2007 - The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam

by Chris Ewan

  I sat in my desk chair, fingers laced together behind my neck, and tried to work out how to solve the problem I’d run into.

  Nicholson was my killer. For once, I’d known it right from the beginning of my book, and I’d known how to prove he was guilty too. It was all about the briefcase, one with a grizzly secret inside—the right hand of his victim, Arthur the butler. I had my hero, Faulks, figure it all out—how Nicholson wanted Arthur dead so he could get inside the home of Arthur’s employer and take back the photograph he was being blackmailed with, how he’d created an alibi by having his wife believe that he’d spent the evening in his study, how Nicholson had, in fact, caught a cab across town, talked his way inside Arthur’s apartment, choked him, cut off his hand, and then taken his hand back across town in a briefcase he’d found in Arthur’s apartment, at which point he’d used Arthur’s keys to get in through the front door and then his cold, dead fingers to open the electronic safe by means of the fingerprint scanner. What I hadn’t noticed, until Victoria pointed it out to me, was that I had Faulks pull the briefcase out from inside Nicholson’s study to prove his guilt, at which point Nicholson broke down and confessed, but I hadn’t explained just how the briefcase had moved from Arthur’s apartment, and then latterly the safe storage complex at the police evidence room, to the inside of Nicholson’s home.

  It was a hitch alright. In the past, I’d solved problems just like it by having Faulks break into places and move the evidence about as he wished. I couldn’t do that here, though, because the briefcase was in the heart of a police station, and no matter how fanciful I might allow my burglar books to become, I drew the line at having Faulks burgle the police. One way of sorting it out was to introduce a new character, say a street-wise cop that Faulks could talk into helping him. Maybe the cop would get the collar in return for loaning Faulks the briefcase? It wasn’t a bad idea but I didn’t like it because it would involve too big a rewrite. If the cop was to have a role like that, he had to appear early on and I’d need to develop a few scenes where Faulks could talk to him and gain his trust and it all sounded like far too much work. Besides, if things worked that way, where was the surprise for the reader when Faulks opened the cupboard in Nicholson’s apartment and pulled out the briefcase?

  Just as I was wrestling with that very thought, my telephone rang and I answered it. It was Pierre, returning my call. Now I’m pretty sure Pierre isn’t his real name but the truth is you need to use a name when you talk business with someone, and since he was French and he lived in Paris, Pierre had always struck me as an appropriate choice. For his part, Pierre didn’t care what I called him, so long as he got a share of each job he passed my way and his cut of any stolen goods I needed him to shift.

  “Charlie, you have business for me in Amsterdam?” he began.

  “Perhaps,” I said, leaning back in my chair and propping my feet up onto the surface of my desk, ankles crossed. “Though it really depends on you, Pierre. On how much I can trust you, to be exact.”

  “Charlie. Please,” he said. “We are friends. We do not talk like this.”

  “Not usually, no,” I said, glancing to my right and straightening the picture frame that contained my Hammett novel. “But then I hear things have changed. I hear you give my name to anybody who wants it.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. I cleared away a dust spot from the glass of the frame.

  “Americans, Pierre,” I prompted. “Admirers of my work. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Charlie—”

  “Take your time. This had better be good.”

  “He is a friend, too,” Pierre said, carefully. “An old friend. He wanted the best I knew in the Netherlands. You are my best, Charlie.”

  “That’s reassuring. Did he tell you what he was after?”

  “Only your name. I said I would contact you, like we agree, but he did not like this.”

  “Why not?”

  “He did not say.”

  “You knew he was a thief?”

  “Of course. It is why I knew him,” he said, with a note of surprise.

  “And it didn’t make you suspicious that he wanted to hire someone else?”

  “A little, oui. But many men lose their courage.”

  “You figured that was what it was?”

  “Twelve years, it is a long time, no?”

  I sat up in my chair and gripped the receiver closer to my ear. “What’s this about twelve years Pierre?”

  “You do not know?”

  “Know what? Was he inside?”

  “He did not tell to you?”

  “No, he didn’t,” I said, reaching for my pen and testing the ink on the top sheet of my manuscript. “What was he in for?”

  “Why, he killed a man.”

  “Murder?”

  “Non. This man, he try to be a hero—to stop Michael taking his diamonds.”

  “So he was a jewel thief?” I asked, meanwhile sketching the outline of a prone body with a question mark planted right in the centre of it.

  “Diamonds, Charlie. This is what he would steal. Only diamonds.”

  “And someone tried to stop him?”

  “A guard, oui.”

  “And he killed him?”

  “It seemed so.”

  I thought about that for a moment. About the man I’d sat opposite in the poorly lit cafe. About how he’d seemed just about as normal as you could imagine. Not a convict, I wouldn’t have said. Not a killer.

  “Where was this?” I asked, sketching out a diamond roughly the size of the body I’d drawn.

  “In Amsterdam.”

  “And he went to a Dutch prison?”

  “Oui.”

  “They didn’t deport him?”

  “What is this deport?”

  “Throw him out of the country. Send him back to the States. I thought that was what happened.”

  “This I do not know.”

  I went over the hook of the question mark again with my pen, building on the layers of ink until the lines became blurred. Then I ground the biro around and around the dot.

  “Pierre, did he tell you anything about the job? Did he want you to sell something on?”

  “Non. Mais—it was not diamonds?”

  “No. It was monkeys.”

  “Monkeys?”

  “Figurines,” I said, casting the pen aside and rubbing at my eyes. “Cheap-looking. A set of three. One covers his eyes, one covers his ears, one covers his mouth. You’ve heard of them?”

  “But of course.”

  “You figure they could be worth much?”

  “I do not know. It would depend on many things.”

  “Worth killing for?”

  “He killed?”

  “Not this time,” I said, then sighed. “The thing is, he’s in hospital, Pierre. And he’s none too healthy from what I can make out. I’m really not sure what you’ve got me involved in here.”

  “This I did not know,” he said, in a wistful tone. “It saddens me to hear it. He was someone I could trust. Like you.”

  “I’ve never killed a man.”

  “Non. But what can I do?”

  “You can find out about these monkeys. See if there’s a market for them.”

  “But of course. It is nothing. I will begin right away.”

  “And Pierre, no more giving my name to people. Especially not convicted killers.”

  I hung up and drummed my fingers on my manuscript, syncopating my thoughts. Three monkeys, three burglars, three men in the cafe. Everything in sets of three, like a combination lock I didn’t know the sequence for. And how many deaths so far? Almost two that I knew of. I just hoped there wouldn’t be a third.

  TEN

  A short while later, I called Victoria and got straight into it.

  “Listen, I’ve been thinking,” I said. “What if there were two briefcases?”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, supposing Faulks could get his hands on a second brie
fcase and plant that in Nicholson’s study.”

  “An identical briefcase.”

  “Exactly. Remember, Faulks is trying to open the safe when he hears Nicholson come in, and so he hides in the closet. But let’s say this time he leaves the door open a bit so he can see exactly what kind of make the briefcase is.”

  “And he can also see who the killer is. Which ends your book on page 10.”

  “Stupid ef me. So try this. Faulks gets the make of the briefcase from someone at the police station, maybe one of the female officers, in return for a steak dinner. It’s a common make, so he goes out and buys a copy.”

  “Except if the real briefcase is with the police, and if everyone knows it, including Nicholson, they’ll also know it’s a plant.”

  “Damn.”

  “And the briefcase is only part of it, Charlie. You need the hand. You need to pop open that case and thrust that bloody hand right in Nicholson’s face. In the reader’s face, too. That’s your climax.”

  “So I get another hand.”

  “Another hand? How are you going to do that? Cut off Arthur’s left one?”

  “No of course not. What about Arthur’s niece, the actress? Suppose she isn’t an actress so much as a special effects designer?”

  “You want a prosthetic hand?”

  “It’s not so much I want one,” I said. “I just thought maybe it could work.”

  “But you still don’t have your second briefcase, or at least any way of matching the original that makes sense.”

  “Granted, it needs some finessing.”

  “I’ll say.”

  I breathed heavily into the telephone receiver. “You know, these are not the easy words of encouragement I was seeking.”

  “Well guess what, you didn’t give me the complete solution I was seeking, either. So it appears we’re both disappointed.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Although I am glad to hear from you. I’ve been worried.”

  “Sweet.”

  “It’s true. Tell me, how are things?”

  “Thieving things?”

  “What else?”

  “Well, they’re interesting, I guess. Or complicated, depending on your perspective.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  And so I did. I told Victoria about my visit from Inspector Burggrave of the Dutch police, about my conversations with Marieke and Pierre, and what I’d learned about the American. In fact, I breezed through it all as if it was a familiar pitch for a new novel I’d been plotting out and when I was done she said, “So he’s a burglar too. It’s odd that he hired you.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “You really think his nerve had gone?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “What do you think?”

  “Well, it’s difficult without meeting him, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “But it does seem odd that he had enough nerve to plan a theft but not enough to carry it through.”

  “My thoughts exactly. And he killed a man, Victoria. If he’d had some kind of conversion in prison, maybe I could believe it, but a born again convict doesn’t get out and start planning a new job.”

  “I don’t like that at all, the fact he killed a man. Put that with the gun you found in the apartment and you’ve, well, you’ve got a handful of people who are capable of really hurting someone.”

  “By breaking fingers and beating skulls, you mean?”

  “Quite. So what about the blonde,” she said, layering the word with contempt. “What does she have to say?”

  “Her name’s Marieke, as well you know. And to be honest I don’t think she told me everything she could have.”

  “They never do.”

  “Blondes?”

  “Femme fatales, Charlie.”

  “She’s hardly that!”

  “She’s the nearest thing you’ve got. It all makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what Faulks might do in your situation?”

  “Faulks wouldn’t be in my situation. At this rate, I’d rewrite the opening chapters to give him some more clues to go on. Think about it: the man who knows everything is in a coma, the femme fatale, as you call her, is holding out on me.”

  “In every conceivable way.”

  “Funny. What else? Oh yes, Pierre, who got me into this mess in the first place, knows just about as much as I do, maybe even less. And then there’s the rogue intruder, who I don’t have a hope of tracking down.”

  “Plus the wide man and the thin man. Who sound more like a comedy duo every minute, by the way.”

  “And finally the monkeys.”

  “About which you don’t have a monkeys.”

  “Ba-da-boom.”

  “That was one of the thin man’s best lines.”

  “From their successful Blackpool season?”

  “No doubt.” She sighed. “So what are you going to do?”

  “Sorry?”

  “What’s the next step to solving all this?”

  “Who said anything about solving anything?”

  “Nobody did. I just thought you might want to look into what happened. Honour among thieves and all that.”

  “Right. The thing is, I need to look out for myself here, Vie. And it strikes me the absolute best thing I can do right now is keep my name out of this mess. So I’m going to finish my book and then I’m going to work out where I’m off to next and that’s it.”

  “You are thinking of moving on then?”

  “Once the book is done, yes.”

  “Well, have you considered London? We could have a conversation in person for once.”

  “And remove my air of mystery? Let you put a face to my name?”

  “Charlie,” Victoria said, as if I was a touch slow, “I’ve seen your jacket photo a hundred times, remember?”

  “Oh yes,” I told her. “I forgot.”

  ELEVEN

  After I was through talking to Victoria, I played around with some more plot ideas for a while but I didn’t come up with anything new to solve the briefcase problem, at least nothing sensible. The truth was I was forcing things, trying to complete a book that wasn’t ready to be finished just yet. Somewhere, deep in my subconscious, my mind was toying with the puzzle I’d set it and in time, though I had no idea when, the brilliant solution would surely come racing through the channels in my mind, like a kid running to show his parents the jigsaw he’s just completed. Until then, though, I would just have to wait.

  So I dropped my pencil and booted up my laptop and connected to the Internet and gave into my curiosity. Once I was online, I called up Wikipedia and typed in the words ‘Three Wise Monkeys’. I clicked on ‘search’ and soon found the content I was after.

  The three wise monkeys are a pictorial maxim. Together they embody the proverbial principle ‘to see no evil, hear no evil and to speak no evil.’ The three monkeys are:

  Mizaru, covering his eyes, who sees no evil;

  Kikazaru, covering his ears, who hears no evil; and

  Iwazaru, covering his mouth, who speaks no evil.

  The source that popularised this pictorial maxim is a 17th century carving over a door of the famous Toshogu shrine in Nikko, Japan. The maxim, however, probably originally came to Japan with a Tendai-Buddhist legend possibly from India via China in the 8th century (Yamato Period). Though the teaching most probably had nothing to do with the monkeys, the concept of the three monkeys originated from a word play on the fact that zaru in Japanese, which denotes the negative form of a verb, sounds like saru, monkey.

  The idea behind the proverb was part of the teaching of god Vadjra, that if we do not hear, see or talk evil, we ourselves shall be spared all evil. This is similarly reflected in the English proverb ‘Talk of the devil—and the devil appears’.

  All of which, to paraphrase, seemed to be saying that the message the monkeys had been intended to convey was that you should stay out of things as much as possible. And who could argue with that? Not me, for one. So I powered down my laptop
and I put on my coat and then I left my apartment with the intention of taking a stroll around the neighbourhood before finding a local brown bar where I could drink a few beers, get something to eat and maybe strike up a conversation or two.

  It was a fine plan, a great one even, but it fell apart the moment I opened the front door of my building to find Inspector Burggrave at the bottom of my steps. A uniformed colleague was stood beside him and a marked police car was parked just behind.

  “Mr. Howard, you are under arrest,” he told me.

  “But Inspector,” I said, “I didn’t even whisper your name.”

  Handcuffed in the rear of the police car, speeding through the back streets of Amsterdam with strangers gawping at me, I wondered if perhaps I should correct Burggrave. I hadn’t been under arrest. I couldn’t be, not until he had placed me under arrest in the first place. But on reflection, I decided that now was not the time to quibble over English usage with a man who seemed to have taken quite a severe disliking to me. Now was the time to keep my own counsel.

  It was just as well I had some counsel to fall back on, because Burggrave did everything in his power to prevent me contacting a lawyer and when, at last, one finally arrived at the police station I was taken to, his English was very nearly as poor as my Dutch. To begin with the three of us sat around an interview table in a sparsely furnished room, arguing in Dutch and then somewhat more and somewhat less broken English, about when I would be allowed my first refreshment break. After ten minutes or so of this nonsense, I finally made myself face Burggrave directly and said, in a measured way, that I’d decided for the time being I would let myself be interviewed without my lawyer present. And at that point, we paused for a refreshment break.

  When we resumed, Burggrave was accompanied by the same uniformed officer who had been present at my arrest. He also had a paperback book in his hand. Burggrave threw the book down onto the table in front of me and I picked it up and fanned the pages, as if I was deciding whether or not to devote the next two hours of my life to reading it. I already knew what happened, though, because it was my first mystery novel, The Thief and the Five Fingers, written by Charles E. Howard and available at all good book shops.