Amsterdam Noir

by René Appel

  So that’s the cash.

  Patrick just sits there.

  I tap the back of his head with the end of the gun barrel. “Pat,” I say, “drive.”

  He says he’s not afraid of me.

  Sayid, sitting next to him, looks from him to me and back again.

  “Pat,” I say, “you gotta drive.”

  “I’m not afraid of you,” he says again, like the weird robot he is. I figure that’s another reason he got this gig with the Pakis. He’s so white he’ll never get pulled over, and he’s a weird robot you can’t scare.

  I point the piece at Linda.

  Patrick watches in the rearview mirror. “Don’t hurt her,” he says.

  I tell him Linda wants to marry him, but I’ll blow her brains out if he doesn’t drive.

  Patrick starts the Focus and drives, and Linda says now she wants a thousand euros.

  * * *

  Patrick drives, and Sayid looks at me and says, “Where we going, man? Where the fuck we going?”

  I say we need to find a good place.

  Sayid says I ain’t given this enough thought. “Shit, G, you shoulda thought about this.”

  “You didn’t think about it either, did you?”

  He says he ain’t the brains of the outfit.

  I say I never said I was neither.

  Linda sighs.

  “Turn right,” I tell Patrick, but he doesn’t listen. He keeps going straight.

  I push the gun into the back of his neck. I tell him he better listen or I’ll blow his brains out.

  He don’t react, just drives straight ahead. We come to the intersection with Meer en Vaart, and he finally pulls into the right lane. Off to the left are the new apartments where the rich white people live. To the right are the old buildings on the Ruimzicht where they used to live.

  “Okay, good,” I say.

  “I’m not doing it because you say so,” he says. “I’m doing it because it’s my job.” He turns onto Meer en Vaart, the cop shop on the right, and I jerk the piece down behind his seat. I tell him in a second I’ll aim it back at his head.

  Sayid turns around and rests his arm on the back of his seat and glares at me. “In a second you’ll aim back at his head?”

  “Come on, gangster, we know Patrick, right?”

  He says what difference does that make. “For fuck’s sake, man, we’re ripping him off!”

  Patrick says he knows us too.

  “That’s logical,” I say. “We all know each other.”

  He says that means we’ll have to kill him. Otherwise, he’ll turn us over to the cops. He downshifts for the red light at the Osdorpplein.

  Sayid looks at me and nods. “He’s right,” he says.

  Patrick drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “I have to do my job,” he says.

  I push the gun deeper into his neck. “Pay attention,” I say. “Make a right.”

  “I’m going straight,” he says. “I’m going to the Lelylaan, and then I’m getting on the ring road, and then I’m driving to Rotterdam.”

  A car pulls up beside us, so I lower the piece again. The light turns green, and Patrick drives straight ahead.

  I tell him, “It’s time for you to get scared, Patrick.”

  “I’m scared already,” he says. “But not of you.” He looks in his rearview mirror.

  “What?” says Sayid.

  I turn around and see a big black Dodge Ram behind us. It’s so close all I can see is the front grill.

  “The fuck,” I say. “Who’s that? Who the fuck is that, Patrick?”

  “That’s the people I work for.” He drives on, doing exactly the speed limit. Ahead of us is the back edge of the Osdorpplein, where a little while ago we were sitting at Mickey D’s, which we never should have left. We definitely shouldn’t’ve done this. To our left is the narrow side of the Sloter Lake. The water is black as death.

  “Speed up,” I say. “Now!”

  He says he’s going to do his job just the way they told him.

  “Patrick, I got a fucking gun here.”

  He says he’s not afraid of my gun.

  Behind us, the Dodge Ram’s engine races.

  Linda screams again—I forgot all about her. I point the piece at her. “Patrick,” I say, “I’m gonna shoot Linda in the face. Now go.”

  Patrick hits the gas. Linda and I are thrown back in our seats, and she swats the piece aside. “Just stop it,” she says. Then she turns to the laundry bag behind her and unzips it. Bundles of pale purple paper: five-hundred-euro notes. “What’s all this?”

  “It’s money,” says Patrick.

  I look behind us. We’re about sixty feet ahead of the Dodge, but he’s coming up fast. Patrick’s Ford Focus is about as speedy as a horse and buggy.

  Patrick runs a red light and somebody honks. He turns left into the Lelylaan. He looks over his shoulder at Linda and says he took this job for her. “I’m doing this for you, Linda.”

  Linda, meanwhile, is holding one of the bundles of money in her hands. “There has to be at least ten thousand euros here,” she says. “At least.”

  The Dodge is right behind us again, its motor growling.

  I take the packet of bills away from Linda and stuff it in my jacket pocket. “You get two hundred,” I say.

  The Dodge comes up and nudges our rear bumper.

  I see Patrick looking at her in the mirror, and he says, “Are you getting paid for this?”

  “Of course,” she says.

  Patrick jerks the wheel to the left and we shoot off the asphalt onto the tram tracks that run down the middle of the Lelylaan. Both the 1 and the 17 trams use these tracks but we’re in luck, they’re unoccupied at the moment. Off in the distance, though, I see a blue tram coming our way, and the Focus skids across the rails and bottoms out, steel scraping steel, but we keep on going and bounce onto the asphalt on the other side of the tramline where the traffic’s coming toward us from the city center, and the cars jam on their brakes, their headlights lighting up the inside of the Focus. We go off the road onto the grassy hill that slants down to the lake, then roll down the slope doing at least fifty. I look back, and the Dodge is coming after us, but the tram that was approaching is there now and it smashes into the side of the Dodge and I think about a story I heard once about how some tram conductors, who get a week off to recover after an accident, don’t bother to stop when there’s a car in their way. I practically shit my pants, but I’m still thinking about that story.

  We roll down the grass and Patrick steers the Focus to the left and onto the footpath that runs along the shoreline, past the tall letters they put there—I amsterdam, with the I and the am in red and the sterdam in white, so it sort of says, I am Amsterdam, ha ha, so the tourists who accidentally wind up out here know they’re really still in the city—and across the water I can see the apartments on Ruimzicht where we used to think the rich people lived and now there’s a bag on the rear seat beside me with two million euros in it.

  “Where we gonna go, man?” asks Sayid, turning to me from the front seat. Then he looks past me to see if the Dodge is still there, but the Dodge has been rammed by tram 17. A kid on a bike in front of us swerves out of our way and onto the grass. From the light we’re shining on him, I can tell our right headlight is out.

  I got the piece in my right hand, and with my left I pat my pants pockets ’cause that’s what I always do when I’m thinking. I can feel my keys, and in my head I go through it: my place, my aunt’s place, the storage unit. The storage unit. We have a storage unit for the shit my old man sells at the market, and that’s the perfect place to hide a bag full of money, in the middle of all those other bags that look exactly the same. I say we’re going to the storage unit. I rest the barrel of the gun on Patrick’s shoulder and tell him we gotta go to Slotervaart.

  He says he’ll decide where we gotta go. “My life is meaningless now,” he says.

  “You’re full of shit, man,” says Sayid.

  P
atrick comes to a stop on the sidewalk when we’re back on Meer en Vaart. In front of us there’s a row of duplexes that must have been pretty nice once upon a time, but now their balconies are all overflowing with crap. There are lights on in a couple of the apartments, though most people ain’t home yet. Most people are still in their cars on either side of us. Everyone who passes stares at us: a car parked on the sidewalk, only one headlight working.

  “My life is meaningless,” Patrick says again. “I was saving up so I could ask Linda to marry me. But now I don’t trust her.”

  Sayid and me both look at Linda. She stares right back at us. “What?” she says. “I did what you told me. I can totally be trusted.”

  I ask her if she’s sure she don’t want to marry this guy. She shakes her head. He sees her do it in the rearview mirror.

  Sayid asks, “Pat, how much you saved?”

  “Twelve thousand,” he says.

  “He’s got twelve thousand euros saved,” I tell Linda.

  “How much did you want to have before you asked me?”

  “Twenty thousand.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” says Linda.

  “I’ll never get it now,” says Patrick. “I’m out of a job.”

  “That’s a shame,” says Linda.

  I say he needs to head for Slotervaart.

  Patrick looks back at Linda. “You don’t think twelve thousand’s enough?”

  She’s sitting next to a bag with two million in it. Patrick told us he carries two million every trip. She shrugs. “Maybe.”

  Sayid and I look at each other. I can see from his face he’s trying not to laugh. I can also see from his face he’s trying not to cry. He’s scared.

  In the mirror, I can glimpse what’s happening on Patrick’s face too. He’s gotta figure this shit out, but he don’t know how. “Come on, Pat,” I say, “be smart. We’re gonna stash this bag someplace safe. You’re gonna lose your job anyway, we might as well be smart, right?”

  He turns around in his seat and looks at me. He says I’m right. We might as well be smart, he says.

  He sits up straight.

  “Let’s go to Slotervaart,” I say.

  “Let’s not go to Slotervaart,” says Patrick, and I can hear from his robot voice I might as well stop telling him where to go, even with the gun I got from Abdulhamed stuck in his ear. He inches his Ford Focus into the traffic on Meer en Vaart and heads back in the direction of Osdorpplein.

  I look off to the right, at the Sloterplas, that weird manmade lake in the middle of Amsterdam New-West you have to drive all the way around to get anywhere. When we were kids, we used to swim there, because our parents wouldn’t give us money for the public pool where all the white kids went, so us brown kids were the poor schmucks who had to settle for the dirty green water of the lake. Us poor schmucks with our brown skin who loved the white kids, because the white kids got to go to their activities in their old man’s car, activities maybe their old man took them to because us brown kids were hanging out on all their streets and squares.

  Poor schmucks, I think, looking at the Sloterplas while Patrick drives, this weird autistic guy, my pal beside him, me on the backseat with some dumb bitch and a bag filled with two million euros. Two million. Two hours ago we were at Mickey D’s and we were poor, because we weren’t smart enough like our cousins who went to good schools and applied for a hundred jobs at banks and insurance companies and finally got a job at the hundred-and-first place they tried because they had brown skin and funny names, but now that they finally got those jobs they had a future. The fuckers.

  My future sits in a laundry bag on the backseat of a Ford Focus, and I’m sitting right beside it. Maybe I’ll buy an apartment in one of those new buildings off the Ruimzicht, tucked in among the white families, and I’ll laugh when the white realtor’s eyes go all wide when I dump payment in full on his desk. Cash money.

  “Patrick,” says Sayid. “Patrick.” He looks at me and I shake my head—Patrick ain’t listening no more. Sayid grabs the piece out of my hand and curses and sticks it in Patrick’s face, and Patrick’s hands tighten on the wheel and he stares right through the gun. “Here,” says Sayid, “here, look, there’s bullets in here and I’m gonna blow your fuckin’ head off.”

  Patrick lifts his right hand from the wheel and rips the piece out of Sayid’s hand. He glances at it, clicks off the safety, aims at Sayid, and then there’s a big bang that makes Linda and me cup our hands over our ears and there’s smoke and the stink of cordite and Sayid is screaming and there’s a hole in the side window with a ring of blood all around it. Sayid goes on screaming. “You cocksucker!” he shouts. “Cocksucker!” He covers his face with his hands, covers his mouth and nose, and he looks at me and pulls his hands away and his nose ain’t there no more and he asks how bad it is while the blood runs into his mouth.

  I don’t know what to say.

  “How bad is it?”

  “Your nose,” I say. “It’s your nose.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “Your nose is—Jesus, it’s sort of gone, G.”

  Linda pukes into the bag of money.

  Patrick drives. “I’m sorry,” he says to Sayid. “I was trying to blow your head off.” He holds the wheel with his left hand, the piece in his right. He checks his mirror and says the Dodge is back. I turn around but don’t see it. “There,” he says, and he nods at the bike path between the road and the lake, and there’s the Dodge, zigzagging a little, probably the tram threw off its alignment.

  “Who’s in there?” I ask.

  Patrick says he already told us. “The people I work for. Worked.”

  Sayid whines, his hands cupped over his face. “I gotta go to the hospital,” he cries. “I really gotta go to the hospital, man.”

  Patrick looks at Linda in his mirror and says her name.

  She looks back at him.

  “You think twelve thousand’s enough?”

  She stares past Sayid at the hole in the passenger window and the blood all around it. “No,” she says, “not anymore.”

  “You think two million’s enough?”

  “Two million? Where you gonna get that kind of money?”

  I tell her there’s two million in the bag. “You stupid bitch,” I say.

  “Don’t insult her,” says Patrick, and he glances over to the Dodge, which is keeping up with us on the bike path.

  Sayid screams, his hands cupped in front of his face. “You stupid bitch!”

  Patrick touches the barrel of the gun to Sayid’s head and pulls the trigger.

  Explosion.

  Cordite.

  Sayid’s body slumps against the passenger door.

  “Patrick,” I say. “Patrick.”

  Linda sits pressed up against the backseat, her hands covering her eyes.

  Patrick steers the Focus to the side of the road, bumps over the curb, and now he’s right next to the Dodge.

  “I’ll shoot you later,” he tells me, “but I can’t do it now because you’re behind me.”

  We’re driving parallel to the new boulevard that runs along the short side of the Sloterplas—before last year it was just trees here, with a walking trail between them, but they cut down the trees and now they got expensive tiles and benches—and Patrick runs the Focus into the side of the Dodge. The Dodge is much heavier than we are, except the tram must have shook it up because it smashes into one of the steel benches and comes to a stop. The streetlamps cast a soft glow on the boulevard’s tiles and on Sayid’s blood.

  Patrick puts the Focus in park and gets out and comes after me, but I jerk away and pull Linda in front of me and she screams, and I smell her puke and I think she’s pissed herself. Patrick doesn’t shoot.

  At first I don’t dare to look, but Linda pulls free and I see Patrick’s on the other side of the car now, the gun—my gun—aiming at the Dodge, and he fires three times.

  Linda and me sit up straight, and we see somebody fall out of the Dodge. Then
we look at each other, and then we both look at the laundry bag with the two million euros, the laundry bag I could have stashed with the bags of my old man’s shit in the storage unit. I try to wipe off Linda’s puke and Sayid’s blood. I grab the bag and she grabs it too, and I want to pull it away from her but two million euros is heavy, man. And for a second that’s the whole world, the backseat of the Focus and our four hands on that bag, all that money so close, and for that second it feels like I ought to kiss her like it’s a fucking movie. Then the door on her side swings open and Patrick yanks her out, and I’m so surprised I let go of the bag and it flies out with her.

  I see Patrick drag Linda and the bag onto the boulevard and it’s like I’m in a long dark tunnel and the tunnel feels safe—just leave me right here—but then Patrick sees me. He hunkers down and holds the piece in both hands and aims at the tunnel, my tunnel, and he shoots—there’s a bang, but not so loud this time because I’m in my tunnel and he’s outside, and I think about that bang while my shoulder is blown to fragments. I drop onto a bench and I die. I think I’m dying. My buddy’s lying here in front of me and he’s already gone, and I’m on my way. I open my eyes and lie on my back and look upside down out of my used-to-be-safe tunnel—it seems so long ago now, that feeling of safety inside my tunnel.

  Patrick says something to Linda. I can’t really hear it. She just squeals. She’s lying on the boulevard in the glow of the streetlamps and she’s squealing, and behind her I see the Sloterplas, its black water beautiful beneath the black winter sky, and I see the Dodge and the man who fell out of it, and he tries to sit up and he stares at me and I see the disappointment on Abdulhafid’s face.

  “I didn’t know it was you,” I say softly, and he didn’t know it was me, either—all I told him was we were gonna score a hundred thou, he never thought I meant his two million.

  Patrick stands up and grabs the bag of money and unzips it. “Two million,” he tells Linda, loud, “two million.”

  She shakes her head, sobbing.

  I hear him say he’s gonna ask her one more time. And then he asks her: “Linda, will you marry me?”

  I hear her say no, soft, sobbing.

  Patrick picks up the bag by its handles, and in the glow of the streetlamps I see him carry it to the water’s edge. He drops the bag on the ground, then grabs it by the bottom and flips it over, and I can’t see the bundles of five-hundred-euro notes drop into the lake but I think I can hear them, plop plop plop, quick splashes as the packets hit the water.