In fact I was so busy staying behind Jacob and avoiding people on bicycles that it really didn’t occur to me where we were going until I saw a guy just lying in the middle of the sidewalk with his eyes half open. This was also like something I’d seen on TV—people totally spaced out from using drugs. Then I started looking around and it suddenly hit me. We were heading for the Quarter.
No, I was wrong. We were in the Quarter.
31
A Near-Death Experience
Those first few blocks in the bad part of town didn’t seem so awful. Yeah, it was drizzly and gloomy and there were some weirdos like the guy on the sidewalk. But there were also fast-food stands and flower stalls, and even little flower boxes on the buildings, just like in other parts of town. Plus, the place was filled with people doing regular tourist things like taking pictures and eating french fries from little cups.
I was still feeling okay when we turned left onto a street that ran by a canal. The street sign—which, like most street signs in Europe, was on the side of a building—said OUDEZIJDS ACHTERBURGWAL. I was just thinking what a weird name this was for a street when I looked down into the street itself and started to feel nervous.
This was like places I’ve seen in previews for the kind of movie I never want to go to. There were buildings advertising sexy girls everywhere. There were stores right on the street where you could buy drugs. Men huddled together on corners talking. It seemed like men were everywhere, alone and in groups. Most of these guys ignored me, but two of them said things to me in languages I didn’t understand. A bunch of guys in U.S. Navy uniforms said something creepy to me in English that I don’t even want to repeat.
There were a lot of women standing around, too, and some teenage girls. Most of them weren’t dressed for the cool weather and they didn’t have umbrellas. They must have been freezing. I thought the women at least would be nice, but when I passed them they nudged each other and looked at me. One of them said, “Little American girl should go home to Mommy.” I didn’t know how she knew I was American.
The only thing that saved me was knowing that Lucas was around. I took a quick look over my shoulder, but I couldn’t see her.
It had been almost two blocks since I’d turned the last corner. She should have been on the street behind me by now. I made sure Jacob was still in front of me, stopped, turned around, and gave a good long look up one side of the street and down the other. I waited to see if she came out from behind somebody or reappeared from a doorway. Nothing.
Lucas just plain wasn’t there.
My heart gave a lurch, and suddenly my mouth felt dry. In the whole time we’d been spying on Jacob and solving this mystery, Lucas and I had always been together. Even when we went separately into the Rembrandt room at the National Gallery, I always knew where she was.
Suddenly I thought about the Jaguar that had almost run over Lucas in London and I stopped dead in my tracks. Had the same thing happened here? Had nobody been there to scream at her and save her life? I turned around and took about three steps back the way I’d come before I remembered that the one person who would try to kill Lucas was Gallery Guy, and he was walking in front of me.
I turned back around and had to run to catch up. As long as she didn’t get hit by a car, I figured I didn’t need to worry about Lucas. The streets we’d been on were extremely busy, and Mom always told me that, except for traffic accidents, busy streets are safe streets.
But I was worried about me. I was alone, following a murderer in a really bad part of town—a murderer who might know I’d been spying on his girlfriend the day before. And where Jacob and I were heading there weren’t as many people on the sidewalks, just closed-up buildings and lots of trash everywhere. If Lucas wasn’t around, was it smart to keep going?
Jacob was half a block ahead of me when I saw him take a right. I decided I’d just go around that next corner, and if it kept on looking lonely and scary down there, I’d turn back.
I half walked, half ran to catch up, glad my tennies didn’t make any noise. But it wasn’t the running that made me breathe fast and my heart pound in my ears—I was scared.
Maybe it was intuition, maybe it was fear, but something made me slow down when I came to the street where Jacob had turned. I took a deep breath and stepped around the corner.
And there he was. Right smack in front of me, opening a door. Five more steps and I’d have run right into him.
I froze. Absolutely stopped moving. Stopped breathing.
Jacob hadn’t seen me—yet—but as close as I was, he would see me when he looked up from turning his key. And when he did, he might kill me.
I knew I should run for my life, but I couldn’t move. Couldn’t even breathe. I stayed there, rooted to the spot. It was like being in a nightmare.
Then, just then, I heard something. Music. At the other end of the block, the sound of a bunch of drunken men singing a song I’d never heard in a language I didn’t understand, then the sound of breaking glass.
The crash brought me back to reality. Jacob turned to look where the sound had come from, and in that instant I pulled back around the corner, ready to run—
And there was Lucas. Closer to me than I’d been to Jacob a minute before, and when she spotted me she opened her mouth to say something.
No time to say shh or put a finger to my lips. I jumped toward her just as she said, “K—” and I clapped a hand over her mouth, spun her around by the shoulders with my other hand, and pulled her up, her back to me, my back to the wall. She reached up to pull my arm away, but I just grabbed her hand and held her tighter.
One second, two seconds, three seconds—it seemed like forever. Then, at last, I heard Jacob’s door slam.
I sagged, let go of Lucas, closed my eyes, and breathed for what I swear was the first time since I’d gone around the corner.
“What the . . . !” Lucas exploded. I let her rant while my heart slowed down.
At last I was able to say, “I almost ran right into Jacob! He just went into a door!”
“Well, I think a couple of my fingers are broken.” She started to massage her hand. I hadn’t realized how tightly I’d squeezed until I saw her fingers were all white and stuck together.
“Where the meep were you?” I asked.
“I was hiding from Heri.”
“Heri the waiter? He was here in the Quarter?”
“Yeah, he was walking around, all alone.”
“Did he see you?”
“I don’t think so. The minute I saw him I stopped and pretended to be looking into a window, but he might have.”
She didn’t seem to be bothered about this, but I groaned. I wondered if Heri knew Jacob well enough to know he had a place in this part of town and, if he’d seen Lucas just a few blocks away from it, if he’d tell him that we weren’t just spying on Marianne, we were spying on him.
“Which is Jacob’s door?” Lucas asked. As usual, she was totally calm.
“The one right around the corner. You can’t see it from here. But Lucas, I could have been . . .” I was going to say “murdered.”
But before I could tell her how scared I’d been, before I could say that this was really, really dangerous, she said, “Well then, let’s go where we can have a look.”
Still rubbing her hand, she calmly walked across the little empty street to the opposite corner and stood under a sign that said MISSION OF ST. MARY MAGDALENE, A SAFE PLACE FOR WOMEN, and what I figured was the same thing in Dutch.
“What, are you crazy?” I hissed. “What if he sees us?”
“You think he’s going to start staring out the window right after he gets up to his room? No way,” she said.
The street Jacob’s place was on was like others I’d seen in Amsterdam. They’re like regular streets, with buildings on each side and front doors and things, except they’re not wide enough for a car to get through. Mostly they’re a way for pedestrians to get from one normal street to another. In the center of town they�
��re full of shops and restaurants. But this one was just an empty, narrow alley with ugly, depressing buildings. The only interesting thing was the mission, which had curtains with the kind of lace trimming they have a lot of in Amsterdam.
Jacob had gone into what looked like a warehouse. It had a pointed roof without any decoration. The windows were especially big, and an outside staircase, almost half as wide as the ministreet itself, crisscrossed the front of it. I remembered something Mom had said, that in Amsterdam, stairs like this were meant for loading, so bulky things could be carried into and out of the big windows on each of the floors because the stairways inside were too skinny.
The buildings were so tall and the street so narrow that it was almost dark. As we watched, a light went on in the top window, five floors up.
“Let’s climb up the stairs and look inside,” Lucas said.
“Lucas! No way! This has been dangerous enough! Besides, it’s six o’clock. Let’s get out of here. We have to be back at six thirty.” I looked hard at Lucas. I knew she wanted to stay and explore, but I wasn’t going to back down on this one.
When I started walking back the way we came, she said, “Okay, okay, but we’ve got to come back here. Maybe tomorrow.”
“Lucas, I could have been killed! Don’t you understand?”
“Next time we’ll stay together,” she said.
I couldn’t even think of anything to say. Sometimes her nerves of steel grate on my regular ones.
We were lucky. The tram we needed pulled up as soon as we got to the stop. It was only about ten after six, and I knew we’d get back with time to spare.
It wasn’t until we were sitting in the tram that my near-death experience hit me and I started shaking. I had to keep my mouth shut tight so my teeth wouldn’t chatter. I wondered if this was how Lucas had felt in London when she was almost run over.
Lucas wasn’t looking at me at first. At last she turned around to say something, opened her mouth, stopped, and said, “Kari, are you okay?”
“N-n-not especially,” I said. And right there in the tram Lucas gave me a big hug, and it helped. I stopped shaking.
32
Bill, Rijsttafel, and Arguing in Bed
Back in our hotel I got a Coke on the way up to our room, and after I’d drunk most of it I started feeling almost normal. Lucas and I were lounging around, looking very casual, when Mom breezed in, saying, “Hi, guys, what’s new and wonderful?”
We told her about watching TV and taking a walk in the rain. It felt like London again, covering up what we’d done. I realized that what had happened to me was exactly the kind of thing Mom had been worried about, and why she’d made us promise no funny stuff.
“Did you get hold of the guy at the Art Institute?” I asked. I thought changing the subject might make me feel less guilty.
Mom stepped out of her shoes and flopped down on her bed, her hands behind her head. “Well, I got through to the Art Institute. The director’s on vacation. Believe it or not, he’s taking a boat trip up the Amazon. He won’t be back until next week.”
Lucas gave me an I-told-you-so look.
“So what are we going to do?” I asked.
“We’ll ask Bill at dinner if he knows of anybody who can help us.”
I’d totally forgotten about going to dinner with Bill.
“By the way, he asked if I’d go with him to a concert tomorrow night. I told him yes. I figured you guys would love to have an evening free of your elderly traveling companion.”
It didn’t take an Einstein to figure out that from that moment on Lucas was thinking of what we were going to do during our evening alone.
Bill was medium height and had straight, shiny dark hair and big brown eyes that made him look kind of like a sweet little puppy.
He took us to an Indonesian restaurant—there are lots of them in Amsterdam, because Indonesia used to be a Dutch colony—and we had something called rijsttafel. It turned out to be a big bowl of rice surrounded by thirty-six little bowls of stuff to go on it, like meats with different kinds of sauces, lots of vegetables and pickles, fruit, nuts, and toasted coconut. You put whatever you wanted onto your rice. It was fun.
When Bill went to the men’s room, Mom asked, now that we’d met him, if we’d feel comfortable having her tell him what we’d found out about the Third Lucretia. We said yes. Bill was the kind of guy you could trust. So when we were walking home and there was absolutely nobody around who could hear us, Mom told him. He seemed very impressed.
“Do you want to be the one to break this story in the newspapers?” he asked Mom.
“No, I’m not a reporter anymore. I just want to write a background feature piece I can sell to a magazine.”
“Then I know exactly the person who can help you,” he said. “Johanna Heimstra. Works for one of the big dailies here. Always after a good story. I’ll give her a call in the morning. I won’t tell her much, just that it’s a major scoop and she has to talk to you.”
“How much do you want to bet Bill can’t reach his friend?” Lucas whispered into my ear when we were lying in bed. Mom sleeps with earplugs, so we can usually get by with whispering to each other if we’re careful to make almost no noise at all.
“Probably on vacation on the Riviera,” I answered.
“Or climbing in the Alps,” Lucas said.
“Exploring Norwegian fjords by sea.”
“Sitting on an Egyptian pyramid.”
“In India studying yoga.”
“So,” Lucas whispered after we’d kept this up for a while, “when are we going back to visit Jacob’s house?”
“Are you nuts? I’m not going back there! You don’t understand. If it hadn’t been for those drunks singing and throwing a bottle down at the end of Jacob’s street, I’d probably be dead by now! And if Mom had found out, she’d have me cut in little pieces and dropped into a canal. Besides, it’s just a stupid thing for girls our age to do. End of story.”
“Listen,” Lucas said. “I understand how scared you were. But if we plan it out—”
“Lucas, I’m not sure anymore that Jacob doesn’t know who we are and that we’re here. I know you don’t believe me, but I still think he was the one driving the Jaguar in London. . . .”
I could feel her take a breath, ready to say something about this, when Mom said, “What are you two whispering about over there?”
“Nothing,” I said. The good old standard, all-purpose line.
“Well, keep it down. I’m trying to get some rest here.”
“I’m not going back over there, and that’s final,” I breathed into Lucas’s ear.
“We’ll talk about it in the morning,” Lucas breathed back.
33
One Last Chapter Before We Get into Trouble
There was a message to call Bill when we got back upstairs from breakfast.
Venice. That’s where his friend was. Venice. She was doing a story on how they’re trying to keep their buildings from sinking into the water. Her boyfriend said she’d be back in town on Friday evening.
We hadn’t thought of Venice.
“We’ll just have to wait,” Mom said. “Remember. The Third Lucretia isn’t going anywhere. We’re not going anywhere. Friday will be here soon enough.”
Easy for her to say. It was only Wednesday. Friday seemed like twenty years away.
The minute Mom was out of the hotel, Lucas took up our conversation exactly where we’d left off the night before. “Look,” she said, “if we don’t get this last little piece of evidence, we don’t have a very strong case about Jacob being Gallery Guy.”
“What last little piece of evidence? Besides, I think we have a very strong case.” I was pretty sure I was being conned.
“Well, what do you think we’re going to find in that place in the Quarter? You think Jacob lives on that ugly little street? Jacob? With his fancy clothes and his big-deal job?”
I thought a minute. At first I thought she meant that Jacob might use t
he space to meet Marianne. But I couldn’t see a woman like Marianne, who was used to having big bucks, sneaking over to meet Jacob in a building that might be full of rats and spiders.
Finally I figured out what Lucas was getting at. I remembered how big the windows were, and that his apartment was on the top floor where the light probably shone in. “It has to be his studio, where he does his painting.”
“Exactly.”
“What do you think he’s working on—another forgery?”
“Who knows? Maybe. But if we can tell that reporter or the cops or whoever that Jacob Hannekroot has a secret art studio at such-and-such an address, and if we can tell them that in that studio there might be studies for the Lucretia painting, or even other forgeries that he’s working on, then we’ll have him for sure. It’ll be even better than catching him and Marianne together. The case will be as good as proved.”
“We have a lot of evidence now! How about the hands we painted? That canvas is in the States, on my closet shelf. We had to have painted it from what we saw in London, and those hands are the hands in the Third Lucretia.”
“But somebody else could be painting them right now from pictures of the Third Lucretia that must be in all the magazines this week.”
“Are you kidding? As careful as I was to paint it like Rembrandt? You couldn’t get that from a magazine picture. Besides, what if Jacob catches us this time? Even if he wasn’t the one who tried to kill you in London, he’s still dangerous. He killed those museum guards.”
“He’s not going to kill us right across the street from a mission, for goodness’ sake. Besides, it’ll be night and he’ll be gone. Artists don’t paint at night. They need daylight.”
“He was at his studio last night when it was dark enough he had to put a light on.”
“Yeah, but that was way in the back of his apartment. The bathroom or whatever, not toward the front. He’s on the top floor. If he works by the window, I’ll bet he was able to paint for at least another hour, even though it was cloudy. Anyway, we’ll wait till it’s a lot darker and we’ll make sure there aren’t any lights on in the building. And we’ll take a flashlight. If we find out it really is his studio, it’s just what we need to prove the whole thing.”
The Mystery of the Third Lucretia Page 14