by Hal Ackerman
A throng of young people was gathered in the Dam Square making music. They were not the hippies of Stein’s day, rather well heeled nouveau Euroscuff. The whole feel of the city had changed. Young money had found it. Across the park facing the Palais Royale was the venerable Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky. The cabbie drove up to the front door and stopped.
“This is it.”
“This is what?”
The driver showed Stein the written address.
“I can’t be staying here-I do battle with the people who stay in places like this.”
“You have an envelope for me.”
It was too cold to argue and Stein handed the driver the packet of cash. A doorman led him inside and looked down his nose at Stein’s hemp rucksack. Stein was pleased to note that at last he was being seen as a disturbance. Entering the lobby of the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky was like being transported into a lost world. The place had been built when the empire of Austria-Hungary dominated Europe. The legendary Winter Garden restaurant, with its high-glassed roof, looked like the waiting room of the Vienna Train Station. James Joyce had stayed here in the 1920’s and fifty years later, Mick and Bianca. It wasn’t the Youth Hostel, that was for damn sure.
“It’s YOU!” Goodpasture sailed into the lobby on a zephyr of glee. He clapped Stein around the shoulder and spun him around. “Would you look at this place! Can you believe something like this still exists? Judging by Goodpasture’s ebullient mood Stein reckoned that poor boy must not have heard about Nicholette and that he would be charged with the sad duty of telling him. He waited for Goodpasture to settle down for a moment, then placed his hand on his arm.
“There’s something you need to know about and it’s not good.”
Goodpasture sobered. “You mean Nikki. Yeah. I know. That’s horrible.”
Yeah, that’s horrible? Stein thought. Is this the way a person reacts to his girlfriend being murdered? But before he could say anything the bellman was there, pushing before him an elegant cart built to accommodate the trunks and footlockers that accompanied traveling aristocracy. He lifted Stein’s hemp rucksack by a shoulder strap, using two fingers the way one might hold a rat, and then wheeled the cart to one of the sixteen elevators.
Goodpasture was excited again. “Wait till you see these rooms.”
The glitz of the suite that Goodpasture had booked offended Stein nearly as much as the young man’s cavalier attitude about Nicholette. The bathtub was the size of a lap pool. There were two four-poster beds. Persian rugs. It commanded a view over the square and the royal palace. Once the bellman had shown Stein all the amenities (towel warmers, all three TVs) and had departed (well-tipped), Goodpasture accelerated again into a whirlwind of energy.
“Dig this. I’ve got you set up as ‘The High Exalted Cannabis Cup Magistrate,’ which means you will have access to every bud in competition! If my orchids are here, and I know they are, those suckers are going to be so busted!” He draped a ribbon around Stein’s neck with a judge’s gold credential dangling at the bottom. “Anyone who pays the hundred bucks can be a regular judge. But there’s only one High Exalted Magistrate.”
Stein took him seriously to task. If the kid was saying Stein was his role model, that gave him the right to interfere. “I don’t get it. Your girlfriend gets murdered and your prime thoughts are with your missing weed? You fly off to Amsterdam, and then you fly me to Amsterdam to help you find it? Don’t you find that behavior just the slightest bit… disproportional? She died trying to protect you.”
Stein’s diatribe left Goodpasture perplexed. It took him a few moments to sort it out. “Were you under the impression that Nikki and I were a couple?”
It irked Stein that Goodpasture would try to conceal that. “Brian. She made it pretty obvious.”
“We were great friends,” Goodpasture said, “but not that way.”
Stein drilled through the sincere geology of Goodpasture’s expression for the topographical error. He was sure Nicholette had referred to Brian as her boyfriend. But now as he replayed the conversation in his mind he realized that the words she actually used were, “I believe you know a friend of mine.” Friend. But surely in that coy, italicized way she said it she had meant to convey boyfriend. Or had he presumed just that? But no. No no no. There were the hourly phone calls she had made to him. The knowing where he was. The unconcealed concern. The very act of seeking help when she feared he was in danger. Who else would do such a thing but a lover? Stein’s thoughts played across his face before he even spoke.
“I know,” Goodpasture said. “Everybody says we’re perfect together. I just wasn’t attracted to her in that way.”
Stein looked rightfully dubious.
“Of course. She’s beautiful. I can see that. But you can only love who you can love. I’m sure women have loved you where you didn’t feel the same even if you wished you could.”
Stein’s mind drifted to the person in his life who fit that description. “I guess it’s possible,” he conceded.
“We tried, but…” Goodpasture let the thought drop away. It’s still hard for me to believe it happened.” His cool exterior cracked for the first time and gave Stein a glimpse inside. “And the way it happened. Who would do such a thing?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out”
Goodpasture poured a glass of water from the delicate Oriental pitcher that sat glistening with condensation on the oak side table. He passed the glass to Stein and poured another for himself. He sat on armrest of the sofa. Now it was he probing fault lines. “I thought you came here to find my weed.”
“Brian. Whoever killed Nicholette was trying to extract your secrets from her. We both know that.”
“What secrets?”
“They stole the golden egg. Now they want the goose that laid it.”
“Why would they need that?”
“Don’t be deliberately dense, Brian. It offends me. They want you for the same reason America wanted Werner Van Braun. You have the product. You have the know-how.”
“Werner Van Braun? Who are you talking about?”
“Oh Jesus, are you that young? There was something called World War II? There were these German rocket scientists. Never mind. The point is she died being loyal to you. You owe her that much.”
Goodpasture gave up the pretense and surrendered to honesty. “All right, Harry. May I please call you Harry? I don’t mean it as disrespect.”
“Call me what the hell you want. Stop bullshitting with me.”
“I just thought if you saw the connection between Nikki and my weed it would be outside the NO DANGER zone and you wouldn’t come. Forgive me for underestimating you.”
“You don’t get it. She came to me for help, Brian. When I said no, I violated every principle I ever believed in. I fucked up. Nothing I can do will ever unfuck me. But I’m going to keep trying until it starts to feel a little bit better.”
Goodpasture nodded like he had seen this sort of thing before. “People fall in love with her quickly,” he said.
“I’m not talking about love, Brian. I’m talking about principle!”
“Yes, that’s definitely what you’re talking about.” Goodpasture reached into the leather pouch slung over his shoulder. “I want you to see that I have principles too.” He handed Stein a chunk of hundred dollar bills.
“I owe you this for bringing you here under false pretenses. And also for underestimating you.”
Stein fanned it and guessed there were fifty. He put it in his pocket with no pretense of declining the offer. “Not to mention the little matter of a stopped check.”
Goodpasture winced. “Sorry about that. It was somebody else’s idea.”
“What’s the deal on that guy anyway? He’s got the sense of humor of turpentine.”
“He does have his social liabilities. But, you know, what he does. You’ve seen those people. The government makes ‘life’ a holy grail until people get old or sick. Then they’re dumped into the same crap heap
as old refrigerators. Do you know what they spend on law enforcement trying to stop us from bringing in a little weed? Wouldn’t it be better to spend that same money on life enhancement?”
“You don’t need to sell me on the cause. I’m just saying about your doctor friend. Get him a colonoscopy, man. Unclog his sorry ass.” Goodpasture smiled and tipped his water glass to Stein as a toast. And then Stein was all business. “I have two days here before I’m back on daddy duty. There are forty some-odd cafes with buds entered for the Cannabis Cup. We can split the work. You go to half, I go to half? We find the one that matches yours and-no, wait. You’re right. I have to go to them all. They’d know who you are and hide the stuff if they saw you waltz in. All right.” He girded himself to go into action. His legs didn’t quite get the message and buckled. He had to brace himself from tipping over.
Goodpasture guided him to the bed. “Plan A is for you to take a nap. Your eyes are falling out of your face. It’s probably yesterday or tomorrow for you.”
The mention of a nap brought the exiled thought of sleep tumbling back into Stein’s consciousness and he instantly craved it. Goodpasture stood and massaged the tight ligaments alongside Stein’s neck. “I’ll be back for you in a couple of hours.”
“Just one question. Why didn’t you tell Nicholette where you were going? Why make her worry like that?”
“She knew.”
“She knew?”
“Of course she knew.”
Goodpasture smiled at how blindly in love with Nicholette Stein was.
“She was an exceptional woman,” Stein said.
Goodpasture agreed. “She was.”
The door closed behind Goodpasture’s departure. Stein’s body dissolved down onto the luxurious feather bed. The pillow looked wide as the Appalachians. It beckoned him and he swooned. The wall mirror above the bureau reflected somebody’s elderly uncle. Only it was Stein. He had to look away. His rucksack was still hanging on the inside door handle. It had caught in the door jamb when Goodpasture left and air currents in the hallway had left the door partly ajar.
There was a rustling of motion passing the open door and perhaps that was what had caught his attention. But there was something else, more persuasive and more subtle. It was a smell, wafting in from the hallway. It had not been there before. Whoever had caused the sound of motion had left that scent in her wake. It made Stein’s entire body tingle from toe to scalp. He had smelled that scent on only one person in his life and there was no mistaking who that person was.
It was Nicholette.
FOURTEEN
A jolt of adrenaline propelled Stein into the hall. At the same time that his brain knew it could not possibly be Nicholette, every other system in his body ordered Go. Find. See. Get. The corridor was deserted, but the scent hung keenly in the air. Stein felt a peripheral sense of motion to his left. The impression of a trailing garment disappearing down an adjoining corridor. He broke into a trot down the carpeted hallway. The plush pile felt firm and resilient. To his pleasant surprise, so did his calf muscles. He felt no sharp, crumbling pain. No ache of rust and gravity. No shock of protest from the shallow cavity of his chest. He imagined himself a Lakota brave running tirelessly through woods and plains, his body its own vehicle.
That feeling lasted about fifteen feet.
As he approached the T-shaped intersection he heard the elevator door slide open in the corridor to his left. He tried to accelerate but his breath was now wheezing through constricted passageways and his legs had taken on weight. He latched onto the edge of the wall and used it to whip himself around the blind corner. The elevator doors were closing. “Hold it, please,” he called out but to no avail..
Brushing aside the internal voice that repeated “what are you doing?” at each new escalation of the insanity, Stein pulled open the heavy metal door to the fire stair and vaulted into the passageway. The stair went straight down then hooked a hundred and eighty degrees to the left. He grabbed the guardrail and yanked himself hard into each turn. He was wearing only his jeans and a flannel shirt over his 1969 Mets T-shirt, but he broke a sweat as he hit the seventh floor landing. Air was not plentiful. He wanted to stop at each floor and run into the corridor in hopes of having gotten there before the elevator. But the thought of just missing it again and losing those precious seconds kept him going. He staked everything on the hope that it would stop at enough floors for him to beat it down to the lobby. He thought of himself as John Henry battling the steel-driving machine. Then he remembered that John Henry dies at the end of that song.
He reached the mezzanine and jumped down the last three steps and pushed forcefully through the door into the lobby. In other cities people might have looked askance at a wild, disheveled creature bursting out of the catacombs. But Amsterdamers during Cannabis Cup season took such occurrences as matter-of-fact. He heard an elevator bell ping. The sound came from his left, which puzzled him because his inner compass told him it should be to his right. But he followed his ears. The light for floor #2 was illuminated in the bank above the elevator door, and Stein positioned himself in front of the doors that would open in a moment. But instead, the light indicating floor #3 went on. It was going up, not coming down. In a panic he spun around and saw that another elevator car had preceded him down and its passengers were dispersed into the lobby.
He had not won the race with the machine after all. There was kaleidoscopic motion all over the lobby, a universe of particles simultaneously expanding and contracting. He didn’t know what he was looking for. But amidst the sea of scents and pipe tobacco and shoe leather and artificial heat, Stein sniffed out that floating Jet Stream of aroma that had guided him. His neck swiveled until he locked in on the source. The glimpse of a woman hurrying out the front door, a trailing arm, the back of a leg.
Stein hastened across the voluminous lobby, trying not to be too conspicuous The front door opened before him. He barely noticed the frigid street air. He saw the woman scurrying across the street in the brief lull of oncoming traffic, and getting into a taxi. Her profile was framed for an instant in the passenger-side window. A jaunty fur cap and her drawn up collar covered most of her features. It wasn’t much past noon but the sun was already at a low angle and shone directly into the window. The taxi eased into the flow of traffic. Stein ran into the street and waved his arms like discouraged semaphore flags. He looked desperately for another taxi but they were all engaged.
A delivery boy of about nineteen stopped in front of the hotel and braced his bicycle into the rack. Stein grabbed him. “Do you speak English?” Stein demanded.
Yes.
“Do you want a hundred dollars?”
Yes.
A moment later Stein was pedaling the thin-wheeled bicycle in pursuit of the taxicab and the kid was putting Stein’s money into his pocket, probably wondering why somebody would pay a hundred dollars for a free city bike. Traffic was heavy and the taxi could not get far ahead. Nor could Stein quite catch up to it. Clusters of cyclists trailed behind the buses and trams like pilot fish. He ducked his head to try to avoid the wind. The moisture in his eyes was freezing over. His nostrils crackled. He pulled his flannel shirt tight around his body. Frostbite seemed inevitable but just then the cab got stopped at a red light at the next intersection. Stein pedaled madly between lines of traffic and nearly caught up. But the light turned green before he reached them, and the cab turned parallel to the frozen Herengracht Canal.
Stein’s hands and his crotch were completely numb. A cold steel ingot was expanding through his rib cage. He couldn’t feel the handlebars or his ass on the seat and was on the verge of turning back. But he caught sight of the taxi again. It was turning around and heading up the hill toward him. But its flag was up and its passenger seat was vacant. She must just have gotten out where the cab made the U-turn. Stein pedaled down the ramp into the lower roadway.
A stone staircase led to the bridge that crossed the canal. Young and old skaters were gliding across the canal�
��s frozen surface using the ice as a means of travel. He compared this to pampered Ange-lenos driving their cars to their expensive gyms and fighting to get the closest parking spot to save walking a few extra steps.
He saw her coat first, trailing out behind her. Her hands were clutched to the small of her back. She skated out toward the center of the canal, then folded her full-length camel coat into a square and placed it on the ice. Underneath it she was wearing a gold jacket and gold pants. She began to skate figures using the coat as the axis of her circles. Her movements were precise. Her arms maintained elongated positions; her eyes followed her fingertips. She skated backwards on one long egret leg, the elevated limb reaching straight back at ninety degrees, then arching higher as her back bowed and the blade of her skate bisected the sky.
Stein was not the only spectator mesmerized. Other skaters stopped to watch her display. Spewing flumes of shaved ice, she spun to an abrupt stop in front of her folded coat, picked it up and tucked it under her arm, and, the cadenza over, skated with sublime ease of purpose upstream.
The medicinal power of lust restored circulation to Stein’s extremities. He noticed for the first time that a saddlebag was draped across the back tire frame of his newly purchased bicycle. He unfastened the Velcro fasteners and reached inside. There was a green lightweight Israeli army jacket tucked away, which he immediately put on. A pair of gloves was in the pocket; a scarf and wool hat stuffed into the sleeve. How nice to have noticed these items before, he thought.
