by René Appel
With a little maneuvering, it was possible to squeeze both his Cordoba and the cargo bike into the space. The upstairs neighbor complained that this made it practically impossible for him to get his bicycle in and out, but he was one of those Amsterdammers who have raised complaining practically to an art form.
Felix saw that the woman from across the street was standing beside her cargo bike, her back to him, and he got out of his car to see if she needed help.
“You just getting back or heading out, Iris?” he asked.
His voice startled her, and she whirled to face him. “Felix! Have you heard the news?”
“Are congratulations in order?”
He knew she was being considered for a promotion to a senior position at the bank where she worked, but various factors were delaying a final decision. Maybe she’d finally gotten the approval she was hoping for.
But he let go of that idea when he saw the expression on her face.
“You haven’t heard,” she said, and began to cry.
“Hey, what’s wrong?”
She was still wearing her work clothes, and she wiped away tears with the sleeve of her gray pin-striped suit. What could have happened? One of the kids fell down the stairs? Her husband got caught messing around with one of her girlfriends?
“Fetty’s dead.”
“Dead?” He felt a shock ripple through his body, and for a moment he found that he couldn’t breathe. Fetty couldn’t possibly be dead. He had a thick wad of cash for her inside his jacket pocket.
His hand went to his chest, and he felt the bulge of the money. Was it possible for a pile of bills to have stabbed him? The pain slowly ebbed.
“What are you saying? Fetty’s dead?”
“It’s so awful!”
She had no idea how awful it was. The lottery money belonged to Fetty, the neighbor he’d expected to see leaning out her window. It was no wonder she was called Fetty. She was shapeless and fat from head to toe, and she could barely make it down the stairs to the street. Felix was one of the neighbors who ran regular errands for her. Aunt Corrie, who lived right next door, helped with the everyday chores, and Felix took care of Fetty’s weekly luxuries. Every Saturday, he stopped at the cigar store to buy her two packs of Stuyvesants. Filtered, she always reminded him, as if she was afraid the company might have suddenly started manufacturing unfiltered Stuyvesants. So, two packs of smokes, with filters, a copy of the weekly magazine My Secret, and two scratchers. The lottery tickets always had to be Lucky Sevens, because—according to her—that was her lucky game.
Her invariable habit was to open one of the packs of cigarettes in his presence and offer him the first Stuyvesant, which he always politely refused, at which point she lit it and smoked it herself, taking shallow puffs that she immediately exhaled. One of his aunts had smoked exactly the same way.
The next part of their Saturday-afternoon ritual was her asking him for a coin, which she would use to eagerly attack her scratchers. Meanwhile, Felix would page listlessly through the new issue of the magazine, which seemed more often than not to be filled with stories of pregnant women who weren’t sure if the baby was their husband’s or the neighbor’s and other nonsense that would, in his opinion, have been better kept secret.
Their routine usually ended with Fetty’s disappointed cry: “No luck!” This time, though, their visit had unfolded differently.
Felix thought at first that she’d had a heart attack. But her explosive reaction turned out to be pure excitement, not a medical emergency.
“Felix, look! Two fifty-thousands! My God, all those zeroes! And look, the last number ends with zeroes too. It can’t be another fifty thousand, can it? I can’t look. You finish it for me.”
He had scratched away the last bit of foil, and the two of them sat there and stared at the winning ticket looking back up at them from the table. The winning ticket Felix had taken to The Hague and cashed in for his housebound neighbor.
“It’s a winner! A winner!” Fetty had screamed, and she’d grabbed Felix by the arms, hauled him up from his chair, and danced around him like a schoolgirl. “We won! We won!”
Later, he’d run into Aunt Corrie on the street. “You two were certainly kicking up a rumpus,” she’d said. “I was afraid the glasses in my kitchen cabinets would get smashed. Did she have a little too much to drink, Felix?”
“Now, Corrie, the woman’s entitled to a little fun once in a while,” he’d said. And that was where he’d left it. He wasn’t going to tell the neighborhood Fetty’d won fifty thousand euros.
* * *
“Vladimir’s still at the police station. I thought you were him a minute ago. Why are you wearing your uniform? He called me and told me he had to go with the detectives, so I should pick Max up from his piano lesson. I wasn’t expecting to go out again, I didn’t even have time to change. I just put on some sneakers, and here I am. I must look ridiculous.”
Felix had noticed the bright red sneakers. They were indeed a sight, but he was more interested in her husband.
“You’re telling me Fetty didn’t just die on her own? And Vladimir had something to do with it?”
“No, of course not. He just found her. And then the police came.” She hesitated. “Is it true Fetty came into a lot of money? Vladimir said he heard she won the lottery.”
Felix had worried Fetty wouldn’t be able to keep her good fortune to herself. “Was Fetty killed?” he asked. “Is that why the detectives were here?”
Iris began to cry. “I don’t know,” she said. “Aunt Corrie told Vladimir she thought Fetty was in clover. I’m not sure what that means—I still don’t understand a lot of your Amsterdam slang. I just want to know when Vladimir’s coming home. He called me at work, I was in the middle of a meeting. He said there was a funny little car outside the building, a handicapped car. What are those things called?”
“You mean a Canta?”
“That’s it. He thinks we ought to buy one, because you can park on the sidewalk, then we wouldn’t need to bother you with the cargo bike. What am I supposed to say to that? Anyway, I was in a meeting, I couldn’t really talk. And then he called back and said he had to go with the policemen because they found Fetty dead.”
“They?”
“Him, I mean. But I don’t know for sure. All I know is Max is waiting. I have to call his piano teacher. But first I want to hear Vladimir’s voice.” She looked straight at him, wiping tears from her eyes with her sleeve. “Felix, can you call the station for me? You’re a cop. Maybe they’ll tell you something.”
“You already tried? Did you call Vladimir’s cell?”
“Yes, but he didn’t pick up. And the woman at the station wouldn’t tell me anything. She said they don’t give information over the phone.”
“You go fetch your son,” Felix told her. “I’ll see what I can do.”
* * *
“I still dream about him,” Fetty had said when she was finished dancing and dropped, breathless, back into her chair.
She was so excited she tried to light the filtered end of a Stuyvesant, but Felix stopped her just in time. He wasn’t sure who she was talking about.
“He’s in trouble, and I can’t help him. Can you believe it, Felix, sometimes I wake up sobbing? But now I really can help him.” She fell silent, gazing straight ahead, beginning to sniffle. “If I only knew where he was,” she said. She grabbed Felix’s arm. “You’re a detective. You know how to find a missing person. And I have money now. You can help me. You can find my little boy for me. You’ll do it, won’t you?” She’d let go of his arm and picked up the ticket, stroking it like a pet.
He sat there and listened to the story. Long ago, Fetty had been a live-in maid for a doctor and his family, and one of the doctor’s sons had gotten her pregnant, then denied ever having touched her. The family was Roman Catholic, and the boy’s father had refused to help her. It was too late to end the pregnancy, and she didn’t know where to turn. The father’s patient list included
a home for unwed mothers, run by nuns, and he made arrangements for them to take her in, which at least was something.
“And that’s where you gave birth?”
Yes, but she couldn’t remember a thing about it. According to Fetty, they had sedated her. It was better that she never even see the child, they told her. She had to sign a paper giving up custody. God had arranged for the baby to be taken in by a good family, they said. That would erase the shame the devil had caused by putting the child inside her in the first place.
“I woke up, and they acted like nothing had happened. I lay there weeping for days. They were witches, Felix, but there was one nun who took pity on me. She told me she had prayed for God to look after my son.”
He understood that the events she was recounting had taken place forty years in the past.
“You can give him the money, Felix. And keep some for yourself, for your trouble. I trust you. You’re the only one I can ask for help. People tell you things. You’re a policeman.”
She was being overly optimistic. In fact, most people had a tendency to say nothing when a cop showed up at their door.
“Here,” she’d said, “you take the ticket. You know what to do. I’m counting on you. Help me find my little boy.”
* * *
Felix swung his garage door shut and looked across the street. There was nothing left to be seen of the day’s drama. The ruffled sheets still hung in Fetty’s front window. Not long ago, someone farther up the street had passed on. Everyone knew about it, because the curtains had been taken down and white sheets hung in the windows. Many of the longtime residents said the Jordaan wasn’t the Jordaan they remembered anymore, but the old customs linger.
The Westertoren’s bells began to ring. It was the day of the weekly concert, Felix realized. Life went on. The carillonneur was known to be a Beatles fan. The bells played John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Yes, indeed, imagine . . .
Only then did he notice that someone in the house next door to Fetty’s was waving at him. Aunt Corrie, naturally. She saw him notice her and opened her window.
“Felix,” she called, “I’m coming down!”
Fetty had been fat and shapeless, where Aunt Corrie was fat but big-boned with more hair, which she dyed blond and wore piled atop her head. An Amsterdammer, Felix knew intuitively which women to call Auntie and which were Ma’am. Explaining the difference to an outsider would be a mission impossible.
Aunt Corrie’s eyes were puffy from crying. “Oh, Felix, I can’t believe it, gone just like that. And then the police at my door and that young man from up the street—what was he doing there? You must know all about it, don’t you?”
He could tell she was angry at herself for not immediately rushing next door to gawk. She’d been in her bedroom vacuuming and had heard screams, but she’d thought they were coming from the television, which was tuned to one of those shows where a host brings on people who are embroiled in some kind of family feud and knows exactly how to stoke the fire. By the time she returned to her living room, another program had begun and the racket had stopped. She’d looked out her window and seen Iris’s husband go in Fetty’s door. And then, later, a police car had pulled up outside.
“Well, that’s when I knew there was something wrong. But who could have guessed what it was? That poor woman. She’d finally hit the lottery, she told me so herself. You don’t think that had anything to do with it, do you, Felix? I hope not. She sent me out to buy a ridiculously expensive bottle of liquor for her. Usually, she only drank lemon gin. But she’d written the name of it on a piece of paper for me, otherwise I never would have remembered. A bottle of Highland Park whiskey, she wanted. You don’t buy something that pricey if you haven’t had a real windfall.”
She pronounced the name of the whiskey Higg-land, but he understood what she meant. It was his favorite brand. Fetty had asked him what she could give him as a thank you.
* * *
Aunt Corrie was not impressed with Iris’s husband. Neither was Felix. He’d always had the idea that Iris was the breadwinner in that family, and no idea whether or not the husband worked at all. He was certainly a world-class gabber. He’d told Felix once that he was named after a famous writer, and the implication was that he too was destined for great things.
“Vladimir,” he’d said, “after Vladimir Nabokov. Maybe you heard of Lolita? He wrote that. My father was a big fan of him.”
Felix had stood there and listened, though he had no idea why the man was telling him the story. It was not a good idea to arouse the suspicions of a detective. So Felix had done some sleuthing and discovered that the man’s middle name was Ilyich, which suggested that he had in fact been named after Lenin, not Nabokov. Of course, that didn’t mean he would harm a hair on his neighbor’s head. But Felix knew anything the man said had to be taken with a grain of salt.
“Iris is worried about her husband,” he explained. “He called her and said there was a Canta parked on the sidewalk.”
“A red one?” asked Aunt Corrie. “That must have been her brother Koos. He’s got a bad leg, so they let him drive one of those little things. But I thought they weren’t speaking, I haven’t seen him around in forever. Was he here?”
Felix didn’t know. Fetty had been a good woman, according to Aunt Corrie. But her brother was a scoundrel, only showed up when he needed money. Money for booze.
“Was he here today?” Corrie asked again.
Felix said the only thing he knew was that a handicapped car had been spotted in front of the house.
“I’m surprised he hasn’t sold that little car for booze by now. It must have been Koos. Funny I didn’t see him.”
* * *
He’d stashed the lottery money in his gun safe and hung his uniform in the closet. Back in civilian clothes, he was on his way with his colleague Dirk Blokdijk to the farthest corner of the Jordaan, just past the Palmgracht. Given that gracht is Dutch for canal, you would expect the Palmgracht to be a waterway, but the original canal had long since been filled in, and all that was left of it was the name.
“You went to the funeral?” said Dirk, a sturdy detective who preferred dogs to people. “And then came home to a dead neighbor? Some job we got, right? But whatever, we just keep on keepin’ on. So where’s this Koos Jollema you want to talk to?” He leaned out the Cordoba’s passenger window and yelled, “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Then he turned back to Felix. “Just Koos, huh, no middle name? His baby sister had one: Fetty Sjoukje Jollema.”
Felix had always assumed that Fetty was a nickname. Amsterdammers loved nicknames, and one look at Fetty told you exactly where hers had come from. In fact, he’d always thought she was called Fatty, just spoken with an Amsterdam accent.
“An original Frisian name, Felix, a name to be proud of.”
It sounded like Dirk might himself have Frisian blood in him.
“Supposedly died of a heart attack.”
Which might well have been the end of the story, except the case had turned out to be not quite that simple. The coroner found bruises on her throat, and her apartment had been ransacked.
“And we caught a guy goin’ through the place.”
The guy was Vladimir. The officers who’d responded to the call had found him in the living room. Fetty lay stretched out on the carpet, and Vladimir was digging around in an open drawer.
“He handed us this bullshit story that some other guy had threatened him with a bottle right outside the dead lady’s door, then took off in a handicapped car. He’d been walkin’ past the house when he heard a scream, which is why he went up, to make sure the neighbor lady was okay. So what were we supposed to make of that, Felix? We stuck him in a holding cell so he could think over his story. Anyway, we were too busy with other cases to deal with him, if I can call this a case.”
“His wife says he wanted to ask the man about his Canta. She’s worried about him.”
“I was locked up in a cell, my wife would worry too.”
> “You could have let him call home and tell her what was going on.”
“Come on, Felix. We’re cops, not the Salvation Army.” Dirk gave him a sidelong glance. “You knew Fetty. She have anything worth stealin’ tucked away in her drawers?”
How was Felix supposed to answer that question? Instead, he avoided it. “Let’s see what the brother has to say for himself. What was he doing there? He hadn’t been to see her in years.”
“What I hear, he’s not the kind of guy you invite over for tea. He’s done time, Felix, two years for aggravated assault—way back when, but still. Not to mention several arrests for public drunkenness.”
* * *
Koos Jollema lived at the end of the Lijnbaansgracht, the slender canal that formed the western border of the Jordaan. The city wall had once stretched along the far side of the canal, but in later years it had been replaced by a long row of cheap rental units squashed side by side.
There were plenty of similar one-room apartments in the Jordaan too. They were claustrophobic little dumps, which was why so many of their residents spent much of their time in the neighborhood cafés. Which, according to one of his neighbors, was where they were bound to find Koos.
