by Chris Ewan
“Nothing. Go on.”
“There is not much else. After I visited him, he wrote me the letters and I wrote back to him. It was not so long before he was released by then.”
“No. You wouldn’t want to risk him losing interest.”
“When he was released, he came to Amsterdam.”
“And you gave him the homecoming he’d been waiting for. And afterwards, he whispered sweet nothings in your ear until he happened to mention that getting his hands on the diamonds wasn’t as straightforward as you’d hoped. There were the monkey figurines to think about, and the other men who had them. That must have been crushing.”
Her lips thinned. “It was not like this.”
“Oh, I think it was. But you can stick to the Disney version if you like. The real question is the monkeys, though, isn’t it? Did he tell you what they meant right then or did you have to work on him for a while?”
“He told me everything,” she said, straightening. “More than he told you.”
“No question. But then I was just the hired help. You were his one and only true love.”
She adopted a prim expression. “You were supposed to bring him the monkeys. We were to leave Amsterdam.”
“With the diamonds?”
“Of course.”
“So they’re still in the city.”
She nodded, rolling her eyes as if that much was obvious.
“Where?”
Just then, the door to the cafe opened and the young man I’d seen working behind the bar earlier in the week walked in. He clocked me right away and paused, half way through unzipping his coat. He said something to Marieke in Dutch, his tone hostile, and it was enough to make the old man turn away from his rum and question me with his eyes. I didn’t have to respond, though, because Marieke did it for me. And whatever she said seemed to set him straight because once he’d given me his best menacing stare he disappeared through the door at the back of the bar.
“You were saying?” I said, turning on my stool to face Marieke once again.
“Bring me the monkeys and I will tell you,” she said, glancing towards the door her colleague had walked through. “Otherwise, how can I trust you?”
“You want to bring trust into our relationship? Don’t you think it’s a little late for that?”
“Not if you bring me the monkeys.”
“You make it sound so straightforward.”
She adopted a stern expression. “But if you get them, do not leave them in your apartment. Bring them here.”
“We’ll see,” I told her. “You never know, I might figure this all out and keep the diamonds for myself.”
She clamped her teeth together.
“What? You think I’m joking?”
I stood up from my stool at the bar and buttoned my coat. Then I slipped my hands into my pockets and bowed my head goodbye. It felt good, in a childish way, talking about the missing figurines and offering to try to find them while all the time I had two of them in my pocket, gripped between my fingers. It was almost tempting to pull them out and wave them at her with a grin on my face but I didn’t do it. I still didn’t know exactly how much she would take.
Outside of the cafe, twilight had begun to descend, lowering the temperature a few degrees and causing the canal-side streetlamps to power up. When I checked my watch, I saw that it was almost half past five, and because I didn’t feel like being crushed in a tram full of commuters I looked around me for a nearby bicycle rack. There was one just a short distance away and I walked across to it and immediately selected a pale blue bike with fitted mud-caps and a wicker basket affixed to the handlebars. The metal chain that secured the front wheel to the bike rack was fastened with a modern padlock and I had my picks out and the lock undone before my fingers could begin to numb. I relocked the chain to the rack, freed the bike from the tangle of adjoining pedals and handle bars, and wheeled it to the side of the road where I prepared to hoist my leg over the saddle and ride away.
Before I could, though, a white panel van surged out of a nearby parking space and veered across the road towards me. The driver didn’t straighten up. Instead, he stamped on his brakes and brought the van to a halt just in front of me, blocking my way. The front doors of the van flew open.
I knew all the cliches about white van drivers, sure, but the recklessness stunned me and it took me a moment to gather my senses and prepare to confront the driver. As it happened, though, the confrontation that followed was of a different order to the one I was expecting because the two men who jumped out of the van were wearing balaclavas and one of them had a baseball bat over his shoulder. I opened my mouth to speak but before I could get the words out the man whipped the bat forwards and buried the sweet spot deep in my solar plexus. The pain was immediate and disabling. It exploded from my chest out to my fingertips, making me let go of the bike and meanwhile robbing me of my breath. My legs buckled and I fell to my knees on the cobbled roadway as the bike toppled over beside me. I looked up, gasping for air, to find the masked man bringing the bat down once again. And this time, when he connected, I didn’t feel a thing.
TWENTY-TWO
The briefcase wouldn’t shut. I was pushing down hard on the lid, fumbling for the clasps, but I couldn’t get them to engage. Something was in the way. I dropped the briefcase onto the floor and stamped on it. When the obstruction still wouldn’t give, I jumped up and down on the lid with both feet. There was some flex but not enough. I decided to open the briefcase and try repositioning Arthur the butler’s hand but when I threw back the lid there was no hand there at all—there was a man’s head. The man was pleading with his eyes, his eyeballs almost crawling out of the slits in the balaclava he was wearing, and he was groaning. The man’s groaning became more insistent and his head began to shake, as if he was trying to say something but couldn’t. I reached down and pushed my fingers past his lips and felt around inside the moist cavity of his mouth until I touched something hard. I gripped the object as best I could and pulled. A monkey figurine slipped out of his mouth, slick with his drool. I raised the figurine to my nose and sniffed. A sweet, peppery smell crawled up my sinuses and clawed at my brain. Then my eyes snapped open and the man who was holding my head upright by my hair passed the smelling salts beneath my nose once again.
He slapped me for good measure and I mumbled something that my dry mouth and lips failed to articulate. I worked some saliva with my cheeks and swallowed and it was then that the nausea hit. Sudden and unstoppable, a wave of heat rushed from my chest to my scalp, turning my forehead into a hot plate. My ears popped and my throat spasmed. I doubled over and let go of a gut-full of vomit.
The man released my hair and jumped clear, grumbling as I spit the last threads of bile from my mouth. I longed to use my hand to clean my lips and wipe the sweat from my face and forehead but found that I couldn’t because my hands were tied to the back of the plastic chair I was sat on. My feet were bound too, secured to the metal legs of the chair. The heat was unbearable. I wanted to be stripped and thrown into an icy pool, longed to be hosed down with gallons of freezing water. I turned groggily to the man and was about to ask him for help but as I parted my foul-tasting lips to shape the words my vision blurred and I found that I was looking into a long, unfocused tunnel that led only to unconsciousness.
The second time I woke the man was holding my head back and pouring water down my throat. I gagged and spluttered, nearly vomiting again. The man tried to give me more water but I shook my head, moaning, and butted the glass away. He moved back and studied me for a moment and then he called over his shoulder in Dutch until his companion walked into the room and joined him. Both men wore jeans and leather jackets and the hair of the thin man with the water glass was flattened and tangled from the balaclava he’d had on. The wide man had no hair. I may have only seen them once before, in the cafe with Michael, but I’d thought about them often enough since then and I knew right away who they were.
Something caught in my nostrils and I looked
down to find that my vomit was still pooled on the floor in front of me. Lifting my eyes, I scanned the room they were keeping me in. I’d been here before too. The mattress and bedding were still torn and ruined, the wooden trunk was positioned just as it had been previously and the hatch to the attic was right where it should have been, immediately above the trunk. On the bare floor a short distance in front of my pooled stomach contents were the two monkey figurines.
The men saw me looking at the figurines and said something to one another. Then the thin man bent down and snatched them up, zipping them into the pocket of his leather jacket and giving me a wary look, as if I could somehow steal them from before his eyes. I wasn’t sure how he expected me to manage it. Just the pull on my chest of having my arms tied behind me was enough to make me wince each time I breathed. My chest felt raw and tender where I’d been hit with the baseball bat and I was afraid that at least one of my ribs might be broken. In a sense, it was good that I couldn’t move my arms because it meant I couldn’t aggravate my injuries or raise my hand to discover just how bad a state the back of my skull was in. Even so, I’d had much better evenings.
“You are English,” the wide man said, finally.
I nodded, then winced as the room lurched to one side.
“Do you know who we are?”
This time I shook my head very carefully.
“We know you. Mr. Charlie Howard. You are a writer.”
“Yes,” I managed.
“And a thief.”
I met his eyes. They were deep-set and very dark. He pulled his head down into his bulky shoulders and breathed through flared nostrils, awaiting my response. The thin man looked between us, like an eager spectator at a blood sport event. I glanced at the floor, struggling to focus, and the wide man repeated himself.
“You are a thief. You stole from us.”
“It was a mistake,” I croaked.
“You say this now.”
I glanced up. “Actually, I’ve been saying it for over a week. Ever since you killed Michael.”
The thin man turned to the wide man, about to say something, but the wide man held up his hand and stopped him. He walked towards me and dropped to his haunches in front of my chair, his face just inches from my own. He hoisted his eyebrows and looked deep into my eyes, stroking his chin with his fingers like a golfer sizing up a tricky putt. For a moment, I thought he might strike me, but instead he just crouched there, wordless and breathing slow, trying to read something from my expression. I wasn’t sure what he was looking for and I was too weak to put on any kind of an act so I let him read me in whichever way he chose. In time, he placed his hands on his thighs and stood upright once more.
“You sleep,” he said, and with that he raised his booted foot into the air and kicked my chair so that it toppled over and I crashed down onto my side, a fresh spasm of pain blooming from my chest.
Somehow, I did sleep, though not for long. I was woken by a tingling sensation in my arm. The blood had drained right out of it and it had gone numb and had started to throb. I gritted my teeth and struggled against the stabs and twinges all around my chest as I tried to manoeuvre myself upright once again. But I couldn’t do it. I was on too awkward an angle. I ground my forehead into the floor and tried to prise myself up a little to let the blood flow back into my arm. It helped a touch but I wanted badly to stretch and shake my arm out.
“Hey,” I called, the note of panic in my voice surprising me. “Hey, my arm hurts. Please. It really hurts.”
I heard feet shuffling towards me out in the hallway.
“Please,” I went on. “At least help me upright. There’s no blood getting to my arm.”
I could see a shadow on the floor at the threshold of the room but it didn’t come any closer.
“Please, I’m begging you. Untie my arms. Let me stretch them. Please.”
There was more shuffling, though this time the shadow receded. Then the light in the hallway went out and not long after that I began to whimper and curse to myself. I could have let go at that point, could have really started to lose it, but instead I got angry. I swore and I gnashed my teeth and I began thrashing around on the chair, screaming each time I aggravated my injuries, which was often, until I somehow managed to throw myself right around so that I was lying on my other arm. And there I lay for God knows how long, face pressed against the dusty wooden floor, my breathing irregular, my chest pulsing sporadically and the gash on the back of my skull maturing into the mother of all headaches, until, at long last, the wide man and the thin man came back into the room and stood looming over me once again.
“Get up,” the wide man ordered.
“I can’t.”
With great impatience, he motioned to the thin man and together they lifted me and set the chair back onto its feet. I had no idea what time it was although something made me think it was probably late at night or early in the morning. The thin man looked tired and drawn, so maybe that was what it was. In any case, it really made no difference.
“Tell us about the American,” the wide man said.
I blinked, trying to gather my senses and put them in some form of order.
“His name was Michael Park,” I began, working my jaw loose and wetting my lips. The vinegary, mucus taste still lingered. “He just got out of prison. He was convicted for—”
“Yes, yes. Tell us about how you know him.”
“He hired me. To steal those monkeys from you. While you were meeting him for dinner.”
“You lie,” he said, drawing his arm back as if to hit me.
“No,” I said, flinching. “It’s the truth, really. He said you would trust him. But he arranged to meet you for a meal so that I could steal them. He told me where you lived and where you kept the monkeys.”
He lowered his arm cautiously. “Why would he do this?”
“I don’t know. But he was going to leave Amsterdam once I gave them to him.”
“He told you this?”
“Yes. And I believed him.”
The wide man thought about what I’d told him and the thin man watched him at it, his rat-like face twitching, spindly arms hanging limp by his side. I didn’t like the thin man at all. The wide man I could talk to but I got the feeling the thin man didn’t have a brain for me to reason with. He appeared jittery, always on edge, though I got the feeling that was his nature rather than any drugs he might be on.
“Anyway,” I said, trying to keep the wide man talking, “what does it matter to you? Michael is dead and you have the three monkeys.”
The wide man pulled his head down into his shoulders once again, as if he was bracing himself for something, and this time I really thought he might step forward and strike me. He took a deep breath and his huge chest lifted up and out, while his hands balled into fists at his side. I could see him squeezing his fists, the skin around his knuckles whitening.
“Why do you say this about the monkeys?”
“It just seems obvious. You stole the figurine Michael had. That was why you beat him—so he’d tell you where it was. And now you have the two monkeys back that I stole from you.”
“You said this before, that we killed him. It is not true.”
The thin man shook his head fitfully.
“Well if you didn’t kill him, who did?”
“You did,” the wide man said. “This is why the police arrested you.”
“That was a mistake.”
“Another mistake.” He twisted his head from side to side. “The policeman who arrested you, Burggrave, he does not make them.”
“He did this time. Listen, the truth is I went to Michael’s apartment after I stole the monkeys from you but he was already hurt by then. He was lying in the bath. His fingers were broken.”
The wide man caught his breath sharply and turned his face away, as if shying from the image I was painting. The thin man’s tongue flicked out of his mouth, like a lizard’s.
“Did he speak?”
“No.”
“He’s lying,” the thin man said, conclusively. “He is trying to trick us.”
“I’m not,” I said. “It’s true. Believe me.”
The wide man held up his hand, silencing us both.
“You do not have the final monkey?” he asked.
“Don’t you?”
He looked me square in the eyes, trying to read me again. This time I did the same. Where was the third monkey? If I didn’t have it and these two didn’t have it, then who did? And were they really telling me the truth about not killing Michael? It was hard to tell, given they’d just beaten me with a baseball bat and bound me to a chair.
“How about,” I went on, “you let me go and I get you the third monkey? I have an idea where it is.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere I should have thought of in the first place. If you let me go, I’ll find it and bring it back to you.”
The wide man grinned then, showing me a mouthful of fillings. He even managed a chuckle.
“You lie. You will go to the police.”
“Believe me, that’s the last thing I’d do.”
“But I do not believe you.” He nodded towards the thin man. “And my friend says we should kill you. I am starting to agree.”
“No, listen to me. I know.”
“You know nothing.”
He motioned to the thin man and the two of them walked out of the room, closing the door behind them.
As soon as they’d gone, I got right back to what I’d been up to before they came in. When you think about it, being a burglar is a lot like being an escapologist. All those locks, chains and bindings, they each work on the same principles. And while being a burglar is all about getting into confined spaces, being an escapologist is all about getting out of them. A recruitment consultant might say that the two professions have transferable skills. All of which is a round-a-bout way of saying that I’d finally managed to loosen the ropes that bound my wrists to the back of the chair.
The truth is I’d been working at the ropes since I’d first regained consciousness. It hurt my chest to do it and bending my wrists and contorting my fingers when my arms were already going numb was certainly painful, but it was a damn sight better than being killed. So I teased away at the rope and fumbled gamely with the knots and after several hours I finally got a break and managed to undo the first of them. And from there it was more of the same, only with a tiny bit more give on the ropes and a fraction more movement in my wrists, until I had the ropes all but ready to slip off of my hands. And slip them off was exactly what I did the moment the wide man and the thin man walked out of the room and left me to my own devices.