‘The girl?’
‘Yes, your Hangwoman. I followed Delia and then I followed her.’
Delia and I were both a bit agape at that.
‘Bartender, get this young woman a drink,’ I said.
‘As soon as she was away from you she began texting. She went to the train station and boarded a train for Haarlem. After that, I returned to search for you, Delia, and when I found the apartment empty I assumed Mitre would be looking for alcohol.’
‘There are a lot of bars,’ I said suspiciously.
‘Yes, but fewer nearby where an older man would be comfortable.’
‘Older man? I’m fucking forty-two!’
‘Yes,’ Chante said, as Delia laughed too much.
‘Did she seem to meet anyone?’ Delia asked.
‘No. In all I only followed her for five minutes. I did not wish to be spotted.’
Delia sighed. ‘Well, that’s good and bad. Bad in that it expands the possible area in which she might be at any given moment; good in that we have a choke-point – the Haarlem train.’
‘Yeah, get some agents to watch the trains,’ I said with angry sarcasm to which Agent D reacted by not reacting. But I was getting so I knew Delia’s expressions pretty well, limited as they were, and it was probably just paranoia, but there was something just a little too blank. So I poked again. ‘I’m starting to see just how helpless you Feebs are without your armies of agents and your helpful local cops. God dammit, now I’m going to be burned in Amsterdam and I really like this city.’
‘You’re not burned; not yet,’ Delia said.
That’s only because you have not yet figured out what I’m planning, Delia, trust me, in the end I will be burned in this city. Thanks to you I lost Cyprus and now I’ll lose Amsterdam. Amsterdam, where approximately half the population are gorgeous tall blond women on bikes! Beautiful, dainty Amsterdam with its tall, narrow houses like so many cereal boxes stacked side by side. Amsterdam, a city with ten Michelin-starred restaurants, eight of which I had not yet visited. I said none of that, it wasn’t even entirely true, Delia wasn’t the reason for Hangbitch. But I was in the mood to be resentful and irrational. Resentful, irrational and paranoid, because my eye was drawn again to Mr Wig. He was one of those people you’re sure you don’t know, and are sure you have not seen, and yet …
Delia attracted the bartender who had decided to ignore me, and Chante ordered a Cognac. No one talked for a while, probably because I was giving off volcanic vibes.
‘She couldn’t be related in any way to USP One …’ Delia mused, breaking the silence and thinking out loud. ‘Extremely unlikely.’
‘Well, let’s hope she’s not related to the Chipster because you gave me an impossible job to do, Special Agent. What you’ve handed me is a police job. It’s a job requiring manpower. I cannot be on watch 24/7/365, in fact if I tried the cops would spot me and assume I was casing the place myself.’ I was being elliptical with Chante within earshot.
‘So … You’re giving up?’ She put a subtle sneer into that.
‘Really? You’re going to try and shame me?’
Delia turned to give me the full face with the eyes and the mocking lips. ‘David, believe it or not, I don’t want you to get hurt.’
‘We’re not talking about “hurt”, we’re talking about “dead”. Don’t play word games with a writer.’
She had nothing to say to that, just silence.
‘I’m not giving up,’ I said after a while. ‘I didn’t say I was giving up.’
‘No? Because honestly, David, you can. If you want to. This does change things, someone trying to kill you.’
‘I said I’m not giving up!’ I snapped. ‘You have succeeded in guilting me into it. Besides, I have an author panel …’
‘Right. Author panel. And that’s sacred to you, is it?’ Delia’s laugh drew the attention of Mr Wig who was at the far end of the bar working on a beer, and he did a clumsy job of pretending to be looking at something else. That was a bad move because Delia laughing would draw anyone’s attention; there would be nothing suspicious about looking her way.
‘Agent D, do you have people watching me?’
She frowned. ‘Do you see something or are you just being you?’ Which an acute observer might have noticed was not an answer.
‘Look in the mirror. Guy in the wig, past me, down the bar.’
‘Turtleneck? Really?’
‘I know, right? Fashion has taken a strange turn …’ I snapped my fingers. ‘Jesus Hippie!’ That required explanation. ‘Saw a hippie-looking dude eyeballing me the other day. Same dude was in the street when I spotted Hangbitch. I’d swear it was him but he had a massive, ugly ass tattoo on his neck.’
‘A tattoo that might be hidden by a turtleneck?’
‘Mmm. Yeah.’ I made a point of looking Delia right in the eyes. ‘Tell me, yes or no, and no bullshit, is he one of yours?’
‘No.’
‘Not one of your agents?’
‘Don’t play games, David.’
She looked at Jesus Hippie’s reflection in the mirror. ‘A turtleneck and a long wig? He’s hiding something. What side of his neck was the tattoo on?’
I thought about it, and then had to resist the urge to curse at myself. The tattoo had been on the left side. And it had extended further north than the edge of the turtleneck.
‘Fucking fake tattoo,’ I said. ‘Just the kind of thing you might apply to disguise a burn scar.’
Delia said, ‘Chante? Is there any way you could …? Never mind.’
But Chante, eager as a puppy to please Delia, insisted. ‘What is it?’
‘Nothing,’ Delia said. ‘Shall we settle up and—’
‘Delia wants to know if you can follow the guy in the wig. But she doesn’t want to be responsible for getting you in trouble. I, however, have no such qualms, mostly because we don’t so much need you to follow him as stay behind and watch to see if he follows us.’
I met Delia’s gaze and she silently acquiesced. We paid the tab and exited the bar. A minute later I got a text.
He follows.
I pulled the selfie trick, drawing Delia close as if we were a couple and taking the shot from a high angle. Chante was of course correct: Jesus Hippie slash Turtleneck Wig, was a block behind us.
I looked at Delia. She looked at me. And as if we’d rehearsed it, we both said, ‘Willy Pete.’
ELEVEN
In four days the Vermeer would be hung on a wall at the Rijksmuseum. In four days it would be vulnerable to the Ontario Crew.
Which meant I had four days – four! Four days to plan, prepare and execute an art theft. Way too much time had been taken up being almost murdered, beaten up and recovering from same.
Also, I should probably think of something clever to say at my bookstore panel on that same night, but that was a lower priority.
Part One, stealing the Vermeer, was complicated, but only because I wanted to raise my eighty percent probability of getting clear of the building to more like ninety-five percent. That extra margin would involve a lot of moving parts, some of which I’d already set in motion.
Part Two would be even more complicated. Because I wasn’t just going to steal the damned thing, I was going to commit a whole different crime at the same time. And also make a great deal of money.
Complicated.
The synonym for complicated in the world of crime is vulnerable. Each new complication was another moving part that might fail. And the odds of failure had risen dramatically with the realization that the Ontario Crew was watching me.
It wasn’t hard to figure out where they’d gotten the idea to watch me: the initial leak had to have come from a government source, and it was probably about Delia, not me directly. A lot of Feebs and Spooks are ex-military, and USP One, Daniel ‘the Chipster’ Isaac, sold weapons to the military. It would not be a surprise if he had connections in the CIA certainly, and probably in the Bureau as well. Politically connected billionair
es facing imminent death by COPD had ways of deploying their cash.
Several thoughts occurred: if someone in the FBI had leaked word that the Bureau was onto the Ontario Crew, how had that led to me? I was supposedly nothing more than a CI file number. The answer was mundane, of course: the leak had been about Delia, Willy Pete had followed Delia and Delia had led him to me. And I was an unknown property, someone the Ontario Crew would want to know about.
The more startling realization was that the Ontario Crew knew the FBI was onto them and yet they were still active. The fact that someone in the Bureau had leaked didn’t alter the reality that rational crooks did not commit their crimes while aware that the Feebs were on to them. You know, unless someone had basically buried them in a pile of money. Fifty million buys a lot of initiative.
The Ontario Crew had presumably done the same math Delia had. They knew we couldn’t rat them out to the Dutch. And they knew as well as I did that in the absence of wall-to-wall, 24/7 surveillance, they were pretty safe. But there was that wild card: me. I bore looking into.
I left Delia and Chante and walked off by myself, down through the Red Light District, De Wallen, the roughly two acres of bars and coffee shops and sex workers sitting in red-lit windows. I was not enticed by the several offers aimed at me, the most direct of which was from a scary hag who sang rather than said, ‘Fucky-fucky, let’s go fucky-fucky.’ This had the unfortunate effect of reminding me of rumpy-pumpy, which in turn made me wince as I remembered the abrupt way I’d shut Tess down.
My phone dinged. It was Delia.
Hey: Located Hangwoman.
Cool. Bit late tonight.
Yep. Tomorrow. Night. I’ll get a vehicle.
I checked the time. I’d left Delia an hour earlier in the café, so how had she suddenly discovered the Hangwoman’s location when all we had on her was a train and a terminal?
The explanation was inescapable: Delia had agents in town. Goddammit, she had people watching me. Professionals, too, or I’d have twigged them. Agents who must have watched from the shadows and followed either Hangwoman or Chante to the train station and then onto the train, leaving me in something of an emotional quandary: was I more angry at the presence of Feebs? Or more relieved that they’d followed Hangwoman to whatever rat hole she lived in?
I watched creepy dudes and prurient tourists eyeball the ladies until depression threatened and I headed for the apartment. Chante was asleep, a relief, because I was still too jazzed to sleep and wanted to work on my plan.
I sipped Talisker and fleshed out the details of my shopping list and contemplated the nature of my fucked-up life. I fell asleep on the sofa at some point and woke to the aroma of coffee and the sounds of Chante in the kitchen.
This time around at the Rijksmuseum I was not the corpulent, sporty dude with the bad mustache, I was the slow, stooped, gray-haired pensioner in a tan canvas jacket, worn thrift-shop shoes and a plaid flat cap. I established a pattern of taking lots of pictures, lots of video, even pics of things clearly irrelevant: lockers, steps, signs. The idea was to look like an easily dismissible old fart who didn’t really know why he was taking pictures of security cameras, guards, the mounting of various paintings, sight lines, distances, crowd concentrations, bathrooms, stairwells …
I retrieved my backpack from the coat check, plopped down in the museum café, ordered an open-faced sandwich and a Pellegrino and opened my newest (non-FBI) laptop. I opened Pages and started to walk the plan through, once again, step by step.
The museum was not going to be the problem, the problem was going to be a bunch of technical issues having to do with tracking Wi-Fi connections, stacking up alternate sites to use for broadcast, and the complex issues around money traveling over the internet. Also there would be some DIY construction work, not a strength of mine.
US Person Isaac lived in Las Vegas. That was a nine-hour time difference from Amsterdam. My ten a.m. would be Isaac’s one a.m. No good. My five p.m. would be his Pacific Time eight a.m. That was better – not much point in my plan if the Chipster slept through it all.
Five p.m. would be H-Hour. Six p.m. would be the first broadcast. Six p.m. here would be eleven a.m. in the media centers in New York. At that time the media would light up with the news while Isaac was eating his corn flakes in Vegas.
Plus, five p.m. would be rush hour, lots of people on the streets and canals, fewer in the museum and no school groups I’d have to worry about trampling.
I went over it again. And again.
1. The diversion(s).
2. The snatch.
3. The camera walk.
4. The dump.
5. The cameras again.
6. The exit.
7. The exterior diversion.
8. The boat.
9. The twelve-hour tick-tock.
10. The banking.
11. The reveal.
I groaned inwardly at the thought of the work still to be done and I shuddered at the thought of all that could go wrong. I had an exit plan in that event, but I wasn’t thrilled with it as it involved a great deal of bike riding, at the very least.
Could I build an alibi? If so, was that just gilding the lily? Should I line up a patsy? And would that be a case of buying trouble? Anyway, who was my patsy going to be, I didn’t know anyone in Amsterdam.
The old saw holds that armchair warriors talk tactics, while professional soldiers talk logistics. In the writing world, the corollary is that wannabes talk inspiration, while pros talk deals and options. A stick-up artist only thinks about the seventy-two dollars he’ll get from a liquor store and the meth he can buy with that money, but armed robbers are lazy and reckless. The professional thief does his homework, and his prep work. The professional plans for problems.
But so much prep work! And so little time.
And as to time, I was to meet Delia at six. Three hours.
In the intervening time I could start acquiring addresses. I typed in airbnb.com, checked map view and began to list properties that fronted the canals here in Amsterdam. Then a pair of properties, one in Antwerp the other in Düsseldorf, as safe houses in case it came to that.
The cost was getting ridiculous. I was spending money like water, burning carefully constructed identities along with their credit cards and passports, and, I reminded myself, it was not as if any of this was my idea. I’d been bullied into it.
I nurtured these grudges as a way to rationalize what I hoped would be an impressive payday. How impressive? That would depend. My net worth was right around two million in various accounts in places where banks didn’t ask questions. I might well double that. This could be a seven-figure score, and in real money, not discounted by a fence.
The FBI is regrettably pretty damned good at following the money, which meant I needed a way to discourage, slow down, even abort FBI interest in tracking my profits. Well, later for that. First, I had to get together with Delia and find my would-be killer and figure out just who wanted me dead. And how much they were offering to pay.
It was going to be humiliating if the price on my head was too low.
TWELVE
‘I have bitterballs.’
I twisted sideways and looked at my friendly, neighborhood FBI legat. ‘Are you aware that when you say things like that you put a huge strain on my maturity?’
‘Just trying to keep you awake, David.’
Surveillance is boring. We were staring at a building. Delia and I were in Haarlem, a city west of Amsterdam that functions as a bedroom community, though it apparently has a charming downtown, I wouldn’t know, I was a long way from the charm.
Delia had rented a small Toyota SUV for the mission and we were parked in a wide cul-de-sac that formed around a bleak, quarter-sized concrete soccer pitch. I imagine, this being the Netherlands, that in winter they hose it down and turn it into a hockey rink. But at this moment no one was playing anything. It was eight thirty, just after sundown in this northern city with a latitude closer to the pole than any
of the lower forty-eight states.
The cul-de-sac was formed by three-story apartment buildings and ended in a taller, seven-story red-brick building with generous balconies. Delia and I were parked on the street, facing the tall building, which, according to Delia, was where the Hangperson lived.
‘So, these bitterballen …’
She turned and rummaged around in the back seat and came back with two cardboard clamshells which, when opened, revealed five eyeball-sized, deep-fried balls.
‘One set is coconut curry, the other is, um, I think shrimp and … something. I also have this sauce which is, well … It’s green is what it is.’
I snagged one of each. Bitterballen are the essential Dutch bar snack, but as with Valentine’s Day chocolates, you can’t tell from the outside what’s inside. They were still warm.
‘Nothing sweet?’
‘I have a package of stroopwafels. Also cold canned coffee.’
Between us we finished off the bitterballen and half the stroopwafels, and we drank the coffee.
‘Aren’t you going to sneak a drink from your flask?’
‘Is that your way of asking if you can have some?’
‘You’re not?’
‘Not at work, Delia.’
‘Work.’ She didn’t find the word appropriate.
‘It’s work when you do it properly,’ I said, mostly out of boredom and a desire to pass the time in argumentation.
Delia was behind the wheel, I was riding shotgun, with the seat pushed all the way back and declined to a forty-degree angle. We each had a bottle of Evian. I had suggested smoking a cigar and Delia had threatened to punch me out if I did, so, no cigars. But I wasn’t actually going to indulge anyway – great clouds of blue-gray smoke rising from a parked car is not subtle.
Night was coming on fast.
‘Lights on in, what, nine, ten of them?’ I jerked my chin toward our target.
‘Mmm.’ She sat there, wrist draped over steering wheel, drinking cold coffee. I studied her profile. She was less guarded when she was looking away. Delia Delacorte claimed to have been born in Muleshoe, Texas, a fact I had not checked because if there was no such place I didn’t want to know.
An Artful Assassin in Amsterdam Page 11
