and said: “What’s your wife’s name? Your stepdaughter’s?”
His eyes were bright with fear. “Leave them alone, Samson, please.”
“Their names.” I made the words sound limed with frost.
“My wife is Bibi. My stepdaughter is Bettina.”
“I hope you and Bibi are happy, Gregor. Tell Bettina I said happy birthday.” I gave him a long look and said, “If they ever make a film about Peter Lorre, you have a lock on the lead.” I turned and walked out.
I was not used to terrorizing people, and if Gregor hadn’t tried to cut me I would have been a lot gentler. But a scared Gregor was a useful Gregor.
On the street I checked the call log on Gregor’s fancy smartphone. Two days ago, a call from a Nic, late in the afternoon. Probably the invitation to have the beer at the Grijs Gander. I checked the other phone records. Nothing of interest that jumped out. Many calls to Bibi, a few to Bettina. Nothing else.
I checked the voice mails. One from Bibi, in rapid-fire Dutch, reminding him to pick up the party decorations for Bettina. Bibi sounded impatient and drunk, and she told Gregor twice in the voice mail that he was a useless piece of crap, but it was not up to me to question Gregor’s choices. True love was blind, I thought, with a sudden and sharp sting in my chest, thinking of Lucy.
The other voice mail, from a week before, was from Nic: and, bonus, there was a picture of Nic next to the voice mail. Thick-necked, red hair gathered in a short ponytail, no smile. “Grijs Gander, tonight, if you can slip from Bibi’s chain. See you there at six. I want you to meet a friend of mine,” Nic said in the unerased voice mail.
Said friend being Piet. Gregor was good at slipping all sorts across borders, under the authorities’ noses.
What did Piet want smuggled into the States?
30
The Grijs Gander was not as nice as the Rode Prins. It wasn’t as nice as a broken urinal.
It sat on the edge of the Rosse Buurt, a block or two from the neon-kissed windows where the hookers pose. It was hard to remember that families and regular working people lived in this district, but they did, and the Grijs Gander wasn’t the kind of bar that opened around lunchtime.
I walked, stuck in a mass of Japanese tourists. In the early evening the streets throng with nervous gawkers who simply want to look and have no designs to touch. The girls standing in the windows mostly pose and preen for the tourists like it’s a warm-up game; they know the real dealmakers will come by soon.
The Grijs Gander wasn’t just a dump bar. It was a karaoke bar. That made it about a thousand times more evil. Think American Idol, except that all the judges are drunk and might be handy with a knife.
It was only nine, early by Amsterdam standards. On the karaoke stage a drunken young Spaniard was slaughtering Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall” as his friends applauded. A few men stood in the back, playing pool; a few others sat in booths. Two young women sat at the bar with their young boyfriends. I cast my bartender’s eye over the drinks: most favored vodka or beer; no fancy cocktails. Then I profiled the room. This is a bartender skill. Trouble has nothing to do with gender or age or economic status.
It has all to do with where people sit, where their gaze goes. Most were here just to get drunk and sing and laugh at the bad singers. The pool players seemed to know each other, which made it less likely for cues to be swung like swords. One trouble spot was in the back; a group of big, dark-haired guys who spoke Turkish, and who kept scanning the bar as if waiting for a bubble of trouble to rise. The other was one of the young women on the opposite side of the bar, who looked exquisitely bored and kept glancing about the room as if looking for bigger muscles or a firmer ass or a brighter smile. Her checking out of the other men was pissing off the boyfriend.
Those were the hot spots, so I avoided both by sitting at the bar, facing the front and looking at the beer taps. I ordered a pint of Amstel. The bartender, a thin, sallow guy with five piercings in his left ear, brought it to me. He gave me the quickest of once-overs and set the beer in front of me. I slid the right amount of euros to him, rounded up for a small tip. He did not offer to start me a tab. I sipped, made eye contact with no one, and listened.
My Dutch wasn’t superb, but I’d spent four months in Suriname, the former Dutch colony in South America, so I had enough to get by, and with any language, hearing it spoken revives the command of it. My parents worked with Episcopal Relief-my father as an administrator and auditor of the charity’s funds and my mother as a pediatric surgeon specializing in cleft palates-and they and my brother Danny and I traveled the world for all my youth. My Spanish, Russian, and French were fluent, my Chinese and German okay. I could say I am an American and I need to call the embassy, in about three dozen languages, although that phrase would do me no good with Howell and the Company hunting me. I’d broken scores on speed of learning back in Langley’s language immersion programs, but I’d never studied Dutch that hard and I didn’t doubt that my words sounded ragged and colonial.
I heard a mix of tongues in the bar: Dutch, English (widely spoken in Amsterdam), French, Spanish. I gave the Turks a careful look again; they noticed me looking at them and I quickly put my gaze up to the moonwalking (or moonstumbling) Spaniard. I could wait in this drunken Babel for hours and Nic might not show up. And someone, someone in Dutch intelligence, was going through the Centraal Station bombing tapes and was going to see Yasmin Zaid enter the station with a backpack on her arm and then leave without it.
I had an overwhelming sense that my time was running out.
I had forgotten the virtue of patience. Spying was waiting. And the sudden dull weight of trying to find Nic hit me. But he was the only link I had to Piet, and Piet was linked to the scarred man and Yasmin. And the scarred man to Lucy.
This was the only chain I could tug on.
I sipped my way, slowly, through my beer. The next karaoke singer delivered an accurate version of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” that drew hearty applause, and then a drunken woman got the giggles halfway through a screech of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” She didn’t get booed because her top was tight and the crowd was more forgiving.
I hated this place. I missed the clean smells of Ollie’s bar. He was no doubt mad at me for running off. I missed hanging out with August. I hoped that Howell and the Company hadn’t leaned on him. Ollie knew nothing, not even that Mila played him for a friend. Interesting, though, that she’d been a regular visitor at Ollie’s. That couldn’t be coincidence, not with me getting a job there. Another thread to pull on, but later.
I watched one of the girls lean close to her date, nuzzle his cheek with a kiss.
I missed Lucy.
Third beer. You had to drink in a place like this. Order a soda or coffee and you were instantly noted as someone worried about keeping his senses. You were suspect. You had to drink.
The young woman with the roving eye was suddenly sitting next to me. “Don’t you want to sing?” she asked me in English, slurring her words. She hadn’t even tried Dutch with me. I guess I looked more American than I thought. I glanced over at the boyfriend. He watched me right back.
“I’d be out of tune,” I said.
“You and everyone else. Hmm. What should you sing?” She studied me, as though you could tell what a man’s musical taste was from his face. “Nirvana? You look a little angry.”
“Uh, no.”
“Ah.” Now a smile crept onto her face. “Prince, I think. I have a purple scarf you can borrow.”
“Maybe Radiohead.”
“They’re too solemn. Maybe Justin Timberlake? You could bring some sexy back.”
I didn’t look at her. The boyfriend had turned his attention to the stage. “No, I’m not a singer.”
“What are you then?”
“Just a guy having a beer who doesn’t want to sing and doesn’t want to talk. Sorry.”
Her smile turned to a frown. “Asshole. Faggot.”
“Go back to your boyfriend,” I said. “He’s willing to put up with your bad behavior. No one else will.”
She got up in a huff and then I saw a man had sat down two stools from me while the girl was chatting. Nic from Gregor’s phone, with his red ponytail and his dour face.
I moved my eyes back to the karaoke stage, where the crowd had turned on a Filipino guy singing a Kings of Leon song with hearty boos. He flipped off the crowd and an empty pint glass nearly hit him. The bartender started
