by Chris Ewan
“It is your habit to write books for murderers?”
“Well, there’s the thing,” I said. “He claimed he was innocent.”
Van Zandt laughed, but not in a genuine way. It was a showy kind of laugh, more like a bark really. He wanted me to know how perverse he found what I’d just said, as if I’d just uttered one of the oldest and most widely known lies in the universe.
“Innocent,” he said, as though the word was doused in vinegar. “He was a killer.”
“With respect Sir, I didn’t get that impression.”
“But of course,” he said, waving his free hand. “He was a thief, yes? A liar. He shot one of our guards. And for what? A few cheap diamonds? The drink you hold in your hands is worth more. This glass is worth more.”
I took a mouthful of the bourbon. It sounded like good stuff and if I was ever to educate my palette, I figured I might as well start at the top. It stung, like a hundred pin-pricks on my tongue. I swallowed cautiously and stifled a cough.
“There was talk,” I said, hoarsely, “speculation that he got more than a few cheap jewels.”
“It is not so,” Van Zandt said, stiffening his shoulders. “If he told you this it is just another lie.”
“Actually, I read it in the papers. After he was attacked. I was intrigued, you see.”
“Journalists,” Van Zandt said, with more pantomime distaste.
“It was in a number of papers.”
“And?”
“And if the speculation was false, I thought maybe you could tell me the truth.”
“You are still writing your book?” he asked, brow raised.
“I’m thinking of it,” I told him. “And the reality is I can go about it in two ways. I can write with all the facts to hand, or I can go on what I know right now. It might not be accurate, but I can only work with what I have.”
Something flickered in Van Zandt’s eyes. A brief smile played about his lips.
“You appeal to my thirst for truth?”
“To your love of books,” I said, gesturing around me. “To the written word.”
“Ha. This book of yours will not be Shakespeare, I am thinking.”
I shrugged. “Granted, it’ll have to be a little more accessible to the modern reader.”
“It will be trash.”
“It could be. Without your help.”
Van Zandt drained some more of his bourbon, his withered throat working overtime as he swallowed. When he refocused on me, there was something new in his eyes. It looked like mirth, as though I was amusing him greatly. He had the air of a predator toying with some hapless prey.
“It is not Van Zandt company policy to discuss security matters. I know this, because I was the director of security.”
“There’s no longer a Van Zandt company. No longer a policy.”
He turned that one over, debating where to go next. The thing was, I could tell he wanted to talk about it. That’s the problem with things that should be left unsaid—it’s always so tempting to say them.
“Put the diamonds aside,” I tried. “Leave all that to speculation. What I’m interested in is the mechanics of what happened on the night Robert Wolkers was killed. That’s what my readers will want to know. How the raid went down.”
“And how the killing happened?”
“Perhaps. But why don’t we start with the simple stuff. There’s no harm in that, surely? Having met you now, I’m certain you would have overseen a sophisticated security system. Would you describe it for me?”
I reached inside my coat pocket and removed a spiral-bound notepad and a pen. Van Zandt eyed my props carefully, sucking on his cheeks.
“We had the best security system in Amsterdam,” he declared.
“I don’t doubt it.”
“It was a point of principle to me. I made sure that we invested heavily. This is why we had so few…incidents.”
“I understand. But how did it work? You had a safe or something similar?”
Van Zandt bobbed his head non-committaly, as if I was working along the right lines but not quite there yet.
“A strong room?”
He smiled and rattled the ice in his glass.
“I commissioned it myself,” he said. “Very good steel. The walls were twenty centimetres thick.”
He held his unsteady hands a short distance apart, as if to demonstrate the metric system to me.
“And that’s unusual, right?” I said, playing along.
“The door contained five steel bolts. There were at least three locks.”
“Really? Three?”
He grinned. “It is good for your book, no?”
I smiled. “Yes,” I said, meanwhile jotting down on my pad a note to the effect that there was probably one lock, at most two. “Where was this strong room located?”
“In the factory.”
“Whereabouts in the factory?”
“The centre,” he said, straightening in his chair.
“Really? You didn’t want to conceal it?”
He beamed at me, as if I’d asked just the question he’d hoped for. “It was very secure. We wanted people to know this. At the end of each day, all of the diamonds were placed inside.”
“Every single one? That sounds a bit risky.”
“There was no risk,” he said. “The concrete floor was many feet in depth. A cement wall was poured around the strong room. There was a cage also.”
“A cage?”
“With thick steel rods. Like this,” he said, forming his hand into a tube and peering through it at me.
“Could the rods be cut?”
He shook his head confidently.
“What about a blow torch?”
“It would take many hours.”
“Really. Wouldn’t the lock be the weak point?”
“Which one?”
“So there were several again.”
“Write five,” he said, gesturing to my pad with a little more enthusiasm.
“And that was it?”
“It was enough,” he said, puffing his chest.
“Along with the guards, I suppose it would be. How many on duty by the way?”
Van Zandt made a performance out of deciding whether to tell me or not. He twisted the glass in his hand and sucked on his lips. At last, he said, “There were four in the daytime. Two at night.”
“Always?”
“Always.”
“Do you remember the name of the guard who was working with Robert Wolkers on the night he was killed?”
Van Zandt hesitated. “I do not remember.”
“You’re sure?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“But a significant night. You really don’t remember?”
“I do not,” he said, shaking his head determinedly.
I held his gaze but his eyes were placid as a mountain lake. Lowering my head, I looked over the notes I’d made, reviewing where the conversation had taken us. It was a good job I was only playing the role of a biographer. My questioning had shown no clear structure whatsoever and I felt sure we’d got off track somewhere along the way. Van Zandt was telling me more than I’d expected, but it was still only the things he was willing to share. In my head, I wondered if it would be better to move away from facts and appeal to his emotional side. Perhaps it would lead him to open up.
“Tell me,” I said, “what was your opinion of Michael Park?”
“He was a killer.”
“Yes, but how did you feel about what he did?”
Van Zandt shrugged and lifted his cane from the floor. “How does this matter? He shot a man, yes? A man with a family. A wife. One daughter. I felt what anyone would feel.”
“Yes, but what is that? Anger?”
He pouted.
“Hatred?”
He shook his head earnestly.
“Even when he took your diamonds?”
Van Zandt wagged his finger at me and clucked his tongue.
“You insult m
e?” he asked. “For what? For this American? What is he to you? He is nothing. He is this,” he said, picking up one of the cubes of ice melting in the base of his glass.
“He said he was innocent.”
“He was a thief.”
“And he admitted as much. Why not confess to being a killer too?”
Van Zandt blew a raspberry. “And spend his life in prison?”
“It’s not so different from how he ended up.”
“That is not my concern. My concern was my guard. The family he had. My concern was the safety of all my employees.”
“And that’s noble.”
Van Zandt nodded, then drained the dregs from his glass, tilting his head right back so that I could see his Adam’s apple plummet and rise. He motioned towards my own drink.
“You do not like?”
“I do,” I said, and managed another sip. This time the sting was less severe, as though the first mouthful had dulled my taste buds. The burn was still there at the back of my throat, but now I was prepared for it, and it wasn’t such a shock. I swallowed, tried another question.
“I wonder, if Michael Park had already killed the guard, why didn’t he take all the jewels? He’d crossed a line by then, so it seems to me he might as well have made the most of it.”
“But he could not get into the strong room.”
“A professional burglar?”
“It was secure.”
“But these locks? Who had the keys or the combinations to them? Was it you?”
“It was combinations. Changed every day. I knew them.”
“And the guards too?”
Van Zandt shook his head.
“So it’s not possible that Michael made Robert Wolkers give him the code before he killed him?”
“There is no chance of this at all.”
Van Zandt dismissed the notion in a cool tone and then levered himself up from his chair and crossed to his drinks cabinet once more. He began fixing himself a second bourbon, not bothering to offer me a refill. I had the sense I’d taken things as far as I probably could and that unless I stopped antagonising him I would soon outstay my welcome.
“I’d be interested,” I said, resigning myself to what I was about to do, “to hear a little about the history of the Van Zandt company. I’m certain some background information would be fascinating for my readers. Could you possibly oblige?”
TWENTY
Later that night, after Van Zandt had finally grown tired of droning on about the wonders of his family’s business empire, I let myself back into my apartment and drew myself a bath. Once the water was hot enough to scald flesh, I added a little cold and then I climbed into the tub and lay flat amid the steaming water, staring blankly at the white bathroom tiles on the opposite wall. Every now and again, I allowed my backside to slip on the porcelain and my head to ease beneath the waterline. Submerged there, I could hear a kind of metallic echo in my ears and I could feel my hair floating above my head like fine seaweed. Slowly, I’d resurface, spitting water from my mouth and feeling the skin of my face prickle against the damp air.
Van Zandt had lied to me, of course, though I was unsure how much. There was always the chance that his memory was not what it used to be but I was certain some of it was deliberate. I couldn’t take offence, since I’d lied to him myself, and in any case it was nothing personal because he’d been spinning the same tale for more than a decade already. The funny thing was how weak the central deceit happened to be. As Van Zandt had said himself, the company line had always been that no more than a handful of cheap stones were taken on the night Robert Wolkers was killed, those jewels being the exact same ones that were found in Michael’s home when he was arrested. I’d been confident for some time that was nonsense but something Van Zandt had said had made me surer than ever before. There was just one strong room, he’d told me, and at the end of each day all of the jewels on the cutting floor were returned to it. Well now, that being the case, how could the American have got his hands on those worthless chunks of zircon unless he’d also got inside the strong room where every other stone was kept?
The contradiction was enough to get me thinking and pretty soon I was stepping out of the bath and patting myself down with a towel and wrapping the towel about my waist and making my way over to my writing desk. I picked up the telephone when I got there and I called Rutherford’s office number again, and while I waited for the machine to pick up I looked out through the dark picture window at the semi-naked reflection of myself suspended in mid-air above the uppermost leaves of the tree that grew on the canal bank just in front of my building. My reflection looked gaunt and hollow-eyed, like some form of gormless refugee from the spirit world. It raised its hand to me, spreading its fingers wide open, and waved half-heartedly, as if it was uncertain whether I was really there. I smiled thinly and was about to mouth something back when the message tone on Rutherford’s machine interrupted my thoughts and I broke away from my double to leave a few words.
Rutherford’s call the next morning woke me from a deep sleep, one in which I’d been dreaming that every last one of my teeth had fallen out and the only thing I had to put my teeth inside to transport them to the dentist with was a glass of coca cola. When the telephone rang, I was in the middle of a mad dash to the dentist’s office, my way barred by countless zombie-like commuters, and all the while my teeth were fizzing and dissolving away into nothing in the glass of pop I held in my hands. The ringing wormed its way into my dream and I found myself struggling to answer a mobile telephone while pushing through the crowds of people. Then, mercifully, the ringing made abrupt sense to the hard wiring in my brain and I woke with a start and grabbed for the telephone receiver.
“Hello?” I managed, before running my tongue over my teeth to check they really were all still there.
“Rutherford here,” said Rutherford. “Got your message. Not too early to call, I trust.”
“Not at all,” I said, pushing myself up on my elbows and rubbing my face with my hand. “I was just reworking a chapter that’s been bugging me. How can I help?”
“Isn’t that for me to ask? You said to call as soon as I got your message.”
“Ah, yes.” I scratched my head and stifled a yawn. “So I did. Sorry Rutherford, I’m just a little caught up in the scene, I guess. How are you fixed for later this morning?”
“One moment,” he said, and I could picture him consulting his schedule. “I could make myself available for a little while, I think. What do you have in mind?”
“Another favour,” I told him. “It’s maybe something your secretary could help out with for starters, but I was also hoping you might be able to come along and meet someone with me.”
“You mean Niels Van Zandt?”
“No, as it happens. I’m thinking of the guard that was on duty with Robert Wolkers the night he was killed. Rijker, I think you said his name was.”
“You have an address?”
“That’s where your secretary comes in. He’s not in my phone book.”
“Well, let me see what I can find out. I’ll be in touch.”
And he was, within the hour. But the news wasn’t what I’d hoped for. It turned out neither one of us would be talking to Louis Rijker in the near future because according to Rutherford’s secretary, he’d been dead at least two years, something that went a long way to explaining why I’d been unable to find an entry for him in the city telephone directory. It was a blow, alright, because he was just about the only other person I could think of who’d been anywhere near the Van Zandt factory at the time of the robbery. There was, though, a silver lining. Rutherford had an address for his mother.
“She lives on Apollolaan. In the Old South district,” he told me.
“Any chance you could come along?”
“Every chance,” he said, with all the eagerness that six grand in used notes can buy.
The property I met Rutherford outside of was a one-storey, redbrick bungalow with double-gl
azed windows that had been blocked out with an opaque film on the lower panes. The film was there, I presumed, to frustrate prowling eyes, although the rationale was lost on me to some extent once I saw the cat flap that had been fitted into the base of the U-PVC front door. The contraption put me in mind of a moggy about the size of your average Alsatian. The opening, to be clear, was huge, and anyone of below average build, including yours truly, would have no trouble at all poking their head and arm through and grasping for the plastic door handle from the inside. And chances were if it was locked, the keys would be hanging conveniently nearby, just waiting to do the very job they were designed for.
Not that any of that really mattered, of course, because the most daring thing I intended to do for the time being was to step forward and press the doorbell. And wait. And then wait some more.
I looked at Rutherford. “You’re sure this is the right address?”
“Of course. But perhaps we should have telephoned first?”
“Perhaps so,” I said, and turned back to face the door and tap my feet on the concrete stoop.
“Why don’t you ring the bell again?” Rutherford asked.
“You don’t think that’s rude?”
“Why would it be rude? She might not have heard.”
I bobbed my head, conceding the point.
“You’re right,” I told him. “I’ll risk it.”
And so I did. And this time, I pressed the doorbell for longer than before, making quite certain that the ringing couldn’t be missed. Once I let go, the silence felt strangely inappropriate and I was almost tempted to ring the bell some more, just to fill the sudden void. Instead, I linked my hands together behind my back and rocked on my heels, then looked down at the damn cat flap again. Even Rutherford could get in through it, I’d bet, and there could be no more telling indictment of the device than that. The man had a head the size of a weather balloon, after all.
“Perhaps we should come back,” he said, lifting his rounded shoulders.
“Perhaps you’re right.”
Only he wasn’t. Because just as we were turning to leave, a shadow passed over the panels of bubble glass on either side of the front door and then I heard the noise of a key in the lock. Moments later, the door opened and I found myself looking at a middle-aged woman holding a plate of food in one hand and a congealed fork in the other. The woman wore a colourful plastic apron and her coarse, greying hair was pulled back from her face in a functional, if less than stylish, ponytail.
