“Okay. They behind the grab on Lucy?”
“No. But I need to know if they are still being tracked by the Company.”
“What for?”
“I need to know where their shipments are. I need to steal one.”
His mouth opened, closed, opened again. “Insanity doesn’t agree with you, Sam.”
“It’s the only way for me to get close to the guy who took Lucy. He… he has a hostage, August, so I can’t force my way in. I have to draw him to me. But I need to know what we know about the Lings’ routes.”
“You’re crazy, Sam. I can’t imagine what you’ve lost. I can’t. But I think your grief has damaged you. Badly. And you have to accept-you’re not getting Lucy and the baby back. They’re gone. You know they wouldn’t have kept her alive for months. They wouldn’t have been saddled with a baby.” He stopped, as if horrified by his words.
I stared at him.
“This is all… for nothing,” August said. “You’re not getting them back. I’m sorry, man, sorrier than you will ever know. But I-”
“Please just do as I ask. If we were ever friends.”
“Friends don’t put friends in positions like this, man. I could lose it all.”
“You could. I already have. August, I know that you, as a decent man, are going to help me. You can’t not help me.” I wanted to say I saved your life today but I couldn’t play that card; he hadn’t seen me and it wasn’t fair.
“Howell will have my head.”
“Howell left a group of women behind in that machinists’ shop.”
“What do you mean?”
“After you and the other agent were hit, and he chased me out, did he secure the building?”
“He did.”
“Did he tell you there were a group of sex slaves being held captive in the back?”
August paled, dragged a finger along his unshaven jaw. “No. I didn’t know. I swear.”
“I believe you. Because Howell is Ahab, and I’m the white whale,” I said. “He’s losing perspective, August.”
“I… I don’t know.”
I took a deep breath. “I knew about you and Lucy seeing each other before Lucy and I dated. She never mentioned it. You both kept it secret and I don’t blame you; the Company doesn’t need to be in your business. But I knew. And you didn’t dump me as a friend for going out with your ex,” I said.
“Lucy and I weren’t a good match,” he said. “It only lasted a month.”
“Why?”
“I never trusted her.” He put his hands into his coat pockets and I wondered what I would do if he pulled a gun on me. I honestly didn’t know. August felt like the last strand of my normal life, and now I was asking him to do a job that was incredibly dangerous. I didn’t know what he was suggesting to me about my wife. I just couldn’t go there.
A long silence, and then he said, “Can I call you on this number if I find out about the Lings?”
“Yes.” I tried to keep the relief from my voice. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. No promises.” He turned and walked out of the Rode Prins without another word.
I sat and drank Henrik’s good coffee and closed my eyes and thought through how I would steal the shipment, given what I could guess about the limitations I would face.
Five hours later August called. “We have an informant inside the Lings’ operation. The Lings’ trucks stop at a sweatshop in France. You do not hit them at the sweatshop, you hear me? You do not. You’ll dirty up a current investigation into them.” He gave me the address. “Their trucks are marked as being part of a company called Leeuw en Draak. Lion and Dragon.”
“Thank you,” I said. And meant it.
“Don’t call me again, Sam. Good luck.” And he hung up. Now I’d lost my best friend as well. I mourned for all of ten seconds.
Then I called Piet. “I have what we need.”
62
The next day, we waited in the rain, just north of Paris. It had taken us nearly five hours to drive south from Amsterdam, to the locale August had given me. It was early afternoon and the day was gray and sodden. Piet sat next to me, sharpening his wakizashi sword on a whetstone. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke. It made the flesh on my neck jerk. How sharp could you make a sword?
The sweatshop was off the E19/E15 expressway, hidden in a gray huddle of buildings. I wondered how pleasant it would be to be rid of Piet. Very soon, I thought. Very soon. We sat and watched absolutely nothing happen at the sweatshop. Hours passed; twilight began to approach.
“How does a Canadian soldier get into this business?” Piet asked, breaking the silence.
I glanced at him. “I was bored. How did you get into trafficking women?”
He smiled. “I needed money for art school.”
“I didn’t expect that answer.”
“An annoying percentage of young people in Amsterdam harbor a secret desire to be Van Gogh or Rembrandt. Anyway, I knew a guy. A friend of my mom’s. He needed help getting girls to Holland. I helped him buy a van so we could move them, and eventually I took over the route.”
“Took over?”
“He got married and thought he shouldn’t traffic girls no more. What, you thought I’d killed him?”
“Yes.”
“No. Known him since I was twelve.” He rubbed at his bottom lip. “He owns a coffee shop now.”
I really didn’t want to know Piet as a person, but some instinctive need to understand took control. So I asked, “Why the sword?”
“The sword is who I am.”
“But it makes you memorable. I thought the idea was to stay under the radar.”
“It honors my mother.”
“She was Japanese?”
“Yeah. She came here for love. Boyfriend brought her, dumped her, she stayed.”
I remembered Nic called Piet a whoreson. Perhaps he meant it as more than an insult, as a description. His mom might have been a worker in the Rosse Buurt; many of the women there were not Dutch.
“I thought I wanted to study art, do Japanese-style stuff, like netsuke or watercolor painting. My mother did that in her spare time.” He shrugged. “But art school didn’t work out. They hated me there and a girl made trouble for me. Assholes. So I left.”
I had not thought of Piet as someone with smothered dreams. He read my expression. “Eh, you thought I was just a snake.” He laughed.
“Well, I-”
“Man, we’re all snakes. Gregor likes to pretend he’s shed his skin, been reborn as an honest soul, but his scales are still there. And I suspect you’re a very crafty snake, Sam.”
I shrugged. “Sure. I got run out of the army. I spoke some Czech from my grandmother’s side of the family. I couldn’t find a real job in Prague so I made my own there. So you went straight from art school into trafficking?”
“Not right away. I used to do contract work for the police department in Amsterdam, designing their websites and brochures,” he said. He gave a long, low laugh. “Then I saw how much the opposition paid.”
I glanced at him. “That’s a switch.”
“You make serious money by being a player. If I’d stayed with the police, then I would have been a cog in their operation. I paid attention. I wanted to own cogs-not be one.”
“So you picked girls for your commodity.” My mind kept saying shut up, but it was a strange thought to sit
