containing a single DVD. They were being shipped to addresses all over the world. You know what a snuff video is?”
“Snuff videos? I think I might have heard something, but…”
“It’s a video where a person’s life is snuffed out,” Kuipers informed him.
“I thought that was an urban legend.”
“It’s not. The Russians have been doing it for some time and so have the Thais. The DVDs we apprehended begin with a man and woman engaging in sex. They end with her murder.”
Kuipers described the murder in some detail.
Bentinck blinked. His pale skin turned even paler.
“We discovered the crime quite by chance,” Kuipers continued. “A few of the envelopes were badly damaged, their addresses illegible. A postal inspector took one of them home in the hope that, if he played it, it might give him enough information to return it to the sender. The poor fellow made the mistake of watching it while he was eating dinner.”
“Were you able to trace the material?”
“There were no return addresses, and there was nothing else inside the envelopes, just the DVDs.”
Kuipers opened his desk drawer and took out a plastic evidence envelope. “This,” he said, “is one of them.”
Bentinck took the DVD and studied it. The grooves reflected a rainbow of light. He turned it over to look at the other side.
“No label,” he said.
“And here’s what it was being shipped in,” Kuipers said, handing him another plastic sheath.
Bentinck examined both sides of the manila envelope through the plastic. The side with the address was scorched.
Kuipers leaned back in his chair and made a steeple with his fingers.
It was time to drive the lesson home.
“Name the five most important elements in the resolution of any crime,” he said.
Kuipers turned red and proffered, “Persistence, good forensics, deduction…”
Kuipers smiled and said, “Good. But here are the two most important: dumb criminals and dumb luck. The operative word is ‘dumb’. Dumb criminals talk about what they did. Dumb criminals don’t cover their tracks; they leave things behind, they leave witnesses.”
“And dumb luck?”
“Dumb luck is what we need when the criminals aren’t dumb. Take a look at these.”
Kuipers bent over and took four mailing envelopes, each in its own protective cover, out of a cardboard box. He lined them up in front of Bentinck as if he was laying out a game of solitaire.
Bentinck studied the envelopes. Each of them was scorched in the area of the address, but otherwise…
And then he got it. “They were all franked at the same post office.”
Kuipers beamed. “Bravo. They were. It’s on the Kloveniers-burgwal, just off the Nieuwmarkt. It’s one of the smallest post offices in the city. All the envelopes were part of the same mailing.”
“So you… we went to the post office?”
“We did. Dumb luck: a clerk remembered.”
“He was actually able to remember a single customer based on the mailing envelopes alone?”
“Dumb luck,” Kuipers repeated, “The individual in question was a flikker. The postal clerk shares his sexual preference. The suspect has been making shipments at the same post office for the last couple of years. The clerk remembered his name, a first name only: Frans.”
Kuipers tapped an identikit composite that had been on his desk all the time. He twirled it around so that Bentinck could get a better look.
“That’s him,” he said.
Bentinck studied the likeness. Frans looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties. He had curly blond hair combed straight back, an earring, a weak chin, and a petulant mouth.
“We figured he had to be living in the neighborhood of the post office,” Kuipers said. “It helped that he had a penchant for wearing bright pink. People remembered him. His last name is Oosterbaan. We tracked him to a canal house on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal.”
“And arrested him?”
“Not yet. We’re going to roust him out of bed in the dead of night. It’s more of a psychological shock that way, makes people more likely to tell us things. Want to come along?”
The first report shocked Arie Schubski awake, causing him to sit bolt upright. Then there was another bang followed by a clatter. Arie threw the covers aside and leaped out of bed.
By the time he’d opened the bedroom door, dark figures were already sprinting up the staircase: men in police uniforms, carrying guns. He slammed the door and tried to lock it, but he wasn’t quick enough. They forced it open.
The guns had spotlight-type devices mounted above the barrels. Two of the beams focused on him. The cop behind one said, “Hands up. Don’t move unless you want to get shot.”
Arie lifted his hands.
Frans stared straight in front of him like a deer in headlights. He held the covers up to his chin as if for protection.
“We’re talking to you too, mijneer. Hands up.” The polite form of address didn’t match the speaker’s tone of voice.
Hesitantly, Frans raised his hands, dropping the covers, exposing his hairless chest.
They pulled him out of bed, put him next to Arie, and slapped handcuffs on them both.
“How many other people in the house?” one of the cops asked.
Frans spoke in a high-pitched and terrified voice. “No one. No one else,” spilling his guts before the cops had even started serious interrogation.
Arie knew right then that Frans was going to cause serious problems.
They split them up, keeping Frans in the bedroom, leading Arie into his office where windows overlooked the street. The street was in the heart of the Zeedijk, Amsterdam’s red-light district. The house had been standing there for well over three hundred years. The law wouldn’t allow Arie to make any modifications to the facade, but he’d gutted the interior and rebuilt it to suit his tastes and needs.
He was going to miss it.
On the floor above him, the top floor, was the heart of his business: one large room with tape players, format converters, DVD burners, and computers that controlled them all. He could make copies from DVDs, but he could also make them from Betacam tapes, both SP and digital, and in Secam, PAL, and NTSC. And that’s all he did: copy and mail. Once they found that out, the cops were going to grill him for the names of the producers, but the cops were going to be disappointed. And that meant they were going to get angry, which meant that the judge would probably throw the book at him. He might get as much as ten years, but he was prepared for that, prepared as anyone could be without it actually having happened.
You couldn’t run a business like Arie’s without confronting the reality that, someday, you were going to be raided by the police. Well, now it was over. Now, he could relax. No more fear. The money was safely squirreled away. A few years in jail wouldn’t kill him. He might even get away with less than ten, if Frans would only keep his mouth shut.
Martin Smit lived in a spacious apartment about three kilometers away from Arie Schubski’s canal house. The duplex was just off the Leidseplein and had cost him just short of three million Euros, all paid in cash.
Smit had been born in Suriname, but he harbored no memory of the place, nor any desire to go back.
During the last few weeks leading up to the 25th of November, 1975, the day the country would receive its independence, the government of The Netherlands, in a gesture typical of a land famed for political correctness, offered Dutch citizenship to those inhabitants of the colony able to reach the Fatherland prior to Independence Day. Half of the population of Suriname took them up on their offer, and much of the other half might have done so if they’d had money to pay for a flight.
Before 1974, a black face like Smit’s had been a rarity on the streets of Amsterdam; by November of the following year, there were neighborhoods, like the Bijlmermeer, where you saw nothing else.
