‘What do I get?’ I asked bluntly.
‘The continuing blindness of the Bureau as pertains to a certain fugitive from justice? And the warm glow of knowing you’ve done something good and useful?’
‘Ah, the glow. Of course. My balls in your pocket and the glow. Swell.’
‘Was there something else you had in mind?’
There was, but I wasn’t going to tell Delia because I’m not that kind of toxic male, I’m a whole different kind. Also in a physical fight my money would be on her. She knows things.
Plus … something. Something was causing the back of my head to tingle. My subconscious had heard something intriguing, it just wasn’t sure what.
‘How’s this for a quid pro quo,’ I said. ‘I do my best to figure out if there’s a way to stop the Ontario Crew without anyone knowing, and in exchange, you find out who’s trying to kill me. Like you, I can’t exactly involve the Dutch cops.’
Delia had to think about that. ‘Without local law enforcement there’s not much I can do.’
‘You have computers. You have data. You can tell your bosses that your confidential informant has a price, and that’s it.’
She nodded. ‘Fair enough.’
‘Also, I’m looking for someone. I have a name for you if you can run it without attracting attention.’
‘A name?’
‘Madalena Azevedo. Oh, and Milan Smit. She’s Portuguese, I think he’s Dutch or maybe Belgian.’
Delia favored me with a dubious look but she tapped the names into her phone and nodded acceptance of my terms.
‘Let’s start with what you have on the Ontario Crew,’ I said.
‘Not much,’ Delia admitted. ‘We only have one name, one guy, this character Willy Pete. He may be the head man, or not, we don’t know.’
‘Interesting name.’
‘It’s an alias. His real name is Carl Willard. Willy Pete is military slang for white phosphorus, something Willard used in an early bank robbery.’
She picked up her phone, swiped around a bit and a moment later my phone dinged.
‘That’s the only photo we have of him and it’s eight years old.’
I opened my phone and looked at the mug shot of a white guy, late twenties, skeletal, with eyes sunk so deep the pupils were invisible. The scale on the wall behind him measured him at 5'10". And he was wearing a uniform.
‘He’s a soldier?’
‘He was. Army. Special Forces, actually. And the picture may not be much use. Carl Willard was injured, burned, perhaps ironically. The report said extensive tissue damage to chest and neck, some facial damage. We don’t have a shot of him post-burn.’
‘OK, that’s yours, now find mine. Did you get a good look at the woman who poisoned me?’
‘I did,’ Delia nodded.
‘Tit for tat. I stop your Crew, you find that crazy murdering woman and Madalena.’
‘Deal,’ Delia said. ‘After all, I can’t have a valuable CI murdered in the middle of helping me on a matter of national security.’ She was practicing, I suppose, for the likely inspector general’s inquiry that would follow if this thing blew up in her face.
I relit my cigar and politely blew the smoke over her head. I wanted time, time to listen to my instincts and see whether they were making sense. But the clock was ticking, both on Delia’s concerns and mine.
‘I may need to do things you can’t know about, Delia.’
She took her time thinking through the implications of that. Then she sighed and shook her head in disbelief at the words coming out of her mouth: ‘Just don’t kill anyone. And, David? Don’t get caught.’
‘Delia,’ I said, sounding more weary than proud, ‘my whole life is about not getting caught. I am the living god of not getting caught.’
SIX
In six days the Vermeer would go on display.
Delia had offered some additional details, to whit that it was arriving from London the next day in the hold of a KLM passenger jet, guarded by both private security and Dutch cops. It would be taken from Schiphol to the Rijksmuseum.
If I lived in a movie rather than reality, the Ontario Crew would organize some elaborate heist which, despite all their planning, would inevitably devolve into a wild shoot-out in which tiny machine pistols would spray ineffectual bullets by the hundreds.
This was a possibility, I supposed, but it would be fantastically stupid. And the Ontario Crew were supposedly professionals so, no, that wasn’t going to happen. The object would be hanging on a wall in a week, why would you take on armed guards?
When Jewess at the Loom arrived at the Rijks the experts would go to work verifying, cleaning, mounting for display and all that, during which time the Vermeer would be in a basement or attic room somewhere in the bowels of the museum. If the Ontario Crew had an inside man the painting would be vulnerable during that period.
Thing was that finding and corrupting a compliant inside man wasn’t something to be done over a long weekend. The Crew had very little more lead time than I had, and while it was possible they’d quickly find and exploit a staff vulnerability, it was very unlikely. And in any case, what the hell was I going to do about it?
Delia repaired to whatever hotel had a discount deal with the US government. And I knew what I had to do: enjoy some art. Six days was not a lot of time to locate and somehow neutralize a gang of professional thieves.
Obviously Thing One would be to visit the Rijksmuseum (Rikes-moo-see-um) and get the lay of the land. Just as obviously I wasn’t going to go there looking like me. If a theft went down the cops would be looking at video from the security cameras, and I planned never to appear on those cameras. It was Captain Louis Renault who first explained basic police methodology when he said, ‘Round up the usual suspects.’ Fugitives are always ‘usual suspects.’ A fugitive who’d been a thief? Hell, that’s not a suspect, that’s your perp, case closed. So it was going to have to be fun with disguises.
‘All right, Chante, I’m giving you a free shot. Tell me: if you just saw me walking around on the street and had to describe me afterward, what would be the main things you noticed?’
That invited a stare. I believe it may have been the first time Chante actually looked at me rather than around me.
‘I would notice different things in different countries. In France you are tall, here in Holland you are only average height. Your face …’
‘What about my face?’ I said, trying not to sound vain and defensive.
‘It is symmetrical and some might say handsome …’
‘Some.’
‘But it is also average in a way. You have no outstanding features, though you have good hair.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘But what is most noticeable is not something one sees, but something one feels. You stand apart. You are at a distance from life around you.’
It was too late to stop her, now. She was circling me, examining a specimen.
‘You are at once wary and predatory. Like a cautious fish who wants the bait but senses the hook.’
Wary and predatory, OK, that sounded kind of cool. But cautious fish?
‘I prefer to see myself as a wise lion.’
Chante squinted at me. ‘No, the lion is majestic.’
‘So glad I asked.’
Chante has a face she pulls, a sort of wry, condescending, implied-eye-roll thing. ‘If you are asking how best to disguise yourself, I would say that you must conceal your hair, your eyes and your arrogance.’
The thing was, she was basically right. An effective disguise is as much about acting the part as looking it. But looking the part is the starting point so, shopping first.
If I were teaching a class – Crime 101 – I would stress the fundamental importance of evidence. A) Don’t create it, and B) If you do create it, don’t let the cops find it.
I never had a wise mentor in crime myself, I had to figure things out the hard way, but right from the start I’d known to avoid creating evidence
. In my first second-story job I’d had to cut my way down through a restaurant’s roof crawlspace. To do that I needed a sheetrock knife and a small wood saw. I bought the sheetrock knife along with five other, unrelated items at a hardware store twenty miles from the scene of the crime. I bought the saw at a yard sale as part of a box of random tools. I paid cash for both. I dropped fake names and misleading details. When I was done with the job, I took the cutter apart and removed the handle from the saw and scattered the bits in random dumpsters and handy bodies of water.
The cops could deduce that I’d used a cutter and a saw and they could search for a year and never prove that I had ever owned either.
Tradecraft. If you’re going to enter the exciting world of crime, boys and girls, work on your tradecraft.
Don’t. Create. Evidence.
If you absolutely can’t avoid creating evidence, and if you suspect the cops are going to get their hands on it (and you should definitely suspect that), make sure your evidence trail is as confused and contradictory as you can make it. Never forget that juries are made up of people who lacked the imagination to get out of jury duty. Salt-of-the-earth folks, or, as we learned from Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles, morons. Presented with any explanation requiring more than one step a moron will dismiss it out of hand. This fact also explains most of politics.
With all that in mind, I went to the mall – but not the Gelderlandplein, the big mall south of the city center. Instead I walked to the train station and bought a ticket – cash, from a machine – to Rotterdam, about a one-hour ride with trains leaving every half hour. Once at Rotterdam Station I walked a few blocks to a Hilton and caught a cab. I directed the cab to an Asian restaurant I’d googled which was a few blocks from the Alexandrium Mall. Then I walked to the mall.
I’m aware that my fellow criminals might find my tradecraft a bit extreme, overly imaginative, bordering on obsessive-compulsive and well into advanced paranoia, but I’m aware of something else as well: most of the guys who’d call me obsessive have done serious time, and I have not. I have an arrest record (well, several under various names), but zero convictions.
Zero.
My clothing choices usually run from Ralph Lauren to Boss and Canali with a side of Tommy Bahama. I dress like a guy with some money because people with money are much happier giving money to a guy who looks like he already has some. And I follow the David Mitchell Sartorial Dictum: that my appearance should be in no way noteworthy, but not so un-noteworthy as to be in itself, noteworthy.
But that was not the look I wanted now. I needed to look not like me, distinctly not like me. So I spent some money which was perhaps not technically mine since the credit card wasn’t technically mine, either, and came away with enough gear to look like a guy who probably fixes air conditioners and is taking a vacation in Amsterdam so he can get high and go to a hooker.
On the way out of the mall I spotted a rucksack and bought two in different colors, then, with my shopping complete I reversed direction, returned to Amsterdam, and walked from the station to my apartment.
‘You have shopped,’ Chante said, making it sound like an accusation.
‘I have indeed. I looked for a flying broom for you, but they didn’t have any.’
It was still just early afternoon, plenty of time for a preliminary run at the Rijks. But first I went to my annoyingly narrow bathroom where I applied instant tan – at least I hoped that’s what it was, the label was in Dutch – going for a ‘probably lives-in-Arizona’ tan and used my fingernail scissors to cut half an inch of hair from the nape of my neck. Crouching to peer into the articulated make-up mirror I applied spirit gum to my upper lip, then spent a very long, very boring time carefully seating hairs to form the kind of mustache Tom Selleck probably had by age ten.
I stepped back to admire my work, using my scissors to trim the ends. It would work so long as no one stared too closely or I started sweating.
I added body weight – a towel over a small throw pillow, secured around my waist. I added some more weight by stuffing the back of my underpants with toilet paper, like an insecure high school girl stuffing her bra before prom. The effect was lumpy though, so I slipped on a second pair of underpants to compress and smooth my padding, and decided the net effect worked well enough.
I took a small temporary tattoo of a cannabis leaf and applied it to my neck, just below my right ear, and emerged at last from the bedroom as a corpulent, granola-crunching, carbon-neutral, blue collar, hiking type of creature with a neck tattoo, a sleazy mustache, a well-tanned complexion and cotton balls in my cheeks both to distort my face and the sound of my speech.
‘You like the new look?’ I asked Chante, serving up a slow one for her.
‘Have you changed something?’
I walked to the Museumplein to soak up some art. It was raining – not a downpour, more of a sullen drizzle – and I had to use an umbrella to keep rain off my mustache. As I walked, the extra clothing and padding added to the humidity made me sweat, and rain and sweat together are not good for fake facial hair. So I slowed my usual New-Yorker-with-a-twenty-minute-lunch-break pace, willing myself to be cool.
What the Red Light District is for guys who’ve never learned to masturbate, the Museumplein (moo-say-um-plane) is for parents and couples and, I suppose, a few genuine art lovers. It’s moo-say-ums and green spaces, a fabulous concert hall and a couple of nice outdoor cafés.
You arrive at Museumplein via the Rijksmuseum’s central arcade, a tall passageway as wide as three cars abreast, that cuts through the middle of the building. The Rijks is about as grand a structure as the Dutch will allow, a late-nineteenth-century, dark-brick behemoth built around two courtyards. It’s a bit like a squared-off number eight, with the cavernous arcade as the crosspiece, and the courtyards as the holes. There is almost always a classical group playing in the arcade, often Eastern Europeans, doing rather good renditions of classical bits and bobs. On this day it was Vivaldi’s ‘Summer’ from The Four Seasons, and the ensemble included two violins, an accordion, a tuba and a balalaika the size of a surfboard, which I don’t think was quite how Vivaldi would have arranged it, but it worked with the accordion and tuba coming together to sound surprisingly like a pipe organ.
I walked through the arcade energized by the frantic violin, squeezed around the bulge of music lovers which inevitably spilled off the walkway onto the center lanes meant for bikes and the rare official vehicle, and passed out of shadow into the damp overcast of the Museumplein.
The first thing one notices is a very large red and white sign/sculpture forming the words ‘I Amsterdam,’ with the ‘I’ and the ‘Am’ in red, the remaining letters in white. This is irresistible for tourists who climb all over it like clumsy monkeys and strike poses for the benefit of their Instagram followers, who would, I assume, see the photo and think, douche, which I suppose makes people happy. It was both wet and chilly and there were nevertheless seven people in or on the sign, including a terrified toddler propped in the hole of the lower-case ‘d’.
Beyond the sign/sculpture was a fan-shaped open space with the efficient name of Art Square. Art Square featured at the northern, Rijksmuseum end a long, ovoid pool, which in winter became an ice-skating rink. There was a large and usually busy outdoor café, not so busy on this day, and just a bit further on kiosks selling hot dogs. Beyond that point (the hot dog latitudes) the plein becomes a vast lawn extending to the concrete lozenge of the Van Gogh (Fon-CHGHKOKGH) museum ahead and to the west, and the Concertgebouw (con-SERT-gay-bow), a great pile of limestone and red brick with classical Greek pretensions. Inside the Concertgebouw is where they keep the giant pipe organ the breezeway accordion wanted to be when it grew up.
The plein is too large ever to be called crowded, it manages to swallow even the largest tourist horde, and on this day, with gray clouds not a hundred feet off the ground, and with peak tourist season fading, there were only a few dozen people, families with kids mostly, wandering around the pool, tossi
ng coins, trailing fingers, yelling at children who believed the word ‘pool’ implied ‘wading’. Individuals or small pods of people walked the gravel pathways heading to and from cultural touchstones. They walked beneath umbrellas, many emblazoned with a hotel’s logo, some with Van Gogh’s sunflowers or irises, booty of the souvenir shops.
I kept an eye open for the Hangwoman, but I was in disguise and in the open and not drinking spike-able beer or motoring down a canal, so not very concerned. I kept an eye open for Madalena and Smit as well, but given what I knew of them they didn’t strike me as museum people. I also kept an eye out for Willy Pete whose interest in art would be quite as avid as my own.
I stood there by the pool for a while with my phone open and my umbrella sort of resting on my head to free my hands, and compared the overhead satellite view with my horizontal real-world perspective. Mise en place is the useful French phrase, a culinary term which translates as putting in place referring to the chef’s arrangement of foods and garnishes, spices, herbs, pans, spoons, ladles, strainers and knives required to prepare an evening’s meals.
This was my mise en place. Where were the major buildings? Where were the walkways and streets and canals? Where did people cluster? And the always important: where are bathrooms, trash cans and places where one might duck out of view or dump something incriminating?
With the essential pieces of the exterior setting clear in my head, I walked back to the musicians who were now at work on one of the Brandenburgs, shook my umbrella and entered the Rijksmuseum, following the stairs down into one of the museum’s two great courtyards. It’s a covered courtyard, all lovely light gray marble, with red brick rising as the backdrop and blanked side windows looking down. Tasteful, restrained, but also a bit generic.
Ahead and down more steps was the gift shop. I went there first because that was what a not-very-artsy tourist might do. Also the various printed museum guides were a good way to get a preview of the building itself. I studied maps, struggling to make sense of the long corridors and the exhibit rooms, which ranged in size from suburban master bedroom, up to great echoing hangars housing the larger and gloomier works.
An Artful Assassin in Amsterdam Page 6
