Amsterdam Noir

Welcome To Amsterdam by Michael Berg

Schiphol Airport

A guard calls my name. I wish I could ignore him, but I know better. I get up and stagger to the cell door.

“Move it!”

The other prisoners watch me go, their faces blank.

“This way!”

The guard shoves me down the passage.

I walk. Breathe. I’m not dead yet.

The corridor is long and wide. It’s an open field compared to the cell I share with twenty-five other prisoners.

Saydnaya is hell. I’ve haven’t been here long, but long enough to have been robbed of any hope. No one gets out of this place alive. Every day is an ordeal. The interrogations, the torture, the sadism of the guards. It’s all just a delay tactic: at the far end of the tunnel, I’m well aware, death awaits me. It will be a release.

We descend into the cellar. As we pass the torture chambers, I hear cries of pain from behind their heavy doors. Or perhaps that’s just my imagination.

“In here!”

The guard kicks me into a room I haven’t yet seen. A dimly lit space that stinks of sweat and piss. A porno film is playing on a big white screen. The volume is cranked up loud. Eight prisoners are being forced to watch the movie. If any of them dares to look away, a guard smashes him in the ribs with a metal baton.

Moaning.

Screaming.

And above all else, the amplified panting of the copulating couple on the screen.

“Take your clothes off!”

The man who issues this command is big, broad, and in his midfifties. He has a bushy mustache. He approaches me, limping on one leg.

“Clothes off!”

He slaps me across the face with the back of his hand.

I take my clothes off. The guards watch, grinning. They make sarcastic comments about my body. One of them taps my butt with his baton.

“Nice ass,” he says.

The man with the mustache shows me where to stand, facing the screen, my legs pressed up against a massive oak table. Two leather restraints are nailed to its surface, and he signals me to lay my hands on the leather. The straps are buckled tight, fixing me in place.

“Spread your legs!” the mustache orders. Then he turns to the prisoners behind me. “Gentlemen,” he says — and, to judge by the scream, one of them takes another blow to the ribs — “be my guest!”

Dared al-Saeed walked into the departure hall of JFK’s Terminal 4 and looked around. Four years ago, this was where he had arrived. Since that day, he hadn’t flown again. The thought of spending hours in the enclosed cabin of a plane filled with other passengers made him break out in a cold sweat.

He had long debated whether or not to accept the invitation to present at the medical conference. The location was what finally convinced him: Amsterdam. As a young student, he and his brother Mustafa had visited the city. The Red-Light District, the pot shops, the bars, the canals, the blond girls lying on the grass in the Vondelpark with their long bare legs. Amsterdam had been a hallucinatory experience for them both.

And now Mustafa was dead.

As were four hundred thousand of their countrymen.

While he, Dared, had survived.

He felt terribly guilty.

This trip would be a testament to his brother’s memory. And at the same time, it would give him the opportunity to overcome his fear of flying.

He checked in, followed the signs to passport control. The new president had complained about leaky borders and promised that — as soon as he moved into the White House — they would be dramatically tightened. But Dared didn’t notice much of a difference. No gray-suited men with earpieces, no police, no armed soldiers.

The immigration officer was a rosy-cheeked white man. Dared handed over his passport and green card. As the man examined the documents, Dared saw him frown for just a moment. Dared al-Saeed, born December 10, 1988, in Damascus, Syria. Permanent resident since 2015.

“I hope you thanked our previous president for this,” the agent remarked, returning the passport and laminated card. “Have a good trip.”

“Thank you,” Dared smiled in return.

Not everyone in the United States had lost their minds.

He checked the departure board and found that his flight, KL 6070, would leave from gate B32. There was a long line at the La Brea Bakery. His stomach clenched, and he suddenly felt dizzy. A panic attack. No coffee, then, and no sandwich. All these people, all this hustle and bustle. He couldn’t handle it. Maybe this trip wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Leaving the crowd behind, he crossed to his gate. He found a quiet place to sit, slid his laptop from his carry-on, and settled in to go over his presentation yet again. Slowly, he felt himself relax.

A voice on the PA eventually announced his flight.

It was just after four. Dared looked up. There weren’t many people in line at the gate. Aboard the Boeing, he found his window seat. There was no one else in his row. As the aircraft taxied out to the runway and the flight attendants delivered their safety instructions, he set his watch ahead to Central European Time.

The engines fired up, and the plane gained speed. Dared felt himself pressed back in his seat. There was no way out of it now — seven hours in the air. He wondered if he should take one Ambien or two.

“Where is your brother?”

I sit on a wooden chair. My hands are cuffed behind my back, my ankles bound to the legs of the chair with plastic zip ties. Except for a filthy pair of boxers, I am naked. I don’t care. After four months in Saydnaya, I have left all shame far behind.

“Where is your brother?”

The man with the mustache punches me in the face. I hear the cartilage in my nose break.

“Answer me!”

His eagle eyes glitter dangerously.

By now, I know his name: Karim al-Zaliq. Because of his strength and temperament, everyone in the red building calls him Thur — the Bull.

“If you don’t tell me where we can find your brother, I’ll knock your teeth out.” There are brass knuckles on his clenched right fist, and, grinning, he brandishes them before me.

I’ve seen Thur knock more than one man’s teeth out. It’s one of his specialties. Eventually it will be my turn; it’s just a question of time.

“Where is your brother?”

“I don’t know,” I lie.

“He’s not at his home.”

“Maybe he left Damascus.”

“For where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are his friends hiding him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who are his friends?”

“I don’t know his friends.”

“You’re lying.”

“My brother’s four years older than me. We—”

“You lie!”

When he cocks his arm, I close my eyes and wait for the blow.

Do it, I think. Kill me.

“You so-called rebels are all the same!” Thur is shouting now. “Cowards, all of you! You’ll never beat us!” He turns to the waiting guards. “Cut his legs free.”

Before I know what’s happening, they dump me into the bathtub that stands in a corner of the cell. I don’t weigh anything anymore. I haven’t had a real meal in weeks; I have the runs all the time. I look like the other prisoners, like a dead man.

The water in the tub is a yellowish brown and smells like piss and shit. I try to breathe through my mouth and squeeze my nostrils shut. I close my eyes.

“So.” It’s Thur’s voice. “Now tell me where your brother is.”

“I don’t know.”

“All right then.”

One of the guards holds my ankles and another shoves my head under the vile water.

I hold my breath.

Don’t think, I order myself. If I think, I’ll go mad.

The hands that hold me under release their pressure. Gasping for breath, I emerge from the filth.

“Where is your brother?”

“I don’t know. I swear—”

The hands push me down again. Longer, this time. I can’t hold my breath anymore. I swallow. The sludge runs down my throat, into my lungs. Much more of this and I’ll drown.

“Where is your brother? Who are his friends?”

I feel myself break, and I begin to speak.

The plane began its descent. Dared could feel the pressure on his eardrums. He opened his eyes.

“Are you all right, sir?”

The flight attendant, an attractive woman in her midtwenties, was leaning over him.

“I’m fine,” he assured her, checking his watch. “How much longer until we land in Amsterdam?”

Her brow furrowed. “You didn’t hear the captain’s announcement?”

He looked up at her, not understanding. He hadn’t heard an announcement. He had slept and dreamed — the usual terrible nightmare.

“Schiphol is closed,” the flight attendant told him.

“Schiphol?”

“Sorry, sir. The Amsterdam airport.” She smiled apologetically. “Heavy fog and sleet. We’ve been rerouted to Paris. There’ll be a ticket and a voucher waiting for you at the customer service desk. The ticket’s for this evening’s flight to Amsterdam, and the voucher’s for a hotel room in the city center. You can spend a few hours in Paris, get some sleep if you like, and still make it to your destination today. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, sir.” She showed him her lovely smile again.

“I, ah...”

He needed time to process this new information. The medical conference didn’t begin until tomorrow. A few hours in Paris. He had never been to the City of Light. Obviously he’d take the hotel room. With any luck, he’d have time to explore the place a bit, perhaps visit a museum, find something good to eat, and...

Do you have plans for today?

The question perched on the tip of his tongue.

He swallowed it.

“Thank you, miss,” he said.

The rumor has been going around the red building for days. Saydnaya is overcrowded, and fifty prisoners are being moved to some other facility. One of the two affected cells is mine. Can it be true?

“Line up!”

Shortly before midnight, Thur and a platoon of guards haul us out of our cell.

“Faster,” Thur orders, complacently stroking his mustache.

They herd us through the corridor, down the stairs to the cellar. The occupants of the other cell are already there. They stand in a circle, and their guards are beating them with whips, sticks, batons, anything capable of inflicting pain. It is an orgy of violence. Then the kicking begins. In the face, the stomach, the back.

And we stand there, watching.

“Second group!”

With the first kick, it feels as if my spleen has ruptured. The second is worse. Please, kick me unconscious. But Thur and his goons know exactly how far they can go. They take turns. Kicking, punching, spitting, pulling my hair. It goes on for an hour, maybe two. I lose all sense of time and place.

Finally, they force us to our feet and drive us outside. It’s the middle of the night. The Big Dipper is bright in the sky. If I’m seeing properly, that is, for one of my eyes is swollen shut and the other is bleeding. I breathe in the cool desert air and am surprised to be alive.

We’re shoved toward a large structure.

“The white building,” one of my cellmates whispers.

I’ve never seen it before, but I know the stories. The white building is where they keep the officers and enlisted men who have refused to support the Assad regime. The tortures to which they are subjected are far worse than what we’ve experienced.

“Let’s go, move it!”

Down in the cellar, we find ourselves in a huge space that looks like an underground parking garage. Dozens of nooses hang from the stone ceiling. Some of the prisoners begin to weep, others pray.

I feel more relief than anything else. In the name of Allah, let it be over quickly.

Chairs are brought out and set beneath the nooses. Fifty chairs for fifty hangings. Before they order us up, they roughly pull a burlap sack over each of our heads.

Someone helps me onto a chair.

I can barely stand.

Yes, I think, it’s about time.

A noose tightens around my throat.

Dared gazed out the window. It was hard to get comfortable; he was squeezed between two big-boned women, but even that failed to dampen his good mood. The flight to Amsterdam would be a short one. He looked forward to the city, to the conference.

His interlude in Paris had been a success: a visit to the Louvre, a delicious meal, a stroll along the Seine. He’d even had time for a brief nap in the hotel room they’d given him — and, for the first time in years, he had slept soundly, undisturbed by nightmares and panic attacks. This trip, the interruption of his normal routine, was doing him good. For the last few years, he had worked like a madman, taking better care of his patients and colleagues than he took of himself. But he couldn’t go on like that forever. He had to think of himself too. He had to live the life he had been given.

He glanced at his watch. KL 1244 had been scheduled to take off at 6:40 p.m., but the plane was still parked at the gate. From his vantage point, it looked like the entire cabin was occupied, with the sole exception of the window seat three rows in front of him. Low voices came from the front of the plane. It sounded as if someone was being welcomed. A delayed passenger?

Then a man walked through the curtain separating the first-class and economy cabins.

Dared felt as if a knife had been plunged into his heart.

It’s the morning after the mass execution. I’m sitting in an office far from the cells and the torture chambers. The treatment to which I’ve been subjected has shattered me. I can barely sit or stand, but my mind is clear. Through the window, for the first time in months, I see the sun.

“Sign it,” grins Thur, “and you’ll be rid of us forever.”

The other men in the room — the general, the lawyer, the guards — all laugh.

Before me on the table lies a statement that begins with the words: I, Dared al-Saeed...

Once I sign it, I’ll be a free man.

I read through the statement. During my incarceration at Saydnaya, it says, I have been treated well, never tortured, never insulted. I have received all the necessary medical care. That’s what it says.

Bullshit.

As is the reason given for my release: General amnesty.

What a joke.

The truth is, they are letting me go because my father, who maintains a close connection with the Assad clan, has paid them a very large sum of money. Should I be grateful? My father and I have never agreed about politics. Now I’ll have to thank him for his intervention. The prospect is unwelcome. In my fourteen months at Saydnaya, I have lost everything I lived for, everything I believed in: my pride, my faith in humanity.

Worst of all, I have betrayed my brother Mustafa. I am deeply ashamed.

One stroke of the pen and I will be free.

Thur and the other men sniff impatiently.

My hand trembling, I pick up the pen. Every muscle in my body hurts.

I sign the statement.

The few seconds Dared was able to see him were sufficient. The limp, the expression, the hooked nose, the way he stroked his mustache before asking the passengers in the aisle and middle seats to let him by. Dared was absolutely certain: in the window seat three rows before him sat Karim al-Zaliq, alias Thur, the Bull.

Dared broke out in a cold sweat, and his mind raced with the images that had tormented him ever since his release: the torture, the humiliation, the dehumanization. There were no words to describe what had been done to him in Saydnaya.

As the plane lifted off the ground, he could feel an unstoppable rage course through him. What the fuck is Thur doing here? Had he retired and left Syria behind? How could such a bastard have escaped punishment for his crimes?

To ask the question was to answer it. All the bastards remained free men, up to and including President Assad himself. Dared remembered the interview he’d given two years before to an investigator from Amnesty International. His testimony — along with that of some eighty other victims — had been incorporated into a report with conclusions that had been impossible to deny. In Saydnaya, thousands of innocents had been systematically tortured and murdered. Students, lawyers, human-rights activists, soldiers, officers. Since the failure of the Arab Spring, somewhere between five thousand and thirteen thousand of the regime’s opponents had been executed. Three hundred deaths per month, often many more than that, and the torture and murder had continued to this day.

The most loathsome fact of all was that the guilty parties would never be held to account for their crimes. Russia still supported Assad, while the rest of the world declined to choose sides and simply waited for the conflict to bleed itself out. Now that the dictator had the upper hand, he was once again the only authority the West could engage with. That thought was unbearable, and Dared struggled with it daily. Was there nothing he could do?

Thur returned from the bathroom at the front of the economy cabin. He’d been there twice already. A weak bladder, Dared suspected. Or airsickness. He had considered following Thur into the narrow space and killing him. But how? Thur was bigger and, despite the difference in their ages, undoubtedly stronger. And how could Dared hope to leave the scene of such an act without being noticed?

An absurd idea.

A daydream.

Thur deserved to die, but Dared wasn’t prepared to risk his hard-won freedom to achieve that end.

He watched as his enemy stood, waiting for the passengers in his row to make room for him, absently stroking his bushy mustache. For the briefest moment, Thur looked right at him, and his eagle eyes glittered. Had he recognized Dared? It was hard to believe that could be possible. Thur had personally tortured, humiliated, and murdered hundreds, if not thousands, of men. Merciless, a killing machine. And the bastard probably never lost a second of sleep over his deeds.

Dared balled his fists and saw his knuckles whiten. The women on either side of him inched away. He tried to force himself to smile, but failed.

The seat-belt sign illuminated. “This is your captain speaking...” The voice on the PA system announced that the plane would be landing at Amsterdam’s airport in a quarter of an hour. The temperature on the ground was 41°F, visibility was good, and there was no wind.

Inside Dared’s head, however, a storm raged. Anger, frustration — especially the latter. Sitting so close to the man who had destroyed his life and had been responsible for the death of his brother, yet he was unable to do anything about it. He craved revenge, but understood that his options were extremely limited. Perhaps he could turn Thur over to the police upon their arrival at the airport. This man is a war criminal. Arrest him!

They would laugh at him.

Meanwhile, Thur had visited the bathroom yet again. Visibly perspiring, he limped back to his seat. Was he ill? Dared hoped so. Typhoid fever, cancer. He would be happy if the villain dropped dead right there and then. Aisle Seat and Middle Seat stood once more to make room for him, and Thur dropped clumsily back into his place by the window.

The airplane descended through the clouds. Far below lay The Netherlands, a sea of lights. Streets, highways, homes. A network of orderly straight lines.

With a gentle bump, the Boeing touched down and taxied toward the terminal. The moment it came to a stop, the passengers jumped up and pulled their carry-ons from the overhead racks. The aircraft’s door opened, and the seats and aisles gradually emptied.

Thur remained in his seat, his head resting against the window, as if he’d fallen asleep.

Dared also stayed where he was, no idea what his next move might be.

“You all right, sir?”

With a concerned expression on her face, the flight attendant bent over Thur, who mumbled something inaudible, got to his feet, took a small case from the bin, and, supporting himself by holding onto the seat backs, struggled up the aisle to the exit door.

Dared slung his messenger bag over his shoulder and followed.

“Have a nice stay in Amsterdam, sir.”

As he nodded his thanks to the crew member at the door, Dared watched Thur stagger up the jet bridge like a drunkard. The man was definitely sick. Dared stayed close behind him.

They reached the far end of the jetway. The terminal was visible on the other side of a glass wall. There was still some distance to go before they would arrive at passport control. A sign on a pole apologized for the moving walkway being out of service. Thur made an annoyed gesture and stumbled slowly on, Dared keeping thirty feet behind him.

The Bull reached the restrooms, then leaned against the wall between them, as if unsure which was the right one. Then he pushed the men’s room door open and went inside.

Dared hesitated. Should he follow the Bull into the bathroom? And, if so, then what?

He looked around. No travelers, no airport personnel, no crew. The corridor was deserted.

He pushed open the bathroom door and examined the interior. Three urinals and two sinks to the right, four stalls to the left. The handicapped stall’s door stood open a crack.

As Dared listened for evidence of anyone else’s presence, he saw Thur sitting on the floor of the handicapped stall, leaning against the side wall, his eyes closed, his face white and dripping with sweat, his jacket unbuttoned. His suitcase lay at his feet.

Dared pushed the stall door open.

“Hello?”

There was no response.

“Are you all right?”

He said the words in English, and there was no sign that the Bull was aware of him standing there. He set his messenger bag down on the floor and leaned over Thur.

“Can you hear me?”

No reaction.

“Do you need help?” he asked, this time in Arabic.

Thur opened his eyes and peered up at him in surprise.

“Are you sick?”

Thur nodded as if it was a foolish question and stammered something unintelligible.

“What’s that you say?” said Dared, swinging the stall door closed behind him.

“Hypodermic,” the Bull gasped.

Dared recognized the symptoms: the pale face, the perspiration, the irritation. Karim al-Zaliq was diabetic, and his blood sugar was dangerously low.

“Dextrose,” the man managed to say, and he motioned to his case, which he had apparently been unable to open.

Dared undid the clasps. Inside one of the compartments, he found a vial of dextrose tablets and four insulin pens and needles.

“Dextrose,” Thur said impatiently.

“I can’t find your tablets,” Dared replied, turning the case so Thur couldn’t see the vial.

The Bull muttered angrily.

Dared took the four needles from their sterile packaging, pressed each onto a separate insulin pen, rotating them clockwise to engage their locking threads, then set each pen to the maximum dosage. When he flicked the top end of each barrel with a fingernail, he saw Thur’s eyes widen in fear.

“What are you—?”

Before the man could move, Dared jabbed two of the needles into his stomach.

“What are you doing?”

“Repaying you for all the deaths you have on your conscience,” Dared spat out, pressing the plungers.

Thur’s mouth gaped wide. “Were you in—?”

“I was,” said Dared, reaching for the two remaining pens. “I was in Saydnaya.” He injected the third dose of insulin. “This one is for my brother. And this one” — he drove the fourth needle home — “this one is for me.”

Thur’s eyes closed, and he slumped to the floor. Dared checked his wrist for a pulse, and found only the slightest flutter. Unless the man was given sugar, he would be dead in fifteen minutes, possibly less.

Dared carefully wiped the pens clean with his handkerchief, then pressed each of their barrels against the fingertips of the Bull’s right hand. He picked up his messenger bag and slung it over his shoulder, slipped out of the stall, closed the door behind him, and left the bathroom without looking back.

Following the exit signs, Dared found himself again surrounded by other travelers: men, women, children, from all directions on the compass. For the first time in years, the sight of so many people around him did not bring on a panic attack. He joined one of the passport control lines, patiently shuffling forward as he waited his turn.

The officer had short hair and wore a light-blue shirt with dark-blue epaulets. Dared handed over his passport. The officer examined it, looking back and forth between the document and the man who had presented it — checking the photo, Dared supposed.

He had just killed a man.

Anyone else would be flushed, shaking in his boots.

But Dared was completely calm. No regrets, no remorse. The only thing he felt was an incredible lightness, the burden he had borne for years at last lifted from his shoulders.

Smiling, the officer returned his passport. “Have a nice stay, sir,” he said.

Dared moved on toward baggage claim. When he found the correct carousel, the conveyor belt had just begun to spit up its load of luggage. The passengers from his flight jostled for position, anxious to collect their possessions and be on their way. Dared ignored the pushing and shoving. It was as if he was wearing protective armor. As he worked his way closer to the belt, he glanced around. Somewhere among that sea of suitcases and garment bags and shrink-wrapped cardboard cartons must be a bag belonging to the Bull. How long would it be before someone found him in the bathroom? Was anyone waiting for him? Would anyone miss him? Dared couldn’t imagine the man had friends or family.

He claimed his suitcase and headed for the green Nothing to Declare sign. A customs agent nodded him through. He walked on.

The arrivals hall was mobbed. Children with balloons, mothers and fathers, a young man with a bouquet of red roses, all searching eagerly for their loved ones.

Dared wondered if someone from the conference would come to fetch him. He’d e-mailed the organizers this morning from Paris to inform them that he’d be on the evening flight, but he’d had no response. He scanned his surroundings. There was a shop selling blue Delft plates and other souvenirs. On the walls, huge posters showed windmills and fields of red and yellow tulips and canal houses and Rembrandt’s Night Watch.

This time, Dared decided, he would go to the Rijksmuseum and see the famous painting for himself.

He was about to give up hope of being met when he saw her. A pretty young woman with long blond hair and green eyes. She was holding a sign with his name printed on it in large capital letters.

Waving, he approached her. “Hello,” he said, “I’m Dared.”

“Hi, Dared.” She had a lovely smile. “I’m Saskia. Welcome to Amsterdam.”

Spui 13 by Anneloes Timmerije

Centrum

April 2016

Ella disappeared on the day I began to live alone in the heart of the city after thirty years of marriage. The day I returned to where I came from, to the person I used to be.

I knew something was up when she didn’t drop by as we’d agreed, but I drew the wrong conclusion from her absence. Ella is always on time, unless a major story breaks. Then she vanishes, and no one can reach her. That’s the way it goes in her line of work.

I decided to consider her nonappearance Lesson #1 in my New Life course, so I threw on a jacket, checked myself in the mirror, and — passing through the living room where Mimi had fought for her life — left the house and walked over to the Athenaeum Bookstore on the corner, as I’d done so many times in the past.

Even before my move, I’d decided not to have anything delivered to my new digs, so that at least once a day I’d have to get out of the house. I bought a newspaper from a girl who could have been me back then: eighteen, maybe nineteen years old, working part-time for extra cash to supplement whatever academic scholarship she was getting. I grew up behind a counter, so I knew the drill. In the four years I worked at the Athenaeum, I dealt with unkempt punks and unwed mothers, sold newspapers in six languages and hash brownies. Over and above my paltry salary, I had the opportunity to meet famous writers like Harry Mulisch and John Irving, the crown princess incognito, and the king of the squatters in full regalia. Everyone who was anyone and everyone who was no one came to the Athenaeum — and there I stood in the middle of it all.

This part of the city is now clean and predictable, all the anarchy of the olden days long gone. The bookstore no longer shows customers with lousy taste the door, and Het Lieverdje — the beloved bronze statue of a cheerful boy of the streets — has survived the Provo riots, the happenings, even its own kidnapping. After eleven occupations by students, the University of Amsterdam’s Maagdenhuis remains stately and forgiving, true to the line from the Gospel According to Mark carved into its lintel: Suffer the little children to come unto me. The square has been newly repaved with stones and is ringed by stuccoed and lacquered buildings — an open invitation to a comfortable and carefree life.

I should have been relieved that day — and happy — but what I felt when I slipped my key into the outer door was alienation. As if I no longer belonged on the “village green,” as Ella used to call the Spui.

I climbed the stairs and let myself into my new home, settled onto my new couch with a bag of chips and the paper, clicked on my new television for company, and fell asleep.

A call from the police awoke me. Apparently my ex had given them my number.

A moment later, although the camera connected to my new doorbell wasn’t yet working properly, I recognized over the intercom the same female voice I’d just heard on the phone. She must have called from across the street, or right in front of my door. I was surprised to see that she was alone; perhaps the police only travel in pairs on TV shows. Ella knows that sort of thing.

She was the one who’d given me the courage to leave my husband, to return to my old stomping grounds. She had kept me grounded as I ripped myself free of the suffocating relationship I had too long confused with love. She’d never pressured me, had always been understanding — though it was true there’d been times she’d impatiently stamped her foot, frustrated with my hesitations and delay.

Of the two of us, Ella is the strong one, the independent one, the determined one, the one who’s always ready to lend a helping hand to a friend in need. I am the quiet one, the timid one, the mouse. It takes awhile to discover that there’s more to me than meets the eye. That’s the way it was even when we were childhood friends in the Haarlemmerstraat, skipping rope on the narrow sidewalk in front of our fathers’ shops.

“We take this matter very seriously,” the detective said.

“This matter” was a video that had been delivered to De Telegraaf — one of Amsterdam’s largest daily newspapers — a few hours earlier.

“Was it a message from Ella,” I asked, “or from someone else, about her?”

Instead of responding to my question, the detective posed one of her own: what was Ella working on?

I never know what Ella’s working on, I answered honestly. Nobody knows what Ella’s working on — that’s why she’s so good at what she does. Her secrecy, Ella says, is what allows her to do her job: her silence protects her sources, her family, her friends... and herself.

“We were going to watch a movie,” I said, nodding at the Blu-ray of The Graduate on the coffee table, “to christen my new house.”

We only watch The Graduate on special occasions. The first time, at the Tuschinski, we were fifteen, maybe sixteen, and we dreamed of growing up to be Joan Baez. Mimi was still with us then. Before we even left the theater, the three of us agreed that we instead wanted to grow up to be Katharine Ross. Ella was already on her way, with that thick brown hair. When we were forty, we saw The Graduate again, now through the eyes of mature women. Ten years later, we watched it a third time, and last year we’d planned yet another showing to celebrate our making it to sixty despite all the cigarettes we’d smoked. That screening never happened, though, since Ella was on the road for the newspaper and I was busy explaining to my husband what an insufferable ass he had become.

On the day of Ella’s disappearance, we’d planned a catch-up Graduate to mark my independence — and, more than that, without either of us having said the words aloud, as a tribute to Mimi. After that, we were going to have dinner at Café Luxembourg, Ella’s favorite. That was all I had to offer the policewoman, I thought at the time.

The kidnapping made the evening news and was almost instantly a trending topic on Twitter. By the next morning, photos of the most famous crime reporter in The Netherlands were everywhere you looked. The banner headline on the front page of De Telegraaf, her employer, screamed, “WHO HAS OUR ELLA?” in oversized capitals.

I’d spent the night in a chair by the window, with all the lights out and the curtains open, waiting for some word from her, staring at the barred windows of the Esprit store across the road, at the soft glow of the streetlights, at the black-and-white neighborhood cat — officially the Luxembourg’s house cat, who lay deep in thought across the Begijnhof’s doorway — at the pedestrians, mostly solitary men who walked past my house from left to right or right to left without giving it a second glance. Some of them were visibly drunk, some hurried self-confidently by as if they were on their way to jobs that really mattered. Between two and five a.m., young women pedaled past on their bicycles, like Ella and I did years ago — without worry, without fear — until Mimi’s fate forever changed our relationship to our little corner of the city.

Ella sometimes jokes that if twenty-four hours go by and I haven’t heard from her, she’s probably lying at the bottom of the Amstel River with a bullet in her head. In that case, my instructions are to get in touch with Bert.

She says it lightly, and I know she is unafraid of the dangers that are such an integral part of her world, a world with which I am completely unfamiliar. She seems to enjoy the excitement, but when no one is paying attention — not even she herself — I think it gnaws at her. Anguish stalks her at the very moments when there’s nothing to be concerned about. When I stay over at her place, or when we share a room on one of our hiking trips, her nightmares keep me awake.

My ex, the son of a bitch, texted to warn me not to involve him in any way, shape, or form in that Ella business. Nobody seemed interested in how I was doing, another reminder of all the people who’d unfriended me. The one who walks away from a marriage is the one to blame, something like that. Only the publisher at the company for which I’ve been freelancing for years took the trouble the next morning to stop by. All he had to do was walk across the street, but his concern seemed genuine and I appreciated the support. We talked about Ella, and then — to convince ourselves that things couldn’t be as bad as they seemed — about a manuscript I was proofreading for him. Before he left, he congratulated me on my new home and my new life. “It’s so cozy here on the Spui,” he said.

And that was my welcome back to the neighborhood where, once upon a time, Ella and I had majored in the Dutch language at the University of Amsterdam, where, encouraged by our parents, we had escaped the humdrum fate of Haarlemmerstraat shopgirls to which, only a few decades earlier, we would have been doomed. Here, at this exact part of the city, our freedom began. Here, for us, the world began.

The morning after Ella’s kidnapping, it seemed as if the world converged on the Spui — I had to zigzag around knots of gawkers to reach the Heisteeg. On my way to the Lijnbaansgracht police station, I imitated the self-confident tread of the men at night: Here I come, and nothing bad can possibly happen to me. From the desk sergeant’s reaction to my name, I could see that any hope it had all been a misunderstanding was misplaced. There’s always that glimmer of hope when something awful happens, even though you ought to know better. Ella and I had experienced that with Mimi. But the desk sergeant knew exactly who I was and why I was there. There was no misunderstanding; it was all true.

The Telegraaf’s editor-in-chief was the only person other than the detectives who had seen the video. I watched it three times that morning, together with a man who introduced himself as Theo, a detective in the major-crimes unit, not much older than me.

It opened with a shot of my house, filmed from across the street: a narrow building, not quite perpendicular to the ground, an unimportant afterthought compared to the chic art nouveau home next door. The camera zoomed in slowly on my front door. In the next shot, I was lugging two huge suitcases, tagging behind Ella, who wore a backpack and carried a smaller bag in her left hand and a key in her right. She opened the door, took a step back, made an exaggerated bow, and ushered me in with a sweep of her arm. It was funny: we looked like teenagers moving into a dorm. That was our way of dealing with the serious nature of the occasion.

The remaining shots were almost all of Ella. She’d been filmed on the way to my house, and coming out the front door, and walking along the Spui, probably heading back to her own apartment on the Singel. I laughed when I saw her wrestling with the lamp she’d bought as a housewarming gift and had planted in my still-empty living room to surprise me. For those few seconds, I could almost imagine I was watching a rerun of The Banana Splits.

Theo paused the video the second time we watched it.

“She had a key to your house?” he asked.

“She still does.”

He nodded and pressed play.

Ella, sitting at a wooden table, a white wall as backdrop. I was surprised to see how normal she appeared. It was like looking at the Ella who reports on a high-profile murder case, the Ella we all know from television: eloquent, informed, well put together. Her left eye was slightly squinted, the only clue to the nervousness she must have been feeling.

“This message is for my man,” she said, straight into the camera. “I’m fine, I’m getting enough to eat and drink, I’m not being mistreated.” She took a breath, cleared her throat, and continued: “I’m being held against my will. The conditions for my release will follow.”

The screen went blank.

“She doesn’t have a man,” I said.

Ella doesn’t believe in long-term relationships, they’re far too complicated. Typically, her boyfriends don’t last longer than a month or so; after that, she gets bored and gives up. She usually sees two or three guys simultaneously, though more recently she’s begun to find that too exhausting. Instead, she’s bought two additional apartments — in the wake of the financial crisis, she was able to pick them up relatively cheaply — so she now has three home addresses scattered around the city. Real estate is her current passion.

“She means me,” Theo said. “My last name is Mann. Ella and I have known each other professionally for years. She’s talking to me.”

It was only then that I realized something Theo already knew: “They think my house belongs to Ella.”

Theo raised an eyebrow.

I asked him when he’d figured it out.

“Last night, soon as I saw the video. Spui 13 is still a red flag for me, so I sent my colleague over to talk to you.”

Mimi was twenty-one, the same age as Ella and me, when she was awakened by a loud noise that October night, almost forty years ago. Her boyfriend Mark was a sound sleeper, which we felt at the time explained why she had gone down to Spui 13’s second floor alone to see what was causing the racket.

It came out during the trial that two men, brothers, had broken into the shop on the ground floor and climbed the stairs to our two-level apartment. One of the brothers put a knife to Mimi’s throat. “Just to scare her,” he told the judge. But then he raped her. And then the other brother took a turn, except he was so drunk he couldn’t come. That’s when — according to the second brother’s testimony — things got out of hand. He slit Mimi’s throat with a single sweep of his own blade. Meanwhile, the first brother went up to the third floor and beat Mark to death with a bicycle chain.

Theo Mann was a young patrolman at the time. His supervisor recognized in him a talent for detective work and brought him along to the scene. The murders of Mimi and Mark, he told me, remained one of the grisliest crimes of his long career. What he saw that night, the butchery of two people around the same age as himself, had stayed with him for all the years that had followed.

“Mimi was my cousin,” I told him that afternoon, after we watched the video.

I didn’t have to think about it for long when I heard that the building was going to be auctioned off. Ella was the one who first found out about it, of course — I never hear about things like that. “Buy it,” she’d said, but without putting too much pressure on me. And you don’t have to know much about real estate to understand that a property like that one — a sweet little house, the smallest on the Spui — doesn’t come on the market often.

“Unusual,” Theo remarked tactfully. “Most people wouldn’t want a house with that history.”

Mimi’s parents — who had died a year after the murders; of grief, my mother always said — had tried to buy it at the time, to prevent strangers from moving in. But the owner, a notorious slumlord, hadn’t even responded to their repeated offers.

“It used to be our house,” I said, “a long time ago. Ella and I squatted there.”

If that weekend had unfolded differently, it would have been our dead bodies the young Theo would have investigated. Ella and I had wanted to get away for a few days to London, but we didn’t dare leave the house empty — we were afraid other squatters would take it over, or the owner would send in a goon squad to secure it. We’d almost given up on our plans when Mimi, who had moved to Groningen to attend the university there, announced that she and Mark would be happy to come down to Amsterdam to house-sit.

“Ella and I were questioned,” I said, “but I don’t think it was you.”

Theo let that pass. “You haven’t been living there for long, I understand.”

“It seems longer, but I only moved in yesterday.”

“From where?”

“From a marriage to an architect who treated me like I was one of his designs.”

With a scarf wrapped around my head, I strolled home through the crowded Leidsestraat, lingering here and there like a tourist and barely recognizable. No one would know that I had just been to the police station. Not that it mattered, but my invisibility made me feel better.

Turning off the Kalverstraat onto the Spui, I tried to ignore the people with cameras. There were three of them right in front of me, and at least five more taking snapshots or videos with their phones — there are always people with cameras on the Spui, but that day there were more of them than usual. In an attempt to convince myself that I was completely relaxed, I went into the Esprit store and bought a shoulder bag I didn’t want. With my old one stuffed inside the new one, I forced myself not to run across the street to my house. Scared on my own square.

Before I left the station, Theo had asked if I was okay, if there was someone who could come and stay with me. I’d lied to both questions. I couldn’t think of a soul I wanted to see, except for Ella.

I shot both of the front door’s dead bolts — with Ella’s key in the hands of her kidnapers, the fancy three-point lock my insurance company had recommended was now worthless — went upstairs, checked all the windows on the second floor, then up another flight of steps to the bedroom I hadn’t yet slept in. I turned on the radio to drown out the sounds from the street and fell into an exhausted sleep in my new bed.

In the middle of the afternoon, I called a locksmith and then the realtor on the corner of the Spuistraat.

“I have a house for sale.”

“We’ll be happy to help you,” the person who answered the phone told me. “May I send my colleague out to have a look, perhaps sometime around the end of this week?”

As soon as I mentioned the address, he proposed moving the preliminary visit to the following day.

“I’d like someone to come today,” I said. “Tonight, if necessary.”

“I need you to see something else,” Theo had told me, after I’d watched the video for the third time. “Can you keep this quiet?”

Keeping quiet was a skill I had mastered during the years of my marriage. I nodded.

He slid a sheet of paper across the table. “This was delivered this morning.”

It was a short list of demands, addressed to The Owner, who was ordered to put Spui 13 up for sale. A particular realtor was indicated, complete with phone number. Even the name of the ultimate purchaser — J. de Vries — and the sales price were specified.

“So they know Ella doesn’t own the house,” I said.

“Or they realized it after kidnapping her,” said Theo.

“No, they kidnapped her because she’s famous.”

“That can’t be the only reason.”

Theo asked from whom I’d purchased the building.

“A homesick American. I can send you his contact information if you want it.”

“Please, although I don’t see a link from him to Ella,” said Theo.

“She was at a real-estate auction when she found out Spui 13 was coming on the market. Does that help?”

After that came a formal interrogation. We went to another room; the woman detective who had visited me the previous evening sat in. Theo wanted to hear all about Ella and me, about my family connection to Mimi, about my purchase of Spui 13. I explained how Ella had handled the bidding for me at the auction, how brilliant she was.

“Why didn’t the American just use a realtor?” he asked.

“He wanted it over and done with, without a lot of hoopla. That’s the advantage of an auction sale,” I explained. “According to Ella.”

“That’s the connection,” said Theo’s colleague.

He nodded. “Yeah, I think Ella’s kidnapper must have seen her at the auction. Was there a lot of interest? Did she get in a bidding war with someone else?”

Ella had bid so strategically that the other potential buyers dropped out quickly. Later, after too much prosecco at the Luxembourg, I asked her if she’d ever considered leaving journalism for the world of real estate. She looked at me, half smiling, took another sip, and said, “An interesting thought.”

Obviously, what I really wanted to know was if she was researching a story about the Amsterdam real-estate market. But I didn’t ask, because I know Ella would rather die than say a word about whatever she’s working on.

I told Theo and his colleague about the impact the murders of Mimi and Mark had had on our lives. How fear had held us in its grip for years and how, as an antidote against the poison of the atrocity, we had become more ourselves than we had previously been. Already an extrovert, Ella had chosen to fight crime with pen in hand and welcome the limelight, while I — the introvert — had abandoned my dream of becoming the same type of Dutch-language teacher I had once had myself in order to avoid standing in front of groups of students. I withdrew further and further from the world and took refuge in the privacy of a home office, surrounded by manuscripts I was paid to proofread.

“I wanted to go back to Spui 13 to keep Mimi’s memory alive,” I said, acknowledging the guilt that had never left us. “I suppose that sounds crazy.”

Theo almost shook his head.

“The American completely renovated the building,” I went on. “It doesn’t look anything like the way it was.”

When Theo brought his questioning to a close, I asked him something that had been burning in my throat for the last hour: “Are you sure the guys you arrested really did it?”

Everyone on and around the Spui was shocked by the murders. Ella and I came back from London when we heard. Until they caught the godforsaken bastards, we returned to our parents’ houses and stayed cooped up in our bedrooms behind closed curtains. Later, my coworkers told me that the Athenaeum was mobbed during the weeks after the crime. Regular customers dropped by two or three times a day to see if anyone had new information, and the same was true of the local residents, the other shopkeepers, the bar owners, and especially the journalists who frequented Café De Zwart. Even the right-wing snobs in Café Hoppe thirsted to learn who had the murders on their conscience as much as they thirsted for another round. And the same two words were on everyone’s lips: Hells Angels.

The day before my house — without photos or even an asking price — was listed in the real-estate website Funda’s Silent Sale section, I found a plastic Media Markt bag hanging on my front doorknob. It wasn’t quite ten o’clock, and I’d just dashed out to pick up a loaf of bread. Inside the bag was a cat, the black-and-white from the Luxembourg, its head severed from its body.

Fear — real, razor-sharp, deathly fear — apparently brings clarity along with it. I went upstairs with the idea that — for the time being, at least — I was safe. They couldn’t kill me, that would complicate the sale of the house. Which gave me the courage to check every room, every drawer. Only then did I lean over the kitchen sink to vomit coffee and bile and weep until I had no tears left to shed.

With the cat wrapped in a hand towel, I crossed the square to the café. I didn’t notify Theo at first, and I lied to the Luxembourg’s owner about where I’d found the poor creature. “Around the corner,” I said, “in the Voetboogstraat.”

He disappeared into his office behind the bar, sobbing, the beheaded cat cradled in his arms. The manager made me a double espresso and asked me if I’d heard anything about Ella yet.

“What a shitty welcome back to the Spui,” she said.

I called Bert. Because Ella had told me to, and because I couldn’t handle the situation on my own.

“If you hadn’t called today,” he said, “I’d’ve called you tomorrow morning. Ella’s instructions.”

That was all the introduction we needed, all we needed to trust each other. Which was good, because Bert showed up at my door an hour later with a laptop, suitcase, sleeping bag, and rolled-up camping pad.

Bert has worked at the newspaper for half his life. Ella is his boss. Her silence about her work extends to the identities of her colleagues, which is why Bert and I had never previously met. I knew his name from the paper and from Ella’s instructions. I could hear her voice inside my head: He’s tall, clever, and a good man — and that’s exactly what you’ll need.

For the time that he stayed with me, he slept on his pad in the living room, close to the steps that led down to the front door. He watched over me, cooked for me, took on the management of my life.

I told him everything, even the things Theo had warned me not to talk about. They were, after all, my things. Including the cat.

“The message is loud and clear,” said Bert. “They’re watching you. But of course you already knew that.”

He made sure the locksmith did a good job, after double-

checking with his contacts in the security sector, since the lock business isn’t always on the up-and-up. Then we made a shopping list for the day and walked together to the Albert Heijn supermarket on the Koningsplein. “This is how we’ll do it,” said Bert. “We’ll show them you’re still here and not alone. The paper’s paying.”

Amsterdammers of my generation are sure to remember the Spui Murders, but it was different for Bert, who was about ten years my junior. After an hour’s research — with his phone on speaker so he could ask questions of his sources at the same time his skilled fingers danced across the Internet — he’d brought himself up to speed on Mimi and Mark’s case. He told me what he’d learned, so I could provide additional details and make corrections. Everything seemed to indicate, he said, that the police had arrested the real murderers. “But of course you already knew that.”

Bert is the kind of guy who can say things like that without being annoying.

I wasn’t so sure. “There has to be a reason they want me to sell the house.”

“Those brothers were released after doing fifteen years, did you know that?”

“No, and I wish you hadn’t told me.”

“No worries, their friends got rid of them... um, about twelve years later. Huh, I wrote that story myself.”

Bert explained that motorcycle gangs were part of his beat, even back then. “Now I understand why Ella didn’t want that assignment.”

“They weren’t in the Hells Angels,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“They always denied it, and so did the actual gang members.”

“Bullshit. The police were able to identify the brand of the bicycle chain Mark was beaten with. Hells Angels all the way.”

A minute later, he held up his left hand and said, “Wait a second.” He studied the screen of his laptop, the fingers of his right hand working the touch pad. When he looked up, he told me he had a new idea. “Is it possible they broke in to prove something? Could it have been some kind of initiation rite that spiraled out of control?”

Three days later, the realtor called to tell me that J. de Vries had offered a hundred thousand euros above the asking price.

I was speechless, and after a moment the man added, “As compensation for your loss.”

They’d kidnapped Ella to blackmail me out of my house, but now they were being generous about it?

“Do you believe that explanation?” I demanded.

The realtor didn’t respond. Instead, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, he asked if I had any questions about the formal settlement. He knew I knew he was just an errand boy.

I told him I wanted to sign the papers as soon as possible.

“They’ve proposed the middle of next week.”

“Make it sooner. And I want a guarantee from the bank.”

“I’ve already got it,” he said.

Something the realtor said got me thinking, and Bert agreed with me that it was strange.

“No one would talk about ‘your loss’ in a situation like this,” Bert said. “Compensation for damages or inconvenience, that I would have bought.”

Today, as I look back and try to figure out when and how things went wrong, it seems to me that this choice of words, which sounded almost intentional, was a clue. I still can’t figure out, though, how we could have made better use of it.

The contract seemed perfectly straightforward. Bert — who like Ella had connections with the Amsterdam police — forwarded the buyer’s address and passport number to Theo.

“This Jan de Vries — that’s his full name — is seventy-four and a filthy-rich old geezer,” Bert told me, after an hour of research. “I can’t find anything unusual about him, which is unusual all by itself. They know him on the business desk. A smooth operator, avoids publicity.”

“I want you to go with me to the signing,” I said that evening, as he stood in the kitchen slicing vegetables for a ratatouille. “But of course you already know that.”

There was no way Bert would have allowed me to go by myself, so the next afternoon we strolled arm-in-arm to the realtor’s office around the corner. Theo had suggested I think of it like any other business transaction, so that’s what I did. There’d be plainclothes cops in the area, he assured me, quiet and invisible, ready to step in if they were needed.

The prospective purchaser of my house wore a fine Italian suit — Corneliani, Bert told me later. His face seemed vaguely familiar, like other people with money and power. The realtor asked him if he’d read the contract carefully.

The man nodded.

“Any questions or amendments?”

We both shook our heads.

After we signed, the realtor quite properly congratulated de Vries on his purchase and me on my sale.

“Now I have a question,” I said to de Vries. “Why did you want me out? Why couldn’t I go on living there?”

De Vries, the realtor, and Bert all looked at me with raised eyebrows.

De Vries got up, gave the realtor an ice-cold glare, and headed for the door.

“When will Ella be released?” I called after him.

He turned and said, “You never should have bought that building in the first place.”

And he left the office.

Bert was furious at me. Theo too, though he did a better job of holding it in. They were right, of course: I should have just played the game for the sake of Ella’s safety. However, a week later — as promised — a new video was delivered to De Telegraaf. Bert and I watched it together with Theo at the Lijnbaansgracht police station.

No Ella. Where I’d expected to see her face, light with relief, I saw instead myself, in tears, Bert’s arm around me. We were crossing the Spui, approaching my house. Bert squeezed my shoulder, I wiped my cheeks. Without our noticing, someone had managed to film us on our way back from the realtor’s office. The video ended with one sentence of typed text: She will be released the day after the closing.

That evening, I thanked Bert for taking care of me by cooking dinner for once. We raised more than one glass to Ella’s upcoming release, but we didn’t talk about it much, as if our words might jinx her. After the third toast, I dared to ask when he planned to publish his story.

“Pretty soon. It’s almost done. When they let her go, she’ll call you first, then me. As soon as I hear from her, I’ll post the article online. We’ll save her piece for the print edition. That’ll be the most important account, obviously.”

In his journalist’s mind, he was already looking beyond the actual release. That didn’t surprise me: Ella is exactly the same.

Movers came to put my things in storage, and I carried a suitcase of clothes and toiletries to Ella’s apartment on the Singel without looking back.

I didn’t want to go to the closing, and I could have given a notary my power of attorney. But I went. The buyer ignored my stare, signed the final papers, and left without a word.

I walked back to the Spui for a sort of final goodbye, and saw him sitting on a bench outside the bookstore.

“Do you have a place to go,” he asked, getting slowly to his feet, “or will you squat again?”

It was only then that I recognized him from all those years ago. Jan de Vries had begun his career as a slumlord on the Spui.

“I didn’t like the two of you then,” he said, “and I don’t like you now.”

And he turned away and crossed the square to a chauffeured limo that was waiting for him.

The brothers who murdered Mimi and Mark had told the truth. They weren’t Hells Angels, and what happened wasn’t an initiation gone out of control. They’d been hired to toss a pair of squatters out of a house, and that was what had gone out of control.

Theo cursed up a storm, immediately assigned a team of detectives to investigate de Vries, and promised me the man would never get away with it. That was a comforting thought, although I knew it was an empty promise as long as Ella was still in the man’s hands.

Bert rewrote his lead and came up with a new headline: “REAL-ESTATE MAGNATE SUSPECTED OF SPUI MURDERS.”

The article would go live the moment Ella was released.

After the closing, I decided to clean Ella’s apartment, just to have something to do. The next morning at daybreak, I began preparing for her return.

April 2017

It’s now a year since Bert’s article nailed the ex-slumlord to the cross. After he published it, he went on to write an entire series of stories about the Amsterdam real-estate mafia, partly with the help of Ella’s notes.

But Theo Mann was unable to keep his promise: Jan de Vries made a clean getaway before the police showed up to arrest him. He’s now living large — and not exactly incognito — in a country that has no extradition treaty with The Netherlands.

On the first Sunday of every month, early in the morning, while the city sleeps, I’ve gotten into the habit of walking down the Spui and along the Rokin to the Doelensluis, where I can stand on the bridge and watch the Amstel River flow slowly by.

It’s been so long since I last heard from Ella that I imagine her prediction must have come true.

This story was inspired by an actual Amsterdam murder case.

Ankle Monitor by Herman Koch

Translated by Sam Garrett

Watergraafsmeer

Maybe it was a mistake to go back to my old neighborhood on the very first day of a weekend leave. I could have been imagining it, but I seemed to read it off the faces of the people I came across on the street: how they glanced up at me, walked on, then took another look. I avoided the butcher shop and the bakery I used to go to. I bought a couple of buns, some sliced liver, and salted beef at the Albert Heijn on Christiaan Huygensplein — the girls at the registers were too young to remember, they were just as friendly to me as they were to everyone else.

When I walked into Elsa’s Café, though, conversations literally slammed to a halt. That’s what I was that first day: a conversation killer. I’m not a complete bonehead, I was more or less prepared for it, but it’s still weird when it actually happens. At Elsa’s they have these swinging doors, like a saloon in an old western. That’s the way it felt to me: as though I was coming through the swinging doors, six-guns drawn, to settle an old account. And in a certain sense I was, but not with the people who were there, not with anyone who was at Elsa’s right then.

I don’t know what I would have done, though, if he had been standing there, prattling at the bar with a beer in his hand. Then I wouldn’t have been fully accountable. In fact, I’ve never been accountable for my actions — not being accountable is the thin red line in my life that’s taken me everywhere, from the maximum-security facility to here again, now, in my old neighborhood.

There are about twenty of us in there, in what you’d probably call an “open block.” Open to the extent that we don’t have to stay in our cells between nine and six, but can just wander the corridors. In fact, it’s only one corridor, a broad one, sure, more than thirty feet across. Everyone on both sides of it has his door open, some of us hang our laundry out to dry on a rack in the corridor. When you look in, the cells are like you’d expect: girlie posters on the walls, a little desk with a couple of books, an outdated desktop computer. A few of the guys don’t have any photos or posters at all, so that’s clear enough: posters of half-naked men or boys would send the wrong signal on our block.

At one end of the corridor is the rec room, with Ping-Pong and foosball tables and a row of shelves with games: Risk, Monopoly, that kind of thing. And about five decks of playing cards, with a couple of cards missing from each deck.

At the other end of the corridor is the point where our open block stops, clearly marked with bars and the kind of massive wired glass you couldn’t bust through, not even with an ax. As though anyone here has an ax in his cell! No, but we do have other things, things I’m not going to talk about here, I’m not out to rat on anyone. What am I saying: I’m not out to rat on myself! Later, when I go back on Monday, maybe I’ll need those things again — I hope not, but you never know. It’s good to have them, the mere thought of those things and what you can do with them is what keeps you calm.

Sometimes, when they start bitching at me, I picture it in my mind: I’m lying on my bed and a guard says something about dirty laundry on the floor, making it sound like he’s my mother. Then I think about it. In my mind, I slide my hand under the mattress. He doesn’t have time to get away, maybe he starts screaming, maybe he doesn’t: I’m fast. Whatever the case, it’s too late. I’m finished before his colleagues can get there.

But I don’t do that. I won’t ever do it, either. As far as that goes, we’re all the same around here. Good behavior is the key thing we have in common. We do our little hand-washes, we borrow a book from the library, we play Ping-Pong and foosball like civilized individuals, pull some weeds in the herb garden. In any case, we never fight. We’re always conscious of the cameras, twenty-four hours a day. “Wasn’t that serve out?” we ask cautiously and, cool as can be of course, lay our paddles on the table. We look at each other. Staring down is what they call that. It’s about who has the steadiest eye, the most eloquent body language. But the security cameras don’t pick up a thing. “I think you’re right, it was out.” You make a mental note to do something later, in the showers or out in the yard, in a corner where there aren’t any cameras.

The serve wasn’t out, you know that — and he knows it too.

The first time he showed up at visiting hours was six months ago. A journalist, a big name in crime circles. Marc Verhoeven. He had a plan: a biography, the story of my life.

“We share the revenues,” Verhoeven told me then. “Everybody wants to read about you. I expect it’ll sell a quarter of a million copies.”

I was up for it. I didn’t have to tell him everything, nothing that would jeopardize my getting out of here three years from now.

“But I’ll need you to tell me a couple of things, of course,” he said. “Things people don’t know. Things they want to read about.” Then Verhoeven asked if I was okay with him interviewing my wife. “Ex-wife,” he corrected himself right away. “To get a complete picture, I want to interview Chiara too. But not without your permission, of course. Not behind your back.”

I sensed something at the time, I don’t know exactly how to describe it: a dark cloud, people say sometimes, as in, “dark clouds gathered.” But what I sensed wasn’t so much dark as compact and odorless. A poisonous cloud from a chemical plant, the neighbors are warned to keep their doors and windows shut.

“She’s not my ex-wife,” I told him. “We’re only separated.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Have it your way. I mean, if you’d rather not have me interview her, just say so.”

Later on, I couldn’t help but laugh about that Not behind your back. All you could really say was that I had been too trusting. Looking back on it, if I had known then what was going to happen, that visiting hour would have gone differently. Would have ended differently, I should probably say.

You have those animal habitats at the zoo that look a little like an open cellblock. In fact, there are no bars. Just a moat with a wall on one side that the visitors can lean on, and the habitat itself is on the other side. A lot of trouble has been taken to reconstruct the animals’ natural surroundings: a couple of boulders have been brought in, there’s some sand, one or two trees that obviously aren’t native to these parts.

At the back of the habitat is where the animals lie — let’s assume we’re talking about predators here, but it could just as easily be zebras or chimpanzees — dozing in the shade. There’s not much movement, a couple of sparrows are pecking around for leftovers between the rocks, but it’s not enough to wake the predators from their afternoon nap. They — for the sake of argument we’re still assuming that we’re talking about mammals here: lions, tigers, bears — blink their eyes occasionally, as though they’re dreaming: a nice dream, perhaps; they’re back where they came from, Yellowstone Park, the forests of Madagascar, the rolling savannas of Kenya or Tanzania.

Then, suddenly, there is tumult. Somebody — perhaps only a child, a child who has escaped its parents’ attention for a few seconds — has clambered up onto the wall and then fallen into the moat. There are screams, mostly from the parents, but then other bystanders get involved in the general panic: they shout instructions at the child, conflicting instructions, one of them shouts this, the other shouts that. Swim! Run! Don’t move! The water is shallow, it only comes up to the child’s chest. A rope! A keeper! A ladder!

Then one of the predators — now we can come out and say it: this is the lions’ habitat — one of the lions opens an eye. What’s all the noise? he wonders. Can’t a lion get a little sleep in this habitat? What’s all that splashing around in the moat?

It’s the biggest lion, the male, the kind of lion we imagine when we think of a lion: from The Lion King, a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion, a lion like the ones on a pouch of Samson rolling tobacco, with a huge mane around its head. Slowly it stretches, even more slowly it rises, one leg at a time, onto all fours; easy as can be, it wanders over to the moat to look at what all the fuss is about.

One of the last times he came to visit, about two weeks ago, that’s the way I looked at Marc Verhoeven: the way a lion would. We were both in the same space; just like the child in the moat, the journalist had found his way into the animals’ habitat. True, there was a guard standing at the door, but I’ve already told you: I’m fast, I can do it in a couple of seconds.

Right then and there, I knew. I’d known it for a long time already, of course, but now I knew for sure. I could smell it.

Like I was sniffing his underpants.

Yes, that’s what it was like, no two ways about it. I’d fished his underpants out of the laundry basket and sniffed at them — and I knew.

And now I could smell it, even without having his underpants in my hand. Later, lots of times, I asked myself how I was able to do that. And I think I know.

First of all, because of all the years of training on the outside. In my professional community, the sixth sense is more important than the other five. For survival. You have to be able to interpret a sound without actually hearing it: the window of a car parked in front of your house is rolled down, the safety on a pistol is slid back. You hit the ground before the shot is even fired. You survive.

And on the inside too, just as much. Without turning around, you know who comes into the showers right after you. Who’s moved up behind you in a flash. You slick back your hair under the hot spray from the showerhead, you keep your eyes closed and let the water splash against your eyelids — but within half a second, you turn. You yank the sharpened screwdriver out of the other person’s hand, in one move you break his wrist — and, if you’ve got enough time, all five of his fingers.

I listened to Verhoeven. For the umpteenth time, he asked me about my connections with this guy, with some other guy, about where I was when Edward G. got plugged behind the counter of his cigar store, about whether I had used different passports during my frequent trips to Thailand, Colombia, and my place on the Costa del Sol.

Yes, I listened, I nodded, and I answered, but meanwhile I breathed through my nose as much as possible. I stuck my nose out above the grassland of the savanna, nothing but my nose, the zebra foal wandering this way would never get to see my head, the cracking of its own vertebrae would be the last sound it heard in its short life, once I sank my teeth into it.

When did it start? How long has this been going on?

It surprised me to realize that I wasn’t really even all that surprised. That’s right, I could even start to understand it a little. Ex-wife of criminal serving solid time sets out to start a new life, to forget the past. And then, one day, a journalist comes to visit. A crime journalist who is planning to write a book about her husband — her ex-husband. He is not entirely unhandsome, he’s charming, patient — not hotheaded, not like him, she thinks, and she brushes the thought aside as quickly as it arises.

On his third visit, the journalist brings her flowers, on the fourth a box of chocolates. She notices, despite herself, that she has started to enjoy his visits more and more, that she spends more time in front of the mirror, pins her hair up and then lets it fall; when the doorbell rings, she moistens her lips with the tip of her tongue.

This time he has brought along a bottle of wine, the apartment is a little less well-lit than during his previous visit; on the coffee table which she’s set with a bowl of nuts and blocks of cheese with mustard, a candle is burning.

“What did you say again, when do you have that weekend leave?” he asked me the last time we sat in the visiting area, after the guard announced we had two minutes left.

“Two weeks from now.”

“And how long have you got?”

“Three days. It’s a weekend furlough, right? Like it says. Out on Friday afternoon, back again on Monday morning.”

Verhoeven took a deep breath, stood up from his chair, took his jacket off the backrest. “I’d really like to check out a few places with you,” he said, watching the guard from the corner of his eye. “I think you know which places I mean.”

“Sure.” I wondered whether he was going to say it — whether he would dare to.

He dared; he just came out and said it: “And please, don’t go anywhere near Chiara. Try not to take any unnecessary risks, you know what I mean. Leave her alone.”

I looked at him, blinked once, not because I felt the need to blink, but because I thought it would put him at ease.

A lion — but a tame lion, napping in the sun. A nice lion: oh yeah, I could be real nice, charming, purring quietly and nuzzling up to my keeper, like a lion in the zoo. Or no, better yet, in a circus: the lion tamer cracks his whip in the sand and I jump through a hoop of real fire, night after night, I eat sugar cubes from his hand and let him scratch me behind the ears. I purr and I smile, a nice tame lion, but only in the knowledge that, one day, when he sticks his head in my mouth again before a breathless crowd, I’m going to snap my jaws shut. He will know, he’ll feel it; maybe at first, when he can’t pull his head back out, he’ll think there’s been some misunderstanding. But there has been no misunderstanding. The children will be the first to start screaming, then the women, the men will gag, the barf will splatter all over the bleachers, here and there some cold-blooded type will go on filming with his smartphone so we can all watch it again later on YouTube; how I spit out the lion tamer’s half-chewed head somewhere in a corner of the cage — maybe the snack was a little stale, it’s certainly not something I’m going to swallow, it might upset my stomach.

“She’s got a restraining order,” I said. “And I’ll be wearing an ankle monitor.”

I’d checked it out already on Google Maps: as long as I stayed on Pythagorasstraat, I was safely outside the area of the court injunction, just barely. It was only about fifty yards’ difference: as soon as I turned the corner of Pythagorasstraat and entered Copernicusstraat, my ankle monitor would send out a signal and an alarm would go off somewhere.

That’s how I imagined it, at least: there’s this central tracking room with computers, the ankle-monitor tracking room, manned by no more than two people. One of them has just ordered a pizza and the other has gone outside for a smoke. I turn into Copernicusstraat, an alarm goes off in the tracking room, it takes a moment for the ankle-monitor tracker who stayed inside to figure out which of the maybe fifty or sixty roaming monitors has been activated. Twenty, thirty seconds, maybe? Not much longer than that, I figure, but in those twenty or thirty seconds I’ve already left Copernicusstraat and am heading up Archimedesweg, toward Molukkenstraat. When I pass under the steel train trestle, the tracking room loses the signal for a bit, the colleague has come back from his cigarette break in the meantime, now they’ve got video too.

“He disappeared... there,” the one says; he points at the screen.

The other guy taps a few keys on the console and now, at the top of the screen, my first and last name appear. And who knows, maybe other things too — I’ve never been in a tracking room like that, all I can do is guess.

My age. My offense. The length of the term I’m serving. Armed and dangerous, yeah, maybe it says that too. I’ve always liked that phrase, though in my case it could be misleading: it might make people think that, when I’m walking around without a gun, I’m not dangerous.

The blinking dot now reappears on the far side of the trestle.

“Where’s he going?” asks the colleague who was just outside for a smoke.

Then the bell rings. “I bet that’s my pizza,” the other man says.

For a moment they stand there, wavering. Just how serious is this? It’s not the first time someone with an ankle monitor has entered forbidden territory. Nine times out of ten, they turn around and go back after a minute or so, to the area where they’re allowed to be. In the background, we hear the opening jingle for the weekend soccer recap on Studio Sport. The timing is perfect: at the very start of the first highlight, a slice of pizza can move from box to mouth.

I stop, turn around, walk back to the trestle.

“Look, he’s realized, he’s going back.” The bell rings again, more impatiently this time. “Could you answer that? It’s my pizza.”

The blinking dot disappears beneath the bridge, disappears completely.

“What do we do? Report it? Send a car out?”

“Hold on a minute. If he comes back out on the right side, it’s a false alarm. They don’t like that much.”

I wait under the bridge, I count to twenty, more or less as long as it would take me to come back out on the right side again. But above all I wait to hear if they’ve done anything yet. If I can hear a siren in the distance.

If I do, I’ll call it off. Tomorrow is another day. But if things stay quiet, I’ll wait those twenty seconds and race out from under the bridge, into the new neighborhood. I’ve already looked at it at least a hundred times on Google Street View — this neighborhood wasn’t there yet when I disappeared from public life — and I could find the door to her building in a flash, even blindfolded. I figured it out. Less than two minutes. I’m an athletic person, I’ve been training, I stopped smoking ten years ago. Within ninety seconds, I’ll be at the door. I’ll ring the bell — not hers, the neighbors’ on the floor above or below her.

Hello?

It’s your neighbor from the ground floor, they left a package with me yesterday, it’s for you.

At a household appliance store on Linnaeusstraat, I checked out a few of the carving knives in the display case. If I wanted a better look, I’d have to ask the salesgirl to unlock the case for me.

I was going to have to rely on my own strength — I could do it with my bare hands if necessary. And maybe it wouldn’t be necessary. I thought about how I would put my foot in the door, the panic in her eyes.

Just want to talk to you for a moment, I’d say. If you’re smart, you’ll keep calm and let me in.

At the stationery outlet a little farther along, I bought a cardboard mailer and a big fat marker. The mailer was one of those you have to put together yourself; I stopped in a doorway on Hogeweg and folded it together, wrote her name and address in block letters on the label.

Back in my day, there wasn’t any fountain at the corner of Hogeweg and Linnaeusparkweg. On that corner, there used to be what the people called a seamy bar. Now there’s a patio restaurant where mothers sit drinking café lattes while their children shriek and splash in the fountain.

Café latte, another one of those expressions. In my day, the year I was sentenced, they were still just calling it a coffee with hot milk.

In fact, restraining orders can be a good idea. What I’m saying, I guess, is that I’m not opposed to restraining orders in principle. They can keep you safe from certain things, they can protect you from yourself, like an ignition interlock in a car. If you can’t get the car started, then you won’t hit a tree on the first curve or cream somebody at a crosswalk.

What I hadn’t counted on was that the ankle monitor would warn not only the imaginary crew of the ankle-monitor tracking room, but that it would warn me too. Halfway down Copernicusstraat, about a block and half from the crossing with Archimedesweg, it started buzzing. Not only buzzing: it actually vibrated. It went off, like an alarm clock.

“Fucking shit!” I said, and picked up the pace. Maybe they’d told me about this, maybe they hadn’t — in any case, I couldn’t remember. The deeper I went into the area covered by the restraining order, the louder the buzzing (and the vibrating). Under the trestle, it buzzed and vibrated almost nonstop.

I picked up the pace a little more; by the time I came out from under the bridge, I was sprinting. The sidewalk went up an incline there. From Google Street View, I recognized the new glass building at the corner of Archimedesweg and Carolina MacGillavrylaan. Like I said, this neighborhood hadn’t been built yet when I went into the slammer. Back then, the only thing along the Ringvaart, across from Flevopark, were some garden plots and a research lab where they did tests with radioactive material. Kids I went to grade school with used to claim they’d seen frogs with three legs and two heads along the banks of the Ringvaart. On Saturday afternoons, we combed out the whole shoreline there sometimes, but we never found a deformed frog.

There weren’t many people out on the street, fortunately. Not a lot of passersby who might hear the buzzing of my ankle monitor. That seemed pretty unlikely to me, anyway; maybe in a closed space, a room or a shop, but not here, not outside.

I was panting by the time I got to the doorway of the brown building with its two apartment towers. I scanned the nameplates beside the doorbells, waited till I’d caught my breath, then rang the one that belonged to her downstairs neighbor, on the ninth floor.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice said through the intercom, no more than ten seconds later.

“I’m your downstairs neighbor,” I said. “They left a package for you at my place this morning.”

I held up the package in front of the camera and started counting to ten; at four, there was a loud click and the glass door swung open.

As I was about to get into the elevator, a guy came through the entrance: a man in a blue windbreaker, short gray hair and glasses. It would have looked strange if I had let the elevator door close in his face.

“Good afternoon.”

“Good afternoon.”

The man pressed the button for five, I hit ten.

We started up, without another word. But there was no silence. From somewhere underneath my pant leg, at ankle height if you listened carefully, came a clearly audible, rhythmic buzzing. The man looked at me.

“My cell phone,” I said. “I’m not going to answer it now. Have to deliver this package first.”

The man nodded, but kept looking at me. Then I saw it happen in his eyes: he knew me from somewhere, though he didn’t know exactly where.

There had been a documentary about me, and the biography Marc Verhoeven was working on wasn’t the first book; there was already one about my formative years in the neighborhood, out in Watergraafsmeer, a book with way too many photos in it, from back then but also from the present.

“I live downstairs,” I said. “I’ve seen you before.”

The man got out on the fifth floor. Was I imagining it, or did he reach into his pocket as soon as he stepped out of the car? Was he maybe going for his cell phone?

Time was running out. It had been running out from the start, but now it was really running out. When I left the elevator on the tenth floor, I heard it right away, and this time I wasn’t imagining things: a police siren. Close by. At the end of the corridor I was in now, there was a little window. The flashing blue lights could be seen from all the way up here on ten.

Maybe it was a mistake, shooting myself in the foot like that by going to my ex’s place on the very first day of my leave — the best way you could think of for me to blow my chance of early parole in three years.

But the moment she opened the door — I didn’t even have to hold the package up to the glass peephole so she couldn’t see my face or my eyes, like I’d been planning — I knew it was no mistake.

I could tell from the way she looked at me; it was in her eyes. The same way those eyes had looked at me at that sidewalk café in Corleone in Sicily, where she’d been working as a waitress. That was twenty years ago. I was there on vacation, because of The Godfather. Because I wanted to visit the hometown of the Corleone family, the way someone else might go on a pilgrimage to Rome. She put a bottle of Peroni and a glass down on my table and looked at me. And I looked back.

“Rob,” her lips whispered now.

“Chiara,” I said.

“What’s...?” She pointed down at my shoes, at the buzz of my ankle monitor.

The only sound from the living room at first was that of a TV, but now there was another sound too: a man’s voice.

“Who’s there?” the voice asked, and the next moment the man appeared in the little hallway that connected the living room and the front door.

I had a feeling then that I can only describe in one way. This is it, I thought, this is what I live for. That’s what sets me apart from people like Marc Verhoeven, who will never do anything but watch from the sidelines. Like a soccer coach in the dugout: his best striker scores with an unstoppable bullet to the top corner, and all the coach can do is throw his hands in the air — all he can do is cheer.

Maybe some things had happened between me and Chiara. Technically speaking, maybe she was at that moment my ex-wife.

But I hadn’t given her up, not just like that, that’s not the way I am. Today I had come to take her back.

At what moment had Marc Verhoeven fallen into the moat? The moat that separates the visitors at the zoo from the lion’s habitat? Was it during his very first visit to the maximum-security unit? Or was it later, when he hit on the bad idea of “interviewing” my wife as well?

No, it was probably right now, I thought, as in one swift movement I tore the lid off the mailer and pulled out the brick. The brick that, in a flash of inspiration, I’d taken from the pile at the corner of Archimedesweg and Carolina MacGillavrylaan, where the road workers were putting in a new section of bike path.

This is who I am, I thought when I saw his face, his eyes those of a cow that’s grazing in the middle of the tracks and suddenly realizes there’s an express train hurtling toward it, his hands making a gesture of fending off something. More like a conciliatory gesture, really: Wait a minute, we can discuss this, right?

But lions don’t discuss.

They don’t wear ankle monitors, either.

This was my life, squeezed together tightly in a couple of seconds.

And a couple of seconds was all the time he had left to sniff around in my life.

Thirty seconds, tops — it almost never takes me longer than that.

Salvation by Simon de Waal

Translated by Maria de Bruyn

Red-Light District

It’s just after midnight, a warm spring night. Waldemar, a thickset man of fifty-eight, is standing on a bridge in the heart of Amsterdam’s Red-Light District. He’s carelessly stuffed his dark wrinkled shirt into his stained pants after rolling up the shirtsleeves a couple of times. The pants’ legs are too long and the cuffs, which drag across the cobblestones when he walks, are frayed. He leans forward against the handrail of the Bosshardt Bridge, named after the Salvation Army major who, for decades, helped the neighborhood’s weak and damned souls without worrying about their pasts.

Waldemar rocks slowly back and forth, to and fro, mumbling something incomprehensible under his breath. A tourist, Hiroki Ota, wearing a wool cap with flaps that say Amsterdam, stops a few yards away. He’s hiding a small camera in the palm of his hand and waiting for the moment when Waldemar’s worn-down soles lose their grip on the asphalt and the crazy old street person plunges headfirst into the murky water. He wouldn’t be the first simpleton in Amsterdam to suffer that fate and drown, but when the man hasn’t fallen in after rocking perhaps fifteen times, Hiroki gives up and walks on, disappointed. He disappears into the knot of people pushing their way through the busy Molensteeg.

Red lights and garish neon ads are reflected in the canal’s still water. Swans float by, slowly, elegantly, and drift beneath the bridge. They come to a halt in front of the Casa Rosso nightclub, vain and almost haughty as they wait for the bread that is thrown to them every evening. Crowds of tourists take photos of the unexpected and paradoxical scene: stately white lines of impalpable beauty on expansive black water, lit up by the simultaneously alluring yet merciless red neon lights of the prostitutes’ claustrophobic windows.

Waldemar has seen it all a hundred times. Silently he straightens his back and leaves the bridge, his gaze turned deeply inward, his bearing making him unapproachable; he thinks of his daughter, whom he’s missed for so long. He looks up only when he reaches the next corner. Rowdy students, unsuspecting tourists, a boisterous group of young women celebrating a bachelorette party all pass him by. He turns a corner into a passageway that leads to the next canal. No red lights here for a change, but a large, busy snack bar where a drunk boy with close-cropped hair and a dangling lower lip fruitlessly tries to insert a coin into a slot so he can open the vending machine’s window, within which an assortment of typical Dutch treats beckon. Behind the vending machine, a sweaty bearded man appears with a tray of fried snacks; with practiced movements, he quickly fills all the empty windows with freshly prepared food. Bold gulls swoop low through the street, waiting for a moment of relative quiet in the passageway so they can snatch up any fallen morsels. The boy takes a bite of his croquette, which is still too hot. Cursing under his breath, he keels forward, gasping for relief, and the food falls out of his mouth. He staggers on angrily, waving the hot croquette in his unsteady hand.

Emerging from the passageway, Waldemar comes out onto the next canal, the Oudezijds Voorburgwal. This has quite a different, almost peaceful look, dominated by the monumental Old Church, Amsterdam’s oldest building, which dates back to the year 1280, its tower illuminated in the evenings. A beacon of hope above a square kilometer of misery, which is how the local police have characterized the Red-Light District for years. Waldemar saunters past the church. The dark-skinned prostitutes preside over their domain in the small alleys surrounding the stately building, just like every other group that has its own space in the district: the S&M ladies, the Thai and Filipino transsexuals, the Chinese, the Eastern Europeans. And all of that spiced up by dozens of busy coffee shops, by a café where the Hells Angels meet, by the headquarters of the Salvation Army. Belief and sin go hand in hand here.

Waldemar knows it all. The entrance to the small passageway at the Oudezijds Voorburgwal is dark and oppressive, only illuminated halfway down by the red neon lights over the prostitutes’ doors. Waldemar assumes his usual spot across from the passage, a place where he can look into it without calling attention to himself. The world passes him by; it’s a day just like the hundreds of others he has spent there. And here comes Aaron, a man in his fifties, sporting an extravagant dark-gray beard and a velvet suit that could belong either to an old-time town crier or a member of Rembrandt’s Night Watch. A dashing hat with a long feather rests atop his head. He carries a wooden staff with a pennant, so he can be easily spotted in the busy crowd. This way, the tourists he is guiding can follow him with no trouble. Waldemar steps back a bit to make way for the guide and his entourage.

“We’ll begin here,” announces Aaron in practiced English. “This, esteemed public, is not only the Red-Light District’s narrowest street; it is the narrowest street in all of Amsterdam. Exactly three feet wide! Only three feet! The name is... De Trompettersteeg. Yeah, you try to pronounce that.” He falls silent, because he knows that laughter and murmuring will arise as the tourists actually try to say the passageway’s name.

An overly ambitious man with a face ruddy from drink begins to cough as he tries to push the last, so undeniably Dutch, syllable out of his throat.

“That G sound,” Aaron finally continues, as the exuberant group quiets down, “saved lives during the Second World War. The Germans couldn’t pronounce it, so the Resistance forced traitors and infiltrators to say the word Scheveningen, where the Sch sounds just like the G. Those who couldn’t do it properly were Germans and therefore risked losing their lives. So remember the name Scheveningen.”

Waldemar shakes his head benevolently as the flush-faced man is thumped roundly on his back after struggling to say the new word.

“Let’s go on,” instructs Aaron. “After we emerge through the passageway, be careful: the ladies are here to earn money, not to be ogled. And do you remember what I said at the start of the tour?”

The sightseers respond like good children on a school trip: “Don’t take photos!”

Waldemar mumbles the words along with them, checking his watch. He knows that this is the last group that will be led through the district tonight. The neighborhood is growing calmer, more shadowy, the night is asserting itself.

Aaron beckons again, and someone from the herd ventures a hesitant first step into the dark passageway, toward the red-lit and seductive temptations. “I’ll follow behind and continue my narration.”

“It’s like entering the gates of hell, where purgatory awaits you,” says the red-faced man, and his words hurt Waldemar. One by one, the tourists disappear into the passage. Aaron brings up the rear, his feather swaying above their heads, his staff tapping on the cobblestones.

“Why don’t you tell them what happened there!” yells Waldemar, but no one hears him because no sound issues from his mouth.

No fucking photo’s!! is misspelled on the passage’s wall; the big graffitied letters are meant to be artistic, but their message is clear. Of course, Aaron’s herd can’t help themselves. As soon as they reach the windows, they gape at the young women. The red lights hide all their flaws, and their white lingerie, which really doesn’t cover anything, shines brightly. The tourists stare and stare and stare.

“They’re actually quite pretty,” a woman whispers in surprise to her husband as they pass the voluptuous, beckoning bodies. He nods a bit too enthusiastically, to which she responds with a frown.

The red light is out at one of the windows; the paint is peeling, and the window is dirty and covered sloppily with brown packing paper from the inside. Aaron passes it by, as he’s passed it a hundred times before.

Waldemar lingers by the side of the canal for a long time.

Later, as the tourists tumble into their beds, what remains are the drunkards, the bullies, and the pimps, who appear like rats in the night to collect cash from their women.

Waldemar knows them all.

It’s a few days later, and there he is again. Waldemar saunters through the district at his characteristically placid pace. He wasn’t gone during those intervening days, but nothing noteworthy happened, so they can be safely ignored.

Tonight, at the end of his usual circuit, Waldemar stops at the Trompettersteeg. Quick footsteps can be heard from the direction of No fucking photo’s!! and Ivan, a plump young man, not yet thirty, with bushy eyebrows and a freshly rolled joint hanging carelessly from his lips, exits the passage. A modish name-brand bag hangs from his shoulder, and he’s carrying a wad of brown packing paper under his arm. Ivan the pimp walks by Waldemar and bumps into his shoulder without looking at him. No apology follows, and the young man carelessly drops his bundle of paper at the side of the canal as he walks away, leaving the penetrating scent of hashish, never really absent for long in the district, hanging around Waldemar’s head.

Soon Waldemar loses sight of the young man, who becomes an unrecognizable silhouette, indistinguishable in the crowds.

Waldemar bends over and picks up the paper. He smoothes it out, then folds it as neatly as possible and puts it under his arm. Slowly, his gaze shifts to the passageway’s entrance, and the voices in his head fade away in an anxious premonition of what’s about to happen.

He strolls into the passageway, up to the window where the packing paper had hung. The red lamp is on again above the door, soft and flickering irregularly. A poor attempt has been made to clean the window, and there she stands. Her eyes are hazy and evasive, her pose inexperienced. Waldemar’s face pales as thoughts and memories and love and hate all fight with one another in his head.

People pass him cautiously; his wide frame is making passage through the narrow alley difficult. Although she looked away from him at first, the girl’s curiosity triumphs. She lifts her head, doesn’t seem unfriendly. Waldemar gestures to the door handle, which she turns from the inside, cracking the door slightly.

“Fifty,” she says hesitantly.

Waldemar says nothing and points inside.

Unpracticed, she makes the international sign for money, rubbing her index finger and thumb together.

Waldemar, who has been standing there with his hands in his pockets and legs spread, shows her his right hand, which holds a bundle of banknotes.

That works. She opens the door wider and lets him in, then pulls the curtains shut.

“What do you want?” A light, unrecognizable accent wafts through her words; it could be foreign but could as easily come from the eastern part of The Netherlands.

Waldemar doesn’t want anything. He looks around the room.

The girl stands expectantly beside the bed and finally lays a questioning hand on his forearm.

“You know what?” says Waldemar.

“What?”

“Let’s just sit down.”

He bends and sweeps his hand over the bed, but remains standing when she doesn’t make a move to sit.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

“Katja,” she answers uncertainly.

“You chose a good name, Katja. A good working name.”

“It’s my real name.”

“Oh.”

A short silence follows.

“You shouldn’t let just anyone in,” says Waldemar.

“Maybe you should go,” she says, suspicion winning out over uncertainty.

Waldemar takes a step forward and grabs her by the arms, just below her shoulders. His dark eyes hold her in a penetrating gaze. “You have to go,” he says, laying the paper — which she hasn’t really paid attention to — on her bed.

This confuses her, and she tries to get loose. “Why should I go?”

Waldemar doesn’t notice the swelling panic in her voice, simply because he hasn’t expected it. “It’s dangerous here,” he responds. “Look, this has to go up on the windows again. No one belongs here anymore.”

Now her shoulders are shaking and he can see fear in her eyes, so Waldemar takes his hands away. “Don’t be afraid, sweetheart. I don’t want to frighten you.”

“But why? Why is it dangerous here?” She looks straight into his eyes for the first time and sees his years of madness. “Why?” she repeats.

Waldemar’s chin trembles and he glances away, because he can’t handle her innocence and fear. He sighs and manages to put into words the thing he has never wanted to say: “A girl was killed in this room. Someone like you. A beautiful, sweet girl. Didn’t they tell you that when they brought you here?”

A shiver goes through her body. “No, he didn’t say anything. Here?”

“Yes, in this room. In that corner. I’m sorry. No one can ever come here again.”

Waldemar wipes the tears from his eyes, shakes his head, and suddenly grabs her by the arm. “You have to leave here. Now.”

He takes her to the door and opens the curtains. A prostitute on the other side of the narrow passage sees Waldemar pull Katja from her room with a crazed expression and drums angrily on her own window.

“You have to leave here. It isn’t safe, it’s not safe here,” he mutters urgently, unaware of the commotion unfolding around him. Aaron, who has just walked into the passageway with a fresh group of tourists, stops, so as not to put his clients at risk. The drumming prostitute pushes an alarm button. Lights flash, and a siren drowns out everything else in the street. People cover their ears, but Waldemar sees, hears, feels nothing. He drags Katja through the passageway, convinced that the devil is at her heels. He pushes people aside; Aaron tumbles against the wall, his hat rolls away, its feather crushed by someone’s shoe.

Waldemar plows through the tourists, and there stands Ivan. Immovable, unwilling to lose his newest acquisition because of the district’s village idiot. His hand rests loosely in his trendy designer bag, his joint dangles from his mouth, a disdainful smile rests on his lips.

Waldemar’s desperate eyes are focused on the light at the end of the passageway. He runs straight ahead and crashes into Ivan, knocks him into the passage wall. Waldemar hesitates, growls like a wounded animal, and looks back — not at Ivan, from whom he now has nothing to fear, but at Katja. She runs surprisingly quickly in her high heels; he scarcely needs to pull her along. The light comes closer. Waldemar turns back once more, they’re almost there, and now he pulls his daughter close. This time he’s there in time to save her, and she knows it, because she hugs him tightly and smiles. The white light dances like a spirit at the end of the passageway.

“Go!” screams Waldemar, as they finally burst onto the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, and the tourists and junkies and johns scatter out of their way. “Go, my darling sweetheart!”

Their hands part. His daughter runs, runs, runs, and when she is almost out of sight, he sees her ascend, lift up into the sky.

Waldemar can still feel her warmth in his hands, and he watches her rise up with a smile.

In the passageway, Aaron finally spots his hat on the ground. When he reaches for it, his gaze falls on Ivan, who is sitting under the graffitied wall. Ivan stashes his switchblade back in his bag, but Aaron sees it, glimpses the red on its blade. Slowly, Aaron picks up his hat, smoothes its feather as best he can, and returns it to his head. He hoists his staff and slams the end of it against Ivan’s head, and the pimp loses consciousness and collapses to the ground like a rag doll. Aaron grumbles with satisfaction as he hears the first sirens approaching. He regathers his flock, who have observed his actions with alarm, and they follow him out of the alley, silent, impressed.

On the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, Waldemar takes a few uncertain steps, and then his knees buckle and he falls. Instinctively, he places his hands on his stomach, and, when he looks down, sees blood seeping between his fingers. Thick drops fall on the cobblestones.

He topples onto his back and is soon surrounded by shocked prostitutes, a coffee shop bouncer, a dozen tourists, and three drunken English hooligans, one of whom, well-meaning, tries to drape his jacket over Waldemar’s head.

Waldemar fends them off with some difficulty. He turns his eyes to the gates of hell, sees that the red light above his daughter’s room is out, and dies, suffused with satisfaction.