I suited up and went out into the street beneath a very visible umbrella with a Van Gogh Sunflowers print. Impossible to miss.
I walked north, wandering this way and that before diving into a coffee shop just off the Nieuwendijk. I had scouted the place and knew the back door led to one of Amsterdam’s hundreds of a tiny courtyards, and from there to an alley and by the time I emerged back into the light the umbrella and the hat I’d been wearing were gone, as was my down jacket.
That was a relief: I was wearing layers. Lots of layers. The day was chilly but I was dressed for Arctic conditions.
From there it was a thirty-second walk to an AirBnB with a coded lock. I let myself in and to my relief found the clothing I’d had Ian place there. I changed clothing yet again and exited by a back stair into a rather lovely pocket garden and from there through the back of a sandwich shop and out to the street again. Six blocks south, near the Rijks, a second AirBnB, this one in a building with a rickety elevator. In this AirBnB – very nice artwork, by the way, not worth stealing, but well-chosen – there was my motorized wheelchair and the rest of my necessaries.
Ian had been surprisingly efficient. He’d done well for me. When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. That’s what Sam Spade said. Ian hadn’t quite been my partner, but he had worked for me, and maybe I had an obligation. I wondered if he had a wife somewhere, maybe kids.
I loaded up my small backpack, slid various objects into various recesses of the wheelchair, double-checked batteries, then drove the wheelchair onto the elevator and motored my way out onto the Lijnbaansgracht, not a thousand feet from the Rijksmuseum. Down the street at a blistering three miles an hour, reminding myself not to move my legs, over the canal bridge, then over the Amstel, plowing heedlessly through crowds, head cranked to one side, drooling a little, playing the part, a stroked-out old fart in a chair with a plaid blanket over his paralyzed legs, impatient, probably in pain.
If there were eyes on me now I was screwed. Simple as that. I’d decided in light of his visit that my opponent in this game was Sarip. I had more enemies than Sarip, so many I had a hard time keeping track of them all, but if Delia had managed to call off her contractors then the essential foes were the Ontario Crew and Sarip. It can be useful to personify the enemy. The Ontario Crew wanted to kill me, but if it came down to who had more resources to devote to tracking me it had to be the cop. Was Sarip sufficiently convinced that I was a bad guy playing some nefarious game that he could justify a street surveillance team? I thought not. If he had a full team in action he’d not have used DeKuyper to watch me at the Albert Heijn.
I motored on toward the great Gothic-Renaissance mash-up of red brick and limestone and cloud-dimmed skylights. It was an impressive building from any angle, huge but not intimidating. I was struck by the notion that the architect had had a sense of humor. It was grand and imposing but at the same time gentle, almost self-mocking in the way it tossed styles together to create a sort of Great British Bake Off showstopper of a confection.
The ensemble in the Rijks’s breezeway was reduced this day, just two violins and the balalaika, playing something melancholy that was probably Russian.
The guard at the entrance did a sort of slight bow, a recognition of my status as an old guy in a wheelchair, someone owed deference and an assumption of harmlessness.
I entered the atrium of the Rijks. In my head there was a score playing, music signifying heightened tension. But in truth I was less tense than I’d been in days. I was at work. On the job. It was too late to worry now, it was all about the plan.
Seen from above the Rijksmuseum is a squared-off figure eight. The holes in the ‘8’ are two courtyards, the first serving as the main atrium and containing the café and gift shop; the other being a sculpture garden.
The exhibits are on four floors, including the bottom level which has some special collections, as well as the two courtyards. On the second floor (or first, if you’re European) are artworks from the period 1700 to 1800. On the fourth floor is 1950 to 2000. The floor in-between was the one that mattered most to me – that’s where the collection of pretties from 1600 to 1700 lived. I don’t know what happened to 1800 to 1950.
Lying along the crossbar on the third floor (my floor) is the vast, ornate gorgeousness of the Gallery of Honor. This gallery stretches from Rembrandt’s huge Night Watch at one end, to the Great Hall at the other, which actually is pretty great, with an amazing mosaic arched ceiling, and soaring stained-glass windows supposedly depicting various art being done by various men, with some women tossed in beneath as avatars of different schools of art. I didn’t figure that out on my own, I’d had to read about it. Suffice to say that the Great Hall was a museum all by itself. The Gallery of Honor acts as the crossbar of our square ‘8’, the other galleries extending in either direction, through a series of smaller interconnected rooms. So if you keep going you circle around to the other end of the Gallery of Honor. Right at the intersection of the Gallery of Honor and the Great Hall are big, wide stairs that lead between floors, as well as doors for toilets and identical smaller stairs, presumably for evacuations.
The Gallery of Honor was subdivided into eight open alcoves defined by partition walls, four on a side. Jewess at the Loom had been placed in the alcove second from the Great Hall, on the right if you were gazing toward the stained glass.
My path would go from that open side room in the Gallery of Honor, through the swinging glass doors into the Great Hall, right, into a line of narrower cubbies. At the end of the corridor I’d pull a U-turn into the excitingly named room 2.8.
Room 2.8 had a problem in that the only way out was back the way you came, but it had compensating virtues, among which were that the putty gray security doors were oversized for the wall and protruded a good two feet into the room. This had the effect of creating a small camera blind spot. It could create other possibilities as well.
The atrium is below street grade so that the cloakroom was more or less below me as I entered the museum. I descended via short elevator ride along with a Japanese family and motored my way along in what I’m certain was an offensive parody, and went for the men’s room. In the privacy of a handicapped stall I opened my backpack and took out the coffee can that was my bomb. The bomb was a piquant blend of sugar and potassium nitrate, cooked together to form a sort of roux, which was then contained in aluminum foil. I’d worn myself out watching YouTube trying to figure out how to make a simple timed fuse, but Ian had made short work of it. He is … was … Irish. Ian had joked that bomb-making is in the national patrimony, so to speak.
Of course this bomb was not meant to explode. There would be very little fire and a whole hell of a lot of smoke. Hopefully. We had not had time to test it. If it failed to go off, or for some reason failed to generate enough smoke to look like a serious fire, I might well be trapped in the museum.
I opened my phone and checked the timer again. I was on schedule. Tick-tock.
I took the coat check receipt and surreptitiously tore the identifying number out and swallowed it, an inelegant, but effective way of destroying evidence. The remainder of the ticket I tore into little pieces and dropped in a bin.
I motored my way back to the elevator and waited patiently for it to come. An extraordinarily fat family of four – Americans, of course – loaded on with me, all of us crammed in together as the father sent me a greasy, apologetic smile. The door began to close and I saw two women rushing to make it and to my abject horror recognized one of them. It was the rumpy-pumpy woman from Tess’s boat.
Jesus H. Christ, what were the odds? But my disguise worked to conceal my undoubted rumpy-pumpiness, so she never so much as glanced at me.
I got off on the third floor, the heart of the Rijksmuseum, all the goodies from 1600 to 1700, the high points of Dutch art, at least the Dutch art the Rijks hosted. The Van Gogh museum might have disagreed as to peak Dutch art.
I motored out of the elevator and into the Gallery of Honor, emerging just to the left of The Night Watch. There was as usual a decent crowd gaping at the massive thing – it’s the size of a billboard – and gazed down the length of the room. Stairways behind me to my left and right, also restrooms. At the far end of the gallery there were also stairways and restrooms, and in-between about, oh, let’s say a billion dollars’ worth of art.
Mosaic arched ceiling, pink and green columns arrayed ahead defining the separate alcoves, long gray benches, polished blond wood floors, skylights full of gray and wet. I’d seen this view in the flesh twice, online dozens of times and in my imagination on countless occasions. This was my theater.
I did a discreet time check. The smoke bomb would ignite in 132 seconds.
Text to flash mob organizer: How’s it going?
Quick response: Just about to start.
I pushed on the joystick and slid up next to one of the benches. I reached beneath my plaid lap blanket and pulled out a small Bluetooth speaker. The back of it was covered with the kind of two-sided tape used to hang wall hooks. I looked like I was playing with myself as I switched on the power: all to the good because if no one looks at old dudes in wheelchairs, even more does no one look at old dude in wheelchair possibly adjusting his colostomy bag.
The speaker was small enough to almost be concealed by my hand. I fiddled and stressed over the inexorable tick-tock until the be-blazered guard looked away. Then I slipped the speaker under the bench. Press, hold, hold, patience … Yes, it was stuck.
The smoke bomb would be going off any second now.
I motored down the length of the hall, past conspiring Batavians on my left and guys dressed like pilgrims on my right, both by Rembrandt. On I cruised, slaloming through the crowd, past landscapes and hunting scenes and paintings of ships by guys who would be household names, maybe, except for the overshadowing existence of Rembrandt.
I approached the third alcove on my right, the target. It was not a huge space, though stratospherically tall. The walls were battleship gray. There was a bench. There were wires stretched at mid-calf height, not to stop anyone, just to remind you how far back you should stay. There was some Pieter de Hooch on the side walls, but it was all Johannes Vermeer on the back wall, none of which I could see for the crowd gazing thoughtfully at Jewess at the Loom, nestled between The Love Letter and Woman Reading a Letter.
My heart seemed to be about six inches higher in my chest than usual, and it was beating heavy, heavy and slow because I was in it now, it was about to go down; and on the job my heart doesn’t speed up, it slows. Or maybe time itself slowed, because everything was moving through molasses now.
A twenty-something couple in near-identical gray coats shifted from left foot to right, synchronized. A toddler whined and Mom reached a slow hand to touch the top of the little girl’s knit cap. Three elderly Japanese, two taking pictures, the other, an old man with the hair-do popularized by Homer Simpson, nodded to himself as if he’d seen something deep and meaningful. Maybe he had.
I was at the back of the crowd of perhaps twenty-five people. I advanced my chair a bit and a woman noticed and moved aside to let me pass, smiling indulgently.
Down below, down in the cloakroom the timer would have completed its circuit. The fuse would have been lit. The sugar and nitrates would sputter and the first tendrils of smoke would appear in the bag resting on shelves beside purses and coats and hats. It would take a while, not long, but a while for anyone to notice.
I forced myself to take long, slow, deep breaths.
This was the last second of time in which I could still bail out.
I opened my phone.
I twisted around and drew from my pack a smallish construction of white plastic and black rotors. Was anyone watching me? I couldn’t look, I just had to do. I slipped it beneath my lap blanket.
I’d kept just far enough back from Jewess at the Loom that I still had line of sight to the speaker I’d planted back near the sacred Night Watch. My phone wouldn’t reach that far but it would reach the higher-power Bluetooth emitter I had epoxied to the bottom of my wheelchair.
Ready.
Last chance to back out. This was it.
Well, what the hell. I could survive prison. Right?
Play!
And it worked! A shrill, distorted, frankly crazed-sounding voice began ranting.
The Night Watch glorifies fascism! It must be destroyed!
A flicker went through the crowd. I mimed my own concern and said, ‘It’s terrorists!’
You cannot stop me! I will destroy it!
The guard leaned out of the alcove to see. Further back other guards were moving, slowly at first, then faster toward The Night Watch.
Rembrandt was an imperialist apologist!
Guards moved faster now, reinforcing each other in their concern that something was wrong, very wrong. My nearest guard hesitated. I yelled, ‘I hope it’s not someone slashing the painting!’ And that did it: my proximate guard moved out of the alcove. The crowd followed, not all the way, just out of the alcove, curious but not determined, they just wanted to see what was happening.
The hour of reckoning has come! Death to Rembrandt!
Now came the move I had practiced probably two dozen times. The drone was under my blanket, whirring, lifting the blanket in what might have looked like an impressive erection. I switched to the drone’s native app and threw back the blanket. The tiny rotors whirred and the drone rose into the air, then veered wildly down the length of the Gallery of Honor, just ten feet in the air, trailing a red ribbon to make it easier to spot. And the Bluetooth speaker shouted, Drones are the tools of the oppressor made to do the work of Antifa!
OK, not the most eloquent statement but baby, it worked, because now the Vermeer crowd was all looking away, and all at the same time. As the drone skimmed along the more ambitious or athletic folks tried to leap in the air and bat it down. So much the better: look away, look away! Follow the drone! Listen to the crazy person’s wild threats.
Did anyone see that I had launched the drone? Three did, a bored teenaged boy and two of the elderly Japanese. And what were they going to do about it? Fuck-all, because they were not guards, just random civilians, and I was a crazy old man in a wheelchair.
I tapped the app and put the drone on hover. It hung in the air maybe twenty feet from The Night Watch, right where it could so easily dive right into the massive painting.
And this was the beauty part: the drone wouldn’t have so much as knocked away a fleck of paint. It was a plastic toy, it weighed ounces not pounds, it moved at a few miles an hour, it was not a bullet. It was, in short, entirely harmless. And entirely captivating, especially to the eager heroes who leapt from atop benches in wild and awkward efforts to knock it down. Someone was going to break a leg and I wasn’t even going to feel guilty. It’s not my fault people are stupid.
I stood up. (A miracle! I can walk!) I took six steps, lifted my foot over the stretched wire, and laid my hands on the gilt frame of Jewess at the Loom.
I lifted it up off its hooks. It wasn’t heavy. I rushed back to the wheelchair, laid the Jewess on my lap, and threw the blanket over it. It was not an effective disguise; it was pretty clear that something rectangular was under that plaid wool. But it was enough for my purpose.
‘Was machst du?’
That was from a frowning, worried woman whose expression was somewhere between thinking I was a senile old fool and a suspicion that the fact that I’d leapt from the wheelchair after clearly launching a drone suggested that just maybe, just maybe, I was neither senile nor old. Certainly not crippled.
‘It’s OK,’ I said to her in my best Voice of Authority. I drew a wallet from an inner pocket and flashed a print-off of a police ID I’d found online. It was an ID for Jim Gordon from the Gotham City police, but at a glance it looked official enough. ‘Be calm. I’m with the police.’
Only a moron would buy that, but God bless the Germans, they will defer to authority.
I turned the wheelchair, pushed the joystick and sped away, out of the alcove, away from the embattled Night Watch, straight toward the swinging glass doors separating the Gallery of Honor and the Great Hall, and plowed right through them. Very Hollywood except for the low speed and total absence of shattering glass or explosions.
Behind me I heard the German woman switch to tentative, plaintive English. ‘This man has taken a painting. Is this correct?’ Given the state of things in the Gallery of Honor it would take her five minutes just to get anyone’s attention.
Then, just ahead, a guard was rushing through the Great Hall toward the Gallery of Honor, which would bring him right by me. So I gave him my best panic face and shouted, ‘I think there’s a bomb! There’s a bomb!’
The guard ran past, through the doors. In a few seconds he might click on the fact that I had something under my blanket but not yet he hadn’t, not yet.
At top wheelchair speed – about eight miles an hour for this model – I raced through the Great Hall, past tourists who hadn’t yet heard that something was going on. Benches and paintings to my right. Stained glass soaring above me on the left. Old man in a wheelchair, look out, step aside!
‘Someone has attacked The Night Watch!’ I cried, like Paul Revere yelling about the British coming. ‘Terrorists!’
That sent the Great Hall crowd scurrying, some heading down the stairs to safety, others milling around and muttering, and still others running toward the Gallery of Honor while pulling their phones out to capture the excitement for their Instagram. This left zero people to chase me.
Three floors down, down at the basement level where the cloakroom was, the sugar and nitrates should be – had damn well better be – billowing smoke.
Because the thing was, all the automated security doors could be locked at the first sign of a robbery or vandalism … but you can’t lock doors when there’s a fire. Priority One: safely evacuate the building. There are countries where the security forces might make a decision to save the paintings and to hell with the lives of people breathing smoke, but the Netherlands was not one of those countries.
Nice Dutch people do not lock doors when there’s fire.
If there was a fire.
I sped along, heedless, literally shoving people out of the way and yelling, ‘Someone’s attacking The Night Watch!’ and the always popular, ‘Fire! Fire!’
Past Frans Hals’s portraits of a husband and a wife, the man world-weary and not impressed, the woman staring bleakly.
The next tiny alcove was empty of people and lacked security cameras. Perfect. I threw off the blanket, stood up again and fumbled at hyper speed with the zippered, black nylon art bag. I manhandled the Jewess into the second bag, the putty-gray bag within the T-Mobile bag and walked on, leaving the chair to block the narrow doorway behind me.
By now the Bluetooth speaker would have been discovered and turned off. The drone, far beyond the reach of my control, had probably been batted down and everyone in the Gallery of Honor – with the exception of the German woman – would be thinking it was all a tasteless prank or political stunt. They’d be laughing nervously.
And, suddenly, like an answer to a prayer, the alarm blew, loud ringing, in bursts. Fire!
Excellent!
Then I saw him. He was behind me, just beyond my strategically parked wheelchair.
Willy Pete!