LUCKY SEVENS

by Theo Capel

De Jordaan

The A4 was crowded, as usual. Felix had been stuck behind a brand-new Seat Ateca for some time. He could almost see the guy in front of him frowning in his rearview mirror at Felix’s old Cordoba. It was time for a new car. There was enough money to buy one in the inside pocket of his uniform jacket. The problem was, it wasn’t his money.

When he hit the ring road, the traffic got worse. Up ahead, somebody slammed on his brakes, and Felix barely managed to avoid rear-ending him.

Eyes on the road, he told himself.

Imagine getting into an accident with all that cash on him. Some of his brothers in blue would surely suspect him of being crooked. He wouldn’t even be given the chance to explain himself. He shook off the thought and proceeded carefully to the exit for the S105—he still insisted on thinking of it by its traditional name, the Jan van Galenstraat—which would take him to his home in the Jordaan. The bureaucrats didn’t care that the Jordaan was the best-known part of the city. They felt it was good enough to put a simple Downtown on the exit signs.

It had been an unusual day for Felix. He was on his way back from South Holland, where he’d attended the funeral of a fellow Amsterdam police officer. Every cop there had been in uniform, including detectives like Felix. Dark-blue jacket, peaked cap. That had caused an uncomfortable moment, later in the day. Coincidentally, he’d also had an appointment in The Hague, at the headquarters of the agency that ran the national lottery. Tickets were cheap, and if you were lucky, instant happiness. Felix wasn’t a gambler himself, but today he’d walked in the door with a scratcher that had revealed a fifty-thousand-euro prize beneath its layer of foil. He’d bought it at the corner cigar store, along with two packs of filtered cigarettes and a magazine. Felix didn’t smoke, and it wasn’t a magazine he liked to read. The winning ticket wasn’t his either, and that’s why he’d collected the money in cash.

They’d been upset at the sight of his uniform. They were expecting a Mr. Felix de Grave, and what they got was a cop. He’d cleared up the confusion, but there’d been another misunderstanding when he left. The woman who showed him out was surprised by his pale purple car. She’d anticipated a police cruiser, not this sad old jalopy. She’d just been telling him that lots of winners bragged the first thing they were going to buy was a new vehicle, but most of them wound up sticking their winnings in the bank. She seemed to think that banking the fifty thousand euros would, in Felix’s case, be a mistake. She didn’t say it in so many words, but he could read it in her expression when she got a look at his car.

They’d already thought it was odd that he’d wanted the money in cash. The unspoken suspicion was that he didn’t want his wife to know about his win. Felix wasn’t married, but the money was indeed intended for a woman. The winning ticket belonged to his neighbor, which was really nobody’s business. It was Felix and the neighbor’s little secret.

* * *

Many of the streets in the Jordaan—Carnation, Laurel, Rose—are named after flowers. Misnamed, really, because the neighborhood was originally a wasteland, with long, narrow alleys and canals that dead-ended where the world-famous seventeenth-century Canal Ring begins. Nowadays, you need to be well-off to live in the shadow of the Western Church’s bell tower, since the realtors do their best to make it seem as if the Jordaan is a part of the Canal Ring.

If Felix leaned out his living room window, he’d be looking right at the church’s Westertoren, which for the older Jordaaners would be good reason to burst out in song. Ever since the neighborhood began to attract a demographic that was still disparagingly referred to as yuppies, the tower had been considered an annoyance, thanks to the fact that, every fifteen minutes, day and night, its carillon played a little tune. For the tourists, the tower was a beacon, guiding them to the Anne Frank House, which stood just around the corner from the church, on the Prinsengracht. Every day they lined up, waiting their turn to go inside, the line usually stretching along the canal to the tower. Felix’s across-the-street neighbor, who was generally to be found hanging out the front window of her apartment, observing the passing scene below, never ceased to be surprised by the enormous interest in the Frank family’s WWII hideout.

“There’s nothing to see in there,” she told anyone who would listen. “I should charge admission to come look at my house. I’d be rich!” She loved daydreaming of wealth, and the fact that Anne Frank had come to a tragic end—which gave the Frank House a dramatic attraction hers couldn’t hope to compete with—didn’t seem to interest her.

As he turned into his street, Felix wondered if he ought to honk his horn to notify his neighbor of his arrival. Probably not necessary, he decided. She peered out her window the whole damn day, so she’d be sure to see him. Especially today, since she knew where he had gone.

Except, to his surprise, she wasn’t at her usual post. When he pulled up to his garage door and, just to be sure, looked up, he saw that her window was closed. The garage door, on the other hand, stood wide open.

Felix lived on the second floor of a building whose ground level had originally served as a sort of workshop for a company that manufactured lampshades. The company’s name still appeared on the gable in white script letters. At the time he moved in, the garage was being used to house a street organ belonging to the previous tenant, an old friend of Felix’s grandmother. When he left for a nursing home, Felix finagled permission to move into his apartment. Not long after that, the street organ disappeared, and he was permitted—for an extra monthly fee—to take over the ground floor. These days, a storage area like that was worth its weight in gold. Hardly a week went by that he wasn’t asked to sublet part of the space. His upstairs neighbor had long been permitted to stash his bicycle there and Felix had graciously agreed to continue that arrangement, and he had more recently succumbed to a plea from a couple who lived across the street and pedaled their kids to school and other activities on a traditional Dutch cargo bike, which had to have someplace to sit when it wasn’t doing taxi duty. In point of fact, he had succumbed to the wife after first refusing an identical request from the husband. Felix thought the husband, who claimed to be some kind of financial consultant, was a bit of a bullshitter, and—as a cop—he didn’t care for bullshit.

With a little maneuvering, it was possible to squeeze both his Cordoba and the cargo bike into the space. The upstairs neighbor complained that this made it practically impossible for him to get his bicycle in and out, but he was one of those Amsterdammers who have raised complaining practically to an art form.

Felix saw that the woman from across the street was standing beside her cargo bike, her back to him, and he got out of his car to see if she needed help.

“You just getting back or heading out, Iris?” he asked.

His voice startled her, and she whirled to face him. “Felix! Have you heard the news?”

“Are congratulations in order?”

He knew she was being considered for a promotion to a senior position at the bank where she worked, but various factors were delaying a final decision. Maybe she’d finally gotten the approval she was hoping for.

But he let go of that idea when he saw the expression on her face.

“You haven’t heard,” she said, and began to cry.

“Hey, what’s wrong?”

She was still wearing her work clothes, and she wiped away tears with the sleeve of her gray pin-striped suit. What could have happened? One of the kids fell down the stairs? Her husband got caught messing around with one of her girlfriends?

“Fetty’s dead.”

“Dead?” He felt a shock ripple through his body, and for a moment he found that he couldn’t breathe. Fetty couldn’t possibly be dead. He had a thick wad of cash for her inside his jacket pocket.

His hand went to his chest, and he felt the bulge of the money. Was it possible for a pile of bills to have stabbed him? The pain slowly ebbed.

“What are you saying? Fetty’s dead?”

“It’s so awful!”

She had no idea how awful it was. The lottery money belonged to Fetty, the neighbor he’d expected to see leaning out her window. It was no wonder she was called Fetty. She was shapeless and fat from head to toe, and she could barely make it down the stairs to the street. Felix was one of the neighbors who ran regular errands for her. Aunt Corrie, who lived right next door, helped with the everyday chores, and Felix took care of Fetty’s weekly luxuries. Every Saturday, he stopped at the cigar store to buy her two packs of Stuyvesants. Filtered, she always reminded him, as if she was afraid the company might have suddenly started manufacturing unfiltered Stuyvesants. So, two packs of smokes, with filters, a copy of the weekly magazine My Secret, and two scratchers. The lottery tickets always had to be Lucky Sevens, because—according to her—that was her lucky game.

Her invariable habit was to open one of the packs of cigarettes in his presence and offer him the first Stuyvesant, which he always politely refused, at which point she lit it and smoked it herself, taking shallow puffs that she immediately exhaled. One of his aunts had smoked exactly the same way.

The next part of their Saturday-afternoon ritual was her asking him for a coin, which she would use to eagerly attack her scratchers. Meanwhile, Felix would page listlessly through the new issue of the magazine, which seemed more often than not to be filled with stories of pregnant women who weren’t sure if the baby was their husband’s or the neighbor’s and other nonsense that would, in his opinion, have been better kept secret.

Their routine usually ended with Fetty’s disappointed cry: “No luck!” This time, though, their visit had unfolded differently.

Felix thought at first that she’d had a heart attack. But her explosive reaction turned out to be pure excitement, not a medical emergency.

“Felix, look! Two fifty-thousands! My God, all those zeroes! And look, the last number ends with zeroes too. It can’t be another fifty thousand, can it? I can’t look. You finish it for me.”

He had scratched away the last bit of foil, and the two of them sat there and stared at the winning ticket looking back up at them from the table. The winning ticket Felix had taken to The Hague and cashed in for his housebound neighbor.

“It’s a winner! A winner!” Fetty had screamed, and she’d grabbed Felix by the arms, hauled him up from his chair, and danced around him like a schoolgirl. “We won! We won!”

Later, he’d run into Aunt Corrie on the street. “You two were certainly kicking up a rumpus,” she’d said. “I was afraid the glasses in my kitchen cabinets would get smashed. Did she have a little too much to drink, Felix?”

“Now, Corrie, the woman’s entitled to a little fun once in a while,” he’d said. And that was where he’d left it. He wasn’t going to tell the neighborhood Fetty’d won fifty thousand euros.

* * *

“Vladimir’s still at the police station. I thought you were him a minute ago. Why are you wearing your uniform? He called me and told me he had to go with the detectives, so I should pick Max up from his piano lesson. I wasn’t expecting to go out again, I didn’t even have time to change. I just put on some sneakers, and here I am. I must look ridiculous.”

Felix had noticed the bright red sneakers. They were indeed a sight, but he was more interested in her husband.

“You’re telling me Fetty didn’t just die on her own? And Vladimir had something to do with it?”

“No, of course not. He just found her. And then the police came.” She hesitated. “Is it true Fetty came into a lot of money? Vladimir said he heard she won the lottery.”

Felix had worried Fetty wouldn’t be able to keep her good fortune to herself. “Was Fetty killed?” he asked. “Is that why the detectives were here?”

Iris began to cry. “I don’t know,” she said. “Aunt Corrie told Vladimir she thought Fetty was in clover. I’m not sure what that means—I still don’t understand a lot of your Amsterdam slang. I just want to know when Vladimir’s coming home. He called me at work, I was in the middle of a meeting. He said there was a funny little car outside the building, a handicapped car. What are those things called?”

“You mean a Canta?”

“That’s it. He thinks we ought to buy one, because you can park on the sidewalk, then we wouldn’t need to bother you with the cargo bike. What am I supposed to say to that? Anyway, I was in a meeting, I couldn’t really talk. And then he called back and said he had to go with the policemen because they found Fetty dead.”

“They?”

“Him, I mean. But I don’t know for sure. All I know is Max is waiting. I have to call his piano teacher. But first I want to hear Vladimir’s voice.” She looked straight at him, wiping tears from her eyes with her sleeve. “Felix, can you call the station for me? You’re a cop. Maybe they’ll tell you something.”

“You already tried? Did you call Vladimir’s cell?”

“Yes, but he didn’t pick up. And the woman at the station wouldn’t tell me anything. She said they don’t give information over the phone.”

“You go fetch your son,” Felix told her. “I’ll see what I can do.”

* * *

“I still dream about him,” Fetty had said when she was finished dancing and dropped, breathless, back into her chair.

She was so excited she tried to light the filtered end of a Stuyvesant, but Felix stopped her just in time. He wasn’t sure who she was talking about.

“He’s in trouble, and I can’t help him. Can you believe it, Felix, sometimes I wake up sobbing? But now I really can help him.” She fell silent, gazing straight ahead, beginning to sniffle. “If I only knew where he was,” she said. She grabbed Felix’s arm. “You’re a detective. You know how to find a missing person. And I have money now. You can help me. You can find my little boy for me. You’ll do it, won’t you?” She’d let go of his arm and picked up the ticket, stroking it like a pet.

He sat there and listened to the story. Long ago, Fetty had been a live-in maid for a doctor and his family, and one of the doctor’s sons had gotten her pregnant, then denied ever having touched her. The family was Roman Catholic, and the boy’s father had refused to help her. It was too late to end the pregnancy, and she didn’t know where to turn. The father’s patient list included a home for unwed mothers, run by nuns, and he made arrangements for them to take her in, which at least was something.

“And that’s where you gave birth?”

Yes, but she couldn’t remember a thing about it. According to Fetty, they had sedated her. It was better that she never even see the child, they told her. She had to sign a paper giving up custody. God had arranged for the baby to be taken in by a good family, they said. That would erase the shame the devil had caused by putting the child inside her in the first place.

“I woke up, and they acted like nothing had happened. I lay there weeping for days. They were witches, Felix, but there was one nun who took pity on me. She told me she had prayed for God to look after my son.”

He understood that the events she was recounting had taken place forty years in the past.

“You can give him the money, Felix. And keep some for yourself, for your trouble. I trust you. You’re the only one I can ask for help. People tell you things. You’re a policeman.”

She was being overly optimistic. In fact, most people had a tendency to say nothing when a cop showed up at their door.

“Here,” she’d said, “you take the ticket. You know what to do. I’m counting on you. Help me find my little boy.”

* * *

Felix swung his garage door shut and looked across the street. There was nothing left to be seen of the day’s drama. The ruffled sheets still hung in Fetty’s front window. Not long ago, someone farther up the street had passed on. Everyone knew about it, because the curtains had been taken down and white sheets hung in the windows. Many of the longtime residents said the Jordaan wasn’t the Jordaan they remembered anymore, but the old customs linger.

The Westertoren’s bells began to ring. It was the day of the weekly concert, Felix realized. Life went on. The carillonneur was known to be a Beatles fan. The bells played John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Yes, indeed, imagine . . .

Only then did he notice that someone in the house next door to Fetty’s was waving at him. Aunt Corrie, naturally. She saw him notice her and opened her window.

“Felix,” she called, “I’m coming down!”

Fetty had been fat and shapeless, where Aunt Corrie was fat but big-boned with more hair, which she dyed blond and wore piled atop her head. An Amsterdammer, Felix knew intuitively which women to call Auntie and which were Ma’am. Explaining the difference to an outsider would be a mission impossible.

Aunt Corrie’s eyes were puffy from crying. “Oh, Felix, I can’t believe it, gone just like that. And then the police at my door and that young man from up the street—what was he doing there? You must know all about it, don’t you?”

He could tell she was angry at herself for not immediately rushing next door to gawk. She’d been in her bedroom vacuuming and had heard screams, but she’d thought they were coming from the television, which was tuned to one of those shows where a host brings on people who are embroiled in some kind of family feud and knows exactly how to stoke the fire. By the time she returned to her living room, another program had begun and the racket had stopped. She’d looked out her window and seen Iris’s husband go in Fetty’s door. And then, later, a police car had pulled up outside.

“Well, that’s when I knew there was something wrong. But who could have guessed what it was? That poor woman. She’d finally hit the lottery, she told me so herself. You don’t think that had anything to do with it, do you, Felix? I hope not. She sent me out to buy a ridiculously expensive bottle of liquor for her. Usually, she only drank lemon gin. But she’d written the name of it on a piece of paper for me, otherwise I never would have remembered. A bottle of Highland Park whiskey, she wanted. You don’t buy something that pricey if you haven’t had a real windfall.”

She pronounced the name of the whiskey Higg-land, but he understood what she meant. It was his favorite brand. Fetty had asked him what she could give him as a thank you.

* * *

Aunt Corrie was not impressed with Iris’s husband. Neither was Felix. He’d always had the idea that Iris was the breadwinner in that family, and no idea whether or not the husband worked at all. He was certainly a world-class gabber. He’d told Felix once that he was named after a famous writer, and the implication was that he too was destined for great things.

“Vladimir,” he’d said, “after Vladimir Nabokov. Maybe you heard of Lolita? He wrote that. My father was a big fan of him.”

Felix had stood there and listened, though he had no idea why the man was telling him the story. It was not a good idea to arouse the suspicions of a detective. So Felix had done some sleuthing and discovered that the man’s middle name was Ilyich, which suggested that he had in fact been named after Lenin, not Nabokov. Of course, that didn’t mean he would harm a hair on his neighbor’s head. But Felix knew anything the man said had to be taken with a grain of salt.

“Iris is worried about her husband,” he explained. “He called her and said there was a Canta parked on the sidewalk.”

“A red one?” asked Aunt Corrie. “That must have been her brother Koos. He’s got a bad leg, so they let him drive one of those little things. But I thought they weren’t speaking, I haven’t seen him around in forever. Was he here?”

Felix didn’t know. Fetty had been a good woman, according to Aunt Corrie. But her brother was a scoundrel, only showed up when he needed money. Money for booze.

“Was he here today?” Corrie asked again.

Felix said the only thing he knew was that a handicapped car had been spotted in front of the house.

“I’m surprised he hasn’t sold that little car for booze by now. It must have been Koos. Funny I didn’t see him.”

* * *

He’d stashed the lottery money in his gun safe and hung his uniform in the closet. Back in civilian clothes, he was on his way with his colleague Dirk Blokdijk to the farthest corner of the Jordaan, just past the Palmgracht. Given that gracht is Dutch for canal, you would expect the Palmgracht to be a waterway, but the original canal had long since been filled in, and all that was left of it was the name.

“You went to the funeral?” said Dirk, a sturdy detective who preferred dogs to people. “And then came home to a dead neighbor? Some job we got, right? But whatever, we just keep on keepin’ on. So where’s this Koos Jollema you want to talk to?” He leaned out the Cordoba’s passenger window and yelled, “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Then he turned back to Felix. “Just Koos, huh, no middle name? His baby sister had one: Fetty Sjoukje Jollema.”

Felix had always assumed that Fetty was a nickname. Amsterdammers loved nicknames, and one look at Fetty told you exactly where hers had come from. In fact, he’d always thought she was called Fatty, just spoken with an Amsterdam accent.

“An original Frisian name, Felix, a name to be proud of.”

It sounded like Dirk might himself have Frisian blood in him.

“Supposedly died of a heart attack.”

Which might well have been the end of the story, except the case had turned out to be not quite that simple. The coroner found bruises on her throat, and her apartment had been ransacked.

“And we caught a guy goin’ through the place.”

The guy was Vladimir. The officers who’d responded to the call had found him in the living room. Fetty lay stretched out on the carpet, and Vladimir was digging around in an open drawer.

“He handed us this bullshit story that some other guy had threatened him with a bottle right outside the dead lady’s door, then took off in a handicapped car. He’d been walkin’ past the house when he heard a scream, which is why he went up, to make sure the neighbor lady was okay. So what were we supposed to make of that, Felix? We stuck him in a holding cell so he could think over his story. Anyway, we were too busy with other cases to deal with him, if I can call this a case.”

“His wife says he wanted to ask the man about his Canta. She’s worried about him.”

“I was locked up in a cell, my wife would worry too.”

“You could have let him call home and tell her what was going on.”

“Come on, Felix. We’re cops, not the Salvation Army.” Dirk gave him a sidelong glance. “You knew Fetty. She have anything worth stealin’ tucked away in her drawers?”

How was Felix supposed to answer that question? Instead, he avoided it. “Let’s see what the brother has to say for himself. What was he doing there? He hadn’t been to see her in years.”

“What I hear, he’s not the kind of guy you invite over for tea. He’s done time, Felix, two years for aggravated assault—way back when, but still. Not to mention several arrests for public drunkenness.”

* * *

Koos Jollema lived at the end of the Lijnbaansgracht, the slender canal that formed the western border of the Jordaan. The city wall had once stretched along the far side of the canal, but in later years it had been replaced by a long row of cheap rental units squashed side by side.

There were plenty of similar one-room apartments in the Jordaan too. They were claustrophobic little dumps, which was why so many of their residents spent much of their time in the neighborhood cafés. Which, according to one of his neighbors, was where they were bound to find Koos.

“One hundred percent chance he’s drinking himself stupid at the Van der Kruk,” she told them.

And, sure enough, they spotted a red Canta right around the corner from the Café Van der Kruk, on a side street where little had happened over the last few hundred years, other than a steady decline. The café itself was shabby enough to fit right in, nothing more than a room in which to sit and drink. In addition to the bar, there was a scattering of tables, each topped with a length of Persian carpet that wasn’t antique, just old. It was quiet inside.

The bartender was a heavy man with a few remaining strands of black hair combed over the top of his head and plastered to his scalp. He knew what Felix and Dirk did for a living before they even opened their mouths.

“Koos, you got company,” he called. “Cops. You been fucking the apes in the zoo again?”

Koos sat alone at a table next to a door along the back wall.

Dirk headed toward him. Felix stayed put by the front door.

“Relax,” said the bartender. “That’s the bathroom. No windows, no way out. And he can’t run, anyway.”

Fetty’s brother struggled to his feet. He was a little fellow with a deeply lined face and baggy pouches beneath his eyes. He staggered out from behind the table, and they saw that he dragged his right leg when he walked. He was clearly drunk.

“She send you after me?” he growled. “Jus’ ’cause I took a bottle of her whiskey? She don’t have enough to bitch about without that? I should’ve smacked her in the mouth with it and knocked that guy’s block off, the dirty yuppie.” He saw Felix looking at his leg. “Yeah, why don’t you take a picture? That fucking bastard knocked me from the deck down into the hold. I could’ve died. My knee never did heal right. And they said it was my fault I stuck a knife in him. And then my sister just totally wrote me off.”

“We’d like to talk with you about your sister,” said Felix.

* * *

They brought Koos back to his apartment, but once Dirk saw the condition of the place he insisted they go elsewhere. “This joint’s a pigsty! My dog would turn up her nose. And Brother Koos stinks to high heaven. Good thing your car’s already a wreck, Felix. At least it can’t get any worse. Come on, let’s take him someplace nice and quiet.”

Felix agreed. The only thing he could see in the apartment that wasn’t filthy was the opened bottle of whiskey on the table. He tried a cabinet door in the kitchen, looking for a glass, and his hand came away sticky. Koos apparently put things away without bothering to wash them.

“There’s no money here, so he can’t have stolen any,” Dirk said. Of course, Felix already knew where Fetty’s money was.

They saw Koos staring at the whiskey.

“Take it along,” said Felix.

Dirk wasn’t so sure. “You don’t think we’ll get in trouble?”

“He’s not going to tell anyone.”

It was a brief ride to the Palmgracht, with Koos in the backseat, a small glass of whiskey in his hand. Dirk sat beside him. Koos looked ready to fall asleep, but Dirk poked him in the ribs to keep him upright.

“Come on, pal. This ain’t a cab here.”

They listened to his story. Koos denied having killed his sister, but he showed no empathy or sorrow at her death.

“She was my sister, sure, but she was a nobody. Yeah, I grabbed her by the throat, but I didn’t hurt her. She shouldn’t’ve blown me off like she did. Wouldn’t even let me have a shot of her whiskey. But she called me, you know? I mean, I don’t have a phone, but she called my neighbor and had her go get me, and then she told me this big story how she’d come into a shitload of money, so now she could make it up to her bastard son. Well, fuck him, he don’t need money up in heaven, they taught me that in Sunday school. Now she can spend the rest of eternity up there with him. He can show her around, he’s been there long enough to know the ropes. That’s what I went to her place to tell her. ‘It’s not true,’ she whined, ‘it’s not true!’ I was lying, I wasn’t gonna get a cent of her money. What was I supposed to do, just sit there and take it?”

Dirk glanced at Felix. “You have any idea what he’s talkin’ about?”

“Hear him out.”

* * *

Back when Fetty had given birth, Koos was a merchant marine. Had Felix and Dirk ever heard of Bandar Abbas? A port city on the Persian Gulf. Hell itself couldn’t be hotter or grungier. When his ship docked there, he’d found a letter from his sister waiting with the news. It was months before he was back in Holland and got the story straight from his sister’s mouth.

“No kid and no money. They just kicked her to the curb, that fucking doctor and his fucking son. Stick your dick inside some dumb little girl, blame her for everything, and then take away her baby.”

He’d shown up at the doctor’s door and convinced the man to give Fetty two thousand guilders. Then they’d be done with each other forever. The only condition was Fetty had to come collect the payment herself.

“And she wouldn’t do it. Said it was blood money. I tried to talk her into it, but she flat-out refused. We could have shared it: a thousand guilders for her, a thousand for me. But forget about it. I should have choked the little cunt then.”

“But you waited almost forty years to do it,” said Felix.

“I always been able to look out for myself. I didn’t need her.”

“You got two years’ room and board from us,” Dirk said. “And the way I see it, pretty soon the state’ll be takin’ care of you again. Only I don’t think you’ll be sluggin’ down any more expensive whiskey for a while.”

Koos ignored the remark. “She won the lottery, she told me. And now she was gonna find her little boy.”

“The little boy you told her was dead?”

“Like I know if he’s alive or dead? But what else could have happened to him? She never heard a peep out of him, all those years. Wouldn’t you go look up your real mother, if it was you? Wouldn’t you? All she had to do was set some of the dough aside for me. But no, not her. Just show me the money, I said. Show me the ticket. It wasn’t none of my business, she said. You’d think she was scared I’d steal it. And then she started screaming I should get out. She wouldn’t even give me a damn drink.” He looked hungrily at Dirk, who was holding the bottle, and Dirk in turn looked at Felix. Who nodded.

“Okay,” said Dirk, “one more. Call it your last meal.”

While Koos drank, the two detectives left him alone.

“So now what?” said Dirk, once they had parked and gotten out of the car. “We’re supposed to believe the sister was still alive when he left?”

“He choked her,” said Felix. “He admits it, we both heard him say so. And his sister’s dead, no doubt about that. I say we arrest him on suspicion of manslaughter, book him, and charge him. The rest’s up to the court. Let’s go.”

“What about the neighbor?”

“He’ll testify he saw the brother leaving the apartment.”

Dirk glanced down at the bottle he was still holding. “And the whiskey?”

“Dirk, you’ve been a cop longer than me. The man confessed. He won’t complain we let him wet his whistle. The whiskey doesn’t come into it. Hand it over.”

Felix took it and poured it down the gutter, then tossed the empty bottle in a trash can, along with Dirk’s glass.

“What a crying shame,” said Dirk.

Felix knew it wasn’t just the liquor that was worth crying over, but he kept that thought to himself.

* * *

The lottery money had been paid out in five-hundred-euro notes. They were spread out on Felix’s kitchen table, a hundred of them. He gathered them together in a nice neat stack. It wasn’t his money, but whose was it? Did he now have a claim on it? He sighed and put the bills back in the safe with his gun.

He could have used a shot of whiskey, but all he had in the fridge was a bottle of Coke Zero.

“Here’s to you, Fetty,” he said aloud, standing at his front window and raising a glass to the darkened apartment across the street. He was still thinking about the money.

He remembered a song his grandmother used to sing: Money isn’t happiness—at least it isn’t yet—but the more of it you gather, well, the closer you can get . . .

He realized that he was humming the tune. He reopened his gun safe and spread the bills out again on the table.

The television was on, and he looked up from the money to see an ad for the new Seat Ateca. Was that a sign from above?

The money’s rightful owner was dead. She didn’t seem to have left a will, so her estate—such as it was—would go to her legal heirs. No way that would be the son she’d given up for adoption, even if the boy—a man now, somewhere in his forties—was still alive. And the courts would disinherit the brother who had very probably been responsible for her death. Who did that leave? There was no written record of Fetty’s agreement with Felix. He had bought the lottery ticket, and he had cashed it in.

He sighed, once again piled up the fifty thousand euros, and locked them away.

“Fetty, I’m going to drink a whiskey in your memory after all,” he announced, taking his jacket from the coatrack. They carried Highland Park in the café up the street. He knew that from personal experience.

Maybe he’d just leave the money where it was for a while. Sometimes problems solve themselves, if you let them sit. Of course he knew better, but for now he was in no mood to go on thinking about it.

He pulled his apartment door shut behind him and headed down the stairs. The Westertoren’s carillon began to play. The bells tolled for everyone, but in Felix’s mind they rang for one old woman in particular.