conducting it.
The postmodern criminal networks come together for a particular function-smuggling in ethnic laborers, muling heroin hidden inside televisions from China that were diverted first to ports in Pakistan, or setting up a train bombing to short-sell a transportation stock price. The cells are small and nimble, and they snap together and break apart into new shapes, like a child’s plane or tank or wall made from the little plastic blocks.
But because the glue of the bricks is temporary, they can be isolated. Where you cannot break a wall, you can shatter a single brick. I just needed to find the right brick.
I sat and I drank a soda at an outside table at a cafe near the sprawling street bazaar of the Albert Cuyp Market, on the south side of Amsterdam, in the dim gleaming sunlight. The air smelled of fish, of herbs, of flowers. I read a Dutch paper and tried to put myself in the mind of Peter Samson, the Canadian smuggler I was on a Company job a year earlier. Samson was a nice guy as smugglers went: paid his fees, paid his bribes, didn’t kill people. I’d stung two Ukrainian weapons traffickers who were attempting to ship contraband uranium to a radical group in New York. The uranium turned out to be fake (counterfeited by them), as was the radical group (counterfeited by me). Samson was held blameless in the grapevine of the criminal community when the two men ended up dead in a Prague apartment, killed by their business partners who didn’t take their failure well. They were screwed by their carelessness and greed and breaking of the bare-bones trust. Networks form because of necessity and a distant trust.
As Samson, I would still be distantly trusted by the man I wanted to see. I’d found him by calling my old contacts in Prague and learning that one of them had moved six months ago to lovely Amsterdam.
I was on my third soft drink when he came ambling along, walking past the tent stalls, shoulders hunched, a cigarette dangling from his mouth like a long, broken fang. I’d positioned myself because I figured he would come this way, through the street market, to reach his little store. I could imagine the smell of the lavender oil in his hair, the slightly rotten smell of garlic on his breath. I remembered he chewed garlic lozenges with enthusiasm because he was scared of colds.
He went inside one of the doors close to the corner. A sign announced a watch repair shop called, in tribute to his craft and his adopted homeland’s national color, CLOCKWORK ORANGE. He closed the door behind him.
I crossed to the door, counted to thirty. It opened up onto the ground-floor business: a tiny old CD and record shop, where the guitar riffs of an old Clash album drilled the smoke-scented air. In the store a bored punk sat at the cash register, waiting for punk rock to come back. Stairs led up to the Clockwork Orange. I went up and tested the door. It swung open. He hadn’t locked it, because his hands were full of bags.
I stepped inside. I saw Gregor setting the bags on a wooden counter. Glass counters showed vintage and collectible watches. A table, covered with black velvet, held a snowfall of gleaming gears, and next to them lay watch-repair tools, craftsman’s tools, laid out in straight lines, ready for work. Gregor was very good at bringing order to chaos.
I shut the door behind me.
He turned and stared at me for twenty long seconds, and then he said, “I know you.” He had seen me only a few times, but watchmakers are detail people. “From Prague.” He did not look overjoyed. “You knew the Vrana brothers.”
“Yes. They tried to cheat me. But I guess I wasn’t as pissed about it as their partners were.” The Vranas had been the morons trying to grab from me money that didn’t exist, for goods that didn’t exist, and the sting I’d run helped the Company empty their bank accounts. Their business partners took it hard. They expressed their disappointment with an ax.
“They buried them in a single coffin,” Gregor said. “No need for two.”
Gregor had been a bit player with the Vranas, a guy whose business they used as a cover to mule goods out of eastern Europe to Britain.
“I remember you were always worried you’d catch a cold. You like the climate in Amsterdam better?” I asked.
“It’s hardly tropical, but I sneeze less.” He was nervous because he couldn’t know what role I’d played in the death of the men he’d known. His eyes narrowed. “Samson from Toronto. Is that still your name?”
I smiled. “It’s the only one I got.”
He didn’t smile back. He tested whether I was armed by saying, “I need a lozenge,” and slowly reaching into his pocket. I tensed but I didn’t pull a gun yet. Gregor pulled out a package of garlic lozenges. He slid one between his thin lips.
A test. I wasn’t here to kill him. I was here either to offer a deal or get information. He’d provided the setup for the smuggling route for the fake uranium, but, since it was never smuggled, the Company had decided to leave him alone, in play, to be useful again. But he’d moved to Amsterdam for what I guessed was a fresh start. Amsterdam had better smuggling routes, and more of them, tied back to the massive port in Rotterdam.
“How do you like Amsterdam?” I said.
“Lovely. The Dutch are very pleasant people.” He sucked hard on the lozenge, drawing out every bit of the garlic’s restorative powers. “They have an excellent health-care system.”
I gestured at the small shop, brimming with inventory. “Business looks good.”
He shrugged. “Watches are a leftover from an analog world. Books, records, movies, everything goes digital.” He sniffled, clicked his tongue. “But analog watches, people still like them. They are both necessity and luxury. We must always know what time it is and we must look good doing it.” He cleared his throat, wiped at his lip with the back of his hand. “How may I help you?” Like I was here to look at his Rolexes.
You don’t ever answer a question when asked. At least, a man like the one I was pretending to be wouldn’t. Instead I invaded his privacy. I peeked inside the bags. Party stuff, for a kid, a girl. Napkins, plates, wrapped candies. “A party?”
“I married a woman here four months ago. I have a stepdaughter. My life is… calmer. I don’t think I can be of help to you, Samson. I am no longer connected.”
“You have a website for your little watch business, Gregor. You probably do a lot of international trade here- ordering from Switzerland for inventory, and shipping goods all over Europe. Great front for smuggling.”
“Get out. I don’t know what you mean.” A touch of panic bruised his voice.
“Oh, I can get out. I could head straight to the Czech embassy and tell them that one of their wayward sons has set up business in this nice country and maybe, if they don’t want to be embarrassed by whatever idiot scheme you’re up to these days, they should keep a careful eye on you. Look very carefully at your books, at your shipping manifests, see where your customers are.”
“I don’t smuggle no more. I am legit now.”
“Hard to make a living with used watches.”
I opened up my wallet. Pulled out and inspected an impressive wad of euros, courtesy of Mila. Everyone has a price.
Gregor looked at the thickness of the wad and stopped ordering me out.
“I need to find someone, Gregor.” I pulled a photo from my pocket. It was a print of the scarred man from the video of Yasmin at the Centraal Station. “Now. I need to know if you’ve seen this man.” I handed him the photo.
Gregor didn’t push it back right away and say don’t know him. That would have been too obvious a lie. He inspected him the way he might peer at damaged gearwork, a narrow pianist’s finger tracing the circle of the man’s face. Finally he said, “I don’t know this man.”
“Think. I don’t want your stepdaughter’s birthday present to be finding out that her shiny new dad used to be a smuggler. Or still is.”
“ She wouldn’t mind me being gone. She acts like she’s allergic to me.” But Gregor studied the picture again. “I don’t know him. But this man I know.”
“Who?”
He looked at me. I peeled off a couple of bills and slid them onto the counter.
“Him. The big man with the dye job. Behind the first guy you pointed at.”
I looked at the picture. A few feet behind the scarred man was a big, broad-shouldered man with dyed white hair. He looked as though he might have Asian ancestry, mixed with European.
“Him I know,” Gregor said. The edge of the photo trembled ever so slightly as he tucked it back into my hand. Watchmaker hands don’t tremble.
