Absinthe

by Guido Eekhaut

  “You managed that situation with the police officer very well. Do not worry about it anymore. It was a bit too spectacular for my taste, but then, there should be a bit of spectacle now and then.”

  “The bomb was the idea of our Ukrainian friends, Mr. Keretsky.”

  “Ah, I understand. A flashy, garish people, these Ukrainians. But good at what they do, I’ll admit. True to their word as well. The officer had no idea the money was counterfeit?”

  “It was dark,” Tarkovski said.

  “And he was greedy. Good. What happened with the recording?”

  “I had it destroyed, as you asked.”

  “I knew I could count on you, Andreï,” Keretsky said. “I knew I could count on you. The recording, we could not permit that to exist.”

  Tarkovski looked out at the city. He had lied only once, today, but the lie had come easily. He did not want to look his boss in the eye, however. He had heard people notice when you lie. They watch your facial expression and know you lie. He was not going to take that risk.

  26

  “HER NAME IS EILEEN Calster and here are some recent pictures of her, a few of which we got out of the university computer.”

  Keretsky didn’t have to know where Monet had gotten the photos and information. He was familiar with the power of money. He knew what the hunger for money did to most people and their motives. In a society geared for consumption and consumption only, money was the ultimate motivator.

  Or was it not? Power was, maybe. Power might be an even stronger motivator than money. Power over the life of others. But finally, after all other factors were weighed, it was not about money or power but about recognition. It was about receiving the appropriate recognition for your actions and for what you were. That made people tick. That’s what made them work twelve hours a day on impossible projects.

  “Mr. Monet,” he said, “I notice that this affair is important to you, but I have to leave very soon, unfortunately. I need to attend to urgent business in Moscow. Things that cannot be postponed. Both my assistants are at your disposal. Mr. Parnow, unfortunately, doesn’t speak English or Dutch, but Andreï does, and he will help you.”

  Andreï nodded as if the current arrangement suited him fine. Keretsky, however, had failed to talk this through with him. He had hoped to accompany his boss back to Moscow with a permanent position in the capital by way of promotion. He had hoped to get out of rainy Amsterdam.

  But now Keretsky was returning alone. Tarkovski would need to talk with him about that. But Keretsky had no time planned for his assistant anymore. Why not? Had Tarkovski not earned his return? Had he not been Keretsky’s servant for long enough? In the Netherlands, a country he had no affinity with? How long had that been? Two years, nearly three? He had even learned the language in a short time. And served the interests of the Keretsky empire. Tended to the business side of the empire, and occasionally a few illegal matters as well.

  Earlier arrangements had been made concerning Tarkovski’s tasks and his return to Russia. He had been made to understand that an end would come to this exile. He had repaid his debt. He wanted to return to Russia. But he wouldn’t. Even then, he wouldn’t contradict Keretsky or refuse to help this fellow Monet. He would follow orders, once again.

  The worst thing was that he had to babysit Parnow. The man loathed him, saw him as an effeminate bureaucrat. Or so Tarkovski assumed. Parnow knew better than to express his feelings. But his face tightened every time he saw Tarkovski, who couldn’t help noticing the man’s disdain.

  “Thank you, Mr. Keretsky,” Monet said stiffly. He too knew that Keretsky’s departure wasn’t to his advantage. Now he would be first in the line of people responsible for the whole affair with Van Boer. If something went south, the cops would call on him first.

  He gave the photographs to Andreï. Monet glanced at the Russian secretary. The young man didn’t seem the kind of person who would act swiftly and decidedly—he didn’t look up to the job. Monet didn’t know what to do about the whole matter. Parnow would be the right man in a tight situation, but Andreï would be useless.

  The meeting was taking place in the Renaissance Hotel after dinner. Downstairs, Keretsky’s Bentley was waiting. Coffee had been served in the room, which was much too large for just the four of them.

  Monet was familiar with these Russians. The hard marble hand in the velvet glove. No, he thought, not hard as marble, but dead. They were all dead. Emotionless and dead. The Russians wouldn’t hesitate to kill him if they thought he would damage them. These are the sort of allies you have chosen, he thought. They were one step up from the rabble of Amsterdam South, somewhat more civilized than the people who traded guns in the harbor, but only just. They would deal with problems in exactly the same way as the rabble. He didn’t doubt that would be Parnow’s main mission.

  Andreï Tarkovski was even less happy with the way things were going. He had wanted to speak to Keretsky about the ongoing business, but the Russian had ignored him. He would be left behind in Amsterdam with a limited budget to run Keretsky’s affairs. For one thing, he wouldn’t have the funds to organize a large-scale search for the missing girl and the list.

  Why did Keretsky want to help those Dutch? The list had his name on it, but why would that matter? Keretsky supported dozens of parties in nearly as many countries. And he sometimes supported different parties with contradictory interests in the same country. Right-wing nationalists, former communists, mainstream socialists. It didn’t much matter to Keretsky, as long as he could influence the decision model in that country.

  Keretsky had his own interests to consider in Holland. Dutch criminal society—the men he had seen earlier—would remember whatever assistance they had received from him over the years. That was how he worked. He would visit Amsterdam again in a year or so, bringing along new expansion plans for his companies. He would call in his debts and renew old friendships like the one with Monet. He now owned a decent share of Fabna Bank, and in a year, he would convince other people to invest in that same bank, strengthening his own position. At some point, he would take over their shares, ending up with more than five percent of the bank’s assets.

  That was why Andreï Tarkovski would have to recover that famous list: because establishing obligations was a part of Keretsky’s strategy, and he needed an untarnished reputation. If more people got hurt during the process of retrieving the list, it wouldn’t be Keretsky’s problem. Maybe Tarkovski could earn his way back to Russia that way.

  Tarkovski had taken his own precautions, however. He hadn’t destroyed the recording he had bought from Breukeling because he assumed he needed some sort of life insurance. Because he might need it as leverage against his boss. He knew it would be dangerous to play this sort of game with Keretsky—who was far better at such games than Tarkovski—but he still hadn’t destroyed the recording.

  He furtively glanced at Parnow who, as usual, was ignoring him. The man reminded him of the pictures he had seen of Egyptian statues. Or Chinese. He was unapproachable. Tarkovski knew the man had been a soldier. Spetsnaz, in the Soviet era. Or even later. Not just any unit, he heard, but one belonging to the Ministry of Defense, the GRU. Afghanistan, probably. And other hot spots where Russian interests had been defended with guns. You didn’t make it into one of those special units if you weren’t a hard-ass. And you needed a link with organized crime too, so Tarkovski had heard. But he was sure a lot of professional and dedicated soldiers were part of the special units as well, because they were tough and liked the adventure, not because they were criminals. Most of organized crime recruited their own soldiers from ex-military who had done active service abroad.

  Andreï didn’t have to know where Parnow came from. The man was dead. He had no feelings. There was no life left behind those eyes. And now he, Andreï Tarkovski, the son of a philosophy teacher and a musically gifted mother, was teamed up with a murderer.

  Not that he had much of a choice.

  A long time ago, this choice ha
d been taken from him.

  Keretsky had almost total control over his life. That was his privilege.

  Saint Petersburg, seven years ago. Keretsky had been able to take over Tarkovski’s life then. It had been inevitable. His parents had asked for Keretsky’s help and protection against a vicious loan shark. His father, a common teacher with few financial prospects in a struggling economy, had been foolish. He needed a car to commute, and he had borrowed the money. Public transport had been degrading rapidly after the end of the Soviet era and had become the battlefield of mobsters, rapists, and other scum. The car was a wreck, and the money had been loaned at a rate of 12 percent. Per month. The ruble was devaluating rapidly, and it would never rise again from its abyss. The loan shark wanted his money back, threefold, after three months. He sent two men in leather jackets when Tarkovski senior was unable to pay. They broke both his wrists.

  Father had gone to Keretsky, a man more powerful than the mayor or the chief of police. Had promised him eternal loyalty. Keretsky intervened. The leather jackets did not come back. Keretsky returned the money but not threefold. The loan shark disappeared six months later, never to be seen again. Everybody knew what had happened to him, more or less. Keretsky didn’t like too much competition in his city. The message had been clearly understood by all.

  “Give me your son,” he had said. “I’ll give him a new life.” He wanted the young Tarkovski on account of his intellectual capabilities. “He’s a brilliant young man,” Keretsky had said to Tarkovski senior. “But here, he has no future. He has no future in Russia. I’ll give him a future.”

  Andreï’s parents lived in a small rent-controlled apartment. They had little money. They had no choice. Andreï went to work for Keretsky, on account of his parents. Keretsky paid Tarkovski decent enough wages as well as all his expenses. He had him settled in Amsterdam. Andreï hoped he would earn enough to buy a cottage in the countryside for his parents.

  But Keretsky had bought his soul. There was no way around it. The man remained civil and never treated Tarkovski as a slave. The young man became a trusted and well-paid employee. Keretsky had been headhunting.

  And now Tarkovski would be left with a problem he dreaded solving: Eileen Calster, a young girl, close to his own age. She would have to die, he assumed. She knew too much. He didn’t like that.

  Tarkovski wondered how Parnow had been recruited. Not that it mattered much. As he looked at Parnow, he knew Eileen Calster wouldn’t stand a chance.

  27

  EEKHAUT LOOKED AROUND, TRYING to find meaning in what amounted to chaos. In the messy room, only a few bloodstains on the mattress reminded him that a human life had ended here in an unfortunate way. This was the essence of a human existence: a few stains of precious circulating fluid, spilled by a careless killer. A life definitely wasted. Van Boer’s life.

  “What do you hope to find?” he asked Dewaal, continuing to observe the room, in search of that one revealing small detail that would lead to the murderer. He knew that, in reality, it didn’t happen too often. “The technical people have been going over this place, haven’t they?”

  Not that he was familiar with the routines of the Dutch. But he also wouldn’t object to a second or even a third thorough search of a crime scene, knowing that things were occasionally overlooked by previous investigators.

  “We return time and again to the same question,” Dewaal said. “Why was Van Boer executed?” She took some of the books from the shelves, flipped their pages, and looked at the text on their backs. “Well? We know about his political affiliations and his urge to go work for his enemies, which in itself is a conundrum, isn’t it? I like that word. I was sure I was going to need it at some point. There’s a connection, surely, but what? I hope at least there’s an identifiable reason for his murder. Otherwise, we’re completely in the dark. If it’s, well …”

  “Random,” Eekhaut offered.

  “Yes, random.”

  “These political backgrounds,” Eekhaut said, “would that be the only option?”

  She folded her arms. “I see no motive beyond that. The technical boys found nothing for us to work with. Actually, there were too many traces. These young people seldom bother with cleaning their apartments. What you see is what you get. Clothes, both Pieter’s and the girl’s. Books, again both of theirs. Heaps of documents, mostly clippings from newspapers and magazines and printouts of websites—he seemed to have collected everything. We could read through all that, but I’m sure we’ll be none the wiser.”

  “Let us assume Van Tillo and her party are in on this, somehow. Then we must assume Van Boer had sensitive information on them. Would make sense. Something they would rather not see in his hands, or anywhere else. Something that made him potentially dangerous. You don’t hire a contract killer because your employee is absent from the office.”

  “No, we can assume that doesn’t happen here.”

  “So we’re left with an unknown factor. Big bloody unknown factor.”

  “Several unknowns,” she said, offhandedly looking in some drawers. She found two large notebooks and flipped through them, again hoping for secrets suddenly revealed. She knew she would probably have to ask one of the team members to go through all these papers. “A sort of diary. It will take days if not more to sift through this. We don’t have that luxury. Meanwhile, we’ll get nowhere, not even with Van Tillo.”

  “And what about Breukeling’s murder?”

  She seemed annoyed by that question, he noticed. “Internal Affairs has questioned his wife. Looked into his accounts, gone through what was left of the house, questioned his friends. Made a thorough nuisance of themselves. All that in a burst of totally unusual activity, Walter. What can I tell you?”

  Nothing he didn’t already know. That Breukeling at some point had been seduced by the dark side. Had taken the wrong path and gone off the reservation. And in the process had met someone who was not going to let the detective live, not with the knowledge he had.

  He stood by the dirty window, looking out. Amsterdam seemed careless and without much concern for the suffering of people. From where he stood, it seemed hopelessly provincial and small. Neglected and even a bit derelict, this city, as if it had realized, long ago, that its golden age was passed and would never be retrieved. People, he assumed, felt at home in this city without ever being home. “Something I wanted to ask you, Chief,” he said. “Why have you brought me along on this investigation?”

  “You have a problem with that?”

  “I mean, you have a complete team over there. All of them experienced people, many of them younger than me, all more familiar with the situation in Holland than I am. And then you drag me along, though you have no idea what I can contribute. Seems strange to me. Not the sort of thing I’d expect you to do, I mean.”

  She kept looking through the notebooks—searching for hidden meaning, for confessions. Not interested in answering him.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Eekhaut continued. “It is not a reflection on your intentions or anything. I appreciate your attention. And I completely understand if you don’t want to talk about this. You already mentioned that—”

  “No,” she said.

  “No?”

  “I mean: I want to talk about it. I certainly do. And I have very good reasons for bringing you along. But I’m sure I already explained these reasons to you. You’re the odd man out. The new face on the team. The unknown factor. That’s what this is about.”

  “I understand. The odd man out with the terrible reputation.”

  “Exactly. The odd man out, with a clean slate.” She looked at him. Amused, it seemed, for a moment. “This is the thing. For some months now, strange things have been happening to my crew. It started when I became their boss. And maybe some of it was going on much longer than that. There is at least one mole in the office. Maybe more. Confidential information is leaking from my team to the outside world. I’m not talking about Breukeling, that’s something else entirely.”


  “Leaks to the press?”

  “If only. The press is sometimes made aware of what we do, but they never get the details. It’s much worse: information is being leaked to people and organizations we don’t want to have any intimate knowledge of our investigations. And as a result, they’re often one step ahead of us.”

  “So there’s a mole in your office.”

  “Yes. Maybe more than one.”

  “So you prefer to work with the odd man out. Me.”

  “At least I know you cannot be implicated in any of those leaks. You arrive here out of the blue, with your annoying attitude and your even more annoying habits, but at least you’re clean. Even if you weren’t clean in Brussels—and I’m not asking, not even interested—you have no connections with Dutch crime.”

  “I’m glad I passed the test.”

  “Happy to oblige,” she said. “And that’s why I want you to tag along. When I heard Van Boer was dead, the alarm in my head went off. Very loud, that alarm. I knew he worked for PDN but had no idea what he was after. Suddenly things started to get complicated.” She closed the notebooks. “There’s not much to find here, I assume. I’ll read this whenever I’m in a romantic or philosophical mood but not now.”

  Eekhaut kicked a cabinet. “Do we take the room apart?”

  “Would that make sense?”

  He crouched down and lifted the sheets and then the mattress. Looked under the bed.

  “You can’t be serious!” she said. “You’re not going to crawl under the bed!”

  “No, I don’t need to,” he said, retrieving two pieces of paper. “I’m sure your technical people are good at what they do, but in this case, they were a bit careless. Never underestimate what you may find during a second or a third search.”

  “What is it?”

  “A list.” He handed her the papers.

  “Shit!” she said. Looked at him sharply. “Maybe this is what we were looking for.”

  “It is?”

  “A partial list of donors.”