An Artful Assassin in Amsterdam

by Michael Grant

  ‘OK, again, I don’t know that poor man. Why do you think I would? Is he an American? There are a lot of Americans in Amsterdam, are you questioning all of them?’

  That brought an answering frown from Sarip and yes, even a hint of doubt. There’s nothing quite like a non sequitur to short-circuit the linear cop brain. But he was a clever boy, my pal Martin Sarip, and he recovered quickly. ‘It seems he is an Irish citizen. No current address. But fingerprint identification points to a long criminal record.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Whatever. A criminal got stabbed. It was probably a drug deal gone bad.’

  ‘Mmm. Perhaps.’

  ‘I mean if it was one of my books, that’s how I’d write it. Now would you mind putting that thing away? It’s kind of early in the day to be looking at dead people, don’t you think?’

  Sarip flicked his cunning eyes sideways and DeKuyper complied, closing the iPad and slipping it back into her bag.

  And round one goes to Mitre.

  Coffee came and we all added sugar or milk or in my case, nothing. No one ate a cookie. Chante hanged back in the kitchen ostentatiously wiping down the counter and the stovetop.

  ‘In your books,’ Sarip began again, ‘Does your hero ever have hunches?’

  I shrugged. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Well, I have a hunch.’

  He wanted me to ask, but all I gave him was an expectantly raised brow.

  ‘You see, like any city, Amsterdam has a certain pattern to crime. There’s an ebb and a flow, but it’s always the same things. Drugs, sex trafficking, drunk tourists getting into fights … But now in, what, eight, nine days, we have three very unusual crimes. Or, if you prefer, incidents. Incident one being your tumble into the canal.’

  ‘OK …’

  ‘Incident two, your regrettable assault.’

  ‘Wait, you think the guys who beat me up did this?’

  ‘Why would they?’

  ‘How would I know?’ I could play this game all day.

  Sarip smiled and said nothing for an uncomfortably long time. So I ate a cookie. Finally he said, ‘Ah, well, it is just a hunch.’

  ‘Dude, I mean, Lieutenant, sorry, I don’t understand any of this. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t mean to be rude – I’m a guest in your country – but I’m finding this awfully intrusive.’

  Time for Sarip’s last gambit. He drew out his phone, opened it, turned it to me and aimed a long shot of Delia at me. ‘Do you know this woman?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said with impressive rapidity. If he was asking it was because he already knew we were connected. ‘You could say we’re dating.’

  ‘And what do you know about her?’

  ‘Whoa,’ I said and held up a hand. ‘Now you want to ask me about my friends? This is just not cool. I mean, really.’

  ‘Would it surprise you to learn that she is an agent of the US Federal Bureau—’

  ‘FBI. Yeah, FBI, of course I know. I met her when I was researching a book. But, not meaning to be unhelpful, Lieutenant and Sergeant, I am not going to answer any more questions unless you think I need a lawyer. Do I need a lawyer? I can call my embassy …’

  And that was check. Not checkmate, but definitely check. Two minutes later they were gone leaving behind the thick musk of suspicion. So, yeah, sadly, however this came out, I was definitely burned in Amsterdam.

  ‘You are a very good liar,’ Chante said when they’d left.

  ‘Chante, I am the living, breathing god of bullshit.’

  I checked the time. Tick-tock. Hours still to go and nothing for me to do. So I waited an hour then went out ostensibly to shop for food at the Albert Heijn. As I cruised the aisles and loaded my basket I looked for Willy Pete. And for any of Delia’s contractors who might still be eyeballing me. I spotted neither. I did however spot none other than the sullen sergeant, filling a shopping cart. I pretended not to see her and not to know that she was following me. Fine, I could always lose a tail I’d spotted. Though, there was a tingling in the back of my head, one of those vague, unsettled feelings. A vague, unsettled feeling that involved DeKuyper and groceries.

  But my never-well-concealed arrogance returned as I lost her. Nice try, Sergeant. I had this. Even under Sarip and DeKuyper’s nose, I had this.

  At three thirty in the afternoon of a gray and drizzly day, I returned to the apartment, unloaded groceries and wine, and began to get ready for the caper that would make me a legend, or a guy in a prison jumpsuit.

  It was time. Time to rob the Rijksmuseum.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I suited up and went out into the street beneath a very visible umbrella with a Van Gogh Sunflowers print. Impossible to miss.

  I walked north, wandering this way and that before diving into a coffee shop just off the Nieuwendijk. I had scouted the place and knew the back door led to one of Amsterdam’s hundreds of a tiny courtyards, and from there to an alley and by the time I emerged back into the light the umbrella and the hat I’d been wearing were gone, as was my down jacket.

  That was a relief: I was wearing layers. Lots of layers. The day was chilly but I was dressed for Arctic conditions.

  From there it was a thirty-second walk to an AirBnB with a coded lock. I let myself in and to my relief found the clothing I’d had Ian place there. I changed clothing yet again and exited by a back stair into a rather lovely pocket garden and from there through the back of a sandwich shop and out to the street again. Six blocks south, near the Rijks, a second AirBnB, this one in a building with a rickety elevator. In this AirBnB – very nice artwork, by the way, not worth stealing, but well-chosen – there was my motorized wheelchair and the rest of my necessaries.

  Ian had been surprisingly efficient. He’d done well for me. When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. That’s what Sam Spade said. Ian hadn’t quite been my partner, but he had worked for me, and maybe I had an obligation. I wondered if he had a wife somewhere, maybe kids.

  I loaded up my small backpack, slid various objects into various recesses of the wheelchair, double-checked batteries, then drove the wheelchair onto the elevator and motored my way out onto the Lijnbaansgracht, not a thousand feet from the Rijksmuseum. Down the street at a blistering three miles an hour, reminding myself not to move my legs, over the canal bridge, then over the Amstel, plowing heedlessly through crowds, head cranked to one side, drooling a little, playing the part, a stroked-out old fart in a chair with a plaid blanket over his paralyzed legs, impatient, probably in pain.

  If there were eyes on me now I was screwed. Simple as that. I’d decided in light of his visit that my opponent in this game was Sarip. I had more enemies than Sarip, so many I had a hard time keeping track of them all, but if Delia had managed to call off her contractors then the essential foes were the Ontario Crew and Sarip. It can be useful to personify the enemy. The Ontario Crew wanted to kill me, but if it came down to who had more resources to devote to tracking me it had to be the cop. Was Sarip sufficiently convinced that I was a bad guy playing some nefarious game that he could justify a street surveillance team? I thought not. If he had a full team in action he’d not have used DeKuyper to watch me at the Albert Heijn.

  I motored on toward the great Gothic-Renaissance mash-up of red brick and limestone and cloud-dimmed skylights. It was an impressive building from any angle, huge but not intimidating. I was struck by the notion that the architect had had a sense of humor. It was grand and imposing but at the same time gentle, almost self-mocking in the way it tossed styles together to create a sort of Great British Bake Off showstopper of a confection.

  The ensemble in the Rijks’s breezeway was reduced this day, just two violins and the balalaika, playing something melancholy that was probably Russian.

  The guard at the entrance did a sort of slight bow, a recognition of my status as an old guy in a wheelchair, someone owed deference and an assumption of harmlessness.

  I entered the atrium of the Rijks. In my head there was a score playin
g, music signifying heightened tension. But in truth I was less tense than I’d been in days. I was at work. On the job. It was too late to worry now, it was all about the plan.

  Seen from above the Rijksmuseum is a squared-off figure eight. The holes in the ‘8’ are two courtyards, the first serving as the main atrium and containing the café and gift shop; the other being a sculpture garden.

  The exhibits are on four floors, including the bottom level which has some special collections, as well as the two courtyards. On the second floor (or first, if you’re European) are artworks from the period 1700 to 1800. On the fourth floor is 1950 to 2000. The floor in-between was the one that mattered most to me – that’s where the collection of pretties from 1600 to 1700 lived. I don’t know what happened to 1800 to 1950.

  Lying along the crossbar on the third floor (my floor) is the vast, ornate gorgeousness of the Gallery of Honor. This gallery stretches from Rembrandt’s huge Night Watch at one end, to the Great Hall at the other, which actually is pretty great, with an amazing mosaic arched ceiling, and soaring stained-glass windows supposedly depicting various art being done by various men, with some women tossed in beneath as avatars of different schools of art. I didn’t figure that out on my own, I’d had to read about it. Suffice to say that the Great Hall was a museum all by itself. The Gallery of Honor acts as the crossbar of our square ‘8’, the other galleries extending in either direction, through a series of smaller interconnected rooms. So if you keep going you circle around to the other end of the Gallery of Honor. Right at the intersection of the Gallery of Honor and the Great Hall are big, wide stairs that lead between floors, as well as doors for toilets and identical smaller stairs, presumably for evacuations.

  The Gallery of Honor was subdivided into eight open alcoves defined by partition walls, four on a side. Jewess at the Loom had been placed in the alcove second from the Great Hall, on the right if you were gazing toward the stained glass.

  My path would go from that open side room in the Gallery of Honor, through the swinging glass doors into the Great Hall, right, into a line of narrower cubbies. At the end of the corridor I’d pull a U-turn into the excitingly named room 2.8.

  Room 2.8 had a problem in that the only way out was back the way you came, but it had compensating virtues, among which were that the putty gray security doors were oversized for the wall and protruded a good two feet into the room. This had the effect of creating a small camera blind spot. It could create other possibilities as well.

  The atrium is below street grade so that the cloakroom was more or less below me as I entered the museum. I descended via short elevator ride along with a Japanese family and motored my way along in what I’m certain was an offensive parody, and went for the men’s room. In the privacy of a handicapped stall I opened my backpack and took out the coffee can that was my bomb. The bomb was a piquant blend of sugar and potassium nitrate, cooked together to form a sort of roux, which was then contained in aluminum foil. I’d worn myself out watching YouTube trying to figure out how to make a simple timed fuse, but Ian had made short work of it. He is … was … Irish. Ian had joked that bomb-making is in the national patrimony, so to speak.

  Of course this bomb was not meant to explode. There would be very little fire and a whole hell of a lot of smoke. Hopefully. We had not had time to test it. If it failed to go off, or for some reason failed to generate enough smoke to look like a serious fire, I might well be trapped in the museum.

  I opened my phone and checked the timer again. I was on schedule. Tick-tock.

  I took the coat check receipt and surreptitiously tore the identifying number out and swallowed it, an inelegant, but effective way of destroying evidence. The remainder of the ticket I tore into little pieces and dropped in a bin.

  I motored my way back to the elevator and waited patiently for it to come. An extraordinarily fat family of four – Americans, of course – loaded on with me, all of us crammed in together as the father sent me a greasy, apologetic smile. The door began to close and I saw two women rushing to make it and to my abject horror recognized one of them. It was the rumpy-pumpy woman from Tess’s boat.

  Jesus H. Christ, what were the odds? But my disguise worked to conceal my undoubted rumpy-pumpiness, so she never so much as glanced at me.

  I got off on the third floor, the heart of the Rijksmuseum, all the goodies from 1600 to 1700, the high points of Dutch art, at least the Dutch art the Rijks hosted. The Van Gogh museum might have disagreed as to peak Dutch art.

  I motored out of the elevator and into the Gallery of Honor, emerging just to the left of The Night Watch. There was as usual a decent crowd gaping at the massive thing – it’s the size of a billboard – and gazed down the length of the room. Stairways behind me to my left and right, also restrooms. At the far end of the gallery there were also stairways and restrooms, and in-between about, oh, let’s say a billion dollars’ worth of art.

  Mosaic arched ceiling, pink and green columns arrayed ahead defining the separate alcoves, long gray benches, polished blond wood floors, skylights full of gray and wet. I’d seen this view in the flesh twice, online dozens of times and in my imagination on countless occasions. This was my theater.

  I did a discreet time check. The smoke bomb would ignite in 132 seconds.

  Text to flash mob organizer: How’s it going?

  Quick response: Just about to start.

  I pushed on the joystick and slid up next to one of the benches. I reached beneath my plaid lap blanket and pulled out a small Bluetooth speaker. The back of it was covered with the kind of two-sided tape used to hang wall hooks. I looked like I was playing with myself as I switched on the power: all to the good because if no one looks at old dudes in wheelchairs, even more does no one look at old dude in wheelchair possibly adjusting his colostomy bag.

  The speaker was small enough to almost be concealed by my hand. I fiddled and stressed over the inexorable tick-tock until the be-blazered guard looked away. Then I slipped the speaker under the bench. Press, hold, hold, patience … Yes, it was stuck.

  The smoke bomb would be going off any second now.

  I motored down the length of the hall, past conspiring Batavians on my left and guys dressed like pilgrims on my right, both by Rembrandt. On I cruised, slaloming through the crowd, past landscapes and hunting scenes and paintings of ships by guys who would be household names, maybe, except for the overshadowing existence of Rembrandt.

  I approached the third alcove on my right, the target. It was not a huge space, though stratospherically tall. The walls were battleship gray. There was a bench. There were wires stretched at mid-calf height, not to stop anyone, just to remind you how far back you should stay. There was some Pieter de Hooch on the side walls, but it was all Johannes Vermeer on the back wall, none of which I could see for the crowd gazing thoughtfully at Jewess at the Loom, nestled between The Love Letter and Woman Reading a Letter.

  My heart seemed to be about six inches higher in my chest than usual, and it was beating heavy, heavy and slow because I was in it now, it was about to go down; and on the job my heart doesn’t speed up, it slows. Or maybe time itself slowed, because everything was moving through molasses now.

  A twenty-something couple in near-identical gray coats shifted from left foot to right, synchronized. A toddler whined and Mom reached a slow hand to touch the top of the little girl’s knit cap. Three elderly Japanese, two taking pictures, the other, an old man with the hair-do popularized by Homer Simpson, nodded to himself as if he’d seen something deep and meaningful. Maybe he had.

  I was at the back of the crowd of perhaps twenty-five people. I advanced my chair a bit and a woman noticed and moved aside to let me pass, smiling indulgently.

  Down below, down in the cloakroom the timer would have completed its circuit. The fuse would have been lit. The sugar and nitrates would sputter and the first tendrils of smoke would appear in the bag resting on shelves beside purses and coats and hats. It would take a while, not long, but a
while for anyone to notice.

  I forced myself to take long, slow, deep breaths.

  This was the last second of time in which I could still bail out.

  I opened my phone.

  I twisted around and drew from my pack a smallish construction of white plastic and black rotors. Was anyone watching me? I couldn’t look, I just had to do. I slipped it beneath my lap blanket.

  I’d kept just far enough back from Jewess at the Loom that I still had line of sight to the speaker I’d planted back near the sacred Night Watch. My phone wouldn’t reach that far but it would reach the higher-power Bluetooth emitter I had epoxied to the bottom of my wheelchair.

  Ready.

  Last chance to back out. This was it.

  Well, what the hell. I could survive prison. Right?

  Play!

  And it worked! A shrill, distorted, frankly crazed-sounding voice began ranting.

  The Night Watch glorifies fascism! It must be destroyed!

  A flicker went through the crowd. I mimed my own concern and said, ‘It’s terrorists!’

  You cannot stop me! I will destroy it!

  The guard leaned out of the alcove to see. Further back other guards were moving, slowly at first, then faster toward The Night Watch.

  Rembrandt was an imperialist apologist!

  Guards moved faster now, reinforcing each other in their concern that something was wrong, very wrong. My nearest guard hesitated. I yelled, ‘I hope it’s not someone slashing the painting!’ And that did it: my proximate guard moved out of the alcove. The crowd followed, not all the way, just out of the alcove, curious but not determined, they just wanted to see what was happening.

  The hour of reckoning has come! Death to Rembrandt!

  Now came the move I had practiced probably two dozen times. The drone was under my blanket, whirring, lifting the blanket in what might have looked like an impressive erection. I switched to the drone’s native app and threw back the blanket. The tiny rotors whirred and the drone rose into the air, then veered wildly down the length of the Gallery of Honor, just ten feet in the air, trailing a red ribbon to make it easier to spot. And the Bluetooth speaker shouted, Drones are the tools of the oppressor made to do the work of Antifa!