Shooting Sean

by Colin Bateman

  My head was throbbing. I had the ultimate painkiller in my hand luggage but I tried not to think about it as I walked through passport control and then cleared customs without a second glance.

  I got a taxi to the Ambassade. It wasn't a long drive. I sat with my eyes closed. I'd never been to Amsterdam before, but I wasn't there for the view. Besides, I'd seen Van Der Valk. All you really needed to know you could learn from TV. I found cities boring anyway. All cities. The reality of them was invariably disappointing, boring and hard on the legs.

  Amsterdam: canals, tulips, drugs and red lights. There you go. Just saved you five hundred pounds. Throw in some Dutch masters and windmills if you want to be exceptionally bored.

  Perhaps I am unduly harsh.

  But probably not.

  I booked into my hotel. It was charming. Made up of ten historic canal buildings knocked into one. The architectural school of higgledy-piggledy. Old and quaint with stairs leading everywhere. A nightmare to negotiate. I didn't need charm, I needed comfort and efficiency and a guidebook that told me exactly where reclusive film stars were likely to hang out.

  I needed to shed blood to save blood.

  Relax.

  I didn't even need a hotel. I should be out pounding the streets looking for him. I should not rest or eat until my mission was accomplished. There was a room service menu, it was early evening, it was time to eat, I'd had nothing on the plane, I felt ill, I needed sustenance and energy, but I couldn't bring myself to order. My wife and son. No food for them. Sucking water from a hamster bottle. Jesus!

  Find Sean.

  Find Sean!

  I didn't even know if he was in Amsterdam. He'd flown into the city, but he could just as easily have flown straight out again. My decision to stay was one fifth intuition, and four fifths desperation. He had to be here. Any other possibility rendered my mission impossible. I was no Tom Cruise. I could not possibly search all of Europe. He must be here. And if he was, I would find him. If he was not, my family was dead. Of that I was convinced.

  Amsterdam. He's here. Definitely.

  O'Ryan was right. I was a journalist. There were things I could do. Using what I already knew about Sean O'Toole I could track him down.

  It was a fair bet that he'd chosen Amsterdam so that he could complete his drugs deal. If that was true, then he was in a world I knew nothing about, and to blunder into it would surely be suicidal. But unless his ambitions had radically altered in the past few days, he would also be determined to complete the post production on his film. Cannes was only two weeks away. If he didn't make Cannes with it, then it was odds on he'd have a financial disaster on his hands. If he was in Amsterdam then he would need access to an editing suite and a recording studio, he would need engineers and sound effects people and he might have to fly in actors to dub in lines and musicians to provide the score. Outside of porn, the Dutch film industry wasn't big; if he was here, the word would be out.

  It would be easy.

  I would find him.

  I would save my family.

  I checked the telephone directory in my room. I settled on twenty-six possible companies. I tried the first six, but either they weren't answering or I got through to a machine. It was getting late. People would still be working, but the receptionists would be away home. There was no point continuing. I would achieve nothing in the hours of darkness.

  Eat.

  No.

  I will not eat until I find my family.

  You'll starve to death and they'll survive.

  Eat, stay strong.

  I put on my coat and went out. I didn't have a map, didn't need one, I didn't know where I was going. I just started walking, I noted the street signs and followed my nose. I crossed over the Herengracht and Singel canals and padded along Paleis straat until I came to a huge cobbled square in what I took to be the city centre. Dam Square, the sign said. There was a character in a kilt playing the bagpipes. There was an empty hat before him. He was surrounded by pigeons. I turned left. A hundred yards along I found an Irish pub. The world was getting predictable. Everywhere the language was English, only the accent was different. Wax works, McDonald's, Guinness and begging Scots. The bar was mock old and quite dark. It was packed with Irish tourists, ex-pats and Germans. I didn't talk to anybody. I drank a Harp and left. There were no particular signs for the red light district, I just followed everyone else.

  I was depressed, and it was depressing. There were hundreds of beautiful scantily clad women flaunting themselves in red-lit doorways and a lot of men walking past, half averting their eyes, pretending they were off to the shops but had taken a wrong turning. And that was the problem. It reminded me of shopping. That erotic. Patricia was a mistress of shopping. I detested it. She could spend hours going from clothes shop to clothes shop, trailing me with her, asking my opinion and then shooting it down in flames, but if I spent more than five minutes in a bookshop she would storm off over my selfishness. I looked at the windows and wanted to ask how much for a hug, but I was too embarrassed.

  A big black girl in a small white bikini leant out of a window and shouted, 'Mister – come and talk.'

  I walked across. She dipped down as I approached and gave me a view of the biggest mountains in Holland. I thanked her for the view but said my climbing days were over. I said I was a stranger in town and asked her if she had any idea where I might sell half a pound of pure heroin. She screamed something in Dutch and slammed her window.

  I repeated the question in a coffee bar a few doors up. One of those coffee bars with the ganja sign outside, the Jamaican colours and the international aroma. They looked at me like I was a fucking loony or an apprentice cop, and I was made equally welcome.

  I wasn't serious. I was just looking for a reaction.

  Outside I leant on a railing and stared into the neon-lit canal and thought about how desperate it was to be alone and friendless in a foreign country and how for thirty quid I could purchase the pretence of both. I had the money but not the inclination.

  There was no company and no friends like those starving in a bunker.

  I spat.

  27

  From day one I had a Moroccan taxi driver called Maurice. He was small and weedy but he had close-set dangerous eyes which grew steadily narrower as the day wore on. By the time we hit lunch time the meter had all but run out of digits. He pulled over and asked me to show him the money; he wasn't going to drive me about all day if I was going to do a runner at the end of it, although of course he said it in a mixture of broken English and Dutch. For all I knew it was broken Dutch as well. He had sharp predatory teeth which looked like they'd bitten off an ear or two in their time. I was pissed off irritable. I gave him a mouthful of abuse then put my hands over my ears for protection as he fired a similar stream of venom back at me. But it seemed to do us both good to let off steam; he finally rolled his eyes, then turned the meter back to zero and started again. He spent the rest of the day muttering under his breath. Finally he took me back to the hotel and shouted some ridiculous figure at me, and I halved it and he swore at me and upped it and we bartered along like that for five minutes until eventually we came to an agreement that made us both deliriously happy, although neither of us let on. I scowled, he scowled. I didn't give him a tip. He roared off. Next morning he was waiting for me, and the next. The pattern was exactly the same: distant but efficient until lunch time, muttering and suspicious until pay time, and no tip.

  On the morning of the fourth day I hung about hotel reception waiting for him for half an hour. I wasn't eating breakfast, I was missing lunch and barely picking my way through a room service dinner. I'd lost ten pounds in three days. I stepped outside and flagged down another taxi. I was just climbing in when Maurice roared up and blasted his horn. I looked at my new driver. He smiled pleasantly, and I looked at Maurice growling over his wheel and sharpening his teeth on a cigarette. I apologised to the other driver. I didn't say anything to Maurice as I climbed into the back. I passed him
a sheet of paper with a list of addresses on it and he perused it briefly. Then he looked round at me and said: 'We did these already.'

  'I know. Now we do them again.'

  He muttered something and pulled out.

  The pattern was: I walk into a film company, give them some shit about making a documentary on Amsterdam and wanting to check out their facilities. I'd get a free tour of their offices and the chance to see if Sean was around. They were all keen for my business, but there was no sign of Sean.

  By the fourth morning I'd exhausted the possibilities. There was no alternative but to start over again. I'd called Mouse to see if there was any news. He had people looking, but there was nothing. He urged me to go to the police. But the Colonel had warned me that any hint of police involvement and he would shoot my wife and son. I couldn't take the chance. He told me Irish police were playing down the death of Dr Fruitke. Although there were a variety of illegal substances in his body, his death appeared to have been an accident. There had been some lurid headlines in the papers – Mouse had written a couple of them – but the police were satisfied Sean had been staying with his wife at her apartment in Dublin at the time of death and would only seek to talk to him when he was next in the country.

  I called Sam and asked him to advance me some more money. He asked how much and didn't have a heart attack when I told him. He said it would be done within the hour. I said, 'You're being unusually helpful,' and he said, 'I talked to Mouse.'

  'I didn't think you even knew Mouse.'

  'You'd be surprised who I know. Is there anything else I can do?'

  'You can find me Sean O'Toole.'

  'I have my eyes peeled and all of my connections looking for him.'

  'Thanks.'

  The eighth stop on the fourth day was at a company called Paralog Films. It was a bright, modernised three-storey building overlooking Prinsengracht. I walked in and told them I was Neil Jordan and I was sick to death of working with the big film studios. I wanted to make an indie film set in the red light district with Leonardo DiCaprio and what could they do for me. It was a vaguely hippie kind of place, like most of Amsterdam, but I could see the dollar signs light up in their eyes as I talked. 'Loved Interview, man!' 'Butcher Boy! Fucking A, man!' I smiled and took another man's plaudits and they gave me the tour. I dropped a bit of gossip. I said Leonardo was a pain to work with and I was thinking about axing him in favour of Sean O'Toole. I'd heard he was in town.

  They hadn't.

  I stalked back out to the cab and slumped into the back seat. We didn't move off. Maurice was looking at me in the mirror. I said, 'What?'

  'Mister,' he said, 'each day you get smaller.'

  'What?'

  'Whatever you got on dem shoulders, you just get smaller.'

  'Yeah, well,' I said.

  'I put word on radio, anyone seen dis Sean-o-toole, but nobody.'

  This was a surprise. We hadn't exchanged more than half a dozen words that weren't fuck you. 'Maurice,' I said, 'do you want a cup of coffee?'

  He looked at me for a moment, then gave a slight nod. There was a café just opposite the film company and there were seats outside it, looking over the canal. Maurice drove over the bridge and parked next to the tables. I said, 'Leave the meter running, somebody else is paying for it.'

  He shook his head and switched it off. We sat at a table. I bought him a cup of coffee and got myself a Coke Lite. Tourist barges were cruising past. Some kids waved and I waved back. I said, 'Maurice, do you have any children?'

  He smiled and held up his hands. He spread the fingers. 'You have ten?'

  He shook his head. 'Eight.' Then added helpfully, 'Two thumbs.'

  'Must be expensive to feed.'

  'I work hard. You have one son?'

  I nodded.

  'He is kidnapped?'

  'Yes, kidnapped.'

  'And you must find this Sean O'Toole, he knows where your son is?'

  'Something like that.'

  'To have a son is a very wonderful thing.'

  I nodded.

  'And to lose a son also, is a very terrible thing.'

  I nodded. 'You've lost a son?'

  'I have lost three sons. Morocco is not an easy place.'

  'I'm sorry,' I said.

  He shrugged. We sat silently for several moments. I looked into the canal. He sipped his coffee and then said, 'Mister . . . would you like a camel?'

  I cleared my throat. 'Ahm, no. Thank you very much for the kind offer. But I would have nowhere to keep it.'

  His brow furrowed slightly. He leant forward and raised his eyebrows. 'You could keep it behind your ear.'

  I cleared my throat again and took a drink of my Coke Lite. I wondered if the waiter had dropped a lump of hash into his coffee. 'No, thank you. My wife, she would not like the . . . smell.'

  'You . . . get used to it.' He sat back. 'I hope my offer . . . does not . . . offend you?'

  'No . . . of course not.' I nodded appreciatively at him. God love his cotton socks. Trying to make me feel better. In Morocco perhaps a camel was as valuable as a son. Or perhaps he was a camel agent in his spare time the way others sold water purifiers and Tupperware. I set my glass down. As I did so he picked up his packet of cigarettes from the table and removed one. I saw that it said Camel on the box.

  I started to explain, and then thought, fuck it, let it lie. I laughed to myself, at myself, and he laughed to keep me company. I glanced back across the canal just in time to see Alice hurry out of the front door of Paralog Films and climb into a waiting cab.

  28

  I said, 'Follow that cab.'

  The thrill of saying it was probably lost on Maurice. Perhaps there was a Moroccan equivalent – follow that cart, follow that hashish, follow that under-achieving World Cup team. For obvious reasons I avoided follow that camel.

  Thankfully most of the narrow canal streets in central Amsterdam are perpetually choked with cyclists, making it a place of slow progress for vehicular traffic. Alice's driver laboured, while my own was something of a master, and we were able to close in on her relatively quickly. Alice's head was down, she appeared to be studying something in her lap. From the front Maurice said, 'This lady – who she is?'

  'Sean O'Toole's wife,' I said.

  'Ah. And do you . . . know her?'

  Intimately. I nodded. Her cab turned right and skirted along Brouwersgracht, then turned onto Prins Hendrik opposite Centraal Station. A couple more turns and we were into the red light district. Her taxi pulled over. We slipped in behind it. I kept low. Alice climbed out, but no money exchanged hands. The driver reached into the back and removed a newspaper, which he began to read. Good. It meant the meter was still running. I asked Maurice to wait for me while I went after Alice.

  She was wearing flat black shoes, sunglasses though it was now starting to rain, a short white jacket and a knee-length black skirt. There was a black leather handbag over her arm, which was large, but blew in the breeze like there wasn't much in it. It was early afternoon. Although the district was comparatively quiet there were enough single men for me to blend in, and few enough single women for Alice to stand out. I stayed close. She was studying house numbers, and ignoring the girls in the red-lit windows which fronted them. She stopped several times to consult a sheet of paper she held in her hands, then peered back up at the houses. After walking several hundred yards she stopped abruptly; evidently she had passed the address she was looking for. She turned on her heel and started coming towards me. Luckily she was concentrating on the houses and not the sex tourists on the footpath; I ducked quickly down a set of stairs. At their foot there was a bouncer in a DJ standing before a garishly illuminated box office.

  'Come in, come in,' he said. 'Girl will do what you want with banana.'

  I heard the clip of Alice's shoes pass above and behind me. I smiled at the bouncer. 'Can she make me a banoffi?' I asked.

  His brow furrowed for a moment, but he recovered quickly. He grinned. 'She do everything,
sir,' he said and opened his palm to shepherd me to the window.

  I shook my head. 'Not like my wife,' I said.

  I hurried back up and peered out before stepping onto the footpath. Alice was twenty yards away, looking up at a doorway. She was folding the sheet of paper back into her handbag. She ran a hand through her hair, then quickly mounted the steps. She rang the bell, then turned away from it for a moment and looked back down the street. I ducked down, gave it five seconds, then chanced another glance back up towards her.

  The door was just closing. I couldn't see who had opened it. Or who had closed it, for that matter. I walked back up onto the path and looked along to the house. There were two red-light cabins on the ground floor with girls touting for business; but to either side of the door at the top of the steps the windows were curtained. There was nowhere on the nearside of the canal to get a proper view of the house, so I crossed over the bridge and began looking up at terraced houses on the other side, working out which one might give me the best perspective. It wasn't exactly rocket science. There was a bank of three red-lit glass doors, each with a bikini-clad girl perched on a stool. All three of them were reading paperback books, which reflected well on the Dutch educational system. Or indeed, the English educational system. The centre girl pushed a smile onto her face when I knocked and said, 'Thirty-five for oral, sixty-five for full sex,' in dulcet Essex tones when I enquired how much.

  I like to watch,' I said.

  'Fifty,' she said.

  I nodded. I gave her the money. She ushered me inside her cabin. She had mousy brown hair and a small chest. She had red nail varnish on one foot and black on the other. There was a single bed and a small lamp. There were several paperback books on the floor, and a large packet of condoms. She moved to close the curtains, but I told her to leave them; she said no way, I said yes way and offered her another fifty. She said okay as long as I stood in front of the window so that others weren't getting a free show. I said okay.