2007 - The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam

by Chris Ewan

  Burggrave scoffed and threw up his hands. “And this was enough for you?”

  “No, of course not. But that changed when I discovered that they thought I had the third monkey, the one that belonged to Michael. That was interesting. I mean, if they thought I had it, then it meant they didn’t.”

  “This does not mean they did not kill him,” Riemer said flatly. “They maybe killed him because he would not tell them where this monkey was.”

  “I thought of that too. But see, if the monkey was important enough for them to kidnap me to find it, I couldn’t understand why they would have beaten Michael so badly that he couldn’t tell them where it was.”

  Riemer nodded slowly, as if she was willing to go along with me for the time being.

  “And when I told them the truth, about Michael hiring me to steal the figurines from them, they didn’t believe me at all. It was as if something like that was unimaginable to them, as if they trusted Michael implicitly.”

  This time, I caught the wide man and the thin man nodding along with me.

  “Why would they feel that way about him, I got to asking myself? And pretty soon the answer was obvious. Actually, I was kind of embarrassed I hadn’t thought of it before. These men weren’t just friends with Michael, they were colleagues.”

  For a moment, I thought I might lose them both. They certainly became more agitated, shifting in their seats. Then Riemer said something that caused all of us to stop and turn.

  “We know this already,” she said. “It was in their files.”

  “So why didn’t you arrest them for Michael’s murder?”

  “This is also police business.”

  “You see!” Van Zandt said. “When they do not know the answer to something, this is what they say. When they make mistakes, this is what they say. It is police business. Pah.”

  “They also say it,” I told him, “out of force loyalty. This was Inspector Burggrave’s case, wasn’t it, Detective Inspector Riemer?”

  Riemer didn’t answer. She just stared hard at me, as if she could silence me through willpower alone.

  “No matter,” I told her. “I’m only just getting to the heart of my story anyway. We need to skip back in time again, you see. To the attempted robbery when Robert Wolkers was killed.” I turned back to Van Zandt. “I believe the main diamond storage facility was just about where we are now, is that right Sir?”

  Van Zandt dithered.

  “Should I repeat the question?”

  His eyes narrowed and his lips thinned. He seemed to be reassessing me from some new perspective. “It is company policy not to…”

  “Oh crap,” I said, interrupting him. “We’ve been through all that. You told me once before already. So let me ask you again—the main diamond storage area was around about here, correct?”

  Van Zandt held off on replying. Even my best no-nonsense stare couldn’t persuade him. Riemer’s, though, was of a different order.

  “Answer the question,” she commanded, planting one hand on her hip and sounding as though her patience was running thin.

  Van Zandt gaped at her but she wasn’t about to relent. He turned back to me with the look of a child who’d been scolded.

  “Yes,” he managed.

  “Good. Would you be kind enough to describe it for us?”

  Van Zandt sighed, and rolled his eyes, but there was something pantomime about it. Just as in his study, I got the distinct impression he was more than willing to talk once he was the centre of attention.

  “As head of security, I designed the system myself,” he began, using a churlish voice, as if this was the hundredth time I’d made him run through it all. “There was a large room made of steel, like a giant safe.”

  “A strong room, I believe we agreed.”

  “Yes, a strong room, you may call it. The walls were made of steel, many centimetres thick. The floor below was concrete. Around the steel was a cement skin. Beyond that was a steel cage.”

  “And how was this facility used?”

  Van Zandt tutted, as if I should have known he was coming to that part.

  “At the end of each day,” he went on, “all the diamonds in the factory were locked inside this room and the cage was locked around it. There were always guards on duty.”

  “Yes. It was a very comprehensive system, though in practice quite simple.”

  “Simple is good,” he told me. “Simple can be strong.”

  “Quite,” I said, casting a knowing gaze towards the wide man. “And presumably the lock on the strong room was a good one.”

  “As I told you before, there were many locks. They were of the highest quality.”

  “I’m sure. Could the bars of the cage be cut?”

  “We discussed this.”

  “That’s right. I believe we agreed bolt cutters would be no good, that it would take a blow torch to cut through the steel rods.”

  “Even that may not work.”

  “And, as you said, there were always guards on duty. Guards like Robert Wolkers.”

  Van Zandt nodded.

  “How many?”

  He hesitated, perhaps sensing a change in my tone. “At night, there were two.”

  “And on the night that Robert Wolkers was killed, how many guards were there then?”

  “Two, of course.”

  “You’re sure?”

  His cheeks puffed up at that. “There were two guards.”

  “Well that’s interesting. Because I happen to know for a fact there was only one.”

  Van Zandt stamped his cane into the ground, as if he was hoping to impose a full stop on the end of whatever it was I was planning to say next. “Two guards,” he said, simply.

  “Oh there were meant to be,” I told him. “There’s no doubt about that. And I’m sure the records you kept back then showed the same thing. And I know the newspaper reports of Robert Wolker’s murder did because Mr Rutherford and I checked them when we went to the city library just the other day. The second guard’s name was Louis Rijker. Mr Rijker, I’m afraid, passed away a little over two years ago. Coronary heart failure. Fortunately for us, though, Rutherford was able to make contact with his mother.”

  I nodded to Rutherford and he stood up from the crate he was sat on and walked away from the group of us towards the oblong of daylight filling the doorway on the eastern side of the building. Outside of that doorway was a yard and in that yard was a taxi cab, engine idling, with an anxious looking widow sat inside of it.

  While I waited for Rutherford to return, I scanned each of the faces surrounding me and then I checked my watch and finally contemplated my own feet. There was nothing more to say for a moment or two and the silence felt oddly oppressive. It seemed to fill the warehouse interior almost to choking point, as if a gas main had been left on, and part of me was worried that if Rutherford and Karine Rijker didn’t appear in the doorway soon someone might say something incendiary and blow everything apart.

  Then I heard a car door shut, the sound like a muffled gunshot in the distance, and shortly afterwards the two of them appeared. Karine Rijker’s flat shoes scuffed against the concrete floor like sandpaper and she seemed to take an age to reach us. One hand gripping onto Rutherford’s arm for balance, the other holding a bulging leather handbag, she threw her weight between her feet like a chef separating a large egg yolk between two broken shells. Her outfit was almost identical to the one I’d seen her wearing at her apartment. She had on a blue housecoat with a floral design beneath a discoloured, padded overcoat, and her swollen legs and ankles were sheathed in thick stockings that bunched up around her knees. The wig on her head was not a good one, looking matted and threadbare all at the same time, and though she’d gone to the trouble of applying make-up, it looked for all the world as if she’d learned her technique at clown school.

  “Mrs. Rijker,” I said, holding out my hand to assist the old woman once she’d neared our small circle of friends.

  She gripped my wrist tightly, han
dbag swinging from her forearm, then grasped for my elbow, and as soon as she was steady Stuart and I lowered her down onto a palette we’d positioned on top of two wooden crates for that very purpose. She sat there in quite a civilised manner, with her handbag on her knees. The only sign that she was fretting was the way her fingers gripped her bag, the leather straps wrapped tightly around her hands.

  I crouched and looked her right in the eyes, then smiled as reassuringly as I could and patted her knee. The old lady contorted her painted features into a graceless parody of my own expression, the wasted muscles beneath her skin doing their best to hoist her jowls into something other than a hangdog expression. Not wanting to prolong this sudden fit of gurning, I found my feet and turned back to the others once again.

  “For the next few minutes,” I said, “you’ll have to forgive me my awful Dutch and understand that Mrs. Rijker doesn’t speak English. We thought it best you heard her story in her own words and in light of that I’ll be quiet now and leave her to tell you what it is she came here to say.”

  And at that point, I nodded to the old dear and, after she’d hesitated for just a moment, Stuart said something to her in a gentle tone that prompted her to clear her phlegmy airways and begin. What she told them didn’t take a great deal of time, but cut out as I was from the nuances of what she said and the way in which she said it, her halting speech seemed to take longer than I’d anticipated. She was nervous and uncertain and every once in a while her voice would croak or catch and she’d look down at her fingers kneading away at her handbag. That’s when Stuart would place a hand on her shoulder and encourage her to go on, speaking to her as if she was a child in his care and all he wanted was for her to share what was troubling her before any of us could be in a position to help.

  What was troubling her was simple enough, though that wouldn’t have made it any less traumatic. She was explaining the very things she’d resisted saying for years, after all, facts she’d buried deep in her psyche. Her son, Louis Rijker, she would have told them, had been a security guard at the Van Zandt factory. He wasn’t a wildly successful individual but he valued his job and he liked that it enabled him to support his ageing mother as best he could. The two of them relied on his wage to keep a roof over their heads and food in thek cupboards and he was willing to do most everything he could to keep things that way. So when someone approached him one day and offered him the chance to make a little extra money on top of his weekly wage, he was tempted. All he had to do, they said, was disappear for an hour during one of the night shifts he’d be working. If he could keep his mouth shut about being absent, whatever the consequences, there was a good deal of money in it for him. If, though, he told anyone about the arrangement, the consequences would be severe. The threat was nothing specific but he got the distinct impression it was genuine.

  Faced with that choice, poor Louis agreed that on the night in question he’d make himself scarce. When he returned, of course, he found Robert Wolkers shot dead beside the Van Zandt strong room. In his police interview, he cobbled together a cover story about being off on a routine check of the warehouse when his colleague was shot. The lie was a gut reaction to the situation he’d found himself thrown into but it was a line he soon found himself compelled to stick with. The morning after the night of the killing someone broke into the bungalow he shared with his mother and pulled her from her bed and made it all too clear to the pair of them what kind of repercussions they could expect if he ever told the truth. So he never did. But it was his mother’s firm belief that the guilt and the fear he’d endured for the best part of a decade was what led to his increased blood pressure and his insomnia and his stress and, ultimately, to the all-out failure of his heart.

  As she concluded her tale, the old lady’s words began to fracture and peter out. Sobs took hold of her and she fished a tatty rag from the sleeve of her housecoat and dabbed at her eyes. It was at that point Riemer looked at me and said, “She is finished. You have heard what she has to say?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And for what it’s worth I happen to believe it.”

  “There is no reason to believe otherwise.”

  “No,” I said, “there’s not.”

  “But what difference does this make?” Kim said, finally looking up at me, her voice hoarse as she spoke for the first time. “What does it change?”

  “It’s another piece of the puzzle,” I told her, as reassuringly as I could. “Another clue to what happened that night.”

  “But we know what happened,” Van Zandt said.

  “Do we? I think we know very little. And that includes one very important factor—the nature of what exactly Michael Park got away with on the night Robert Wolkers was killed.”

  I met Van Zandt’s gaze and held it. I thought he might look away but he was a wilful old bastard and arrogant enough to think I might not pursue it. I’ve been known to be a touch arrogant myself sometimes, though, and I wasn’t about to relent.

  “The popular rumour was that your family lost a small fortune, Mr. Van Zandt. The theory was Michael got away with a pile of jewels after killing the only guard brave enough to challenge him. And the fact Van Zandt never publicly acknowledged this was as good for many people as a flat-out admission.”

  Van Zandt bristled. “We did not talk about company security. You know this. It was an important rule to us.”

  “Important because your security wasn’t good enough. The truth is you could have ten strong rooms made of reinforced steel, one inside of the other, but the whole system would still only be as secure as the men who guarded it. And when there was only one man, and that man was corrupt, well, the whole thing was a bit of a joke now, wasn’t it?”

  “You should not speak like this,” Van Zandt said, lowering his voice and casting a sideways glance towards Kim. “Not in front of her.”

  I made myself look at Kim then and what I saw on her face was enough for me to pause. Her lips had thinned and her eyes were moist and unfocused, as if she was looking beyond the scene in front of her right now, back to the scene that had unfolded twelve years beforehand when her father had been killed. The father she’d told herself she’d avenge. The father who just happened to be a crook.

  “Forgive me,” I told her, “but it’s true. It had to be. Good thieves always look for the simplest solution to steal something. And your father was that solution. He had you to look out for, your mother too. Suppose Michael offered him a share of what he stole? Suppose he told himself it would just be that one time, that once would be enough? Except he didn’t realise what that really meant. Because men like your father never do. In schemes like this one the take gets split between as few people as possible. And these two benefited from that.”

  I pointed to the wide man and the thin man. The thin man wheeled around and checked Riemer’s reaction, a hunted look on his face. The wide man just leaned back in his chair, crossed his sizeable arms in front of his chest and stretched his booted feet out onto the floor in front of him.

  “Some thieves work alone,” I went on. “Michael didn’t. He liked to have back-up. People to help him carry his score. People to help him store it and move it on. Some muscle if it was necessary. In Amsterdam, that’s what these two were.”

  The wide man gave me a crooked smile, as if I was amusing him greatly.

  “See, one thing always bothered me. Michael had been in prison for twelve years and he was only out for a matter of days before he contacted me. But he knew the job he wanted doing inside out. He knew where you lived and he knew what kind of security you had. He knew one of you kept your figurine in a safe on a boat. He knew the other one had been keeping his figurine under his pillow and that there were three good locks on your front door. He knew there was no alarm at either property. But how could he know all that? He was friends with the two of you, he told me as much, but he wouldn’t know it even if he’d visited you since his release and there’s no way you would have told him.”

  I ignored the wide man�
��s grin, determined to keep my composure.

  Partly it was for Kim and partly it was for Michael himself. None of this was a laughing matter. The man had been killed for Christ’s sake.

  “There was only one way he could know,” I said, “and when I found out he was a thief it made perfect sense to me. The fact is Michael knew because he’d been inside your homes before me. He’d already broken in and found the monkeys. Truth is, he’d done more than simply case the job—he’d carried out a dummy run.”

  I paused and looked confidently at the wide man. As I studied him, I had the sense that a little of his bravado was beginning to ebb away. I wanted the drip-drip effect to become a flood. I wanted him to see things the way I did. In some ways, Victoria had been right—there was a kind of bond between Michael and me. It wasn’t just that we shared the same profession—it was that we were a part of the same world, and it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that someday somebody might want to beat the life out of me for something I’d taken.

  “So then the question became,” I went on, the words sounding faintly robotic to me, “why didn’t he take the monkeys when he could? They were right there for him. He could have just reached out and grabbed them and been clean away before you knew anything about it. But he didn’t.” I paused again, staring at the wide man with more determination this time, wanting him to get how important this really was. “Then I remembered something else he told me. He said that you wouldn’t suspect him of being involved in stealing the figurines even if you found them missing the moment after I’d taken them. He said the reason was simple: you trusted him. And I asked myself, where does trust like that come from? The answer, of course, is it comes from working together. It comes from being a part of a unit. And as Inspector Riemer has confirmed now, the three of you were a gang. Who knows how much you stole together? My guess is a fair amount. But the real score came here, on the night Robert Wolkers was murdered.”

  I gestured at our surroundings, turned a complete circle and inhaled deeply, as if something of that time still lingered. I looked once at Karine Rijker and then I glanced up at the steel rafters in the ceiling and went on.