2007 - The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam

by Chris Ewan

  As a first step, I checked the side-panel of the bath, just in case we really were on exactly the same wavelength. It proved a tricky panel to remove. One of the screw-heads was mangled and the panel had been forced in at an awkward angle so I had a real job to get it out and, quite typically, I needn’t have bothered. All the panel concealed was the underside of the plastic tub and the metal pipe work and I wasn’t about to start tackling the plumbing.

  There was no towel rail or shower rail in the bathroom and even if there had been the monkey was probably too big to be fitted inside something like that. I checked the plastic toilet brush holder and found only a yellowy-brown sludge in the receptacle beneath. The light above my head was from a bare bulb and there was no medicine cabinet or laundry cupboard of any description.

  I looked again at the bloody scene around the bath, at the discoloured porcelain and the tiles, and just then a jolt ran through me. It was only a small thing, but the metal cover of the overflow pipe seemed a touch proud. I reached for my screwdriver again and very carefully used it to prise the metal cover away from the bath, keeping my wrists and arms clear of the dried blood and pulped body tissue surrounding me. There was no rubber sealant holding the cover in place and it popped out into the palm of my hand with no trouble at all. Something else came with it. Taped to the back of the cover was the top of a small, clear plastic bag. I tugged on the bag and the rest of it came up and away from the overflow pipe all at once. The bag was bone dry, though it smelt pretty foul. I shook it out and opened it up and then I removed what was inside. It wasn’t the missing monkey figurine—it was far more interesting than that.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  By the time I’d put everything back as I’d found it and slipped out of the bathroom window onto the flat roof once again, it was almost dawn and a faint, gauzy rain was beginning to fall. I collected my holdall from the nook where I’d hidden it and ditched my gloves in the waste bin, then rolled the bin back into position and went in search of a place where I could collect my thoughts.

  I found a cafe nearby, a few streets over towards the Singel canal, where the owner who was opening up took one look at my pallid, sleep-deprived face and ushered me inside for the first coffee of the day. I drank it sat beside the etched-glass side window, warming my hands around my mug, thinking about the events that had transported me to where I was now. On the table in front of me was the single piece of paper I’d found folded up in Michael’s overflow pipe. It was a photocopied document and the reproduction wasn’t perfect but it was good enough to tell me what it had been intended to. I sipped on the coffee and waited for the caffeine to trickle into my grey cells and get me thinking around the implications of what I’d found, listening, in the meantime, to the clatter of crockery being removed from the dishwasher as the owner continued to prepare for the day.

  A half-hour later, when he’d finished the donkey work and found time to drink a coffee himself, I asked the owner for some food and he nodded and disappeared into a back room while I went in search of the gents and tended some more to the bloody gash on the back of my skull. I emerged some minutes later, clutching a paper towel to my wound, to be presented with a plate of just about the best cold meat and cheese I had ever tasted. I chewed the food, along with my thoughts, for close to an hour and then I made my way to a pay-phone at the rear of the cafe and dialled the number on the business card Rutherford had given me. I was expecting to leave a message on his machine but to my surprise Rutherford picked up, sounding groggy.

  “Sleeping at your desk?” I asked, once we’d exchanged greetings.

  “Telephone’s on divert,” he explained, then yawned. “I wondered if you might be in touch.”

  “Considerate of you,” I told him. “Thing is, I need another favour.”

  “Not in the clink again are you, dear boy?”

  “Not just yet. But I am in a tight spot Rutherford and the truth is I was wondering if you might be able to put me up for a day or two. I could go to a hotel, only…”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he interrupted. “Truly. You’re familiar with the Oosterpark?”

  I told him I was.

  “Very good. I live on the western side. You have a pen?”

  “And a napkin.”

  “Good man,” he said, and then he told me the address and asked me if I thought I could find it.

  “I’m sure I can,” I told him. “Is it okay to come on over?”

  “Of course. I’ll fix us some tea.”

  I thanked him again and hung up, then paid the cafe owner, leaving a few extra euros on his tip tray before bidding him farewell and walking off in the direction I’d come from earlier that morning. The chill air was raw against the cut on my head and I was shivering. I pulled the thin man’s leather jacket tight around my body for warmth, slipped one hand in my trouser pocket and drew the hand that was carrying my holdall up inside the jacket sleeve.

  From St. Jacobsstraat, I crossed the tourist strip of the Damrak and walked past the Oude Kerk into the very heart of the Red Light District. The scene was drearily familiar. Here and there, hung-over revellers stumbled out of whore booths and twenty-four hour sex clubs, their clothes unkempt and their movements limp and aimless. Meantime, clusters of working girls, their arms linked together, walked away from the area in plastic overcoats and knee-high PVC boots, heading for Centraal Station and whichever homely suburb they hailed from. In their place, other girls were arriving to begin the less lucrative day shift, layers of heavy make-up giving their faces an expression of forced optimism.

  I lowered my head and avoided their eyes, looking instead at my feet on the grubby concrete, tuning out of the half-hearted rugby song a handful of my compatriots were slurring. Soon, I was near-ing the Nieuwmarkt, passing from the fringes of the Red Light District into an off-shoot of China Town. East Asian grocery stores and butchers and restaurants began to surround me in a splash of bright yellows and reds and a world of symbols and signs I couldn’t decipher. The rapid-fire yammer of Chinese conversation filled my ears and strange, meat-based scents caught in my nostrils.

  I strolled down Zeedijk street, and was just passing a newsagents when the owner of the store tottered out into the street carrying a postcard display unit in front of his face. Because of all the postcards, he couldn’t see where he was going and he bumped right into me. The display unit fell from his hands and crashed to the floor, scattering postcards and pocket-sized maps across the street. I stooped to pick the goods up, not sure if the man was cursing himself or me, and while I was reaching for a handful of the loose cards something in a first floor window above the newsagents caught my eye. I hesitated, and stared at the window, and by now I knew that the man was cursing me but I no longer cared. Adhered to the glass was a familiar motif, no more than a couple of feet in height, and above it were more Chinese symbols. I couldn’t read the symbols but the motif was as clear as day. Three monkeys—one covering his ears, the next covering his mouth and the final one covering his eyes.

  Wordlessly, I found my feet and pressed some of the cards into the man’s hands. Already, I was walking beyond him towards the glass and aluminium-framed door beside his shop. There were several buzzers positioned next to the door but I didn’t delay myself with them. Instead, I opened the door and walked into an unheated entrance hall where my breath instantly condensed in the still air before me.

  Ahead was a darkened storage area and a lighted staircase lined with a threadbare red carpet. I climbed the stairs, walking in a vaguely dazed fashion like a man who has been hypnotized, and at the top of the stairs I faced up to a second door with a bubble glass insert that again contained the monkey insignia, though this time the insignia was smaller. I tried the handle. It was unlocked. I opened the door and walked inside.

  The room I found myself in was cramped and cheaply furnished. It was dominated by a waist-high plywood counter that faced three plastic chairs only a few feet away. The walls were bare and painted in an off-white colour. The only it
ems on top of the counter were a cordless telephone and a small brass service bell. I hovered for a few moments and when nobody appeared I stepped up and rang the bell.

  Let me tell you, I wish there were more bells just like it because the woman who appeared to answer the chime was just about the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen. Perhaps five feet tall, she was dainty as air and she wore a lustrous, peacock-blue kimono that complimented the dark, glossy hair tied atop her head. Her face was painted in an almost geisha style and she bowed her head in the Oriental fashion as she approached.

  I bowed my head too but when I looked up the charmed smile I’d adopted slipped from my face in an instant. Flanking her were two huge men, with shoulders like boulders and no necks to speak of. They wore suit jackets and dark shirts but they would have looked more at home in a sumo ring. Waxed hair scraped back on their heads, they walked in an odd kind of shuffle, throwing their considerable weight from one foot to the next, as if their ability to move depended entirely on a complex form of perpetual motion, like one of those executive toys with the rows of silver ball bearings knocking endlessly together.

  The Asian goddess waited at the counter, smiling sweetly, until the two giants were hovering behind her shoulders in a queer visual echo of the three monkeys. I focused on her dewy eyes and she nodded in discrete encouragement.

  “Hi,” I began, rather brilliantly. “Do you sell monkeys here?”

  The woman shook her head minutely, as if it genuinely troubled her that she didn’t quite understand.

  “Monkeys, like those ones?” I asked, pointing over my shoulder towards the motif etched into the bubble glass on the door.

  She shook her head again and then lowered her eyes, focussing on a point of unfathomable interest on the bare wooden counter. Very slowly, one of the goons behind her rolled his neck around his massive shoulders and I heard the crunch and crackle of his load-bearing vertebrae as clearly as if I was eating cereal. His twin inhaled deeply through his nose, looking as if he might vacuum every last molecule of oxygen from the room just for the thrill of seeing me pass out.

  I got the impression they weren’t in the habit of having their time wasted, so I fumbled in the pocket of the thin man’s leather jacket until I found the two monkey figurines and then I placed the figurines onto the counter in front of me. They lay there haphazardly, the one covering his ears and the other covering his mouth, somehow appearing to cower under the quiet gaze of the beautiful girl. To my great relief, the girl raised her head and smiled at me easily and the two men either side of her allowed their massive shoulders to relax just a fraction.

  “Do you recognise these?” I asked. “Were they made here?”

  The girl just blinked at me, as if waiting for me to rid my system of such trivial questions.

  “I don’t have the third one. Are you able to make it? Or would you like to buy these?” I asked, gently sliding them across the counter towards her. “How much would you pay?”

  This time, the girl nodded, as if she understood my wishes completely. Then she reached below the counter for what I imagined would be some money or a ledger. I was wrong. Her hand emerged holding a small metal hammer. The hammer was rendered in some dull, lead-like material, but unlike a normal hammer, both ends of the striking head were shaped into a point so that, side-on, it looked like a flattened hexagon.

  She reached below the counter a second time and fetched a shammy cloth and spread it flat across the surface of the counter. Then she picked up my two monkey figurines and positioned them carefully on the shammy and, before I could stop her, raised the little hammer in the air and bought it down hard onto each figurine with a sharp, deadly tap that instantly reduced the monkeys to a fine and irretrievable rubble of plaster and dust.

  I gasped and reached out, mouth agape, but as my eyes scanned the destruction properly for the first time my sense of horror was suddenly replaced by the first glimmerings of understanding. There, shining amid the mess of plaster debris, was a small metal object. I stepped closer and brushed the plaster chunks aside with my fingers and picked it up. The object was a key, no bigger than the kind that would fit a suitcase, and there was a second one just like it amid the remnants of the other figurine. Both keys had an identical Chinese symbol etched into them. I picked the keys up in my hand and studied them in my palm. So it was true—the monkeys were worthless—it was what had been inside of them that had been worth killing for.

  As I held the keys aloft and marvelled at how clean and shiny they were in spite of the plaster they had been housed in, the girl raised a hatch in the plywood counter and motioned for me to walk through and join her. I did as she suggested and then she bowed once more before stepping aside and inviting one of the tailored sumos to relieve me of my bag and search it while his partner patted me down. The one who was patting me down didn’t find anything of interest but his friend who was searching the bag pulled the handgun out and showed it to him. They studied me carefully, as if from a new perspective, and I shrugged, as casually as I could, and then watched as they deftly emptied the cartridge of bullets, put the gun back inside my holdall and kicked the holdall to one side. When they were done, the girl motioned for me to follow her towards a plain white door at the back of the room. I did just that and the two heavies fell into line behind us so that we walked towards the door in group formation, looking, I imagined, a lot like a bizarre delegation from a far flung planet in a television Sci-Fi series.

  On the other side of the white door was a small vestibule and beyond it was a substantial metal door with a circular wheel fixed to it. The metal door was wider and taller than a normal door and looked to be made of a highly polished steel. It was the kind of door you might expect to find in Fort Knox or at the entrance to a topflight nuclear bunker. To the side of the door was a flat, electronic screen and I watched, soundlessly, as the girl pressed her palm against the screen and the screen flashed a blinding light against her delicate palm, almost like a photocopier. There followed a solid clunk and then the door dropped on its hinges just a shade. The girl nodded to the sumo on my right and he stepped forwards and turned the wheel on the front of the door, then heaved the thing wide open.

  What I saw beyond the door was enough to take my breath away. Here, on the first floor of an ordinary looking building in Amsterdam, was the kind of security facility that a first rate bank would be proud of. Row upon row of safety deposit boxes stretched for the entire length of the room, forming a corridor that was illuminated by the flickering light from a series of suspended fluorescent tubes. The safety deposit boxes were made of a similar metal to the door and they gleamed in the light as if they had never been touched. There were perhaps three hundred in all, stacked side by side, and there was nothing else beside the boxes and the lights in the room, not even a window. I turned to look at the girl and she gently took the keys from my hand and led me into the heart of the metallic corridor ahead of us.

  A little over halfway down the corridor the girl paused and consulted the Chinese symbol on the front of both keys, then matched it to one of the safety deposit boxes beside her hip. She gestured to the box and I saw that it had three locks on the front of it. The girl inserted the keys she was holding into two of the locks and then waited for me to produce the third key. I couldn’t, of course, because the third key was inside the final monkey, wherever that might be.

  “I don’t have it,” I said, and showed her my palms and shrugged my shoulders by way of explanation.

  She pointed to the third lock and said something in Chinese, then acted out inserting the final key and turning all three locks and opening the box.

  “I know,” I told her. “But I don’t have the third key.-Do you have a copy?” I asked, pointing at the third lock and then the girl with a hopeful look on my face.

  The girl glanced anxiously over my shoulder towards one of the sumos and he motioned towards the door we had come in from. She nodded minutely, then began to remove the two keys she’d inserted.
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br />   “A copy?” I asked. “Don’t you have a copy?”

  But it was no good. The girl placed both keys in my hand, rather dismissively I thought, and then bowed ever so slightly before walking away in the direction of the door. I didn’t follow her immediately and the delay was enough for the sumo nearest to me to place his sizeable palm on my shoulder and usher me after her with a no-nonsense shove. When we got back to the reception area, the girl peeled off into a side annex where I glimpsed a low table and a leather couch and a television set, while the two sumos accompanied me to the bubble-glass door, handed me my holdall and watched me climb down the stairs until I was out on the street.

  Normally, I might have consoled myself by planning to break back in at some point in the future but I didn’t rate my chances. I had no idea how to bypass a fingerprint scanner like the one that guarded the room and I didn’t possess the kind of high-tech gear that might enable me to get through the steel door without it. And that was not to mention that safety deposit boxes are notoriously difficult to open or that the two sumos could tear me apart like a sheet of origami paper if I happened to get caught. And I thought there was a reasonable likelihood of that happening because I was pretty sure they manned the place on a twenty-four hour basis. That kind of accessibility would be a major draw to the type of clientele I guessed they catered for but, more to the point, Michael had told me he’d planned to leave Amsterdam right after I’d given him the two monkeys. The building I was stood outside was just a five-minute stroll from Centraal Station so it didn’t take a genius to work out where he was headed before leaving the city. It didn’t take a genius to work out what was inside the deposit box, either, but knowing where the diamonds were didn’t mean a thing without the third key. I groaned and shook my head. I was tired and beaten up and in need of a rest, and I wasn’t keen to hang around outside a building that I assumed the thin man and the wide man knew all about. With each passing moment, Rutherford’s apartment was becoming an ever more appealing place to be.