2007 - The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam

by Chris Ewan

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Rutherford’s apartment was on the third floor of a grand old mansion building with an imposing stone facade. The floor-to-ceiling windows of the sitting room looked out over the Oosterpark and the distant outskirts of the city and I imagined Rutherford had spent many an hour absorbing the expansive view. The decor was English traditionalist, heavy on the floral patterns and antique furniture and watercolours. Some of the paintings were originals and had probably cost him a fair sum. His family money must have been pretty substantial, I supposed, because the whole shebang would have dwarfed his government salary.

  “Dear boy,” he said, when I walked into the sitting room for the first time and he caught sight of my head wound. “What on earth happened?”

  “I was jumped,” I told him. “By two of the American’s associates.”

  “The killers?”

  “I don’t think so. But they certainly know how to swing a baseball bat.”

  “Sit down,” he said, patting a nearby chair. “I’ll fetch something.”

  He returned a few moments later with a bottle of iodine and some cotton pads and began to clean my wound, making me wince each time he applied the iodine to a sore spot or caught an area that had clotted with my hair. I could smell the musty odour of his underarms as he reached for my head, pressing his large stomach up against me. He was wearing his suit trousers and a work shirt with the sleeves rolled up and every now and then he would pass me a bloodied pad to hold onto. By the time he was finished, I had quite a collection of the discoloured rags and Rutherford fetched a waste bin for me to drop them into.

  “You look drained,” he told me.

  “I feel it. I haven’t slept at all and I’ve had a busy night. I’m not sure I needed to impose on you though, Rutherford. I could have checked into a hotel under a false name, I suppose.”

  “And who would have cleaned your wound? The maid? I think you may need stitches, incidentally.”

  “Terrific.”

  “You have health insurance?”

  I nodded, then yawned.

  “Well, I’ve made up the bed in the spare room,” he went on. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, naturally, though I’m afraid I have to leave for the office shortly. Unless,” he said, raising a finger to his lips, “I call in and delay for a while. I suppose I could. Are you concussed at all?”

  “I imagine so. In fact, it would explain a hell of a lot. But you should go. The main thing I need right now is sleep.”

  “Very well, let me show you the bed. I’ll fetch you some night clothes too.”

  I didn’t use the night clothes, as it happened. They were more than a couple of sizes too big for me anyway and as soon as I saw the neatly made bed all I wanted to do was fall down onto it and shut my bleary eyes. And once Rutherford had left me to my own devices, I removed my shoes but left my clothes on and did just that, collapsing on top of the covers and plummeting into a deep and fitful sleep.

  When I woke, many hours later, my head was stuck to the pillow. I must have twisted and turned a fair bit in my sleep and that seemed to have aggravated my wound and started it bleeding some more. The blood had clotted, binding my hair to the pillow fabric and making the procedure of lifting my head away a tricky one. Once I’d negotiated it and I was upright again, I looked down at the crusted stain on the pillowcase and decided it was a right off. I turned the pillow over and hid it for the time being.

  I hadn’t had time to draw the thick velveteen drapes in my room before sleep took hold of me and I was relieved to see it was still light outside when I glanced at the window. Knuckling my gummy eyes, I checked the bedside clock and saw that it was coming up to three o’clock in the afternoon. I hadn’t heard any noises in the rest of the apartment and so I assumed that Rutherford was still at work. Standing feebly from the bed, I gently tested the area around my head wound with my fingertips and decided that I would risk a shower.

  The bathroom was ostentatious by Dutch standards, with the shower positioned over the centre of a claw-foot bath. I shed my clothes and stepped into the bath and then I positioned the shower-head so that the hot water hit me on the neck and shoulders rather than the back of my head. The steamy water sluiced over the darkening bruise on my ribs and I carefully soaped my chest and let the suds rinse away. I cupped the water to my face and eased some of the soreness from my eyes and then I reached down as best I could to clean the rest of me. When I was done, I dried myself in one of Rutherford’s soft, downy bath towels and then I tiptoed back to my bedroom to find a clean change of clothes in my holdall. The gun was still there when I opened the holdall, resting amid the clothes I’d managed to grab, but I didn’t pick it up or investigate it at all. It had done as much of a job as I’d needed it to in order to get me out of the wide man’s apartment and for that and the fact I hadn’t needed to fire it I would be forever grateful. But it didn’t change my mind about owning a gun and I wondered how long I would have to wait before I could ditch it safely.

  Beside the gun was my passport, and since I wasn’t a spy, it happened to be my real passport, with my real name and my real date of birth in the back of it. I didn’t pick it up either—it was just reassuring to know it was there.

  I dressed and made my bed, then stood still for a moment, making a pretence of deciding what to do next before quickly giving in to the urge to look around Rutherford’s apartment. It was a new space, after all, and it would have been remiss of me not to familiarise myself with the layout—imagine the fire risks!

  I left the bedroom and faced up to the closed door positioned next to the sitting room I’d been in earlier. Closed doors are never quite satisfying enough for me so I tried the handle and found myself inside a dining room with an oval-shaped, teak dining table and eight elaborately carved dining chairs. The windows shared the same park view as the sitting room, and the walls displayed another pair of quality watercolours that in my non-law abiding moments I might well have been tempted to snatch.

  Interesting.

  I moved on through a door on the far wall of the room and found myself in a functional galley-style kitchen that I paused in just long enough to find a packet of crisps to eat. The kitchen led back to the main hallway and the bathroom I’d showered in. Beside the bathroom was Rutherford’s bedroom and I stuck my head inside for a quick peek. Almost inevitably, it was dominated by a four-poster bed, though no offence to Rutherford, you could tell he was a bachelor. The bed-set he’d chosen was of a dark-grey colour that did nothing for the room, while a spare pin-stripe suit and several clean work shirts were hanging from the wardrobe doors. I left the bedroom and entered the final room in the apartment, which was sandwiched between Rutherford’s bedroom and my own. It was only a small room but it was the space I warmed to most of all—his study.

  The walls of Rutherford’s study were lined with row-upon-row of books, there was a comfy fabric arm chair with an ethnic-style throw in one corner, a matching rug on the floor and a large antique writing desk made of a deeply burnished oak across the way. The desk was covered in loose papers and correspondence and there was also a green-tinted reading lamp and a touch-tone telephone. I settled myself in the leather swivel chair that faced the desk and reached for the phone. While it rang, I idly sorted through the papers and knick-knacks on top of Rutherford’s desk, not really paying any attention to what I was looking at.

  “You’re a genius,” I said, when Victoria finally answered.

  “Mr. President?”

  “Close.” I smiled, opening a small personal banking book and thumbing the pages. “How are you?”

  “Just dandy. You?”

  “Like a burglar with a sore head.”

  “I won’t ask. But tell me, why am I a genius?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Well it could be anything, I suppose,” she said, airily.

  “Actually, it was something you said the last time we spoke.”

  “About you catching something from the blond
e?”

  “No,” I told her, sounding more stern than I’d intended. “I’m going to rise above that one. See, I’m rising as we speak. I’m helium. I’m a hot air balloon. I’m a fresh loaf of bread.”

  “You’re a writer running low on similes. Come on, what was it I said Charlie?”

  I closed the banking book and began flicking through a loose-leaf pad of paper.

  “You said, and I might be paraphrasing a bit here, but it was something like the monkeys were the key to everything.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes. And do you know why that was so clever?”

  “Surprise me.”

  “Because the monkeys contained keys. And that’s what all the fuss has been about.”

  “Really? Just keys?”

  I turned the pad over, then switched the reading lamp on and fanned a few pages of the Dutch-English dictionary that was open on Rutherford’s desk. I lifted the dictionary by the spine and shook it in case anything interesting fell out but nothing did.

  “Just keys to a safety deposit box,” I told Victoria. “With the stolen diamonds inside of it.”

  “Aha.”

  “Aha indeed. There’s just one problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “The box needs three keys to open it.”

  “Oh. And you’re still missing a monkey.”

  “Exactly. Although, now I think about it, I suppose being kidnapped last night was something of a problem too.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Kidnapped. Beaten with a baseball bat. You know how it goes.”

  “No Charlie, I don’t. I think you’d better fill me in.”

  And so I did. And while I brought Victoria up to speed, I turned my attention from the things on the top of Rutherford’s desk to the contents of his desk drawers. There were seven drawers in all, three on either side of the desk, and one central drawer situated just above my knees. The central drawer was the only one that was locked and, as ever, it tweaked my curiosity. So as I talked, I wedged the telephone receiver between my neck and my ear, removed a paper clip from one of Rutherford’s documents, unbent it, and began to pick at the lock.

  “Charlie?” Victoria asked, a few moments later. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re breathing rather heavily.”

  “Am I? Sorry. I’m just trying to open something while we talk.”

  “As long as that’s all it is.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked, pausing.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “But the wide man and the thin man—you really believe they don’t have the third key?”

  “Or even the third monkey,” I said, resuming my task. “If they did, they wouldn’t have stayed in the apartment with me. They’d have gone and got the diamonds themselves.”

  “Unless they were bluffing.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Why is anyone doing anything anymore? I don’t know, maybe they wanted to make you think they didn’t kill the American.”

  “But they didn’t kill him. And why would they care what I think? To them, I’m just a burglar who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m not a threat. I’m an inconvenience.”

  “Only now you have their monkeys again.”

  “Actually, no. The monkeys are long gone. They’re powder. Now all I have are their keys and a long-shot at a locker full of diamonds.”

  “Poor you.”

  “I will be if they catch up with me. Damn.”

  “What?”

  “This bloody thing I’m trying to open. I just broke a paperclip.”

  “A paperclip? Why are you using a…Oh, Charlie, do I want to know about this?”

  “It’s just a desk drawer. Probably harmless.”

  “Is it your desk drawer?”

  “Don’t ask dumb questions, Victoria. You’re a genius, remember?”

  “A genius. Yes, of course. A genius who has no idea whodunnit.”

  “You’re not the only one.”

  “But it doesn’t bother you, does it? You’re only interested in the diamonds, right?”

  “Right,” I said, distractedly.

  “Charlie, what is it?”

  “The drawer,” I said, “is open.”

  “And?”

  “And you’ll never guess what I just found.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  No, it wasn’t the third monkey. But it wasn’t so far off either. Perched on the top of a small collection of personal items was a Dutch passport, red in colour. I picked it out of the drawer and flicked to the back cover and what I saw there turned everything upside down. Why? Because it was the exact same document I’d found a photocopy of in the overflow pipe of Michael’s bath. But what was it doing in Rutherford’s apartment?

  “I’ll call you back,” I told Victoria, then hung up the phone and stared at the photograph at the back of the passport for a long time, not really thinking of anything in particular, at least not on a conscious level. The photograph would have been around five years old, I guessed, but the likeness was still there. The hairstyle had changed and the glasses had been replaced with contact lenses, but there was no mistaking who it was. I read the name and address details for perhaps the twentieth time and then I put the passport down and picked up the telephone receiver.

  The call I placed took no longer than a couple of minutes to complete and it told me what I’d suspected it would. Once it was over with, I had only to wait. It was gone four thirty already and I was expecting him to return some time after five o’clock. I occupied myself in the meantime by pacing his sitting room, occasionally glancing out of the picture windows at the cyclists and joggers circling the Oosterpark, at other times working out exactly what it was I was going to say. Of course, the moment I heard his key turn in the lock and his footsteps out in the hallway, all of it escaped me and I had to make do with whatever popped into my head.

  “Wonderful, you’re up,” he said, meanwhile setting his plush overcoat down on the back of a Chesterfield and beaming at me. “Feeling better?”

  “My head’s begun to clear,” I told him.

  “Splendid news. And your appetite?”

  “It can wait a while. I thought we might have a chat.”

  “Of course. Everything alright, dear boy?”

  “You tell me, dear boy,” I said, and with that I pulled the passport from my pocket and threw it at him. Rutherford fumbled it, then bent down to retrieve the document from the floor. He opened it up, then looked wide-eyed at me and shook his head as if he didn’t understand what was happening.

  “You can drop the act,” I told him. “I called the British Embassy. They don’t have a Henry Rutherford working for them.”

  He almost tried something else at that point. I could see him turning ideas over in his mind, probing new possibilities that might just work. But then he met my eyes and he seemed to see something there that told him whatever it was just wouldn’t wash.

  “Bollocks,” he said, shoulders plummeting. “I arseing well knew I shouldn’t have left you on your own. Didn’t expect you to find this, mind.”

  “Dumb luck, I guess.”

  “No use complaining, I don’t suppose?”

  I looked hard at him.

  “Yeah, I should probably just be grateful you didn’t rob me blind. Plenty here that’s worth a bob or two.”

  “Any of it yours?”

  “In a round-a-bout way. You know how it is,” he said, gesturing at me with the passport in a helpless way, as if everything that had happened was beyond his control.

  “Tell me.”

  “What’s to tell? We’re the same, you and I.”

  I frowned. “You’re a burglar too?”

  “Nah,” he said, casting his hand around his apartment in a vaguely fey manner. “Confidence man. But neither one of us exactly plays by the rules now, do we?”

  Shaking my head, I dropped down into the wingback chair across from him a
nd gestured at the passport.

  “What are you doing with that?”

  “Mikey asked me to get it for him,” he said, eyes blank.

  “The American?”

  “The one and same.”

  “So you knew him?”

  He nodded. “We were inside together.”

  “In the Netherlands?”

  “Not so far from the Hague, as it happens. I was doing some bird for a scam that turned sour. Dutch lady I went into partnership with got more suspicious than I bargained for when she checked into the company I’d set up.”

  “I don’t think I need to know.”

  “You don’t. Want a drink? I could do with a beer.”

  I shook my head and he left me for a moment, returning from the kitchen shortly afterwards with a lager can in his hand. He popped the lid on the can, loosened his tie and his shirt collar and began to drink greedily, his swollen throat working overtime.

  “Name’s riot Rutherford, by the way,” he offered, belching.

  “I guessed as much.”

  “It’s Stuart. Rutherford’s just a persona I use. You get the right name, the right way of talking, the right clothes and the right apartment and, well,” he said, drawing my attention to the room around him, “you can do okay by it.”

  “So long as you stay out of prison.”

  “Occupational hazard. You done much time?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t plan on it either.”

  “Nobody does, son. Mikey sure as hell didn’t.”

  Stuart knocked back some more beer, then collapsed onto the Chesterfield, his stomach ballooning up and quivering in front of him like a moulded jelly on a plate.