I don’t think I’ve ever been more frustrated than I was as I left Waterstones at about nine p.m. I had built and let loose upon the world a brilliant plan which, at that very moment, was either working or not. And I could not find out. There was an excellent chance that Sarip had eyes on me – possibly the eyes of his missing partner – and if I was seen whipping out a phone that would drastically diminish the exculpatory power of the phone I’d had Madalena take on a tour around Amsterdam and handed to Sarip.
I could go back to my apartment and there I could check, but there were two problems with that. One was that there might be all manner of active electronic snooping aimed at my place. And two, Delia might be there and I wasn’t ready to deal with her. It was entirely possible that she might yell at me.
So I walked over to the Singel and followed it north, hung a left on Blauwburgwal and crossed to the Arendsnest, a sardine tin of a brown bar, and after some jostling found a few bare inches free. I usually avoid the brown bars because they represent a sort of sacred space for locals in a city devoted to tourists. But I was pretty sure I’d be leaving Amsterdam soon and not at all sure I’d ever be able to return. I was feeling pre-nostalgic.
The Arendsnest was about as narrow as a bike lane, wonderfully shiny with bottles and mirrors and stacked glasses and knick-knacks. Behind the bar loomed a chalkboard beer menu listing nothing but Dutch artisanal beers. I craved whiskey, but the job was not yet done and I might yet have another encounter with Lieutenant Sarip. I ordered a Seabeggar rye pale ale on the grounds that I’d never had a rye beer and started to run through the plan again, obsessively searching for holes.
I tried a couple other beers as well in the course of killing a couple of hours. I watched the fourth broadcast on a stranger’s phone, looking over his shoulder. The theft of the Vermeer was definitely a topic of conversation, though in this bar, at this moment, people were speaking Dutch so I gleaned no new data.
Just before midnight I left, swaying a little perhaps, but sober enough. Six hours in. The halfway point. A light rain fell through a clinging mist leaving the brick sidewalk slick. The mist turned lights dim and starry and deepened the darkness of the Herrengracht canal, which was on my left, as I walked south toward what passed for home. Between me and the canal was the narrow one-way street and a long line of parked cars, all angled in and facing the canal. Wherever there wasn’t a parked car there was a cluster of chained bikes. Elm trees dripped and rustled fitfully in a downright cold breeze that somehow penetrated to the bone without clearing the mist away.
Half a block down the street I saw a woman leaning against a parked orange VW Polo and talking on her phone. She was turned in my direction and I had the impression that she reacted to seeing me. Nothing dramatic, just a sort of subtle pushing away from leaning on the car.
It was nothing, I told myself, just a woman getting home late, or maybe about to take the drive of shame after a tryst. But I hadn’t survived as a fugitive by ignoring the little warning bells tinkling in the back of my brain.
I mimed forgetting something, patted my pockets, and turned around, instinct telling me to walk away. Then, behind me, I heard the door of the Polo open, then slam shut. And a second or two later, the engine came alive with a diesel rattle.
I turned my head, still affecting a casual lack of concern and the Polo was creeping down the street in my direction, headlights blinding. Wrong way on a one-way street. But slow. Not looking to run me down, more like the driver was following me.
Then, ahead of me, an unmarked white-paneled van turned off Blauwburgwal and came toward me, creeping as cautiously as the Polo. I was between a van and a VW, a Mitre sandwich. Too late to turn back now, I kept walking, very casual, seemingly unaware, toward the panel van. The van continued closing the distance as did the Polo, the two vehicles no more than ten car lengths apart now.
I heard the sound of the van’s transmission shifting gears and the engine revved. It lurched forward, came right at me and would run me over in about two seconds … except for the fact that Amsterdam canal houses are all slightly elevated with front doors reached by anywhere from three to eight or nine steps. I danced nimbly aside and took seven steps in two leaps. I tripped at the top and stumbled into the black iron railing. The van screeched to a halt just beside me, the Polo screeched to its own halt just twenty feet away to the south.
I saw the van’s sliding door open. At that moment what I expected was half a dozen guys in black tactical gear to pile out, grab me and force me into the van. I mean, that’s the way it works in the movies. And what the Ontario Crew, the CIA and the Dutch cops all had in common was that none of them wanted me dead. Yet.
No one wanted me dead … except the man who had tumbled from the driver’s seat into the back, snatched up a shotgun and leveled the thing at me. It was a double-barrel shotgun, side-by-side, old school. A hunting weapon presumably.
At six feet you have to really try to miss a target with a shotgun and I’d have taken a whole bunch of buckshot onboard had Hangbrother, the Naked Nazi, not been in such a hurry to grab his gun that he neglected to take the van out of gear. The van rolled, Hangbrother pulled the trigger, there was a catastrophically loud explosion that echoed and reverberated, lengthening a half-second explosion into a three-second-long blast, which annihilated the window and shredded the curtains of whichever unlucky person lived at number 98.
The van rolled on and crashed into the Polo, not enough to do much damage, but enough that the van’s engine shuddered and died. Hangbrother scrabbled to get himself back into firing position. I let loose a terrified whinny and vaulted the railing and only when I was airborne did I see that I would fall into a well leading to a basement door, a fall that was guaranteed to break an ankle at very least. I executed a graceless half-pirouette and managed to land one foot on a low planter and the other foot on a concrete post which was some pretty impressive acrobatics, except that I was now turned away from the shotgun and I knew I had to jump again and right the fuck then, so I tried to reverse my pirouette, caught my foot on the planter and fell hard onto the brick sidewalk as a second shotgun blast blew out the windows of number 96.
At this point no one within a square block could possibly still be asleep unless they were passed out, but no one was quick enough or perhaps foolish enough to open their windows and yell for quiet.
I twisted a bit, fell face down, rolled, then slithered up out of the well and scooted like an alligator under the van.
Hangwoman yelled something furious in a foreign language that probably translated to, ‘He’s under the van! Drive over him!’
There was not a lot of clearance under the van, and by not a lot I mean that my behind was pressed against a hot muffler. I heard the transmission being shoved into gear and I heard the engine respond and the vehicle jumped forward just as I slithered through to the other side. The rear tire caught just the very tip of my left foot which caused me to leave a shoe behind. The second time I’d lost a shoe in Amsterdam, thanks to these crazy bastards.
I jumped to my feet and found myself making eye contact via the wing mirror with Hangbrother.
‘What the holy fuck!’ I roared, outraged.
His window was down and I was well past common sense, so I tried for a grab, got my hand briefly on the steering wheel, but he was in reverse, so he pulled back, bashed into a bike stand and in panic threw the van into first and hit the gas. The van shot forward, Hangbrother hit the brakes too late, and the van smashed into the front of the Polo, this time for real.
Anyone who’d slept through the shotgun blasts would be awake now. It wasn’t a totaling crash, just some bent sheet metal, but car crashes have a very distinct noise and there’s no one alive who won’t take a moment to look at a crash.
The smart way to run seemed to me to be south, away from the van, past the Polo. Hangwoman had come running around the back of the van, maybe assuming I’d go that direction, or maybe just to berate her brother, but it was too good an opportunity for me to pass up: there was the open door of the Polo and steam rising from its exhaust pipe and I did not fancy testing whether I could – with just one shoe – outrun a shotgun blast. I thrust my rear end into the car, pulled my legs in after me, stood on the clutch pedal, ground the gear shift in what I hoped was the right direction – left and forward? God, I hoped so.
The engine revved, the gears ground and there was a sphincter-tightening moment of hesitation as the Polo’s bumper, entwined now with the van, did not want to yield and Hangbrother piled out of the van, fumbling bright red shells into the chambers of the shotgun. He was ten feet away, snapping the double-barrel gun closed, all the while being goaded by his furious sister, and I was in the car, stuck in the car, not nearly time enough to run.
Then the Polo’s bumper broke free and I reversed, fish-tailing wildly. Ahead of me, back up the street, the Hangsiblings had climbed back aboard the van, brother behind the wheel, and my female nemesis now leaning out of the passenger side window with the big gun.
They were coming after me, the lunatics. Every cop in Amsterdam would be heading our way and these assholes didn’t know when to walk away. I was in reverse, they were in a forward gear, and that was not a race I’d be winning. My only hope was reaching the cross street and turning around. Turned the right way the Polo would easily outrun the van. But the cross street was still a hundred yards off and suddenly I saw just about the last damn thing I wanted to see at that moment: bikes, four of them, turning onto Herrengracht, going the wrong way right down the middle of the street. Tourists. Drunk tourists on bikes!
I could of course plow right through them. But even in my panicky state I had the feeling that maybe killing or maiming four people would be what Delia calls, ‘wrong.’ I braked hard and saw an opening: an actual empty parking space. I’d go in rear-first, throw it into gear, and at least be ready to race away once the two-wheeling idiots passed.
Which would have worked had Hangbrother not panicked on seeing the approaching bikes and swerved.
Right into the Polo. Right into the Polo which was backed right up against the canal.
I felt a sickening thump when my back wheels rolled right over the ridiculous six-inch-high iron barrier. I dropped the clutch and gunned it. The powered front wheels squealed and – oh, that was a mistake: I was still in reverse.
The Polo didn’t so much slide off the quay into the canal as execute a perfect backward dive. It was a five-foot drop, not enough to break my neck as the Polo’s hatch back hit the water, but enough for the back of my head to bang the headrest. There was a shriek of metal on concrete, and a second hard bump and the front wheels spun madly in the air.
And then, the Polo was a boat.