by Chris Ewan
“So,” she said, drawing the word out and letting the ‘o’ hang before us for an eternity.
“Sooooo,” I mimicked, then looked to Rutherford for assistance.
“Goedemorgen,” he began, brightly, and continued from there in much the same tone, though the details of what he was saying were lost to me until I heard the name Louis Rijker, after which Rutherford gestured at me, explained we were ‘Engels’ and finally asked if she happened to speak our language.
“Yes,” she said, in a matter of fact tone. “But I am not Mrs. Rijker. I am her nurse.”
“You are?”
She nodded.
“May we speak to Mrs. Rijker?”
The woman inhaled deeply and held both hands up to us, raising the fork and the dinner plate until they were level with her shoulders and framing an expression that seemed to be saying our guess was as good as hers.
“You may try, of course,” she explained. “But she does not speak English, I do not think.”
“My friend can translate,” I said, pointing to Rutherford.
The woman gave another helpless shrug of her shoulders and then backed away from the door and ushered us inside with a wave of her fork.
“Please,” she said. “Come in.”
I glanced at Rutherford and then stepped inside the threshold ahead of him, my feet sinking right into the downy fibres of a dark-red carpet. As soon as I was inside, my eyes began to sting like I’d just snorted lemon juice. The smell of cat was incredibly strong. The thing is, I’m allergic to cats at the best of times, but in this place the scent wasn’t just air-born, it was in the very fabric of the building. Cat pee and cat hair in the carpet, cat odour in the wallpaper, cat food in a tray by my feet. Everywhere, CAT. But nowhere could I see the little blighter responsible for it all.
I sneezed, and snatched my hand to my face, wafting a fresh dose of the feline miasma towards my nostrils so that I sneezed again.
“Alright, dear boy?” Rutherford enquired, while wiping his feet behind me.
“Uh huh,” I nodded, holding my finger beneath my nose and squeezing my eyes tight shut.
“You are allergic to cats?” the nurse asked, perceptively.
“Some cats,” I said, and just managed to stifle a second sneeze before it took hold of me.
“Here,” she said, placing her fork onto the plate and then gripping me by the bridge of my nose with her spare hand, pinching hard between her forefinger and thumb.
I winced, then almost sneezed again, but found I couldn’t while she was holding me in that way. Maybe it was just the pain distracting me, because she was squeezing pretty damn hard.
“Better?” she asked.
I nodded, carefully, but before I could extract myself from her grip she led me by the nose into a dimly lit room on our left. I stumbled after her, nose aloft, unable to tell if there were any obstacles in my way.
“Here,” she said again, and this time I heard her set the plate down before guiding my own fingers to my nostrils. “You try.”
“D’alright,” I managed.
“Sit. Please.”
She pushed me down and I fell onto a soft couch covered with a woollen throw that might as well have been weaved from cat hair. Rutherford gave me an apologetic look and then dropped his considerable backside next to me, creating an instant allergy-cloud that made matters much worse. I whipped out my hanky and got it in front of my nose just in time for another sneeze and then I held it there and bit hard on my tongue until I was able to regain some composure, at which point I looked up and noticed for the first time that we were not alone.
Across the room from us sat a woman who was well beyond retirement age. She was overweight, with swollen wrists and ankles, perhaps eighty years old. She wore a blue floral housecoat, or some kind of velour dressing gown, and several blankets across her lap.
On top of the blankets was the direct cause of all my discomfort, a giant marmalade cat with a torso so distended it looked as if a tear-away teen had got hold of it on its last venture out from the bungalow and force fed it helium. The creature barely lifted its head to survey us before burying its nose back into its forepaws and closing its eyes, content to just lie there and emit as many pollutants as it could conjure without moving a single muscle.
I lowered my hanky and managed to manipulate my face into something approximating a smile, though my efforts seemed to have no effect on the old dear and I began to wonder if she could even see us. Her eyes were pinhead-small, like tiny emerald studs that had dulled over the years. They seemed to be focused, quite randomly, on a point on the wall a few feet above Rutherford’s forehead. I glanced up and Rutherford did the same but neither of us could see what was there to hold her attention besides a featureless square of wallpaper. After trading a look, the two of us returned our attention to the nurse.
“Karine,” the nurse ventured, in a singsong voice, calling to the old woman as if she were hoping to coax a shy child into socialising. “Karine,” she repeated, and then looked at us with a pained expression, wringing her hands.
I looked back at the old lady. She was absently clenching and kneading at a roll of cat flesh in her fingers. Did she know we were there? I got the impression I could pop a crisp bag right next to her ear and she wouldn’t flinch.
“Is she deaf?” I asked.
The nurse shook her head.
“Does she ever talk?”
“Sometimes.”
The nurse forced a smile. “She does not have so many visitors, I think.”
I thought so too. She clung to the cat as if it was her sole companion in the entire cosmos, and looked grimly ahead of her, lips puckered, as though her chair was approaching the tipping off point of a giant rollercoaster.
“Have you worked here long?” Rutherford asked the nurse, resting a different approach.
“A month only,” she said, and shrugged.
“Do you know anything about her son? Does she talk about him?”
“Yes. This is him,” she said, pleased to help at last, and reached for a teak occasional table set beside the wall where a single photograph frame was positioned. She handed the frame to Rutherford and the two of us contemplated the man pictured in it.
The Louis Rijker in the photograph was of a similar age and build to Rutherford, although he had more hair, with just a small coin-shaped patch of it beginning to thin on top of his head. He had a dark, bushy mono-brow and his teeth were crooked and gapped. Like his mother, though, what struck me most about him were his eyes. In the photograph, he was looking straight to camera, but you got the sense there was something missing. To be blunt, Louis Rijker didn’t look like the smartest Dutchman who ever lived.
“Does she have other family?” I asked.
“I do not think so,” the nurse said, and cast a mournful glance towards her patient.
“Is she ill?”
“A little. Her heart,” she said, and patted her own chest.
“And her mind?” I asked, twirling my finger at my temple.
“It is okay. She talks sometimes.”
“About her son?”
“No. The weather maybe. Or Annabelle.”
“Annabelle?”
“The cat.”
I sniffed, as though just the mention of the creature had stirred something in my nasal passages.
“Maybe if you came back tomorrow she would talk,” the nurse suggested.
“Yes,” I agreed, nodding and regaining my feet. “You could be right.”
I smiled reassuringly to the nurse, waiting for Rutherford to stand too. We were just on our way out when one last thought occurred to me. Holding up a hand to the nurse, I unzipped my coat pocket and removed one of the two monkey figurines I was carrying. Then I stepped over towards the old lady and crouched down, doing my best not to recoil from the cat.
“Do you recognise this?” I asked softly, lifting the monkey into her line of sight and turning it before her eyes. “Did Louis ever have one of these?�
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I started to wave the figurine from side to side in front of her, as if it was a hypnotist’s pocket watch. Left to right, left to right. Gradually, the movement drew her under its spell and then, quite suddenly, like a television set tuning into a crystal clear signal for an instant, the old lady focused directly on the, figurine. Her eyes brightened, irises opening like tiny flowers blooming, and she raised a quivering hand from the cat to reach for the monkey. She grasped at my fingers and went to take the figurine from me but just as I let go her grip failed her and the monkey fell to the floor. I reached down for it but when I looked up again her sightless gaze had returned.
“Do you want to hold it?” I asked, taking her hand and unpicking her clammy fingers, then placing the figurine in her palm. But her hand was limp. I tried to shape her fingers around the figurine but it was no use, there was no life in them at all.
“Does this mean something to you? Do you know what it is?”
There was no response. I may as well have been addressing a waxwork.
“Come on,” Rutherford said from behind me, resting a hand on my shoulder. “It’s no good.”
“Perhaps tomorrow,” the nurse suggested again.
“Yes,” I managed. “Perhaps.”
Outside on the street, away from the cat, I took a few deep breaths to clear my airways, then pocketed the monkey and raised my eyebrows to Rutherford.
“You think she even knew we were there?” I asked.
“I suspect not.”
“I suspect not too.” I inhaled another lungful of air and glanced about us, shaking my head disconsolately. “It looks like I’ve rather wasted your time.”
“No, not at all,” he assured me, placing an arm on my back. “I happen to know the perfect place for a spot of lunch.”
TWENTY-ONE
After we’d eaten in a nearby patisserie, we parted company and I went in search of Marieke once more. I found her working behind the bar in Cafe de Brug, her hair tied up in a tortoise-shell clip and a white apron secured about her trim waist. She seemed skittish when I walked in, unsure how to react for perhaps the first time since we’d met. It took her a few moments to decide what attitude to adopt and in the end she reverted to what seemed to be her default setting—moody.
There was just one other customer inside the bar, an old man in a thick horsehair jacket who had a tailored woollen hat and a tot of rum on the table before him. We shared a nod when I walked in but he failed to focus his milky eyes upon me. He was licking his lips and staring at his rum, looking as if he might tempt himself with a sip for the entire afternoon.
“I’d like a beer,” I told her. “And don’t look at me that way. I’m not the worst mistake you ever made.”
Wordlessly, she took down a small glass from the shelf above the bar and began to fill it from the pump. The beer formed a foaming head and she wiped the froth from the rim of the glass with a plastic spatula. I took a mouthful and watched her watching me. She hadn’t expected this and I could tell she wasn’t sure what to make of it. Was I just some dumb Englishman who’d become infatuated with her or was I here for something else?
“It’s good beer,” I said. “And the glass is clean and the service is impeccable. You should be proud of yourself.”
That got a sneer. At least it broke up the scowl for a while.
“How many years do you figure you have ahead of yourself here? Two or three, maybe, before you quit and let some rich guy with a hole for a brain marry you?”
A sneer and a scowl. Who’d have thought it.
“I mean, that has to be the plan, doesn’t it? Assuming you really have missed out on these diamonds.”
Amazing, isn’t it, what just one word can do to a person’s face? Marieke’s turned utterly blank. The bitterness and distrust just evaporated, leaving her stunned, as if her face was re-booting while it waited for the next set of instructions to be transmitted to the network of muscles beneath her skin. She didn’t stay that way for long, but it was enough to tell me I was on the right tracks.
“Michael got away with them, didn’t he? The rumour was he stole a fortune all those years ago, so who knows what it’s worth now, right?”
She pouted, and tried glancing out of the window in a carefree manner, not willing to commit just yet.
“What I don’t get is how the monkeys fit into it all. Or why you need all three of them. You feel like sharing?”
“Why should I?”
“It could be in your interest.”
“But you do not have the monkeys. You have nothing to interest me.”
“You have to get high first, is that right?”
Her lip curled. I didn’t mind. I could look at her lips all day long.
“These monkeys,” I said. “I got them once. I can get them again.”
“How would you do it?”
“Well, that’s for me to figure out. Question is, how much is it worth to you? And before you even think it, the twenty thousand euros won’t do. I want half the diamonds.”
She cast a sudden look towards the old man, then focused back on me.
“Keep your voice down.”
“By all means,” I said. “But you haven’t answered my question.”
“I cannot give you half. They are nothing to do with you.”
“But you’re different? Listen, you might have been sleeping with Michael, but I don’t picture it is a love affair.”
“You do not know,” she said.
“So tell me.”
She stared at me peevishly and took a deep breath, blinking once or twice. Then she looked at the window once more, without focus this time, and exhaled with a faint sigh. She was crossing her fingers on the bar, I noticed, though whether it was a conscious gesture I wasn’t sure. I didn’t look at her fingers for long; it was her face that stole my attention. In profile she looked so elegant, like a young blue-blood monarch on a postage stamp. Wisps of blonde hair at her sun-kissed temples, a faint scattering of freckles on her cheeks. And those lips, delicate and upturned, just waiting to entrance any fool dumb enough to obsess over them.
“How did you meet Michael?” I asked. “He was out of prison, what, a handful of days?”
“He wrote me letters,” she said, turning to me and speaking in a disarming monotone. “Sweet letters.”
“And you wrote back?”
“Yes, why not?”
“He was a killer. Didn’t it bother you?”
“We did not talk about that.”
“Did you talk about the diamonds?”
She shook her head.
“Not in the letters. The guards read them.”
“So you met in person?”
Marieke delayed for a moment. She reached up to the shelf above her head and fetched down another glass. She filled the glass with tap water from the bar sink and took a sip. Her hands weren’t shaking, nothing like that, but the water seemed to calm her to some extent.
“It was where I worked,” she said, finally.
“The prison?”
“For two years. In the kitchens.”
“And what, he told you a piece of history each time you dropped mashed potato onto his plate?”
“Stupid. You ask me how it happened and then you say these stupid things.”
“It’s a bad habit, you’re right. Go on.”
She took another sip from her water, then dabbed at her lips with her finger tips. I sat there waiting while she pinched her bottom lip between her fingers. Eventually, she continued.
“Michael was…polite. And also he was different, an American in a Dutch prison. He liked to talk to the cooks and the guards, to people who lived outside of the building.”
She paused, half expecting me to interrupt with something flippant, but I controlled myself.
“He would ask me anything—what had I done the day before? Where was I going at the weekend? What was the weather forecast to do? What car did I own? Did I visit Amsterdam often? Of course, we were not supposed to
answer such questions. They told us it could be dangerous.”
“If a prisoner learned too much about you?”
“Or if they liked you. They might ask you to do things for them, bring them things.”
“Did Michael?”
“Never.”
“But he wrote you letters.”
“Not at first. When I worked there he would just ask me his questions. But then I lost my job.”
“So how did he get in touch? Had you told him your address?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It was me.”
“You?”
She shrugged. “After I left, I missed his questions. I missed telling him the things he asked. And I did not know if anyone else was answering him. It made me sad to think of it. So I went to see him again.”
“And he just opened up?”
“He felt the same way. He had…developed feelings for me.”
“Useful.”
“And this is when he told me about the diamonds.”
“And I bet you looked surprised. Only, you already knew by then, didn’t you? I mean, all you would have needed to do was ask someone at the prison what he was in for, or consult an old newspaper. Maybe you’d done that before he began talking to you. Like you said, an American inside a Dutch prison, it is kind of novel.”
She waited me out, neither confirming nor denying it. She didn’t have to. It made complete sense to me.
“He wouldn’t have told you where they were, he was too careful for that. Twelve years can teach you a good deal of patience.”
“He told me he had them.” She lowered her voice and leaned towards me across the counter of the bar. “He said there were many diamonds,” she whispered. “But they had not been finished.”
“You mean cut?”
“Cut, yes.”
“Which is why he wouldn’t have been able to sell them immediately. He needed a fence. One in Paris, I’m thinking.”
“Excuse me?”
