Amsterdam Noir

The Tower by Hanna Bervoets

Van der Pekbuurt

“Is this your first visit?” the girl in the red jacket asks.

The elevator ride is apparently part of the attraction. Gita hadn’t realized that, hadn’t expected there to be an operator in the car with her.

She nods, and the girl smiles. “This is the fastest elevator in Western Europe,” she says. “It only takes fifteen seconds to get to the top. You should look up.”

The girl cranes her head back, and Gita follows her example, but she’s not sure what to do with her hands. Oddly enough, she misses her rolling suitcase — its handle has been the only thing she’s had to hold on to this evening. She checked it when she came in from the street, though, handed it off to a girl whose hair was tied back in exactly the same ponytail worn by this child who stands beside her. Gita watched her tuck it away in a corner, with another suitcase and two carry-ons, the luggage of others just arrived from Schiphol or on their way there. She wonders if anyone can tell from her appearance. Can the bag-check girl and the elevator girl see that she’s a local, not a tourist?

Tourists, Schiphol... at the thought of the airport, Gita feels nauseous, although that might just be the light show, as bright images flicker along the car’s ceiling: the three Xs from Amsterdam’s coat of arms, the Dutch flag, a tree, a cat, a skull — is that really a skull? — a house, a child, something blue, something red, an orange dog, a pink smiley.

“We’re there,” the girl says.

The silver doors whoosh open. The observation deck is larger than Gita had imagined it would be.

“We’re open for another hour. If you have a ticket for the swing, though, you’ll have to hurry — it closes at nine.”

Gita nods, and the girl retreats into the elevator. Does she still tip her head back when she’s alone?

It’s peaceful up here on the roof. A couple strolls along the railing to her right, two teenage girls take selfies with the city spread out below them in the gathering dusk. A boy standing beside the huge steel swing wears the same red jacket as the girl in the elevator and looks at her questioningly. She shakes her head.

Of course, she thinks. Of course there’s hardly anyone here tonight: it’s almost dark, it’s drizzling, it’s practically freezing — but, God, the view is gorgeous.

You can see for miles in every direction, despite the fence on the other side of the railing. The fence is six feet tall, she got that tidbit from Femke. The couple, an older man and woman in white sneakers — probably Americans — examines a signboard with a line drawing of Central Station and other landmarks. But the station’s not very interesting anymore, since the grand renovation it’s actually quite ugly, and Gita finds the other landmarks — the Old Church, the Palace on the Dam, the Stock Exchange — equally unappealing, so she walks around to the far side of the roof for the view of Amsterdam-North.

And there is the neighborhood where she grew up. The streets, the houses, the trees, all laid out in miniature; she can hold a streetlight between her thumb and forefinger. From the ferry dock, the Buiksloterweg ambles northeast, then, just past Pussy Galore, forks off to the right. To the left, it changes its name to the Ranonkelkade and then the Van der Pekstraat, a caterpillar with fat legs extending to either side. The legs are the Anemoonstraat, the Oleanderstraat, the Jasmijnstraat, the Heimansweg.

Mireille lives in a house on one of those legs. Right now, she’s probably sitting in front of the TV.

Gita’s parents lived for many years on the highest floor of an old building on the next leg, until the block was torn down and renovated and the prices went sky-high. Atop the new building on the site where she was raised, there’s now a penthouse that seems unoccupied, since no light ever burns in its windows.

The caterpillar’s head is a square, the Mosplein, and Gita knows that, at this moment in the Café Mosplein, Sjors and Maya are lowering the metal shutters across the plateglass window that looks out on the square. She wonders if she can make out her own building from here. Yes, there, the street just south of the square, that must be it.

What would happen if she went there now? Climb the stairs, slip her key into the lock, and then immediately the scream, the uproar that only she can understand. She left the heat on but turned out all the lights — had she been hoping for burglars? The longer she stares at her building in the distance, the more clearly she can hear the screams.

She turns away and sees Femke’s complex, those buildings there on the right. Femke pointed it out to her once, from the ferry: “That one, there, with the big windows!”

Earlier this evening, Gita checked all the mailboxes and buzzers in the lobby, but she couldn’t find Femke’s name. She’d actually grabbed a complete stranger by the arm and said, “Sir, you don’t happen to know Femke de Waal, do you?” The man shook his head and scowled at her suitcase. “Airbnb’s not allowed in this building,” he said severely, pulling a ring of keys from his jacket, and Gita had turned away and left but not gone home. Instead, she’d wandered aimlessly through the warren of streets until she found herself at the foot of the A’DAM Tower, the tallest building on the waterfront.

Gita fishes her cell phone from her pocket. No new messages — nothing from Femke. Without thinking, she scrolls up, past dozens of texts, maybe hundreds, until she comes to the very first one in the chain: Red leather gloves!

Johnny hadn’t wanted to wear his rain jacket that day. It had rained all week, fat drops pelting the windows, the bed of Johnny’s plastic dump truck filling with water — Gita hadn’t had the energy to bring it in from the backyard. Johnny shook his head angrily when she held the jacket up for him. He made a face like he’d swallowed something gross and growled what sounded like a no. It was only a few steps from the front door to the curb, where the school bus would stop, and, if he wanted, his teachers would let him stay indoors all day. Strictly speaking, he didn’t need the jacket, but Gita had just bought it and wanted to convince herself that the money hadn’t been wasted — it had cost more than she could really afford.

Their argument unfolded like most of their arguments. First Johnny began to scream, his eyes already tearing, his cheeks flushed, and then he started kicking. His flailing arms struck her in the face, but Gita knew he didn’t mean to hurt her. Finally, he broke out in uncontrollable sobs.

She was reminded of a video that had been going around on Facebook for weeks. A man tells his three-year-old daughter that steak comes from cows and the girl bursts out in tears. “Poor cows,” she whispers to the camera.

Every time Gita saw that clip, she felt a mixture of anger and jealousy. She was jealous of the parents, who had a healthy, beautiful little girl with two pigtails, a child who felt empathy for other living creatures. But she was mad at them too, for bragging so shamelessly about their blessings. Why would anyone be interested in the private happiness of strangers?

The bus stood outside her door for ten minutes that morning, two wheels up on the curb. When she couldn’t calm Johnny down, she bribed him with a prepackaged pancake. It was much too early for a treat — she could see Johnny’s nutritionist shake a finger — but what choice did she have? The bus was waiting, with other children aboard. Thank god Johnny stopped screaming the moment he heard the crinkle of the plastic wrapper.

“Sorry,” she told the frowning driver, when Johnny finally clambered up into the bus.

Later that day, she regretted the humbleness of her apology. She did what she could, damn it, and who was a school-bus driver to judge her? She wished she’d told him so, right to his face. But at the same time she felt guilty about the way she’d treated Johnny. She shouldn’t have insisted on the rain jacket. He was tired, he’d had a bad night, his day hadn’t even begun, and she was already nagging him. When she brought him home from Mireille’s that evening, she decided, she’d give him another pancake, just because.

Had she noticed Femke come into the café that morning?

Probably not. She can barely recall taking her order — the only reason she knows now that it had been an open-faced egg sandwich was that she remembers Femke saying, “You should leave off the dill,” when she paid for it. A typical remark, she would come to learn: Femke always spoke her mind, whether or not anyone had asked for her opinion. At first, Gita saw the trait as arrogance, until she realized that in a way it came from a desire to be helpful. Femke simply knew better than most other people, and with each observation about the things she ate and saw and did, Gita’s admiration for Femke’s knowledge and insight and pure bravado grew.

After the comment about the egg sandwich, though, Gita had merely nodded. She’s not from around here, she thought. She could tell from the woman’s long, formfitting raincoat, nothing like the shapeless things worn by the café’s usual customers. Before heading back out into the rain, Femke had tightened her belt, but Gita didn’t notice how slim she was until later that day, when the woman returned. Her raincoat was dry then, and so elegant that Gita wondered if it really was a raincoat, after all.

“I think I left my gloves here,” Femke said.

Now that they were standing face-to-face, Gita realized that the woman was beautiful. Maybe it was her makeup, she thought at the time. But four or five weeks later, Femke gave her an eyeliner pencil, the same kind she used herself, and it didn’t make Gita’s eyes any bigger or more attractive.

“I don’t think we found a pair of gloves,” said Gita, and she glanced at Sjors, who stood in the doorway to the kitchen, shaking his head.

Femke shrugged. “Might as well have a drink, since I’m here. Do you carry Macallan?”

She spent the rest of the afternoon at the bar, reading the newspaper, playing with her phone, asking questions whenever Gita had a free moment. About the café — “You didn’t have to close when they renovated the square?” — but personal things too: “Do you live in the neighborhood?”

Gita remembers finding their on-and-off conversation odd, but not unwelcome. When customers talked to her, they were mostly older gentlemen who did little more than order another drink. Femke was young — probably ten years younger than Gita — a member of a more interested generation. So when she suggested that Gita pour one for herself, Gita did something she’d never done before. She set a shot glass on the bar beside the register and filled it to the rim with whiskey.

She hadn’t had much to eat that afternoon. The guilty residue from the morning’s scene with Johnny stuck to her ribs like chewing gum, but the whiskey burned some of it away and gave her the courage to speak honestly for once. “Actually,” she heard herself say, “I don’t like the neighborhood as much as I used to. They promised us a whole new clientele after the renovation. But most of our regulars moved away, and we’re not good enough for the new residents. They like the trendy spots in the Van der Pekstraat, little bistros that serve soup, where the whole menu is soup and nothing but soup, you know what I mean? Can you believe anyone would come all the way up here to eat soup?”

Femke toasted her and sipped her whiskey.

Encouraged, Gita went on: “All those chichi places are the same: a brick wall, ferns, folding chairs, a wooden bar; it’s like you’re in a house that’s in the middle of being remodeled. They serve your drink in a mason jar instead of a normal glass, but it’s not like those jars ever actually held pears or peaches or whatever, they buy them brand new by the case. Did you ever try to drink out of one of those things? You’re lucky if you don’t spill all over yourself!”

Femke laughed and shook her head. “I’ll drink to that!” She emptied her glass in one swallow and leaned across the bar, her face only inches from Gita’s. Her heavy perfume reminded Gita of her father’s aftershave, with just a hint of Gauloises mixed in.

“We should go to one of those hip places sometime,” Femke whispered conspiratorially, “and sabotage the joint.”

Gita laughed, not sure if Femke was serious, too tipsy from her drink to come up with a witty response.

Femke rose from her stool and picked up her phone. “I’ll text you so you can let me know if my gloves turn up. What’s your number?”

Gita told her. It seemed natural but at the same time not, as if she’d eaten a piece of candy of a type she hadn’t tasted in years. When was the last time anyone had asked her for her phone number?

When she got to Mireille’s that evening, Johnny was parked in front of the TV. She’d hurried up the six flights of stairs and stood panting in the quiet living room; the ticking of the cuckoo clock was an almost sarcastic echo of her heartbeat. Johnny was watching Elmo. It was his favorite DVD, though Gita wished he would pick something else for a change. Elmo reminded her that Johnny never made any progress, which reminded her in turn that she never made any progress, trapped in a stuffy room where the light was always blue and Elmo endlessly showed off his brand-new shoes.

Mireille slouched in her armchair by the window, paging through a magazine.

“Sorry I’m so late,” said Gita.

“You couldn’t call?” Mireille snapped, not looking up. “Johnny was worried about you.” She nodded at the television: Johnny was glued to the screen, his mouth slightly open, as if this was the first time he’d ever seen Elmo’s big red feet. “I do this for you, you know,” Mireille muttered, struggling to her own feet. “You want Earl Grey or rose hip?”

Whiskey, Gita thought. Do you carry Macallan?

That Friday evening, Johnny had splashed merrily in the tub, teasing her. She’d found the game tiring, but she’d played along: “Come on, I bet you can’t get me wet!” She was mopping the bathroom floor with a towel when her phone buzzed in her hip pocket. A text. She had to scroll up to see who had sent it, and what she found, from four days earlier, was Femke’s number and Red leather gloves!

This new message read: Sabotage the Soepboer on Sunday?

Gita stuffed the phone back in her pocket, as if she’d been caught looking at something not intended for her eyes.

She got to the Soepboer a little early. She’d dropped Johnny off at Mireille’s with the excuse that she’d been asked at the last minute to work an extra shift at the café, and then she hurried down the Van der Pekstraat more quickly than necessary, perhaps motivated by her lie, which had made it sound like she was in a rush. She wore her tightest jeans but worried her age would be a giveaway that the Soepboer wasn’t her type of place. The moment she came through the door, someone called her name: Femke, already seated at a little table by the window.

“No mason jars,” Femke whispered, after the server took their order. They had to back away from most of their other prejudgments too. Yes, there was a brick wall, but otherwise the Soepboer was more cozy than run-down, and they gave up their plan to sabotage the place. They sat there all afternoon, talking and talking, while the server kept returning to refill their wineglasses.

At Femke’s insistence — “You have a son? Really?” — Gita talked about Johnny. He was fourteen, she said, a sweet boy, at least most of the time. His father? After Johnny was born, she’d never seen the guy again. “Men,” said Femke. “They can be such assholes, don’t you think?”

Gita didn’t say a word about Johnny’s condition.

Femke explained in turn that she was an independent financial consultant. She’d had an office in Utrecht for a while, but had recently relocated to Amsterdam: a month ago, she’d moved into one of the new apartment blocks by the water, and now she was eager to make some friends in the neighborhood... which answered a question Gita hadn’t dared to ask.

Over the next few weeks, Femke was a lunchtime regular at Café Mosplein. She usually hung out at the bar, chatting about the book she was reading or a movie Gita had to see, and more and more often about new clients she’d taken on, like the woman who kept fiddling with her phone during a consultation. “She was adjusting and readjusting the temperature in her house,” Femke laughed, “so her Bouvier wouldn’t be too cold — can you beat that?” Those were afternoons when, for the first time, Gita found herself glad that the café attracted so few customers.

One Thursday, Gita called in sick so she and Femke could take the ferry across the IJ to go shopping. That was one of the few times they left Amsterdam-North together. From the boat deck, Femke pointed out her apartment building as, giggling like schoolgirls, they brushed the windblown hair out of each other’s faces. In the city center, Femke steered Gita to stores she’d never even heard of. Femke decided on a long red evening gown that Gita thought suited her perfectly, and Gita bought a jacket Femke pulled off the rack for her. It’s on sale, she rationalized, handing her debit card to the sales clerk, a steal at this price. Tapping in her PIN, she felt a deep connection to Femke, who had just done the same thing herself. Pressing those little numbered keys was like sealing their friendship.

“Where’d you get the jacket?” asked Mireille that afternoon.

“Ordered it online,” said Gita, tugging Johnny away from the TV. “It was on clearance.”

She had by then told Mireille about Femke, there’d been no way to avoid it. “I think I’ve made a new friend,” she’d said. Talking about Femke gave her almost as much pleasure as talking with Femke. When she brought Johnny over to Mireille’s one Saturday evening, she’d explained away the almost-unheard-of occurrence by saying that she and Femke were going out.

“You look chic,” Mireille had said, admiring Gita’s black velvet sweater. Gita didn’t know if that was a compliment or a reproach, but she understood that she’d better not ask Mireille to take Johnny again on a weekend night.

The next week, when Femke mentioned a new restaurant she wanted to try, Gita suggested they wait till after Johnny’s bedtime.

That evening, Gita rummaged through the plastic crate in the bathroom for the nylon straps and metal leg braces Johnny’d worn to bed as a child — well, as a younger child. Back then, he’d sometimes had epileptic seizures during the night, and the straps and braces protected him from hurting himself. Over the years, the frequency and intensity of the attacks had abated, until the risk of an episode was outweighed by the discomfort the restraints caused the boy, not to mention the struggle it took to tie him down.

“Come on, now,” she said, “give me your arm.” Johnny was exhausted. She’d fed him a big bowl of mac and cheese for dinner, and that had filled him up and tired him out, so he didn’t put up a fight. He remembered the routine, the tightness of the straps on his wrists and legs, though it had been a long time since they had last used them.

“Mama,” he said, the word a question. “Ma?”

The moment Gita locked the apartment door behind her, she felt herself go limp. With every step she took, a shiver ran from her shoulders up her neck to her throat, and it wasn’t until she finished her second rum and Coke at the Butcher — the new hot spot by the water — that her arms and legs felt normal again.

When she returned home a few hours later, Johnny was sleeping peacefully, and she kissed him lightly on both cheeks.

Gita leans in to peer through the rooftop telescope, swivels it on its axis from left to right. Do the people down there realize it’s possible to peep right into their homes? The curtains on most of the windows of the apartment complex on the water are drawn, but she can see right into some of the illuminated living rooms, make out a shape here and there that could be nothing more than a houseplant but could just as well be someone’s husband or father or lover. Gita releases the telescope and reaches again for her phone, presses again on Femke’s name. Does a screen light up behind one of those windows?

She puts the phone away and returns to the telescope, aims it straight down twenty-two stories to the street: the black asphalt jumps into focus before her eyes. There, 367 feet below, is where their plan began. It wasn’t much later then than it is now, though at that time of year it was still quite light out. It was cold, their summer jackets too thin for the crisp September evening.

“Oh no!” cried Femke.

“What?”

“It’s closed. We can’t go up.”

They’d talked about the Tower often, laughed at the crazy idea of the giant swing on the roof, visible from every café, every house and apartment in the area. It was big enough for two people, they could see that from the ground. But could you sit close enough to hold hands, and was it really safe? They weren’t going to find out, not that night — now that they’d finally talked themselves into the adventure, the Tower was closed.

A little old woman hurried past the shuttered doors, struggling to keep up with a dachshund on a leash. The dog trembled, as surprised by the cold as they had been. “An accident,” the woman told them. Femke shook her head sadly, but Gita didn’t understand at first. “A jumper,” the woman said quickly, as if she’d already told the story a dozen times today, and perhaps she had.

Gita and Femke stood there in silence, necks craned, looking up to the top of the Tower, the observation deck, ringed by a tall fence meant to prevent the sort of tragedy that had apparently occurred despite its presence.

“That fence is six feet high,” said Femke softly, and Gita visualized a man — it had to have been a man — reaching above his head, grabbing hold of the top metal bar, pressing the toe of his sneaker into one of the diamond-shaped openings in the chain link, and hoisting himself upward.

She can’t remember which she noticed first, the music — a piano being played beautifully somewhere behind them — or the shadow that suddenly fell across Femke’s face. Gita turned and saw the colossus: a ship, the AIDA, the biggest cruise ship in Europe, though she didn’t know that at the time. At that moment, the ship made her think of Mireille’s balcony, the only difference being that the people on the ship’s balconies seemed happy, little Playmobil figures who leaned over their railings and waved at them. And where was that heavenly music coming from?

“Three concert halls,” said Femke, reading her mind. “Two casinos, four pools, nine restaurants.”

As they watched the enormous craft glide by, Gita was reminded of an animated film she’d recently seen, Pinocchio. The movie was long and too difficult for Johnny. He’d begun to whimper impatiently, and she’d put him to bed and watched the rest of it alone in her dim living room. One moment in particular had stayed with her — the scene with the whale, a sea monster so huge that it sucked whole schools of fish, sea urchins, anemones, even poor wooden Pinocchio down its gigantic gullet, the whale’s jaws gaping wide and everything in its path disappearing between them. She imagined the prow of the cruise ship breaking open and inhaling her and Femke from the dock into its maw.

She felt dizzy. She might even have staggered a bit, and suddenly Femke’s arm was around her waist, supporting her. It was the first time Femke had touched her in such an intimate manner. She was a little taller than Gita; her slender arm slid easily around her back, her left hand came to rest on Gita’s hip and held her close.

“We should do that,” said Femke. “You and me, we should go on a cruise.”

“Yes,” said Gita, “absolutely.” And she laid her hand on Femke’s, and the two of them stood there for a moment, until the ship and its music had passed out of their sight and hearing.

A cruise, they’d told each other several times that evening, we really have to do that, each time bursting out in peals of laughter — and when Femke laid a thick travel brochure on the bar the next afternoon, Gita assumed she was making a joke.

But Femke leafed furiously through the colored pages until she found what she was looking for. “This one!” she said, tapping her forefinger on a photograph of a sleek white ship with bright blue trim. “Leaves from Naples and goes all the way around the world!”

“That would be wonderful,” Gita sighed, and she tried to slide the brochure aside to make room for the glass of Macallan that Femke had ordered, but Femke held it in place with her finger.

“Look,” she said, “thirty thousand euros a person, all included. Around the world!” She drank down half her whisky and took an envelope from her purse.

Gita had seen similar mailings before. Every so often, one of them showed up with her bills and advertising circulars: Need extra cash for Christmas? or words to that effect.

“Fill this out and sign it,” said Femke. “We’ll be on our way in three weeks.”

Gita looked up from the envelope and couldn’t tell from Femke’s expression if she was serious or trying to be funny. “That’s a loan application,” she said. “How am I supposed to pay it back?”

“We’ll split the payments,” Femke replied cheerfully. “Sixty euros a month each, that’s doable, isn’t it?”

Gita shrugged, and then Femke did something she’d never done before. She slid off her stool and came around the bar. From behind, she put her arms around Gita and hugged her. Femke was so close that Gita could feel her heart beating against her back, could smell the familiar musk of Gauloises. All at once, she felt truly happy.

Femke put her chin on Gita’s shoulder and nodded at the brochure. “Look,” she said, “that woman in the straw hat is me, and the one holding the cocktail is you.”

It all went as smoothly as Femke had predicted. A week after Gita signed the application, the money was deposited into her account.

She worried that people could smell it on her. When she hunched down in the supermarket to pluck the cheapest brand of tomato soup from the bottom shelf, she felt like she’d been caught red-handed: was this the behavior of a woman in possession of so much wealth? Femke proposed that they open a special vacation account — putting it in Femke’s name would get her a significant break on her taxes, she explained, and she was a financial consultant, so she ought to know what she was talking about — and Gita was relieved to see the enormous sum disappear from her own account, as if she’d taken off a heavy fur coat that had never really fit her in the first place.

Johnny seemed especially irritable those days, and Gita went through twice as many prepackaged pancakes as usual. He often wept when he awoke in the mornings, and at night he was anything but cooperative. When she finally got him settled beneath his Grover blanket, he stared up at her fearfully. She knew what was bothering him. The leg braces. The straps. But she never used them more than once a week, only when she went out to eat with Femke and then never longer than a couple of hours. That frightened look of his annoyed her. She was his mother, she had always taken care of him, had never hurt him. Didn’t that count for anything?

Meanwhile, she had to figure out what to do with him when they went off on their cruise, an entire month. For just a moment, she considered taking him along, but she couldn’t do that to Femke, she decided, or to Johnny either. He’d be terrified of the waves. What was meant to be a vacation would only make his mood swings worse.

And besides, Gita thought, she hadn’t had any real time off in fourteen years. For fourteen years she’d taken care of Johnny, spent every weekday and many Saturdays on her feet in the café. In fourteen years, she’d withered from a promising young lady determined to make the best of things to a middle-aged woman who’d accepted that she wasn’t entitled to the best of anything, that the future she had once dreamed of had turned out not to be a pretty pink house and a dog, but a swamp. Didn’t she have the right, just this once, to enjoy herself?

She asked Mireille to take Johnny in, offered to pay her for the trouble. Mireille had been offended by the idea of payment, but she hadn’t said no to looking after the boy.

Until two days before their departure, when Mireille had called her. “I’ve talked it over with Bor,” she said, “and he won’t have Johnny here for a month.”

There was a long silence on the line.

“To be honest,” Mireille said at last, “I don’t think I could handle it, anyway. I haven’t got the energy. You understand, don’t you?”

So she’d had to make other arrangements.

On the afternoon of their flight, she and Femke had agreed to meet across from the airport Burger King at five. Femke had to see a client in Utrecht at noon, but their flight didn’t leave until 6:30, so she’d have plenty of time to get there. Femke would bring the tickets.

At 5:05, Gita lifted her suitcase onto a baggage cart and hurried through the arrivals hall to the Burger King. The smell of frying meat made her hungry, but she couldn’t stop to eat and risk missing Femke.

She waited for five minutes and watched a somber young couple take their place in the line approaching the counter. She waited ten minutes and watched the couple settle at a table with a tray piled high with burgers and fries. She waited fifteen minutes and watched the couple revive over their meal: the girl’s face became animated, the boy laughed at something she said.

After twenty minutes, Gita sat on the edge of her baggage cart. She watched the couple rise, watched the girl playfully order the boy to clear their table, watched him stick out his tongue at her.

While she waited, she sent Femke a text, then another. She asked a security guard if there was a second Burger King elsewhere at the airport. She called Femke’s cell phone three times, maybe four, but no one answered.

At 6:20, Gita wheeled her cart into the departures hall. She approached the customer service counter for the airline on which they were ticketed, and asked the agent if it was possible to get a refund.

“I’m sorry,” the girl said, “we don’t process refunds here. I can cancel your reservation, though. Would you like me to do that for you?”

Gita hesitated, then nodded.

“What’s the name on the booking?” the girl asked.

“Femke,” said Gita, “Femke de Waal.”

The girl typed the name into her computer, then asked Gita to spell it. “I am sorry,” she said at last, “but I don’t show a reservation under that name.”

Gita’s fingers tighten on the cool chain-link fence. It would be so easy to hoist herself upward, to climb, to perch on the crossbar at the top. From that vantage point, the view of the city would be even better: the passenger terminal across the IJ to the left, the Prinseneiland to the right... and below? She closes her eyes and imagines falling forward. As she falls, her velocity will increase — one of the few things she remembers from her science classes in school.

“Ma’am?” says a voice behind her.

She opens her eyes and turns around. The boy in the red jacket is pointing at the swing. “Last chance. Do you want to ride?”

The roof is deserted. The drizzle has strengthened into rain. With her hands in her jacket pockets, Gita approaches the swing. Her fingertips glide across her phone, a cool black brick that remains stubbornly silent.

Now that she is beside the swing, she realizes for the first time just how tall it is: the steel pyramid stretches far above her head.

“Have a seat,” says the boy, and Gita settles onto a flat red wooden board that reminds her of the ski lifts she’s seen in the movies.

“Now fasten your safety belt, please.”

She pulls the black bar up between her legs, fumbles with the locking mechanism, and then she sees them. Two terrified eyes, pupils darting back and forth as if they’re following a bumblebee in flight. She clicks the tongue into the buckle and sees the windmilling arms, the kicking legs, the thin wrists she wrestles with difficulty to the mattress. She pulls the belt tighter, feels the nylon press into her thigh. She can hear him screaming now, whimpering like a cornered dog. Johnny’s pajama bottoms are suddenly wet, she can smell the urine, but he’s finally secured, so she pulls his blanket over him, over his pajamas. She sets the iPad on the night table next to his bed and points at Elmo, who is laughing gaily.

The ski lift jolts upward. Gita’s legs dangle in the darkness.

“Here we go,” says the boy beneath her, and the swing begins to move, first back, then forward, and Gita looks down at the city spread out beneath her. There are houses to the left and cars to the right and boats in the water, all pinpoints of light, glowworms that wriggle across the earth and mean nothing at all to her.

Look, she hears Femke say, that woman in the straw hat is me, and the one holding the cocktail is you.

Silent Days by Karin Amatmoekrim

Oosterpark

It was early autumn when they began to cut down the trees. The wind was aggressive, the rain thin but steady. I sat at my window and looked out at their balding crowns, and then I watched them fall. It happened in silence, as if the trees were fainting, dropping to the ground without the least resistance.

The park seems wounded now. But I’ve lived here long enough to know that even this will pass. The gaps left behind by the fallen trees will close, the park will heal itself, and people will say they can’t imagine it ever being any different.

I’ve lived in this neighborhood for eighty-two years. I’ve seen it change: the city itself, its inhabitants, their faces, even the language they speak. But at heart the neighborhood remains the same. Amsterdam-East was never flawless. It’s the side of town where the Jews lived before the Germans came and took them away. Their empty homes were immediately repopulated. We all worked hard but remained poor. No one had time for sentimentality. In the summers, the heat fanned our discontent, and we invented turbulent celebrations, throwing old furniture out of upper-floor windows to the streets below. We built bonfires of the shattered remnants, the flames so high they tickled the underbellies of the clouds.

I was born over there, in the Dapperstraat. Over the years, I moved around the area and eventually landed here, on the fourth floor of a stately building on the east side of the park. I spend most of my time in an armchair just inside my living room window, looking out onto the park. Most of the city’s sounds fail to reach this high, and I content myself with observing the silent stories of the world outside my window. Some things are better without sound. Even violence seems peaceful when wreathed in silence. I have witnessed robberies and drunken brawls that suggest contemporary ballet, the dancers wheeling around each other with exaggerated, expressive movements. From my vantage point, these events are almost beautiful.

I don’t have many friends. Just one, really. His name is Ruud. He’s absurdly fat and always in a bad mood. He doesn’t walk — probably because of his weight — but putters around in a motorized wheelchair. I have no idea why we’re friends. Perhaps we’re both lonely, who can say? We see each other almost every day in the library in the Linnaeusstraat. I read the newspaper, and Ruud asks me what’s in it, and then he curses the world while we drink free coffee from plastic cups.

A few months ago, Ruud asked me how long I plan to stay on in the house on the park. “You’re old,” he said, meaning maybe it was time for me to start looking for a place in a rest home. But I’m not planning on moving, and I told him so. “You’ll die there, then?” he growled, and I said yes, that is indeed my plan, not necessarily right away but eventually. At which point Ruud felt compelled to tell me yet again about his neighbor, a hoarder who tripped over a pile of junk, fell down the stairs, and broke his neck. When the police searched his apartment, they found his dog half-dead, with — so the story went — its decomposing body melting into the carpet. “They had to carry the poor thing out of the house, rug and all. Finally had to put him to sleep.”

“I’m not a hoarder,” I said.

“That’s not the point,” Ruud hissed between his teeth. “You’re too old to go on living there. One of these days you’ll break your hip or something, and you’ll be too weak to call for help, and then you’ll die up there, and your body will rot away and start to stink. Everyone else in the building will suffer, just because you’re too stubborn to go to an old folks’ home where you belong.”

“It won’t take them long to find me,” I shushed him. “You’ll miss me, won’t you?”

“You wish,” he muttered, then ordered me to go on reading from the paper.

To be honest, it doesn’t matter to me if I die alone in my apartment. I’m used to being alone. It would be strange to be surrounded by people when my time comes, to see Ruud’s fat face before me as I take my final breath. I don’t even want to think about it. No, I’m accustomed to my own company, and the prospect of dying alone doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I only hope my death is painless. Violence frightens me — even the thought of it makes me nauseous.

I clearly remember that conversation with Ruud, because it happened the same day the walls of my house began to speak. I’d been reading in bed, and at the moment I closed my book and reached to turn out the light, I heard it. The voice was soft but audible, right beside my face. A vague whisper. I listened, holding my breath. It was a woman’s voice, and though I couldn’t understand what she was saying, I could tell that she was unhappy. The experience made me quite nervous, but after a few minutes the voice faded away and I drifted off to sleep.

A curious thing about this type of old structure is that you can’t really predict how sound will travel. I didn’t recognize the voice that came from within my walls. It might have been someone living two doors away, or on the ground floor, three flights below me. Or it might have come from the third floor, where the building’s new owner lived with his wife. He was a lawyer who’d bought the house a few months earlier in the hopes of increasing his income. I watched him go out the front door every morning in a gray or dark-blue suit. A man of routine, who returned home each evening promptly at a quarter past six. His wife didn’t work. She was a quiet woman with a pale face, not unfriendly.

The owner was almost as insistent as Ruud in his attempts to convince me to move out. He even offered me a sum of money to leave. He wanted to renovate my apartment, I knew, so he could offer it at a much higher rent to expats or some other wealthy sort. But I’m not leaving, and I politely told him so, even though that means I’ll go on having to mount a discouraging number of steps to reach my nest. I don’t want to leave this house, because I know it inside and out. The stairs are very steep, yet I know which ones will creak when I step on them. I know where the handrail is loose and how the front door sticks in the winter, how you have to give it a bit of a push before it will open. And although I don’t know all of the residents, I do know the building’s idiosyncracies... and that’s a sort of love, isn’t it? Yes, I love this house, and in a way I believe the house cares for me too.

Looking out the window one day, I saw the owner approaching. I glanced at the clock on the church tower farther up the street: it was only three in the afternoon.

Without undue haste, he chained his bicycle to the fence on the other side of the road. There was a noticeable calmness in his movements. Something in the way he checked to make sure it was safe to cross — too in control. A hint of pent-up anger. I stepped away from the window and stood in the middle of the living room, listening for any sound from below. I heard him open the front door and quietly lock it behind him. As his footsteps ascended the stairs, I had a growing sense of discomfort. It was the middle of the week, a workday. At this time, the building was deserted, except for the owner and his wife. And me, above them. He’d probably forgotten all about me.

Involuntarily, I held my breath. The ticking of the clock on the windowsill sliced the air. Then, without warning, a storm of violence burst out beneath my feet. The owner roared as I’d never heard before. Furniture crashed, some glass object shattered against a wall. The wife’s sobbing pleas seemed to come from every direction. They leaked through the cracks in the windowpanes, crept through the mouse holes, climbed the walls, and oozed into my apartment and filled it, bouncing off me as I stood in the middle of my living room, my hands over my face, more frightened than I’d ever been in my life. When the crying stopped, the hitting continued, and I slowly dropped my hands to my sides. Bang bang bang, I heard, and I wondered what the woman’s silence meant.

Perhaps the scene below was less violent than it sounded? Or perhaps he had knocked her unconscious? And then, in a sudden insight I couldn’t wish away, I realized that she might no longer be crying because she was dead. Perhaps I — hiding behind my hands like a coward on the building’s top floor — had overheard the murder of the quiet woman with the pale face.

The next day, I told Ruud that the owner of my building had beaten his wife, that I’d been afraid I’d been a witness to her death — but that later, thank God, I’d heard her scurrying around below. I was concerned, I said, that at any moment the situation could take a turn for the worse.

He shrugged. “She’s the one who’s chosen to stay with him,” he said.

I don’t really like Ruud, although I call him my friend. But his words contained a grain of truth: if the woman wanted to leave, she’d be gone by now. And what, I asked myself, could an old-timer like me possibly do to help her, anyway? How could I protect her from a husband decades my junior? And what if he found out she and I had spoken — wouldn’t that make him even angrier? What if, because of my interference, he did something even more violent than he’d already done?

I worried about so many facets of the situation that once again I wound up taking no action.

And then one evening I woke up in the middle of the night. I lay still in my bed, my eyes closed, asking myself what it was that had awakened me. A few minutes passed, and then I heard her voice. It was very soft, a whisper from the depths, each word seeming to erase the one that came before it. I slid out from beneath my blanket and quietly got to my feet. I followed the sound to the living room, then into the hallway. I paused a moment inside my door, leaned against the wooden frame, and tensed in order to better capture the faint whispering from downstairs. It was so hushed that it would have been easy to ignore. I cautiously unlocked my door, careful to make no noise, and peered out into the stairwell. It was pitch-black except for a narrow strip of light that came through the window in the front door down on the ground floor. I pushed my own door open a bit wider and inched my head through the crack. My attention was drawn to a movement one floor below me. It took another second for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, and then I realized that it was the owner’s wife. She was lying on her stomach, crawling on hands and knees up the stairs toward me. She seemed to be pulling herself upward with her arms, as if her legs were no longer working. Her hair stuck to her face in wet stripes. She breathed heavily but almost without sound, as if she didn’t want to be overheard. Then she apparently became aware of something behind her and stiffened, just for an instant. Her features froze in an icy fear that crackled through her, and I suddenly saw that her hair wasn’t wet but drenched with blood. It streamed from her hairline, trickled down her face, pooled at the bottoms of her eyes. She couldn’t see me, I knew. She shivered and sighed, her fingers clawing the steps to pull her more quickly upward.

And that’s when I saw him. He was leaning against the doorjamb, his arms folded across his chest, watching her in utter silence. Then he leaned forward and, without a word, grabbed her by the ankles. He dragged her down the stairs and, in continued silence, back into their apartment. Her eyes and mouth gaped wide open, but still she made no sound. Just before she disappeared from my sight, it seemed as if she stared straight up into my face. He shut the door noiselessly, and the quiet of the night was absolute, as if it had swallowed her whole.

The next few days, I was immersed in a somberness inappropriate to a person of my years. For some time, I had observed my surroundings with a sort of lighthearted resignation, and I was quite satisfied with that attitude. But now this darkness, this violence, had penetrated my walls. I sat in my armchair for long hours and watched the crowns of the tallest trees swaying gently in the wind. I remembered how, only a few months earlier, the older ones had been cut down, had vanished from the park after living there for decades and had quickly been forgotten, and how their disappearance had offered light and air to those that remained. This park, I thought, just like this house, just like this city I know so well... everything changes, but at heart it remains the same.

Everything is irreplaceably what it is. Nothing yields. Nothing bends to the world’s violence.

The following day, I waited for the owner’s wife. Each time I heard the front door open, I hurried to the stairwell to see who it was. The third time, it was her. She was coming up the stairs, a blue-and-white shopping bag in her hand. I started down, holding carefully to the railing. Although I moved as quickly as my tired legs permitted, she reached her apartment door before me. She glanced up at me for a moment, surprised, and offered me a slight nod as she slid her key in the lock.

“Ma’am?” I said, inwardly cursing my old bones for not being faster.

She hesitated, visibly reluctant, the knob in her hand. “Yes?”

A few steep steps still separated us. It seemed to take an eternity before I reached her, but fortunately she waited. When I finally got there, I had to catch my breath. I leaned a hand against the wall, held up the other in a gesture that pleaded with her to grant me a moment to compose myself.

“Yes?” she said again, and she sounded irritated. Much of her face was concealed by large sunglasses, which I expected her to remove now that she was indoors, now that we stood side by side. But she kept them on and wore no visible expression. Her skin was as pale as I remembered, her lips pressed tightly together, leaving no room for emotion.

“Is your husband home?” I asked when I was able to speak.

She shook her head and turned to go inside.

“No, wait, it doesn’t matter. I mean — I actually wanted to talk to you.”

She seemed distracted. I got the strange feeling that she anticipated I would strike her.

“I wanted to tell you that I know. I know what he does to you. Is there anything I can do to help?”

Her mouth opened very slightly, but she promptly closed it again. I still couldn’t read her expression. She swallowed and said, “He can’t help it. It’s his heart.”

“He has a heart condition?”

She nodded. “He takes medication, and it has side effects. Sometimes... sometimes he’s not himself.”

“Why don’t you leave him?”

She lowered her head and whispered, “I don’t dare.”

“But you want to?”

She nodded without saying anything, then turned away from me abruptly, as if shocked by her own response.

After that conversation, I was determined to help her. I had done nothing in my life for which I needed to be embarrassed, but also nothing to be proud of. This, as I neared my finish line, would be my gift to the world. I devised a plan, and practiced the appropriate expressions of hysteria before the mirror. It wouldn’t be easy, but I hadn’t felt so keyed up in years.

The next day was a Saturday. It was ten minutes to six in the morning. I sat on the edge of my bed in pajamas and robe. I stood up and took off the robe, examined myself in the hall mirror, then went back to my bedroom and put it back on. Between the trees, the park outside was a dark gray. It wouldn’t be long before the light would shift and daybreak would come. I checked the clock on the windowsill. Eight minutes to six. The owner would be fast asleep. It was time to act.

I picked up the telephone receiver and waited for the trembling of my hand to subside. Then I dialed his number. It was awhile before he answered, his voice hoarse with sleep. “Hello?”

I took a deep breath and screamed, as loudly and hysterically as I could, trusting that, newly awakened, he wouldn’t recognize the sound as rehearsed: “Rats! Rats! There are rats in my apartment! You have to come up!”

“What? What are you... do you know what time it is?”

“They’re in the attic! I can hear them scuttling around all night long, and now they’re in the walls! I’m scared!”

“Can’t it wait? It’s—”

“No! No, it can’t wait! Please come now, I can’t stand it!”

“All right, calm down. I’m on my way. Jesus!”

He hung up. I set down the phone and waited, shaking with excitement, until I heard his apartment door open below. I took a breath and burst out into the stairwell with all the emotion I could muster. “There must be five or six of them!” I screamed at him, while he was still climbing the flight of stairs between us. He looked at me with irritation tinged with suspicion. I must have appeared crazy, with my white hair sticking out in all directions, my wrinkled pajamas, my unkempt robe hanging off my shoulders. “It’s horrible! Disgusting! I’ve always been terrified of rats. And now they’re in the ceiling. I can hear their nails scratching the wood, they probably have a nest of babies by now. The filthy beasts must be everywhere, and they eat everything. What do I do if they come into my apartment? What do I do?!”

“Calm down!” he ordered, and for one moment I thought he was about to hit me in the face. He didn’t, but he studied me with unconcealed contempt. “I can’t think if you keep on like that.” He went on staring at me, and I realized that, in addition to contempt, there was also a certain interest glimmering in his gaze. He surely believed I had gone mad. Alzheimer’s, if he was lucky. Then he’d have no trouble getting me out of the building.

I lowered my voice a bit. “Please, can you look in the attic? I’ll never get any sleep.”

He glanced up at the ceiling above the stairwell.

“There’s a hatch,” I said.

“I know,” he sighed, and he reached for its metal handle. When he pulled on it, flakes of white paint and clouds of dust rained down on us. The hatch, I knew, hadn’t been opened in years. The folding aluminum ladder above it was a cheap model. The previous owner hadn’t wanted to spend a lot of money on a mechanism that would rarely, if ever, be used. It rattled coldly as it unfolded. When it was fully extended, it left little room for us on the landing. Its feet settled barely two inches from the topmost step of the stairwell. It was an unsteady contraption he would have to climb, thanks to the fears of a hysterical tenant, so early in the morning that he hadn’t yet taken his medication.

I watched him furtively as he leaned one hand against the wall, the other pressed to his chest. He was panting, just a little. I was so close beside him that there was no need to shout, but I did so all the same. “Do you hear that? Do you? Rats!” I shoved him roughly, and he jerked away from my touch.

“Jesus, would you calm the fuck down?” Any vestige of politeness was gone now, and he stared at me in fury. “If you don’t relax, there’s nothing I can do.”

“Sorry,” I gasped, trying to look frightened.

He shook his head and examined the ladder. He raised a foot to the bottom tread and tested its strength. “Wobbly,” he muttered. “Hold it steady, would you?”

I ducked beneath the ladder and grabbed onto it with both hands. The owner groaned a bit and slowly began to climb. He was so close to me now that I feared he would hear my heart pulsing against my ribs. I had to wait for the exact right moment — this was what it all came down to. He had to be as high as possible, to make his fall as long as possible.

When he reached the top tread and raised his right foot to feel for a next one, I took a deep breath and shrieked gibberish at him as loudly as I could while shaking the ladder violently. He struggled to hold on, but I shoved my hands between the treads and beat against his chest. He swallowed a cry and lost his balance. I went on screaming as he fell. He hit his head and tumbled backward down the steps before landing with a heavy thump on the bare wooden floor in front of his own apartment door, one flight below.

I stopped shouting and, panting heavily, peered down at him.

His door opened, and his wife appeared. She saw him and then, astonished, looked up at me. “What—?”

“He fell,” I whispered. “Is he dead?”

She dropped to her knees and touched his throat. Then she rose, both hands covering her mouth.

“Dead?” I asked again.

She nodded, her face etched with horror.

“Go back inside,” I said. “I’ll call the police.”

Not waiting to calm down, I dialed the emergency number and used the same overexcited, frightened tone with which I had talked to the owner. After hanging up, I went to stand at my window. I drew a deep breath and was not dissatisfied to note the profound serenity that came over me. The clock on the sill told me that it was three minutes after six. Eleven minutes had gone by since the last time I had stood there.

The park was still dark, though daylight was already peeking out between the treetops. In the distance, a siren sounded. I waited, and it seemed as though — if I paid close enough attention — I could see the night hide itself beneath the benches beside the trees. As if, right before my eyes, it disappeared behind the walls of the park.

Soul Mates by Christine Otten

Tuindorp Oostzaan

They were on our doorstep at ten after six this morning. I know the exact time because a fraction of a second before the bell rang — one short, two longs — I woke up and looked at my iPhone. 6:10. It was just getting light. I knew it was the cops. I mean, you just know. I heard Mom’s bedroom door creak, her footsteps on the stairs, the murmur of voices. So I splashed some water on my face, sprayed my pits with Axe, and got dressed. I was calm. At times like this, my emotions just sort of freeze. I grabbed the Prada jacket Miriam gave me, slipped my bare feet into my Pumas, and went down. I’m a good boy, I am. I tried to ignore Mom’s expression; if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s that exhausted, disappointed look she gets in her eyes. Can’t I ever have a moment’s peace? Instead, I focused on the crew-cut heads of the two detectives standing in the doorway, their hands deep in the pockets of their ugly, cheap H&M jackets, and said, cheerfully as I could manage, “Good morning, gentlemen, and what can we do for you today?”

You could see them thinking, This is one polite Algerian. You always gotta stay a step ahead of them. Be the strongest, the smartest, don’t let them figure you out, and most important: keep your anger under control. I learned that at kickboxing. Not too long ago, I got pulled over on my moped on the Meteorenweg because I was supposedly driving too fast. I was heading to the Mandarijnenstraat to deliver six frikandels, three croquettes, a deep-fried bami slice, a couple of kebabs, and fifteen euros worth of french fries with mayo. I guess they were having a party. So, anyway, I was in a hurry, nobody wants soggy fries and lukewarm frikandels. I don’t understand how anyone can stomach that disgusting haram shit in the first place, but whatever, not ours to reason why. The point is, I got pulled over. Must have been the cop’s first week on the job. “Sir, you’re driving much too fast.” We both knew it was bullshit, I wasn’t doing more than fifteen miles an hour, twenty tops, we both knew the only reason he flagged me down is I look like a Moroccan — a Marrow Khan in Tuindorp Oostzaan, I’m a poet and I don’t know it! — but whatever. He whips out his little citation book to write me up, and I say, “I’m terribly sorry, officer, but my grandma is sick, she’s in really bad shape, and I don’t want her to be alone, that’s why I’m in a rush.”

When he hears me talking in complete sentences without a hint of an accent, his eyes practically pop out of his head. “Oh?” he says.

“She lives right around the corner here, on the Zonneplein.” Which is 100 percent true: Mom’s mother lives on the Zonneplein, upstairs from a Turkish grocery.

So the cop waves me on, and that’s the end of it. Which is why I say: you have to stay a step ahead of them. Don’t give ’em the chance to fuck with you.

Anyway, I had a good idea why the detectives were at our door. See, the Chink’s been missing for five days now and the Mercury’s been shuttered, although the old gook normally opens up at noon ’cause he don’t miss a chance to cash in on the lunch trade. He didn’t tell me he was gonna be gone: no e-mail, no text, nothing.

When I showed up for work five days ago and he wasn’t there, I tried his doorbell — he lives upstairs from his snack bar/Chinese takeaway, see. I was only inside his apartment one time, and the stink of grease made me want to hurl. He really needs to do something about his ventilation.

So I got no response when I rang, and there wasn’t any lights on I could see. Pissed me off, because it was payday, and man does not live by tips alone. For the last couple months, the old guy and me have had a little side deal. “Call it hush money,” is the way he put it. I never asked for nothing extra. Didn’t need to. The old guy read in my eyes that I knew the score. I mean, I’m not stupid. He never should have asked me to fetch that box of croquettes from the freezer, the fool.

All those bricks of brown and white powder hidden among the frozen snacks and fries! Street value? I have no idea. Jesus. I mean, you want to play gangster, at least you could be a little careful about it. Fine, well, anyway, the way I saw it, we had us what you call a win-win situation there. And I could use the extra cash. Him too, apparently. The Mercury Snackbar on the Mercuriusplein ain’t exactly a gold mine, if you catch my drift. Until he gets the windows washed and loses those disgusting orange plastic stools and the greasy Formica countertop and does something about the ventilation, he pretty much needs a little sideline if he wants to stay afloat, you see what I’m saying?

I understand the Chink. He’s gotta think about his future. He’s not gonna wind up some old geezer wasting away in that pitiful apartment on the Mercuriusplein, not when he could live out his golden years in Malaysia or Hong Kong or Singapore or wherever the hell he comes from. Am I right? So I figured he emptied out his bank accounts and was having himself a roll in the hay with some Chinese hottie in a massage parlor off in Whereverland. I was actually kind of proud of him. I wasn’t worried about our deal, or about the cops implicating me in his drug trade, because there was absolutely no paper trail or anything else pointing my way. I’m the delivery boy for the Mercury Snackbar, and that is all I am.

Except, with those two cops standing there awkwardly at the door, I began to feel just a wee bit sweaty.

The older of the two — you could already see the male-pattern baldness making inroads on his temples — cleared his throat. “We’re sorry to bother you so early, but I’m afraid we have bad news. May we come in?”

No way, I thought. But Mom automatically took a step back. I could see her fear in the slump of her shoulders inside her pink robe. She grabbed my face and started whining like a wounded animal. “Where did I go wrong, Armin? You were always such a sweet little boy!” I was afraid she was about to keel over, so I slung an arm around her to keep her on her feet. I mean, I am the man of the house. But I guess I can’t blame her for projecting her shit onto me.

“Calm down, Ma,” I said. “Don’t worry. Let’s hear what the officers have to say.”

To make a long story short, the Chink was dead. At least the detectives thought it was the Chink they’d found hacked to bits and the bits deep-fried, “considering how close the dumpster in the Maanstraat is to the Mercury Snackbar, and his contacts in the Chinese tongs.” The only thing they could say for sure at this point was that what they had found was definitely human remains, though they were in such a state they weren’t sure it would ever be possible to positively identify the victim. Somebody from the neighborhood had called it in. His little Staffordshire terrier had started barking and howling when they came in sight of the dumpster. The smell was pretty ripe, they said.

The older detective must have seen the dismay in Mom’s eyes, ’cause all of a sudden he put a hand on her shoulder and said they were 99 percent sure it was the Chink, and they hoped the techs would come up with like a molecule of DNA that would lock in that last 1 percent. No such thing as a perfect crime, he said, puffing out his chest, “there’s usually a loose end or two, we know that from experience,” looking like he was starring in an episode of CSI, like he was some kind of a big shot. “We don’t want you folks to worry now, ma’am, do we? Tuindorp Oostzaan’s such a quiet little neighborhood, where nothing ever happens.” I could hear the contempt in his voice. On the downtown side of the IJ, they think we’re all hicks up here in Amsterdam-North.

So I told you I sort of freeze at times like this, right? My friends don’t call me Ice for nothing — after the old rapper/actor with the pigtail from Law & Order, you know? Maybe the story was a little too crazy to believe. Even Mom just stood there crying silently instead of busting out screaming. But I realized pretty quick that the cops weren’t out to tie me to whatever had gone down. When you’re in their headlights, you know it. They were pretty chill about the whole thing. Just said they’d appreciate whatever I could tell them about the Chink, seeing how I was the Mercury’s scooter boy and all — I wanted to correct them and say moped boy, but I didn’t think I ought to interrupt — and I saw the old guy pretty much every day, so maybe I could help them with their inquiries. I told them I thought the Chink was out of town for a couple days, he said something about needing a break, checking out the tulips at the Keukenhof, yadda yadda yadda, and running a Chinese takeout/snack bar in Tuindorp Oostzaan ain’t exactly what you call a sinecure, right? Meanwhile, the little gears in my head are spinning overtime, you know what I mean?

See, something told me maybe the deep-fried dead guy was not the Chink, after all.

Maybe I watch too many cop shows. On TV, nothing ever turns out the way you think it will, right?

But there was something else. Which is why I’m writing all this down, not as evidence but as a sort of testimony, in case something happens to me. For Mom’s sake, you with me? Ain’t nobody I love more than her, not even Miriam.

I don’t know if I can call Miriam my girlfriend, exactly, since she’s married and all that. She and her husband and their two little girls live in one of those villas on the Kometensingel, a fancy place next door to the house where our family doctor used to live. Once upon a time, Mom was the cleaning lady there. So one night they order a double portion of chow mein from the Mercury. I deliver it, Miriam answers the door, and the rest is history.

Trust me, Miriam is not just some ordinary chick. She is what I’d call a perfect ten. From our very first date, though, she told me she was never ever gonna divorce her husband, ’cause her own parents split when she was fifteen and she wasn’t gonna put her girls through that kind of trauma. That’s class, am I right?

Her husband’s a lung doctor in some hospital up north. His name’s Ed. He’s forty-four. (Just so you know: I’m twenty-four.) I only know him from Miriam’s stories and his Facebook page. Soon as the detectives left, I went online: his most recent photo was posted yesterday, from a bar, right after the Ajax — Sparta game. He was grinning into the lens with this smug doctor expression on his face and a glass of beer in his hand, an Ajax scarf draped around his neck, like, See how normal I am? You could almost hear André Hazes singing in the background. That’s why he bought that house in Tuindorp Oostzaan — to prove what an ordinary guy he is. Miriam told me his whole bio. Ed’s dad worked in the metal foundry on the Distelweg; the five of them lived in this dreary little bungalow on the Pomonastraat. Ed was a nerd, so after high school they told him he could go to college and he grabbed the chance. Props to him and his family, I gotta give them respect. If my loser of a father had half the guts Ed’s dad had, I could’ve... nah, never mind, I don’t want to go throwing stones.

Anyway, when Miriam met Ed he was a member of like a fraternity — you know what I mean, a group of students who were ashamed of their origins and put on high-class accents like they were part of the royal family. At first, she said, she thought it was kind of cute, that Ed was trying so hard to fit in. She told me she saw right through his act and decided she could help him “grow into himself.” I mean, bullshit, right — and she knew it was bullshit even at the time. But a woman like Miriam’s gotta have a project. Sometimes I think maybe I’m her newest project, but at the same time I think, What the fuck? I’ll tell you what: she’s my project. I love her.

Miriam and me come from two different worlds. Her mother was something high up at the university, and her father was a bigwig at Nestlé. When she was growing up, they moved to a new country every couple of years: Egypt, Canada, Nigeria, South Africa, Russia, Morocco. I mean, she’s a woman of the world. Sometimes she tells me, “Ed’s a real Tuindorper, totally white-bread. But you, you’ve got that Algerian blood.” She has this tone when she says it, like, This is heavy, man. And the look in her eye, yowza. I don’t know exactly what it all means, but so what? The bottom line is, it’s pretty great with us between the sheets, if you follow me.

But I digress.

I love Miriam, you with me? And I know she’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. Hey, put yourself in her position: your hubby’s cheating on you with some pretty young intern while you sit home and look after a couple of kids. That’d make you nuts, am I right?

So, okay, this is where the story really begins.

From the first time we ever did it — Ed works irregular shifts and I’m pretty flexible, so she texts me when it’s okay to come over — she’s spilled her guts to me. I’m not so dumb I believe in love at first sight, but something just clicked between Miriam and me. “Soul mates,” she calls us. That’s such a Miriam thing to say. “We’re both outsiders,” she tells me. “We understand each other.” It don’t bother me she’s fifteen years older. Just the opposite: I think older women are sexy, they know exactly what they want in bed.

Shit, I’m getting off track again. Focus, Armin!

So Ed’s fucking this intern, right, and Miriam finds out about it. She confronts him. He goes all guilty, all pitiful, all I’m sorry, you’re the one I love, it don’t mean nothing, and he begs her to forgive him. And she does, the dope.

Okay, fine, I know what you’re thinking: she’s cheating on him too. To which I say, Well, who started it? Miriam was lonely. Can you blame her for taking comfort from a guy like me? A guy who at least listens to her?

As my mom’s only son, trust me, I have learned how to listen.

So Miriam forgives Ed. But meanwhile, Ed goes right on nailing this intern every chance he gets. They’re snorting coke — possibly coke they get from the Chink, what do I know? — and Ed don’t realize right away the woman he’s boinking is the devil in disguise. But then, see, the bitch commences to blackmail him. If you don’t leave your wife and kids, I’ll tell the hospital administrator what you’ve been up to. I’ll say you forced me into it. Abuse of power. Shit like that. So you’ve got a doctor riding the coke train and banging an intern: Ed would definitely lose his job and probably his medical license or whatever you call it. I got all this from Miriam.

So once again, Ed fesses up, only this time Miriam plays it smart. She “forgives” him, she says, but now she has a plan.

“You’re my sweet revenge,” she tells me, this one time after we do it. We’re smoking cigarettes in bed. Ed’s working a double shift, and the girls are at his parents’. “You’re my secret weapon.”

Tell you the truth, that comment shook me up a little. It wasn’t so much what she said but the way she said it, the bitterness in her voice, and the way she looked... like I wasn’t even there, like I wasn’t lying right beside her in the bed.

Anyway, Miriam doesn’t trust Ed no more, but she doesn’t want to leave him because of the kids. So she goes all detective on his ass: when he’s in the shower, she checks his e-mail and his texts. And that’s when the shit really hits the fan.

And then there are Ed’s wimpy responses:

This is all pretty recent, by the way. I was with Miriam just last night, and she brought me up to speed.

So now I gotta be careful what I write. I don’t want to screw anybody over until I’m 100 percent sure. I know what it’s like to be blamed for shit I didn’t do. I mean, how many times have we had the cops at the door because so-and-so made a crack and everybody’s all, It must’ve been Armin who done it?

How am I supposed to prove I didn’t, right?

I mean, come on!

Look, I figure you’d probably freak if you found out your husband’s lover wanted you dead, right? So I told Miriam maybe she ought to report it. Which, by the way, sounded really weird coming out of my mouth. Report it? Like the cop on the corner is your friend, right? But I just didn’t trust the situation. I was worried about Miriam.

“This is private,” she said. “I don’t want the girls to hear anything about it. I’ll deal with it.” And then she climbed on top of me and drove me out of my gourd with her tongue. We fucked like we never fucked before, like... well, like wild animals. It was like Miriam squeezed herself inside of me. She bit me, licked me, raked my back with her long sharp nails, sucked my balls — Jesus, I thought I was about to black out — and meanwhile she whispered all this shit I figured was meant to stir me up and make our coming even more explosive, words and sentences I didn’t really absorb — you know what I mean, we all say weird stuff when we’re excited. I mean, I get it that Miriam wished the bitch was dead and I’m not a baby, I’ve got a pretty rich imagination myself, if you get my drift, I’ve downloaded some illegal videos — you know, where Somebody A really hurts Somebody B, hits her, beats her with whips, cuts her with razors, tortures her — snuff films, I mean, that shit’s fucked up.

Anyway, I didn’t think much about the fairy tale she told me last night until those cops showed up this morning, but since then I can’t get it out of my mind.

And I can totally see it happening.

Miriam waiting outside the hospital for her husband’s chippie. Inviting her for a cup of coffee so they can “talk things out.” Driving in Miriam’s mint-green MINI Cooper convertible from North Holland down to Tuindorp Oostzaan, the wind in their hair, it’s actually much too cold to be driving with the top down but Miriam wants to teach the bitch a lesson, she’s wearing a leather jacket and a cap, she’s prepared, she snuck the Mercury Snackbar’s keys out of my pants pocket the day before, when I slipped out of bed to take a dump. Miriam parking the car somewhere on the Meteorenweg, and the two of them strolling to the snack bar, Ed’s cunt grossed out when she sees the Mercury’s grimy windows, This is where you want to go for coffee? The Chink’s already long gone, Miriam knows that because I told her. Fine, so she holds the door open for the bitch, gives her a little wink, they’re in this together, they understand each other, they both know Ed’s a piece of shit and they’ll figure a way to get through this, but the second Miriam locks the door behind them the nightmare begins. Miriam’s thought of everything: the ropes, the bread knife, the chain saw, she switched on the fryer before she headed north so it would be nice and hot by the time they got back, she don’t leave nothing to chance, and meanwhile the cunt’s all shitting bricks and begging Miriam to let her go, but Miriam’s got her chained to the meat hook that’s attached to the kitchen ceiling by then, like a dead pig, like a dog — the Chinks eat dog, don’t they? — her mouth duct-taped, and while the bitch shivers from the cold and the terror, Miriam goes to town, one finger at a time, one toe at a time, the blood dripping into an old-fashioned iron bucket, the cunt turning yellow then gray then finally white and blue and she’s not dead yet, her left shoulder jerks when Miriam slices a chunk of meat from her leg and tosses it into the boiling oil in the fryer — can you imagine watching this happen to you, you know you’re gonna die and there isn’t a fucking thing you can do about it, just hope you’ll pass out soon — but Miriam goes at it for hours, big pieces, torso, thighs, arms, she trims them to size with the chain saw and one by one the hunks of meat and bone and hair and guts and everything all disappear in the boiling oil.

You understand, I see the situation in a different light, now that the cops have come and gone.

You’re my sweet revenge. You’re my secret weapon.

See, Miriam’s always sort of been a mystery to me. A woman like that, a woman of the world, so... smart, so well spoken, and beautiful too, even though she’s just past forty, I never met nobody like her in my life. We might have come from different planets. You see where I’m going with this?

Is it possible the detectives showed up at her door before they came to mine? Like maybe yesterday, so she already knew about the mess in the dumpster before we got together last night? She lives practically right around the corner from the Mercury, she’s a steady customer, I drop off an order of chow mein like two, three times a week. The detectives must know that if they’re halfway decent at their jobs.

They go around the neighborhood door-to-door asking questions, don’t they?

Meanwhile, I never once noticed my key to the Mercury was missing, so maybe Miriam made the whole thing up. I mean, maybe she’s gotta fantasize shit like that to keep her frustration from driving her nuts, what do I know? Her husband’s rich, but money don’t make nobody happy. Status, neither. I know that much by now. And her whole story could have come straight out of a bad episode of Midsomer Murders. Mom watches that show every Wednesday night.

I get it, Miriam wanted the bitch out of her life, but even if she did decide to waste her, even then, she would have just run her down with her MINI, wouldn’t she, or gotten a gun and blew her brains out? Wouldn’t she? I mean, I just don’t see Miriam going to town with a fucking chain saw. I don’t think she’d even know how something like that works.

I know what you’re thinking: Why don’t you just go ask her? Ask her what’s the real deal and, boom, case closed. But see, here’s the thing: we don’t have that kind of a relationship. I never ask her nothing. I just listen.

I mean — and I’m not talking about my relationship with the Chink here, that was pretty clear-cut, no surprises — I mean, it sucks the old guy got chopped into mincemeat and all, but that’s the chance you take when you get in with the tongs, he knew the risk — but the idea that I dumped myself into this rich-people’s soap opera, what does that say about me?

I love Miriam and all, but what about my self-respect? What about my pride?

Maybe this whole thing’s some kind of a sign. Whatever really happened, my job at the Mercury Snackbar is gone. I am now footloose and fancy-free. I could just hang out for a while, see which way the wind blows. Nothing’s stopping me from trying something completely new, stepping out on my own. Maybe computers? Or I could take over the Mercury and run it myself. Get rid of those shitty plastic stools, put in some decent ventilation, turn it into a hip new takeout place. Snackbar Armin, something like that, everything 100 percent halal. I bet there’s a market for that in Tuindorp Oostzaan, especially if I hire a couple of kids with scooters to make deliveries all over Amsterdam-North. Why not?

I got all that hush money from the Chink saved up. Plus the tips Miriam always gave me — not just for the chow mein, but after we screwed too, now that I think of it.

Every cloud has a silver lining, right?

Am I right?

On the other hand, there’s no way I’ll ever hook up with a woman like Miriam again, that’s for sure.

And what we have, that has to be love. I mean, the sex, the way she trusts me...

We’re soul mates, aren’t we?

I mean, aren’t we?

This story was inspired by an actual Amsterdam murder case.