both places after me.”

“If you say so. It makes sense that way but I’ve never known for
certain you were there.”

“I was there,” I said, folding my arms. “I was in the apartment
in the Jordaan when you were searching it. You cut the mattress
with a knife.”

“Well, I’ll be. Where were you hidden?”

“The attic.” I glanced up, as if an identical hatch had appeared
in Stuart’s ceiling to help me explain. “There was a crawl space
there. But I couldn’t see you.”

“Or else you’d have had me pegged the first time you saw me in
the police station,” he said, in an almost wistful tone.

“You were luckier than you realised.”

“Although what could you have told them, I guess?”

“It’s a conundrum.”

“Isn’t it?”

“You know,” I said, scratching at the sore spot on my chest, “I
happen to believe what you’re telling me. I knew whoever broke into
the apartment was a beginner. What did you use on the door, by the
way?”

“Fire extinguisher. Found it on the street.”

“I’d figured it was a mallet, though a fire extinguisher works I
suppose.”

“Sure worked for me,” he said, grinning again.

“But why did you go to the apartment at all? You must have known
I’d taken the first figurine from the houseboat.”

Stuart shook his head. “Couldn’t get into the safe, could I? I
told Mikey I wouldn’t be able to but I guess that shows how
desperate he’d got. He wanted me to try.”

“But when you got to the second apartment and the monkey wasn’t
there, you had to assume I’d been in before you?”

“There was no sign that anyone had broken in.”

“Because I didn’t break anything. I used my picks.”

He pouted. “Except I didn’t know that, did I? It was a
possibility, sure, but equally the monkey could have been
moved.”

“So what did you do after you left?”

“Headed to the café the girl works in. That’s where Mikey wanted
to meet. But when I got there he was already leaving so I came here
and waited for him to call.”

“Was he with the wide man and the thin man?”

“There were two men, yeah.”

“You think they’re the ones who killed him?”

“Could be. Or it could have been the girl. Or maybe it was you.”
He peered at me, brow furrowed.

“Or you,” I suggested.

“Well now,” Stuart said, sitting up in the Chesterfield and
spilling some of the beer on his shirt. “I know it wasn’t me.”

“Likewise,” I told him, then reached up and probed at my head
wound, picking away a flake of dried blood. “And after they put a
baseball bat to my head, the wide man and the thin man said it
wasn’t them.”

“So it was the girl then.”

I leaned my head on an angle. “Perhaps. Although she would have
had to wait until the wide man and the thin man had left him alone,
then beaten him, then got back to the café to meet me. Which I
don’t see happening. Are you sure she wasn’t with Michael and the
two men?”

“Absolutely,” he said, looking as serious as he had done at any
time since he’d got home. “Although she could have already been in
his apartment, maybe. I didn’t go inside the café once I saw him
leave but I didn’t see her through the window either.”

“It’s possible.”

“Or somebody is lying.”

“Or somebody else killed him.”

“Hell, maybe it was suicide.”

I gave Stuart a look that told him that wasn’t funny. He slumped
a little on the sofa, then drained the rest of his lager.

“Was it you who broke into my apartment?” I asked.

He frowned, wiping his lips clean with the back of his hand. “I
don’t know anything about that. Matter of fact, I’ve been tying to
find out where you live. So you got burgled, huh?”

“I’m not sure it’s something I’m entitled to complain
about.”

“Did they get the monkeys?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Stuart squinted at me, then gestured in my direction with his
lager can.

“You know, you just looked away when you said that. It’s a sure
sign you’re lying.”

“I’m telling you the truth,” I said, focussing on his eyes.

“Horseshit. You blinked.”

I sighed, then rubbed the back of my neck and afterwards the
stubble on my chin.

“What about your secretary, the one who called me?”

“Some bird in a bar. I gave her a few notes.”

“She was kind of curt.”

“No shit. You get what you pay for, I guess.”

“And that whole library thing,” I went on, throwing my hands up.
“Why’d you go through all that? We were in there for hours.”

“Well, I couldn’t go finding what you were looking for right
away now, could I?”

“But three hours!”

“Yeah,” he said, smirking, “I sensed you were getting a bit
restless. I could have gone another hour or so.”

“There was no need.”

“I was being thorough. Besides, you’d paid me well enough.”

“The six thousand euros? I found it in the safe in the
houseboat.”

He shook his head, amused. “Easy come, eh?”

“Something like that. Truth is I figured it could be marked and
I might as well get it laundered through your office account.”

He whistled. “What did you think, you’d ask for some of it back
after a while?”

“The thought had occurred to me.”

“From a lawyer? Man, you’re a born optimist.”

I leaned forward against the chair and planted my hands on the
backrest again.

“One final question,” I said. “Marieke, Kim, whoever she is –
you think she might have the third monkey?”

He chewed his lip, then nodded slowly. “I’d say the odds are
pretty good. And I say that as somebody who knows you must already
have been through my apartment.”

“Hey,” I told him, smiling, “you do something for a living, it
pays to be good at it.”

∨
The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam
∧

C
afe de Brug was
busier than I’d ever seen it. All of the tables were occupied and a
cigarette smog was suspended above the room. Both the girl and the
young man were working the bar and because of the number of
customers she didn’t see me to begin with. I took a stool and lit a
cigarette with a book of matches from a nearby ashtray, looking, I
thought, a bit like Glint Eastwood in one of his Western movies.
I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know how I really looked.

When she finally saw me, I could tell she thought about not
serving me and leaving it to her light-fingered friend. In the end,
though, she thought better of it and fixed me a beer.

“Thanks Kim,” I said, when she placed the beer in front of
me.

Her hand didn’t leave the glass. All that mattered right then
was that she’d heard me say her real name.

“You might want to let go,” I told her. “Otherwise, it’s going
to be pretty hard for me to drink.”

When she still didn’t move, I prised her fingers away from the
glass and raised it to my lips, swallowing a mouthful of the icy
liquid. Then I took another draw on my cigarette. My chest still
hurt when I inhaled deeply, though I did my best not to show it. I
vented the dry smoke through my nostrils, reached into my pocket
and removed her passport. I slid it across the surface of the bar
towards her.

“Let’s take a walk,” I said. “Tell your friend to earn his wage
for a while.”

I drank another mouthful of the beer and then got up from the
bar and waited outside for her to join me. She emerged around five
minutes later, having taken longer than I’d expected to put on a
black puffa jacket and gloves. I led her towards the lighted canal
bridge without saying anything and waited until we were in the
middle of the bridge span before taking a last draw on my
cigarette, then flicked the butt into the oily waters below and
leaned against the brick balustrade.

“Michael knew,” I began, looking down at the dark, curd-like
surface. “I found a photocopy in his apartment.”

My words were met with silence. Either she didn’t know what to
say or she was waiting to hear where I was going with it. The truth
was I didn’t really know where I was going with it but it seemed I
had to say something more.

“It was in the overflow pipe in his bath. I happen to know he
had the copy before he got out of prison. So he knew who you were.
He knew it was your father he’d killed.”

She pulled her hands out of the pockets of her jacket and
wrapped her arms around herself. Then she kicked at the soot-coated
brickwork with her foot, nodding her head, as if part of her had
already known.

“He didn’t tell you?” I asked, and she shook her head in a
cheerless way. “You were sleeping with the man who killed your own
father,” I went on, the words sounding harsher than I’d
intended.

Finally, she said, “Not me.”

“Well,” I replied, “unless you have a double I don’t know about,
I’m pretty sure it had to be.”

“No. Marieke, maybe, but not me.”

“I’m not sure that’s a distinction you can make.”

“You do not know how it is,” she said, giving me a sharp
look.

“I guess I don’t. I guess I don’t understand it at all.”

She turned and leaned back against the balustrade beside me,
resting her elbows on the stone plinth and looking up at the dark
night sky. Her breath fogged in the air, obscuring her face, but I
could see that the cold had given her skin a pinched look, somehow
making her cheek bones more pronounced. With her blonde hair
hanging loose on her shoulders and her eyes seeming to retreat into
their sockets, she had a heroine-chic look about her, like a
catwalk model from the nineties.

“I didn’t mean to like him,” she said, in a small voice, half to
herself. “At first, I hated it. But it was true anyway. If we’d met
by accident and I didn’t know who he was, I would have been
attracted to him.”

“But you always knew who he was. What he’d done.”

She closed her eyes, as if to block out my words and focus on
her own. “When he told me for the first time that he was innocent,
it was so shocking. Not because it made me angry.” She turned to
me. “Because I wanted to believe it was true.”

“Maybe it was.”

She bit down on her lip, draining the blood from it. “No,” she
said, and shook her head wilfully.

“It was something he told a lot of people, I hear.”

“Not so many killers say they are guilty.”

“Some must. Some even plead that way.”

She inhaled deeply, composing herself. “I was nine years old
when it happened. I saw his pictures in the papers. I saw his eyes
and I knew it was him, even before the trial. But then, all of a
sudden, it was over. He was in prison and I knew nothing about him.
Did he think about me? Did he even know I existed? Did he know what
he’d taken?”

“It’s not something he’d be likely to forget.”

“But it could have been. I did not know him then. I knew only
what my mother would say, spitting his name, saying terrible
things. She told me he was a monster.”

“I imagine it was easier, thinking of him like that?”

“Of course,” she said. “It was simple. But then, the first time
we spoke – I don’t know, he was so…different.”

“And that hurt.”

“Yes.”

“But that changed.”

She tensed, and I wondered for a moment if she’d go on. She had
every reason not to. I wasn’t her counsellor, or even the police. I
could have said that she owed me a version of the truth, but what
did that mean really? Perhaps all she wanted was someone to listen
to her, though, because after a pause she beg & i to speak once
again.