I had flashes of rolling back across the Dam. Flashes of being hauled up the stairs to my apartment by Delia, Chante and the Croatian guy I recognized as living in the flat below mine.
I was dropped on my bed and left there.
Sometime later I woke with a huge headache and pee-stained trousers. My limbs worked but awkwardly, like they were the members of a band reuniting after twenty years’ estrangement. I had just enough coordination to stand, fighting a tsunami of nausea, and stumble to the shower.
Hot water helped – it always does. I had no memory of being bandaged, but there was gauze and tape on my chest, being made heavy now by water. I peeled the bandage off and looked at my terrible wound, which, OK all things considered, wasn’t too bad. A neat, half-inch vertical cut. No stitches needed.
Funny how I’d gone my whole life without being stabbed, but since meeting Special Agent Delia Delacorte? Twice. That was either an omen or a coincidence, depending on one’s level of superstition.
Clean and dressed in fresh clothing over fresh bandages, I emerged in search of the remaining vital element of recovery, which was handed to me.
‘Black, if I recall correctly,’ Delia said as she passed me a mug of coffee.
‘Like I like my women: black and bitter.’ I grunted and gratefully sank onto the sofa, still very shaky, spilling a bit as I did.
Chante was in the open-plan kitchen busily cooking something that smelled amazing and made my stomach cry out.
‘How long was I out?’
Delia Delacorte, FBI legat out of the Rome embassy, Special Agent of the Bureau, the physical embodiment of danger to my continued freedom, all six feet of her, sat opposite me, feet on the coffee table, a cup in her hand, her sleepy, half-lidded eyes watching me. ‘Let’s see, it’s seven thirty—’
‘Is that a.m. or p.m.?’
‘It’s a.m. You slept all through the evening and night, so call it sixteen hours?’
That explained the ravenous hunger. It did not explain why a crazy woman had roofied me. Nor did it explain Delia’s presence here, a presence that brought very mixed emotions: fear, lust, worry, pleasure, resentment, some more lust, some additional fear … basically all the emotions of which I am capable aside from greed and self-regard.
The caffeine was kicking in and I had many questions, among which were, I have this image of a construction site. Was that real? But I also smelled frying pork and knew that not all of my brain was quite fully engaged with reality, so questions could wait.
‘This is my interpretation of a full English breakfast,’ Chante said, placing a plate in front of Delia like she was serving the queen. Chante slid my plate across to me as if I was the cowboy at the far end of the saloon bar. We sat like a little family: reprobate dad, responsible mom, and their difficult daughter.
Chante’s interpretation of the Full English involved eggs en cocotte, not bacon but a slab of good Danish ham, a grilled herbed tomato, a well-browned sausage, a piece of fried fish, quartered new potatoes, a welcome absence of black pudding, a slightly less welcome absence of beans, a fruit salad freshened with mint, freshly squeezed orange juice and straight from the oven scones with clotted cream and orange marmalade.
I try to hate the girl, I really do.
Finally, sated, caffeinated and with a pair of ibuprofen chasing my headache, I looked across at Delia and said, ‘So. To what do we owe the pleasure?’
I did not ask how she’d found me. Delia had a snitch. Part of the deal for allowing me to continue to breathe free air was that Delia would have a way to keep track of me. I hadn’t hired Chante because I found her charming.
‘We can talk about that in a minute. First of all, why are you getting roofied?’
I told her the sad and desperate tale of my near-hanging/drowning, a tale of courage and endurance, quick wit and clear-thinking which the two women found very entertaining.
‘If only we had pictures,’ Chante said. Or to be phonetic, ‘Eef un-LEE we had peek-tures.’
‘Not exactly professional work,’ Delia remarked after the merriment had subsided.
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘You can tell when it’s a professional hitter because you’re dead.’
‘Mmm.’ Delia frowned and tilted her head, looking at me as if I had the explanation. ‘It’s beyond amateur. It’s hard to get a firearm in Holland, but still, there are knives. Why not just cut your throat in an alleyway?’
‘Or run you down with a car?’ Chante suggested.
‘Or push you in front of a tram?’ Delia offered.
‘Or, if someone is going to the difficulty (dee-fee-cool-tay) of poisoning your beer, why not the belladonna or the strychnine or even concentrated nicotine? You can make that easily in the kitchen with only two packs of cigarettes or a few cigars. Or, you could grind glass up very finely and in beer the carbonation would keep it from settling to the bottom of the glass.’
This by the way, all from the woman whose food I regularly ate. I shuddered to think what Chante’s browser history must look like.
‘Do you have any idea who might be responsible?’ Delia asked.
‘I got a very good look at the fake paramedic and she’s no one I know. She was not a past …’ I hesitated to try floating the word ‘client’ past Delia and ‘victim’ was so harsh – ‘a past, um, dalliance.’
‘She drugs you then pushes you into a construction site to stab you ineffectually? She could have cut your throat in the Dam and just walked away,’ Delia pointed out.
Chante chimed in with, ‘An icepick in the ear …’
‘Or she could have dipped me in a fucking vat of acid,’ I said. ‘Gee, this is fun. Let’s think of more ways I could have been killed.’
‘The question is not how you could be killed,’ Delia said sagely, ‘but why someone wants you dead, and why the attempts were so bizarre.’
‘No one even knows I’m here in Amsterdam, outside of a few book nerds and you, Delia, as well as Chante, and your old pal Agent Kim, and whoever else you told at the Bureau.’
I rubbed at my stab wound. It ached.
‘By the way, Delia,’ I said, belatedly. ‘Thanks for saving my life.’
She accepted it gracefully. ‘No problem, David. And FYI, you are listed as a confidential informant with an assigned code name and number. Your various names never appear, and I have not included details about you. Besides, the Bureau does not leak.’
‘It feels personal,’ I said, reflecting. ‘At least the motive if not the means. Someone – some perfectly average-looking Slavic woman – is sincerely trying to kill me, just doing a lousy job of it.’ Then I shook my head, realizing I still did not have an answer to a rather important question. ‘Um, Delia? What the fuck are you doing in Amsterdam?’
‘It’s almost like you aren’t happy to see me,’ Delia said.
‘I love seeing you above all people, Delia, but you showed up while someone was trying to kill me, which means you already had eyes on me. So I kind of have to wonder just what the hell is going on, Agent D.’
‘My business with you is not connected to you being targeted for a hit.’
‘Sure of that, are you?’
‘Reasonably.’
‘Because I have to tell you, it seems like a hell of a coincidence.’
‘Coincidences do happen,’ she said.
‘Oh? TV cops never believe in coincidences.’
‘David, you of all people should know that there’s no such thing as TV cops; there are only writers for TV cop shows and they’re a bunch of twenty-something Ivy League kids who’ve never so much as met a real law enforcement officer except when they got drunk on spring break.’
‘Which takes us right back to, WTF? You’re here and you had obviously been looking for me. Why?’
Delia pushed back from the table, stood, stretched, and started to pace. ‘I’m deciding whether it is time for Chante to leave, and I think, sadly, that it is.’ She smiled sympathetically at Chante. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s for your own legal protection, Chante.’
Chante nodded and without so much as a sneer, marched off to her room. She could have cleared the dishes on her way, but no, so I used my ancient waiter skills to load the dirty dishes up my arm, then walked them all to the sink.
I scraped plates into a can – Europeans don’t do garbage disposals – and said, ‘All right, spill, Delia.’
Delia loaded the dishwasher. Her expression grew serious. Mine grew worried.
‘You know the phrase “it takes a thief to catch a thief”?’
I answered with a suspicious drawl. ‘Uh-huh.’
‘Wait …’ Delia dried her hands on a towel and retrieved an iPad. She lit it up, satisfied herself that she had the right document, and handed it to me. ‘That’s a non-disclosure agreement. I need you to sign it. And David?’
‘Yes, ma’am?’
‘We are not playing around. This is a very serious NDA, we will absolutely arrest you and prosecute you if you violate it. I will not be able to protect you. Do you hear me?’
‘Yes, Delia, I hear your pointed threat.’
‘I hope so. Look me in the eyes, David.’
I looked her in the eyes. She imagined this moment as me recognizing just how serious she was. In reality I was mostly thinking that she was gorgeous and forbidden and I knew from past experience that any attempt would be rebuffed. Still … but I also got the whole, ‘this is serious’ thing. I am able to multitask.
I used my fingertip to sign the document. ‘Cross my heart and hope not to die.’
‘OK,’ Delia said.
I drizzled dishwasher detergent and hit the right buttons. We moved to the shallow balcony with drinks in our hands and a cigar in my teeth.
‘Nice location you have here,’ Delia said. ‘The wages of sin?’
‘It’s an AirBnB. The Wi-Fi is excellent, but the master bathroom could use another fifty square feet. I practically have to stand in the shower to take a leak, but that’s kind of not the point, the point is you’re worrying me, Delia. Should I be worried? Because you’re worrying me.’
She sighed and took a moment to organize her thoughts, while gazing out of the window at the crowds passing the Munttoren. ‘The last time we worked together, as you recall, I was not officially on duty. This time I am. I’ve told my supervisors that I may have a way to solve a problem they, we, have, a big problem with serious political and international relations implications.’
‘Oooh, implications.’
‘Yes, implications.’ She found that word less absurd than I did. ‘A very wealthy man, a very, very wealthy man, a man with deep political connections, a man who owns a controlling interest in a major defense contractor, is preparing to do something extremely stupid.’
‘Sounds like the kind of guy who could get away with it. Whatever it is.’
‘This man is old and sick, in late stage COPD, gasping for every breath. Like a trout in the bottom of a boat. He’ll be dead within a year.’
I had my phone out and was busy googling.
‘This man,’ Delia went on, ‘we’ll call him USP One, United States Person One, has essentially unlimited assets. We know he’s planning to commit a crime but—’
‘But arresting Daniel “Chip” Isaac would be a huge political mess?’ I winked coquettishly. Hearing about upstanding citizens who are secretly scumbags always makes me happy.
Delia’s left eyebrow rose an entire two millimeters, mute evidence of the depth of her surprise. I held up my phone. ‘Arms merchant with COPD. Doesn’t take major Google-fu.’
‘USP One,’ Delia insisted pointedly, waving away a cloud of my cigar smoke, ‘is of Jewish origin—’
‘Daniel Isaac? I’d have thought Buddhist, but OK.’
‘And as he’s neared the end of his life, he’s become more pious.’
‘That’s the trick with God,’ I opined. ‘Be as much of an asshole as you like then, right at the end, when you’re impotent and reduced to gruel and chamomile tea, you discover faith. Ta-da! Heaven!’
‘This will go quicker without the snide asides.’
‘Yeah, but it won’t be as much fun. So what is USP numero uno, Danny “the Chipster” Isaac up to?’
‘USP One has come to believe that a recently discovered Vermeer – that’s a painting—’
‘A Vermeer painting, you say? Not a Vermeer brand cheesesteak?’
‘Belonged to his family before the war—’
‘Which war?’
‘World War Two.’
‘Ah, that one. I’ve heard of it,’ I said, with a cheeky smile. I was still trying to charm Delia, still wanting her to like me. It’s both a strength and a failing of mine that I want women to like me. Men I can take or leave, but I want women to like me, to be charmed. Someday I should go to a shrink, just to see what a professional makes of a guy who wants to be liked by women … and then takes their money. I am not a mental health professional, but I’m guessing that’s not ‘normal’.
‘Anyway,’ Delia said, grating a bit, ‘his family owned the painting – Jewess at the Loom – here in Amsterdam before the war and it was, according to family lore, looted by the Nazis during the occupation. Also, according to that same family lore, the Jewess in question is an ancestor of USP One’s family. So now he wants the painting back. It’s become an idée fixe. An obsession. I suppose he sees it as some sort of penance, a balancing out of things he may not wish to discuss with Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates.’
‘Saint Peter? You said he’s Jewish.’
‘So was Peter.’
‘Pretty sure that’s not how it works. I think he’d be talking to Moses not Peter. I don’t suppose you want to save me some Google time and tell me just what Chip’s done that Moses wouldn’t approve of?’
No, she didn’t. ‘The current owner of the painting denies USP One’s story and claims it was legally purchased by his great-grandfather before the occupation.’
‘At a steep “the Nazis are coming” discount?’
‘Exactly. Early on the Nazis went easy on the Dutch seeing them as fellow Aryans, but everyone knew it wouldn’t last. Everyone knew that sooner or later the Gestapo would roll into town and start deporting Jews to slave labor camps. Or worse.’
‘OK, so Isaac’s great-grandfather—’
‘Just his father, actually. USP One is eighty-seven years old.’
I glanced down at my phone. ‘By amazing coincidence, so is Chip Isaac.’
‘But the courts,’ she plowed ahead, determined to ignore my interruptions, ‘have decided for the owner, who handed it off to the Rijksmuseum. In fact, they’re adding it to their Vermeer display next week. In six days.’
‘So … more lawsuits?’ I suggested. I did not yet know where this was going, but I was already having a bad feeling about it.
‘USP One doesn’t think he’ll live long enough for a new round of lawsuits even to reach a court. He’s decided on a different path: he’s going to steal it.’
I very nearly did a spit-take. ‘The fuck?’
‘He’s hired a gang of thieves, a professional gang called the Ontario Crew. He’s hired them to steal it from the Rijksmuseum and bring it to him.’
This made sense if you stretched the word ‘sense’ far enough. It’s easy to steal art, any clown can do it. The problem is that the art cannot then be sold because the internet is always watching. If Starry Night shows up at Sotheby’s auction house no one is going to doubt it’s stolen property. The only people who turn a blind eye to stolen art are the Chinese – if said art is itself Chinese and ends up in a Beijing museum. Theft, repatriation, it all depends on where you’re standing, I suppose.
Even a bespoke theft made sense only if the collector meant to keep it hidden away, which I suppose seemed like a solution to a dying old man who wouldn’t have to cope with the FBI kicking the door in with a search warrant.
‘OK, so call up the Dutch cops and warn them.’
‘How?’ she asked, and leaned back, the better to poke holes in my answer.
‘How? Pick up the phone. Dial 112. Hello, officer? Hey, guess what? Someone’s going to hit the Rijks.’
‘And they ask: who? Who is calling with this helpful tip? And who is doing the stealing?’
‘FBI and the Ontario Crew, respectively.’
‘So you want us to lay our cards on the table for the Dutch? Pray tell, master criminal, what do the Dutch cops do next?’ Now Delia got to be the smart-ass.
I shrugged. ‘They demand more information.’
‘Which we cannot give them without implicating USP One.’
‘Which you don’t want to do because of politics. And the arms business. Which are pretty much one and the same.’
‘Mmm.’
‘OK, so you tell the Dutch cops about the Ontario Crew and leave it at that. They run a search, see if they can turn up crew members in the city. If they can, they mount surveillance. They want to catch them in the act, that makes for a better headline and promotions.’
‘Yes,’ Delia agreed. ‘The Dutch lay a trap, the Ontario Crew are arrested, and they are questioned. What do you suppose question number one will be?’
I shrugged. She waited, knowing the answer I had to give. ‘OK, so Dutch cops offer them a deal if they give up their employer, US Person Isaac. But that goes nowhere unless the Crew have something on Isaac.’
‘Unfortunately, there is something on USP One: FBI electronic surveillance intercepts.’
‘Yeah, but that’s what you have, not them. It doesn’t mean …’ I petered out, knowing what she would say.
‘The Dutch cops will ask us if we have anything.’
‘And like idiots you’ll tell them?’
‘We are the Bureau,’ Delia said stiffly. ‘We do not conceal evidence. Especially not if this case gets anywhere near a court, in which event we can be legally compelled to produce evidence. And, by the way, the crew know we have it on tape because the surveillance was on a whole different matter, for which we questioned them and, well, we didn’t have enough to—’
‘Whoa.’ I held up the appropriate, out-turned ‘whoa’ palm. ‘The Ontario Crew are coming to Amsterdam to steal a painting for the Chipster, and they know you know about it? And they’re still going through with it?’
‘Mmm.’
‘They think they’re protected. They think they’re untouchable by US law because of Isaac. They know you know and they’re so sure you can’t do anything about it, they’re going through with it?’ My usual baritone hit a soprano squeak by the end of the question.
‘USP One,’ Delia said, the words bitter, ‘is offering to pay the Ontario Crew fifty million dollars.’
‘Jesus! I’ll steal it for half that. Wow. That boy wants his painting.’ I was confused. ‘So, Delia, this is all very interesting, but what does it have to do with me?’
‘I need you,’ Delia said, giving me her slow, sly, disconcertingly predatory smile. There are times with Delia when I feel like a field mouse being eyeballed by a hawk.
I like to think that I’m pretty quick to catch on, even in the face of the unexpected, but in this case there were simply too many absurd ideas to process. I had heard all the words, but since those words included gang of professional thieves, Rijksmuseum and I need you, all spoken by an FBI legat, it did not immediately make sense.
‘After all,’ Delia went on, ‘it takes a thief to catch a thief.’
‘Yeah, that’s bullshit. For a start, I’m not an art thief,’ I protested. I realized I was unconsciously backing further into the tight corner where balcony railing met wall and forced myself not to retreat further.
‘My list of available consulting thieves did not include an art thief. It did, however, include you. If there is anyone who can figure out how they’re doing it, and stop them without getting them arrested, it’s you.’
I’d like to say I’m immune to flattery. I’d like to say lots of things that also would not be true.
Only you, Batman, only you can save Gotham …
‘Before we go any further, and bearing in mind the last time I helped you, I have to ask: is the Russian mob, or for that matter any other mob, likely to make an appearance in my life?’
Delia has an array of smiles. There’s the skeptical one, the amused one, the one that’s more of a sneer than a smile. Her smile now was the patient, ‘explaining to the slower students’ version. ‘There is no mob, Russian or otherwise, involved. Unless you’re worried about tangential Nazis.’
Tangential Nazis.
It was a good forty feet to the cobblestones below and I wondered, if I were to throw Delia off the balcony, whether it would kill her or whether she would just brush herself off and come back at me like that liquid-metal Terminator.
‘Tangential Nazis?’
‘Calm down, I just meant the painting was stolen by Nazis. Tangential Nazis. Let’s not get bogged down in semantics.’
Oh, no, no, no and a hearty fuck you, Delia, I did not say but instead beamed via my white-hot glare. ‘Semantics? You could say the same about almost dead and dead,’ I shot back. ‘Semantics.’
She just waited then, watching me, infuriating me because I knew she was tracking the workings of my mind, which went something like:
1. She can pack you off to San Quentin if she decides to.
2. Who the hell steals art nowadays?
3. She did kind of save your life.
4. Tangential Nazis?
Was this why someone had tried to murder me? Had Delia or Delia’s office leaked information about me? Was I already being threatened for something I was only just now finding out about?
‘What do I get?’ I asked bluntly.
‘The continuing blindness of the Bureau as pertains to a certain fugitive from justice? And the warm glow of knowing you’ve done something good and useful?’
‘Ah, the glow. Of course. My balls in your pocket and the glow. Swell.’
‘Was there something else you had in mind?’
There was, but I wasn’t going to tell Delia because I’m not that kind of toxic male, I’m a whole different kind. Also in a physical fight my money would be on her. She knows things.
Plus … something. Something was causing the back of my head to tingle. My subconscious had heard something intriguing, it just wasn’t sure what.
‘How’s this for a quid pro quo,’ I said. ‘I do my best to figure out if there’s a way to stop the Ontario Crew without anyone knowing, and in exchange, you find out who’s trying to kill me. Like you, I can’t exactly involve the Dutch cops.’
Delia had to think about that. ‘Without local law enforcement there’s not much I can do.’
‘You have computers. You have data. You can tell your bosses that your confidential informant has a price, and that’s it.’
She nodded. ‘Fair enough.’
‘Also, I’m looking for someone. I have a name for you if you can run it without attracting attention.’
‘A name?’
‘Madalena Azevedo. Oh, and Milan Smit. She’s Portuguese, I think he’s Dutch or maybe Belgian.’
Delia favored me with a dubious look but she tapped the names into her phone and nodded acceptance of my terms.
‘Let’s start with what you have on the Ontario Crew,’ I said.
‘Not much,’ Delia admitted. ‘We only have one name, one guy, this character Willy Pete. He may be the head man, or not, we don’t know.’
‘Interesting name.’
‘It’s an alias. His real name is Carl Willard. Willy Pete is military slang for white phosphorus, something Willard used in an early bank robbery.’
She picked up her phone, swiped around a bit and a moment later my phone dinged.
‘That’s the only photo we have of him and it’s eight years old.’
I opened my phone and looked at the mug shot of a white guy, late twenties, skeletal, with eyes sunk so deep the pupils were invisible. The scale on the wall behind him measured him at 5'10". And he was wearing a uniform.
‘He’s a soldier?’
‘He was. Army. Special Forces, actually. And the picture may not be much use. Carl Willard was injured, burned, perhaps ironically. The report said extensive tissue damage to chest and neck, some facial damage. We don’t have a shot of him post-burn.’
‘OK, that’s yours, now find mine. Did you get a good look at the woman who poisoned me?’
‘I did,’ Delia nodded.
‘Tit for tat. I stop your Crew, you find that crazy murdering woman and Madalena.’
‘Deal,’ Delia said. ‘After all, I can’t have a valuable CI murdered in the middle of helping me on a matter of national security.’ She was practicing, I suppose, for the likely inspector general’s inquiry that would follow if this thing blew up in her face.
I relit my cigar and politely blew the smoke over her head. I wanted time, time to listen to my instincts and see whether they were making sense. But the clock was ticking, both on Delia’s concerns and mine.
‘I may need to do things you can’t know about, Delia.’
She took her time thinking through the implications of that. Then she sighed and shook her head in disbelief at the words coming out of her mouth: ‘Just don’t kill anyone. And, David? Don’t get caught.’
‘Delia,’ I said, sounding more weary than proud, ‘my whole life is about not getting caught. I am the living god of not getting caught.’