An Artful Assassin in Amsterdam

by Michael Grant

  I felt a return of optimism but it went as fast as it came because I noticed something that my wannabe-assassin had almost certainly counted on: Tess’s party boat was not the only boat on the canal. In fact there was a second boat, one of those long, low, glass-canopied tour boats that cruise the canals, coming right for me, and when it hit it would either choke me out or snap my neck.

  I had maybe eight seconds.

  My stronger right hand was pulling on the taut rope, my left was partly inside the noose, keeping minimal blood flowing, but that tactic had seven seconds left before it proved irrelevant. So I freed my left hand and with both arms pulled myself up. This did not immediately loosen the noose and my head was swimming better than the rest of me, but with wild, desperate thoughts bouncing around in my oxygen-deprived brain, I hauled with all my strength until I was halfway out of the water.

  Try hauling yourself up by a rope. Try it when you’ve added the weight of wet clothing and you’re feeling the carbon dioxide build up and the current is fighting you. It was not easy. In fact, it was impossible. I got myself out of the water to about the lower butt cheek level, but as I rose I lost buoyancy, which meant I was heavier. I had reached the limits of my upper body strength. My muscles were quivering, a warning of impending collapse.

  Four seconds.

  Four seconds and I was crotch-deep in the canal. To make matters still worse, the current kept trying to spin me around so that when the boat hit me – about three seconds now – it would catch me mid-spine, a few dozen tons of tour boat moving at five miles an hour, smack, right between the vertebrae.

  I kicked madly, trying to walk on water but with my legs submerged. I managed to twist around to aim my exploding tomato face at the prow which was suddenly right there, right there and coming at me like a slow-moving bus.

  Time’s up.

  I was all-in on adrenalin and had just one last, desperate heave left in my screaming muscles. I curled my legs up so that I was sort of butt-surfing, and at the last moment thrust my legs forward and … contact!

  You wouldn’t think a boat moving at a little above walking speed would hit that hard, but speed is one thing and mass is another, and there’s a world of difference between being hit by a Frisbee moving at five miles an hour and being hit by tons of boat doing the same.

  My ankles buckled, my knees buckled, I felt a shock in my pelvis. I was pushed back like a pendulum, then fell forward, and hit the prow with my calves. In rapid succession I snapped a short flagpole, managed to swing wide of a sturdy wooden staff bearing a light and began motoring my heavy, sodden feet like I was auditioning for the role of Wile E. Coyote.

  I was up and promptly smashed the crown of my head into the bottom of the bridge. But by this point I was an old hand at maintaining motor activity while the carbon-dioxide-poisoned rational part of my brain was busy thinking, Oooh, fuzzy lights.

  The bridge was too low to allow me to stand atop the superstructure so I dropped to my belly and crawled like the world’s most motivated tortoise, trying to keep the life-enabling slack in the rope, while the boat moved relentlessly beneath me. Tourists looked up from below, formed their mouths into ‘o’s and pointed. Look, mommy, is that Spider-Man? I was about two seconds from running out of canopy at which point I’d fall into the rear well and be dragged over the stern, there to be run over by every subsequent boat.

  I felt the noose begin to give. I had maybe an inch of slack, enough to allow for breathing, not enough to allow me to slip out.

  I reached the end of the canopy, grabbed the rope with my right hand further up than I’d been able to do earlier and pulled while using my left to yank at the noose, sliding the rough hemp up over my chin, crushed my nose, dropped from the canopy, bounced from the stern, snapped another staff with another limp flag, banged the hell out of my shin, Tarzaned out over the water, slipped the noose and suddenly I was in the canal again, landing in a wild flailing motion.

  But free of the rope.

  I sucked every molecule of oxygen my starved lungs could take in, sounding like a hungry seal or Jimmy Carr laughing. The rope dangled harmlessly.

  Beyond the bridge and past the tour boat I saw Tess’s party boat make a turn to come back and rescue me.

  But I was done with that. I swam the other way, invisible in shadow, searching in vain for a ladder or a ramp as the quayside was too high for me to scale. There was one of the low, blue-trimmed boats that carry a crane to dig debris out of the canal, which would have been low enough to climb onto, but it was in the wrong direction and would mean fighting the current. So instead I swam to the side opening leading to the Leliegracht canal with its lower banks. I rolled onto my back and kicked my way along the smaller canal until I spied a trio of stoned tourists, who giggled as they hauled me up to land on the embankment like a suicidal whale.

  ‘Dude!’ one of them said.

  ‘Thanks,’ I gargled through my bruised voice box. I was soaked, shaking, nauseous, my face all pins and needles as circulation returned. Hands seized mine and levered me up onto my feet. One of which was still wearing a shoe.

  ‘Want a hit?’

  Did I want a hit of weed after nearly choking to death? Of course I did, also much alcohol, but I knew if I did either I’d start coughing and hack up an organ. ‘No. Thanks,’ I croaked.

  I walked away lopsidedly with their collective wisdom wafting after me.

  ‘Gotta watch where you’re walking, dude.’

  ‘Yo, man, canals and shit.’

  Much laughter.

  I was not in a mood to share in their merriment. Someone had just tried to kill me. And I hadn’t even done anything wrong. Recently.

  TWO

  My name at the moment is David Mitre.

  Long ago I was named Martin DeKuyper – no relation to the people who bottle Blue Curacao. Young Martin DeK went down a dark path of lies and fraud and theft and more lies. Martin got into serious trouble of the burglary-of-a-business variety, was arrested and jumped bail. I became, and I remain, nineteen, almost twenty years later, a fugitive from justice.

  Once you’ve made the decision to jump bail, you’re going to need fake ID. It’s easy enough to buy excellent drivers’ licenses online and I have a few, but if you want an ID that will pass muster at Customs and Immigration, and get you past the facial recognition stuff they’re bringing online, you need to go all-in and build an identity from the ground up. I have several such ground-up identities – David Mitre being one – and other shallower identities that are just drivers’ licenses and credit cards.

  Under various names I currently have four Netflix subscriptions, four Amazon accounts, two iTunes accounts, two each of the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Guardian, and other bits and bobs of subscriptions, all as a way of keeping my aliases’ credit cards active. A small price to pay. And I have five quite genuine passports: three American, one Canadian and a rather less impressive though equally real passport from Peru. Peru, though; well, that’s the kind of passport that makes border patrol agents roll their eyes because it’s available to anyone with a fat enough bank account.

  I am at age forty-two a (retired) thief and grifter, and currently an author. If that seems an unlikely collection of occupations, consider that a grifter is by definition a storyteller. Grifting, writing, pretty much the same thing, only there are no unkind Goodreads or Amazon comments sections for criminals. Prison, sure, but no snotty one-star reviews from people who won’t stop telling you how much better a writer Tana French is.

  I’d been in Amsterdam for a few days, occupying an AirBnB at the corner of Kalverstraat and the Singel, from which I had a straight-on view of the Munttoren, the rather ordinary red-brick clock tower, and a sidelong glimpse of the flower market where tourists bought suitcases full of tulip bulbs they could buy online for half the price.

  Within a few hundred feet of my apartment were a number of decent restaurants and cafés and coffee shops of the sort that serve coffee but not primarily coffe
e. There were also a number of bookstores including the impressive American Book Center, and a surprisingly large and well-stocked Waterstones where I was due to speak on an author panel in nine days.

  The apartment was on the fourth floor (or third if you’re European) of a triangular building that had previously been a hotel. It had three bedrooms and was large by Amsterdam standards, with a beautifully updated interior that was all sleek hardwoods and stainless steel and marble. I had the master bedroom with its queen bed and mini-balcony overlooking the canal, and the upgraded but still cramped en suite bathroom. One bedroom was unoccupied. The remaining bedroom, with its own en suite, housed Chante Mokrani, my personal assistant.

  Chante – no exact idea of her age, so let’s say twenty-three-ish – was an appendage I had picked up while in Cyprus where an FBI legat from the Rome embassy dragged me into a matter involving child sex trafficking, money-laundering, corrupt cops and mediocre beer. Chante – pronounced ‘shont’ – was French by way of Algeria, and in no particular order a rather good cook, a lesbian, a literary snob who sneered at my work, and a suspicious, ungenerous, demanding, insolent pain in the ass.

  My personal assistant: Chante the Unhelpful.

  As I battled the keys to the apartment door, she opened it. Not a large woman, Chante, quite small actually though she punches above her weight. She had vaguely punkish black hair and dark, suspicious eyes that never quite looked at me, but seemed always to be interested in something happening just behind me. She was pretty in a hostile/gamine sort of way, like a darker-complected Zooey Deschanel maybe, if Deschanel were fueled by spite and resentment and marinated in Gallic insuperability.

  Chante took in my wet, disheveled, half-shoeless condition and said, ‘If you track mud on the floor I will not clean it.’

  ‘It never occurred to me that you would.’

  ‘Is it raining?’ she asked as I brushed past her, making big, wet, mismatched footprints on the hardwood floor.

  ‘No, someone tried to murder me,’ I said, expecting this news to throw her off-stride.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘What did I do? What did I do?’ I spun to face her and tried out my moral outrage using both points of emphasis, but she was unmoved. ‘Some asshole dropped a noose on me and hauled me into the Prinsengracht.’

  I made a point of saying Prinsengracht (Prince-’n-chghkgraaakhght) because as bad as my Dutch pronunciation was, Chante’s was worse.

  ‘You will need to send your clothing to the cleaners. I have several things to go as well, I will put them in a bag and leave it by the door for you to take tomorrow.’

  Me? Me? I’m doing a laundry run? Me? The guy paying your salary? The guy paying the rent? Listen here, honey, I am the semi-famous, semi-successful author, you are my assistant, not the other way around. You take the stuff to the cleaners, I don’t do your laundry, you annoying troll. I didn’t actually say any of that out loud.

  What I did say was, ‘I’m getting a drink.’

  ‘I’ll take one as well.’

  Because now I was her launderer and bartender. I was outraged, but there’s something about standing in wet clothing and a single Ferragamo loafer that makes it hard to strut around issuing pronouncements.

  I kicked off my remaining shoe, retrieved my bottle of Talisker 10, poured myself two fingers if you were using gorilla fingers, and a bare, resentful shot for Chante.

  ‘Your date, it did not go well?’ Chante asked.

  ‘Nonsense, I like being dragged away by the neck and dipped like a fucking teabag in the shadow of the Anne Frank house.’

  She wanted more detail, but she’d be damned if she’d show interest in me or my activities. ‘Police will come,’ she warned.

  ‘Let them,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘I hope they catch the crazy bastard.’

  I managed this with some bravado, but I pulled out my main phone – turned out the new iPhone really was waterproof – and texted Tess.

  Hey, I’m fine, went home to sleep it off. Sorry to ruin the party. Seems my sleeve caught on a spike on the bottom of the bridge. It’d be funny if it weren’t so embarrassing.

  I wanted to add, don’t call the police, but it was possible that she hadn’t and if I made a point of telling her not to, she just might.

  I had changed out of my wet things and slipped into sweatpants and a hoodie when she texted back.

  Tess: Are you all right?

  Me: Sleepy, embarrassed and a little drunk.

  Tess: Poor baby. Want some company?

  Me: Nah, you play with your friends. Night.

  And lose my number, lady, I don’t appreciate being used. I didn’t text that. Instead I did the cowardly thing and blocked her number. She was leaving town in a few days, joining a long list of women I’d disappointed and/or outraged.

  I would most likely have survived the minimal scrutiny cops give a victim – and, astonishing thought: I actually was the victim, there’s a first time for everything – but a man in my position seeks to minimize conversations with people who hold arrest power.

  I’ve been retired from crime these last ten years, give or take. It’s nice being able to retire in your thirties. It’s a luxury that few criminals ever achieve unless you think San Quentin is a Spanish-themed retirement home. The decision to leave the grifting life came as a result of a realization, and an event. The realization was that the game of cops and robbers was not a game of fox vs. hounds, but rather a game of tightrope walker vs. ground: sooner or later you’re going to slip, and the ground is always there. It’s a fact of life, any crook not working in banking or politics gets caught, so the only way to win is to cash in your chips, disappear and find another career.

  The incident, the thing that finally pushed me out of the criminal life was, well … A guy shot himself. Because of me. I didn’t pull the trigger, but … Yes, I tend to get a bit elliptical when I think back on that.

  I went back into the living room in search of more whiskey and Chante said, ‘Must we leave Amsterdam now?’

  ‘No! Why?’

  She produced one of the many shrugs in the French shrug armory and said, ‘We had to leave Cyprus …’

  ‘That was different,’ I snapped. ‘I have things I have to do here. I have a panel!’

  ‘Pfff!’

  ‘That’s not the only reason,’ I said defensively, because I couldn’t stand the idea of Chante thinking I took things like author panels seriously.

  That cocked her eyebrow.

  ‘I also have an obligation to a guy.’

  Cocked eyebrow remained so.

  ‘It’s a bit of a story, actually.’ I hesitated going ahead, Chante’s interest in my life being roughly the same as my interest in particle physics. But she hadn’t sneered yet and if I were to pretend that my assistant might actually assist me at some point it would make sense if she knew what was going on.

  ‘Like twelve years ago, give or take, I was in Portugal hanging out with this woman—’

  ‘A rich woman?’

  ‘Of course a rich woman. Why would I be running a con on a woman who wasn’t rich? Unfortunately she turned out to have some issues. For one thing she was rather fond of heroin.’

  ‘I will pour you more alcohol while you tell me how you despise drug addicts.’

  ‘I don’t despise … well, I kind of did, but live and let live. It was an issue but also helpful because, man, when a junkie passes out, they pass all the way out. I could have dynamited her safe and she wouldn’t have woken up. But that was not the real issue.’

  ‘No?’ she asked an invisible person just behind and to my right.

  ‘No, the thing was she had Hollywood connections and wanted me to accompany her to a movie opening, I assume because I look good in a tux. But walking the red carpet in front of half the cameras in LA is not something the intelligent fugitive does.’

  She wanted to make a crack about the insinuation that I was ‘intelligent’, I could see it in her eyes, but she held h
er fire, possibly because she was just waiting for a better opening.

  ‘So I did something a bit stupid—’

  ‘No!’

  And there was the better opportunity.

  ‘Cute,’ I said. ‘I emptied her safe but I hadn’t yet found a hook-up – a fence.’ I was at the refrigerator now, suddenly ravenous. Some ham looked promising. ‘So I find this name on the Dark Web and I go see this guy who uses a rare books shop as a front. We do some business, we have some lunch at a local tasca, we get back to his shop and the fucking Polícia Judiciária have already popped Azevedo’s – that’s the guy’s name – safe. Some detective is literally holding my loot in his hand.’

  ‘Your loot.’

  I pretended not to hear that bit of snark. ‘At which point Azevedo could have said, “Hey, boys, that stuff belongs to this American, I was just getting ready to call you.” Instead he did the honorable thing and ended up catching two years while I walked.’

  ‘Honor among thieves?’

  ‘I live by a code.’ I said that just to provoke her. She let the baited hook glide by. ‘So last week when we were in Tbilisi he reached out to me and we had a little Skype.’

  We’d gone from Cyprus to Tbilisi prior to Amsterdam to confuse the trail. Lovely city, impossible language, not great food. None of which is relevant.

  ‘Long story short, Azevedo has a nineteen-year-old daughter named Madalena who he says is mixed up with some dude here in Amsterdam. Named Milan Smit. He wants me to check on her.’

  ‘So? Have you?’

  ‘I have to find her first. She’s gone off-grid. I wanted to settle in for a few days before—’

  ‘We have been here for almost a week.’

  ‘A few days, a week, Jesus, now you’re nagging me? What do you care?’

  That ended our little tête-à-tête. Besides, I had thinking to do, so I took the Talisker and repaired to my bed and there, alone in the dark, I asked myself the big question: why was someone trying to kill me? Me? Granted I was not a candidate for sainthood, but in the great Pez dispenser of people who needed killin’ I was nowhere near the top. How did I deserve to be killed while Harvey Weinstein, Bashar Assad and Boris Johnson still lived?