by René Appel
“One hundred percent chance he’s drinking himself stupid at the Van der Kruk,” she told them.
And, sure enough, they spotted a red Canta right around the corner from the Café Van der Kruk, on a side street where little had happened over the last few hundred years, other than a steady decline. The café itself was shabby enough to fit right in, nothing more than a room in which to sit and drink. In addition to the bar, there was a scattering of tables, each topped with a length of Persian carpet that wasn’t antique, just old. It was quiet inside.
The bartender was a heavy man with a few remaining strands of black hair combed over the top of his head and plastered to his scalp. He knew what Felix and Dirk did for a living before they even opened their mouths.
“Koos, you got company,” he called. “Cops. You been fucking the apes in the zoo again?”
Koos sat alone at a table next to a door along the back wall.
Dirk headed toward him. Felix stayed put by the front door.
“Relax,” said the bartender. “That’s the bathroom. No windows, no way out. And he can’t run, anyway.”
Fetty’s brother struggled to his feet. He was a little fellow with a deeply lined face and baggy pouches beneath his eyes. He staggered out from behind the table, and they saw that he dragged his right leg when he walked. He was clearly drunk.
“She send you after me?” he growled. “Jus’ ’cause I took a bottle of her whiskey? She don’t have enough to bitch about without that? I should’ve smacked her in the mouth with it and knocked that guy’s block off, the dirty yuppie.” He saw Felix looking at his leg. “Yeah, why don’t you take a picture? That fucking bastard knocked me from the deck down into the hold. I could’ve died. My knee never did heal right. And they said it was my fault I stuck a knife in him. And then my sister just totally wrote me off.”
“We’d like to talk with you about your sister,” said Felix.
* * *
They brought Koos back to his apartment, but once Dirk saw the condition of the place he insisted they go elsewhere. “This joint’s a pigsty! My dog would turn up her nose. And Brother Koos stinks to high heaven. Good thing your car’s already a wreck, Felix. At least it can’t get any worse. Come on, let’s take him someplace nice and quiet.”
Felix agreed. The only thing he could see in the apartment that wasn’t filthy was the opened bottle of whiskey on the table. He tried a cabinet door in the kitchen, looking for a glass, and his hand came away sticky. Koos apparently put things away without bothering to wash them.
“There’s no money here, so he can’t have stolen any,” Dirk said. Of course, Felix already knew where Fetty’s money was.
They saw Koos staring at the whiskey.
“Take it along,” said Felix.
Dirk wasn’t so sure. “You don’t think we’ll get in trouble?”
“He’s not going to tell anyone.”
It was a brief ride to the Palmgracht, with Koos in the backseat, a small glass of whiskey in his hand. Dirk sat beside him. Koos looked ready to fall asleep, but Dirk poked him in the ribs to keep him upright.
“Come on, pal. This ain’t a cab here.”
They listened to his story. Koos denied having killed his sister, but he showed no empathy or sorrow at her death.
“She was my sister, sure, but she was a nobody. Yeah, I grabbed her by the throat, but I didn’t hurt her. She shouldn’t’ve blown me off like she did. Wouldn’t even let me have a shot of her whiskey. But she called me, you know? I mean, I don’t have a phone, but she called my neighbor and had her go get me, and then she told me this big story how she’d come into a shitload of money, so now she could make it up to her bastard son. Well, fuck him, he don’t need money up in heaven, they taught me that in Sunday school. Now she can spend the rest of eternity up there with him. He can show her around, he’s been there long enough to know the ropes. That’s what I went to her place to tell her. ‘It’s not true,’ she whined, ‘it’s not true!’ I was lying, I wasn’t gonna get a cent of her money. What was I supposed to do, just sit there and take it?”
Dirk glanced at Felix. “You have any idea what he’s talkin’ about?”
“Hear him out.”
* * *
Back when Fetty had given birth, Koos was a merchant marine. Had Felix and Dirk ever heard of Bandar Abbas? A port city on the Persian Gulf. Hell itself couldn’t be hotter or grungier. When his ship docked there, he’d found a letter from his sister waiting with the news. It was months before he was back in Holland and got the story straight from his sister’s mouth.
“No kid and no money. They just kicked her to the curb, that fucking doctor and his fucking son. Stick your dick inside some dumb little girl, blame her for everything, and then take away her baby.”
He’d shown up at the doctor’s door and convinced the man to give Fetty two thousand guilders. Then they’d be done with each other forever. The only condition was Fetty had to come collect the payment herself.
“And she wouldn’t do it. Said it was blood money. I tried to talk her into it, but she flat-out refused. We could have shared it: a thousand guilders for her, a thousand for me. But forget about it. I should have choked the little cunt then.”
“But you waited almost forty years to do it,” said Felix.
“I always been able to look out for myself. I didn’t need her.”
“You got two years’ room and board from us,” Dirk said. “And the way I see it, pretty soon the state’ll be takin’ care of you again. Only I don’t think you’ll be sluggin’ down any more expensive whiskey for a while.”
Koos ignored the remark. “She won the lottery, she told me. And now she was gonna find her little boy.”
“The little boy you told her was dead?”
“Like I know if he’s alive or dead? But what else could have happened to him? She never heard a peep out of him, all those years. Wouldn’t you go look up your real mother, if it was you? Wouldn’t you? All she had to do was set some of the dough aside for me. But no, not her. Just show me the money, I said. Show me the ticket. It wasn’t none of my business, she said. You’d think she was scared I’d steal it. And then she started screaming I should get out. She wouldn’t even give me a damn drink.” He looked hungrily at Dirk, who was holding the bottle, and Dirk in turn looked at Felix. Who nodded.
“Okay,” said Dirk, “one more. Call it your last meal.”
While Koos drank, the two detectives left him alone.
“So now what?” said Dirk, once they had parked and gotten out of the car. “We’re supposed to believe the sister was still alive when he left?”
“He choked her,” said Felix. “He admits it, we both heard him say so. And his sister’s dead, no doubt about that. I say we arrest him on suspicion of manslaughter, book him, and charge him. The rest’s up to the court. Let’s go.”
“What about the neighbor?”
“He’ll testify he saw the brother leaving the apartment.”
Dirk glanced down at the bottle he was still holding. “And the whiskey?”
“Dirk, you’ve been a cop longer than me. The man confessed. He won’t complain we let him wet his whistle. The whiskey doesn’t come into it. Hand it over.”
Felix took it and poured it down the gutter, then tossed the empty bottle in a trash can, along with Dirk’s glass.
“What a crying shame,” said Dirk.
Felix knew it wasn’t just the liquor that was worth crying over, but he kept that thought to himself.
* * *
The lottery money had been paid out in five-hundred-euro notes. They were spread out on Felix’s kitchen table, a hundred of them. He gathered them together in a nice neat stack. It wasn’t his money, but whose was it? Did he now have a claim on it? He sighed and put the bills back in the safe with his gun.
He could have used a shot of whiskey, but all he had in the fridge was a bottle of Coke Zero.
“Here’s to you, Fetty,” he said aloud, standing at his front window
and raising a glass to the darkened apartment across the street. He was still thinking about the money.
He remembered a song his grandmother used to sing: Money isn’t happiness—at least it isn’t yet—but the more of it you gather, well, the closer you can get . . .
He realized that he was humming the tune. He reopened his gun safe and spread the bills out again on the table.
The television was on, and he looked up from the money to see an ad for the new Seat Ateca. Was that a sign from above?
The money’s rightful owner was dead. She didn’t seem to have left a will, so her estate—such as it was—would go to her legal heirs. No way that would be the son she’d given up for adoption, even if the boy—a man now, somewhere in his forties—was still alive. And the courts would disinherit the brother who had very probably been responsible for her death. Who did that leave? There was no written record of Fetty’s agreement with Felix. He had bought the lottery ticket, and he had cashed it in.
He sighed, once again piled up the fifty thousand euros, and locked them away.
“Fetty, I’m going to drink a whiskey in your memory after all,” he announced, taking his jacket from the coatrack. They carried Highland Park in the café up the street. He knew that from personal experience.
Maybe he’d just leave the money where it was for a while. Sometimes problems solve themselves, if you let them sit. Of course he knew better, but for now he was in no mood to go on thinking about it.
He pulled his apartment door shut behind him and headed down the stairs. The Westertoren’s carillon began to play. The bells tolled for everyone, but in Felix’s mind they rang for one old woman in particular.
THE STRANGER INSIDE ME
by Loes den Hollander
Central Station
Monday
Ted Bundy came again last night.
Ted always comes around midnight on Sundays, every other week for a year now. He says I’m his friend, his best friend. I’m proud of that. It’s great to finally have a friend.
* * *
Mother says I have to take a shower. She says she can smell me, and that other people will say I stink and blame her. Mother’s been nagging me more and more lately. She says I eat too many eggs. Eggs are bad for my cholesterol, according to her. The blood vessels in my brain will get all sludgy. She also wants me to go back to getting my meds by injection, because the pill I’m supposed to take every week is bad for my stomach. I don’t like needles, and the pills never actually get to my stomach. I don’t need them anyway, but try explaining that to someone who believes God knows best and medication can make the negative thoughts in your head disappear.
Mothers. There ought to be a law.
Against mothers and caseworkers.
* * *
I can’t stand anybody who has anything to do with the psychiatric profession. They think they know everything about your mental ability, they label you without any idea who you really are, they ask questions and arrange your answers in their spreadsheets, and—presto!—they slap you with a diagnosis you carry around for the rest of your life. And of course you’re stuck with them for the rest of your life too.
Caseworkers should all be exterminated.
* * *
My mission is scheduled for this Thursday. The woman will be wearing a short brown leather jacket, a tight black skirt, black stockings, and high-heeled black boots. She’ll have long blond hair, and here’s the important thing: it’ll be parted in the middle. Ted really made a point about that middle parting.
The place: Amsterdam’s Central Station, track 13B. The time: Thursday, between 11:30 a.m. and 2:37 p.m. Not one minute sooner, not one minute later.
Ted knows he can count on me.
* * *
The first time he came was the night before my eighteenth birthday. I woke up and saw him standing in a corner of my bedroom.
I wasn’t surprised, and I was aware that I wasn’t. It would have been normal if I’d screamed and run out of the room, because I can really overreact when I’m startled. Instead, though, I just lay there in my bed and folded my hands behind my head and asked him who he was.
“They call me Ted Bundy,” he said.
“Is that your name?” I asked.
“I was born Theodore Robert Cowell, but it was changed to Bundy when my mother married a loser and he adopted me. You can call me Ted.” There was laughter in his voice.
“What’s so funny?” I wanted to know.
“Me, being here. You, letting me in.” He looked at me with an intense expression in his eyes. “Letting me inside you, do you understand?”
I didn’t.
It got very quiet in my room, and I didn’t know what he expected of me.
He came closer. “They stopped me,” he said. “I want you to pick up where I left off.”
At that moment, I heard Mother in the bathroom. I turned my head toward the sound. Water ran out of the tap, then stopped. The toilet flushed.
When I turned back, Ted was gone.
* * *
Anja, the psychiatric caseworker I have to see every month, always asks me if I hear voices or have visitors. She wouldn’t ask that if I’d just ignored Mother always grilling me about who I talk to late at night. But I had to go and tell her someone was coming to see me, someone she couldn’t see. She should have known that was private information, not something she was allowed to pass on to anyone else, but Mother doesn’t understand things like that. It doesn’t surprise me when every man she goes out with winds up dropping her. What does surprise me is that, with all those guys, she’s only had the one child: me.
Mother lives in a world of her own.
I don’t give the caseworker a hard time. I’m polite, I answer her questions, I tell her I take my penfluridol every week. It’s important I stay calm when she asks me trick questions. I know for a fact she’s trying to trap me.
Tuesday
Ted told me about track 13B months ago, and today I went to take a look at it.
Mother had a migraine this morning and stayed in bed. She can’t stand the least bit of light or sound when she gets a migraine, so I shut the living room drapes, made sure the windows were latched, and disconnected the doorbell. Then I snuck out of the house.
She didn’t come right out and say so, but she made it clear that the migraine was my fault. In her indirect way, she let me know that I’d disturbed her sleep by making a racket until all hours, not even quieting down when she banged her cane against the wall that separates our rooms.
See, Ted showed up again last night, which was a surprise. When I realized he was there, I tried to make a joke: “Don’t you have days of the week up there in Eternity?” I asked him, but I don’t think he got it. I backed away from his angry reaction and apologized profusely. He raised his voice, and that made me start screaming. When Mother wouldn’t quit banging on the wall, I begged him to calm down. I lowered my voice and began asking him questions. Open-ended questions, full of empathy. That helped.
He was clearly in the mood to talk, and to brag. Full of pride, he told me that, right before his execution, he confessed to more than twenty murders, but in fact his count was much higher. He explained what it had meant to him, the kidnapping, the raping, the killing, and he especially wanted me to understand how much he missed it, and how happy he was to be able to enter into me, and we were going to be a team. An amazing team that would always be there for each other.
I was so touched.
I feel this powerful connection to Ted, because we’re both children of unwed mothers and we never knew who our fathers were. That’s why I don’t think it’s weird that he picked me to be his special friend. And that’s why I’ll do whatever he tells me to. I won’t be surprised if he shows up every night this week, though he didn’t promise that he would.
He’s always welcome.
* * *
I go into the Central Station by the main entrance. The gates from the main hall to the tracks never close, so I can
walk right through.
There are two women in front of me, and they keep looking around. I go past them as quickly as I can and hug the right side of the expansive shopping area. First I check to make sure all the stores are in the right order. De Broodzaak: check. Swirls Ice Cream: check. Smullers: check. The Amstel Passage is closed. The Döner Company: check. No changes, so that’s good.
There are two sets of fifteen steps up to track 13B. I have to be sure to remember to count them again when I come down.
* * *
My mission is so exciting! I can feel that it’s all going to go just right for once. The woman I’m supposed to look for will be there. Everything will work out perfectly. I know it, and that sense of certainty makes me happy.
I’ve never been so happy in my life.
* * *
The man is only a few feet away from me, and I can smell his cigarette. “There are special smoking areas,” I say, and I point to the standing ashtray not far off. He inhales deeply and blows a white cloud at my face.
I lower my head and count to ten. Every time Ted gives me a mission, he tells me not to raise my voice and not to argue with anyone. If I say something to this man . . .
I count to twenty.
I feel like Ted is watching me, but I can also feel Anja’s eyes aimed in my direction. Let that frustrated caseworker find herself another victim! A piece of advice: make it somebody who’ll give her a good roll in the hay. Somebody her big boobs will make all horny.
“Watch where you’re going,” a voice beside me snarls.
I’m standing next to a woman whose buttons are practically popping off her blouse. I mumble an apology and walk away.
As I approach the stairs, I see a woman in a short brown leather jacket coming toward me. Black skirt, black stockings, black high-heeled boots. Her long blond hair is parted in the middle. But it’s only Tuesday.
I hurry down the thirty steps.
* * *
