Smit arrived speaking only Sranang Tongo, but he quickly mastered Dutch and breezed through the country’s school system (ten years of it, anyway) before he got bored and quit. By then, his speech was indistinguishable from that of any other Amsterdammer.
At fourteen, he’d already begun dealing drugs. By the time he was thirty, Smit, now known to most as The Surinamer, had become the head of a criminal enterprise called the Rakkers, an organization almost as international as Royal Dutch Shell or Philips.
The Rakkers’ main business was the production and distribution of methylenedioxymethamphetamine, better known as Ecstasy, but they also served as middlemen for criminal enterprises across the globe. If you wanted something, they were the people who knew where to find it. A murder for hire? They could locate the man (or woman) who’d commit it for you. Drugs of any nature? They knew where to go. They profited by putting criminals into contact with criminals and by promoting transactions. That was how the Surinamer had come to be acquainted with Arie Schubski.
Arie, who had begun his business dealing exclusively with pornography, had been receiving an ever-increasing number of requests for snuff videos. No one would be crazy enough to try to make them in The Netherlands. The country was too small, the cops were too good, and the disappearance of protagonists would quickly be noticed. But if Arie could find foreign producers, the potential for profit was great.
He called the Surinamer and invited him for coffee.
Smit used the Rakkers to put the word out. As a worldwide supplier of Ecstasy, the gang had relationships far and wide, contacts in Thailand, in Russia, in Brazil, all of them places where people might be able to get away with killing people for other people’s amusement. And, when Schubski met their price, some of them started doing just that.
The producer in Moscow was a nightclub owner who ran girls on the side. The one in Bangkok was an opium exporter, who drew his protagonists from across the border in Cambodia. The woman in Manaus was someone Smit had sold a number of false passports to, who’d indicated she was open to any profitable proposition.
But now the shoe was on the other foot.
Arie Schubski’s arrest had made the front page of De Telegraaf. The Surinamer hadn’t found it necessary to read the whole article, just enough of it to discover what the cops had found.
Arie and his little friend Frans would obviously be going away for a long time. They wouldn’t need The Surinamer’s help any more.
But the suppliers would. If they were going to stay in business, they were going to need a new distributor. And Martin Smit, The Surinamer, intended to furnish one.
Chapter Six
The smell of fresh coffee, beer, and poffertjes -sugared pancakes-hung over the terrace of the American Hotel on the Leidseplein. The place was packed, but the Surinamer had been lucky. He’d captured a table that put his back to the wall of the building, as far as was physically possible from the passing streetcars. A hundred meters to his right, tourists were lining up for the canal tours. Others were flocking over the bridge toward the Rijksmuseum on the Stadhouderskade. Amsterdammers, enjoying an unprecedented seventh straight day of sunshine, were on the terrace in force. Most of the voices around him were Dutch and, like him, many were talking on their cell phones.
“They busted Schubski and Oosterbaan,” The Surinamer said, cupping a cautious hand over his mouth.
“I don’t want to know anything about their personal lives,” the banker in Riga snapped. “The only thing that concerns me is their accounts. Anything else?”
“No. That’s it for today.”
The banker grunted and hung up without saying good-bye.
The employees of the Latvian Overseas Bank didn’t go out of their way to be cordial. They didn’t have to be.
The Surinamer lifted a finger to summon a waiter.
Mijneer?” “
The Surinamer ordered a beer on tap.
The waiter returned three minutes later with a brimming glass of Amstel. The Surinamer didn’t usually drink beer when he was making his calls; it was too diuretic. But the day was warm and talking had made him thirsty.
The call from the woman in Brazil came in right on time, at 11:25. She started talking as soon as she recognized his voice.
“Where’s my money?”
“We’ve got a problem, Carla. The cops busted Arie Schubski.”
Carla-or whatever her name really was-remained silent for a moment. The line didn’t. The Surinamer could hear static and crackling.
“You still there?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Is he likely to talk?”
“Not Arie.”
“How about that little princess he lives with?”
“Frans Oosterbaan.” The Surinamer snorted contemptuously. “Yeah, him.”
“One time,” The Surinamer said, “I dropped by to pick up some of our money. Arie wasn’t home, so I had a little chat with Frans, told him if he ever shot off his mouth about me, I’d get him, cut off his balls, and let him bleed to death. Before our conversation, I was worried he might break if the cops bent him far enough. That’s why I figured we had to talk.”
“And now?”
“Now, I’m no longer worried.”
“Good. How about finding me another distributor?”
The Surinamer had been waiting for the question. He took another sip of beer, letting her think he was considering it.
“Now that the heat is on,” he said, “the new guy’s gonna want a bigger percentage.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“What do you mean by that?” The Surinamer said sharply, even though he knew exactly what she meant by that.
“Now that the heat is on,” she said, “the price of my work just went up by fifty percent. Go ahead and find me somebody. We’ll work it out.”
“I’m on it,” The Surinamer said.
The Dutch cops were on it too.
That morning, all of Smit’s calls were being recorded. He’d been tripped up by an instance of what Hoofd Inspecteur Kuipers liked to call dumb luck.
A little over four weeks earlier, a water pipe had broken in the apartment where The Surinamer kept his answering device. After repeated and unsuccessful attempts to contact someone living in the apartment, the manager of the building asked the police to force the door.
After a short discussion between a judge and the landlord’s lawyer, the proper paperwork was issued. The cops called a locksmith. Why break down a door when you don’t have to? The locksmith made short work of getting them into the place. The maintenance people repaired the broken pipe and departed.
The police stayed. They were intrigued by the sole contents of an otherwise empty apartment: an answering machine sitting in the middle of the living room floor.
Research revealed that the individual who’d rented the flat had been doing so for nineteen months and had been dead for a year and a half. The rent, however, was still being paid directly into the landlord’s postgiro out of a numbered account in Riga.
It was time to bring in Hoofd Inspecteur Kuipers.
Kuipers listened to the greeting on the machine, a teenage voice reciting a series of numbers in English. The
