SEVEN

Once I’d thought a bit more I walked back through the Rijks, this time with an eye not to stopping the Ontario Crew but with my own plans in mind. I was looking for something specific and I found a couple of possibilities.

First was a massive, very ornate dresser that stood a good seven feet tall and was outside camera view but not far from the spot where they’d be hanging the Jewess at the Loom.

And I found a second, more desperate answer in one of the back stairwells. There was a little hatch in the wall concealing a water main shut-off. The hatch was not locked. I spread my hand in front of the hatch for scale and took a picture. It would mean doing a bit of damage to the paintings frame, and I didn’t want that, but in an emergency it’d do.

My scouting expedition to the Rijks had convinced me of something I didn’t want to accept: I was going to need help, human help. Whenever possible I fly solo in my criminal enterprises and avoid crime partners like the plague, because there’s a synonym for crime partner: witness for the prosecution. But just the shopping, let alone the operating of various devices and a bit of DIY construction, would mean many days if I tried to do it all, and if I was going to do this it had to be done very soon after the Vermeer went on display in just six days. Any more time and the Ontario Crew might make off with my painting.

That’s right, my painting.

There was a guy I knew, and he was probably not far away, unless he was in stir, which, in his case, was a distinct possibility. His name was Ian McSweeney. He was an Irishman, a lousy thief, a mediocre grifter and rather more violent than I am comfortable with. But he owed me and he was almost certainly broke and best of all, when he worked – which was seldom – it was in construction, so he was good with his hands. Presumably. Anyway, better than me.

I searched my memory for the name he knew me by. I keep useful contacts I don’t want anyone to find in my One Password file, all nicely encrypted and hidden behind a computer-generated, sixteen-character password I dare the NSA or GCHQ to crack.

I opened the latest, updated end-to-end encryption app and texted:

Me: It’s Jimmy C. I have profitable work for you.

I didn’t expect an immediate response, but unless Ian had changed his number he’d get the message and he would respond. Ian could no more ignore me than I’d been able to ignore Azevedo, because I knew things about Ian.

The rain stopped in late afternoon, and by nine that night, when I again ventured out, I could spot occasional stars through breaks in the overcast sky.

Twan Van Geel turned out to be a thin dude with long, stringy blond hair – rather like what I’d been told to expect of Milan Smit. Twan was a decent thrash metal axe man backed by an excellent drummer, with Cookie Monster lyrics growled by a front man who sounded as if he dined on raw flesh.

Headbangers do love the dramatic.

My bartender Ella wasn’t on duty, so I wormed my way to the bar, hand on wallet the whole way – crowds and pickpockets go together like bacon and eggs – and ordered a Johnnie Black which I carried around but did not drink.

My immediate problem was finding Smit, if he was there. The crowd was thick, on its feet and obscured by the band’s smoke machine. It was a sea of bobbing heads lit by strobes punctuated by frequent air-punching. I pushed my way around the room, beset on all sides by jumping, thrusting, heaving bodies, largely male given that the music was metal. The crowd was different from Tim Armstrong’s crowd on my initial visit – no gaggle of giggling Japanese girls, more dudes who looked like trouble, some of whom did not like the look of me: I was a well-dressed guy lacking interesting hair, extravagant beard or other visible evidence of rebelliousness. Also, I looked like I probably had some cash in my wallet. When I left I was going to want to make sure no one was following me.

Two hours I stood and occasionally sat and milked that one Scotch. I was offered sex three times, twice straight, once gay; I was offered drugs once, and sex plus drugs once. Two different junkies thought I’d be an easy touch and started to regale me with their life stories, so I gave them each a tenner and they disappeared.

All through the band’s first set, a break, then the start of their second set I endured, and finally, there he was. Possibly. Anyway, he was tall, blond and looked like trouble. When I managed to get closer I confirmed the presence of a Hell’s Angels Antwerp jacket. Bingo. I had my guy and I was pretty pleased with myself.

And … now what?

I could try to cozy up to him but a 42-year-old, conservatively dressed, expensively coiffed guy vs. a metalhead in an Angels jacket was not the basis of friendship, it was grounds for suspicion. He’d make me for a narc or a perv.

Which left following Smit when he left, and that was not going to be soon.

The Cave Rock Bar is on a block with a bakery (closed at that hour), a schnitzel-themed restaurant and not one but two coffee shops of the Amsterdam variety. All three had outdoor seating but the restaurant was shutting down, so I went into the adjacent coffee shop, bought an eighth and some papers, ordered an orange juice – coffee shops are not allowed to sell alcohol – plopped down at a tiny empty table on the chilly street and idly chopped my purchase up with the edge of a metal American Express card. I edged my chair sideways a little and had an excellent line of sight to the below-grade entrance of the Cave. There would be at least one other exit, but in theory at least, Smit wouldn’t take a less-convenient way out unless he thought he was being followed, and he wasn’t. Yet.

I sat and did not smoke the weed I’d bought, but did drink three orange juices and was then faced with a desperate need to pee, which could result in losing Smit if he chose that two minutes or so to leave. So I went back over to the Cave, spotted Smit chatting disinterestedly with some girl who was clearly not Madalena, did the necessary, and re-emerged just in time to see Smit heading for the door.

I followed him from the door of the Cave Rock Bar all the way to where he’d chained a bike to a rack, twenty feet away. A bike. Not a motorcycle for this wannabe Hell’s Angel, a grubby Amsterdam bike.

He rode off and I watched him, helpless. But fate lent a hand in the form of another bike whose chain lock had not quite caught. I stripped away the unlocked lock and for the first time in probably thirty years swung a leg over a bike seat and saw that I was observed. The observer in question was a thirty-ish hippie-looking dude, replete with rainbow-striped Peruvian poncho, torn jeans and sandals despite the intermittently wet weather. He was too young to have been anywhere near Haight-Ashbury and I had a thrilling moment of fear suspecting he was an undercover cop. But he also had a rather gruesome tattoo up the left side of his neck, a dragon that looked as if its artist had been in the throes of a delirium tremens shakes. Undercover cops do not typically have lurid, poorly done tattoos.

I pulled out my wallet and held a twenty-euro note out to him. ‘You’re not seeing me,’ I said and smiled conspiratorially.

He took the money but said nothing. He had clean hands. Clean fingernails even. That stuck out to me, that and the blond hair that had not been professionally barbered in the last few weeks but had been at one time. Again, absent the tat I’d have made him for a cop.

‘Oh, you can have this, too.’ I tossed him the eighth of an ounce I’d bought at the coffee shop. He caught it in mid-flight, nodded, did not smile and turned away.

Amsterdam bikes are Dutch modesty squared. I am convinced that in the entire city of 847,000 bicycles – that’s not a made-up number – there are not three bikes with a street value over thirty bucks. It was almost not stealing to take this bike, certainly no more than petty theft. The challenge was that while I had all kinds of tradecraft when it came to tailing someone on foot or in a car, I had no idea at all how to tail someone on a bike. But I had seen the Dutch way of bike riding and did my best to mimic it: I sat tall and straight and looked rigidly ahead with an expression of smug belligerence on my face. Bike riders in Amsterdam do not wear special outfits, no spandex, no helmets, just the armor of righteousness, so it was not unusual that a grown man wearing business casual should be biking along at one in the morning. Stranger, perhaps, was a man wearing a Hell’s Angels (Antwerp) jacket on what was definitely a girl’s bike.

I was able to ride reasonably well as it turned out, helped by the fact that I was sober. My biggest problem was avoiding outpacing and catching up to Smit, because he was in no hurry and not overly devoted to straight lines. We were heading south by east along bike paths that sometimes ran beside large, multi-lane boulevards and in other places ran past patches of woods.

I googled as I rode, checking out the landscape ahead. We were almost certainly headed for the Bijlmermeer (Bale-mer-meer) district, which I had never before visited. It was a landscape of big, modern buildings, bigger sports stadiums, and what the Brits would call council housing and Americans would call subsidized housing. Bijlmermeer looked like the boxes that dainty central Amsterdam had been packed in. It was an intimidating place, especially at night, with vast open spaces and closed big box stores, parking lots with a single random car, a cross between an industrial park, a community college campus and a working-class ghetto.

On the plus side the openness of the terrain allowed me to keep falling back gradually, while still maintaining visual contact. I took an opportunity to veer off, to disappear from any rearward glance, race around an electronics store and follow Smit on a parallel track. I was learning the bike thing.

Finally, after half an hour, Smit slowed and dismounted before a gate in a chain-link fence which ran between a three-story red-brick apartment building on one side, and an eight-floor building that I guessed was also apartments and which accommodated at street level a tailor, a lawyer’s office and a tattoo parlor. The fence that connected the two buildings protected a short, dead-end street that had been made into a closed courtyard.

Facing this fence from across the street was a wide greenway with well-spaced trees, where I was able to dismount behind a trunk and watch without being seen. Smit unlocked the gate, pushed his bike through and locked the gate behind him.

I flitted from tree to tree like Elmer Fudd sneaking up on Daffy Duck but could not get close without stepping out into plain view beneath street lights. But I was able to see in which backyard he parked his bike and that gave me the location of his apartment, five doors down. I walked around the back of the building and looked up at Smit’s residence. Facing the street was a door, metal frame but with curtained glass panels. A tall window stood beside the door on one side, standard double window to the other side. Turning my gaze upward I saw that each townhouse was three floors, with the top floors having two windows per level, one of which had a waist-high iron railing as if it was a balcony. It was not. But I guessed that the windows with the iron railings could be opened while the others could not.

There was a light in the top-floor window and the curtains were not drawn completely, but at this angle I could see nothing but the ceiling light fixture in that top-floor room.

I returned to my borrowed bike, feeling pleased that I now had Smit’s location. Tomorrow or the next day I would return better prepared to mount surveillance, discover whether Madalena was in the townhouse, and ask her why she was upsetting her poor father.

I was not very worried about Milan Smit as I pedaled away. In my experience real threats almost never ride bikes. I made it almost half a block before a little Nissan hatchback went roaring past, skidded to a screeching stop just ahead, and disgorged three men.

They did not look happy to see me.