End of the World Blues

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “You known Kate O’Mally long?” Kit asked.

  “Never heard of her,” said Tony, adjusting the joystick to slide the Air King E90 between a narrow strip of lights. “Never heard of you either. I’m not even here.”

  There were slow trains to Paris from Calais, express trains, and even a Eurostar, which stopped to take on passengers at a dedicated station nearby. A plane ticket was already waiting for Kit at Aeroport Charles de Gaulle. All the same, Paris, the ticket, and Kit’s flight to Tokyo would have to wait. There was somewhere else Kit needed to go first. He got there by truck.

  “Good for you I was passing.”

  They’d been through this. It was good Philippe had been passing and even better that he stopped when Kit stuck out his thumb. So now Philippe wanted paying in English conversation and Kit was doing his best to oblige.

  “It’s a clear morning.”

  The driver peered intently through his windshield and then nodded agreement. “Very clear,” he said.

  “And the sea is blue.”

  “Very blue. Also grey.”

  Kit sighed. It was 370 kilometres from Calais to Amsterdam and so far they’d managed 50 of them. If Philippe was to be believed, his cargo was going the whole way. Although Kit had a feeling his original question might have been misunderstood, he’d find out in a while.

  “Your hand it is hurt?”

  This was a fair guess, given Kit was wearing a finger shield and had tape holding what remained of his smallest finger to the ring finger next door. “An accident,” said Kit, folding his hand out of sight.

  “Nasty,” Philippe said. “You walking?”

  “No,” said Kit. “I’m in a truck with you.”

  Philippe laughed. “I mean, are you holiday walking? Lots of the English visit Pas de Calais to walk. Also Amsterdam, where they hire bicycles.”

  “Not walking, or planning to hire a bike in Amsterdam.”

  “But you’re visiting the city on holiday?”

  “Yes,” said Kit. “And I’m late.”

  Philippe frowned. “How late?” he asked.

  At least fifteen years, thought Kit, but he kept the words to himself.

  There were cities where Kit barely knew one place from another outside the area in which he’d lived. The squalor of a ghetto in Istanbul, an arid little suq in a town Sudanese rebels called their capital. Even Tokyo—where Kit could have told Roppongi from Shinjuku blindfolded by street noise alone—largely remained a mystery to him.

  And yet the city about which Kit knew most was the one he’d never visited. Empires had squabbled over it and Protestants besieged Catholics to claim its muddy, flood-threatened streets. Home to Rembrandt van Rijn, the place where Descartes linked identity indelibly to thought, the city had fought against the British, French, and Spanish, given England a king and been ruled by one of Napoleon’s brothers.

  Its canals were famous, it had two of the most famous churches in Europe, and yet all most tourists knew it for was brothels, endless bicycles, and cafés where it was still legal to smoke dope.

  Amsterdam had been Mary’s idea. Although it was Kit who bought the map and found the first guide book. Mary was the one who bought the postcards, five in total from a charity shop in Newbury. All black and white, and showing views of a city that probably didn’t exist even then. The Prinsengracht canal, Anne Frank’s house, and a solemn-looking Rijksmuseum, Rembrandt’s Night Watch, and last of all a typical Dutch square overlooking a narrow canal.

  Tulips grew in wooden tubs, an old man in clogs sat smoking a pipe…a girl in a dark coat and a young man with a beret pushed a pram beneath a row of poplars.

  That was going to be them.

  It took Mary and Kit a whole weekend to identify Statholder Square from a map. The bridge helped and the church opposite. They were going to become famous, sell millions of Switchblade Lies CDs, and buy one of the narrow houses that stared from the square to the canal beyond. The dream lasted about seven weeks. Long enough to learn a handful of Dutch words, cut a demo, and decide they’d have a white cat and never see either of their families again.

  All of this in the year before Kit stopped beside a hut above Middle Morton to crash a party to which he definitely hadn’t been invited, and everything in his life suggested he’d have done better to avoid.

  Seven narrow houses lined one edge of Statholder Square, a museum dedicated to the Goldsmith’s Guild and a row of smaller houses stood opposite. The tulip tubs were gone and the poplars on the canal edge had sprouted wrought-iron cages to protect them from the world. And looking from the square’s open edge, Kit saw five more houses and a wide-windowed art gallery where the original postcard had shown a print shop.

  A steel grille protected the gallery window and a sign on the door read, Gesloten.

  Closed.

  Taped to the window was a large poster of a semi-nude with wild blonde hair, a sour smile, and dark nipples. The words beneath read 33/33 @Thirty-three. A series of self portraits by Sophie Van Allen at Gallery 3+30. Whatever Kit expected, it wasn’t this.

  It took five knocks to earn a shout and another five before footsteps could be heard on the stairs behind the door. When the last of the bolts shot back, a cropped-haired woman blocked his way.

  “Gesloten,” she announced, pointing to the sign and reading it aloud in case he was a complete idiot.

  “I’m a friend,” said Kit, nodding to the poster.

  “Of Sophie?”

  “Yes,” said Kit.

  The woman looked doubtful.

  “Call Sophie,” he suggested. “Say I’m here to see Mary.” When that failed to work, Kit added please, and somehow that was enough.

  The conversation happened just out of earshot, with Kit on the doorstep. When the woman returned her eyes were hard. “This Mary of yours is dead. Sophie says you know that already.”

  “Except she isn’t. Is she?”

  It took another ten minutes and two more calls. The last call to Sophie sounded very much like an argument. “She’ll see you,” said the woman, not bothering to disguise her anger.

  “Sophie?”

  “The other one.”

  I always thought this is where we’d both end up. So obvious, but only in retrospect. It made Kit want to punch himself.

  “Which house?” he demanded.

  The gallery owner looked puzzled.

  “Where’s Mary staying?”

  “At the hotel, obviously…”

  Herberg Statholder was so hip it avoided signs and any clues that it might actually be a hotel. A simple black-painted door, with a dolphin door knocker, opened onto stairs leading up to reception. The air smelled of scented candles and expensive leather. The Warhols on the wall looked as if they might be original.

  A brass lift carried Kit down to an almost-empty sitting room, which looked over Statholder Square or the canal, depending on which sofa one chose. It was here he found Sophie, who clipped a bell on the table in front of her and ordered two espressos from the man who materialised, without bothering to check if Kit wanted coffee.

  She looked older than he remembered, her hair unwashed and her nails bitten. Worry, anger, or a migraine had closed down her face. “So…” Sophie said, when their cups arrived. “You’ve come to see Mary.”

  “Yeah,” said Kit.

  “How did you find out?”

  “Mary told me where she was,” he said. “Only, I was just too fucking stupid to realise.”

  “She told you.”

  “I got a postcard before Christmas,” said Kit. “An old card I thought she’d long since thrown away. It said…” He hesitated. “It said things that should have been said long ago. And it said here was where Mary thought we’d both end up.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Nor did I,” said Kit. “Not at first.”

  “I think this is a bad idea,” Sophie said. “Mary knows that. If Ben or the Russian follow you here…”

  “They’re dead.”
/>   Sophie put her cup down with a click.

  “Ben Flyte died six months ago,” said Kit. “The other one died yesterday.”

  “What happened?” asked Sophie.

  “I killed him.”

  Sophie blinked. “You killed Armand de Valois?” Her hands were shaking, Kit realised. Shaking so badly she halted on the edge of reaching for her cup. “What about the Sergeant?”

  “What about him?”

  “He was employed by de Valois. And Ben relied on the Sergeant for protection. They’d been working together for years.”

  For years? Kit put down his own cup and looked round the elegant drawing room, rejecting a house phone that sat on a marble table near the door. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “I need to make a call.”

  CHAPTER 56 — Monday Morning, 2 July

  The first phone booth was empty and working but took only credit cards, so Kit walked until he came to another, which was occupied. A quarter mile after that he found a third outside a café.

  Everyone at a pavement table looked up, but this was probably because Kit had just entered a booth in a city where even tramps seemed to carry their own phones.

  Feeding a 20-euro note into a slot, Kit fed in another and then a third, making sure he had sufficient credit. He wanted to avoid the slightest chance of losing his concentration while making this call.

  “Amy.”

  Stunned silence gave way to a gasp. “Shit,” she said. “I can’t believe you’d…” And then Amy said nothing, although her silence was thick with worry, anger, and unmade decisions.

  “You could record this,” said Kit. “Or you could give me the Brigadier’s direct number.”

  “I’m at Boxbridge,” Amy said. “We were just talking about you.”

  A briefer silence became the voice of Brigadier Miles. “Mr. Newton,” she said, “I imagine you realise we’re tracing this call.”

  “I’m in Amsterdam,” said Kit. “About ten minutes’ walk from Statholder Square, outside the Tolkien Café. Although I’ll be gone the moment I hear sirens or see anything resembling a police car. I want to do you a favour. Do you know someone called Alfie…Might have worked with Mr. de Valois?”

  “Not as well as I’d like. He’s currently in South London, helping the Met with their enquiries. Apparently he was somewhere else when Mr. de Valois got murdered. Alfie just can’t quite decide where. You did hear about that unpleasantness, didn’t you?”

  Kit ignored the comment.

  “And for some reason,” said Brigadier Miles, “the Met are unhappy with us. They think we’ve been hiding things.”

  “Which you have.”

  It was Kit’s turn to get ignored.

  “Talk to Alfie,” he said.

  “And say what?” The Brigadier sounded interested.

  “Ask him about Mr. de Valois’s relationship with Sergeant Samson. You’ll have to offer him immunity, but more to the point, tell Alfie it will make Kate O’Mally and Mike Smith very happy.”

  “Will it?”

  Kit shrugged, watching his money count down on a little digital window. “It probably won’t make them unhappy.”

  “You know,” said the Brigadier, “I’m beginning to believe the rumours that you’re actually working for Mrs. O’Mally.”

  “I’ve heard those rumours too,” Kit said. “All lies.”

  “And if I did offer Alfie help, it would be immunity from what?”

  “General wickedness, I imagine…Unless you know something I don’t.”

  “So he didn’t knife de Valois?”

  “No,” said Kit. “He didn’t.”

  The Brigadier sighed. “I was afraid of that. You do realise, don’t you, that your prints are all over that blade?”

  “Quite possibly,” said Kit.

  “Anyway,” the old woman said, “let’s get back to Alfie. What can he give me?”

  “Something to upset the Met…”

  “Really?”

  Kit grinned. It was a tired grin, one that barely made it onto his face but it was still a grin. He felt it catch the side of his mouth like a hook setting. “Thought that would interest you,” he said. “Armand de Valois was paying Sergeant Samson in women as well as cash for information…”

  Brigadier Miles laughed.

  “It gets better,” Kit added. “The Sergeant and Ben Flyte were a team. In fact, I’d bet it was Sergeant Samson who told Flyte that de Valois was dead, right after that shooting in Germany. I can see the attraction. All that heroin with no owner. What’s a crooked cop to do? Only, Armand wasn’t dead. A bit like Ben Flyte.”

  “Flyte?”

  “Last seen in South London, I believe…sometime yesterday.”

  He had the Brigadier’s attention, the hook set as firmly into her mouth as it was set in his.

  “What you’ve got,” said Kit, “is a murdered terrorist, and a society drug dealer as your chief suspect—and providing Alfie talks—a currently suspended officer from a South London drugs squad who’s the only known connection between the two. If I were you, I’d offer Alfie anything he wants.”

  “I’m going to make some calls,” said the Brigadier. “Give me a number where I can call you back.”

  “I need a favour in return.”

  “A favour?”

  “The name behind a construction company in Tokyo.”

  Silence greeted this request. A handful of seconds of static and doubt. And then the Brigadier was back. “And how do I get that for you?”

  “You must have friends,” said Kit.

  “Not in Tokyo,” said Brigadier Miles.

  “People like you,” Kit said, “have friends everywhere.”

  CHAPTER 57 — Monday Morning, 2 July

  All of the rooms at Herberg Statholder had double beds, their own glass-topped vanity tables, satellite television, discreet minibars, music systems, and wireless internet. Laptops were provided for guests who forgot to bring their own.

  Meals could be served at any time of day or night and in any place, although the sky café apparently offered unrivalled views across the slate roofs of Amsterdam, and all guests got preferential booking at a Michelin-starred brasserie less than three minutes’ walk from the hotel.

  The Herberg Statholder had money. It had money because its guests had money and matching expectations. Herberg Statholder pulled off that difficult trick of offering the expensively shabby and casually exclusive. Although a wooden panel in the lift was cracked, the brass fittings were hand-polished and the lift’s single picture was signed and numbered and came from one of Chagall’s shorter runs.

  Kit took the lift alone because Sophie refused to accompany him, her anger so obvious that he began to wonder if it was with Mary rather than him.

  Room 12.

  Herberg Statholder avoided numbering its rooms according to floor. With only twelve bedrooms such fussiness was irrelevant. The narrow corridor onto which Kit’s lift opened led to the Sky Café in one direction, and to three bedrooms in the other: servants’ quarters, made fashionable by their rooftop view and the tectonic shifts of history.

  “Come in…”

  He would have known the voice anywhere. Kit was still wondering what to say when Mary pulled herself up and adjusted the pillows behind her head.

  “Long time,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “I didn’t mean you to find me,” said Mary, then added, “Sophie called me, while you were on the way up. You read more into my card than was there.”

  “No,” Kit said. “I didn’t.”

  She looked at him.

  “Why send it then?” demanded Kit. “At least, why that card and those words?”

  “To hurt you,” Mary said. “So you knew what really happened. I was tying up my life’s loose ends and you were one of them.” Her window was open on the other side of the bed, a vase of orchids stood on the vanity table and an open copy of Vanity Fair lay discarded on the floor. It made no difference. The room reeked of illne
ss.

  “Sit down,” said Mary, and that was when Kit realised he was still standing in her doorway.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “A mistake, we shared needles. Ben was in remission and I didn’t even know he was ill. I came apart in a matter of months.” She nodded towards a chair. “Sit,” she said.

  A child could be heard outside, chattering excitedly about nothing very much. A bicycle went past in need of oiling. A woman talked to herself, or on the phone. “You hear all that?” said Mary, indicating her open window.

  He nodded.

  “It’s called life. That’s what I’m leaving behind.”

  “I don’t suppose,” said Kit, when he’d listened some more to the noises outside and seen Mary smile, “there’s much point in my asking why you staged a fake suicide?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “How would I?”

  “Because you always boasted you knew me better than I knew myself.”

  Kit shrugged. “I must have been lying.”

  Mary’s laugh was thin. “Take a guess,” she said.

  “You were escaping Armand de Valois.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because the man wanted his heroin back.”

  “My choice had nothing to do with Ben,” she said, sitting back. “Or that dealer of his. Anyway, I couldn’t have told de Valois where his drugs were because I didn’t bloody know.”

  “If Ben wasn’t the reason?”

  “Oh God,” said Mary, “work it out.”

  Sitting on a chair, beside a bed in a room in the attic of an absurdly over-priced hotel in Amsterdam, Kit did. It was a very Mary reason.

  “You couldn’t stand Pat and Kate watching you die.”

  She nodded.

  “You wanted to spare them the pain.”

  Mary laughed, hard enough to set her coughing again. When Kit patted her back he felt mostly bone. “Oh God,” she said, catching her breath. “All that black leather and cynicism and fucked-up back history. And you’ve still got a heart of pure marshmallow. You’ve seen how my father is. You’ve seen how my mother fusses. I wanted to spare me the pain.”