2007 - The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam

by Chris Ewan

  Afterwards, we lay on Marieke’s bed while she lit a fresh joint that we smoked together. I watched the smoke drift up from my mouth and hang in the air above me, meanwhile teasing a strand of her hair between my fingers. She rested her hand on my chest and crossed her leg over my waist. Then, when I was sucking on the last of the joint, she finally asked me what she’d wanted to know all along.

  “Charlie, will you give me the two monkeys?”

  “But you don’t have the third one,” I said, exhaling.

  She shook her head against my chest.

  “So what’s the use?”

  “For me. Please. I would like the two you took.”

  I made a show of thinking about it.

  “Do you have the twenty thousand?”

  “Michael made me keep it here.”

  “Then we should go to my apartment.”

  FOURTEEN

  In all honesty, I knew the moment we reached my apartment that someone else had been inside. Call it a burglar’s intuition. Call it the small things I’d learned during my years of breaking and entering. Call it the fact my door had been smashed clean off its hinges and was lying flat on my living room floor.

  As soon as I saw the door, I told Marieke to wait out in the hallway and stepped cautiously inside. I didn’t expect to disturb anyone but I didn’t want to take unnecessary risks either. Checking the place didn’t take long. I only had the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom and my bedroom to search. Once I’d confirmed there was nobody inside, I went back to the doorway and told Marieke to join me.

  “Excuse the mess,” I told her.

  “But this is ridiculous,” she said. “Charlie, it is terrible.”

  It was pretty terrible, even for a self-confessed burglar. My every possession was scattered across the floor—books, manuscripts, notes, CDs, photographs, even my laptop. The few soft furnishings in the living room had been sliced open and their stuffing exposed and much the same thing had happened in the bedroom to my clothes, my sheets and the mattress I slept on. In the bathroom, the side-panel along the bath had been unscrewed and my burglar tools had been removed from their hiding place there and discarded in the bath itself. In the kitchen, all the cupboard doors had been opened and the food and household sundries the cupboards had contained had been dumped in a big, soggy pile on the floor. The freezer door was ajar too and a pool of water had formed around its base, then spread to touch the edge of the grocery pile and form a stinking toxic sludge.

  I led Marieke away from the kitchen and back to the living room, where I approached my desk, picking up the broken desk drawer from the floor on my way towards it. I set the drawer to one side, dropped to my knees and felt around in the space where the drawer had been. My fingers searched right around the drawer cavity but no matter how hard I searched, the figurines weren’t there. My shoulders dropped and I turned to her and shook my head.

  “They’re gone.”

  “No,” she said, through gritted teeth, like a teenager trying to deny the obvious.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I thought they’d be safe here. I had good locks fitted to that door. And I didn’t think anyone would know I was involved.”

  “Who could know?”

  “Perhaps my arrest was in the paper. That would connect me with Michael and it would be easy enough to find out where I live. Anyway, it’s obvious, isn’t it? The second intruder, the man who broke into the apartment in the Jordaan while I was still there, he did this.”

  Marieke frowned at me. “It is obvious why?” she asked.

  “Because I saw what he did to that apartment, remember? He’s done the same thing here. All the ripping and the slicing. Forcing his way inside by breaking the door. Leaving everything in a mess. And it wasn’t a random burglary. My laptop would be gone if that was the case.”

  “But who is this man?”

  “You tell me.”

  “But I do not know. How could I know?”

  “Because I think Michael hired him. And because I think he would have told you about it.”

  “I told you he didn’t,” she said, swatting the air with her hand and then pointing at me. “Do not say these things. They are not true.”

  Marieke stamped her foot on the floor and then she started to scream and yelp. I could have told her to quieten down, that she might disturb the neighbours, but then I remembered that the noise of my door being smashed through and my apartment being torn apart hadn’t upset them, so I let her scream all she wanted. She was so good at it that part of me was tempted to join in. Eventually, though, she stopped and glared at me, looking for all the world as if I was the only reason for her present troubles in life.

  “You told me they were safe,” she said, pointing again. “You are an idiot. You kept them in your desk. This is stupid. It is the first place I would look.”

  “Well it wasn’t the first place he looked, or he wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of carving open a perfectly respectable couch. That’s my damage deposit gone, right there.”

  “You joke? You think you can make me laugh? I will not laugh. You are stupid. The monkeys are gone. You are a stupid, stupid man. And to think I…I…with you,” she spat. “For what? For this?”

  “You mean you faked it,” I asked, batting my eyelids.

  “Stupid,” she yelled, flapping her hands in the air. “Stupid!”

  She kicked at the broken couch, then kicked it some more. When she was through kicking the furniture, she stamped her foot once again. Then she shrieked, eyeballed me with more contempt than I would have cared for, and finally stormed out of my apartment.

  After she’d gone, I dropped onto my backside and looked around longingly for the well-ordered room I used to know and love. If I focused hard enough, I could almost picture it, but I soon gave up trying because the gulf between the image in my mind and the one that presently confronted me was so depressing. True enough, my own thieving is a pretty sizeable character flaw, but I’d never do anything like this to somebody’s home. It was going to take me hours to clean up and probably hours more to explain to the letting company what had happened and to convince them there was really no reason to report it to the police. And I would have to pay to replace the door and the couch and the bedding, plus any incidental damage I happened to come across as I tidied. All things considered, it was turning into something of a costly day, especially if you included the six thousand euros I’d given Rutherford and the twenty thousand I’d missed out on from Marieke.

  I was still slumped on the floor almost half an hour later, trying to muster the will to get started on the clean-up process and fighting the tiredness that was beginning to afflict me yet again, when my telephone rang from somewhere beneath the pile of scattered books by my side. I searched through the pile until I found the plastic telephone receiver and then I snatched it to my ear.

  “Charlie,” Pierre began warmly, as if he was greeting me after an interlude of many years, “where have you been? I have been calling since yesterday and you never answer. I am beginning to think you leave Amsterdam.”

  “I’m starting to think I should, Pierre. Tell me, what have you found out?”

  “About these monkeys, it is not so good news, I am sorry. If they were very old, made from ivory maybe, they could be worth a little. Otherwise, non.”

  “I think they’re made from a modern material. Plaster, perhaps.”

  “Then they are worthless.”

  “That’s what I was afraid you’d say. There’s no market for them at all?”

  “A few collectors. One in Switzerland I spoke with. Mais, the price, it is not good. Sometimes, he collect metal monkeys, gold say, but usually these come from Japan. He did not sound interested in your monkeys. I am sorry Charlie.”

  “No, that’s okay. I sort of expected it. And, well, there’s something I have to tell you Pierre. It’s bad news I’m afraid.”

  And at that point I did my best to explain that Michael was dead without blurting the news
out insensitively or humming and hawing for no good reason. I told him when it had happened and I shared my condolences and then I shut up and waited for Pierre to react in whichever way he cared. He was silent for a few moments and then, in a slightly hollow voice, he thanked me for telling him and muttered a short blessing.

  “You want me to try and find out if there’s going to be a service?” I asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  “He struck me as a good man,” I offered.

  “Oui. And an excellent thief.”

  “I’m sure.” I paused for a moment, then cleared my throat. “Pierre, I don’t mean to be crass but there’s something I need to ask you. When Michael spoke to you about what he needed, did you recommend anyone else to him?”

  “In Amsterdam? Non. Only you Charlie.”

  “So where would he have gone if he wanted to hire a second burglar?”

  “This I do not know. Why would he do it?”

  “Exactly what I’ve been asking myself,” I said. “But not to worry. You’ve already been a help.”

  “If you say so Charlie. But please, take care, oui? It does not seem so safe for burglars in Amsterdam just now.”

  I couldn’t agree with him more. Setting the phone down, I rubbed at my eyes and groaned rather indulgently and then I got up from the floor and made my way back into the kitchen. It was all just as I had left it, a sorry jumble in the middle of the floor. I stepped over the puddle of melted water from the freezer and kicked a cereal box and some kitchen paper to one side so that I had somewhere to put my feet. Then I rooted through the sticky, sodden detritus until I found the box of washing detergent I was looking for. I wiped my hand dry on my trousers, reached inside the box and delved into the citrus scented powder and felt around until I found what I was after. I checked the room for any prying eyes and then I pulled the two monkey figurines out from where I’d hidden them at the bottom of the box. I dusted the soap granules off of them, then held them before my eyes and asked myself for what seemed like the hundredth time what could possibly be so special about them.

  FIFTEEN

  I was up early the next morning, which might have surprised me given the lack of sleep I’d had during my night in police custody, if it wasn’t for my mattress being somewhat less comfortable now that it had been sliced and torn apart. My early start was a blessing in some ways, though, because it meant I’d completed the bulk of the cleaning and tidying before the chore could impact on too much of my day. By nine, I was able to call a joiner to come and fit a replacement door to my apartment and afterwards the two of us worked together to secure my old locks to the new door. I could have changed the locks, of course, but it would have cost me a tidy sum and there seemed little point while they still functioned. It wasn’t as if I’d left a spare set of keys lying around and besides, whoever had broken in was more than willing to bypass a good set of locks anyway.

  Once I’d settled up with the joiner and seen him outside, I telephoned Henry Rutherford and asked if I could buy him breakfast. He said he’d be delighted to join me and we arranged to meet at a cafe-restaurant on Westermarkt, not far from the Westerkerk and the Anne Frank House. I arrived before him and bagged us a window table and when he showed up we made small talk over plates of fried egg and ham and mugs of strong black coffee until I asked him if he could possibly spare me an hour or so and accompany me to the city library. Rutherford agreed readily enough, as men who enjoy hard cash are prone to do, and so I led him down the Prinsengracht canal in a pleasant morning sunshine that reflected off the canal water and bathed the colourful Dutch barges and prestigious brown-brick townhouses lining the canal banks in a pleasant glow. At the Centrale Bibliotheek, Rutherford did the talking and I listened as, in fluent Dutch, he arranged with the girl on the counter for us to be given access to a micro-fiche machine and a series of slides containing back issues of De Telegraaf and NRC Handelsblad from roughly twelve years ago. The girl led us, carrying the slides, to a small private room where Rutherford hung his jacket over the back of a chair and rolled up his shirt sleeves while I fetched a second chair so that I could sit beside him and offer what help I was able to provide.

  Together in front of the antique-looking machine, the two of us passed three of what were quite possibly the most tedious hours of my life, speeding through reams of Dutch headlines that rarely made even the vaguest sense to me. To his credit, Rutherford never complained, and though I apologised for the nature of the task I’d set him more than once, he proved the very definition of studious dedication. As the hours ticked by, it reached the stage where I could close my eyes and still see the sepia newspaper files rotating on the back of my eyelids, and had we not got lucky when we did, I’m sure it wouldn’t have been long before I’d have called time on the entire endeavour and told Rutherford he could give it a rest. As it happened, though, Rutherford suddenly gave a self-satisfied gasp of delight and showed me exactly what it was we were looking for on the front page of an October 1995 edition of De Telegraaf.

  At that stage, Rutherford made some hasty notes and afterwards we moved to a brown bar just a short distance further along the canal. There I ordered us a brace of toasted ham sandwiches and a couple of glasses of Heineken and, once we’d filled our stomachs with the food, Rutherford unfolded the sheet of paper he’d scrawled on and told me what I wanted to know.

  “It was a botched robbery, by all accounts,” he began, blotting his greasy lips with a paper napkin. “The article we found was the court report from the trial of your American friend. It seems he tried to carry off one of the biggest diamond heists in Amsterdam’s history.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes. There was quite a sizeable trading company back then called Van Zandt’s. Have you heard of it?”

  “It doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “No reason why it should, of course.” He drained some of his Heineken, meanwhile circling his hand to let me know he was set to continue. “Must be five, six years since they were bought out,” he said, gasping. “By a South African multi-national I believe. Back in the day, though, they were a major company in the Netherlands. Every Dutch person would have heard of them.”

  “And their business was diamonds?”

  He set his beer glass to one side, bobbing his head. “Precious jewels, I suppose you’d say, though diamonds were the heart of it. Like a lot of the Dutch jewellery merchants, they imported mined stones from the former Dutch colonies and cut them here in Amsterdam. They had a facility bordering the Oosterdok with quite a number of warehouses, if I remember correctly.” He raised his eyes to the ceiling, as if the answer was etched into the Aertex above us. “Yes, that’s right, they had their name plastered along the side of the buildings.”

  “So they were a big deal.”

  “Indeed they were. As were the diamonds they traded. Some of the world’s finest gems, without question.”

  “And Michael stole some?”

  “Well, yes, though how many is open to debate. The article isn’t terribly clear on it. Apparently some jewels were recovered from his home, that’s what they got him on, but there was speculation that a great deal more jewels were stolen. Van Zandt, though, denied this out of hand.”

  “A cover up?”

  “That seems to be the implication. No doubt it would have been against their interests to let people know their security was anything but airtight.”

  I nodded, ignoring the way Rutherford was eyeing the last of my sandwich. “So Michael faced trial for burglary?”

  “Aggravated burglary, with manslaughter. That’s what they got him on in the end.”

  “Yes, he killed a guard.”

  “A security guard who worked for the company,” Rutherford said, consulting his notes. “A Robert Wolkers, age 44. It seems Mr. Wolkers disturbed the American while he was trying to access the main diamond storage facility. The American shot him.”

  “He was carrying a gun?” I asked, slipping the last morsel of ham and toast into my m
outh.

  “So it would seem,” Rutherford said, through pinched lips.

  “I’ve never heard of a professional burglar carrying a gun before.”

  Rutherford shrugged, no small gesture for a man of his size. “Well, your American did. The prosecution theory was he shot the guard but was so thrown by the whole incident he fled the warehouse before he got the jewels he was after. The ones he took weren’t worth very much, you understand.”

  “According to Van Zandt.”

  “Yes, according to them. But the American would never confirm it either way.”

  “He was what, arrested some time later?”

  “One day,” Rutherford said, raising his index finger.

  “Which would have given him time to hide the/really valuable jewels, if he did have them.”

  “Arguably.”

  I chased the last of my sandwich with some beer, swilling it around my mouth to clear the toast from my teeth. “So what happened at the trial?” I asked, working my tongue around my molars. “Did Michael plead guilty?”

  “Guilty to the robbery charge. There was enough circumstantial evidence to prove that, not least because of the diamonds they found in his home. But he denied the manslaughter charge.”

  “Interesting. On what grounds?”

  “He said he’d never even seen a guard.”

  “There was only one on duty?”

  “No, as it happens,” Rutherford said, glancing at his papers. “There were two, though the other guard was in an altogether different part of the building when the robbery occurred. Didn’t hear a thing, apparently, although he was the one who discovered the body. I wrote his name down somewhere. Is it important?”

  “I’m not sure,” I told him. “Probably not.”

  “Well it’s here someplace. Ah yes, Louis Rijker.”