Just before falling asleep the thought came to him that with her hands tied behind her, it was as close to rape as he had ever come.
“S it down. Don’t turn on the light,” Scorpion said, showing him the gun. The dwarf, Hassan Tassouni aka Ali, started for the door, but stopped when he heard Scorpion cock the hammer of the HK pistol he had bought in Germany.
“Ik heb niet veel geld,” the dwarf said.
“I don’t speak Nederlands. Speak in English or Arabic. Turn on the table lamp, no other lights,” Scorpion said.
The little man climbed up on a high stool by the small table and turned on the lamp, then sat, elbows on the table, his face in his hands. “Godverdomme. I knew this day would come. I should’ve killed myself,” Tassouni said. He had a flat, squashed dwarf’s face covered with a sparse reddish beard.
“Why? What did you do?” Scorpion asked. He sat on a threadbare sofa, which apart from the table and chair and a rumpled futon in the corner, was the only furniture in the apartment. The room was filled with the dwarf’s artworks, jagged sculptures vaguely reminiscent of twisted human limbs made of junkyard pipes, cables, and jagged wires resembling muscles and nerve endings, painted red and overlaid with random Arabic letters in white. The walls were covered with pasted newspapers and magazine pages spray-painted with the same random Arabic letters. The walk-up apartment was cold and smelled of fish, metal, paint, and water from the nearby Lijnbaansgracht Canal. In Amsterdam’s art world, Scorpion had learned, Tassouni had a small but growing reputation as a serious artist.
It had only taken him a few hours to find the dwarf. In the morning, after his normal morning workout, two hundred push-ups in four minutes, one hundred sit-ups in two minutes, twenty pull-ups by his fingers from the door lintel molding, he dressed and got coffee, water, and almond pastries from the corner cafe. Returning to his room, he and Najla had breakfast at a small table next to the window. The only view was of another building, and the morning light was gray, as if it might rain.
“I’m letting you go,” he said. “Story’s over. You’re free. Go back to Germany.”
She looked down at her coffee. She wore just a top and panties, her hair still bed-tousled, and he thought she was heartbreakingly beautiful and sexy.
“What if I don’t want to go?” she said, still not looking up.
“I don’t know where you fit in all this. I’m breaking every protocol in the business. I was planning to leave you tied up in here, because even that’s better than some of the other alternatives I have to think about.”
“I could help,” she said softly, looking at him with those incredible aquamarine eyes.
“No.” He shook his head. “Either you’re mixed up in this or you aren’t. If you are, you’re too dangerous to have you with me. If you’re not, it’s too dangerous for you. Either way, you’re either going back to Germany or I tie you up all day in this room till I get you vetted.”
“What about last night?”
“Last night I found out just how close to losing control with you I am. It’s because of last night that I’m letting you go. Go on, get out,” he said in a voice he didn’t recognize as his own.
She stood up, and it was all he could do not to grab her. She was close enough for him to still smell sex and the smell of her.
“You think I don’t know you are some kind of policeman or spy? What if I am involved? What if you are letting an enemy go free?”
“Others will find you. It won’t be me and it won’t be pleasant,” he said in the thick voice that didn’t seem to belong to him. It wasn’t much of a choice, he thought. Even if he left her tied up, there was a good chance the femme de chambre would free her before he could get back.
“You really are a cold bastard, aren’t you?” she said, angrily grabbing her clothes and pulling them on.
“Tell me you never exploited some poor bastard’s personal tragedy for a two-minute TV network feed? We’re all bastards,” he said. “It’s a bastard world.”
Two hours later he rode a rented bicycle to an RDV with someone named Piet De Jong of the Dutch Secret Intelligence Service, the AIVD. They met on a bridge over the Herengracht Canal. The water was cool and gray, reflecting clouds that promised rain. The canal along this section of the Herengracht was lined with trees and houseboats, and the outdoor setting and passing boat traffic made it less likely a sound receiver could pick up their conversation. They stood beside each other at the railing, gazing down at their reflections in the water. De Jong took his time stuffing and lighting his pipe.
“His name is Hassan Tassouni. Moroccan. An artist. Quite a good one, according to those who are supposed to know about such things. Here’s his address,” De Jong said in accented English, passing him a slip of paper. “Not a bad address.”
“That didn’t take long,” Scorpion said.
“Well, a Muslim dwarf in the Jordaan,” De Jong said. “You made it easy for us.”
“What else?”
“He doesn’t fit the usual profile. More likely to frequent the brown bars and the bordeels in De Wallen than a mosque. Then perhaps eight months ago he shows on the radar at the Moroccan Islamic Center in Osdorp.”
“You keep a close eye on them?”
“You know what we are dealing with in Nederland,” De Jong said, puffing on his pipe. “After two months going to the mosque, he is never there again. There was something about a woman.”
“Who was she?”
“A Muslim woman in hijab. There are a million of them.” He shrugged. “Peters said you would not share.”
Peters was the CIA station chief in Amsterdam. It was why he had hesitated about using Company resources to track Tassouni down. Given a day or two, he would have found the dwarf without them. As De Jong had said, finding a Muslim dwarf in the Jordaan district shouldn’t be that difficult, but the time factor was burning him. Somewhere, he knew, the Palestinian was en route to whatever was about to happen, and by now he would have heard about what happened in Damascus. Every second was beginning to count.
“No,” Scorpion said. “I won’t share.”
“It does not seem like good partners. We tell you, but you tell nothing. In Nederland we have many rules,” De Jong said, his eyes searching Scorpion’s face. “You do not seem a man for rules.”
“Did Peters tell you that?”
“No. That is my own judgment,” De Jong said. Scorpion looked at him: business suit, tall, sturdy, fair-haired; someone who did his job by the book.
“I’m not gezellig?” Scorpion smiled, using the word for cozy, comfortable, the Dutch ideal.
“Definitely not gezellig. I have the feeling you will deal with this Moroccan on your own and leave us to clean up the mess, Heer Crane,” De Jong said, deliberately using Scorpion’s current cover name to let him know they were aware of him. Before he left Holland, he would jettison it, he decided.
“What about his communications? Computer?”
“So far as we can tell, he doesn’t have one. Either old fashioned or he doesn’t want his communications tracked. And you haven’t answered my question. Amsterdam is not your, how you say, kinderbox, for children’s play.”
“Peters should’ve explained. I don’t exist. There are no rules.”
“And the artist? He is a Nederland citizen.”
“Stay away from him,” Scorpion said, walking away, toward where he had left his bicycle.
“Our patience is not unlimited,” De Jong called after him.
“Neither is mine. I don’t have a lot of time,” Scorpion called back as he got on the bike.
That afternoon in Osdorp near the Westhaven harbor, over a trade for cocaine with two members of the Moroccan Smitstraat street gang, Scorpion tried to find out about the dwarf’s girl.
“Who was she?” he asked. They were speaking in standard Fusha Arabic.
“Some girl. I don’t remember the name,” the Moroccan said. His eyes were bloodshot and glassy, typical of heavy hashish use. “This is good
coca.” He held up the plastic-wrapped packet. “Listen, you want ice-o-lator hashish? They use this ice water method makes the hashish so pure, you think you die it’s so good.”
“About the girl?” Scorpion asked.
“Doesn’t matter now,” the other Moroccan said, his eyes darting around the coffee shop, filled with the smell of marijuana and hashish. It was near the overpass to the port, a bare place with Formica tables for foreign dockworkers and local gangs to stop in for a quick high. The other Moroccan was the twitchy one; the one to keep an eye on, Scorpion thought.
“Why?”
“Someone killed her. Dood, Brother. Pretty girl, nice, then batoom,” he said, pointing his finger and making a sound like a gunshot.
“Who did it?”
The hashish user shrugged. “Who knows? Her family, maybe.”
“They didn’t want her to see the dwarf?”
“It looked stupid,” the twitchy one said. “She was, you know, tall for a girl. Her with that ugly little fatah!”
“I saw them at the mosque,” the hashish user said. “He was too old for her too. She was young. College girl. Nice, not some shlicke slut.”
“How’d they get together?”
The twitchy one stood up. He put one of his hands in his pocket.
“Shem et Duat!” Go to hell! “Who cares about this zarba? You want to buy or not, ya khawal?”
“Wait! We’re doing business, right?” the hashish user said.
“Kess emmak,” Scorpion said, insulting the twitchy one’s mother. As the twitchy one started to pull a Spanish folding knife out of his pocket, Scorpion grabbed his wrist in the Krav Maga move, making him cry out in pain, and took the knife away.
“Neem het buiten!” the burly Dutch counterman shouted, pulling out a police club from under the counter. Take it outside! “Nu!” Now! The dockworkers at other tables, some Dutch, some foreign, turned to watch. The hashish user’s eyes blinked rapidly. Suddenly, he stuffed the cocaine in his pocket and ran out. By the time Scorpion and the twitchy one got outside, he was running down the street.
“The coca’s gone. There’s nothing to fight about,” Scorpion said.
“Give me my knife,” the twitchy one said.
Scorpion flung it across the street.
The Moroccan shouted in Arabic that Scorpion’s mother had committed adultery with a thousand monkeys as he ran to retrieve his knife, but by then Scorpion was already down the block, pedaling away on his bicycle.
“L ook at me,” the dwarf said. “One of Allah’s jokes. Bitter, a cynic. Never go to a mosque. Religion’s a farce. I despise people; the ones who mock me and my art, and I hate even more the ones who feel sorry for me and pretend not to see the grotesqueness of a grown man in this ridiculous misshapen child’s-size body. The only women I’ve ever been with are whores. So who should I love? Tell me, who should I love if not the most beautiful, most innocent, young, tall, slender, gentle, exquisite creature who ever lived?! It was my fate.”
“One of Allah’s ironies,” Scorpion said, glancing around the apartment. He had searched it before the dwarf came home. He found nothing except a photo of Tassouni with a tall young woman wearing a hijab in a park, and in the trash, two torn night train tickets on successive days from the Amsterdam Central Station to Utrecht.
“She had come to an exhibit where my work was appearing. I didn’t know why she was there. It is haraam for Muslims to make images, so of course they despise me, and yet there she was, in a hijab no less. But we spoke and she was so gentle and her face was like an angel. So beautiful, like Christ’s mother in her perfect youthful moment of illumination. I had to have her. I had to paint her. Can you understand? It was beyond idolatry. She was more than art. She was the thing itself. The thing that art in its clumsy, self-glorified way tries to get at.”
“You were obsessed.”
“Obsession is a small word. She was my soul. Until I met her, I didn’t believe in souls or any of that kak, but there she was. She talked to me. We held hands. We walked and talked in Vondelpark. I couldn’t imagine what she could possibly see in me. I was too old, too small and grotesque, too ugly, not pious. It was impossible, but I didn’t care. I dreamed of her. I thought of nothing but her. Her face, her smell, her touch. I had to have her. I would have done anything. Murder, anything. And then they told me what they wanted.”
“Who was it?”
“Her uncle. Her father’s brother. An elder in the mosque. And another. I never knew his name.”
“Why you?”
“Exactly,” Tassouni said, pouring them both glasses of Dutch jenever gin that he had gotten from the refrigerator. “Sante!”
“Sante,” Scorpion toasted, and sipped the gin. The little man swallowed his in a gulp, poured himself another and downed that as well.
“I asked them. They said the mosque had been infiltrated by informers for the Dutch. They needed someone no one would ever suspect. Someone not religious or who even gave a kak about the Muslim community. What difference did it make?”
“You would have done anything.”
“Anything. If they had told me to put on a suicide vest and kill half of Amsterdam, I would have done it.”
“They promised her to you.”
“Suggested. They said they would not object. For a Muslim girl, that is much.”
“And she-what was her name?”
“Salima. They killed her,” Tassouni said, staring into space.
“For ikram?” Family honor?
“I don’t know. For being defiled just kissing me on the cheek once that day in the park. For knowing too much. What difference? They’re coming for me now,” the little man said, emptying the glass and pouring himself another.
“How do you know?”
“What do you think? They’re going to kill her who was so innocent and leave me alive?”
“I can help you,” Scorpion said.
“How? By bringing her back to life? That’s the only way you can help me,” he said.
“What did you do for them?”
“Carried messages. I would pick them up in a place and leave them in another place. I would put them behind a loose brick in an alley wall or under a specific seat in a cinema, places like that.”
“Dead drops, they’re called. Did you go to Utrecht?”
“So you know already. I wasn’t even good at that,” Tassouni said.
“Where in Utrecht?”
“Different places. Once near the university. Most were in the Kanaleneiland district.”
“Muslim neighborhoods?”
“Obviously,” Tassouni grimaced.
“What were they? Moroccan? Turkish? Farsi?”
“Maghrebi. You could smell the cinnamon and cumin in the streets.”
“What did the messages say? Did you read any of them?” Scorpion’s cell phone vibrated.
“I don’t know. They were all in some kind of code,” Tassouni said.
His phone vibrated again. He took it out and looked at the text message. It was from the default number and read: 000. It was in response to his Internet cafe query to the International Corn website on Najla Kafoury. It meant they had come up empty. They would have run checks on her through all the U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies, Interpol, the German BND and Bundespolizei, and the response indicated they had found no alerts or evidence of criminal, intelligence, or radical Islamic connections. Too late, he thought. He had let her go.
“I have to go. You have to come with me. You’re not safe here,” Scorpion said, motioning with the gun.
“No, I’ll stay here. You can shoot me,” Tassouni said. “Do it now. Without her…” He looked at Scorpion. “Better to shoot.”
“I can make you come.”
“Then I stop talking. It’s not worth it for you. A man who doesn’t care if he dies can be very difficult.”
“They’ll kill you.”
“They kill me, you kill me. What difference?”
“I have to take
care of something, but I’ll be back. Keep the door locked. Don’t let anyone in till I return,” Scorpion said, getting up. He had to find out about Najla. He had left her in the hotel room, washing her hair in the bathroom.
“Why should I trust you? I don’t know you. You come in with a gun-and listen to a fool’s story.”
“Because I’m the only one, including you, who wants you alive.”
“Then that makes two of us who are fools.”
“Lock the door. If anyone comes, no matter how well you know them or what reason they give you, don’t let them in. I’ll be back soon,” Scorpion said, opening the door.
He left the dwarf staring into his drink, and waited in the dimly lit hallway till he heard the door lock. He pulled a hair from his head and wrapped it from the doorknob to a screw he loosened in the doorjamb as a simple trap. He left his bicycle by the apartment house rack to help discourage anyone who might show up, by letting them think Tassouni had company, and caught a taxi back to the hotel. On the way, he tried calling her cell phone-he had taken the number off the phone in her purse in the morning before he got breakfast-but she wasn’t using it and it went immediately to voice mail.
He thought about it in the taxi. Langley had cleared her, but he didn’t buy it. Najla had earned her chops as a TV reporter, yet according to the BND and Bundespolizei, she didn’t have a single questionable contact. He’d been with her. She was smart and tough and hadn’t done it all on her looks. And it still didn’t explain why she’d followed him after staking out the mosque in the middle of the night. Langley was missing something. Being a reporter was classic cover for an operative, he thought. He had made a mistake letting her go. The sex had colored his judgment. He had to find her again, and if he were honest with himself, wanted to see her again.
Night had fallen, the lights of the city blurred by a drizzle. He could smell the canals. Going by the Dam Square in the taxi, the Royal Palace with its cupola, the Nieuwe Kerk church and the tall pillar of the National Monument were brightly lit. They gleamed wetly in the rain. The restaurants and the brown bars were open, and despite the weather, the streets were filled with people out having a good time. Back at the hotel, he raced back up to the room. The prive card he had put into the card key lock was gone. When he opened the door, the room was empty.
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