The Wrong Girl

by David Hewson

  ‘I know. But they’ve got friends. They say they never meant to harm her. I was the one who got in the way. If I hadn’t tried to find her in Westerdok—’

  ‘This is what we’re supposed to do? Sit back and trust people like that know what’s best for us?’

  ‘There are places I can’t go right now,’ Vos told her. ‘I wish I could.’

  Hanna sensed his outrage. That didn’t help.

  ‘So I’m nowhere different, am I? I thought I traded what I was in Georgia . . . an honest woman with no money, no future . . . for something better here. In return for sitting in those damned windows we got security. Safety. A promise Natalya wouldn’t have to go through the same as me.’

  Vos kept quiet.

  ‘I was wrong, wasn’t I?’ she murmured. ‘An idiot.’

  ‘We’ll provide protection. Counselling for Natalya. For you if you want it.’

  She stared at him.

  ‘You don’t have to work for Cem Yilmaz,’ he said.

  ‘He thinks he owns us. Me. And my daughter. Can you save us forever?’

  Vos started to say something. Then stopped.

  ‘You really can’t lie, can you?’ She looked round the room. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘My best,’ he answered. ‘The commissaris would like a word before you go. Then we’ll meet up with Natalya. Have a coffee. A drink. I’ve got a suggestion . . .’

  She folded her arms. The brown coat was nice. Better than her old black jacket.

  ‘Where have I heard that before? Oh yes. Everywhere.’

  There was a knock on the door. De Groot walked in. Made nice, apologetic noises.

  She didn’t have the energy to argue or fight any more. So she listened, nodded, shook his hand when he wanted to go.

  Then went downstairs with Vos.

  When they set him free Henk Kuyper walked out of Marnixstraat, didn’t even try to talk to Mirjam Fransen. She was too busy on furious calls to The Hague. To the new acting head of AIVD in the city. To his father.

  Kuyper just wandered back into the centre and headed for a bar near Spui.

  Sat in front of a big glass of Chianti staring at his reflection in the window.

  He couldn’t put it off any longer. So he phoned her. Renata was home, waiting, angry in one sense, relieved in another.

  ‘You might have told me,’ she said.

  ‘What? That I was a fraud? A liar?’

  She sighed.

  ‘I meant you might have told me you’d gone looking for the girl. I would have understood. I was trying to help too, remember?’

  ‘But you were acting out of goodness. And I was doing it out of guilt.’

  She groaned.

  ‘The self-pity doesn’t help, Henk. Where are you?’

  He gave her the name of the bar. She told him to stay where he was and not drink any more. Ten minutes later the orange cargo trike he’d bought them parked up on the pavement outside. The compartment up front was empty. She walked in, got a mineral water, came and sat at his table.

  ‘Where’s Saskia?’ he asked.

  ‘Staying with one of her friends tonight. Lucy. The English girl. I thought it might be best.’

  Renata reached over and pulled the Chianti from him.

  ‘Enough of that. You’re coming home.’

  ‘You don’t have more questions?’

  ‘Not really,’ she said with a shrug.

  ‘Why I . . .’

  ‘Why doesn’t matter,’ she interrupted. ‘Whatever you did to begin with . . . you went looking for her. Maybe I made you get that money out of guilt too. And Lucas paid it. We all screwed up. You can’t just blame yourself.’

  Silence. She took his hand and said, ‘We’re going.’

  Cold outside. Christmas shoppers tramping idly down the street, looking in the bright shop windows, thinking about the holiday to come.

  ‘You pedal,’ she said, and pointed at the saddle. ‘I ride for free.’

  Then, when he was seated, she climbed into the front bucket, tidied her arms and legs into the tiny cramped space meant for a child, looked back and smiled at him.

  Henk Kuyper found he felt better then, for no good reason at all. He lugged the trike round on the cobbles and turned for the Herenmarkt, for home.

  ‘Beer Hoover?’ Bakker said, watching Van der Berg raise a glass of obscure Belgian tripel to his nose and sniff at it.

  ‘Don’t start,’ he told her. ‘Came in useful, didn’t it?’

  ‘But I don’t get why . . .’

  He growled something, took a dish of ice cream from Sofia Albers at the bar then wandered to the upper section where Natalya was playing with the dog.

  ‘Strawberry, chocolate and vanilla,’ he said and put the dish on the table.

  Bakker followed and watched the cautious, interested way she responded. The kid was remarkable. It wasn’t that the ordeal hadn’t marked her. It had. There’d be counselling. The authorities would insist on it. But there was such resilience in her small, skinny frame. She had the look of someone who bounced back, however hard the blow. Much like her mother.

  That stony resilience was supposed to be a good thing. But not in a child of eight.

  ‘Thank you,’ Natalya said and handed him the rope bone for Sam to tug.

  She spooned the ice cream delicately into her mouth, as if each portion was precious. Vos had stopped in the Nine Streets on the way back from the house in Sloterdijk and taken her and her mother into one of the fancier clothes shops. There the grubby pink jacket was placed in an evidence bag. Natalya had chosen the cheapest clothes they had, ignoring his protests. Not that they were cheap at all. They let the two of them use the showers in Marnixstraat. Now she wore a blue denim jacket, matching jeans and a red jumper, hair clean and tidy, held back behind her head with a band.

  The striped woollen hat Vos had picked out in the shop sat in her pocket. Bakker felt sure Natalya thought it a touch too girly. She was with her on that.

  ‘I heard you’re getting a dog one day,’ Van der Berg told her, sitting down as Sam tugged and growled at the rope.

  ‘Mum said,’ Natalya agreed.

  ‘And if she promises something . . .’

  The girl stared at him. He was talking down to her and she didn’t like that.

  Bakker pulled up a second chair. Like all the ones in the bar it was old bare wood, wobbly, close to falling to pieces.

  ‘Your mum’s going to need some help for a while,’ she said. ‘Our help. Yours.’

  Natalya Bublik had large, watchful eyes. And a gaze that was quite uncomfortable in one so young.

  ‘OK,’ she said and went back to the ice cream.

  Vos turned up with Hanna Bublik. Sofia Albers was smiling at them both from behind the bar.

  ‘I’m glad you got your little girl back,’ she said, glancing at the small gathering at the table in the upper room. ‘She’s quite something.’

  ‘She is,’ Hanna agreed then ordered a coffee, took it, went to sit with Natalya. The others left the two alone for a while. They were talking in Georgian anyway.

  ‘Beer Hoover?’ Vos asked.

  Van der Berg rolled his eyes.

  ‘Don’t want to talk about it.’ He glanced at Bakker. ‘I’ve had enough from her.’

  Vos raised his beer and grinned.

  ‘I just like the idea there are still things I don’t know about you. After all this time.’

  That seemed to dismay him.

  ‘We’ve all got secrets, Pieter. Even you. Even Laura.’

  ‘I have?’ she asked.

  A plate of cheese, liver sausage and some freshly boiled eggs appeared on the bar. Sofia told them to help themselves. It was on the house. Even the sausage and the cheese.

  ‘Yours,’ Van der Berg declared, grabbing an egg and crushing the shell in his fist, ‘is you like hanging round with older men. Must be the food.’

  She didn’t laugh. Just looked at Vos and said, ‘We need to talk.’

>   ‘Now?’ Vos asked, and sounded pathetic.

  ‘Now . . .’

  ‘I mean . . . right now?’

  ‘Pieter . . .’

  She stopped. Hanna Bublik was there. She looked as if she needed something.

  ‘What is it?’ Vos asked.

  ‘Can we have a word outside?’

  The night was close to freezing. Vos looked at his boat and realized he’d left a light on. It was linked to the line of coloured bulbs he’d wound around the neck of the ballerina statue on the front bows. The old klipper barge looked festive.

  ‘Can you look after Natalya for half an hour?’

  ‘Why? I thought you wanted to go home.’

  She had gloves on. Black leather. He hadn’t noticed them before.

  ‘I’ve been thinking. Renata Kuyper. She went out of her way for me. I was pretty horrible to her too. I just want to go and say thanks. And sorry. In person.’

  ‘You could do that tomorrow.’

  She smiled then and there was something unexpected and genuine in it. He realized he’d never seen her without the possibility of tragedy hanging round her. There was a different woman here, one who’d stayed hidden.

  ‘I could. But then I’d be awake all night wondering what to say. I need to do this now.’

  On the way down from the station he’d talked her through some of the options the social services people could offer to get her out of prostitution. Charitable financial support. Courses to give her a career. She’d listened, hadn’t said much at all.

  ‘Are you going to turn up for that appointment? With the people I fixed?’

  ‘Of course I am. And I want somewhere else to stay. I don’t want to be around that place, not if Cem Yilmaz still thinks I’m his.’

  ‘I said I can help . . .’

  She looked at him frankly.

  ‘I know you can. And I thought I told you before. In this business . . . where I come from . . . you’re always wary of a man who wants to help. It rarely works out well in the end. For both parties.’

  He nodded and said he understood.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘What do you think you’ll do?’ he asked.

  She reached up and touched his long, unruly black hair.

  ‘I might be a hairdresser. I could start with you.’

  She took her hand away and he said, ‘You’d be good at that.’

  ‘I know. There are always going to be hairdressers. Just like there are always going to be whores. Thanks again. Thirty minutes. Forty at the most.’

  Then she walked off over the Berenstraat bridge, into the bright lights of the Nine Streets where she was soon lost amid the glitter and the tinsel.

  He’d changed his appearance in a backstreet barber’s in Chinatown. Black hair dyed grey. Then the beard went. It was twenty years since the man called Khaled had been clean-shaven. That meant the stubble hurt and left his pale-brown cheeks pink and sore. Though not as irritated as his ego. And the beard he’d grow again when he was somewhere safe. Like Barbone himself now on board a plane to Cairo, fleeing under a stolen name.

  Khaled had left De Wallen behind for good. He was walking around a different, more elegant part of town, thinking of history and how little the world changed. A bag by his side. Clothes. Documents. Four thousand in euros. Five thousand in that universal currency the US dollar. Three passports, all authentic-looking, none in the least genuine.

  A couple of hours to kill then a car out through the long night down into Belgium. France. Marseilles. There were friends there. A boat to North Africa. After that he was free.

  The weapon he’d have to leave behind and that hurt too. Tucked inside a wheeled ski bag it was a Remington Modular Sniper Rifle, stolen from the hands of a dead US scout caught behind what passed for enemy lines during the 2010 assault on Marja in Helmand province. Smuggled out of Afghanistan to Yemen. Then to Barbone who’d passed it on that afternoon.

  Never used except for practice when the two of them lived in Milan and would drive into the Valle d’Aosta to find a lone spot and take down chamois and deer.

  Time to flee now. To regroup. To face the consequences when they reported back to command.

  The weapon was state-of-the-art, deadly accurate, almost silent. It hurt that he had to leave the thing. When he left Amsterdam he’d change identity altogether. Become briefly a doctor. An anaesthetist who’d worked for one of the more famous hospitals in London.

  His life, like the world, was built on lies. So many after a while they became inseparable from the truth, even for him.

  All that was certain was history. It stood around him in Amsterdam. Reminded the man called Khaled – not his real name either – how little he could alter it by himself.

  Finding the place he wanted he looked around, lit a cigarette in the dark.

  The ski bag and the precious Remington he’d leave here. Then walk to the small hotel near the station, pick up a car as arranged.

  An assignment finished. A job half-done. He loathed failure, in himself as much as others.

  He was smoking in a small playground near a pissoir. The grand building next to him was still open. A restaurant busy with Christmas diners. A courtyard, a statue in it. One he knew. Another Dutchman who’d crossed the world hoping to own it. To rob those who preceded him of their identity and dignity. To rule like a master, given that role by God.

  A name. He struggled for it.

  Stuyvesant.

  A grim, unforgiving man, no friend to the Jews either.

  There was an irony, he thought then threw his half-smoked Marlboro into the child’s sandpit by his side.

  Hanna Bublik didn’t go to see Renata Kuyper. She strode quickly through the city, into the red-light district, on to Spooksteeg.

  One code for the door. One for the lift.

  The ballpoint scribbles on her wrist had barely faded. Why should they? The last few days seemed like an age. But taken out of grim context they were nothing. To the world around her, to the ordinary people of the city, it was just Sunday to Thursday. A brief interval before the holidays, soon to be forgotten.

  In Spooksteeg she looked up. A light at the window. No shapes moving there.

  And if there were? If he wasn’t on his own as she prayed?

  She stopped at the glass door and thought about that. It wouldn’t make any difference. The journey had started. Begun by someone else. Continued by Cem Yilmaz. No stopping it now.

  A confident, arrogant man, he hadn’t changed the code and probably rarely did.

  She pushed open the door and stepped inside. The place was hot on this chilly night, even in the lobby. She wondered what there was on the floors beneath his.

  Hanna Bublik walked to the lift, checked the second code on her skin, tried that.

  Listened to the gears and chains begin to whirr above her.

  Would he hear too? And if he did would he think this was for him? Or whoever lived in the rooms below?

  Pointless questions. Ones that could never be answered.

  The lift came.

  The door opened.

  She stepped inside, keyed the code, pressed the button for the top floor. Pictured in her head the room into which the lift opened directly, straight into his home like something from a movie.

  Gloves on. She took the weapon from her bag, checked it was loaded. Tried to remember the YouTube video on the web. The only pointers she had on how to use it.

  The lift started up. She unbuttoned the brown coat then pushed the gun beneath the front.

  And waited, breath short, mind fixed, intent, determined.

  Renata bought in supper from Marqt. Seafood linguini. A bottle of white. Italian too though light on the alcohol. She couldn’t wean him off that straight away. But she could make a start.

  With Saskia away they sat opposite one another at the dining table by the first-floor window. Christmas lights sparkling against the panes. Faces reflected in the glass. The tiny bulbs sent dots, red, green and blue twinkling over
their features.

  ‘Early night,’ he said with a sigh.

  She reached out and felt for his fingers.

  ‘Yes.’

  For two months now she’d been sleeping in the spare room. Going in there after she thought Saskia was asleep, hoping the girl wouldn’t notice.

  A stupid illusion. Of course she knew.

  ‘I’ll stay tonight,’ she said.

  He put down his fork and the glass of wine.

  ‘Only if you want to.’

  ‘If I didn’t I wouldn’t do it.’

  ‘True,’ he agreed with a wry smile.

  There were practical questions they had to face. To do with money. The future. On the walk back Henk had started to unburden himself a little. He’d been on a secret AIVD salary ever since he supposedly left his job. Most of the money she thought came from his father was actually paid by the state.

  Thinking about it she realized she’d suspected there was something wrong all along. In his furtive manner. All the half-answered questions. Now he was out of the security service for good they’d have to make ends meet. And without any prospect of support from his father too. Lucas didn’t like the idea his son might quit the service. He’d already made that clear in a brief and chilly phone call.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ she asked.

  ‘Go to bed,’ he said, raising the glass again with a hopeful wink.

  ‘And after that?’

  He turned serious again.

  ‘Me? Try to be a husband again. A better dad.’

  ‘Saskia thinks you’re the best already.’

  ‘Only because I cut you out. Divide and rule. It’s what we do. And the Kuypers have always . . .’

  His eyes strayed towards the grand building opposite and the statue of the stern, old aristocrat in the courtyard. The man who lost New Amsterdam and now lay buried in a crumbling stone tomb not far from Wall Street, in the city that followed, New York.

  ‘Henk,’ she said and took his hand, squeezed the fingers.

  He couldn’t stop staring out of the window. The West-Indisch Huis. The little park. The trees. The kids’ playground. This was home and he’d forgotten about it, completely.

  There was a shape across the way, just visible in the weak street lights. A man resting against the metal playground fence, something in his hand.