An Artful Assassin in Amsterdam

by Michael Grant

  If I were unaware of who Delia was, and simply had her profile to judge, I don’t think I’d have made her as police, but I’d have made her as smart and forceful. I’d have noticed her. But of course I did know Delia, I had seen her in action, I’d been privy to her thoughts, I’d even noticed that for brief moments she was capable of emotion. God help me, I liked her. I liked our relationship, if you could call it that. And that was a startling thing for me to recognize: I didn’t hate working with Delia. I didn’t hate what I’d done for her in Cyprus. I bitched about it, I whined, but I had come away from that clusterfuck with this one, tiny little thing, this one mitzvah, this one time when I had done something … good.

  I had stopped a child sex-trafficking operation. Me! Martin DeKuyper aka David Mitre and a whole long list of names. I had actually rescued abused children. Me! At great risk. Me!

  But only because of Delia.

  ‘I’m going to tell you something, Delia, and if you ever remind me of it, I’ll … I’ll do something. Something bad.’ I took a deep breath, and to my horror my voice was actually hoarse with emotion that must have been a result of my beating or stress or … something. ‘Agent D, if by some miracle there really is a supernatural being I have to justify myself to, I’ll have exactly one thing to offer to counterbalance the bad things I’ve done. I mean, I give money to street people sometimes, I hold doors for people, and I have never killed anyone – well, except that one time in self-defense. And I haven’t stolen from anyone who couldn’t afford it, but as to something that took some effort, that required some degree of courage and was actually good? The sum total of good I’ve done has been because of you, Delia.’ I laughed in surprise at myself. ‘If there’s a path to some kind of redemption for me, it runs through you.’

  In profile I saw her nod very slightly.

  ‘Anyway, I’m tired of camping out here. See the big gray rectangle just inside the lobby?’ I handed her my Carl Zeiss Victory compact binoculars and pointed. ‘Buzzers and presumably name tags beside them, and mailboxes, but those are locked and I don’t think they have names listed.’

  ‘We don’t know Hangwoman’s name,’ Delia pointed out. ‘And we don’t even know if the apartment is in her name, she could be staying with someone.’

  I nodded. ‘Yep. However, we do know she’s Eastern European. If she’s crashing with someone it’s likely they are also not locals. So, you run down the list and eliminate all Dutch-sounding surnames, all Muslim-sounding surnames, anything Javanese, etc. … You look for names ending in the letter “v.” Or patronymics. It’s not exactly foolproof. But I’ve heard her voice and I might recognize it.’

  ‘Well, it’s dark,’ she said.

  Amazingly the lobby door was an unlocked slider so I was able to pop in and study the names. The first thing I noticed was that I’d overestimated the number of apartments, there were just fourteen. That was good. Five of the fourteen had distinctly Dutch names, three were Middle Eastern, one looked Italian. Of the remaining five, two were unlabeled, and none were notably Slavic.

  I made note of the two apartments without nametags and went back outside to gaze up and try to connect location to number to name. I walked around to the back of the building and from here the layout was clearer: a central stairwell and elevator shaft, apartments to left and right.

  I made note of illuminated windows, compared it to what I’d seen from the front, then ambled back to Delia and leaned in the window. ‘I’m going to try buzzing. If she’s a pro she could be scared, but more likely she’ll assume it was a mistake or kids playing around. However, if she bolts it’ll be on foot or bike, so we should be ready.’ I pointed out my targets and added, ‘Watch the windows.’

  I went back into the lobby and buzzed the first of the unlabeled doorbells. Nothing. Again. More nothing.

  I pressed the other buzzer. Nothing. And I was just about to press again when a voice crackled from the speaker, speaking Dutch, but even a non-Dutch speaker could hear that the voice was female and not a native Dutch speaker.

  I said, ‘Sorry,’ in a thick accent. I waited for a few minutes to avoid having Hangwoman look out of her window and spot me exiting the building, then sauntered back to the SUV. ‘See anything?’

  ‘I saw Hangwoman looking out of her window,’ Delia said and pointed.

  ‘Hah! Well done, me. And on just the second floor, too. Or what the locals would call the first floor. Excellent.’

  ‘Now what?’

  I considered the building before me. Hangwoman lived on the second floor, so I could climb to the balcony easily enough and creep her apartment when she went out, but—

  ‘Look! That’s her, isn’t it?’

  It was. Hangwoman was walking out of the lobby and heading down the street, on foot not bike, and fortunately not toward us.

  ‘We can front her now, or follow her,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll follow her,’ Delia said. ‘And you?’

  ‘Don’t ask. Leave me the keys.’

  She handed me the key, waited until Hangwoman had turned a corner, and took off on foot after her. I started the SUV and eased it around the circle until it was directly beneath Hangwoman’s balcony. I turned on the flashers so I’d look like a delivery person, or maybe a friend of one of the residents doing a quick pick-up. I wasn’t too concerned with the Toyota being traced back to Delia – some miscreant had swapped the plates with a Kia.

  Note to self: remember to swap the plates back before Delia hands it in to Avis.

  I opened the moon roof, took a careful look around, and climbed up. I’m six foot one or two in the morning before gravity and the weight of my sins drag me down, and the car stood about five and a half feet high, which put my head about eleven feet from ground level. I could see into the apartment past partially closed blinds. The lights were low. No sign of anyone or anything.

  So, I hauled myself up and over – easy – painful as bruises take a long time to heal completely, but easy – and paused, waiting for noises from inside. Nothing. I touched the handle of the slider and applied gradually increasing pressure. I was almost convinced it was locked, but then it moved.

  I stepped into a living room, surprisingly well furnished for a criminal lair. There were all the little touches – throw pillows, fashion magazines and a local guide fanned out on the coffee table, old advertising posters, professionally framed.

  I moved quickly. Some random civilian might have seen me climbing and in this irritatingly upright country they might well call the police.

  The only light came from the stove hood. The kitchen was open-plan, and it, too, was empty. I opened cupboards and the fridge, just to reassure myself that someone did actually live here. Yes, it seemed, the flat was occupied by someone who quite liked tinned fish, muesli and vodka, presumably not all together.

  This left the bedroom or bedrooms. I saw two closed doors. I tiptoed to the first and pressed my ear against the hollow-core door. Silence. I turned the knob noiselessly, slipped inside and shut the door just as silently behind me. I was confident the apartment was empty, but one must observe the proprieties of tradecraft.

  Pro tip: It’s better to risk the small noise that comes from turning a doorknob all the way than to risk the more attention-getting click if an insufficiently withdrawn latch touches the strike plate. One must never hurry those things.

  The bedroom was also nicely furnished, with a single bed, neatly made; a dresser with one drawer partly open and spilling a scarf; a side table and two lamps. And in the corner two suitcases. I pushed them gently: empty.

  I went first to the closet. Clothing. Yep. Women’s clothing. But not much, and the sparseness seemed at odds with the rest of the apartment.

  Of course, dummy, it’s an AirBnB or something like.

  I carefully rifled the dresser drawers, taking note of the exact placement of every item I touched, which wasn’t much. A sweater and a lacquered yellow box filled with weed, a pipe, papers and a rolling machine.

  In th
e bedside table’s only drawer were condoms, a vibrator and lube, as well as a handful of receipts. I shuffled through the receipts – groceries, books, and oh, hello there, a receipt from the phone company, Vodafone. Was her phone number on the receipt? Of course not, that would be too easy.

  On the table was an off-brand iPad. Password protected and the answer was not 1-1-1-1-1 or Q-W-E-R-T-Y or any of the dozen obvious passwords. It remained unprobed.

  Brilliant. I had discovered that Hangwoman wore clothing, ate food, owned a phone and an iPad, and was staying in a temporary rental.

  I almost didn’t notice the flyer. It was green, with black print, and it advertised a Waterstones literary event: me, along with three other authors. My picture was only the second largest and I was half-obscured. I almost didn’t resent that.

  A door led from the bedroom into an en suite bathroom, and a closed door leading beyond to the second bedroom. Careful sleuthing revealed that Hangwoman suffered from seasonal allergies. This was not life-altering news.

  A noise!

  I froze. Tapping. Someone on a keyboard. In the second bedroom. Someone was in the apartment and it wasn’t Hangwoman. I cursed myself for taking for granted that she lived alone. Amateur!

  Moving by millimeters I carefully, so very carefully, turned the knob and the door was yanked from my hand and flew open.

  He was a bit shorter than me with stringy brown hair that fell to his narrow, sloping shoulders. He had an intelligent face, thin, colorless lips, a nose that someone had broken at some point, and wide, frightened, but clever eyes.

  First impression: I could take him.

  Second impression: No, I couldn’t, because he was holding a meat cleaver.

  Third impression: he recognized me. I was able to deduce this just moments after he yelled, ‘Mitre?’

  I said, ‘Sorry, wrong apartment. I don’t know how I got so turned around; this isn’t my mother’s apartment at all!’

  This baffled him for a few seconds during which time I saw past him into what was clearly the most important room in the place, because there was a good bit of expensive-looking tech – three monitors facing a black leather ergonomic swivel chair. Definitely not typical of an AirBnB.

  ‘Get out of this place!’ the dude yelled, sounding a lot more Slovak or Polish or Russian than Dutch. He brandished the cleaver clumsily.

  ‘So sorry!’ I said, backing toward the door. ‘I’m just going to leave right now.’

  I saw the hesitation on his face. Should he let me leave? Or should he chop parts of me off with that cleaver? I chose not to wait and find out. I turned, shot through the first bedroom and ran for the front door. But he knew the layout better than I did and managed to reach the door before me. I spun away and raced back the way I had come in, via the balcony.

  I reached the slider, saw the SUV was still flashing away on the street below, started to climb the railing and the bastard swung the cleaver at me. It missed me but flaked paint from the iron railing. I had one leg over and if I could just … but now he was on his knees, hugging my leg to his chest with one arm and brandishing the cleaver.

  ‘Do not go or I will cut you. With this!’

  ‘I thought you wanted me to go away!’

  ‘No! I will cut you!’

  As a rule the ratio of threats to actions is about ten to one, but if he swung that cleaver he could carve a filet out of my thigh, so I stopped, one leg still over the railing.

  ‘Who the hell are you and why is your roommate trying to kill me?’

  ‘Go back in!’

  ‘Dude, if you cut me I’ll go over the side and you’ll be explaining to cops why there’s a guy bleeding out on the sidewalk beneath your balcony.’

  A pretty good argument, I thought, but I could see that he was running a whole different script. The crazy son of a bitch actually meant it, I was morally certain of that. So I sagged my shoulders in a gesture of collapsing will, raised my empty palms, shifted my weight and fell over the side with gravity yanking my leg free of his grip.

  You know how in the movies a guy can fall ten floors but so long as he lands on a car or in a dumpster he’ll just walk it off? This fall was maybe seven feet and when I hit the SUV’s roof it did not give an inch. I might as well have fallen on concrete. Every molecule of oxygen exploded from my lungs. I was able to protect my head, but I landed on my back and my rear end sagged right down through the moon roof, leaving me stuck with my legs in the air like an overturned tortoise and my hands pushing desperately to right myself, and goddamn if he wasn’t getting ready to jump off the balcony and come after me! He was climbing over!

  Really?

  This was outrageous. I hadn’t hurt him and I was fleeing as you’re supposed to do when caught in the act, and in those circumstances the proper and correct thing for him to do was to stay on the balcony and shake the cleaver menacingly as I motored off with a middle finger salute extended out of the moon roof.

  I hefted myself up on my hands, exquisitely painful with old bruises welcoming a whole new set. I freed my butt, squirmed around till I could drop my legs down through the hatch and half-tumbled, half-slithered down onto the center post which caused a particular impact I was going to feel really badly in five … four …

  I hit the starter just as Mr Cleaver steeled himself for the jump. He jumped, I hit the gas, and he bounced off the back end and fell to the pavement. I pulled way, my middle finger salute raised, and as soon as the slow-build agony in my nether regions passed, all was right with the world.

  ‘Hey, Siri? Text Delia.’

  ‘What do you want to say?’

  ‘What I want to say is how come when I get involved with you I end up in pain?’

  ‘Ready to send?’

  ‘No, Jesus! Text: Delia I am fleeing in the fucking car. Need a ride?’

  Siri sent, ‘No cheeses text daily I am feeling in the ducking car need a ride?’

  Good enough.

  Delia texted back. Just a grocery run. I picked her up outside the Albert Heijn where Hangwoman was buying sausages, and we drove off into the night.

  THIRTEEN

  Ian’s train was due in at eleven p.m. sharp and I’d been worried I might not make it and he would make a beeline for the nearest bar, but Delia had rented the SUV at the train station so, conveniently we arrived at Amsterdam Centraal twenty minutes early. And then, conveniently, I ditched Delia telling her I was heading straight home.

  Once Delia was gone I spent the time trying to flush out tails. I did not see Jesus Hippie aka Willy Pete. But I was pretty sure about one guy, a too-fit, too-alert, decidedly large guy with a shaved-head. He sat reading his phone and sipping coffee and doing the no-eye-contact, pretend-to-be-looking-elsewhere thing.

  I walked past him, heading in the direction of the exit. Once out of sight I nipped into a tourist shop and watched as Mr Bald ‘n’ Fit passed, peering ahead. Turnabout being fair play and all that I followed him out of the station, out onto the square where he spent some time looking all around with mounting frustration until the crowd thinned. Then he made a call.

  So tail number two. But for whom was he working? Delia? Or Willy? Or God forbid some third party, like tangential Nazis.

  There are times when the fugitive life can be a bit wearying. Maybe someday I’ll be able to walk through a train station without paranoia. I’d hate to think I’d have to grow old still having to view the world through frightened gerbil eyes.

  I went back into Amsterdam Centraal, a conventional European train station with platforms beneath a high, arched, lattice canopy. The Dutch had cleaned it up quite a bit since I’d first visited the city many years ago when I was nineteen and drawn to the city by legal weed and tall blond women on bikes. There were fewer street people, fewer beggars; the burnouts and junkies hadn’t been driven off completely but you no longer had to plot a careful path through the station to avoid them. And there was a great deal more by way of shopping opportunities, though I remained baffled as to who exactly
shops for lingerie at a train station.

  The train slid up to the platform almost silently, exactly one minute late. That made it on time by Northern European standards, hours early by the standards of American trains, while in Japan that kind of laxity would be a national humiliation which might bring down the government.

  ‘Jimmy C!’

  How to describe Ian? If you cut his hair he’d look a little like me: tall, long-limbed, moderately attractive if you liked bad boys who’d only break your heart. He had gnarled large hands missing a ring finger on his left. (I knew the story behind that, one of the reasons Ian would do as I asked.) He was in his thirties but had the air of a younger man or older boy, lots of fidgety nervous energy, lots of nervous tics and habits. He touched himself a lot, reassuring himself that his trousers are still on, and his sleeves are just so, and his white dog collar was nicely framed by his black cassock.

  That last was one of Ian’s little quirks. He sometimes preferred to dress as a priest. Other times he might be a brown-clad UPS driver or a mail carrier. He liked uniforms.

  ‘Hello, Ian. How was the trip?’

  ‘Had to change trains twice, and you, you cheap bastard, you didn’t even go the extra for first class. How you doing, Jimmy?’

  We shook hands.

  ‘I’m fine. I rented a place for you, an AirBnB. I want you isolated as much as possible.’

  He had interesting eyes, Ian; they were not entirely level, the left one drooping a good half inch lower, which made him one of those guys who, if you want to look them in the eyes, you have to choose left or right. I preferred the right eye. It looked less crazy.

  ‘Out of sight, so? Fuck me! Out of sight in Amsterdam, by God?’

  ‘You’ll like the pay,’ I said. Spotting a look of shock on a passing woman’s face, I added, ‘And most of your better class of priest doesn’t yell, “fuck me” in train stations. Just a thought.’

  ‘No, they yell for the next altar boy. Bring me little Johnny Bunghole!’ Of course he shouted that, of course. ‘Don’t tell me about priests, the bastards, I know about priests. Almost as bad as the fucking nuns, or maybe I should say those non-fucking nuns, right?’ He pivoted to leer at a young Dutch woman and mimed the movement of her rear cheeks with his hands. ‘What a ride she’d be!’