The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam (4 page)

And one I really shouldn’t have been wasting my time on. After
all, the real issue was where the monkey figurine had got to. If it
was still in the apartment, finding it wasn’t going to be as easy
as finding a wall safe. Yes, the apartment was sparsely furnished,
but the monkey figurine was only a few inches tall #nd it could be
hidden just about anywhere. And that was supposing it was still
here in the first place. The American had insisted that it would be
under the pillow and it simply wasn’t.

I checked my watch again. It was just shy of 9.30, which meant I
only had an hour left until I was supposed to meet the American and
just half an hour until the wide man and the thin man would be
finishing their meal. The margins were getting uncomfortably tight
and that was assuming the American didn’t make them any tighter by
bidding his companions an early good night. Was that so unlikely?
After all, the American didn’t know that I’d changed my mind, even
if he’d hoped I might.

Ten minutes. That was all I was going to allow myself and it
wasn’t much time at all. I certainly couldn’t dither any longer.
But where to begin? I shook my head and raised my eyes to the
ceiling, perhaps hoping for some kind of a clue. Which is funny,
because I actually found something much better – a ceiling
hatch.

The hatch was immediately above my head and I hadn’t noticed it
before because it had been painted the same colour as the rest of
the ceiling. And wouldn’t you know it, the thing was positioned
right above the trunk. Curious, that.

In a flash, I slipped the gun inside the waistband of my
trousers and then closed the lid of the trunk and climbed up onto
it. Standing on tiptoes, I pushed the hatch up into the roof space
and carefully slid it to one side. Then I felt around the opening
with my finger tips. The wood was rough and grainy and covered in
dust. I felt right around the wooden frame and still I didn’t find
what I was looking for. But I had a funny feeling about it all the
same and so I popped my torch into my mouth and, with a well-timed
leap and a heave, contrived to pull my head up into the opening. Of
course, I hadn’t had the foresight to turn the damn torch on and so
I had to heave myself higher until I had my elbows resting on the
inside edge of the hatch and I could reach for my torch with my
free hand. I clicked it on and shone the beam around the cold,
damp-smelling interior. There was nothing of any consequence in
front of me and so I used my elbows to work myself around, legs
dangling into the room below, turning almost a complete circle
before I saw the monkey figurine. It was just beyond the wooden
frame of the opening, resting on its side on the spongy loft
insulation, wide-eyed in surprise, with its front paws clamped to
its mouth. I reached for the thing and gripped it in my hand and
wondered how in hell it could be worth all this effort.

I wondered even more when I heard a sharp bang, loud in the
hallway, followed by a second bang and the rip of splintering
wood.

∨
The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam
∧

T
here were more
splintering and ripping and cracking sounds, less violent now, as
if the intruder was clearing the split wood away from the hole he’d
punched in the door. Then I heard the locks being turned and I
figured the intruder had reached his hand through the hole to get
at them.

Not, you understand, that I was just hanging around waiting to
see if I was right. In point of fact, as soon as I’d heard the
first thud I’d heaved myself up into the roof space and I was now
busy sliding the hatch back into its housing as quietly as I could.
Light from the bedroom was visible around the edge of the hatch but
I was pretty sure I had it positioned right. I’d find out soon
enough if I was wrong.

I flashed the torch around the loft space, just to make sure my
weight was positioned on the wooden joists rather than the padded
insulation and the flimsy ceiling board below. Then I switched off
the torch and waited.

The door to the apartment opened and somebody stepped inside.
They paused for a moment, perhaps surprised that the lights were on
and wondering if they should have knocked first.

“Hallo?”

It was a man and he sounded Dutch. It occurred to me for a
second that I could respond and that maybe just the sound of my
voice would send him running. Then it occurred to me that I should
banish ideas as stupid as that one from every last cell in my
brain.

We waited, the intruder and me, and when he finally decided that
the apartment was as empty as he’d imagined, he began walking in my
direction, the noise of his footsteps resonating with the wooden
struts I was balancing upon.

He seemed to dismiss the small second bedroom just as quickly as
I had and then he made his way into the main bedroom and paused,
just a handful of feet below me. Had I left something down there? I
didn’t think so. In fact, I was sure I hadn’t. And I’d put the
bedding and the mattress back as I’d found them, and the lid of the
trunk was closed too. There was always the possibility that I’d
disturbed some dust when I’d been searching around the roof space
and that it had fallen into an incriminating pile on the floor
below, but that was unlikely, and the intruder would need some keen
eyesight to spot a sprinkling of dust from across the room.

I mention the dust because it was a scenario, albeit a little
far fetched, that I’d worked into one of my early burglar books. My
series character, Faulks, had crawled inside the ventilation system
in a Berlin art gallery with the intention of waiting until the
gallery closed and then lowering himself on a wire to steal a
particular painting, only to accidentally knock some debris through
a grate, just in front of a watchful old museum guard. The guard
had peered upwards, his suspicion aroused, and Faulks, being a
quick thinking type, had made some scuttling noises with his
fingernails inside the ventilation shaft. His impromptu rat
impression was convincing enough to make the guard shudder, though
I couldn’t see how that would help me in my current situation.

What in blazes was he doing down there?

Carefully, I lowered my head and pressed my ear against the
hatch. But it didn’t help in the slightest – it just seemed to
amplify the swirling noise of the blood in my ears. I tried peeking
through the tiny crack at the edge of the hatch but all I could see
was a blur of light. I leaned back and listened some more,
straining my ears above the percussion of my heartbeat. There was
some kind of movement, though I couldn’t be sure what it was. My
best guess was that he was searching the bedding, because what kind
of noise would that produce anyway? Nothing loud, that was for
sure.

Whump
.

Now that sounded like the mattress being dropped onto the floor,
as if the intruder had lifted it up to search underneath it. More
footsteps. A slow creaking noise and a low-level thud. My guess was
that he was searching the trunk. He didn’t spend long on it. Then I
heard him slide the trunk across the floor, perhaps to check if
there was something below it, a move I hadn’t thought of, and a few
minutes later I heard long, deliberate ripping noises. This I
thought I understood – he was slicing through the bed covers, which
suggested he had a knife with him.

The knife was not a nice thought. I mean, who carries a knife
unless they’re the type of character to use it? I had visions of a
scar-faced, one-eyed drifter, passing his blade from one hand to
the other, just itching to cut up the hapless burglar who happened
to have backed himself into the wintry roof space above him.

But then, the odds of him finding me were slim, and even if he
did, there was always a chance I could somehow talk my way out. I’d
managed it in the past. One time, I’d even been caught red-handed
by a home owner happily pocketing her best silverware and had
managed to walk clean away after giving her a rough appraisal of
her collection’s worth.

But what was I thinking? I still had the gun stuffed in the
waistband of my trousers for God’s sake. Which come to think of it
now, was kind of worrying, because I hadn’t even paused to try and
work out if the safety was on before I pushed it towards my groin
and began crawling around an enclosed space.

As nimbly as I could, I rolled onto my side and eased the gun
from my trousers, then aimed its weighty barrel down at the hatch.
The intruder could feel free to poke his head up now, I thought,
and if he wanted me to I could blow it clean off his shoulders.

I ended up holding the gun like that for long enough for my
wrist to begin to ache, and meanwhile, the ripping and slicing
noises continued. Then, just as abruptly as it had begun, the
ripping stopped, and the intruder moved on to the second bedroom. I
set the gun down, shook some feeling back into my wrist and used my
torch to check the time on my watch. It had gone ten o’clock, which
meant the wide man could be home at any moment. And he knew about
the hatch, even if the intruder hadn’t spotted it yet.

I turned the torch beam onto the monkey figurine, wondering what
was so special about it. The monkey stared up at me beneath the
glare, like a petrified interrogation suspect. He was still
covering his mouth with his hands, as if he was afraid he might
spill his secret, or worse, squeal and give away our hiding place.
I was all set to lean hard on the little fucker to make him talk
when I heard the man’s footsteps again, moving with more purpose
this time, though thankfully they were heading away from me. After
that, I heard the front door swing open and the noise of his
footfall began to fade away to nothing.

He’d left, I was fairly sure, but I waited another few minutes
Just to be certain. Then, when I was convinced beyond all doubt
that he was gone, I eased up from my crouched position and
stretched the cramp out of my legs and my back. Once I’d regained a
little movement, I slid the hatch carefully open and swung my legs
around and down into the ceiling space below. Then, leaning as far
as I could to the side, I lifted up a square of the loft insulation
and buried the gun beneath it, pocketed the monkey figurine,
lowered myself from the hatch and dropped to the bedroom floor.

I could, at that point, have moved the trunk back to its
original position and stood on it to reach up and slide the hatch
cover back into place. But really there was no point. My successor
had made such a mess of the bedding and the mattress that the room
looked as if a sorority house pillow fight had got out of hand.
Shredded fabric and feathers covered the floor all the way to the
doorway and I didn’t have a hope of putting things back as they’d
been. And even if I could have magicked up a fresh and identical
set of bedding, the gesture would have been pointless because of
the mallet-sized hole that had been left in the front door of the
apartment.

So I dusted myself off and got out of there as quickly as I
could, leaving the door ajar and drumming my way down the five
flights of stairs until I reached the front door to the building,
which, it turned out, had received similar treatment to its cousin
upstairs, although this time the lock itself had taken the brunt of
the mallet’s force.

I slipped through the door and out onto the street, sucked in a
mouthful of chill air, and, for just a moment, found that I had
something to smile about. My bike was still there.

∨
The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam
∧

C
afe de Brag was
empty when I returned. The lights were off and the door was locked
when I tried the handle. I was only a few minutes late but there
was no sign of the American. I wondered for a moment if he might
whisper to me from a darkened side alley but that kind of thing
only happened in the pages of my mystery novels. I looked around
anyway and found that the street was deserted. If I’d wanted to, it
was the perfect opportunity to break into the café, though I
couldn’t see what purpose it would serve. In the end, I tried the
door handle again and then banged my palm hard against the
glass.

Within moments, the blonde bartender appeared from a back room.
She switched the lights on and hurried to the door to unlock it for
me, not even pausing to see what I wanted. Her movements were
rushed and she looked anxious. I wouldn’t say the colour had
drained from her skin, because her tan was too established for
that, but the animation was certainly gone from her face. She
locked the door behind me and then stood and chewed on her lip and
clutched her hands and pushed her hair behind her ear and gave off
a hundred other less obvious signals that she was worried half out
of her mind.

“They took him,” she told me, breathlessly.

“The two men?”

She nodded. “An hour ago. To his apartment.”

“You’re in on this?”

She hesitated. I pulled one of the monkeys from my pocket and
showed it to her. As soon as she saw it, something seemed to catch
in her throat and then she nodded, her blue eyes transfixed by the
figurine.

“What’s your name?”

“Marieke.”

“And your connection with the American?”

She met my eyes and blinked and I knew right away what a dumb
question that had been. Then she looked again at the monkey
figurine and I slipped it back into my pocket.

“You don’t think he’ll be back?” I asked.

She shook her head, as if clearing her mind of the spell the
monkey had cast over her. “He said he would be here all night,” she
told me. “That he would not leave.”

“But something changed his mind.”

“It was them.”

“Right.” I looked about the café for some kind of inspiration. I
seemed a little short of inspiration as it happened. “This
apartment you mentioned, you’ve been there?” I asked.