Prinsen’s girl kidnapped! He remembered her as he had met her briefly in connection with a previous case. The girl had endured quite a lot, the things she had gone through. And now, kidnapped. He could blame Prinsen for getting her into trouble, but it probably—as far as he knew—wasn’t his fault.
But this idea, him going around to bars and cafés, trying to find out who knew anything about her kidnappers, that was a laugh. He hadn’t said that much to Dewaal; she wouldn’t have listened anyway. Ten years ago, he would have had his finger firmly on the pulse of this city. He would know what was going on in the streets and in the minds of the local crowd. Today, he no longer had his fingers anywhere near that pulse. He still had friends and occasionally foes he could talk to, but this was no longer the same as it had been.
The ones that would still talk to him were of an older generation.
He slowly walked through De Jordaan, the formerly proletarian neighborhood, now the new place for the new kids, a quickly gentrifying area with small houses and apartments and corner stores and old pubs. Small fashion boutiques had taken over grocers and mom-and-pop stores, selling outrageous clothes and accessories, secondhand design items, and old toys as well as homemade pies and health food. After ten in the evening, it was still a nice place to have a drink and expect a good conversation.
Like in Rick’s Bar.
“Bloody hell,” Rikkert admitted, not even suppressing a yawn while simultaneously stroking his beard. He was an old hand at neighborhood gossip, an old mainstay of De Jordaan. Although somewhat younger than Van Gils, he had known this part of Amsterdam before the gentrification. And he still had his own bar. “You’re still at it, Van Gils? Trying to amend or whatever? There’s always going to be injustice in this world. And crime. We try to avoid crime now, these days. But it’s going to be around forever.”
“I’m a cop,” Van Gils explained simply.
“You’re asking ’bout men who might have kidnapped a girl? What sort of question is that? This isn’t Colombia or Mexico or wherever they kidnap people for money.”
“She wasn’t kidnapped for money,” Van Gils said. “And I didn’t ask around, either.”
“Yeah, and I’m the most discreet of bartenders, that’s my reputation.”
Rikkert was certainly discreet, or Van Gils wouldn’t have been so direct.
“Nobody kidnaps anymore, Van Gils. Too much risk, not enough gain. There are the perverts, the pedophiles, and the gangs that pick up girls from the street, the girls that are lost and scruffy and have no place to go, but that’s not what you have in mind, I guess.”
“No. These guys would kidnap on order.”
“Like, ‘I need a girl this size and color, get me one’?”
“Something like that. In this case, a specific girl. And she’s twenty, not underage.”
Rikkert thought this over. “Some Russians might do that.”
“Had enough of them Russians,” Van Gils said. They all had. Even in De Jordaan. With the upwardly mobile young people moving in, things had changed rapidly, the dealers moving out, working people moving out. Although the new crowd wouldn’t shy away from hard drugs for recreational use.
“How much time you got?”
“Not much. I need info tonight.”
“Tonight? Like there’s no tomorrow, eh? Well, things are not moving that fast anymore, Van Gils. The Chechens are in on the game as well. Moved out of Antwerp, coming in here. Not in De Jordaan, though.”
“Chechens.”
“They’re worse than the Russians. Have known nothing but war all their lives. Why don’t you drop by the Dead Sailor? You don’t have old friends there anymore? It’s a more likely place for this sort of information. But be careful. Your police ID isn’t going to protect you against the Chechens.”
The Dead Sailor wasn’t a tavern for sailors but for people working in municipal services, mostly. Bus drivers, sanitation workers, maintenance, and so on.
“I’ll give it a try,” Van Gils said. The Dead Sailor was two streets down. He finished his beer and stepped out in the cold. The Dead Sailor was a busy place. He hesitated before entering. This was his seventh pub. He wasn’t concerned about the expenses—the boss would take care of those. However, his wife would object to him being out this late. And returning with alcohol on his breath. He had promised her, a while ago, he was done with pubs. And alcohol.
He walked into the Dead Sailor and quickly got rid of his overcoat, as the place was hot and crowded. He would have a final beer, ask around a bit, carefully, and only if he met someone from the old crowd. He glanced at his watch. Quarter past ten. He ordered a beer, got it, paid for it, and walked away from the bar.
A powerful hand gripped his upper arm. “Van Gils,” a deep voice said, sounding neither surprised nor happy, just registering his presence. A man much taller than himself. Van Gils looked up. This was not merely a man but a mountain of meat and bones and muscles who could have crushed him and probably had crushed quite a few people in bars, here in Amsterdam and all over the world.
“Sjaakie,” Van Gils said. Not exactly the man he had hoped to bump into. Sjaakie had been big and imposing since childhood, or at least those were the rumors. He had worked in a great variety of places and jobs, mostly because of his size and nastiness. Occasionally he had worked for local mobsters, being the sort of bodyguard nobody was going to ignore. Van Gils had booked him twice for assault, and both times Sjaakie (whose name was a diminutive of Jacques, which happened to be his real first name, to everyone’s surprise) had come without any fuss, as if the police simply had the right to arrest him.
Sjaakie had one redeeming quality: he was not vindictive. Van Gils had merely done his job by arresting him, as Sjaakie had merely done his by beating people up. This was the foundation for the respect both parties had for each other, on the one side the unarmed detective and on the other the imposing mountain of a man.
The man emitted a deep gurgling sound, which Van Gils knew was his way of laughing. “You still remember me, Van Gils? It has been a while.”
“You’re not the sort of person one is likely to forget, Sjaakie. How much time did you spend inside?”
“A year and a half in all. No problem, Van Gils. Nobody bothered with me. You still a cop?”
“Yes.”
“No pension yet? You still on the street?”
“No pension yet,” Van Gils said. “You want a beer?”
“Sure, why not. You’re here officially?”
“I am.”
“Ah.” A big fist clutched the new beer. “I heard you moved up to . . . whatever it is you moved to. Great to hear. Now you still come to these bars? Missing us?”
“Sometimes I need to talk to the old crowd. Hear about what happens in the city. And you’re probably the man I should listen to.”
“Sjaakie knows everything,” the mountain admitted.
“Can we sit somewhere where we can have a chat discreetly?” Although Sjaakie would never really be unobtrusive.
“Well now, mister detective. Would I want to be seen talking to you? I have to consider my reputation. Well, if you insist. There’s a table free in the corner. Keep those beers coming, and I’ll keep the news coming.”
There would not be much privacy, even in the corner, but with all the noise, they wouldn’t be overheard. “Young woman, twenty, kidnapped and held somewhere, to exert pressure on a colleague of mine,” Van Gils said. “But keep this under your hat.”
“What sort of thing is he working on, your colleague?”
“You read about these people in the Ardennes, burned?”
To the amusement of many, Sjaakie’s face could manage a wide variety of facial emotions, but this time if showed only revulsion. “Read about it,” he said. “Pretty fucked-up shit. And now they pick a girl off the street?”
“Professional guys, I guess.”
“There aren’t many who would do this,” Sjaakie said. “I heard about three men interested in a building wit
h a basement they could use for a while. Isolated, too. Would that be something?”
“Could be. Did they find the building?”
“Friend of mine rents these things out, even if they don’t really belong to him, you know what I mean?”
“Where?” Van Gils said, although he suspected it was a long shot. Still, it was the most promising thing he’d heard all evening.
“You know where Bickersgracht is? At the Westerdok?”
Some place around the harbor. “I do. One of those places we’d be keen to visit on an evening like this. Us and Customs.”
“You won’t find much. Been unused for ages. But that’s where they got a place all to themselves. I don’t have names or nothing.”
“We’re talking three men?”
“Maybe. I could ask around.”
“No, don’t, Sjaakie.”
“Was that helpful?”
“It might be. Much appreciated. Another beer?”
FRIDAY
42
JUST BEFORE LINDA’S PLANE took off from Madrid, she called Eekhaut, waking him at three thirty in the morning. She would arrive at Schiphol Airport around six. She only had hand luggage, and she would be in Amsterdam Central Station no later than seven thirty.
“Good thing you still have your passport,” he said, trying to get fully awake. “But I can pick you up at the airport.”
“I don’t want you to drive all the way to Schiphol.”
“Early like that? There’ll be almost no traffic.” Although he knew that would probably not be the case for the return trip.
“I hardly have any luggage. Pick me up in Amsterdam.”
By seven fifteen he had parked the unregistered police vehicle in front of the Amsterdam Central station. He had picked up the car earlier from the underground parking garage below the office. It had a discrete AIVD logo on the windscreen, so a parking guard would leave it alone.
He entered the busy station. He was still fifteen minutes early, so he got himself a coffee, which turned out to be worse than the ones at the office. Nevertheless, it was hot and caffeinated, so he drank it. He used to be a morning person, but lately he needed caffeine to start the day. And a decent breakfast as well. This morning he had neither. He hadn’t slept after her call.
Finally, the train from Schiphol was announced, and he hurried to the platform. Passengers got off, most of them with suitcases. He spotted Linda at once. She waved. She looked different, he noticed, but exactly as he would have expected. A long trip, a stay in a totally different environment. Where things were done differently than in the Netherlands. Somalia. Africa. She wore casual clothes that didn’t suit or fit her. That didn’t suit the Linda he had known.
They embraced and kissed and embraced again.
He looked her over. Carefully. She smiled. “Is that grime or do you have a tan?”
She laughed. “It might be grime. I can’t remember sunbathing. The hotel in Madrid had a functioning shower, but I guess I couldn’t rinse off weeks of dirt.” She held up her bag. “This is all I have left. I need some new clothes, Walter, but not right away.”
“You have to tell me everything. Every detail.”
“I will. But not here. I want to go to my apartment. I want to sit on my own couch. I want a decent Dutch breakfast, if such a thing exists, and I want to talk to you. How much time do you have?”
“For you? All the time we need. But Dewaal urgently needs us in the office by ten. Crisis meeting. Really bad shit going on.”
“Aren’t there crises all the time? I didn’t get the chance to follow the local news.”
“I’ll tell you later. It’s confidential anyway. Most important is that you’re back. I’ll take you home so you can have a decent shower, and I’ll make you some breakfast. We can catch up later today.”
“I’m still in shock, Walter. From all that happened over there and from the sudden adjustment to civilization.”
“I imagine things are very different over there.”
“You have no idea.” He really had no idea, and she couldn’t blame him. She had gone there with misconceptions about how life would be.
She tossed her travel bag into the back of the car, and they drove off.
“What went wrong?” he wanted to know.
“There was a huge storm,” she said. “Something not even the locals seemed familiar with. The end of the world, almost. Afterward, the camp was gone, and so was most of our equipment. The soldiers got us out, in the end. There was no sense in remaining since the refugees had left the area.”
“Soldiers?”
“Part of an African peacekeeping force, Kenyans. United Nations mandate. I don’t know if the dead were buried. We were ordered out at once.”
“And no one stopped the refugees when they fled?”
“It was chaos, Walter. We couldn’t. And the soldiers weren’t going to keep them there either. Everything was simply gone. Everything we had set up.” She was, she realized, close to tears now. She hadn’t shed a tear before this.
“I’ll get us something to eat. Your apartment?”
“I don’t know if there’s electricity. Probably still cut off.”
“We’ll use mine then. You can take a shower there. You got an extra set of clothes?”
She nodded.
“Good.”
He parked the car around the corner on Utrechtsestraat. Then he went to the nearest shop and bought bread, eggs, ham, cheese, instant coffee, milk, sugar, tomatoes, onions, and a can of baked beans. And two bottles of wine for later.
“All that?” she said, surprised.
“Full breakfast. I don’t know what I have in the fridge, so I just bought what I think we need.”
He left the car on Utrechtsestraat, close to the tram stop but in a spot that wasn’t exactly a parking space. They carried her bag and the groceries to his apartment, where she went right into the shower. She came out twenty minutes later dressed in her other set of clothes. He had turned the heat on, and the apartment was quickly getting warm. He was now occupied with eggs, bacon, and beans in tomato sauce. “You can stay if you want. I have a spare room with a bed I don’t use.”
“I’ll have to think about that.” She watched him preparing breakfast. “This shit . . . I mean, I’m not used to such abundance anymore. Hot shower and personal breakfast service and all.”
“Guess you aren’t,” he said. “Sit down.”
She sat at the kitchen table next to the window. He brought coffee, toasted bread, and an almost complete English breakfast. “You’ll feel better with a full stomach,” he said. “Trust me on this.”
She ate with an appetite that surprised him. Or not, actually. After the second cup of coffee she said, “I think this is what I needed. Breakfast and you.” And suddenly tears ran down her cheeks. She hid her face.
He held her by the shoulder. “That’s all right,” he said. “It’s a delayed reaction and shock. After all you went through, and you didn’t have the time to let it really sink in.”
“There’s so much . . .” she started but couldn’t finish her sentence.
“You can’t help them all, Linda,” he said softly. “There’re too many.”
“There were literally thousands of refugees there, Walter. Men, women, old people, and children. And we let them all down. When they needed us most, we let them down.”
She pushed away her empty plate.
“All that time they were just sitting there. Before the storm, all those weeks. Those who were ill came to us, the others just sat there. They had nothing to live for. They’d reached the end of the road. And there was us. A handful of medical staff. We meant nothing. We didn’t make any difference.”
“That’s not true. You helped those who were sick.”
“We might have made a difference for some of them, for a little while. And then, after the storm, nothing remained of our efforts.”
He poured her more coffee and kept an eye on the clock. He couldn’t afford to miss
this meeting with Dewaal.
“Tell me about you,” she said. “We need to talk about you too. I want some normality in my life.”
“Compared to what you’ve been through,” he said, “things have been rather routine here.” Which was a lie, but he wasn’t going to burden her with tales of immolation and murder.
“Be more precise, Walter. You’re being evasive. You haven’t been doing nothing.”
“I guess you’ll read about it in the newspapers anyway. We’re looking into the criminal activities of a cult.”
“A cult?”
“Not just any cult. This one sacrifices people. We’ve found examples of their work.”
“Sacrifice?”
“We came across the remains of a ritual murder somewhere in the Belgian Ardennes. Seven victims. All tied to stakes and burned alive. That’s the sort of thing this cult does.”
She stared at him. He realized he shouldn’t have brought this subject up. Too many horrible things in her life, and now this.
“I think,” she said, “I’ve seen something similar in Somalia.”
He frowned. “What are you talking about?”
She described what she had seen in the hills. Both circles of bodies, old and new. She described what Lieutenant Odinga had told her about these sorts of sacrifices having been performed for centuries in the most remote places. How the old bodies had looked petrified. Literally. “It’s as if that sect you’re talking about had been active outside Europe and for some time already.”
He wasn’t surprised. He told her about how many disasters were supposed to be the work of the church, and how a new group, the Society of Fire, had continued the tradition.
“That’s . . . I don’t know what to say. How can people do that? Are we going back to, I don’t know, the Middle Ages?”
“We’re after these people, and we’ll get them, but there are probably many of them, and not just here. It’s evil, Linda. We’re fighting extreme evil.”
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