Amsterdam Noir

by René Appel

  Waldemar plows through the tourists, and there stands Ivan. Immovable, unwilling to lose his newest acquisition because of the district’s village idiot. His hand rests loosely in his trendy designer bag, his joint dangles from his mouth, a disdainful smile rests on his lips.

  Waldemar’s desperate eyes are focused on the light at the end of the passageway. He runs straight ahead and crashes into Ivan, knocks him into the passage wall. Waldemar hesitates, growls like a wounded animal, and looks back—not at Ivan, from whom he now has nothing to fear, but at Katja. She runs surprisingly quickly in her high heels; he scarcely needs to pull her along. The light comes closer. Waldemar turns back once more, they’re almost there, and now he pulls his daughter close. This time he’s there in time to save her, and she knows it, because she hugs him tightly and smiles. The white light dances like a spirit at the end of the passageway.

  “Go!” screams Waldemar, as they finally burst onto the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, and the tourists and junkies and johns scatter out of their way. “Go, my darling sweetheart!”

  Their hands part. His daughter runs, runs, runs, and when she is almost out of sight, he sees her ascend, lift up into the sky.

  Waldemar can still feel her warmth in his hands, and he watches her rise up with a smile.

  In the passageway, Aaron finally spots his hat on the ground. When he reaches for it, his gaze falls on Ivan, who is sitting under the graffitied wall. Ivan stashes his switchblade back in his bag, but Aaron sees it, glimpses the red on its blade. Slowly, Aaron picks up his hat, smoothes its feather as best he can, and returns it to his head. He hoists his staff and slams the end of it against Ivan’s head, and the pimp loses consciousness and collapses to the ground like a rag doll. Aaron grumbles with satisfaction as he hears the first sirens approaching. He regathers his flock, who have observed his actions with alarm, and they follow him out of the alley, silent, impressed.

  * * *

  On the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, Waldemar takes a few uncertain steps, and then his knees buckle and he falls. Instinctively, he places his hands on his stomach, and, when he looks down, sees blood seeping between his fingers. Thick drops fall on the cobblestones.

  He topples onto his back and is soon surrounded by shocked prostitutes, a coffee shop bouncer, a dozen tourists, and three drunken English hooligans, one of whom, well-meaning, tries to drape his jacket over Waldemar’s head.

  Waldemar fends them off with some difficulty. He turns his eyes to the gates of hell, sees that the red light above his daughter’s room is out, and dies, suffused with satisfaction.

  PART II

  KISS ME DEADLY

  THE TOWER

  by Hanna Bervoets

  Van der Pekbuurt

  “Is this your first visit?” the girl in the red jacket asks.

  The elevator ride is apparently part of the attraction. Gita hadn’t realized that, hadn’t expected there to be an operator in the car with her.

  She nods, and the girl smiles. “This is the fastest elevator in Western Europe,” she says. “It only takes fifteen seconds to get to the top. You should look up.”

  The girl cranes her head back, and Gita follows her example, but she’s not sure what to do with her hands. Oddly enough, she misses her rolling suitcase—its handle has been the only thing she’s had to hold on to this evening. She checked it when she came in from the street, though, handed it off to a girl whose hair was tied back in exactly the same ponytail worn by this child who stands beside her. Gita watched her tuck it away in a corner, with another suitcase and two carry-ons, the luggage of others just arrived from Schiphol or on their way there. She wonders if anyone can tell from her appearance. Can the bag-check girl and the elevator girl see that she’s a local, not a tourist?

  Tourists, Schiphol . . . at the thought of the airport, Gita feels nauseous, although that might just be the light show, as bright images flicker along the car’s ceiling: the three Xs from Amsterdam’s coat of arms, the Dutch flag, a tree, a cat, a skull—is that really a skull?—a house, a child, something blue, something red, an orange dog, a pink smiley.

  “We’re there,” the girl says.

  The silver doors whoosh open. The observation deck is larger than Gita had imagined it would be.

  “We’re open for another hour. If you have a ticket for the swing, though, you’ll have to hurry—it closes at nine.”

  Gita nods, and the girl retreats into the elevator. Does she still tip her head back when she’s alone?

  It’s peaceful up here on the roof. A couple strolls along the railing to her right, two teenage girls take selfies with the city spread out below them in the gathering dusk. A boy standing beside the huge steel swing wears the same red jacket as the girl in the elevator and looks at her questioningly. She shakes her head.

  Of course, she thinks. Of course there’s hardly anyone here tonight: it’s almost dark, it’s drizzling, it’s practically freezing—but, God, the view is gorgeous.

  You can see for miles in every direction, despite the fence on the other side of the railing. The fence is six feet tall, she got that tidbit from Femke. The couple, an older man and woman in white sneakers—probably Americans—examines a signboard with a line drawing of Central Station and other landmarks. But the station’s not very interesting anymore, since the grand renovation it’s actually quite ugly, and Gita finds the other landmarks—the Old Church, the Palace on the Dam, the Stock Exchange—equally unappealing, so she walks around to the far side of the roof for the view of Amsterdam-North.

  And there is the neighborhood where she grew up. The streets, the houses, the trees, all laid out in miniature; she can hold a streetlight between her thumb and forefinger. From the ferry dock, the Buiksloterweg ambles northeast, then, just past Pussy Galore, forks off to the right. To the left, it changes its name to the Ranonkelkade and then the Van der Pekstraat, a caterpillar with fat legs extending to either side. The legs are the Anemoonstraat, the Oleanderstraat, the Jasmijnstraat, the Heimansweg.

  Mireille lives in a house on one of those legs. Right now, she’s probably sitting in front of the TV.

  Gita’s parents lived for many years on the highest floor of an old building on the next leg, until the block was torn down and renovated and the prices went sky-high. Atop the new building on the site where she was raised, there’s now a penthouse that seems unoccupied, since no light ever burns in its windows.

  The caterpillar’s head is a square, the Mosplein, and Gita knows that, at this moment in the Café Mosplein, Sjors and Maya are lowering the metal shutters across the plateglass window that looks out on the square. She wonders if she can make out her own building from here. Yes, there, the street just south of the square, that must be it.

  What would happen if she went there now? Climb the stairs, slip her key into the lock, and then immediately the scream, the uproar that only she can understand. She left the heat on but turned out all the lights—had she been hoping for burglars? The longer she stares at her building in the distance, the more clearly she can hear the screams.

  She turns away and sees Femke’s complex, those buildings there on the right. Femke pointed it out to her once, from the ferry: “That one, there, with the big windows!”

  Earlier this evening, Gita checked all the mailboxes and buzzers in the lobby, but she couldn’t find Femke’s name. She’d actually grabbed a complete stranger by the arm and said, “Sir, you don’t happen to know Femke de Waal, do you?” The man shook his head and scowled at her suitcase. “Airbnb’s not allowed in this building,” he said severely, pulling a ring of keys from his jacket, and Gita had turned away and left but not gone home. Instead, she’d wandered aimlessly through the warren of streets until she found herself at the foot of the A’DAM Tower, the tallest building on the waterfront.

  Gita fishes her cell phone from her pocket. No new messages—nothing from Femke. Without thinking, she scrolls up, past dozens of texts, maybe hundreds, until she comes to the very first one in the chain: Red leather
gloves!

  * * *

  Johnny hadn’t wanted to wear his rain jacket that day. It had rained all week, fat drops pelting the windows, the bed of Johnny’s plastic dump truck filling with water—Gita hadn’t had the energy to bring it in from the backyard. Johnny shook his head angrily when she held the jacket up for him. He made a face like he’d swallowed something gross and growled what sounded like a no. It was only a few steps from the front door to the curb, where the school bus would stop, and, if he wanted, his teachers would let him stay indoors all day. Strictly speaking, he didn’t need the jacket, but Gita had just bought it and wanted to convince herself that the money hadn’t been wasted—it had cost more than she could really afford.

  Their argument unfolded like most of their arguments. First Johnny began to scream, his eyes already tearing, his cheeks flushed, and then he started kicking. His flailing arms struck her in the face, but Gita knew he didn’t mean to hurt her. Finally, he broke out in uncontrollable sobs.

  She was reminded of a video that had been going around on Facebook for weeks. A man tells his three-year-old daughter that steak comes from cows and the girl bursts out in tears. “Poor cows,” she whispers to the camera.

  Every time Gita saw that clip, she felt a mixture of anger and jealousy. She was jealous of the parents, who had a healthy, beautiful little girl with two pigtails, a child who felt empathy for other living creatures. But she was mad at them too, for bragging so shamelessly about their blessings. Why would anyone be interested in the private happiness of strangers?

  The bus stood outside her door for ten minutes that morning, two wheels up on the curb. When she couldn’t calm Johnny down, she bribed him with a prepackaged pancake. It was much too early for a treat—she could see Johnny’s nutritionist shake a finger—but what choice did she have? The bus was waiting, with other children aboard. Thank god Johnny stopped screaming the moment he heard the crinkle of the plastic wrapper.

  “Sorry,” she told the frowning driver, when Johnny finally clambered up into the bus.

  Later that day, she regretted the humbleness of her apology. She did what she could, damn it, and who was a school-bus driver to judge her? She wished she’d told him so, right to his face. But at the same time she felt guilty about the way she’d treated Johnny. She shouldn’t have insisted on the rain jacket. He was tired, he’d had a bad night, his day hadn’t even begun, and she was already nagging him. When she brought him home from Mireille’s that evening, she decided, she’d give him another pancake, just because.

  Had she noticed Femke come into the café that morning?

  Probably not. She can barely recall taking her order—the only reason she knows now that it had been an open-faced egg sandwich was that she remembers Femke saying, “You should leave off the dill,” when she paid for it. A typical remark, she would come to learn: Femke always spoke her mind, whether or not anyone had asked for her opinion. At first, Gita saw the trait as arrogance, until she realized that in a way it came from a desire to be helpful. Femke simply knew better than most other people, and with each observation about the things she ate and saw and did, Gita’s admiration for Femke’s knowledge and insight and pure bravado grew.

  After the comment about the egg sandwich, though, Gita had merely nodded. She’s not from around here, she thought. She could tell from the woman’s long, formfitting raincoat, nothing like the shapeless things worn by the café’s usual customers. Before heading back out into the rain, Femke had tightened her belt, but Gita didn’t notice how slim she was until later that day, when the woman returned. Her raincoat was dry then, and so elegant that Gita wondered if it really was a raincoat, after all.

  “I think I left my gloves here,” Femke said.

  Now that they were standing face-to-face, Gita realized that the woman was beautiful. Maybe it was her makeup, she thought at the time. But four or five weeks later, Femke gave her an eyeliner pencil, the same kind she used herself, and it didn’t make Gita’s eyes any bigger or more attractive.

  “I don’t think we found a pair of gloves,” said Gita, and she glanced at Sjors, who stood in the doorway to the kitchen, shaking his head.

  Femke shrugged. “Might as well have a drink, since I’m here. Do you carry Macallan?”

  She spent the rest of the afternoon at the bar, reading the newspaper, playing with her phone, asking questions whenever Gita had a free moment. About the café—“You didn’t have to close when they renovated the square?”—but personal things too: “Do you live in the neighborhood?”

  Gita remembers finding their on-and-off conversation odd, but not unwelcome. When customers talked to her, they were mostly older gentlemen who did little more than order another drink. Femke was young—probably ten years younger than Gita—a member of a more interested generation. So when she suggested that Gita pour one for herself, Gita did something she’d never done before. She set a shot glass on the bar beside the register and filled it to the rim with whiskey.

  She hadn’t had much to eat that afternoon. The guilty residue from the morning’s scene with Johnny stuck to her ribs like chewing gum, but the whiskey burned some of it away and gave her the courage to speak honestly for once. “Actually,” she heard herself say, “I don’t like the neighborhood as much as I used to. They promised us a whole new clientele after the renovation. But most of our regulars moved away, and we’re not good enough for the new residents. They like the trendy spots in the Van der Pekstraat, little bistros that serve soup, where the whole menu is soup and nothing but soup, you know what I mean? Can you believe anyone would come all the way up here to eat soup?”

  Femke toasted her and sipped her whiskey.

  Encouraged, Gita went on: “All those chichi places are the same: a brick wall, ferns, folding chairs, a wooden bar; it’s like you’re in a house that’s in the middle of being remodeled. They serve your drink in a mason jar instead of a normal glass, but it’s not like those jars ever actually held pears or peaches or whatever, they buy them brand new by the case. Did you ever try to drink out of one of those things? You’re lucky if you don’t spill all over yourself!”

  Femke laughed and shook her head. “I’ll drink to that!” She emptied her glass in one swallow and leaned across the bar, her face only inches from Gita’s. Her heavy perfume reminded Gita of her father’s aftershave, with just a hint of Gauloises mixed in.

  “We should go to one of those hip places sometime,” Femke whispered conspiratorially, “and sabotage the joint.”

  Gita laughed, not sure if Femke was serious, too tipsy from her drink to come up with a witty response.

  Femke rose from her stool and picked up her phone. “I’ll text you so you can let me know if my gloves turn up. What’s your number?”

  Gita told her. It seemed natural but at the same time not, as if she’d eaten a piece of candy of a type she hadn’t tasted in years. When was the last time anyone had asked her for her phone number?

  When she got to Mireille’s that evening, Johnny was parked in front of the TV. She’d hurried up the six flights of stairs and stood panting in the quiet living room; the ticking of the cuckoo clock was an almost sarcastic echo of her heartbeat. Johnny was watching Elmo. It was his favorite DVD, though Gita wished he would pick something else for a change. Elmo reminded her that Johnny never made any progress, which reminded her in turn that she never made any progress, trapped in a stuffy room where the light was always blue and Elmo endlessly showed off his brand-new shoes.

  Mireille slouched in her armchair by the window, paging through a magazine.

  “Sorry I’m so late,” said Gita.

  “You couldn’t call?” Mireille snapped, not looking up. “Johnny was worried about you.” She nodded at the television: Johnny was glued to the screen, his mouth slightly open, as if this was the first time he’d ever seen Elmo’s big red feet. “I do this for you, you know,” Mireille muttered, struggling to her own feet. “You want Earl Grey or rose hip?”

  Whiskey, Gita thought.
Do you carry Macallan?

  * * *

  That Friday evening, Johnny had splashed merrily in the tub, teasing her. She’d found the game tiring, but she’d played along: “Come on, I bet you can’t get me wet!” She was mopping the bathroom floor with a towel when her phone buzzed in her hip pocket. A text. She had to scroll up to see who had sent it, and what she found, from four days earlier, was Femke’s number and Red leather gloves!

  This new message read: Sabotage the Soepboer on Sunday?

  Gita stuffed the phone back in her pocket, as if she’d been caught looking at something not intended for her eyes.

  * * *

  She got to the Soepboer a little early. She’d dropped Johnny off at Mireille’s with the excuse that she’d been asked at the last minute to work an extra shift at the café, and then she hurried down the Van der Pekstraat more quickly than necessary, perhaps motivated by her lie, which had made it sound like she was in a rush. She wore her tightest jeans but worried her age would be a giveaway that the Soepboer wasn’t her type of place. The moment she came through the door, someone called her name: Femke, already seated at a little table by the window.

  “No mason jars,” Femke whispered, after the server took their order. They had to back away from most of their other prejudgments too. Yes, there was a brick wall, but otherwise the Soepboer was more cozy than run-down, and they gave up their plan to sabotage the place. They sat there all afternoon, talking and talking, while the server kept returning to refill their wineglasses.

  At Femke’s insistence—“You have a son? Really?”—Gita talked about Johnny. He was fourteen, she said, a sweet boy, at least most of the time. His father? After Johnny was born, she’d never seen the guy again. “Men,” said Femke. “They can be such assholes, don’t you think?”