2007 - The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam

by Chris Ewan

  Marieke moved towards the door ahead of me but I put my hand on her arm and went first. I-wasn’t greatly surprised by what I found; only that he was still alive. He was slumped in the porcelain bath and covered in a lot of blood. The blood was thick and oxidised and dark as good ink. His skull had caved in above his left temple and I could see white flakes of what looked like bone fragments amid the blood that had matted in his hair. His right hand was hanging over the edge of the bath, fingers bent right back at a gruesome angle, but though his eyes were closed and he was clearly unconscious, his chest rose and fell in a fitful way.

  Behind me, Marieke shrieked and dropped her keys to the floor, which was better than fainting I supposed. I turned to usher her out of there and back into the other room and it was at that point I heard the sirens for the first time, followed by the screech of car brakes. Seconds later, somebody kicked through the front door of the building and shouted “Police!” up the stairway.

  Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t tend to hang around when that happens. Marieke was glassy-eyed and shaking but I did what I could in the circumstances.

  “You came alone,” I told her. “I wasn’t here. You came up here and you found him like this and that’s all that you know. Marieke? Understand?”

  She slumped to the floor, head lolling, and I couldn’t be certain whether she’d got it or not. I didn’t have time to make sure. The window in the bathroom was a sash and I opened it and climbed out onto the flat roof below. Then I turned around and jumped up to pull the window shut behind me and after that I ran away as fast as I possibly could.

  Six

  I stayed in bed until late the next morning, then spent the early afternoon printing off a final copy of my latest novel. Once the pages were all lined up and ready to go, I stretched an elastic band around the bundle, added a short handwritten note to the cover page and slipped the package into a large brown envelope. Then I walked the envelope to the central post office where I handed over enough euros to guarantee a next day delivery to London and after that I made my way to Centraal Station and purchased a return ticket to Leiden, the nearby university town.

  I needed some time away from Amsterdam, if only for a brief spell, and Leiden seemed as good as any place else. Getting there involved nothing more strenuous than a thirty minute train ride and once I’d bought a takeaway coffee and a fresh packet of cigarettes to smoke during the journey, I was glad to drop my bones into a window seat on the bottom level of a double-decker train carriage and gaze sightlessly out through the dirt-streaked glass at the backs of moving houses and office buildings, and then the hinterland estates and after them the stretches of bleached highway tarmac leading towards Schiphol airport. The train stopped on time at the underground airport station and most of my fellow passengers left the carriage to wheel plastic suitcases towards the escalators at the far end of the platform. Once the train pulled away again, I continued my journey with nothing to distract me other than the hypnotic drone of wheels on track and the occasional draw of nicotine.

  I don’t remember much of what I did in Leiden. My feet carried me around the cobbled streets and along the canal pathways, I’m sure, but my mind was in another realm entirely, zoned out of my physical surroundings altogether. I often get that way when something big happens to me. Just to order my thoughts I need a change of scenery, but the nature of the scenery usually doesn’t matter a great deal. I could have been in Africa or the Antarctic and the effect would have been much the same. All I needed was a little alone time, a feeling of space within which to clear my mind, and no more than three hours later something had clicked enough for me to climb back aboard an Amsterdam-bound train and return to the city.

  Two wholly uneventful days later, my agent, Victoria, called me from London to discuss the book I’d mailed to her.

  “It’s wonderful Charlie,” she began, which struck me as a good sign.

  “You’re not just saying that?”

  “Of course not. It’s one of your best so far.”

  “Because I was kind of worried about the ending.”

  “You’re always worried about the ending.”

  “This time in particular.”

  “What are you worried about? The briefcase? You think anyone’s going to read back and notice it couldn’t have made its own way to Nicholson’s apartment?”

  “Oh crap,” I said, striking my forehead.

  She waited a beat. “Listen, it’s not a huge problem.”

  “The hell it isn’t.”

  “We’ll work it out.”

  “We shouldn’t have to. I should have caught it myself. What else? If I missed that I must have missed other things too.”

  “Nothing big. Really. It just needs a little tidying here and there.”

  “You’re sure? Because this one got way more complicated than I planned.”

  “Complicated is a good thing.”

  “Only if I can put all the pieces together,” I said, reaching for a pen and a nearby pad of paper.

  “You will. I know it. And the briefcase is the final piece.”

  “Well, it should be,” I agreed, drawing the outline of a briefcase on my pad and then crossing it through and stabbing it with my pen for good measure. “But why do I get the feeling that if I solve that one it’ll just throw up another hitch?”

  “It might. But where would we be without hitches?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. The bestseller lists? Award ceremonies? Colour supplements?”

  “It’ll happen Charlie.”

  “Yeah, right. Just as soon as I work out how to move a briefcase from a police evidence room to an apartment without giving away the killer’s identity.”

  “Maybe the briefcase has wheels?”

  I smiled and threw my pen to one side. “Yeah, or maybe I forgot to mention in chapter eight how Nicholson made his money by inventing a teleport machine.”

  “I liked my idea better.”

  “You always do.”

  “Anyway,” Victoria said, treating me to one of her more theatrical sighs, “how’s Amsterdam?”

  I sighed myself. It was a good sigh, as it happened, so I did it again.

  “It’s Dutch,” I told her, when I was done admiring our vocal ranges.

  “Wow,” she said. “You know, I’m pretty sure that’s why I agreed to represent you—your dazzling powers of description, and all.”

  “You want tulips and clogs and windmills?”

  “They have windmills in the city?”

  “I’ve seen a few.”

  “And Dutch people wearing clogs?”

  “Tourists buying clogs. The moment I see a Dutchman wearing clogs and riding a bicycle, I’m moving on.”

  “But for the time being you’re staying put?”

  “Well, that kind of depends,” I said.

  And it was then that I told her about my most recent caper; about the American and the monkey figurines and the houseboat and the apartment and the intruder and the stunning blonde and the almost-corpse the American had become. And while I explained everything to her, Victoria listened with barely an interruption, which is one of the things I like most about her. In fact, her capacity to listen to the finer details of whatever scrape my thieving has got me into since we last spoke is only bettered by her ability to pinpoint plot-holes at a hundred paces and the tendency she has to ask the right questions at the right time, which is something she did the moment I reached the end of my story.

  “So this American’s not dead?”

  “Not yet, anyway,” I told her. “I called the hospital this morning. They said he was in a coma.”

  “They just told you that?”

  “Well no, I had to explain that I was Mr. Michael Park’s personal physician first.”

  “And they believed you?”

  “It was a nurse. I don’t think she knew the procedures. And I guess maybe my accent helped a little.”

  “Hmm. Wait though, how did you get the American’s name?”

/>   “It was on the travel papers I found in his suitcase,” I told her. “And it was in the newspaper report too.”

  “You can read Dutch now?”

  “The story was covered in the International Herald Tribune.”

  “Oh. You think he was someone important?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe it was a slow news day and the mysterious beating of a Yank in a Dutch brothel house caught the editor’s attention.”

  “They called it a brothel house?”

  “They did, although as far as I could tell it was just a lousy bedsit in a pretty colourful neighbourhood.”

  “With the main colour being red.”

  “Actually,” I said, glancing up from my desk to the moving leaves on the tree in front of my window. “I’ve noticed that a lot of the brothels use plain fluorescent lights. Although electric blue seems kind of popular too.”

  “You’ve carried out a survey?”

  “I’m just giving you some of that description you like so much.”

  “Cute,” she said, and I could picture her grinning. “But just going back to these monkey figurines for a minute—do you still have them?”

  “The two I stole, yes,” I said. “I had a look for the third one in the American’s suitcase but it wasn’t there.”

  “You think the men who beat him took it?”

  “That would make sense.”

  “And then they went home and found they’d lost their own figurines.”

  “I suppose so.”

  She paused, trying to act casual about the question she really wanted to ask. “Charlie, how much do you think these figurines might be worth?”

  “I have no idea,” I told her. “If I’d seen them in a place I was robbing, I’d have passed them over as worthless.”

  “Which they’re clearly not.”

  “So it would appear. I mean, nobody would beat a guy like that just for fun, I don’t think.”

  “Plus you said you thought he’d been tortured.”

  “I did? Oh, the broken fingers, you mean. Yes, I’m not sure why they did that.”

  “Well,” Victoria said, “people generally only use torture if they want information, right? Unless they’re sadists, that is, but that can’t be the case here because they stopped at the one hand. Which means either the American told them what they wanted to hear or they figured he wouldn’t tell them anything at all.”

  “Or they got disturbed in some way. Or squeamish. Or any one of a thousand other explanations. None of which we’ll ever know.”

  “Yes,” she said, sounding deflated. “But supposing he did tell them what they wanted to know, he could have given them your name, couldn’t he?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “More than possible?”

  “Honestly? I don’t think so. I mean, they had no reason to ask anything about me. The way I see it, they were after the third figurine. They didn’t know the American had hired me to steal their figurines on the same night. So once he told them where the third figurine was, they had no need to ask any more questions.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “And that’s not to mention that they haven’t come looking for me.”

  “True. There is something else though Charlie. The man with the knife who broke into the apartment after you—where does he fit into it all?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. But one thing did occur to me—I turned the American down at first, yes? He was hoping I’d carry out the job anyway, and he was right about that, but he didn’t know I would for certain. Say he got nervous the next day and hired someone else at short notice—someone who didn’t have what he called ‘my talent’.”

  “Which he didn’t. Because he used a mallet to get in and he made a hell of a mess.”

  “Well, a mallet or something similar, but you take my point. Plus he was looking for the same thing I was because he started his search under the pillow.”

  “And he knew to leave just after ten o’clock.”

  “Exactly.”

  Victoria paused and made a humming noise as she considered my theory. I scratched my earlobe, waiting for the outcome.

  “But if you’re right,” she said, “the American took one hell of a chance. Imagine if you two had run into each other.”

  “We pretty much did! But I guess from his point of view, and going on what happened to him later, he had to be sure someone would get him the figurines.”

  “Right. Hey, you know what you could have done? Gone back to the cafe after you found the American to see if someone else was waiting for him.”

  “Yes, I didn’t think of that until the following day. But I’m not sure I could have done it anyway. What if the police had taken Marieke back to the cafe? I think there’s a good chance she might own the place or at least live above it. And supposing she saw me waiting there and pointed me out. It’s kind of far fetched but it could have happened.”

  Victoria didn’t respond. Her mind was off on another track, pursuing other ideas. I waited for her to conclude her thoughts and when she next spoke, it was with a certain hesitancy, as if something terrible had just occurred to her but she didn’t want to worry me unduly.

  “Charlie, what if the men beat the American like that because he’d already told them what they needed to know? What if he’d told them your name after all and they were just tying up loose ends?”

  “You’re beginning to depress me.”

  “Well, don’t you think you should consider moving on? I mean, you’ve finished your book and these men sound dangerous.”

  “They don’t just sound it. But the book’s not finished yet and I’m not ready to leave Amsterdam. I like it here.”

  “Right. Plus there’s the girl, I suppose.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The blonde, Charlie. Don’t think I didn’t notice the time you spent describing her.”

  “Marieke? Oh, she’s attractive enough. But I hope I’m not quite that transparent.”

  “Come on, another damsel in distress? You love that stuff.”

  “Do I now. Listen Vie, if you want the truth I suppose it did occur to me that the American could have given the men her name. But that’s really not my concern. I get the feeling she knew what she was letting herself in for.”

  “There is something else though, isn’t there?”

  “Well, there’s my twenty thousand euros for starters. I did the job I was hired for, after all. But suppose the American doesn’t make it and I can’t collect, the way I see it I already have two of the figurines. Maybe if I can just find the third one…”

  “Charlie…”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “But why take the risk? You have the six thousand euros you found and maybe I can try for a little more for this book.”

  “If I can solve the briefcase problem.”

  “Well, yes. But how about I place some calls?”

  “I don’t think so. Not yet anyway. Wait until I’ve had a chance to think it over. And listen, Victoria? I’m going to have to go. There’s someone knocking on my door. Take care, okay?”

  “Like I’m the one who needs to take care,” she said, as I went to lower the receiver. “I mean, what do I have to worry about? A paper cut?”

  SEVEN

  The man I found on the opposite side of the door to my apartment looked every inch the police officer. He was of above average height (although perhaps not for a Dutchman) with an upright stance that gave him the appearance of a soldier standing to attention. His hair was neat and clipped close to his head and a sober rain coat hung from his angular shoulders, concealing a charcoal suit. The only thing vaguely out of the ordinary were his spectacles, which were frameless and achingly modern, the kind of glasses a Swedish designer might wear.

  “Mr. Howard?” he asked.

  “Charlie Howard, that’s right.”

  “I am Inspector Burggrave from the Amsterdam-Amstelland police force. I would like to talk with you please.”


  What he said fell somewhere between a request and an order and the distinction was blurred enough for me to usher him into my living room without another word. Antagonising police officers, I’ve found, is just about the quickest way to make your life a misery. Still…

  “Do you mind if I ask how you got inside my building Inspector? Usually visitors have to buzz me from downstairs.”

  “Somebody was leaving,” he said, without elaborating any further.

  “I see. And they just let you inside?”

  He nodded.

  “You didn’t mention you were a police officer?”

  I received a puzzled look, as if I was labouring the point.

  “Forgive me,” I said. “But this is a communal building and I tend to think those of us who live here have certain responsibilities to one another. Especially where strangers are concerned. Could I trouble you to show me your identity?”

  He sighed and reached inside his coat with a practised gesture, removing a leather folio that he flipped open before my eyes. I scanned his name and rank.

  “That’s fine then. Can I get you a drink?”

  “No,” he said, returning his ID to his pocket.

  “A seat?”

  The Inspector remained standing, behaving as if he hadn’t heard me at all, and meanwhile he looked around my living room, taking in the piles of books on the floor and the coffee table, my writing desk and laptop, the copy of my latest manuscript and beside it my telephone and an ash tray containing a few cigarette butts. His eyes passed over the framed first edition of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon hanging on my wall and on to the picture windows overlooking the Binnenkant canal below and the houseboats moored along the water’s edge. You learn to get used to the way a policeman treats your home—how they inventory everything as if it’s their God-given right to nosey around anyplace they please. Burggrave was no different, although perhaps a little more thorough than most.