The man called out, “Is er iemand met je, of bij je verstopt?”
Dutch wasn’t too difficult to translate; open the same in English, deur a cognate to door, the context and the other words like iemand and verstopt were similar enough to German and English that Mae had no problem interpreting what was being asked: was someone with him or was he constipated?
Kitt appeared to understand as well.
In the last few months, it had become evident that he spoke a few more languages than he’d previously mentioned, Russian for example. There was much about her husband she still didn’t know, things she hadn’t asked because she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Occasionally, she had to remind herself that he was a spy and, regardless of how he liked to disavow the cliché, however much a joke she thought it was, Kitt had the spy skills one read about in novels and saw in films and television series, so it wasn’t a surprise that he’d speak Dutch any more than it was that he was a master of improvisation. As he had from the start, he grunted and moaned again, this time with an edge of annoyance and exertion.
“Mincha,” the gardener said in Italian. “Ricordati tirare l’acqua dopo aver cagato!—Remember to flush after shitting.” A sliver-view of black and white moved closer.
“Rot op!” Kitt said gruffly.
“Okay, okay.” The hoodie-wearing gardener laughed like Flipper the dolphin, stone-washed jeans and hoodie disappearing from sight.
It went quiet for a moment. Kitt waited, counting to ten, eyes on the crack in the door. Waiting, counting, he got all the way to seven when the gardener hammered on the door and shouted in Italian, “Ti ha cagato adosso, Gert?” asking if he’d scared the shit out of Gert.
It went quiet again.
The sudden peace expanded, a few heavy and frightening seconds ticked over to a minute that felt like an hour and Mae’s heart thumped faster, the beat droning in her ears. Why the feck did Kitt tell her to hide in here, in this minuscule space where she was utterly cornered with her eyes wide open? She looked about the tiny, bleach-perfumed shower, at the shampoo and bar of soap sitting in a wire rack hung from the neck of the shower spray nozzle. Her hand closed around a tube of blackhead scrub. She wondered how much damage she could inflict with apricot kernel exfoliant and hazarded a peek around the edge of the shower curtain.
One foot jammed against the door almost casually, the gun resting on his knee, Kitt sat on the toilet, perfectly still, unruffled, patient, expressionless, maddeningly detached from the threat as he kept watch through a crack in the doorframe. Jaysus, the man looked…zen and she was trembling, she was sweating, she was dry-mouthed, she was…letting fear get the better of her. She took a long, slow breath and let it out without a sound.
The man outside the bathroom sighed. “Okay, okay, sorry,” he said in Italian. “I know you’re pissed off. I’ll send Luciana to clean. Women clean better than men. Okay?”
“Okay,” Kitt muttered, watching through the crack.
“Allora.” The off-key Pavarotti began singing Funiculì, Funiculà again and crossed the storeroom. He paused at the angled under-stairs storage door, waving his cattle prod as if conducting an orchestra, before he left the way he’d arrived, entering the staircase behind him, his footfalls on the treads muffled, his operatic warbling ending abruptly.
Kitt waited another minute before he lifted his cramping foot and pocketed the Sig. “Mae,” he said softly, rose, and slid the shower curtain across. A groove of worry fixed between her brows, she stared at him, a tube of something clutched in her fist. He put out his hand. She set the tube into his palm. “You right?” he said.
“If I hadn’t taken care of things before you burst in, I surely would have wet myself.” She pulled her clothes into place, the paper packet of tulip bulbs in her coat pocket crinkling as she adjusted her little handbag under her coat. “I would have preferred to run rather than stand in here.”
“There wasn’t time to run. Now,” he said, glancing at the facial scrub she’d handed over, “what were you going to do with this?”
“Throw it in his face and kick him in the bollocks.”
“You need to get close enough to kick someone in the balls.”
“That’s why you should have let me have the toilet brush.”
With a faint laugh, Kitt tossed the tube in the sink and took her hand, drew her out of the shower. “Stay behind me,” he said and opened the ill-fitted door, pausing to look about. “Come on.” He led her across the stockroom, past the door to the stairs, heading toward the exit into the little alcove. He pulled Gert’s keys from his pocket and had them ready to unlock the deadbolt. Then he turned about. “Hang on a second.”
Mae followed him back to the short door with the slanted top. He studied it and she said, “What do you bet that’s where they keep the vacuum?”
He pushed against the angled door and, spring-loaded, it popped open to reveal another door, this one with a deadbolt lock like on the other two doors leading into the stockroom. Kitt looked at Gert’s keys, chose one and began to slide it into the lock. It did not fit. He chose another, slipped it into the mechanism, which turned freely, and the door opened outwards. “No Goddamned vacuum in here,” he said through his teeth.
“Dear Jaysus,” Mae murmured, gathering a fistful of the back of Kitt’s jacket, a hand going to her mouth and nose to block the pasty, slightly sweet smell of shit and vomit and blood that wafted out.
The body of a Caucasian man dressed in a grey uniform smeared with his own filth and blood lay stiff on the floor, hands bound with fluffy, hot-pink cuffs. Bearded, his split, bloodied face was wrapped tightly in kitchen plastic, disfiguring his features, his open, gasping, scarlet mouth missing teeth. Miraculously, the orange collar of his shirt was pristine.
Revulsion and fright gave way to facts both practical and scientific. Kitt disentangled Mae’s hand from his jacket and crouched over the body. The onset of rigor mortis varied from one to six hours after death occurred and lasted, depending on location and circumstances, for a few hours or several days. This man had not been dead long.
“Okay, he’s dead. Let’s go,” she said, digging her fingers into her temples, her breathing sharp, shallow, and noisy with an edge of irritation mixed into her fear.
He rose. “I know it’s going to make you cross, but breathe.”
She yanked off her hat and glared at him.
“Breathe, my love. Breathe and tell me what you see here.” He turned her to the dead man.
“I don’t want a feckin’ lesson in observation right now.” She crossed her arms, eyes narrowing, and took a deep, begrudging and slightly sarcastic breath.
“There’s my gir—” The sharp, hot shock hit him hard, an electric jolt shooting up his left arm and across his shoulder. Kitt pitched forward with a shout of pain and stumbled over the dead man.
The former opera warbler turned for Mae, cattle prod at the ready. She kept good on her promise to run and darted for the door, but the gardener leapt, caught the lapel of her coat, drove her against the angled doorframe, shoved the cattle prod into her hip with a noisy, electric tzzzt, yet she remained standing, hurling abuse. “Get off me, ya bealin’ cuntiballs!”
Snarling, the gardener discharged the prod again, electrical current arcing, tzzzt tzzzt. Mae hissed Italian obscenities, and a split second before her knee met testicles, the gardener dropped, chin hitting the floor first, the deep pink tip of his tongue a small stone skipping over the grey carpeting, the red butterfly knife Kitt had plunged into the base of his neck protruding like a handle for easy carrying, the smell of scorched fabric and paper in the air.
Chapter Eleven
One minute she was looking at a dead man whose face was a plastic-wrapped mess of dark beard and pulp, the next she was staring at a red-handled knife stuck in the base of another dead man’s skull, and a moment after that she stood in the doorway of a room full of bunkbeds, breathing in the stink of body odour and fish fingers. Where was she now? Where were they?
Mae shivered even though she wasn’t cold. She shoved a hand into a pocket and felt the little hole the cattle prod had burnt into the pale green fabric and the paper packet of bulbs. There was another brown-toasted fissure right where her purse sat beneath her coat. The one impractical thing in her life—besides loving a man who killed for a living—was an indulgence in the occasional vintage garment. How many vintage garments had she had spoiled thanks to feckin’ henchmen and thugs? What was it now, three or four dresses, a coat, and a few pairs of shoes?
She looked at Kitt. He tossed his baseball cap into a rubbish bin. He’d put his jacket on the minute they’d rounded the corner from the shop. When had he grabbed the hat, sunglasses and the cloth bag he’d discarded from the floor in the sex shop fitting room?
“Slow down,” he said, taking her elbow as they rounded the corner onto Rokin where a tram passed by. “There’s no need to break a speed record. A walk will do us both good. We need the fresh air.” The bottom edge of his jacket flared out as he fell into step beside her.
“Please don’t remind again me to breathe,” Mae said and continued her swift pace, yanking off her hat and the cheap windmill scarf, squeezing them into a ball, shoving them into her coat pocket with the bulbs, making the green cloth bulge.
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Kitt smiled faintly, so faintly Mae barely caught the expression before it vanished into a mask of nothingness.
His nonchalant façade made her want to scream.
He made a blasé call, in English, coolly leaving the address of the place they’d just left, casually mentioning a few other details, like where to find Gert, two dead bodies, offhandedly noting the filth and rubbish of what appeared to have been cramped, recently-vacated living quarters upstairs in the building next door.
There had been handcuffs attached to the beds, and not the fuzzy or padded fun sort that had been for sale in Erotica.
The sunlight shifted as Kitt spoke, moving clouds alternating the bright and dark, bright and dark. Then he tucked his mobile away, and slipped his arm though hers, controlling the speed of their walk.
As swift-footed as she wanted to be, as much as she resented slowing down, the blur of colours began to sharpen. The simple action of walking, of navigating a way through a crowd, loosened her anxiety—but not her annoyance at his detachment. Still, she let Kitt lead her along Rokin and into the historic centre of the city, toward Dam Square and the National Monument.
They passed the Obelisk commemorating Dutch casualties of WWII, the Royal Palace of Amsterdam, and the Nieuwe Kerk, a fifteenth-century church turned exhibition space. At the edge of Dam Square, Kitt turned right, avoiding the crowds and ever-present bicycles. He took her through cobblestoned back streets that became narrower and snaked between brick buildings until all at once they were on a cobbled street alongside a canal lined with small boats, bicycles in racks, trees with branches green with new-budding leaves, and charming red brick canal houses. Again, he reduced their pace, making it more leisurely and lethargic, until he halted next to bicycles racked beside the open-edged canal, and let her go.
Finally. A crack in his armour appeared. Mae had wondered when it would happen, and, rather pettily, she waited for Kitt to move closer to the canal, to bend forward and disgorge his chip lunch into the water.
He didn’t move. He stood looking across the canal, blank-faced, maddeningly calm, as if his nausea wasn’t there. Instead of moving forward, he stepped sideways and pulled her into his arms, her back to his front. “Have you noticed,” he said, hands splayed at her waist, “how some of the houses are crooked?” He nuzzled his cheek to her ear, nudging her to gaze across the water.
Automatically, she looked at the row of gabled houses on the other side of the canal, the skinniest home with the bell-shaped white gable listed to the left, as if sinking into the low Dutch earth. The house to the right just as slanted. Crooked and sinking, that summed up how she felt. She leaned back into Kitt, who was not sinking but was employed in a crooked occupation full of crooked people who did crooked things. She pulled his arms closer about her and pressed into him, squeezing his forearms.
Kitt held her. It was surprisingly quiet where they’d stopped. A soft breeze stirred branches. Sunlight glimmered in and out, changing shadows and colours. Water lapped gently at the sides of a houseboat tied to a short, black post. Kitt watched the boat bob gently. “It’s really quite lovely here, isn’t it?”
“It’s charming, and,” Mae made a sound, a half sigh and snort, “I find you so irritating when you are unperturbed, as you are now, which isn’t charming.”
“I thought you found my ability to disconnect endearing.”
“I find your vomiting after a frightening event endearing.” She turned in his arms and looked up at him. “Why aren’t you hunched over the canal spewing?”
“Because your work here is done. You’ve managed to uncover a little nest of snakes, just by listening. I have no idea what the nest means yet, but now you can go home and I can get on with hunting reptiles.”
“You think Tanja Goedenacht is a snake?”
“She may be a Hydra or a little reptilian hatchling. Either way, that’s for me to find out. You’ve done as you’ve been…ordered, and,” he smiled, “you’re going home. Thank Christ.”
“But you’re not.”
He held her a little tighter, her handbag a lump between them. The sun’s light disappeared behind cloud, its warmth replaced by Mae. Her hands moved beneath his jacket, fingers slipping over his shirt, gliding over the scorched cloth and small burn he’d plaster over later. He wasn’t proud of how he’d killed a man—another man—in front of Mae, but he was impressed he’d maintained enough self-control to not take the cattle prod and beat the living hell out of Gert like he’d wanted to. He’d really wanted to.
Her fingers found the hole burnt in his shirt again and felt the spot gingerly. “Why didn’t that Taser thing shock me like it did you?”
“The handbag under your coat and the bulbs in your pocket took the current.”
It began to rain, a delicate, cool mist. She rested her cheek on his chest. “Did you expect to find hydroponic equipment and plants growing when we got upstairs?”
“Expect, no, hope, yes. I admit I was concerned we’d find young women, girls, and boys.”
“Because of the proximity of the sex shop or the manacle on the bed in the stockroom and beds upstairs?”
“You saw them. Very good observation. Sexual exploitation seems likely, but the two men we saw getting into the van outside, the grey uniforms hanging in the storeroom, and the man we found dead in the cupboard don’t quite add up. It’s not only forced prostitution. The window decals, the mattresses and beds upstairs, say sexual exploitation, but it could also be accommodation for refugees and immigrants trafficked for employment—most likely in the hotel or restaurant industry.”
“Restaurants and hotels?”
“The hospitality industry has vulnerabilities that make it ideal for the exploitation of refugees and illegal immigrants, like seasonal tourism, when there’s a spike in the need for short-term temporary labour. A trafficker may be a member of hotel management, or a labour recruiter or labour broker, subcontracting with the hotel to provide cheap labour. The subcontractors take advantage of the business and the immigrants.” He stroked her hair. “You heard me on the phone. I reported the situation to the local police. The police and the AVIM—The Aliens Police, Identification and Trafficking in Human Beings Department—will deal with this. Should anyone return
to the shop, or next door, the police and AVIM will offer them assistance, find them a safe place and not prosecute. But I think the place was in the process of being shut down, cleaned up. I doubt anyone will return.”
“Cleaning up. That’s why it all smelled of bleach.” Mae drew away and looked up at him, brows knit together in bewilderment, a sheen of rain appearing on her cheeks. “What in underfuck does this have to do with Vlaming and his jewellery, if it has anything to do with Vlaming and his jewellery, or if it’s all Tanja Goedenacht?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. It’s puzzle pieces, Mae. Some fit, some don’t fit, some seem to fit, but they’re from the wrong box entirely. Whatever the case, one picture is clear: you are going home.” Kitt couldn’t help himself. He smiled and it began to pour. Despite the rain, there was a spring in his step when he took her hand and headed for the hotel, leading her along pretty, cobbled streets into the now-quiet red-light district, past the empty shopfront windows where sex workers would later sit on display.
Hair dribbling water, Mae’s feet ached from walking. A blister had formed on one little toe. She looked down at fashionable taupe kitten-heels not meant for playing tourist, their colour contrasting against the gleaming tiles of the hotel’s foyer. Her shoes click-clacked over white tiles and, for a moment, it reminded her of the white kitchen tiles at home, and how they’d once seemed to gleam even brighter when covered with blood. Tiles gleamed brighter when the blood was dried too.
True to Your Service Page 14