by Jeff Abbott
“You have a website for your little watch business, Gregor. You probably do a lot of international trade here—ordering from Switzerland for inventory, and shipping goods all over Europe. Great front for smuggling.”
“Get out. I don’t know what you mean.” A touch of panic bruised his voice.
“Oh, I can get out. I could head straight to the Czech embassy and tell them that one of their wayward sons has set up business in this nice country and maybe, if they don’t want to be embarrassed by whatever idiot scheme you’re up to these days, they should keep a careful eye on you. Look very carefully at your books, at your shipping manifests, see where your customers are.”
“I don’t smuggle no more. I am legit now.”
“Hard to make a living with used watches.”
I opened up my wallet. Pulled out and inspected an impressive wad of euros, courtesy of Mila. Everyone has a price.
Gregor looked at the thickness of the wad and stopped ordering me out.
“I need to find someone, Gregor.” I pulled a photo from my pocket. It was a print of the scarred man from the video of Yasmin at the Centraal Station. “Now. I need to know if you’ve seen this man.” I handed him the photo.
Gregor didn’t push it back right away and say don’t know him. That would have been too obvious a lie. He inspected him the way he might peer at damaged gearwork, a narrow pianist’s finger tracing the circle of the man’s face. Finally he said, “I don’t know this man.”
“Think. I don’t want your stepdaughter’s birthday present to be finding out that her shiny new dad used to be a smuggler. Or still is.”
“She wouldn’t mind me being gone. She acts like she’s allergic to me.” But Gregor studied the picture again. “I don’t know him. But this man I know.”
“Who?”
He looked at me. I peeled off a couple of bills and slid them onto the counter.
“Him. The big man with the dye job. Behind the first guy you pointed at.”
I looked at the picture. A few feet behind the scarred man was a big, broad-shouldered man with dyed white hair. He looked as though he might have Asian ancestry, mixed with European.
“Him I know,” Gregor said. The edge of the photo trembled ever so slightly as he tucked it back into my hand. Watchmaker hands don’t tremble.
“Do they owe you money?” he asked, and that was his second mistake. He wanted to know why I was looking for the blond. So he could tell the blond about it.
“Who is he, Gregor?”
“Uh, I have to think about his name.” He backed away, toward the gear table.
“No more money. Who is he, Gregor?”
“Tell me first why you are looking for these men.”
“I have a business proposition for them.”
“You can take their picture but not walk up and introduce yourself? I don’t know, this looks like a police photo. It’s been cropped.” Of course it had. I’d cropped out Yasmin.
“Gregor, just tell me the blond’s name and where to find him.”
“The blond—look, I’ll do you a favor and give you some advice. Stay the hell away from him. Whatever job you’ve got lined up, find someone else.”
I stepped forward and said, “Tell me.”
“No, no. If I tell you, then I’ve sent you to him. That means he comes to see me. No thank you.” Terror colored his tone. “He cuts up people who get in his way. No. I’m a family man. I’ll tell you his name, but you can get someone else to put you close to him. Not me.”
I touched his shoulder.
And he tried to slice my throat open.
29
THE BLADE WAS A SMALL THING; but then, so is a vein. I wasn’t sure if it was part of his watch-mending gear or if it was simply a weapon he kept close at hand. I heard the hiss it made as it sliced the air and I flinched back and it parted only the air close to my skin.
“Oh, hell,” Gregor said, hesitating. “Sorry. I just want you to go.”
“I’m insulted you’re more afraid of him than of me.”
He dropped the little blade. “It wouldn’t have hurt you really.”
“That’s between me and my carotid,” I said. “Why’s he got you so scared?”
He didn’t answer me and so I decided that if he was afraid of violence I’d show him a little. Just a taste. I shoved him back toward the watchmaker’s repair table. I knocked him with a hard blow to the throat into a chair.
“You’re a bully,” he coughed. “I just wanted to run you out of here. Leave me alone.”
“That is entirely unfair, Gregor.” I inspected the craftsman’s tools. They were designed to hold gears in place, remove bits of metal. One had a curved point to it; like an instrument you would see in a surgery. I picked it up.
I put a fingertip on each side of his left eye. I held up the vicious little tool.
“I don’t know the scarred man!” he yelled.
“Oh, I believe you. But you know the blond.”
“Please, please!”
“Gregor. I don’t want to hurt you. I want you to go to your stepdaughter’s party and enjoy your 20/20 vision.”
“I have to pick up the cake,” he said, sobbing a little. “For the games, the koekhappen.”
“The what?”
“The game the kids play, sticky cake hanging on a string, you try to eat it fastest…”
“Oh, Gregor, that sounds like fun. I want you to go to that. I want you to go get the cake and win the race. I hope it’s an awesome party. And you can go, soon as you tell me his name and where he is.”
Gregor tried to wrench away from me.
“Is the blond an old friend?”
“More… friend of a friend.” He gave in. “The blond’s name is Piet. He is close to an acquaintance of mine.”
“And your acquaintance?”
“His name is Nic ten Boom. I haven’t known him long. He and I had a beer a week ago, this Piet came with him. But Nic is connected, and Piet carries himself like he is, too.”
“And what did you talk about during this beer.”
“Ajax—that’s the Amsterdam football team. And we talked about women.”
I put the edge of the tool closer to his eye. “Then what? You just hung out and drank beer?”
“We went to the Rosse Buurt—the red-light district.”
“And you a newlywed, Gregor.”
“I… I didn’t partake. Neither did they.”
“You just went and looked at the whores?” I said this in approximately the same tone as a disbelieving spouse.
“That was what Piet wanted. He was a little drunk; he likes his beer. He wanted to see the hookers standing in the windows.”
“Is he a pimp?”
Gregor’s tongue flicked along his lip. “No. No. I don’t know why Piet wanted to go. He was insistent. We just went and we laughed at them, the women standing behind the glass. I don’t know. Piet laughed and so Nic and I laughed, too. You do whatever Piet likes. He takes over the room.”
Laughing at prostitutes. I didn’t believe him.
I cut him a little, close to the eyelid. “What else did you talk about?”
He yelled, gritted his teeth. “Okay, okay. Piet wanted to know about moving goods to North America. He asked me questions. How did I sneak goods into the States? I told him, but I think they decided I was too small an operation for what they wanted. I don’t ship watches in big enough quantities, I guess.”
“Have you seen either of them again since?” Now I put the instrument so close to his eye I could see the eyeball tremble, shake in its socket.
He didn’t answer right away and I jabbed the small blade into his palm. He gasped. A little blood welled up from his hand.
“Next the eye. I am serious, Gregor. You do not want to get in my way right now.”
“I haven’t seen Piet again. I had a beer with Nic two nights ago.”
“What’s Nic do?”
“He works with Piet—but I know him just through frien
ds in the business, he does stuff with computers—he’s a bit of a geek. He runs Internet scams, you know, bank letters from Nigeria kind of stuff. I don’t know how he’s gotten involved in smuggling.” His face was tense under my hands. “He’s… he’s odd. I don’t really want to be friends with him, but he always has good e-mail lists for marketing.”
Oh, a spammer. True evil. “Where can I find Nic?” I touched the pointed end of the instrument to my tongue. Wet the metal.
Gregor shuddered under my grip. “He lives above a coffee shop over in the Jordaan neighborhood. But mostly hangs out at a bar. Called the Grijs Gander. It’s down near the Rosse Buurt. They know him there.”
I let him go. Slowly. “You tried to cut my throat,” I said. “If you want me to forget that bad idea of yours, you’ll forget we talked. You don’t mention me unless I need you as a reference with these guys. Then we’re buddies, got it?”
Gregor nodded. “You’re after Piet. Piet, I don’t like. Piet can fry in hell.” He clutched his hurt hand close to him, but carefully, so he didn’t besmirch his suit with the blood. He didn’t look at me. They’re always ashamed after they talk.
“If you tell anyone about our visit, I will be back, Gregor. I mean Nic no harm. I just want to talk to this Piet. But you narc on me to them and I’ll make a phone call and you’ll be on the next plane back to Prague.”
“I’ll say nothing.”
I tucked a little extra wad of euros in his pocket. He nearly sighed with relief. Then I extracted his cell phone and said: “What’s your wife’s name? Your stepdaughter’s?”
His eyes were bright with fear. “Leave them alone, Samson, please.”
“Their names.” I made the words sound limed with frost.
“My wife is Bibi. My stepdaughter is Bettina.”
“I hope you and Bibi are happy, Gregor. Tell Bettina I said happy birthday.” I gave him a long look and said, “If they ever make a film about Peter Lorre, you have a lock on the lead.” I turned and walked out.
I was not used to terrorizing people, and if Gregor hadn’t tried to cut me I would have been a lot gentler. But a scared Gregor was a useful Gregor.
On the street I checked the call log on Gregor’s fancy smartphone. Two days ago, a call from a Nic, late in the afternoon. Probably the invitation to have the beer at the Grijs Gander. I checked the other phone records. Nothing of interest that jumped out. Many calls to Bibi, a few to Bettina. Nothing else.
I checked the voice mails. One from Bibi, in rapid-fire Dutch, reminding him to pick up the party decorations for Bettina. Bibi sounded impatient and drunk, and she told Gregor twice in the voice mail that he was a useless piece of crap, but it was not up to me to question Gregor’s choices. True love was blind, I thought, with a sudden and sharp sting in my chest, thinking of Lucy.
The other voice mail, from a week before, was from Nic: and, bonus, there was a picture of Nic next to the voice mail. Thick-necked, red hair gathered in a short ponytail, no smile. “Grijs Gander, tonight, if you can slip from Bibi’s chain. See you there at six. I want you to meet a friend of mine,” Nic said in the unerased voice mail.
Said friend being Piet. Gregor was good at slipping all sorts across borders, under the authorities’ noses.
What did Piet want smuggled into the States?
30
THE GRIJS GANDER WAS NOT as nice as the Rode Prins. It wasn’t as nice as a broken urinal.
It sat on the edge of the Rosse Buurt, a block or two from the neon-kissed windows where the hookers pose. It was hard to remember that families and regular working people lived in this district, but they did, and the Grijs Gander wasn’t the kind of bar that opened around lunchtime.
I walked, stuck in a mass of Japanese tourists. In the early evening the streets throng with nervous gawkers who simply want to look and have no designs to touch. The girls standing in the windows mostly pose and preen for the tourists like it’s a warm-up game; they know the real dealmakers will come by soon.
The Grijs Gander wasn’t just a dump bar. It was a karaoke bar. That made it about a thousand times more evil. Think American Idol, except that all the judges are drunk and might be handy with a knife.
It was only nine, early by Amsterdam standards. On the karaoke stage a drunken young Spaniard was slaughtering Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall” as his friends applauded. A few men stood in the back, playing pool; a few others sat in booths. Two young women sat at the bar with their young boyfriends. I cast my bartender’s eye over the drinks: most favored vodka or beer; no fancy cocktails. Then I profiled the room. This is a bartender skill. Trouble has nothing to do with gender or age or economic status.
It has all to do with where people sit, where their gaze goes. Most were here just to get drunk and sing and laugh at the bad singers. The pool players seemed to know each other, which made it less likely for cues to be swung like swords. One trouble spot was in the back; a group of big, dark-haired guys who spoke Turkish, and who kept scanning the bar as if waiting for a bubble of trouble to rise. The other was one of the young women on the opposite side of the bar, who looked exquisitely bored and kept glancing about the room as if looking for bigger muscles or a firmer ass or a brighter smile. Her checking out of the other men was pissing off the boyfriend.
Those were the hot spots, so I avoided both by sitting at the bar, facing the front and looking at the beer taps. I ordered a pint of Amstel. The bartender, a thin, sallow guy with five piercings in his left ear, brought it to me. He gave me the quickest of once-overs and set the beer in front of me. I slid the right amount of euros to him, rounded up for a small tip. He did not offer to start me a tab. I sipped, made eye contact with no one, and listened.
My Dutch wasn’t superb, but I’d spent four months in Suriname, the former Dutch colony in South America, so I had enough to get by, and with any language, hearing it spoken revives the command of it. My parents worked with Episcopal Relief—my father as an administrator and auditor of the charity’s funds and my mother as a pediatric surgeon specializing in cleft palates—and they and my brother Danny and I traveled the world for all my youth. My Spanish, Russian, and French were fluent, my Chinese and German okay. I could say I am an American and I need to call the embassy, in about three dozen languages, although that phrase would do me no good with Howell and the Company hunting me. I’d broken scores on speed of learning back in Langley’s language immersion programs, but I’d never studied Dutch that hard and I didn’t doubt that my words sounded ragged and colonial.
I heard a mix of tongues in the bar: Dutch, English (widely spoken in Amsterdam), French, Spanish. I gave the Turks a careful look again; they noticed me looking at them and I quickly put my gaze up to the moonwalking (or moonstumbling) Spaniard. I could wait in this drunken Babel for hours and Nic might not show up. And someone, someone in Dutch intelligence, was going through the Centraal Station bombing tapes and was going to see Yasmin Zaid enter the station with a backpack on her arm and then leave without it.
I had an overwhelming sense that my time was running out.
I had forgotten the virtue of patience. Spying was waiting. And the sudden dull weight of trying to find Nic hit me. But he was the only link I had to Piet, and Piet was linked to the scarred man and Yasmin. And the scarred man to Lucy.
This was the only chain I could tug on.
I sipped my way, slowly, through my beer. The next karaoke singer delivered an accurate version of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” that drew hearty applause, and then a drunken woman got the giggles halfway through a screech of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” She didn’t get booed because her top was tight and the crowd was more forgiving.
I hated this place. I missed the clean smells of Ollie’s bar. He was no doubt mad at me for running off. I missed hanging out with August. I hoped that Howell and the Company hadn’t leaned on him. Ollie knew nothing, not even that Mila played him for a friend. Interesting, though, that she’d been a regular visitor at Ollie’s. That couldn’t
be coincidence, not with me getting a job there. Another thread to pull on, but later.
I watched one of the girls lean close to her date, nuzzle his cheek with a kiss.
I missed Lucy.
Third beer. You had to drink in a place like this. Order a soda or coffee and you were instantly noted as someone worried about keeping his senses. You were suspect. You had to drink.
The young woman with the roving eye was suddenly sitting next to me. “Don’t you want to sing?” she asked me in English, slurring her words. She hadn’t even tried Dutch with me. I guess I looked more American than I thought. I glanced over at the boyfriend. He watched me right back.
“I’d be out of tune,” I said.
“You and everyone else. Hmm. What should you sing?” She studied me, as though you could tell what a man’s musical taste was from his face. “Nirvana? You look a little angry.”
“Uh, no.”
“Ah.” Now a smile crept onto her face. “Prince, I think. I have a purple scarf you can borrow.”
“Maybe Radiohead.”
“They’re too solemn. Maybe Justin Timberlake? You could bring some sexy back.”
I didn’t look at her. The boyfriend had turned his attention to the stage. “No, I’m not a singer.”
“What are you then?”
“Just a guy having a beer who doesn’t want to sing and doesn’t want to talk. Sorry.”
Her smile turned to a frown. “Asshole. Faggot.”
“Go back to your boyfriend,” I said. “He’s willing to put up with your bad behavior. No one else will.”
She got up in a huff and then I saw a man had sat down two stools from me while the girl was chatting. Nic from Gregor’s phone, with his red ponytail and his dour face.
I moved my eyes back to the karaoke stage, where the crowd had turned on a Filipino guy singing a Kings of Leon song with hearty boos. He flipped off the crowd and an empty pint glass nearly hit him. The bartender started yelling at the offending table; they all shrugged like kids caught lobbing spitballs in class. The lazy bartender stayed behind the bar.