The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam (3 page)

What I decided to do next was pocket the money. Sure, I was
being paid over the odds for the job I was carrying out, but that
didn’t mean I had to pass on a little extra cash when it was right
there waiting for me to take it. And while the cannabis held no
attraction to me – Amsterdam was hardly a seller’s market and if I
was ever in the mood for a smoke, I would likely get a much better
high from the cheap weed being sold in any number of coffee houses
within walking distance of my apartment – I took the drugs too.
That way, if the thin man happened to check his safe when he got
home he might not automatically assume that the person who’d broken
in had been after the figurine. Or at least that was my theory.

With the safe emptied of everything except the photograph, I
closed and re-locked the door, hung the painting back on the wall
as I had found it and turned off the overhead lights. Then I opened
the curtains I’d drawn and made my way outside again, locking the
door to the barge behind me and removing my gloves.

I checked my watch. It was already a quarter to nine and I would
have to get a move on if I was to meet my deadline. With a casual
flick of my wrist, I tossed the cannabis over the side of the barge
and into the dark canal waters below and then I stepped up onto the
pavement and went in search of a bike.

∨
The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam
∧

B
icycles are stolen
all the time in Amsterdam. It’s one of the reasons why all the
bikes are so old – nobody wants to invest in something that’s
likely to be taken at any moment. The funny thing is how many
locals are willing to replace their stolen bikes with other stolen
ones. They buy them from the thieves who operate in Dam Square,
keeping the whole racket alive.

I couldn’t tell you how many bikes are stolen each day but I
know it’s a lot. So it stands to reason that there are more than a
few bike thieves around. Virtually all of them, it seems to me, use
bolt cutters to break through the bike chains and padlocks as
quickly as possible. In that sense I’m unusual because I like to
use my picks. If a padlock is straightforward enough, I’m almost as
fast as a pair of bolt cutters anyway, and my picks are a lot less
awkward to carry around. And as an added bonus, I don’t destroy the
owner’s lock, which is often worth more than the bike in the first
place.

On this occasion, I chose a bike with Dynamo lights and a
comfortable-looking saddle and then I removed the lock and chain in
less than a minute. After that, I locked the chain back around a
railing and peddled clean away. It turned out the gearing was a
little higher than I would have liked but I couldn’t do much about
that because the bike only had one gear. The brakes were operated
by pedalling backwards, something that’s illegal in the UK, and
though the Dynamo hummed willingly against my back tyre, the front
lamp barely flickered. But I enjoyed the ride nonetheless. It
lasted a little over five minutes and when I reached the street I
was after, I was almost sorry to get off and leave the bike resting
against a tree.

The building the apartment was housed in was typical of the
Jordaan. Dark-stoned, tall and thin, it had a gabled roof and an
old winching hook extending from its very highest point. It was
part of a terrace of perhaps forty similar buildings that each
overlooked the Singel canal, and a fine location it was too.

I climbed the steps to the front door and cast my eyes over the
buzzers that were affixed to the door frame. The uppermost buzzer,
which I assumed belonged to the fifth floor apartment I was after,
had no name written on it. I leaned on the buzzer and waited. Given
the age of the building, and since there was no speaker positioned
nearby, I didn’t think I’d operated a modern-day intercom system
and so I allowed the occupant enough time to either open a window
and yell down at me or to descend the full five floors and open the
door. I waited for the minute hand on my watch to complete two
revolutions and, when nothing had happened, I gave the buzzer one
more ring and waited some more. Eventually, switched-on chap that I
am, I deduced that nobody was in.

Of course, the lack of an intercom system cost me not only time,
but also an easy way into the building. With a modern apartment
block, I could always buzz one of the other apartments and have an
unsuspecting person admit me. I couldn’t do that here, though,
because anyone I buzzed who happened to be in would have to come
and open the door, meaning I’d need to somehow talk my way inside
while giving them a chance to remember my face. It was unlikely to
work and even if it did it was risky.

The front door itself was a mighty thing, fully two feet taller
and wider than standard, as though it hoped to deter me through
intimidation alone. Fortunate for me, then, that the lock that had
been fitted to it was about as resistant to my charms as any one of
the near-naked women who danced in the red-lit windows only a few
streets away. And just like the more commercial of those particular
ladies, the door accepted my credit card, which I slid up the frame
until the snap lock slid back. There was a second lock, with a
recessed bolt, and it would have been an altogether trickier
prospect had the good people who lived in the building decided to
engage it.

I eased the door open and stepped inside. Ahead of me was a near
vertical staircase that I began to climb in a style not dissimilar
from climbing a ladder. The steps were wooden and full of
unpredictable creaks and groans and part of me worried that a nosy
neighbour might be drawn out from one of the other apartments to
ask me who I was. The other part of me cussed the fool who’d built
the staircase on such a fun-house angle in the first place. It made
me think that anyone who lived above ground level had to be
relatively young and healthy and that if I needed to get away from
them in a hurry, it wouldn’t be straightforward. A nasty image of
me slipping and falling and breaking my leg in several places
appeared in my head and I winced as I heard the imaginary sound of
my femur snapping repeatedly, like an ice cube plunged into a glass
of tap water.

I made it to the top floor eventually. I may have stopped twice
to catch my breath and to allow the acid to leak away from my
thighs, but I didn’t encounter anyone else and I was grateful for
that. The door I was looking for was at the far end of the hallway
and as I squared my shoulders and faced up to it, I experienced a
tingle of nervous energy at the thought of entering yet another
space that was forbidden to me. This time, part of the buzz was the
challenge the locks presented. There were three of them, just as
the American had said, but they were of a different order to the
locks I’d bypassed earlier. The reason for this was that they were
Wespensloten
, meaning literally, Wasp Locks.
Wespensloten
were the most expensive locks on the Dutch
market, and for good reason too. I’d bought several when I first
arrived in the Netherlands and it had taken me a while to become
familiar with their particular quirks. My big breakthrough only
came when I dismantled one of the locks and then rebuilt it in
order to understand what was proving so awkward. The answer was
that there was an extra set of pins at the base of the cylinder as
well as the top, but knowing that still didn’t make the lock a
cinch and it would usually take me a few attempts to pick my way
through.

But before I confronted the locks, I knocked firmly on the door
and waited again. When nobody came to see what I wanted, I felt
safe enough to slip my surgical gloves on and remove my torch from
my pocket. I shone the torch beam around the edge of the door,
checking for any tell-tale wires. The American had been right about
everything he’d told me so far, but it was my neck on the line if I
got caught, so I wanted to be as sure as I could be that there was
no alarm. I couldn’t see any wires, and while that was hardly
conclusive, it was close enough for me to get started.

I decided to tackle the top lock first, and the bottom lock
second, because they were both snap locks and likely to be easier
than the dead-bolt in the middle. So I got out my micro screwdriver
and my picks and, torch in mouth, began to probe away at the
internal pins that were preventing the bolt on the top lock from
sliding back. Soon, the torch became uncomfortable against my teeth
and my jaw began to ache, and, since the light wasn’t really
helping me a great deal anyway, I pulled the torch out of my mouth
and slipped it back into my pocket. I worked my jaw around until it
cracked and once it felt comfortable again I resumed teasing and
probing away inside the lock cylinder, being rewarded every once in
a while with the muffled tick of a pin lifting up to rest upon the
delicate internal ledge I was visualising in my mind. Before very
long, I had the top set of pins raised and at that point I turned
the pick upside down and probed at the bottom set of pins. It was
fiddly stuff, but I was stubborn enough to want to do the job right
without breaking down the door, and I stuck at it until the last
pin fell into place and the force I was applying through the
screwdriver caused the cylinder mechanism to rotate. Now the
difficult part was over, I wedged the cylinder open and repeated
the same procedure on the bottom lock until a little while later
that was undone too.

That only left the middle lock, something I delayed tackling for
a little while longer by pausing to catch my breath and to wipe the
sweat from my forehead with my coat sleeve. When at last I turned
my full attention to the lock, I realised with a groan that it was
a
Wespenslot Speciaal
, a product that for once lived up to
the name the marketing people had conjured for it. The
Speciaal
, you see, worked on the same basic principles as
the two locks I’d already disarmed but it also had a few other
tricks besides, none of which are worth going into, save to say
that they require a little more thought and a good deal more
ingenuity, and while that might be something capable of amusing me
in the comfort of my own home, it was a good deal more irritating
when it happened to be preventing me from entering someone else’s.
So I cussed my luck and I gritted my teeth and I sighed, and then I
got myself together again and began to focus on the damn thing,
tackling the pins to begin with and then turning my hand to all
kinds of jiggery-pokery and improvisation and sheer brute force
until, in a shade over five minutes, I had the cylinder ready to
turn. And it was then that I discovered something nasty I should
probably have seen coming – the locking mechanism wasn’t connected
to a simple door-bolt, it was attached to a much larger steel rod
that was braced right across the back of the door.

Now this was a problem, and the reason it was a problem was
because I didn’t seem to be able to transfer enough force through
my micro screwdriver to move the rod and I hadn’t had the foresight
to bring a bigger screwdriver along with me. I stepped back and
thought for a moment and what I decided was that I didn’t have
enough time to get hold of the right tool for the job. The wrong
tool would just have to do. So, closing my mind to all the things
that could very likely go wrong, I twisted as hard and as fast as I
could on the tiny screwdriver and, to my considerable relief, the
steel rod gave way before the screwdriver snapped.

With the final obstacle negotiated, I removed my prods and picks
from each of the locks and then I eased the door open and peered
around it, looking for the infra-red blink of any movement sensors.
When I didn’t see any, I stepped in way over the doormat in order
to avoid any pressure sensors and then I checked under the that to
finally satisfy myself that the apartment really had no alarm. Once
I was convinced, I closed and re-locked the door behind me,
switched on the main lights and set off in search of the
bedroom.

The apartment had two bedrooms as it happened, both situated at
the rear of the building, away from the canal views afforded by the
picture windows in the front sitting room. One of the bedrooms was
tiny and it contained only an unmade camp bed with no pillow. I
moved passed it and on to the second, much larger bedroom, which
was dominated by a large double mattress in the middle of the
floor. I knelt down beside the mattress and felt under the single
pillow that was resting on it. Then I felt inside the pillowcase.
Then I pulled the pillow out of the pillowcase and turned the
pillowcase inside out. But there was nothing there.

I put the pillow back as I had found it and searched under the
duvet cover and around and then underneath the mattress. After that
I checked the pillowcase once more and then I sat back and scanned
the room. It was empty aside from a large wooden trunk. The trunk
had a small padlock on it and I picked it open without a great deal
of thought and had a look inside. There were plenty of clothes
there, as well as a blister pack of what looked like headache pills
and a scattering of condoms in various colours. I dug a little
deeper and my fingers touched something cold and hard. I knew what
it was before I pulled it out of the trunk but I pulled it out
anyway.

The object was a handgun. Sure, my knowledge of guns is
rudimentary at best, but any fool could tell it was deadly. Holding
the gun made me think for the umpteenth time that I really should
learn something more about firearms. That way, whenever I happen
upon one (which is more often than I care to think about) I could
remove the bullets or do something destructive to the trigger that
would prevent it from firing. But for some reason, I’m reluctant.
Maybe it’s because learning about guns is something the bad guys
do. Or the police.

Since I couldn’t disarm the gun, I began to think about hiding
it instead, a tactic I’d resorted to once or twice in the past. The
problem, of course, was that the only place to hide the gun inside
the bedroom was the trunk and I had a funny feeling its owner might
look for it there. One possibility was to take the thing with me
but I didn’t like it. Imagine if I got stopped and searched outside
the apartment by a passing police officer and he happened to find
my burglar tools
and
the gun on me. Not an appealing
prospect.