An Artful Assassin in Amsterdam

by Michael Grant

  And what would I call myself? The Thief? The Grifter? What if instead of keeping all the money I stole I made contributions to the poor? Say, 50 percent? Too much, too showy? Maybe 20 percent? A ‘portion of proceeds’? Could I call myself Robbing Hood then? If I did, would I have to wear the boots and have a sidekick named Will Scarlet?

  Sometimes it amazes me that I ever get any work done, but by the time lunch beckoned I had six new pages down.

  Chante might be, well, Chante, but she could cook. For lunch she served up some sautéed herring filets with lime and pepper, roasted potatoes and Brussels sprouts with bacon and caramelized sugar.

  ‘Excellent fish,’ I said. I don’t stint on praise for people who feed me well. Enlightened self-interest.

  We ate together, pulling a small round table up to the French doors before the faux balcony. It was early September and had rained during the night bringing clammy humidity, but the temperature still lingered in the low sixties and the street outside was bustling with late-season tourists in North Face down and jeans, or tight leather and jeans, or Ralph Lauren oilskin and jeans. I was glad to note the appearance of stocking caps as the weather cooled. There’s no quicker or more portable disguise than a stocking cap and glasses.

  Chante did not respond to my compliment; she took it as a given that her food was excellent. ‘Coffee?’ she asked, meaning that I should make coffee.

  ‘Actually, I’m going out. I think I’ll find a nice café and drink beer all afternoon, unless the rain comes.’

  I slid my laptop into my battered brown-leather shoulder bag and walked north along the Kloveniersburgwal (Cloven-ears-burgs-val), which back in the sixteenth century was part of the city walls and was now a lovely residential street beside a wide canal.

  My destination, the Dam, is the largest of Amsterdam’s various squares, divided into unequal portions by a crossing street and further sliced up by tramlines. On one end there’s the seventeenth-century royal palace which, if you’re familiar with French, British or Italian notions of a royal palace, is pretty disappointing. The Dutch were never big on kings. The underlying ethos of Amsterdam was that of a mercantilist republic devoted to making money, Protestant modesty, and also making money. The palace is half a dozen stories tall, topped by a turquoise dome, and looks like a very nice city hall, which is what the original builders intended, and thus completely lacks the ‘fuck the peasants’, grandeur of a Versailles or a Kremlin.

  Just to the left of the palace and set back a bit is the Nieuwe Kerk, the New Church. New because it was built in the fourteenth century, practically yesterday. The original burned down, as things were prone to do back before the invention of smoke detectors, and was replaced by the current, grandly gothic structure in the seventeenth century. It’s not used as a church anymore but as an exhibition space, the outer walls invariably hung with banners advertising the latest show.

  Then there is the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! and the Madame Tussauds with its giant, tacky, domineering sign, mute testimony to the fact that the Dutch are perhaps just a little too willing to compromise aesthetics for the amusement of tourists.

  At the other end of the square is the National Monument. Here again, people imagining something that is the equivalent of the Washington Monument or perhaps Nelson’s Column have failed to grasp the degree to with the Dutch reject ostentation. The Dutch are not big on fancy frills, and lack in great tyrants to build great monuments to their own greatness. So when challenged to design a monument to World War Two, they slapped up something that looked rather like a travertine butt plug with various puzzling symbolic statues and bas reliefs arrayed around the base.

  The pillar is their official monument to the suffering of the Dutch under Nazi occupation, and it’s fine, I suppose, but the real WWII monument is a Dutch canal house on the Prinsengracht, not far from where I’d gone swimming. Anne Frank and her family were kept hidden by people with good Dutch names: Kleiman, Kugler, Gies and Voskuijl. Those people weren’t risking money or career or even three-to-five, they were risking their lives and the lives of their families.

  Righteous Among the Nations, the Jews call people like that. I don’t pretend to understand the kind of humans who would be so moved by simple decency they’d risk a trip to a concentration camp, but I will readily admit that the world would be a better place with more of them and fewer of me.

  My goal on this fresh, gorgeous day was not the palace or the church or even Madame Tussaud’s. I was heading to the Majestic, an outdoor café on the Dam. The food was mediocre, the service often absent without leave, but they poured good beer and provided a place for me to sit while eyeballing passersby and making up lurid stories about them.

  A phalanx of young women in cowboy boots walking with linked arms – probably foreign art students – became a group of defiant cancer survivors.

  A busker waving a huge bubble wand and sending great, undulating shapes skimming across the paving stones, became a former high-tech executive who’d had a nervous breakdown and now sold bubble wands to tourists. He’s never been happier, though, sure, there are days when he feels regret … but then he meets a pleasant Canadian family and it turns his mood right around.

  An old man in a long raincoat was either a flasher or a Nazi-collaborator who’d hidden out in Argentina after the war but was unable to resist coming home. This story had some problems in that the man was old, but he was definitely not old enough to have served in the war.

  The sounds on the Dam were gentle, the clip-clop of horses’ hooves ahead of a carriage full of tourists; the clink of glasses; the musical tinkle of bicycle bells which the Dutch cyclists are required to ring a half-second before they run you down.

  There were clouds in the sky, some forming tall white towers reaching to a pale daytime moon, others, lower, threatening to dump rain. It was pleasantly cool, cool enough that the patio warmers had been fired up.

  After about a month a waiter appeared and I ordered a Rodenbach, a strange beer which pours almost red but has a nice white head, which arrived just a few weeks later. I had a table behind the first row and toward the center of the café, the spot chosen because it felt snug and safe from the Hangman. Unless my comic book nemesis was Will Rogers he’d have a hard time lassoing me.

  I sat there for an hour or so, progressively squeezed and jostled as people came and went – one surly woman with the face of a DMV clerk very nearly knocked over my beer – the crowd waxing and waning like a tide. I contemplated my situation, particularly the question of why someone might want to kill me, but I kept circling around the fact that there was no evident logic to it. I’d left a trail of slightly impoverished rich people, betrayed women and embarrassed cuckolds in my wake, but none of that justified murder. At least not to me, of me.

  I was drinking good beer, but only beer, and as a rule it’s not possible for me to get drunk on beer – I don’t like it enough – so I was surprised when I stood up to go in search of the restroom and found I needed to put a hand on the table to balance myself.

  ‘Wha th’fuh?’ Tongue and lips were not working quite right, which was surprising. I was more surprised still when the table tipped and my glass shattered on the paving stones and I did a sort of twisting collapse move, looked up at the awning, felt myself accelerating downward and landed hard, flat on my back. Someone should have yelled, ‘Timber!’ because I was nothing but six feet of toppling flesh tree. My head bounced and geometric patterns confused my vision.

  I lay there on the ground noting the cries of alarm and the recoiling of my fellow café patrons. I tried to stand – as one does when one finds oneself flat on the ground – but my limbs were not having it and rather than stand I just flailed limply as my vision narrowed and went in and out of focus like a phone camera video trying for a close-up.

  Then a woman wearing a bright-yellow, high-visibility jacket appeared, bent over me and in a loud but unsteady voice said in English, ‘Give him rooms!’

  I stared at her shoes, r
ight at eye level. They were Adidas sneakers in a complex blue-and-pink pattern. I’d seen them before, of course I had: on the feet of the surly woman who’d almost knocked my beer over, and, it was now clear, had dropped something into my glass.

  I tracked up and saw that she was wearing gray yoga pants. Also wrong for an emergency medical tech. And the scoop-necked top was wrong, EMTs and ambulance drivers and such generally being too busy to want to flash cleavage. A whole bunch of wrong was happening and I could not make my mouth work to say anything more than, ‘Unh.’ I was paralyzed, legs and arms numb as if blood had been cut off. I thought I could move them, should have been able to, but could not.

  Frightening, but of course the drug had the effect of damping down fear so that even as my rational mind was screaming, This is bad! the rest of my brain was basically OK with being restfully flat on my back in a café.

  The ‘clumsy’, beer-knocking paramedic with the wrong shoes, pants and top bent over me and slipped a hand behind my neck, palm cool on my rope burns. She put her other arm under mine which brought her face to within inches. She was probably younger than she looked, with dark hair that blew in the slight breeze and tickled my nose. She was white but not, I thought, Dutch, at least not by birth. She had an eastern European look, with Slavic cheekbones and a sad, downturned mouth. Her slightly slanted eyes were so pale the blue was a genuine gray. She avoided meeting my stunned-stupid gaze, nor did she mutter soothing words of comfort.

  What she did say was, ‘Please, some person to help me get him to wheelchair, yes?’

  Wheelchair?

  Some big ol’ Polish guy with a popped collar and a thin calfskin jacket stepped up like a gentleman and between the two of them they half-carried, half-dragged me through tables rapidly pulled aside, ignoring such cogent remarks of mine as ‘Mrh guh’ and ‘Whuh mh fra’, and there, parked just a few feet away, was a wheelchair.

  Not an ambulance. Not a gurney. A wheelchair.

  My body was paralyzed but my brain was not. I knew I’d been poisoned. I even had a pretty good notion as to the specific poison: Rohypnol. I was familiar with it because I’d used it twice before. Not to commit a rape. I’m not an animal. I only ever used it to ensure that my ‘client’ slept soundly while I worked on gaining entry to a safe or a laptop or a phone.

  The Good Samaritan and the woman I was now forced to suspect was actually the Hangman dumped me into the wheelchair. I noted with embarrassment that I no longer needed the restroom since my very relaxed body had decided not to wait any longer to recycle the Rodenbach. Thus with soaked crotch and a cut finger from my tumble I was wheeled away, rattling across the paving stones of the Dam, embarrassment in my wake.

  The nature of the plan eluded me. Why roofie me and drag me to a wheelchair? And why was she now pushing me across the Dam? And down a narrow side street beneath construction scaffolding?

  The construction site was closed off by waterproofed canvas tied to an anodized aluminum frame with plastic zip ties. The EMT – no, the Hangwoman – opened a clasp knife and cut two zip ties. Then she pushed me through the flap.

  I was now in a space hidden from foot traffic on the busy street just inches away, surrounded by stacks of two-by-fours, or their metric equivalent, which had accumulated a thick coat of dust. There were bags of cement, also dusty. And a dusty, parked, white van. The dust was not good news: no one had worked here for some time.

  We were alone, me and the Hangman, surrounded by debris.

  My kidnapper leaned back against the van, breathing hard, then sneezed as the dust got to her. I aimed my wandering eyeballs at her, focus going in and out and never quite coming clear. But I would recognize her if I saw her again, I was sure of that.

  I was still not terrified. It was all too ridiculous and I was too high to generate profound fear … until I noticed that she had not folded her knife away.

  Then I was properly terrified.

  It was becoming clear that this crazy woman meant to murder me right there, right then, and there was not a single damned thing I could do about it. Her next move would be a slash across my throat which, if she did it right, would have me unconscious in three seconds and dead in fifteen.

  I said, ‘Unh uh uuuunh,’ to which she did not respond.

  I wanted to ask her why. Why? For what crime I was I being executed? I wanted to ask her a lot of things. I would have had a nice long chat about Amsterdam’s favorite philosopher, Spinoza, anything to stall for time. But brain and mouth were not connected, and increasingly brain was not even connected to consciousness. I could soon be unconscious and miss my own death.

  She frowned and bit her lip and sent every signal that she was scared and nervous and uncertain and then she stabbed the knife into my left pectoral muscle.

  The knife, a nice, brass-and-bone handled, locking-blade clasp knife with what looked to have a three-inch blade, plunged through my jacket, through my shirt, and penetrated skin and muscle. But only about half an inch.

  She drew back, disgusted by what she’d done, alarmed at the blood that bloomed like a poppy on my shirt. At the same time, though, there was a light in those gray eyes, a glitter of excitement. I could see her steeling herself. She licked her lips, nodded encouragement to herself, and drew a deep breath. She was going to stab me again. This time she would mean it.

  ‘Who’s in there?’

  The Hangwoman froze. She actually put a finger to her lips as if urging me to stay silent. Like I had a choice. Like if I’d had a choice I’d have agreed not to scream, ‘Save me, a crazy woman’s trying to kill me!’

  I heard the sound of the canvas being thrown back.

  ‘Drop that knife. Now!’ A woman’s voice, husky, authoritative. American.

  And oddly familiar.

  ‘Go away, you have no permission!’ The Hangman protested in an accent with more than a few Slavic tells in it.

  The stab wound started to hurt. It would hurt worse if I survived.

  The Hangman looked frantic, unsure, glancing from me to my unseen would-be savior. She laid the knife’s edge against my throat and had I not already wet myself, this is when I’d do it. Cold steel on neck flesh is dire. But she did not swipe right to end my life, rather she dithered.

  Then suddenly she turned and ran, tripping and cursing through the construction debris.

  Another woman stepped into my extremely limited field of vision. She was tall, black, around my age, about eighty percent leg, gorgeous and clearly amused at my predicament.

  ‘Well, hello there, David,’ said FBI Special Agent Delia Delacorte.

  FIVE

  I had flashes of rolling back across the Dam. Flashes of being hauled up the stairs to my apartment by Delia, Chante and the Croatian guy I recognized as living in the flat below mine.

  I was dropped on my bed and left there.

  Sometime later I woke with a huge headache and pee-stained trousers. My limbs worked but awkwardly, like they were the members of a band reuniting after twenty years’ estrangement. I had just enough coordination to stand, fighting a tsunami of nausea, and stumble to the shower.

  Hot water helped – it always does. I had no memory of being bandaged, but there was gauze and tape on my chest, being made heavy now by water. I peeled the bandage off and looked at my terrible wound, which, OK all things considered, wasn’t too bad. A neat, half-inch vertical cut. No stitches needed.

  Funny how I’d gone my whole life without being stabbed, but since meeting Special Agent Delia Delacorte? Twice. That was either an omen or a coincidence, depending on one’s level of superstition.

  Clean and dressed in fresh clothing over fresh bandages, I emerged in search of the remaining vital element of recovery, which was handed to me.

  ‘Black, if I recall correctly,’ Delia said as she passed me a mug of coffee.

  ‘Like I like my women: black and bitter.’ I grunted and gratefully sank onto the sofa, still very shaky, spilling a bit as I did.

  Chante was in the open-plan k
itchen busily cooking something that smelled amazing and made my stomach cry out.

  ‘How long was I out?’

  Delia Delacorte, FBI legat out of the Rome embassy, Special Agent of the Bureau, the physical embodiment of danger to my continued freedom, all six feet of her, sat opposite me, feet on the coffee table, a cup in her hand, her sleepy, half-lidded eyes watching me. ‘Let’s see, it’s seven thirty—’

  ‘Is that a.m. or p.m.?’

  ‘It’s a.m. You slept all through the evening and night, so call it sixteen hours?’

  That explained the ravenous hunger. It did not explain why a crazy woman had roofied me. Nor did it explain Delia’s presence here, a presence that brought very mixed emotions: fear, lust, worry, pleasure, resentment, some more lust, some additional fear … basically all the emotions of which I am capable aside from greed and self-regard.

  The caffeine was kicking in and I had many questions, among which were, I have this image of a construction site. Was that real? But I also smelled frying pork and knew that not all of my brain was quite fully engaged with reality, so questions could wait.

  ‘This is my interpretation of a full English breakfast,’ Chante said, placing a plate in front of Delia like she was serving the queen. Chante slid my plate across to me as if I was the cowboy at the far end of the saloon bar. We sat like a little family: reprobate dad, responsible mom, and their difficult daughter.

  Chante’s interpretation of the Full English involved eggs en cocotte, not bacon but a slab of good Danish ham, a grilled herbed tomato, a well-browned sausage, a piece of fried fish, quartered new potatoes, a welcome absence of black pudding, a slightly less welcome absence of beans, a fruit salad freshened with mint, freshly squeezed orange juice and straight from the oven scones with clotted cream and orange marmalade.

  I try to hate the girl, I really do.