An Artful Assassin in Amsterdam

by Michael Grant

  ‘Got it. You want to melt the thing down so the Nazi assholes don’t get it, and you want to give the cash to your dad to buy off the thief. You figure this plan takes care of everyone. But the Nazis found out and told your dad if he didn’t stop you, they’d hurt him or you or both. It’s not about the gold for them, it’s about the Hitler.’

  Madalena shrugged. ‘They are very stupid. There is a legend, a story, yes? A story that their Führer will come back to life if this gold Hitler is returned to Salzburg.’

  ‘That is in Austria,’ Smit interjected, assuming as all Europeans do that Americans know nothing of geography. Generally a smart assumption.

  ‘Yes, I’ve been. Why Salzburg?’

  ‘Because it is Hitler’s birthplace.’

  ‘Ah.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Of course, they can’t actually believe that. I mean, granted these wannabe brownshirts are proof that evolution has a reverse gear, but they aren’t complete imbeciles.’

  ‘Some know better, many others do not and are easily led,’ Smit said. ‘They can perhaps be convinced to rally to a person who has such a sacred object.’

  ‘So this gold Hitler is a piece of the True Cross?’

  I didn’t expect either of them to get the reference but both nodded solemnly, in unison.

  ‘All right, so in this scenario, if I pretend to believe you, old Azevedo is getting squeezed hard. And you think your own father would give you up?’

  Madalena shrugged. ‘I have also a brother and a sister. I am sure they promise him not to hurt me just take the golden Hitler.’

  ‘If he’s doing that, why send me to find you?’

  ‘Because as you said, these skinheads are not intelligent. They did not find us.’ Smit looked down, unwilling to give offense. ‘You did. They must have followed you. They beat you to discourage you from further interest in us.’

  A very clear memory rose to my consciousness, the image of skinhead-looking dudes at the Rock Cave Bar. They’d known enough to look for Smit there and must have seen me following him. They must have thought I had made contact, perhaps suspected I had the gold statuette and beat me down to search for it.

  I had been followed. I had ridden a bike and yet I had somehow been followed. That realization did nothing for my self-confidence.

  ‘Where is this gold Hitler now?’ I asked.

  Neither of them liked that question. Four eyes narrowed suspiciously and Madalena muttered, ‘Vai pentear macacos,’ which I intuited was Portuguese for ‘go suck eggs’.

  ‘Ah, so that’s the heavy object in your bag.’ Not rocket science figuring that out.

  ‘You will not tell my father?’ Madalena asked and clutched her bag.

  ‘I won’t tell your father unless you bullshit me. If you’re straight with me, and you really are afraid of him being, um, indiscreet … Look, I am not in the business of setting people up.’ My mind was searching for ways to exploit the situation, but I had just enough IQ left over to consider how I was going to keep these two idiot idealists safe, what with having led skinheads to their door. That the skinheads had jumped me on my way back without promptly kicking in Madalena and Milan’s apartment door suggested they didn’t have the exact apartment number. ‘First things first, if skinheads know your location you need a change of location.’

  Smit made a helpless, ashamed look. ‘We have no money.’

  ‘Of course not,’ I muttered. I pulled out my phone and opened the Expedia app. ‘You know the hotel Amrath? It’s a gloomy old monstrosity, but it’s better than it looks. I know you’ve got aliases, Smit, do you have ID to go with any of those aliases?’

  He did. I booked him a room. It was €313 a night. I was beginning to wonder if Delia had a secret plan not to arrest me but to bankrupt me. But these two were my problem, not hers.

  ‘If you spend more than a hundred euros a day on room service, I’ll hand you over to the bad guys personally, you hear me?’

  Madalena and Milan both nodded.

  ‘You’re covered for a week. Take your gold Hitler with you, put it in a locked box of some sort and give it to the front desk to hold in their safe.’

  ‘No,’ Madalena said, eyes alight with an idea as she re-assessed me and, like so many of her insufficiently cynical sex, decided I was basically a good guy. ‘You must take it and keep it safe.’

  ‘No, no, that’s fine, I don’t really want a gold Hitler. It’s not even my birthday.’

  ‘My father he trust you,’ Madalena said.

  ‘The man you say was broken in prison and agreed to steal the goddamned thing and then set you up? That’s whose judgment you’re relying on?’

  But she was ignoring me and opening her backpack. I knew what was coming. And there it was.

  It was about the size of a large apple, an apple with a mustache that had gone completely out of style right around 1945. The gold looked sweaty. The features were not chiseled to a Michelangelo level, but it was competent work.

  What do you say when someone hands you a gold Hitler? What I wanted to say was, ‘keep the fucking thing’. But my recently re-awakened criminal instincts were tickling the back of my neck hinting at some potential use. Also it goes against my nature not to take gold. So I hefted the weight of the thing in my hand, looked into der Führer’s iris-less eyes and surprised myself and them by laughing.

  ‘Will you melt it, please?’ Madalena pleaded. ‘When it is destroyed we will be safe.’

  ‘Kid, the melting point of gold is north of a thousand degrees C, and my AirBnB does not come with a forge.’

  I turned it, looked at the profile, the fanatic’s brow, the iron determination indistinguishable from invincible stupidity.

  ‘We would be very grateful if …’ Milan said.

  ‘Yeah? Well, I may have a way for you to repay my generosity,’ I said. ‘And who knows, I may just have a use for Hitler. But if you want my help, let’s make something crystal clear.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You two belong to me. You’ll do what I ask, when I ask, and you’ll damn well do it properly.’

  FOURTEEN

  I dropped my new pals off at the Amrath, returned the rental car and grabbed a taxi back to the apartment with gold Hitler in my bag.

  When I got home I was surprised to find the place empty. No Chante. The door to her room was open – mostly – so I peeked in and no, she wasn’t there, either, which was good because Chante’s bathroom toilet had a cistern while the master toilet (to coin a phrase) was plumbed into the wall.

  I flitted into Chante’s room, went to her bathroom, lifted the toilet tank’s lid. Ah, the memories. Toilet lids were my madeleines, I’d sort of killed a guy with a toilet lid once. It had been self-defense and the guy was a scumbag, but it was the only time I’d taken a life, ruining my proud zero-homicides record. I had to fiddle around a bit to get Hitler properly situated in such a way that he would not obstruct the flushing mechanism.

  ‘Sieg heil, little buddy, you just sit right there.’

  I replaced the lid. Each time Chante flushed, Hitler would displace and therefore save a good cup or so of clean water, making me something of an eco-warrior. Saving endangered penguins, one cup of Hitler water at a time.

  I listened for Chante, heard nothing and passed quickly through her room.

  And then I stopped.

  Her laptop was open. She had a caffeine app turned on and had not manually re-set the power-down timer. No password required.

  Just a glance, I promised the wonderfully tolerant God to whom I make such promises, just a glance. Occupying most of the screen was an open email. An email from Nouvelle Revue Française, the French equivalent to the New Yorker, perhaps. In any event the kind of literary magazine that openly despised genre writers like me.

  It was a rejection letter.

  I read halfway through before realizing that fact – my French is fine, but lacks nuance. I read it again from the beginning.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ I muttered. There was a short sto
ry attached. I forwarded the email and attachment to one of my email addresses, then hid my tracks.

  I went to my room, closed the door, and opened the email. As rejection letters go, it wasn’t awful. For one thing, it wasn’t just a form letter; an editor had taken a few minutes to respond. He was encouraging, but not very. There was a suggestion that Chante needed more years on her, more maturity.

  ‘Don’t read the story,’ I ordered myself even as I opened the attachment. And read it. Of course I read it, I’m just me, not some better man.

  It probably wasn’t ready for the Nouvelle Revue Française, though I wasn’t sufficiently qualified in French to judge the prose to a very high standard. But Chante had put some heart into her story. She’d developed at least one interesting character and a couple of thin but competently detailed supporting players. The plot was meh, and it was a good two pages too long, but she was decent. Decent enough to someday be good. She had talent.

  I didn’t quite know how to process this revelation. I’d always known Chante was intelligent – she was too evil to be stupid. And I’d known she could cook and had a good singing voice but, well, come to think of it, I knew very little else about her. Her dad was Algerian and she was raised in Bayonne and she liked girls more than boys, which was sensible, so did I.

  An aspiring writer. In my apartment. In my life. It was horrifying, really, because in all the world there are three groups of humans toward whom I have some fellow feeling: waiters, crooks and writers. I preferred Chante as a simple object of irritation and useful scapegoat, and I didn’t want to have to start thinking of her as an actual human being.

  I dropped the email in the trash and emptied the trash. I never wanted her to know that I knew. As much as I disliked the girl, Chante was not a mark and even by my moral standards (rated five stars for flexibility) it had been uncool to creep her email. I knew things about her that she didn’t know I knew, and that power imbalance was a result of my bad behavior. So … wrong, I guessed. Almost definitely wrong.

  No wonder people never get anything done: trying to figure out right and wrong is exhausting.

  I’d long ago realized that my mind works differently. I think in straight lines. There’s where I am, Point A, and there’s where I want to be, Point Z. I do the math, calculate the shortest distance between those two points, and act accordingly.

  Normal people don’t seem to do that; they think they do, but they don’t. Half the time they can’t figure out either A or Z, and if they get that far they then spend enormous energies turning the bright, clear line into a game of Snakes and Ladders, wandering this way and that, trying to parse their own desires, the opinions of their friends and society at large, what would Jesus do, what would Oprah do, what would the parents think … It’s crazy. Find Point A, find Point Z, whip out your Sharpie and draw a line between them. Then, if you insist, you can consider secondary questions. But first: draw the line. Solution first, rationalizations later, for if you happen to get caught.

  But that’s me, and I have honestly begun to question whether I am entirely all right in the head.

  I left the apartment, grateful that Chante had not returned, and went for a walk, trending vaguely toward Centraal. I had a new toy, a new capability of the human kind, and if Willy Pete was around, I intended to test it.

  And there he was, the clever boy, back in his unconvincing Jesus Hippie Rasta gear: Willy Pete. He was on a bench aimed toward the canal, not like he was looking at me, nope.

  I texted Smit at the Amrath.

  Let’s see how good you are. There’s a pocket I need picked.

  The Amrath is a stone’s throw from Amsterdam Centraal and Smit responded quickly, eagerly even. He practically ran out the front door, possibly wishing to be helpful, possibly just desperate to get out of the hotel. Like I said, the Amrath is nice, but it’s also the place you’d expect to find Dracula if he were vacationing in Amsterdam.

  I did a shop window pause and confirmed that Willy Pete was tracking me, a block back.

  Smit spotted me, I spotted him and I texted.

  Walk past me.

  He did.

  See the white hippie dude?

  He did.

  I want to know who he is. ID. Credit cards. Careful: he might be dangerous.

  We were three seemingly unconnected points on a map, Willy the Jesus Hippie, Smit and me. My shadow was behind me, Milan was walking purposefully past, and I was turning south for Prins Hendrikkade.

  My shadow plowed right into Milan who did an excellent job of being knocked on his rear end.

  I slid into a Chinese restaurant, walked straight toward the restrooms, located the back door and exited into a courtyard rather than an alleyway. Here I faced three doors, two closed, one open. Two weary, greasy-looking cooks from an adjoining restaurant were catching a smoke.

  ‘Do you mind if I take a shortcut?’ I asked, and the twenty-euro note in my hand added weight to my request. Through the kitchen drenched in the aromas of curry and turmeric, through the half-filled dining room, and out the door onto Geldersekade (Gchelder-seh-kawduh). I beelined for Amsterdam Centraal yet again, time running short and confident that I was no longer being followed. Then my phone dinged. It was Milan. Starbucks has successfully invaded Centraal, so I dropped in there and took a table.

  Smit: The hippie is American. Edward Fabruzzi. Virginia driving license.

  Smit typed out the home address and date of birth.

  Me: Anything else?

  A photograph popped up in the text feed. A photo of credit cards arrayed up Smit’s arm.

  Me: Well done. Order yourself some room service Champagne.

  I was not concerned that Jesus Hippie wasn’t carrying ID for Carl Willard, Willy Pete’s true name, of course he’d be using an alias. But why a Virginia license? I Google-Mapped the home address on the license and checked Street View. The address was for a fifties-era bungalow in McLean, Virginia, a town which had absorbed another town. That second town being Langley.

  Langley, Virginia, an innocent-sounding place unless you knew that it was home to the CIA, and not the Culinary Institute of America CIA.

  I ran a real estate search on the property address. Until 1982 it had belonged to its original owner. Then it had been bought up by a corporation that looked an awful lot like a shell company: Libertree Holdings, a Bahamas-based corporation about which Google knew nothing more.

  An Agency mail drop and/or safe house.

  I’ve often sneered at Hollywood’s insistence that there exist super-hackers who invariably live in some darkened basement surrounded by glowing monitors and Star Wars action figures and can, with a few taps on a keyboard, casually hack anyone. Those people do not exist. What does exist, and in abundance, are guys who have access to credit records. I forwarded the picture of Willy’s credit cards to one such person along with the enticement: 500 $$$ if you have it in 20 minutes.

  I stood in line to order coffee and by the time it was ready, so was my source. It hadn’t taken him five minutes and my email lit up with charge-card spreadsheets. I scanned the list and had to laugh. On the first card, a Visa, was a Netflix account, the $9.95 paid out monthly, just like clockwork. And nothing else over the last eighteen months, then a flurry of charges first at Heathrow, then at Schiphol, and finally various restaurants and bars in Amsterdam.

  And, my, oh my, a hotel charge for the Ibis hotel out near Schiphol. I mapped it. Not just near the airport, about as near as you can get to the meeting of the A4, the A9 and the A10 highways. Easy to get to Schiphol, easy to hop on a freeway and scoot for Belgium or Germany. I approved of the tradecraft. But it was also a tell because of what it was not near: the port or the train station. The Ontario Crew were planning exfiltration by vehicle or possibly plane, but most likely vehicle, which suggested they intended once they made the grab to drive it from the Rijksmuseum south. I doubted they intended to really stop in at the hotel on their way, but they would want some place to switch cars, a place where they c
ould leave a vehicle parked for a few days without attracting attention.

  I texted back to my credit-bureau guy: Got a bank account for him?

  He did. An account under the Fabruzzi alias with nine hundred dollars and change in it.

  A Portuguese dude who’d done me a solid.

  Two fools with a Hitler statue.

  Some tangential Nazis.

  Two Dutch cops.

  A ‘friendly’ FBI agent who knew things she shouldn’t.

  A gang of professional thieves.

  A lunatic trying to kill me for money.

  A dying arms dealer in Las Vegas hung up on legacy.

  And now the CI fucking A?

  And I was going to do a panel and in my spare time steal a Vermeer from the Rijksmuseum and achieve true, criminal art?

  Insane. Pulling off a robbery when the local cops already had you on their radar? That was crazy. Pulling off a robbery when an ex-special forces dude with a possible connection to the CIA wanted to steal the same thing you were trying to steal? On the scale of stupid ideas, it was a good eight or nine on a ten-point scale.

  On the other hand …

  On the other hand, what if I pulled it off? What if I pulled it off despite Dutch cops and Willy Pete and Hangwoman and Tangential Nazis and maybe even the CIA?

  This was hubris of the worst sort, so I corrected with a dose of paranoia. If Delia had freelance watchers on me, and those watchers occasionally did freelance work for the CIA as well as the FBI, did that mean Delia and Willy Pete were working together? No, even my paranoid lizard brain wasn’t buying that. The obvious answer was that a certain group of dudes were for rent. They probably worked as private investigators or bodyguards or security people the rest of the time and picked up one-off freelance gigs.

  You didn’t keep the freelance muscle job if you forgot who you were working for. If Delia had watchers (she totally did) they’d be discreet at the very least. Which did not mean they wouldn’t chat among themselves, but probably within certain professional limits.

  I was thirty-six hours out from D-Day, at another go or no-go fork in the road. I had my flash mob and props. I had my toys either in hand or en route. I had my disguises. I had my accounts and my web portals. I would soon have my wheelchair. Ian and I would manage the DIY …