Amsterdam Noir

by René Appel

  I decided to consider her nonappearance Lesson #1 in my New Life course, so I threw on a jacket, checked myself in the mirror, and—passing through the living room where Mimi had fought for her life—left the house and walked over to the Athenaeum Bookstore on the corner, as I’d done so many times in the past.

  Even before my move, I’d decided not to have anything delivered to my new digs, so that at least once a day I’d have to get out of the house. I bought a newspaper from a girl who could have been me back then: eighteen, maybe nineteen years old, working part-time for extra cash to supplement whatever academic scholarship she was getting. I grew up behind a counter, so I knew the drill. In the four years I worked at the Athenaeum, I dealt with unkempt punks and unwed mothers, sold newspapers in six languages and hash brownies. Over and above my paltry salary, I had the opportunity to meet famous writers like Harry Mulisch and John Irving, the crown princess incognito, and the king of the squatters in full regalia. Everyone who was anyone and everyone who was no one came to the Athenaeum—and there I stood in the middle of it all.

  This part of the city is now clean and predictable, all the anarchy of the olden days long gone. The bookstore no longer shows customers with lousy taste the door, and Het Lieverdje—the beloved bronze statue of a cheerful boy of the streets—has survived the Provo riots, the happenings, even its own kidnapping. After eleven occupations by students, the University of Amsterdam’s Maagdenhuis remains stately and forgiving, true to the line from the Gospel According to Mark carved into its lintel: Suffer the little children to come unto me. The square has been newly repaved with stones and is ringed by stuccoed and lacquered buildings—an open invitation to a comfortable and carefree life.

  I should have been relieved that day—and happy—but what I felt when I slipped my key into the outer door was alienation. As if I no longer belonged on the “village green,” as Ella used to call the Spui.

  I climbed the stairs and let myself into my new home, settled onto my new couch with a bag of chips and the paper, clicked on my new television for company, and fell asleep.

  A call from the police awoke me. Apparently my ex had given them my number.

  A moment later, although the camera connected to my new doorbell wasn’t yet working properly, I recognized over the intercom the same female voice I’d just heard on the phone. She must have called from across the street, or right in front of my door. I was surprised to see that she was alone; perhaps the police only travel in pairs on TV shows. Ella knows that sort of thing.

  She was the one who’d given me the courage to leave my husband, to return to my old stomping grounds. She had kept me grounded as I ripped myself free of the suffocating relationship I had too long confused with love. She’d never pressured me, had always been understanding—though it was true there’d been times she’d impatiently stamped her foot, frustrated with my hesitations and delay.

  Of the two of us, Ella is the strong one, the independent one, the determined one, the one who’s always ready to lend a helping hand to a friend in need. I am the quiet one, the timid one, the mouse. It takes awhile to discover that there’s more to me than meets the eye. That’s the way it was even when we were childhood friends in the Haarlemmerstraat, skipping rope on the narrow sidewalk in front of our fathers’ shops.

  “We take this matter very seriously,” the detective said.

  “This matter” was a video that had been delivered to De Telegraaf—one of Amsterdam’s largest daily newspapers—a few hours earlier.

  “Was it a message from Ella,” I asked, “or from someone else, about her?”

  Instead of responding to my question, the detective posed one of her own: what was Ella working on?

  I never know what Ella’s working on, I answered honestly. Nobody knows what Ella’s working on—that’s why she’s so good at what she does. Her secrecy, Ella says, is what allows her to do her job: her silence protects her sources, her family, her friends . . . and herself.

  “We were going to watch a movie,” I said, nodding at the Blu-ray of The Graduate on the coffee table, “to christen my new house.”

  We only watch The Graduate on special occasions. The first time, at the Tuschinski, we were fifteen, maybe sixteen, and we dreamed of growing up to be Joan Baez. Mimi was still with us then. Before we even left the theater, the three of us agreed that we instead wanted to grow up to be Katharine Ross. Ella was already on her way, with that thick brown hair. When we were forty, we saw The Graduate again, now through the eyes of mature women. Ten years later, we watched it a third time, and last year we’d planned yet another showing to celebrate our making it to sixty despite all the cigarettes we’d smoked. That screening never happened, though, since Ella was on the road for the newspaper and I was busy explaining to my husband what an insufferable ass he had become.

  On the day of Ella’s disappearance, we’d planned a catch-up Graduate to mark my independence—and, more than that, without either of us having said the words aloud, as a tribute to Mimi. After that, we were going to have dinner at Café Luxembourg, Ella’s favorite. That was all I had to offer the policewoman, I thought at the time.

  * * *

  The kidnapping made the evening news and was almost instantly a trending topic on Twitter. By the next morning, photos of the most famous crime reporter in The Netherlands were everywhere you looked. The banner headline on the front page of De Telegraaf, her employer, screamed, “WHO HAS OUR ELLA?” in oversized capitals.

  I’d spent the night in a chair by the window, with all the lights out and the curtains open, waiting for some word from her, staring at the barred windows of the Esprit store across the road, at the soft glow of the streetlights, at the black-and-white neighborhood cat—officially the Luxembourg’s house cat, who lay deep in thought across the Begijnhof’s doorway—at the pedestrians, mostly solitary men who walked past my house from left to right or right to left without giving it a second glance. Some of them were visibly drunk, some hurried self-confidently by as if they were on their way to jobs that really mattered. Between two and five a.m., young women pedaled past on their bicycles, like Ella and I did years ago—without worry, without fear—until Mimi’s fate forever changed our relationship to our little corner of the city.

  * * *

  Ella sometimes jokes that if twenty-four hours go by and I haven’t heard from her, she’s probably lying at the bottom of the Amstel River with a bullet in her head. In that case, my instructions are to get in touch with Bert.

  She says it lightly, and I know she is unafraid of the dangers that are such an integral part of her world, a world with which I am completely unfamiliar. She seems to enjoy the excitement, but when no one is paying attention—not even she herself—I think it gnaws at her. Anguish stalks her at the very moments when there’s nothing to be concerned about. When I stay over at her place, or when we share a room on one of our hiking trips, her nightmares keep me awake.

  * * *

  My ex, the son of a bitch, texted to warn me not to involve him in any way, shape, or form in that Ella business. Nobody seemed interested in how I was doing, another reminder of all the people who’d unfriended me. The one who walks away from a marriage is the one to blame, something like that. Only the publisher at the company for which I’ve been freelancing for years took the trouble the next morning to stop by. All he had to do was walk across the street, but his concern seemed genuine and I appreciated the support. We talked about Ella, and then—to convince ourselves that things couldn’t be as bad as they seemed—about a manuscript I was proofreading for him. Before he left, he congratulated me on my new home and my new life. “It’s so cozy here on the Spui,” he said.

  And that was my welcome back to the neighborhood where, once upon a time, Ella and I had majored in the Dutch language at the University of Amsterdam, where, encouraged by our parents, we had escaped the humdrum fate of Haarlemmerstraat shopgirls to which, only a few decades earlier, we would have been doomed. Here, at this exact part of t
he city, our freedom began. Here, for us, the world began.

  * * *

  The morning after Ella’s kidnapping, it seemed as if the world converged on the Spui—I had to zigzag around knots of gawkers to reach the Heisteeg. On my way to the Lijnbaansgracht police station, I imitated the self-confident tread of the men at night: Here I come, and nothing bad can possibly happen to me. From the desk sergeant’s reaction to my name, I could see that any hope it had all been a misunderstanding was misplaced. There’s always that glimmer of hope when something awful happens, even though you ought to know better. Ella and I had experienced that with Mimi. But the desk sergeant knew exactly who I was and why I was there. There was no misunderstanding; it was all true.

  The Telegraaf’s editor-in-chief was the only person other than the detectives who had seen the video. I watched it three times that morning, together with a man who introduced himself as Theo, a detective in the major-crimes unit, not much older than me.

  It opened with a shot of my house, filmed from across the street: a narrow building, not quite perpendicular to the ground, an unimportant afterthought compared to the chic art nouveau home next door. The camera zoomed in slowly on my front door. In the next shot, I was lugging two huge suitcases, tagging behind Ella, who wore a backpack and carried a smaller bag in her left hand and a key in her right. She opened the door, took a step back, made an exaggerated bow, and ushered me in with a sweep of her arm. It was funny: we looked like teenagers moving into a dorm. That was our way of dealing with the serious nature of the occasion.

  The remaining shots were almost all of Ella. She’d been filmed on the way to my house, and coming out the front door, and walking along the Spui, probably heading back to her own apartment on the Singel. I laughed when I saw her wrestling with the lamp she’d bought as a housewarming gift and had planted in my still-empty living room to surprise me. For those few seconds, I could almost imagine I was watching a rerun of The Banana Splits.

  Theo paused the video the second time we watched it.

  “She had a key to your house?” he asked.

  “She still does.”

  He nodded and pressed play.

  Ella, sitting at a wooden table, a white wall as backdrop. I was surprised to see how normal she appeared. It was like looking at the Ella who reports on a high-profile murder case, the Ella we all know from television: eloquent, informed, well put together. Her left eye was slightly squinted, the only clue to the nervousness she must have been feeling.

  “This message is for my man,” she said, straight into the camera. “I’m fine, I’m getting enough to eat and drink, I’m not being mistreated.” She took a breath, cleared her throat, and continued: “I’m being held against my will. The conditions for my release will follow.”

  The screen went blank.

  “She doesn’t have a man,” I said.

  Ella doesn’t believe in long-term relationships, they’re far too complicated. Typically, her boyfriends don’t last longer than a month or so; after that, she gets bored and gives up. She usually sees two or three guys simultaneously, though more recently she’s begun to find that too exhausting. Instead, she’s bought two additional apartments—in the wake of the financial crisis, she was able to pick them up relatively cheaply—so she now has three home addresses scattered around the city. Real estate is her current passion.

  “She means me,” Theo said. “My last name is Mann. Ella and I have known each other professionally for years. She’s talking to me.”

  It was only then that I realized something Theo already knew: “They think my house belongs to Ella.”

  Theo raised an eyebrow.

  I asked him when he’d figured it out.

  “Last night, soon as I saw the video. Spui 13 is still a red flag for me, so I sent my colleague over to talk to you.”

  * * *

  Mimi was twenty-one, the same age as Ella and me, when she was awakened by a loud noise that October night, almost forty years ago. Her boyfriend Mark was a sound sleeper, which we felt at the time explained why she had gone down to Spui 13’s second floor alone to see what was causing the racket.

  It came out during the trial that two men, brothers, had broken into the shop on the ground floor and climbed the stairs to our two-level apartment. One of the brothers put a knife to Mimi’s throat. “Just to scare her,” he told the judge. But then he raped her. And then the other brother took a turn, except he was so drunk he couldn’t come. That’s when—according to the second brother’s testimony—things got out of hand. He slit Mimi’s throat with a single sweep of his own blade. Meanwhile, the first brother went up to the third floor and beat Mark to death with a bicycle chain.

  Theo Mann was a young patrolman at the time. His supervisor recognized in him a talent for detective work and brought him along to the scene. The murders of Mimi and Mark, he told me, remained one of the grisliest crimes of his long career. What he saw that night, the butchery of two people around the same age as himself, had stayed with him for all the years that had followed.

  “Mimi was my cousin,” I told him that afternoon, after we watched the video.

  * * *

  I didn’t have to think about it for long when I heard that the building was going to be auctioned off. Ella was the one who first found out about it, of course—I never hear about things like that. “Buy it,” she’d said, but without putting too much pressure on me. And you don’t have to know much about real estate to understand that a property like that one—a sweet little house, the smallest on the Spui—doesn’t come on the market often.

  “Unusual,” Theo remarked tactfully. “Most people wouldn’t want a house with that history.”

  Mimi’s parents—who had died a year after the murders; of grief, my mother always said—had tried to buy it at the time, to prevent strangers from moving in. But the owner, a notorious slumlord, hadn’t even responded to their repeated offers.

  “It used to be our house,” I said, “a long time ago. Ella and I squatted there.”

  If that weekend had unfolded differently, it would have been our dead bodies the young Theo would have investigated. Ella and I had wanted to get away for a few days to London, but we didn’t dare leave the house empty—we were afraid other squatters would take it over, or the owner would send in a goon squad to secure it. We’d almost given up on our plans when Mimi, who had moved to Groningen to attend the university there, announced that she and Mark would be happy to come down to Amsterdam to house-sit.

  “Ella and I were questioned,” I said, “but I don’t think it was you.”

  Theo let that pass. “You haven’t been living there for long, I understand.”

  “It seems longer, but I only moved in yesterday.”

  “From where?”

  “From a marriage to an architect who treated me like I was one of his designs.”

  * * *

  With a scarf wrapped around my head, I strolled home through the crowded Leidsestraat, lingering here and there like a tourist and barely recognizable. No one would know that I had just been to the police station. Not that it mattered, but my invisibility made me feel better.

  Turning off the Kalverstraat onto the Spui, I tried to ignore the people with cameras. There were three of them right in front of me, and at least five more taking snapshots or videos with their phones—there are always people with cameras on the Spui, but that day there were more of them than usual. In an attempt to convince myself that I was completely relaxed, I went into the Esprit store and bought a shoulder bag I didn’t want. With my old one stuffed inside the new one, I forced myself not to run across the street to my house. Scared on my own square.

  Before I left the station, Theo had asked if I was okay, if there was someone who could come and stay with me. I’d lied to both questions. I couldn’t think of a soul I wanted to see, except for Ella.

  I shot both of the front door’s dead bolts—with Ella’s key in the hands of her kidnapers, the fancy three-point lock my insurance
company had recommended was now worthless—went upstairs, checked all the windows on the second floor, then up another flight of steps to the bedroom I hadn’t yet slept in. I turned on the radio to drown out the sounds from the street and fell into an exhausted sleep in my new bed.

  In the middle of the afternoon, I called a locksmith and then the realtor on the corner of the Spuistraat.

  “I have a house for sale.”

  “We’ll be happy to help you,” the person who answered the phone told me. “May I send my colleague out to have a look, perhaps sometime around the end of this week?”

  As soon as I mentioned the address, he proposed moving the preliminary visit to the following day.

  “I’d like someone to come today,” I said. “Tonight, if necessary.”

  * * *

  “I need you to see something else,” Theo had told me, after I’d watched the video for the third time. “Can you keep this quiet?”

  Keeping quiet was a skill I had mastered during the years of my marriage. I nodded.

  He slid a sheet of paper across the table. “This was delivered this morning.”

  It was a short list of demands, addressed to The Owner, who was ordered to put Spui 13 up for sale. A particular realtor was indicated, complete with phone number. Even the name of the ultimate purchaser—J. de Vries—and the sales price were specified.

  “So they know Ella doesn’t own the house,” I said.

  “Or they realized it after kidnapping her,” said Theo.

  “No, they kidnapped her because she’s famous.”

  “That can’t be the only reason.”

  Theo asked from whom I’d purchased the building.

  “A homesick American. I can send you his contact information if you want it.”

  “Please, although I don’t see a link from him to Ella,” said Theo.

  “She was at a real-estate auction when she found out Spui 13 was coming on the market. Does that help?”

  * * *