He nods and smiles. He’s too polite to tell me that he doesn’t have an answer.
I point to the girl in the drawing and take out the photograph of Samira. “What about this girl?”
“Many girls in and out.” He makes a circle with his left forefinger and thumb and thrusts a finger through the hole. “Prostitutes,” he says apologetically, as though sorry for the state of the world.
I ask to see the flat. One of his sons will show me. He takes me through a fire door that opens into an alley and leads me up a rear staircase to where he unlocks a door.
I have been in depressing flats before, but few have disheartened me as quickly as this one. It has one bedroom, a lounge, a kitchen and a bathroom. The only furniture is a low chest of drawers with a mirror on top and a sofa with cigarette burns.
“The mattresses were thrown away,” Mr. Weng’s son explains.
“How many lived here?”
“Ten.”
I get the impression he knew the occupants better than his father.
“Do you remember this girl?” I show him the photograph.
“Maybe.”
“Did she stay here?”
“She visited.”
“Do you know where she lives?”
“No.”
The tenants left nothing behind except a few cans of food, some old pillows and a couple of used international phone cards. There are no clues here.
Afterward, I catch a taxi and meet Ruiz at a bar in Nieumarkt, a paved open square not far from the Oude Kerk. Most of the outside tables are empty. It is getting too late in the year for backpackers and American tourists.
“I didn’t think you were going to buy one of those, sir,” I say, pointing to his guidebook.
“Yeah, well, I hate asking directions,” he grumbles. “I’m sure someone is going to say, “You want to go
A couple at the next table are locals. They could be having an argument or agreeing completely. I can’t tell.
“The Dutch can squeeze more vowels into a sentence than anyone else in the world,” says Ruiz, too loudly. “And that Dutch ‘j’ is a deliberate bloody provocation.”
He goes back to his guidebook. We’re sitting on the western flank of the red light district, in an area known as de Walletjes (the Little Walls).
“That building with all the turrets is the Waag,” he explains. “It used to be a gatehouse to the old city.”
A young waitress has come to take our order. Ruiz wants another beer, “with less froth and more Heineken.” She smiles at me sympathetically.
Opening his marbled notebook, Ruiz relates how Hassan and Samira Khan were smuggled across the German border into the Netherlands in the luggage compartment of a tourist coach in April 2005. They were taken to an application center at Ter Apel and were interviewed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Hassan claimed to be fifteen and Samira seventeen. They told the authorities they were born in Kabul and had spent three years living in a refugee camp in Pakistan. After their mother died of dysentery, their father, Hamid Khan, took the children back to Kabul where he was shot dead in 1999. Hassan and Samira were sent to an orphanage.
“That’s the story they told in every interview, together and independently. Never wavered.”
“How did they get here?”
“Traffickers, but they both refused to name names.” Ruiz consults his notebook again. “After they were screened, they were housed at a center for underage asylum seekers operated by the Valentine Foundation. Three months later they were moved to the campus at Deelen where 180 children are housed. In December last year both their visas were revoked.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. They were given twenty-eight days to leave the Netherlands. An appeal was lodged but they disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“Not many of these people hang around to get deported.”
“What do you mean ‘these people’?”
Ruiz looks at me awkwardly. “Slip of the tongue.” He pauses to sip his beer. “I have the name of a lawyer who represented them. Lena Caspar. She has an office here in Amsterdam.”
White froth clings to his top lip. “There’s something else. The boy made an earlier North Sea crossing. He was picked up and sent back to the Netherlands within twenty-four hours.”
“Guess he tried again.”
“Second time unlucky.”
2
The lawyer’s office is on Prinsengracht in a four-story building that deviates from the vertical by a degree or two, leaning out over the brick-paved street. A high arched doorway leads to a narrow courtyard where an old woman is swabbing flagstones with a mop and bucket. She points to the stairs.
On the first floor we enter a waiting room full of North Africans, many with children. A young man looks up from a desk, pushing his Harry Potter glasses higher up his nose. We don’t have an appointment. He flicks through the pages of a daily schedule.
At that moment a door opens behind him and a Nigerian woman appears, dressed in a voluminous floral dress. A young girl clings to her hand and a baby is asleep on her shoulder.
For a moment I don’t see anyone else. Then a small woman emerges, as if appearing from the folds of the Nigerian’s dress.
“I’ll send you a copy of the papers once I’ve lodged the appeal,” she says. “You must let me know if you change your address.”
Dressed in a long-sleeved cotton blouse, black cardigan and gray trousers, she looks very lawyerly and businesslike, despite her diminutive stature. Smiling absently at me as though we might have met, she glances at Ruiz and shudders.
“Mrs. Caspar, excuse this interruption. Could we have a word?”
She laughs. “How very English that sounds. Just the one word? I’m almost tempted to say yes just to hear which one you might choose.” The skin around her eyes wrinkles like peach stones. “I’m very busy today. You’ll have to wait until—”
She stops in mid-sentence. I am holding up a photograph of Samira. “Her brother is dead. We have to find her.”
Mrs. Caspar holds her office door open until we follow her inside. The room is almost square, with highly polished wood floors. The house has belonged to her family for generations, she explains. The law practice was her grandfather’s and then her father’s.
Despite volunteering this information, Mrs. Caspar has a lawyer’s natural caution.
“You don’t look like a police officer,” she says to me. “I thought you might require my services.” She turns her attention to Ruiz. “
“Not anymore.”
“Tell me about Hassan,” she says, turning back to me. “What happened to him?”
“When did you last see him?”
“Eleven months ago.”
I describe the discovery of his body in the truck and how my name and address were sewn into his clothes. Turning her face to the window, Mrs. Caspar might be close to tears, but I doubt if such a woman would let strangers see her emotions.
