by René Appel
He shook his head and spoke to Saleem in Urdu. From his tone, I gathered that his words meant something along the lines of: What are you doing mixed up with a sissy like this?
Imran gave me a penetrating look. “Listen, boy, the police don’t do anything but write reports. That’s all they’re good for.” He tugged at his beard as if he wasn’t completely satisfied with his explanation. “In Pakistan, the cops would beat the shit out of a bastard like this guy. Then he’d never do such a thing again.” He pounded his palm with his massive fist to emphasize the thoroughness of the Pakistani police. “But the Dutch cops will sit the guy down, give him a cup of coffee and a slice of cake, and talk the situation over with him, ask him why he did it, explain the rules, tell him little boys are fragile creatures, that sort of bullshit. And then the dirty pervert gives them an understanding nod, and they offer him a ride home. But I’m telling you: you don’t solve a sickness like this with polite conversation.” He snorted, probably with revulsion and not just because he had something stuck between his throat and his nose. “If I’ve learned anything these last years in Holland, it’s that you don’t trust family matters to the cops. Let them write their traffic tickets and sit behind their desks scratching their fat asses until it’s time to clock out for the day.”
“Uncle Imran,” Saleem said suddenly, “the same man frightened Metin in the elevator.”
“The same man? In your building? The goddamn shitbag!”
“He asked Metin if he’d ever seen a grown-up’s penis,” said Saleem, suddenly without shame. “And then he showed it to him.”
“The bastard!” snarled Imran. “And next time it’ll be you in the elevator with him, or your little brother.” A new sort of rage welled up in him. “Fucking hell, man! This is too much, this bloody pedophile has gone too far!”
As we walked on, Imran appeared more determined than ever. He was terrifying me.
After a while, Saleem said, “Here! This is where he talked to us.”
Imran examined the place as if there might still be traces of the man to be found. He scouted the area like a detective investigating a case. Then he crouched down and pulled a loose brick from the pavement. “Let’s go on,” he said, the brick clutched in his hand.
Two hundred yards farther, I almost choked with shock. The man we were looking for was sitting on a bench on a jetty overgrown with weeds, gazing out at the canal. His racing bike was leaning against the bench. I couldn’t believe my eyes. What was he still doing here? Why wasn’t he long gone? Why would he take such a risk?
One leg crossed casually over the other, he sipped from a clear plastic bottle. And as he sat there drinking peacefully, looking out at the water, apparently enjoying the afternoon sun, for a moment I couldn’t imagine there was anything really evil lurking within him. He was probably nothing more than an ordinary pencil pusher.
Saleem was a few yards out in front, and he hadn’t noticed the man through the high weeds. And though Imran was looking around alertly, he hadn’t yet seen him either.
What should I do? What else could I do but announce that I had spotted the guy we were searching for? Imran would make sure he never bothered us again. There’d be no reason for us to be afraid in our own neighborhood anymore. But what exactly would he do to the man? He’d said he would teach him a lesson, but did that mean just put the fear of God in him, or would he go further and work the guy over with his fists, like the Pakistani cops he had praised?
I hesitated and glanced at Imran, at the brick in his hand and the muscled arms that stretched the fabric of his tight black polo shirt. He walked clumsily for a boxer. He stomped his feet and looked more like a wrestler about to go on the attack.
What should I do? Saleem and his uncle had already gone past him. The man unfolded a paper sack and took out a piece of bread. He broke off a bit and tossed it into the canal. As the bread hit the water, a raft of ducks surrounded it with a great flapping of wings, but just before they got to it, a covert of greedy coots chased them off, their eyes red, their beaks sharp. The man was clearly enjoying the show, since he went on tossing bits of bread into the canal. Soon, a colony of seagulls joined the battle. The squawking and splashing got louder, swelled to a cacophony of sound. Saleem turned around to look, and his eyes slowly widened.
“That’s him!” he shouted. “Uncle Imran, there he is!”
Not asking if he was sure, Imran stepped from the pavement onto the strip of grass that bordered the canal. He marched heavily toward the jetty, began to run, like a warrior who’s suddenly recognized his enemy in the distance. He must have stepped on a pool of bird shit, because his legs flew out from under him and he lost his grip on his brick, which arced into the weeds. Imran’s huge body landed with such a loud thud that it attracted the attention of not only the man but also the coots and ducks and gulls. He hauled himself upright, roaring with anger. He brushed off his jeans, now spotted with greenish-brown stains, and, cursing, wiped the bird shit from his hands onto his pants. And then he set off again at top speed, aiming for the bicyclist. Like a gladiator confidently entering the arena for his final battle, he leaped onto the jetty, which creaked and wobbled beneath his weight, and flung himself at the man, who by now, shocked by Imran’s approach, had gotten to his feet and instinctively raised his hands.
Imran quickly grabbed the man by the front of his shirt and yanked him close. No one who might have witnessed such a scene would have expected the giant bald man to speak before punching his insignificant opponent’s lights out, yet that’s exactly what he did. Imran gestured wildly toward the two of us and demanded, “Why were you bothering these boys?” The question didn’t match his wrathful appearance. It was as if the gladiator had stopped himself at the last moment to make sure the figure who’d appeared out of the dust clouds of the Colosseum was in fact another gladiator and not some innocent deliveryman who’d accidentally stepped through an open doorway into the arena.
“Who, me?” the man mumbled.
“My nephew says you’ve been waving your dick in his and his friend’s faces.”
The man stared at us, astonished. “What? No! I—I only asked them for directions.”
Imran pulled him closer, and the man’s heels left the ground. He dangled on his tiptoes, like a doll. “Are you sure?” It wasn’t a question. It was a warning that threatened impending disaster, as if that hadn’t already been announced.
“I was lost! I swear, I was lost, I only asked the boys for help!”
Imran shook him violently. “Don’t lie to me, you bastard!”
“Let me go,” the man whined. “You’re hurting me. Let me go, I didn’t do anything!”
“You showed two little boys your fucking cock!” barked Imran. “And then you followed them, you pervert.”
The man tried to worm out of Imran’s grip, swatting ineffectually at the hand that held him tight. When that had no effect, he jerked away, screeching. His fluorescent bike shirt tore, and he fell backward, leaving Imran holding nothing but a scrap of fabric, glaring at it in confusion like he was doing an impression of King Kong. The man scrabbled away, trying to escape.
“You’re not going anywhere,” growled Imran. “I’m not finished with you.” He crouched down and grabbed the ripped shirt, but the man kept crab-walking backward, and the shirt tore off completely, leaving him naked from the waist up, flopping around on the jetty like a fish out of water, about to be gutted and fileted. Imran took hold of his wrist and hauled him to his feet as if he was weightless. The man struggled to get loose, pulling and hitting the hand that held him captive.
“Stop it!” Imran ordered, and he hit the man on the ear. “Stay still!”
But the man failed to obey, went on shrieking that Imran had to let him go.
Imran dealt a second blow to the bicyclist’s mouth with the back of his hand. The man cowered in Imran’s grip, his hands clapped over his lips, and then he seemed to go insane. He unleashed a fearsome cry, then sank his teeth into the hand that s
till held him and shook his head wildly, like a hungry caiman ripping the flesh of its prey in the brown waters of the Amazon.
It was weird to hear our mighty protector yelling like a wounded beast. His voice tormented, he snarled, “You’ll pay for that!” He balled his right hand into a fist and smashed it into the man’s left eye. There was the sound of bone cracking, and a hellish scream.
“My eye!” the man wailed. “My eye!”
At that moment, I felt an intense sense of pity for the man. I turned to Saleem, filled with concern, but he was hopping up and down, swinging his arms like a charged-up Roman citizen who’d spent the whole week looking forward to this battle and was now enjoying it to the max.
The man staggered, and only remained on his feet because Imran was holding him up. Suddenly Imran noticed that his hand was bleeding. He stared at it, unbelieving, his massive chest heaving. Then he returned his disgusted attention to the bicyclist and spat, “If you gave me AIDS, you fuck, I’ll kill you!”
Imran swiveled his torso and hip and let loose another right-handed wallop. This one caught the man full in the nose, and there came again the crunch of bone. The man sank to his knees.
We had to do something before Imran really did kill him. We had to stop the slaughter. I yelled at Saleem, but he didn’t react, just stood there transfixed by his uncle’s merciless attack. Maybe he was reminded of the many times we’d watched our hero, the Ultimate Warrior, on the mat. But this was no theatrical wrestling match: a human being was actually being torn apart, and all we could do was watch.
As Imran kicked the man in the ribs, I grabbed Saleem’s arm. “We have to stop him! He’s gonna kill the guy!”
Only then did Saleem face me, the color drained from his face. “Yeah,” he muttered, “but . . . what can we do?”
“Pull him off,” I said. I dragged Saleem onto the jetty. As we came up behind Imran, he kicked the guy again, then a third time. It sounded like all the air was leaking out of the man. I shoved Saleem forward and said, “Do something!” But he just stood there, watching his uncle go to town. So I pushed him aside and approached Imran myself.
“Stop,” I shouted, “you’re killing him!” But Imran seemed not to hear me.
And right then I heard a shout from the apartment building on the far side of the canal.
“Hey, stop it!” a voice called. “Leave the man be!”
That gave me the encouragement I needed. “Please,” I said, “stop, before you kill him. Have mercy!”
Imran whirled around, his expression furious, and when his eyes met first mine and then Saleem’s, it was as if the gladiator’s mask slipped from his face and he morphed back into a concerned uncle. Imran was still holding the bicyclist by a limp wrist. He glanced down at his victim one last time, then let him go. The man collapsed onto the jetty. His thin body convulsed.
Imran took a step toward us. “I’m sorry,” he said softly, “I—I lost control.” He looked at his bloody hand and wiped it on his shirt. “He shouldn’t have bitten me. I was only going to rough him up a little.”
The man dragged himself to a sitting position, looked around in a daze, and dropped his head to his knees. He sat there defeated, folded almost in half to protect his battered rib cage from further damage, his spine so slender it seemed it might snap in two at any moment. Again I felt pity wash over me.
Imran fetched his water bottle from the bench and held it out to him. “Drink.”
Without looking up, the man took the bottle. As he drank, blood dripped from his nose down his chin and onto his naked chest. I figured his nose must be broken. As if he’d only now noticed it, he waved at a fanny pack lying on the bench. I picked it up, unzipped it, and found a ring of keys, three foil-wrapped rubbers, lip balm, and a pack of tissues.
Groaning, the man got to his feet. He seemed only barely conscious, with nothing left to lose. One eye was puffed shut, his nose was unnaturally bent and continued to bleed. Not saying a word, he held out his hand to me, palm up. I hardly dared to look at him, but as I gave him the pack of tissues, I couldn’t avoid the sight of his chest all covered with blood. With a trembling hand, he pulled a tissue from the pack and pressed it to his nose. The white paper immediately reddened.
“You’ll never see me again,” he said. He dropped the bloody tissue to the jetty. “As far as I’m concerned, this never happened.”
Imran nodded. “None of it happened.”
The man picked up his water bottle, staggered to the bench for his fanny pack, and strapped it to his waist with some difficulty. Then, breathing heavily, he righted his bicycle and pushed it through the weeds to the path. Moaning, holding onto the handlebars with one hand, pressing the other to his ribs, he pulled himself onto his saddle.
Without looking back, he pedaled away.
LUCKY SEVENS
by Theo Capel
De Jordaan
The A4 was crowded, as usual. Felix had been stuck behind a brand-new Seat Ateca for some time. He could almost see the guy in front of him frowning in his rearview mirror at Felix’s old Cordoba. It was time for a new car. There was enough money to buy one in the inside pocket of his uniform jacket. The problem was, it wasn’t his money.
When he hit the ring road, the traffic got worse. Up ahead, somebody slammed on his brakes, and Felix barely managed to avoid rear-ending him.
Eyes on the road, he told himself.
Imagine getting into an accident with all that cash on him. Some of his brothers in blue would surely suspect him of being crooked. He wouldn’t even be given the chance to explain himself. He shook off the thought and proceeded carefully to the exit for the S105—he still insisted on thinking of it by its traditional name, the Jan van Galenstraat—which would take him to his home in the Jordaan. The bureaucrats didn’t care that the Jordaan was the best-known part of the city. They felt it was good enough to put a simple Downtown on the exit signs.
It had been an unusual day for Felix. He was on his way back from South Holland, where he’d attended the funeral of a fellow Amsterdam police officer. Every cop there had been in uniform, including detectives like Felix. Dark-blue jacket, peaked cap. That had caused an uncomfortable moment, later in the day. Coincidentally, he’d also had an appointment in The Hague, at the headquarters of the agency that ran the national lottery. Tickets were cheap, and if you were lucky, instant happiness. Felix wasn’t a gambler himself, but today he’d walked in the door with a scratcher that had revealed a fifty-thousand-euro prize beneath its layer of foil. He’d bought it at the corner cigar store, along with two packs of filtered cigarettes and a magazine. Felix didn’t smoke, and it wasn’t a magazine he liked to read. The winning ticket wasn’t his either, and that’s why he’d collected the money in cash.
They’d been upset at the sight of his uniform. They were expecting a Mr. Felix de Grave, and what they got was a cop. He’d cleared up the confusion, but there’d been another misunderstanding when he left. The woman who showed him out was surprised by his pale purple car. She’d anticipated a police cruiser, not this sad old jalopy. She’d just been telling him that lots of winners bragged the first thing they were going to buy was a new vehicle, but most of them wound up sticking their winnings in the bank. She seemed to think that banking the fifty thousand euros would, in Felix’s case, be a mistake. She didn’t say it in so many words, but he could read it in her expression when she got a look at his car.
They’d already thought it was odd that he’d wanted the money in cash. The unspoken suspicion was that he didn’t want his wife to know about his win. Felix wasn’t married, but the money was indeed intended for a woman. The winning ticket belonged to his neighbor, which was really nobody’s business. It was Felix and the neighbor’s little secret.
* * *
Many of the streets in the Jordaan—Carnation, Laurel, Rose—are named after flowers. Misnamed, really, because the neighborhood was originally a wasteland, with long, narrow alleys and canals that dead-ended where the world-famous seve
nteenth-century Canal Ring begins. Nowadays, you need to be well-off to live in the shadow of the Western Church’s bell tower, since the realtors do their best to make it seem as if the Jordaan is a part of the Canal Ring.
If Felix leaned out his living room window, he’d be looking right at the church’s Westertoren, which for the older Jordaaners would be good reason to burst out in song. Ever since the neighborhood began to attract a demographic that was still disparagingly referred to as yuppies, the tower had been considered an annoyance, thanks to the fact that, every fifteen minutes, day and night, its carillon played a little tune. For the tourists, the tower was a beacon, guiding them to the Anne Frank House, which stood just around the corner from the church, on the Prinsengracht. Every day they lined up, waiting their turn to go inside, the line usually stretching along the canal to the tower. Felix’s across-the-street neighbor, who was generally to be found hanging out the front window of her apartment, observing the passing scene below, never ceased to be surprised by the enormous interest in the Frank family’s WWII hideout.
“There’s nothing to see in there,” she told anyone who would listen. “I should charge admission to come look at my house. I’d be rich!” She loved daydreaming of wealth, and the fact that Anne Frank had come to a tragic end—which gave the Frank House a dramatic attraction hers couldn’t hope to compete with—didn’t seem to interest her.
As he turned into his street, Felix wondered if he ought to honk his horn to notify his neighbor of his arrival. Probably not necessary, he decided. She peered out her window the whole damn day, so she’d be sure to see him. Especially today, since she knew where he had gone.
Except, to his surprise, she wasn’t at her usual post. When he pulled up to his garage door and, just to be sure, looked up, he saw that her window was closed. The garage door, on the other hand, stood wide open.
Felix lived on the second floor of a building whose ground level had originally served as a sort of workshop for a company that manufactured lampshades. The company’s name still appeared on the gable in white script letters. At the time he moved in, the garage was being used to house a street organ belonging to the previous tenant, an old friend of Felix’s grandmother. When he left for a nursing home, Felix finagled permission to move into his apartment. Not long after that, the street organ disappeared, and he was permitted—for an extra monthly fee—to take over the ground floor. These days, a storage area like that was worth its weight in gold. Hardly a week went by that he wasn’t asked to sublet part of the space. His upstairs neighbor had long been permitted to stash his bicycle there and Felix had graciously agreed to continue that arrangement, and he had more recently succumbed to a plea from a couple who lived across the street and pedaled their kids to school and other activities on a traditional Dutch cargo bike, which had to have someplace to sit when it wasn’t doing taxi duty. In point of fact, he had succumbed to the wife after first refusing an identical request from the husband. Felix thought the husband, who claimed to be some kind of financial consultant, was a bit of a bullshitter, and—as a cop—he didn’t care for bullshit.