CAPTAIN HENK
‘Well this is cosy,’ I said, entering Sergei’s apartment. The lighting was low; a familiar bossa nova song played in surround sound. The green hue of my wife’s drink suggested chartreuse, which she rarely succumbed to.
‘Henk,’ Sergei said, stepping forward. ‘Join our little borrel.’ He used one of the Dutch words with no easy translation, though he’d apparently understood its origins. ‘I have chilled jenever.’
‘I’m sure you do. Where’s Nadia?’
‘Erm… working late, I believe. But I like where you’re going – we should make this into an engagement celebration.’
My daughter now had a job with an ‘online fashion-lifestyle hub’, whatever the hell that meant. We’d barely spoken since she’d been caught with MDMA on her aboard the submarine-nightclub.
‘Well at least let me take your jacket,’ Sergei said.
I preferred to keep it on. ‘I have to be elsewhere too, I’m afraid.’
I met my wife’s challenging stare and said to her, ‘Describe the man who came to our boat earlier.’
‘I told you,’ she responded, tersely. ‘He seemed official. Why don’t you ask at your work?’
‘All that journalistic experience,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you can give a better description that that.’
Her jaw clenched as she held back from speaking.
‘You hadn’t seen him before?’
‘No!’
He wasn’t Joost, clearly. But it could have been almost anyone – one of Frank Hals’s old henchmen, even? No, that hardly connoted ‘official’…
‘Look, Henk,’ Sergei said, stepping bulkily between us. ‘Maybe I could help?’
If you know a London escort called Kamilla, then I’m sure you could, I almost said.
He continued: ‘Petra mentioned the situation with Joost.’
‘Oh?’ I said, shocked.
‘These favours, for energy –’
‘What the hell else did she fill you in on? Our sex life, perhaps?’
‘Henk!’ Petra shouted. ‘Sergei is offering to help!’
‘How?’
‘I know people,’ he said, raising his own voice. ‘In energy. Russia was involved, too.’
‘No it wasn’t!’
‘It wasn’t in the end,’ he qualified, ‘but discussions still took place, before.’
I exhaled hard, shaking my head in bewilderment.
‘How do you know this, Sergei?’ I demanded. ‘Just who is your so-called contact?’
‘Henk!’ my wife reproved me once more, setting the chartreuse down and striding over. ‘Your problem is with Joost.’ She yanked me away from Sergei. ‘Just go and see the man, for fuck’s sake, and have it out with him – not with your family!’
It was a moment of piercing clarity, a shaft of internal illumination – the best idea I’d heard all year. I reached for my phone, and in my contacts found Stefan’s number. Joost had forged a mentoring relationship with my old team member, after all.
‘Stefan?’
‘Henk?’
‘Where the hell is Joost these days?’
*
We’d made it as far as the remote hamlet of Ransdorp, with its brick church – squat-looking, huddled against the night sky. The full moon bathed the surrounding dykes with a silvery gleam. I cursed the low flatness, the sight lines it afforded.
Zsolt was still kicking at the door, every hundred metres or so now, his groans getting louder. His moaning was joined by thudding and rattling as I drove off the road, as far away as I could get from other vehicles and human habitation.
I killed the headlights. We were off grid, with no easy way back, the road getting ever narrower. I’d never felt more hot and anxious; suddenly I pulled over and cranked open the window. The still dyke alongside gave off a brackish, putrid odour. The moonlight lent the car bonnet a sheen. Beneath, the engine clicked as it contracted.
Once my breathing had evened out I said, ‘You need to go get your Sig.’
‘What?’ Johan turned in his seat; it creaked sharply.
‘Your gun, Johan.’
A loud moan came from the back.
‘We discussed this,’ Johan said, his features pinched.
I tried to think – not about what we’d discussed, rather what we needed to do next.
‘Anything could happen now,’ I said, recalling our army training. ‘Someone might find us here. We need to be prepared for all eventualities. Take the car.’
‘But –’
‘Do it now. Don’t worry about our friend, I’ll stay here with him. Drive back to yours, get the weapon, and be back here soon as you can. It won’t take long.’
I jumped out, strode round the back of the car and pulled Zsolt from the rear seat. He landed on the peaty soil like a sack of baby potatoes.
His silvery-looking eyes glared up at me.
You – his accusing look said, as clear as the moonlight above – you killed my younger brother…
Johan got in the driver’s seat of the car. The engine started again and he began reversing back up the track, the tyres slipping in the soft earth. Johan’s head was out of the window, bent away from me to see behind. He’d kept the headlights off, thank God. A single dark vehicle snaked along the main road.
Otherwise, all was quiet.
All was still.
Apart from Zsolt.
‘You’ll die,’ he managed to say.
‘Really.’
Blood was still leaking darkly from his nose.
I had the physical sensation of sinking into the swampy terrain.
‘You fucking shit,’ I hissed, booting him in the ribs. ‘I didn’t kill your fucking brother. He killed himself, after he tried to burn me to death!’ I booted him again. ‘And my wife.’
He curled into a ball, a silvery-black embryo.
The smell, the swamp – there was something primordial about it all. I kneeled in the damp softness. My clenched fist hovered above his face with a consciousness of its own, seeking its target…
‘Stop.’
Seeking, wanting…
‘You want information.’ His mouth bubbled blood.
‘What information?’
*
Joost spent his days now on a small island in Zeeland, off Middelburg – an hour and a half’s drive south of The Hague. The more I thought about him – while driving down there the following morning – the less I understood about what had become of him. About his police role. His life…
The satnav gave a misleading sense of proximity as I approached his address. In vain I searched for a house.
The land either side of the causeway had narrowed to strips of dun-coloured heather. There was a sparkle of frost. Wind generators beat the sky, breaking the distant, dark horizon. Modern, slender versions of the windmills that would have been here for centuries – visual references sunk into my subconscious.
And sea, of course.
Zeeland.
*
Stefan had mentioned that Joost recently suffered a heart attack, but my adversary’s physical condition still shocked me. His physique had always been scrawny, only now it seemed to have shrunk, reminding me of a walnut.
‘Henk,’ he said wheezily, at the door of the sea cabin. ‘What in God’s name are you doing here?’
I’d half-expected Stefan to have forewarned him; it was gratifying to sense that he hadn’t.
‘Just passing,’ I replied. ‘Thought I’d look you up. Old times’ sake.’
A gull cawed above.
He eyed me. He’d lost none of his disquieting, evaluative stare. ‘You’d better come in.’
He led me into a sparsely furnished living room with a picture window onto the sea. Binoculars stood vigilantly on the windowsill. There was a distinct ‘old man’ smell, a green upholstered chair, and a trolley alongside for wheeling an oxygen tank…
‘Bane of my life,’ he said about it. ‘The sea air’s supposed to help, mind.’
‘Does it?’
He shrugged. ‘Do you want coffee?’
‘Thank you.’
As he moved slowly into the kitchen, I eyed the wooden-walled room. There were surprising books: classical fiction, and others about nature, the area…
No evidence of a female presence.
All the signs of solitude.
‘Last of the pot I made earlier,’ he said, reappearing with a mug.
I sipped. It had a bitter, singed taste.
‘Well sit, man!’
I did so, crouching forward, the cup at least warming my hands. You could freeze herrings in here.
‘Just passing, eh?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’
He pulled a blanket over his knees and took a shot of oxygen. I thought of asking about his heart attack, but couldn’t think what to say. He’d had one. End of story.
‘Not exactly on the road to anywhere, is this, Captain Henk?’
The form of address woke something inside me. It was a long time since he’d conflated my old army rank with my first name. Indeed, I hadn’t heard it since the start of the long train of events that had now brought me here.
‘OK,’ I admitted, ‘so I wasn’t passing.’
‘Didn’t you think to call ahead?’
‘Feared you might be out.’
He guffawed, gesturing at his entrapments.
‘I’m haunted by some words you once used,’ I said.
His old, alert gaze was back.
‘At the police station’ – I led us back to the previous spring – ‘you were talking about the To˝zsérs, though I didn’t know them by that name at the time. You said that no one had invited the Eastern European thieves and whores to come here, that there were always trade-offs… Those were your words.’
His demeanour soured. ‘The words that you took to Rem Lottman, eh?’
‘Yes. Only, why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why did you say them in the first place?’
‘Those were the words of… the system.’
‘You were the system. You ran IJ Tunnel 3.’
‘I ran nothing.’
I narrowed my gaze, trying to make sense of what he’d just said. A petroleum tanker had come into view behind him, on the far horizon. It was too far offshore to be docking in Holland. Maybe it was en route from Norway to some newer economy.
Joost sighed. ‘I’m on the way out, Henk, in every sense. You really want to know what happened?’
For a moment, maybe two, we stared at one another.
‘Well do you, Captain Henk?’ He snapped his fingers.
And I flinched with sudden recollection.
*
‘What information?’ I demanded of the Hungarian lying in the mud.
‘Cut binds,’ he implored. ‘Too tight. They slice my hands.’
The memory of that breeze block, on the ring road, came flying towards me through my inner vision. I blinked hard, trying to erase the enlarging, white-grey impression.
‘How about we try doing this a different way?’ I said.
His upper arm was bowed in a struggle to free himself; I grabbed him there and began rolling him towards the lip of the dyke.
‘If you’re so concerned about your brother, why don’t you fucking join him?’
I recalled the breeze block smashing into the windscreen frame, and my wife sobbing…
‘Or you can share this lousy information of yours.’ I stood up, leaving him balanced on the slippery edge. ‘Ever the informant, eh, Zsolt?’
My forced chuckle gave me a curdling sensation inside. I barely recognised myself. ‘C’mon you shit, you’ve intrigued me.’
With the tip of my boot I held him on the edge. The dyke wasn’t deep, but with his hands and feet bound it would quickly become his swampy grave.
He was exhaling sharply, irregularly.
‘Take your time. There’s another ten minutes, maybe, before my friend gets back with his gun. It’s a lot like that FÉG PA-63 you left by my front door, by the way, only less cheap. Fires better.’
I looked around the dark landscape, registering the vague feeling of something being very wrong. Only what?
‘I try to remember!’ he cried.
‘You’re a little tease, aren’t you?’
Some combination of rage and curiosity took over, and I rolled him in. He slid and shrieked and thrashed like a fish in shallow water trying to regain the deep; he managed to roll a complete turn onto his back once more, his silvery, agonised face breaking through the water’s surface. It was his keening cry that persuaded me to drag him out again. He heaved in ragged breaths.
A dog began barking, distantly.
I knelt by his dripping ear. ‘Before your brother died, I asked him a question.’
He was shaking, his wet eyes wide…
‘I asked him what was so fragile that when you say its name, you break it.’
Shaking with cold, with shock…
‘Silence,’ I hissed.
‘I tell you,’ he said, trembling.
I waited. ‘What?’
‘I begin as informant, now I am more!’
I had that sickly feeling again, the source of which I still couldn’t fathom.
‘Go on.’
‘They ask me to arrange things for people.’
‘Who? What things?’
‘Girls, jewels, drugs. Cars, painting.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about, To˝zsér? Who’s asking you to arrange what… ‘
But my words died as I recalled Operation Boost – the high-end stolen vehicle ring, which this man had helped the Amsterdam police to infiltrate.
‘For who?’
‘They offer these things to important people. Gifts, for favour.’
‘To who? Who’s they?’
His teeth were chattering. At first, it disguised the rattling noise of the vehicle approaching.
Not my car.
Not Johan’s either – a black van. I watched it approach, transfixed.
I’d noticed it before, on the main road. I’d felt its presence. The headlights were off, but as it nosed towards me, rising and dipping, they flared white. I froze like a trapped animal.
Then looked down.
He was gone. Submerged.
Heart in my mouth, I lunged for him but knew from his frozen expression in the white of the approaching headlights that he was already dead. A silver trace of bubbles rose from his mouth.
A familiar figure was running towards me.
‘The fuck’ve you done?’ Joost cried. He staggered. ‘You killed him!’
‘I –’
‘Jesus, Henk, what’ve you done?’ He looked at me aghast. ‘You’re so out of your depth, you’re in your own fucking undersea world! He was protected! Don’t you see?’
I started to grasp, dimly… ‘He mentioned arranging favours…’
‘He did what?’ Joost stood still. ‘Where’s the other guy?’
‘Who?’ I managed.
‘Your fucking army friend!’ He looked around wildly.
‘He’s gone,’ I said. Withholding was pointless now. ‘He’s gone to get a gun – he’ll be back.’
‘When he gets back, shoot him.’ He indicated the body in the dyke. ‘Don’t hesitate. Once in the heart, once in the head.’ Joost must have caught my incomprehension, as he said: ‘You make it look like a revenge attack, a Zaandam gang job. Yes?’
I nodded dumbly.
Hot tears ran down my mud-caked cheeks.
‘Now let’s get you straightened out. Jesus.’ He looked around wildly. I was too numb to question what he meant by ‘straightened out’.
‘There’s a disused tool shop just outside that hamlet… When’s your friend getting back?’
I was shaking. ‘Ten… maybe five minutes…’
‘We’ll have to take care of it in the van, then.’
‘Take care of what?’
‘Get in the van.’
‘But –’
‘Now!’