I played it off as smoothly as I could. We traded random jokes, huddled up as a foursome, laughed at everything, laughed at the absurdity of what we were doing, laughed at Nikos—who looked better now—then made a plan.
“I’m so fucken’ starving,” said Nikos.
I put my arm around him, buddy to buddy, knowing I had to stay deep in character and play the game harder than ever. “Then here comes the best part.”
Fifteen minutes later, a kilometer and a half away, we were seated at a small Italian restaurant at the corner of Leidsekruisstraat and Lange Leidsedwarsstraat. I tried to get situated to his right so I could view his cell phone the instant he might take it out, maybe even steal it and run, a fleeting thought vetoed immediately.
“Food tastes biblically amazing on mushrooms,” I said to Nikos.
“Like amazing,” said Trevor. “Like, for real. Like, your colon’s getting tongued by a tiny herd of virgins.”
I didn’t ask any of them if they saw Katarina. I didn’t want to draw attention to the possibility of it—in case they simply saw me talking to the back of what was to them a random tall female. I had about two hours to get to the Beguine Courtyard, that meant two hours to wait on the infamous text, if Nikos would even get invited, which was a workable amount of time except that Trevor invited additional people, who’d be arriving any minute. “We should get Mathieu and Jerome and all them.”
“From the team?” said Dustin.
He was having three of the other sales reps join us—reps from the Paris office, reps who knew exactly what my current status was within the company. It was the power move on his part—Trevor’s—he’d already started messaging them by the time our waitress was serving us our pizzas, personal-sized, one to each of us, perfectly dripping with perfect cheese.
“This is delicious,” said Nikos.
“You seriously won’t let me get you a pro?” said Trevor. “What’s your preference? Redhead? Brunette? Blonde? What do you like?”
“Me?” said Nikos.
“Seriously, what’s your flavor? Fifty euros gets you twenty minutes here but that’s street-grade. For us? For you? At the royal price range? I know where we can buy girls hotter than any living creature you can imagine.”
“I don’t know, man, the whole prostitute thing . . . feels . . . feels . . .” Nikos shifted in his seat.
“Feels defeatist? Not at all! Y’know, if you’re a cripple, the Dutch government gives you vouchers to get laid? They give you twelve sex vouchers a year if you’re disabled.”
“Do they like it?” said Dustin.
“Who? The cripples?”
“The hookers.”
“Do the hookers like the cripples?” said Trevor.
“Yeah.”
“What the fuck kinda question is that?”
“It’s gross,” said Dustin. “When I think of touching one . . .”
“You think about touching a cripple, Dustin? Maybe you’re the one who should be accepting the vouchers?”
Nikos laughed.
Trevor laughed.
I tried to laugh but I could barely get it out. Their world was nauseating. No wonder Katarina was ready to plunge a dagger in the back of all mankind.
“No,” said Dustin. “I like girls way more than any of you do.”
Another hour of this drivel went by. I couldn’t partake of it but I had to try. Maybe it was the chemicals in me, or the fatigue, or the emotional turmoil I felt in every neuron, but I had to play the game despite the constraints. My attention kept drifting to the TV screen mounted on a wall in the opposite restaurant—a newscast. The significance of it wasn’t apparent to me right away but it was in my field of view and I kept glancing at it for no reason other than that it was there. It was replaying a random clip—a grainy video clip—of a recent criminal assault. I must’ve been hallucinating because it looked like the camera had zoomed in on a young woman with the same exact face as Katarina—same clothes, same hair—and whoever she was, the caption was saying she maliciously beat up a guy in broad daylight, possibly with the same bloody fists I saw on my own Katarina. And the city was putting out an alert.
“Christ,” I whispered to myself.
Was this what she didn’t want to tell me about?
I leaned over to get a better look at the screen to see if the police knew she was Russian or French or something else dangerously indicative. I wasn’t totally stupid. I knew I was running around town on a pretty hopeless mission on behalf of a young lady who was, by any normal application of logic, setting me up, while I sat at a table surrounded by juvenile delinquents who’d—
“What’re you staring at?” said Dustin.
The other guys kept talking as Dustin turned around in his seat to take a look at whatever he’d caught me looking at, not in a friendly way, not out of an amused curiosity, but as a competitor hoping his colleague might make a fatal mistake.
“Nothing,” I said to him, sitting up, straightening up, trying to keep the rest of the group’s attention away from the TV. “You guys, uh . . .” I broached the only topic that could work at this table. “You guys, uh—Hey, if you guys wanna know the best way to meet a girl in the Netherlands, like the actual way to meet a local girl in a genuine type of courtsh—” Which was when Nikos got a message on his phone.