by Chris Ewan
The apartment had two bedrooms as it happened, both situated at the rear of the building, away from the canal views afforded by the picture windows in the front sitting room. One of the bedrooms was tiny and it contained only an unmade camp bed with no pillow. I moved passed it and on to the second, much larger bedroom, which was dominated by a large double mattress in the middle of the floor. I knelt down beside the mattress and felt under the single pillow that was resting on it. Then I felt inside the pillowcase. Then I pulled the pillow out of the pillowcase and turned the pillowcase inside out. But there was nothing there.
I put the pillow back as I had found it and searched under the duvet cover and around and then underneath the mattress. After that I checked the pillowcase once more and then I sat back and scanned the room. It was empty aside from a large wooden trunk. The trunk had a small padlock on it and I picked it open without a great deal of thought and had a look inside. There were plenty of clothes there, as well as a blister pack of what looked like headache pills and a scattering of condoms in various colours. I dug a little deeper and my fingers touched something cold and hard. I knew what it was before I pulled it out of the trunk but I pulled it out anyway.
The object was a handgun. Sure, my knowledge of guns is rudimentary at best, but any fool could tell it was deadly. Holding the gun made me think for the umpteenth time that I really should learn something more about firearms. That way, whenever I happen upon one (which is more often than I care to think about) I could remove the bullets or do something destructive to the trigger that would prevent it from firing. But for some reason, I’m reluctant. Maybe it’s because learning about guns is something the bad guys do. Or the police.
Since I couldn’t disarm the gun, I began to think about hiding it instead, a tactic I’d resorted to once or twice in the past. The problem, of course, was that the only place to hide the gun inside the bedroom was the trunk and I had a funny feeling its owner might look for it there. One possibility was to take the thing with me but I didn’t like it. Imagine if I got stopped and searched outside the apartment by a passing police officer and he happened to find my burglar tools and the gun on me. Not an appealing prospect.
And one I really shouldn’t have been wasting my time on. After all, the real issue was where the monkey figurine had got to. If it was still in the apartment, finding it wasn’t going to be as easy as finding a wall safe. Yes, the apartment was sparsely furnished, but the monkey figurine was only a few inches tall #nd it could be hidden just about anywhere. And that was supposing it was still here in the first place. The American had insisted that it would be under the pillow and it simply wasn’t.
I checked my watch again. It was just shy of 9.30, which meant I only had an hour left until I was supposed to meet the American and just half an hour until the wide man and the thin man would be finishing their meal. The margins were getting uncomfortably tight and that was assuming the American didn’t make them any tighter by bidding his companions an early good night. Was that so unlikely? After all, the American didn’t know that I’d changed my mind, even if he’d hoped I might.
Ten minutes. That was all I was going to allow myself and it wasn’t much time at all. I certainly couldn’t dither any longer. But where to begin? I shook my head and raised my eyes to the ceiling, perhaps hoping for some kind of a clue. Which is funny, because I actually found something much better—a ceiling hatch.
The hatch was immediately above my head and I hadn’t noticed it before because it had been painted the same colour as the rest of the ceiling. And wouldn’t you know it, the thing was positioned right above the trunk. Curious, that.
In a flash, I slipped the gun inside the waistband of my trousers and then closed the lid of the trunk and climbed up onto it. Standing on tiptoes, I pushed the hatch up into the roof space and carefully slid it to one side. Then I felt around the opening with my finger tips. The wood was rough and grainy and covered in dust. I felt right around the wooden frame and still I didn’t find what I was looking for. But I had a funny feeling about it all the same and so I popped my torch into my mouth and, with a well-timed leap and a heave, contrived to pull my head up into the opening. Of course, I hadn’t had the foresight to turn the damn torch on and so I had to heave myself higher until I had my elbows resting on the inside edge of the hatch and I could reach for my torch with my free hand. I clicked it on and shone the beam around the cold, damp-smelling interior. There was nothing of any consequence in front of me and so I used my elbows to work myself around, legs dangling into the room below, turning almost a complete circle before I saw the monkey figurine. It was just beyond the wooden frame of the opening, resting on its side on the spongy loft insulation, wide-eyed in surprise, with its front paws clamped to its mouth. I reached for the thing and gripped it in my hand and wondered how in hell it could be worth all this effort.
I wondered even more when I heard a sharp bang, loud in the hallway, followed by a second bang and the rip of splintering wood.
FOUR
There were more splintering and ripping and cracking sounds, less violent now, as if the intruder was clearing the split wood away from the hole he’d punched in the door. Then I heard the locks being turned and I figured the intruder had reached his hand through the hole to get at them.
Not, you understand, that I was just hanging around waiting to see if I was right. In point of fact, as soon as I’d heard the first thud I’d heaved myself up into the roof space and I was now busy sliding the hatch back into its housing as quietly as I could. Light from the bedroom was visible around the edge of the hatch but I was pretty sure I had it positioned right. I’d find out soon enough if I was wrong.
I flashed the torch around the loft space, just to make sure my weight was positioned on the wooden joists rather than the padded insulation and the flimsy ceiling board below. Then I switched off the torch and waited.
The door to the apartment opened and somebody stepped inside. They paused for a moment, perhaps surprised that the lights were on and wondering if they should have knocked first.
“Hallo?”
It was a man and he sounded Dutch. It occurred to me for a second that I could respond and that maybe just the sound of my voice would send him running. Then it occurred to me that I should banish ideas as stupid as that one from every last cell in my brain.
We waited, the intruder and me, and when he finally decided that the apartment was as empty as he’d imagined, he began walking in my direction, the noise of his footsteps resonating with the wooden struts I was balancing upon.
He seemed to dismiss the small second bedroom just as quickly as I had and then he made his way into the main bedroom and paused, just a handful of feet below me. Had I left something down there? I didn’t think so. In fact, I was sure I hadn’t. And I’d put the bedding and the mattress back as I’d found them, and the lid of the trunk was closed too. There was always the possibility that I’d disturbed some dust when I’d been searching around the roof space and that it had fallen into an incriminating pile on the floor below, but that was unlikely, and the intruder would need some keen eyesight to spot a sprinkling of dust from across the room.
I mention the dust because it was a scenario, albeit a little far fetched, that I’d worked into one of my early burglar books. My series character, Faulks, had crawled inside the ventilation system in a Berlin art gallery with the intention of waiting until the gallery closed and then lowering himself on a wire to steal a particular painting, only to accidentally knock some debris through a grate, just in front of a watchful old museum guard. The guard had peered upwards, his suspicion aroused, and Faulks, being a quick thinking type, had made some scuttling noises with his fingernails inside the ventilation shaft. His impromptu rat impression was convincing enough to make the guard shudder, though I couldn’t see how that would help me in my current situation.
What in blazes was he doing down there?
Carefully, I lowered my head and pressed my ear against the hatch.
But it didn’t help in the slightest—it just seemed to amplify the swirling noise of the blood in my ears. I tried peeking through the tiny crack at the edge of the hatch but all I could see was a blur of light. I leaned back and listened some more, straining my ears above the percussion of my heartbeat. There was some kind of movement, though I couldn’t be sure what it was. My best guess was that he was searching the bedding, because what kind of noise would that produce anyway? Nothing loud, that was for sure.
Whump.
Now that sounded like the mattress being dropped onto the floor, as if the intruder had lifted it up to search underneath it. More footsteps. A slow creaking noise and a low-level thud. My guess was that he was searching the trunk. He didn’t spend long on it. Then I heard him slide the trunk across the floor, perhaps to check if there was something below it, a move I hadn’t thought of, and a few minutes later I heard long, deliberate ripping noises. This I thought I understood—he was slicing through the bed covers, which suggested he had a knife with him.
The knife was not a nice thought. I mean, who carries a knife unless they’re the type of character to use it? I had visions of a scar-faced, one-eyed drifter, passing his blade from one hand to the other, just itching to cut up the hapless burglar who happened to have backed himself into the wintry roof space above him.
But then, the odds of him finding me were slim, and even if he did, there was always a chance I could somehow talk my way out. I’d managed it in the past. One time, I’d even been caught red-handed by a home owner happily pocketing her best silverware and had managed to walk clean away after giving her a rough appraisal of her collection’s worth.
But what was I thinking? I still had the gun stuffed in the waistband of my trousers for God’s sake. Which come to think of it now, was kind of worrying, because I hadn’t even paused to try and work out if the safety was on before I pushed it towards my groin and began crawling around an enclosed space.
As nimbly as I could, I rolled onto my side and eased the gun from my trousers, then aimed its weighty barrel down at the hatch. The intruder could feel free to poke his head up now, I thought, and if he wanted me to I could blow it clean off his shoulders.
I ended up holding the gun like that for long enough for my wrist to begin to ache, and meanwhile, the ripping and slicing noises continued. Then, just as abruptly as it had begun, the ripping stopped, and the intruder moved on to the second bedroom. I set the gun down, shook some feeling back into my wrist and used my torch to check the time on my watch. It had gone ten o’clock, which meant the wide man could be home at any moment. And he knew about the hatch, even if the intruder hadn’t spotted it yet.
I turned the torch beam onto the monkey figurine, wondering what was so special about it. The monkey stared up at me beneath the glare, like a petrified interrogation suspect. He was still covering his mouth with his hands, as if he was afraid he might spill his secret, or worse, squeal and give away our hiding place. I was all set to lean hard on the little fucker to make him talk when I heard the man’s footsteps again, moving with more purpose this time, though thankfully they were heading away from me. After that, I heard the front door swing open and the noise of his footfall began to fade away to nothing.
He’d left, I was fairly sure, but I waited another few minutes Just to be certain. Then, when I was convinced beyond all doubt that he was gone, I eased up from my crouched position and stretched the cramp out of my legs and my back. Once I’d regained a little movement, I slid the hatch carefully open and swung my legs around and down into the ceiling space below. Then, leaning as far as I could to the side, I lifted up a square of the loft insulation and buried the gun beneath it, pocketed the monkey figurine, lowered myself from the hatch and dropped to the bedroom floor.
I could, at that point, have moved the trunk back to its original position and stood on it to reach up and slide the hatch cover back into place. But really there was no point. My successor had made such a mess of the bedding and the mattress that the room looked as if a sorority house pillow fight had got out of hand. Shredded fabric and feathers covered the floor all the way to the doorway and I didn’t have a hope of putting things back as they’d been. And even if I could have magicked up a fresh and identical set of bedding, the gesture would have been pointless because of the mallet-sized hole that had been left in the front door of the apartment.
So I dusted myself off and got out of there as quickly as I could, leaving the door ajar and drumming my way down the five flights of stairs until I reached the front door to the building, which, it turned out, had received similar treatment to its cousin upstairs, although this time the lock itself had taken the brunt of the mallet’s force.
I slipped through the door and out onto the street, sucked in a mouthful of chill air, and, for just a moment, found that I had something to smile about. My bike was still there.
FIVE
Cafe de Brag was empty when I returned. The lights were off and the door was locked when I tried the handle. I was only a few minutes late but there was no sign of the American. I wondered for a moment if he might whisper to me from a darkened side alley but that kind of thing only happened in the pages of my mystery novels. I looked around anyway and found that the street was deserted. If I’d wanted to, it was the perfect opportunity to break into the cafe, though I couldn’t see what purpose it would serve. In the end, I tried the door handle again and then banged my palm hard against the glass.
Within moments, the blonde bartender appeared from a back room. She switched the lights on and hurried to the door to unlock it for me, not even pausing to see what I wanted. Her movements were rushed and she looked anxious. I wouldn’t say the colour had drained from her skin, because her tan was too established for that, but the animation was certainly gone from her face. She locked the door behind me and then stood and chewed on her lip and clutched her hands and pushed her hair behind her ear and gave off a hundred other less obvious signals that she was worried half out of her mind.
“They took him,” she told me, breathlessly.
“The two men?”
She nodded. “An hour ago. To his apartment.”
“You’re in on this?”
She hesitated. I pulled one of the monkeys from my pocket and showed it to her. As soon as she saw it, something seemed to catch in her throat and then she nodded, her blue eyes transfixed by the figurine.
“What’s your name?”
“Marieke.”
“And your connection with the American?”
She met my eyes and blinked and I knew right away what a dumb question that had been. Then she looked again at the monkey figurine and I slipped it back into my pocket.
“You don’t think he’ll be back?” I asked.
She shook her head, as if clearing her mind of the spell the monkey had cast over her. “He said he would be here all night,” she told me. “That he would not leave.”
“But something changed his mind.”
“It was them.”
“Right.” I looked about the cafe for some kind of inspiration. I seemed a little short of inspiration as it happened. “This apartment you mentioned, you’ve been there?” I asked.
She nodded.
“You’d better show me.”
The blonde disappeared into the back room behind the bar again, leaving me to push any doubts I had about what I was doing to the deepest, darkest corners of my mind. When she returned, she had on a padded winter coat and she was carrying a set of keys that she used to lock the cafe door with before leading me away across the canal bridge and along a series of cobbled streets, her heels echoing in the darkness. It was just starting to drizzle and I turned my collar up and plunged my hands into my pockets as I paced along beside her. I didn’t like the way things were shaping up—first the second monkey not being where it should have been, then the gun and the intruder, and now this. The whole situation reeked of trouble and I had a fair idea how it might end, but I also had a girl who seemed as if she co
uld use a little help and, just maybe, twenty thousand euros to collect.
The American’s apartment building, Marieke told me, was on St. Jacobsstraat, not too far from Centraal Station. The street itself was a second-rate off-shoot of the Red Light District, lined with squalid bars and coffee houses and peopled by tourists who’d wandered cluelessly off the Damrak only to be approached by shady types selling drugs. One of the pushers followed us for a while and asked me if I wanted to buy some Viagra for the lady. We ignored him until he left us alone, meanwhile passing street-level windows lit with coloured fluorescent tubes where the prostitutes behind the glass seemed bored by the whole charade. One of them was sat on a wooden chair in a Lycra bikini, legs splayed and high heels pressed against the glass, texting someone on her mobile phone.
We were half way along the street before Marieke turned and faced up to an ill-fitting door beside one of the coffee houses. The door was covered in flyers and graffiti and looked like it had been forced open one too many times. She fitted a key into the spring lock and led me inside a communal hallway that was lit by a bare, wall-mounted light bulb, and that stank of stale reefer smoke. We went up a floor in silence, me trying not to make too much noise or attract her attention as I slipped my throwaway gloves onto my hands, Marieke occupying herself by fumbling with her keys.
It turned out she needn’t have bothered. The door to the American’s apartment was ajar.
I moved past her and walked through the door and found myself inside a cramped, windowless bed-sit. The place was barely furnished but it was neatly kept. In one corner there was a single bed with a dark green bedspread and white sheets. On top of the bed was an open suitcase. I sorted through the case quickly. It was filled with neatly folded clothes and there were some travel documents and a small laptop computer inside, but nothing else of consequence. Beside the bed was a chest of drawers, and all of the drawers were open and bare. On the opposite side of the room was a small wooden table and two foldaway chairs, a single burner stove connected to a gas canister and a free standing sink with a couple of scratched water glasses draining on it. Ahead of us and just off to the side was a second door.