Amsterdam Noir

Seven Bridges by Max van Olden

Grachtengordel

Lisa was running ten minutes late. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, since there were usually two of them on Saturdays — but now, in early March, there were so few bookings she had to prepare the tables on her own.

In the crew cabin, she changed from her wool sweater to a tight white blouse and put on an apron. She checked the schedule. A Delight cruise, twenty-two passengers. She could handle that — sometimes, even in the winter, they had as many as forty on board. She piled eight crates onto her service cart — six beverages, two glasses — and above those balanced the plastic bin labeled Tableware. She glanced out the window and saw people already lined up at the Pier F ticket office, waiting for the passenger door to open. Sighing, she pushed her cart out into the main cabin.

Starting at the back of Princess Beatrix, she set each table, as always, with place mats that indicated their route with a dotted line on a map of the city’s canals, bottles of water, bowls of beer nuts. She looked up and spotted their guide approaching. Arno was a dope, but he was always willing to lend a hand. That was more than you could say for some of the others.

“Need some help?” he said as he stepped on board, and, without waiting for an answer, pitched in and started setting tables. The sound system was already on, and they worked to the syrupy tones of Laura Pausini.

They finished at a minute to four. Foreheads glistening with perspiration, they took up their positions on the dock, Lisa on one side of the door and Arno on the other. They smiled brightly at the passengers as they boarded. The four o’clock and six o’clock cruises mostly appealed to retirees and families, quiet customers who never made any trouble.

“Goodbody, every afternoon,” Arno began his usual spiel. After two years of it, Lisa didn’t even notice the joke anymore. Wim, their captain, steered the boat — long enough to hold eighty passengers, low enough to sail beneath the city’s innumerable bridges — past the train station. Back in the kitchen, Lisa pulled soft drinks from the fridge and arranged them on her cart.

“The Central Station is built on an artificial island,” Arno said, first in English, then in Dutch and French and German. “It was designed by the same architect who designed the Rijksmuseum, which is where you can find our most important Rembrandt paintings.”

Pulling the cork from a bottle of Chianti, Lisa glanced outside. The sky was gray, and there were wisps of mist along the embankment. When Arno paused for breath, she heard raindrops patter on the boat’s glass roof.

She thought back to that morning, that lovely morning with Timo. They hadn’t gotten out of bed until ten thirty. She’d cracked open a can of Jus-Rol croissants and slid them into the oven. They’d only been together for three months, but Lisa was already spending so much time at Timo’s place she had practically moved in. Her toiletries were in his bathroom, half her clothing hung in his wardrobe, she felt so comfortable she knew their relationship was the real thing.

“On your right is NEMO, the science museum, and underneath it is the highway to Amsterdam-North.”

The passengers gaped at the vast green building that rose up from the water like the prow of an enormous oil tanker.

When she was with Timo, she lost all sense of time. After breakfast, they’d put on Netflix and continued watching Stranger Things, the series they’d begun last night. When you were in love, all you wanted to do was snuggle up together, all day long. And so they did, until the middle of the afternoon, when Timo had pointed to his wristwatch and she realized it was past time for her to leave for work.

They continued along the river, “the majestic five-star Amstel Hotel on your left, the Rolling Stones’ favorite place to stay when they’re in town.” The passengers were always on the lookout for celebrities. In fact, was that Robbie Williams working up a sweat on the treadmill in the glass-walled fitness center? No, too tall. Probably just some businessman.

After they passed the hotel, the captain turned them around and set a course for the Herengracht. When she could make out the distant bridge that marked the entrance to the world-famous Grachtengordel — the Canal District — Lisa felt a rush of pleasure well up from deep inside her. Not because of the bridge or the canal, but because she knew it wouldn’t be long now before—

First, of course, would come the Willet-Holthuysen Museum with its imposing latticed windows to the right, and then “the relatively new Waldorf Astoria hotel” on the left, but after that it would be barely half a minute before Wim throttled back the Princess Beatrix almost to a standstill to give the passengers time to point their cameras off to the left for one of the cruise’s highlights: beneath the graceful stone bow of the bridge over the Reguliersgracht, six more bridges could be seen, each of them illuminated, stretching all the way south to the Lijnbaansgracht, seemingly stacked up one atop the other. Yes, the Seven Bridges did indeed make for a lovely picture.

Her own personal highlight came almost at the same moment as the photo op: some thirty yards before it, there was something to be seen that seven hundred bridges couldn’t compete with — as soon as the boat slowed down and the passengers turned their attention to the left, she could blow unseen kisses to the handsome young man on the old houseboat not six feet to their right. For those ten or fifteen seconds, it would be as if she was home, with Timo, done with work for the evening, and the love that would wash over her would be so intense, so delicious, it would carry her through the second half of the cruise.

They were almost there: the first passengers were getting to their feet, their phones at the ready, and Lisa turned to face the scene where, just a few hours earlier, she and Timo had relished their warm, sweet croissants. The skipper slowed the boat. Another fifteen yards, ten. She ran a hand through her hair. Five more yards, and she would be able to see into the living room. Three...

Lisa’s shoulders slumped. Timo wasn’t standing at the window, waiting for her. He was on the couch, asleep. The TV was still on. She sighed, but her disappointment quickly melted into tenderness. He’s even cute when he’s sleeping, she thought.

It was natural that her boyfriend would need to catch up on his sleep over the weekend. He rose at six every morning and put in at least fifty hours a week at work, sometimes sixty. His own ad agency — he’d wanted that since high school. There were times that he and his team slaved over a pitch until two in the morning.

Behind her, the cameras began to click. She turned around, and almost got a selfie stick in her face.

The Princess Beatrix returned to Pier F at five thirty. That gave Lisa half an hour to prepare the boat for the six o’clock cruise. She’d have to hurry. The moment the last of the four o’clock passengers were gone, she gathered up the empty bottles, dumped the trash in a large plastic bag, replaced the dirty place mats with fresh ones, checked the tables and the restroom. Arno helped her restock the drinks, and she wound up with a couple of minutes to sneak a cigarette on the back deck before the next load of passengers boarded.

With her imperturbable smile, Lisa took orders, refilled the nut dishes, snapped pictures for everyone who asked. Meanwhile, her thoughts were filled with Timo.

He was so different from Stefan. Timo was the complete opposite of that bastard she’d somehow stayed with for two and a half years. In him, she found everything her previous boyfriend had been unable or unwilling to give her: attention, tenderness, great sex. And the things she’d resented in Stefan were absent from Timo: egotism, self-righteousness, emotional distance. Opening a container of chocolate milk, she asked herself for the umpteenth time why she had let herself suffer through a relationship that, if she was honest, she had never for one moment truly believed in. The only answer she could come up with was simple cowardice.

Walking down the aisle with two bottles of Heineken in her hands, she heard someone say the words “Waldorf Astoria.” She delivered the beers and returned quickly to the back of the boat. Once they passed the Waldorf, everyone would be looking ahead for the Seven Bridges. Lisa took up her usual position by the window, but then changed her mind. She opened the door to the back deck and was greeted by a chilly gust of wind in her face. There were puddles of water on the wooden benches. Rain dripped from the Dutch tricolor that hung out over the black surface of the Herengracht, as if the flag had just been fished out of the canal.

They approached Timo’s houseboat. Inside the Princess Beatrix, passengers were getting to their feet, angling for a better view. Ten yards to go. She wished she had a cigarette but was afraid the captain might smell it.

Two more yards.

One.

“Can you give me a hand, please?”

Lisa whirled at the sound of the voice. A man stood in the doorway. He was having trouble staying erect, thanks to the thin elderly woman clutching his arm.

“My mother needs to use the lavatory,” the man said apologetically. “She’s ninety-four.”

The old lady seemed about to collapse, and a moment later Lisa was on her other side, propping her up. The woman looked up at her gratefully and managed to right herself.

Lisa looked back. The houseboat was already far behind them, and the distance was steadily increasing.

For the remainder of the cruise, her cell phone burned in her pocket. She wanted to call Timo, just to hear his voice and tell him she loved him, but each time she thought she might be able to slip out to the back deck, someone ordered a drink or suddenly needed to know what tram to take from the Central Station to the Leidseplein.

She let Arno help the passengers disembark by himself. That was against the rules, but Wim was nowhere to be seen. When she told Arno she had to make an important call, he merely shrugged.

Timo didn’t pick up. “Sorry I missed you,” she told his voice mail. “I was helping an old lady into the bathroom. With all the old folks on board, sometimes I feel more like a nurse than a server.” She dropped her voice to a whisper: “You look really sweet when you’re asleep. I’ll see you next time around!”

The candlelight cruise was not her favorite. It was harder to work in the dark, especially back in the kitchen. And the passengers were more critical, more impatient. During the day, no one complained if they had to share a table with another couple, but in the evenings there were often people who refused to sit with strangers. Sometimes they even left the boat and demanded their money back. Then of course there were always a few who took the forty-euro “all you can drink” offer seriously, and there was nothing to be done about that: “all you can drink” did, in fact, mean all you can drink.

The electric candles were on the tables, and the dishes of beer nuts had been distributed. When Wim closed the cabin door and Arno picked up his microphone to welcome the passengers, she took one last look at her cell: nothing from Timo. She stuffed it back in her pocket and asked the first couple what they wanted to drink. By the time she got back to her service cart, she’d already forgotten their order.

The weather had worsened. Arno had to turn up the sound system to be heard over the rain, and it was so windy the waves on the Oosterdok shook the boat from side to side. With two bottles of wine in her hands, it was hard for Lisa to negotiate the aisle without bumping into the tables on either side. Arno recounted the legend of the Skinny Bridge: a couple that kissed on or under it would stay together forever. A minute later, as the bow of the Princess Beatrix swept beneath the bridge, dozens of phones and cameras clicked off selfies of smooching tourists. Lisa couldn’t find it within herself to smile at the sight.

She was thinking of Timo. And, strangely, of Stefan.

It hadn’t ended well for them. But there had been nothing left of their relationship, other than the fact that they still slept in the same bed. Stefan had withdrawn into himself, barely spoke to her. Apart from the occasional mechanical sex, there was no intimacy between them. No wonder she had fallen so hard for someone new.

It hadn’t taken Stefan long to notice that she had metamorphosed into a new and reenergized version of herself, a Lisa who spent more and more time away from their apartment, who when she was home seemed to be constantly hunched over her phone texting. In retrospect, she realized why she had behaved so recklessly: without being consciously aware of it, she had wanted her affair to come to light as soon as possible. Which was precisely what had happened.

The cruise had another hour to go. Lisa walked up and down the aisle with plates of Dutch cheese cut into cubes and dotted with mustard. Passengers nudged each other and oohed and aahed over the toothpicks topped with red-white-and-blue paper flags.

“This is canal?” asked an older Japanese gentleman, pointing at the dark water outside the window.

“No sir, this is the Amstel River. We will turn into the canals very soon.” She looked ahead to orient herself. In the distance, the red neon letters of the Koninklijk Theater Carré were visible. She explained their route: first they would sail past the Carré and the Amstel Hotel, then they would turn around and retrace their path, go back under the Skinny Bridge, and then turn left into the Herengracht, the most elegant of the city’s three main canals. “Ten minutes, sir, maximum, until we’re there.” The man nodded politely and translated the explanation for his wife. Satisfied with her own professionalism, Lisa moved on.

There hadn’t been an explosion, more of an implosion. A change came over Stefan, subtle but inescapable, definitive. She knew she’d have to say goodbye to their little studio, the first place she had ever lived with a man. She felt guilty, miserable, but beneath all of that was excitement at the realization that she would now be able to bring her growing relationship with Timo out of hiding.

The Princess Beatrix passed beneath the Skinny Bridge. A young Italian couple sitting near her service cart struggled to take a kissing selfie. The volume of the conversations of those passengers who’d by this point downed three or four alcoholic beverages swelled.

Lisa snuck her phone from her pocket and checked the screen. No calls, no messages, nothing.

She looked at her watch. Quarter to nine. A little longer, and they would reach the houseboat.

As she served the next table, a memory welled up inside her. In her mind’s eye, she saw Stefan’s angry face. She was on her way to the elevator, a box of clothing and textbooks in her arms, and he stood in the apartment’s doorway, watching her go. He took a step toward her, leaned closer, and she would never forget the single sentence he whispered in her ear: “You haven’t seen the last of me.”

White wine flowed over the rim of the glass, and the passengers sitting at the table jerked away from the spill.

“I’m sorry,” she cried. “I’m so sorry!”

She whipped a dishtowel from her apron pocket and dropped to her knees. When she’d cleaned up the mess, she apologized yet again and shot a glance out the window.

Fifty yards.

It was raining hard. She hid herself away in the narrow passage leading to the restroom. The boat slowed, the passengers looked around excitedly, figuring out where to stand for the best possible shot of the Seven Bridges. They were nearing the houseboat. In the darkness, it looked like a black shoebox, with thick cables mooring it to the embankment.

In the flickering blue light of Timo’s TV, she could make out the outline of his bookshelves, then the painting on the side wall.

Then the couch.

She couldn’t believe what she saw: Timo’s arm hanging off the edge, his head bent slightly to one side — it was all the same. Timo was lying in exactly the same position she’d seen him in four hours earlier.

Four hours.

The only thing that stopped her from screaming was the fact that, at that moment, a girl tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Would you mind taking a picture of us? With the bridges in the background?” Lisa stared at her for two full seconds, as if the girl had appeared out of some other dimension, before taking the proffered cell phone. She clicked off three shots, numb, and managed a weak smile as she handed the phone back, but the moment she turned away, fear overwhelmed her. She felt it accelerate her heartbeat and breath, and her hands trembled so badly she had to clasp them together to stop the shaking. She was afraid her legs would give out beneath her, and she held tightly to the handle of the door leading out to the back deck to keep herself upright. She peered out the window at the houseboat, already far behind them, and for just an instant considered diving into the water and swimming back. But for what purpose? To say a last goodbye?

The passengers had returned to their seats, the boat was picking up speed, it was time for her to get back to work. She ran her hands through her hair and grabbed a bottle of wine and began to refill glasses.

All she could see before her was Timo’s face as she had just now glimpsed it. Was his expression merely relaxed in sleep... or was it frozen in death?

He’s not dead, she thought. There’s nothing wrong. He shifted in his sleep a few times over the last four hours and wound up the way he was before.

For half a minute these thoughts calmed her, but then the panic reasserted itself. She kept on working, but she was on autopilot.

She heard Arno say something about the blue of the imperial crown and glanced outside. They were passing the Western Church. She shook her head. She had completely missed their transit from the Herengracht to the Prinsengracht. She tried to remember something of the last ten minutes, anything — an order, a glimpse of the canal — but her mind was completely blank.

Arno started talking about the Anne Frank House. In half an hour, they would be back at the pier. She would clean up faster than she’d ever cleaned before.

When they docked, Arno apologized and took off. His son was sick, he explained. Lisa forced herself to empathize. Inside her head, she caught herself praying that Timo was merely sick too. Perhaps he was unconscious. Was that possible? Some sort of temporary condition that would resolve itself the moment she shook him out of it?

As the passengers got to their feet and shrugged into their jackets, she reached for her phone. No calls, no messages. She speed-dialed Timo’s number. Then again, and again, and each time her call went to voice mail she had the same thought: I’ll never hear his voice for real again.

The boat was empty. Arno and Wim were gone. The rain had slackened, but the wind was stronger, and the Princess Beatrix thumped against the rubber bumpers. The dock was deserted, the café shuttered. A single light burned in the office, at the Damrak end of the pier.

Lisa raced up and down the aisle like a madwoman, brushing tricolored flags, brochures, and crumpled napkins from the tables. She scrawled the date on the front of an envelope and dumped the contents of the tip jar into it and licked the flap. She packed empty bottles and glasses into their crates and stacked the crates on the back deck, ready to be transferred to the trash cart. In five minutes she was finished — but she decided to call once more before jumping onto her bike.

Breathing heavily from exertion and nervousness, she pressed the icon beside Timo’s name and waited for the ring... and then her eyes narrowed. From somewhere in the distance came the sound of music. It was faint, barely audible beneath the wind, but it was unmistakably Eminem’s “Lose Yourself”—Timo’s ringtone.

A warm glow spread from the pit of her stomach up through her body, and she shivered with relief, her terror turned in an instant to joy.

Far ahead, past the row of darkened tour boats, she saw a figure step into the light from the office. It cast a long shadow that moved toward her. The guitar riff echoed off the wooden pier. She was still holding her phone to her ear, but it suddenly felt different against her skin. It was as if she were hugging Timo’s dear face to her own.

The music stopped as her call was answered.

“Hey,” she heard, and the phone almost dropped from her hand. It wasn’t Timo. It was Stefan’s soft, icy voice, and at the same moment she recognized his walk. “I see you,” he said. “Thanks for calling.”

She broke the connection.

“You should have seen this coming!” he shouted over the wind. “You’re next, darlin’, you hear me?”

Lisa pulled back behind the cabin door and peeked around the edge of its frame. Stefan had reached the Prince Claus, the next boat over from the Beatrix. He was gaining fast, his steps determined, staring straight ahead. It felt like he was staring right into her eyes.

She eased out of her heels.

“I’m going to reunite you with your boyfriend,” Stefan said coldly. “You two belong together!”

She reached behind her back and untied her apron. It dropped to the deck.

Stefan was at the bow of her boat. Carefully, without making a sound, Lisa slipped to the other side of the deck. She climbed onto one of the wooden benches, ducked down to stay out of sight. The wind ruffled the surface of the black water, stirring up tiny foam caps. Stefan was still talking, so loudly it sounded like he was standing right beside her.

“You dumped me, you fucking bitch! Now I’ll dump you! You’re gonna be fish food!”

There was the screech of metal on metal.

She raised a foot to the gunwale, her arms stretched out to the sides to maintain her balance. She brought up her other foot and stared down. She could smell the water’s chill.

“Look at me when I talk to you, bitch!”

She straightened, then pushed off with all the strength she could summon, as if she were diving into a pool at the start of a race.

She tucked in her chin, exactly as her swim coach had taught her, and the one second she hung in the air stretched out as if someone had adjusted the dials on the laws of nature.

Just out of reach, she could see Timo’s face, could see the two of them together, entwined on the couch in the living room of his houseboat.

The vision enveloped her like a thick warm blanket, and it was so beautiful, so grand, that when she hit the water she never even heard the shot.

The Girl at the End of the Line by Abdelkader Benali

Sloten

A farmer found her with her head facing southeast, toward Mecca, as if in prayer. The stretch of reclaimed polder land is on the edge of the city, ringed by fields and narrow irrigation channels. Amsterdam’s last remaining milk cows graze in the marshy meadows. I sometimes bike out that way, when I’ve got nothing better to do. When my yearnings are too strong to ignore.

Geese — a constant nuisance at nearby Schiphol Airport — also feast on the grass. If there’s one good place in the city to dump a body, this is it. In my head, I divide Amsterdam into places where you can safely hide a body and places where you can’t. They told me it was my job to think like that. But it wasn’t just my job, it was my way of making sense of the world.

Somebody once left a tourist-office folder with information about the area at the station. Thanks to that, I knew more about the place than the rest of my colleagues put together. As I roamed around the scene, I felt myself dissolving into thin air, so that less and less of me remained.

This was where, in the olden days, criminals were exiled. They were forbidden to set foot back in the city. Out here, they were no longer Amsterdammers, they no longer existed. Someone had ruled that they were no longer permitted to exist.

Modern-day Amsterdam sees a murder victim a week, and that week it was her turn. I saw her in my mind’s eye, standing at the tram stop at the end of Line 1, beautiful, mortal. I thought of her as the girl at the end of the line, but she wasn’t really a girl; she was in her early twenties, a woman. In life, it would have been impossible to miss her. I thought she was lovely. Lovelier than I would ever dare to acknowledge.

A reminder of the city’s old border still stood there, a tall pole that had once held a road sign, rising out of the mist like a sternly pointing finger. The farmer found her body not far from the pole.

Nadia. A lovely name.

The pole was mentioned in the tourist-office folder. I was never good at history. Unless someone explained it to me, I couldn’t understand. But this interested me. Because it hit so close to home. Things that hit close to home give me a chilly feeling of excitement. Like a bucket of cold water flung in my face.

It had rained heavily. She lay on the wettest section of the farmer’s field, a worthless bit of land no one bothered with. Not too far off, the farmer kept llamas and horses. It was a desolate place. The trucks that rumbled by on the nearest road seemed to come from nowhere, heading for some other nowhere. Far off, jets rose from the airport’s runways. Something inside me said those planes were crowded with the guilty, but none of them knew what it was they were guilty of.

In her pockets we found a key to a bicycle lock, a plastic tram card, a wrapped peppermint from a restaurant, and a torn ticket stub for the Pathé De Munt’s showing of 12 Years a Slave. I’d seen that movie myself. It had disturbed me. Black people in America were treated like animals. Nadia’s ticket brought back the powerful scenes of torture.

At the Meer en Vaart police station, my report got a lukewarm reception. They wanted to know if I’d visited the parents yet. That task fell to me, since I was “one of them,” as the guys put it, and better suited to deliver the terrible news. My colleagues automatically assumed I must know every Moroccan in the city. You knew one, you knew ’em all, right? That was why I’d been hired in the first place, wasn’t it, to put my Mocro background to good use, to offer the police an entrée into what was otherwise for them a closed-off world. Around the station they spoke of affirmative action, but never when I was within earshot. I got that from Ali, who was Turkish and told me everything. “They have loose lips when I’m around,” he said. “It’s not like they want me to hear it. It’s just they don’t even notice I’m there anymore.”

How was I supposed to tell the family their daughter had been found facing Mecca? There was no question of rape. Her carefully manicured nails had jagged tips, as if she’d been trying to escape, like a rabbit clawing its way out of a burrow that had suddenly flooded. I couldn’t get that image out of my head, but I wouldn’t share it with her parents.

Talking to them was supposed to help us find a starting point for our investigation, some clue that would eventually lead us to the killer.

When Nadia’s father let me in, I expressly asked that his wife — who was watching from the kitchen — join us, and then I took them aside to break the news. “She was lying with her head toward Mecca,” I consoled them. “Under the eyes of her Creator, she became the victim of a terrible crime. He sees all.”

We sat there for a time, in silence, staring at nothing. No one moved. There were no questions. There were tears, there was weeping.

Nadia’s mother got up to make tea.

Then the father said, “The Creator has taken her to His bosom. May Allah receive her with mercy.”

We drank tea.

I asked Nadia’s parents for her bank statements. They had no such documents. They had nothing belonging to their daughter. The mother talked about her, the father sat silently by. He looked like my father. At that age, they all look like my father. Worn out by life. The subsidized housing in which they had lived for so long had aged them. Not enough space. What I had feared turned out to be the case: they had little or no knowledge of their daughter’s life.

I knew girls Nadia’s age — I’d dated some of them — and they all lived double lives. What they were up to outside the home was terra incognita to their parents. They never revealed who they hung out with, what they did.

This gave Nadia’s killer a definite advantage.

Her parents kissed my cheeks when I left. They had appreciated my understanding of their situation. But it hadn’t gotten me anywhere. Somehow, though, I had enjoyed my time with them. I was convinced I would be able to solve the case. They reminded me of my own parents, except mine would never have given me such a warm welcome. Who needs or wants a cop in the family?

One of my colleagues complimented me: “You fit right in. We couldn’t do that. You made real contact with them.” I was an outsider accepted into the police force’s inner circle specifically because I was an outsider. If it all turned out right, I’d be a hero. If I failed, the fault would be entirely mine.

“We didn’t get anywhere,” I said. “They don’t know their own daughter.”

“It had to be someone in her circle who did it,” Ali said drily. “What did you find in her phone?”

“Girl stuff. Nothing suspicious.”

“Then she must have had another one. Her killer must have taken it.” Ali proposed a hypothesis: “She was cheating on her boyfriend — or pretending to — and he caught on. She was a smart girl, plenty smarter than he. Maybe she texted him at the hookah bar. Maybe he was stoned. Anyway, he got pissed off. Arranged to meet her outside the city, said there was something he had to show her. She was naive, right, didn’t have it in her just to break up with him. Figured she’d do him this one last favor. Girls like her are experts at confusing the issue. This’ll make the investigation more complicated. Even her best girlfriends didn’t know her secrets. There are girls like her all over this neighborhood, all coy and shy inside the family but vamps and divas out on the town. On their way home, they change back into whatever’s acceptable. And nobody has a clue what they’re up to.”

I gazed at him. Ali thinks fast, talks fast, forgets fast.

“Bullshit,” I said.

“You’ll see. It’s complicated, boss.” He held up his hands and moved them apart. “Think big.”

What was she doing out there in the dead of night, on the border between the city and the countryside? What was a beautiful young woman looking for in one of the loneliest parts of Amsterdam? What was she thinking?

Back at the station, I printed out my report, stapled the pages together, and dropped it in my out-box. Perhaps the results of the DNA testing would be helpful. If she’d fought her killer — and it looked that way to me — some traces should have been left behind.

For the rest of the day, I lost myself among the shoppers. It was spring, the sun wouldn’t set until late, there were plenty of people out and about. It didn’t feel like Amsterdam. No tourists. No canals. No women in summer dresses walking their dogs. It felt like a different city in a different country, where there was so much space and light that it was easy for the population to act as if no one else existed. Here and there I spotted pretty girls waiting for a tram. For the longest time, I used to suppress the urge to talk to girls like that. Until, one day, I decided that it really didn’t matter what happened. Sometimes they’d ignore you, and then you’d feel like shit for a while. Sometimes they’d welcome your advances, and that could be the start of something very nice. I no longer suppressed the urge. But here in New-West, I had to be careful. I was somebody here.

Downtown, I used to go after pickpockets — I was good at it, it was an exciting period, I still think about it every day. The time before my transfer to Meer en Vaart was like a dream. I did great among the shoplifters, because I wasn’t your typical undercover cop. With my three-day stubble, my worn leather jacket, my beat-up sneakers, I could have been an illegal alien on the make. There in Amsterdam’s crowded streets, I could use my appearance to capture guys with criminal intentions.

I was the child of Moroccan immigrants who’d been visibly shocked when I told them I’d been accepted into the police academy. They warned me about flying bullets and murders, told me I’d never be home for dinner, which would make it hard to develop a good relationship with a peaceful girl. Emotional blackmail. I figure a little blackmail can be a sign of love, but too much blackmail can scar you. There’s a thin line between a little and too much. I have to admit that I carried the scars, though I tried not to make a big deal of it.

Where did I get the idea of becoming a cop, they wanted to know. They’d always heard me cuss out the police — They’ve got it in for Moroccans, but they let the white offenders slide — so why this change of heart? Should I tell them about my instinct, my almost infallible ability to see who was cool and who was up to no good, who was a crook and who wasn’t? Sure, try to explain that to your parents, who are Berbers from the Rif Mountains. My father had bad memories of the police back home. “They speak Arabic to us, they insult us, they take our money. The authorities sic them on us to fill their own pockets. Vultures.”

Sometimes I’d follow some guy down the street, because he seemed to fit the description of a murderer. Even with my friends, I asked myself who was running a racket and who was on the up-and-up. It bothered me that I couldn’t share this with anyone. I felt like a traitor.

“Mother,” I said, “this choice brings me peace.”

That would have to be enough for them.

And it did bring me peace. The training went by quickly, although I never told my parents how irrationally the other recruits grumbled about “my people,” the Moroccans, the Mocros, the Muslims.

One part of our training happened at the academy, the other part came from the popular reality show Detection Requested. All the trainees watched it, and the next day it was all they could talk about.

What it boiled down to was that all Moroccans were the same, except me. I was different. One of my fellow trainees put it this way: “You fit in everywhere. You could be a suspect or a cop.”

After I graduated and got my first assignment, I was shy, I kept things superficial, and the result was that my new colleagues didn’t trust me.

They couldn’t get rid of me, though: I was good. Maybe too good. So they transferred me. Something about excessive force, something about complaints from bystanders. I was just a little too assertive.

Sometimes it’s pointless to resist the inevitable, because you know nothing’s going to change.

There wasn’t much for me at the Meer en Vaart station. Those first weeks, I missed not only the bustle of the city center, the anonymity, but most of all the old connections. The way we knew each other, the in-jokes, the speed with which things happened. We were a team. At my new assignment, I was left to my own devices.

Before too long, my desk was piled high with case files. My predecessor — who had retired — was old-school, which meant that few of his records had been digitized. The whole station was still stuck in the 1980s. The only real crime was bureaucracy.

By the end of my first month, Ali — one of the old-timers — had taken me under his wing. He was my big brother, and he took pity on the new kid. “Go here after your shift,” he said, handing me a slip of paper with an address that turned out to be a blue-collar sailing club on the Sloterplas. The building was hidden behind trees, bushes, and a fence. When I turned up, Ali was already there, on his second beer. He’d exchanged his work face for a carefree joviality. He hugged me. “I’m a Turk,” he explained. “We hug.”

If he was looking for an after-hours drinking buddy, he’d picked the wrong guy. I don’t drink. I ordered a mineral water. I really shouldn’t drink, it’s just asking for trouble, especially since I do things I’d be better off avoiding. Which is why I was in New-West now and not still in the heart of the city.

Ali cautioned me not to take the suspicion that dominated our workplace personally. The station had been going through an identity crisis for some years, caused by the treatment it received from headquarters. The station felt it wasn’t being taken seriously, and that was the reason for the pain I could feel whenever I walked through the door. The city center had forgotten us, despite the recent increase in criminal activity. Organized crime ran illegal casinos, refugees streamed into our forgotten neighborhoods, once-proud buildings were degenerating into tenements, some areas were under the control of street gangs. “Let’s say the problems of us brown people are a lower priority than the problems of the white people in the Grachtengordel.”

Only when there’d been a gang murder did they come out our way to have a look.

“Then all at once we’re New York, Los Angeles. The media show up, the social services stand around and nod thoughtfully. Put on their cool act. Shove us off to the side.”

Of course, HQ had to put in an appearance when something high-profile happened. The rest of the time, they stayed nice and cozy in the Canal District.

“The canal ring’s like an albatross around our neck,” said Ali. “There’s the world inside the ring — with all its glamour and wealth and success — and then there’s the world outside the ring, with our six hundred creeps on the most-wanted list, our jihadis in training, our gambling dens, our money launderers, our meth labs, our tough guys and welfare cheats. They don’t give a shit. Worse than that, arkada, they like it like this. They figure they can never get rid of evil altogether, but what they can do is give it a place to live. So here we are in Evil’s Preserve. Marhaba!”

Now, in the distance, children were taking sailing lessons on the calm surface of the lake. The Sloterplas dominated the neighborhood. Wild horses couldn’t drag me out onto the water.

“My kids are almost old enough for that,” said Ali. “Pretty soon now, they’ll start whining, ‘Papa, I want to sail!’” He dreamed aloud of a boat of his own and brought his glass of beer to his lips. He could drink here without anyone watching him. “Social control, man,” he said conspiratorially, and took another slug, and then another.

I knew this sort of drinking, the behavior of a man who didn’t have the luxury of spreading his consumption out across the day, so he had to suck down as much as he could when he had the chance. If he was going to drink, it had to be here and now.

“Everything’s got to be normal here. If you can’t fit in, don’t try to live here — go downtown. Every crime that happens here is explainable. But what happened to Nadia? That wasn’t normal. They’re all talking about it, even in the mosque. But it won’t last long. People forget. They want things to go back to normal.”

Ali was the only one of us who lived near the station. He grew up here. He lived in Old-Sloten, close to the lake. He could be home in a jiffy; you could get from anywhere to anywhere else in this neighborhood in a jiffy.

“Still, Old-Sloten’s different,” he said, “not like this. Here, nobody knows anyone else. That’s the way things are now. They don’t call us Old-Sloten for nothing. We’re old. Even the newcomers. We make them old. I love that. I’m a traditional man. A man who appreciates the old ways.”

He ordered another beer. I’d already seen him put away three of them tonight, and he might have had more before I got there. Alcohol made Ali a better man. I envied him that. My parents caught me drunk once. They basically freaked out. I had “adopted the habits of the infidels.” As far as they were concerned, I was already on my way to hell. I kind of enjoyed their reaction. Better drunk and in hell than sober among the hypocrites.

Ali confided in me that the Meer en Vaart cops would try to get rid of me as soon as possible. “Then they’ll be happy. So don’t be bitter if you have to move on. It’s got nothing to do with you personally.”

The kid was standing beside the school principal, waiting for me. They’d arrested his father on suspicion of money laundering, racketeering, and extortion. The trifecta. My colleagues had knocked in the front door of their house and found a lot of cash on the premises. They took the mother away too. One visit from the cops, and your whole family’s gone. I was supposed to bring the kid to child protective services, since he was a minor. I made a wrong turn at first. There was traffic, and it was raining. Springtime was working against us.

The kid didn’t speak, just looked out the window. I figured he had no idea what his parents had been up to, though you never really know. Someone had warned him to keep his mouth shut, but he suddenly seemed to realize I wasn’t just some random guy.

“You doing okay at school?” I tried.

His face twisted. I wasn’t his older brother or any other relative, I was a cop, even though I wasn’t in uniform. He turned away, but I could see he was having a hard time of it.

“I used to want to be a doctor,” I said. “Then you can help people get better. But I became a police officer instead.”

“Nobody trusts a cop. You’re all traitors.” The look in his eyes was harder than granite.

“Who killed Nadia?” he demanded when he got out of the car. As if he were interrogating me. As if I knew something about it. Why do these kids all think the police are part of the problem?

I visited the other members of the family. Everywhere I went, I was received graciously. Maybe a friendly reception makes it harder to find the solution.

Her sisters told me she loved movies, but she never went out. I kept my own opinion to myself. She never hung around with bad boys. They’d never known a purer girl. Then they cried. The conclusion I drew from these conversations was that Nadia had kept her sisters in the dark too. They knew nothing about her. No details that could send us in a useful direction. Nothing.

Maybe she was murdered because she was so present, because she was dominant, because she was different. At least that’s how her girlfriends described her: radiant, well behaved, defiant. There had to be plenty of guys in the neighborhood who were attracted to her. Everyone was absolutely convinced of the goodness of her character. She was an unusual girl, unique. That breeds jealousy. Killed because she was too good for this world. Something like that.

Her death had made Nadia a martyr. She had been promoted to sainthood. She would be held up forever as an example.

He was six years older than Nadia. They’d met at a Turkish restaurant she frequented with her girlfriends. He was there with his buddies. There was chitchat and flirting. The two of them began texting each other. They both loved Turkish comedies. He had a Turkish background. “I’m an Alevite,” he told me. She was a Moroccan Sunni.

So she couldn’t tell her parents about their relationship?

He nodded.

Was it serious between them?

“She meant everything to me.” A romantic soul, but I believed him. I could see in him the same sense of loss I’d seen in her girlfriends. “She was one of a kind. She didn’t know how to lie. She lived from the heart. You don’t meet many people like her.”

I didn’t pay much attention to whatever he said after that. What it came down to was that Nadia had been his guarantee against bad behavior.

But their relationship had been troubled. He wanted more time with her than she was willing to give. At last, a few weeks back, she had pulled the plug.

Had he been devastated?

No. In fact, he’d been relieved. He’d been wondering how long it would take before she finally acknowledged her doubts. He didn’t have a steady job, no wealthy parents, no brothers to support him. He had little chance of making something of himself. “She woke me up. I never hated her, not for one second.”

We had to believe him, he said.

Why do we always have to believe these people?

When I left him, we shook hands. His were dry, and rough as sandpaper.

The forensics report came in. No traces, which now suggested she hadn’t fought against her attacker. The conclusion was that she’d been lured to her death by someone she knew. “The killing must have been premeditated. It was carefully planned by someone who knew what he was doing.”

“I told you,” said Ali. “Whoever did this wasn’t normal. Wasn’t from around here. But he had an eye for pretty girls.”

Back on the street, I encountered two young Muslim men.

“As-salaam alaikum,” they said.

“Alaikum salaam,” I replied.

They introduced themselves. They were on their way to the mosque. Would I come by sometime, talk about my work as a policeman and what I contributed to society? “We are proud of you. You are one of us.” They’d be happy to welcome me to the mosque. The House of Good. I didn’t want to insult them, so I accepted their invitation. I would come. When I was ready, they said, when I was spiritually clean. When that day came, I would also call my parents.

That evening, I went to Ali’s home. I was uncomfortable about those two Muslims. It was as if they knew of my torment. And there, in Ali’s living room, I felt the earth shift beneath my feet. For the first time in months, I drank. By the end of the evening, I had no idea what I was saying. I talked and talked and talked. I rattled on about the young girls, my feelings of guilt, of rejection. I talked of death, said I hoped that when my time came I would be laid to rest with my head facing Mecca.

Ali comforted me. When I left, he looked at me differently than he had when the evening began. My only hope was that he would always be my friend.

I wanted to find out where that peppermint had come from, so I decided to go downtown. There were a number of places to get a quick bite near the Pathé De Munt. I went into many of them, ostensibly to use the men’s room, and on my way out I took a peppermint from the bowl by the door. It was, of course, a fool’s errand. She could have gone anywhere in the city that evening.

But I knew she’d been here. In the area around the theater. She’d had something to eat. To drink. She lived her life to the fullest.

In New-West, you didn’t have the luxury to be naive. She’d told him everything about her life, her yearning to be free, her bossy brothers. Her sweet sisters. Her wonderful parents. And he had listened. Understood that she was suffering. She told him everything. Deep inside her was a human being in pain. Someone who couldn’t see any hope for the future. The moment she stepped back inside her house, it was as if she’d confined herself within a glass cage. Running away wasn’t an option; it would break her heart. She was a good girl. Honest. But where had her honesty gotten her? She was living a lie, deceiving her family. And some boy had taken advantage of her.

A few months later, I was pulled off the case. Despite my background and knowledge, I hadn’t produced the result they’d expected. I rubbed them the wrong way. I wasn’t the Mocro-cop they’d dreamed of, who would fit in among the Moroccan community. In my evaluation, they wrote that my familiarity with the killer’s milieu and my ability to win the trust of its inhabitants had gotten in the way of my professional judgment, had perhaps even prevented the murder from being solved. They were ready to trade their approachable Moroccan man in for a more standoffish model. That’s how I read it, those are the conclusions I drew. Not long after that, I requested a transfer and left Sloten.

This all happened ten years ago. The case was never solved. The reports were filed and forgotten.

I’ve resigned from the police. I do something different now, though I still divide the world into places where you can safely hide a body and places where you can’t.

Sometimes I dream of Nadia. I see her quite clearly, before she disappears into the polder. She says, I don’t know how I wound up here.

A girl with too many secrets.

I believed that, with my background, I’d be able to solve her murder. I thought I was convincing enough to get the answers I needed, that the solution would simply present itself to me.

I was wrong.

Had she lived, Nadia would still be a mystery.

The only indisputable fact is that she is dead.

The rest is silence.

Get Rich Quick by Walter van den Berg

Osdorp

So I tell Sayid pretty soon we’ll be rich. In two hours. Maybe three.

He says he don’t know what he’ll do with his share. He says he can’t imagine what a person would do with a fuckin’ million euros.

We’re at the Mickey D’s on the Osdorpplein, and we got cheeseburgers in front of us, but I can’t eat. I’m too hyped. “We can’t do nothin’ with it,” I say. “We bust ourselves if we spend it. We gotta wait a month. Maybe two.”

“Okay,” Sayid says, but I can see he don’t think it’s okay.

“We don’t spend it,” I say. “That’s lesson number one.”

“Lesson number one at what school, man? The Uni-fuckin-versity of Stealing?” He looks over at the counter, where his kid sister stands behind the register, ringing up an order.

I remind him he’s seen plenty of gangster movies.

“What are you tellin’ me, gangster — we’re gangsters now?”

I say I think we are gangsters now, and I open my jacket just enough so he can see the piece stuck in my waistband.

“Chill,” he says. “That’s way chill.” Then he shakes his head. He reaches across the table and opens my jacket a little wider, so he can get a good look. “When do we gotta give it back?”

I tell him that depends on if we use it or not. “We use it, we dump it in the lake. We don’t use it, I’m s’posed to bring it back tomorrow.”

“You got it from the Abduls?”

“Half,” I say. “I got it from Abdulhamed. Abdulhafid didn’t wanna give it to me. He said he promised my old man. Abdulhamed said he never promised my old man nothing.”

“Chill, man. The Abduls are chill.”

“They want a cut.”

“What?”

“They said nothing goes down in Osdorp unless they get a cut.”

“Shit, gangster, what’d you tell ’em?”

I shrug. “I told ’em they can have a cut.”

Sayid shakes his head.

I say I’ve given this some thought. “They got no idea how much money’s involved here, so we can tell ’em it was a hundred thou and slip ’em ten Gs.”

“Why’d you tell ’em anything, gangster?”

I say, ’cause we needed the piece. “It wouldn’t work without a gun, gangster.”

“True dat.”

I say I didn’t tell ’em what we were up to. “They asked, but I didn’t tell ’em. They said we should be careful, and I said we would. Then they asked again, but I ducked the question. If I’d told ’em, they’d know we’re not after no hundred grand.”

“Okay then,” says Sayid.

I remind him we’ll be rich in two hours.

“Rich or dead,” says Sayid.

“Forget dead. Rich.”

“Inshallah.”

“Yeah, inshallah, gangster.”

Then Linda waltzes into the Mickey D’s and every guy in the place checks her out. Linda wears these skintight jeans, man. I give her a wave, and she heads over. “Hey,” she says.

“Hey,” I say.

Sayid stays quiet. He looks to see if his sister is watching — his people don’t like him hanging out with girls like Linda.

I ask her if she’s ready.

She shrugs. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Wave. When you see Patrick coming, you step out in the street and wave. He’ll pull over. You get him talking, and we get in the car.”

She says she doesn’t know what he drives.

I say I’ll point it out. “I’ll give you a sign when I see him. All you gotta do is wave, and then give him a little chitchat.”

“Okay,” she says. “And what do I get?”

“A hundred euros,” I say.

“Two hundred.”

“All you gotta do is wave.”

“And chitchat,” she says.

“One hundred.”

“He wants to marry you,” Sayid chimes in.

“I know. Two hundred.”

“Okay, fine, two.” I stand up. “Let’s go.”

Linda climbs on behind me, and Sayid and me aim our scooters for the Osdorper Ban.

Here and there on the Ban are these clusters of shops. They got clusters like this all over Osdorp and the other New-West neighborhoods: used to be that the little groceries and cigar stores and bakeries were for the white people, but now the whites who still live in these parts go to the big supermarkets. So you got Turks roasting chickens on the sidewalks and stores selling hearing aids and Pakistani dry cleaners with their hawala banks in the back.

Patrick told Sayid and me he was making a run tonight. Patrick brags about shit like that, because he wants to impress us. He’s been bragging about shit like that for a couple months now, but we never took him serious until somebody said we oughta take him serious. Told us he’s been moving bags of cash back and forth between this one hawala here and another one in Rotterdam for months now, and he got the gig ’cause he’s about the whitest white guy ever lived, he even drives a fucking Ford Focus. He brags about it in this weird robot way he’s got, like he’s not really human, you know, and when we kid him about it, he’s the one laughs the loudest, but not exactly real, like he don’t know what’s funny and what ain’t, like he’s just guessing. He says he’s saving up so he can ask Linda to marry him. I say maybe he oughta try going steady before he starts talking about getting hitched, but he says he already thought it through, and in the movies girls go for romance and bust out crying if you ask ’em to marry you. So it’s better you ask ’em to marry you than go steady.

We park our scooters outside Snackbar Van Vliet. Sayid won’t go into Van Vliet, he says they cook the pork in the same fryers as the french fries, but it’s a good place to leave the scooters — there’s always scooters parked there, and I figure we better leave our scooters someplace they won’t stand out. I want to be professional about this, and I think that includes we put our scooters someplace they won’t stand out.

I tell Sayid and Linda we’ll wait across the street. Patrick will make his pickup at the dry cleaners, and then he has to take the ring road, so he’s gotta come right past here. There’s a parked van we can hang out behind. I tell Linda I’ll let her know when I see Patrick’s car, and I keep my eyes fixed on the dry cleaners. I check my phone and it’s almost five. It’s starting to get dark — it’s winter, but not cold. Feels like it’s gonna rain.

Without turning my head, I ask Sayid what’re the odds we’d get pulled over if we tried driving for the hawalas.

“One in four, gangster.”

“Maybe one in three,” I say. “That’s what you call racial profiling. What a world, right?”

“Are you two gangsters?” asks Linda.

I say society has made us gangsters. And then a blue Ford Focus pulls into the parking space in front of the dry cleaners.

“There he is,” I say.

Behind me, I hear Sayid puking. Linda gives out like a little scream. I shoot a quick glance over my shoulder and tell him he’s an asshole. I ask him does he want to be rich or not.

“I want to be rich,” he says.

I signal Linda to come closer. “You see that blue car? That’s him. So you step out in the street and wave him over, and when he rolls down his window you have a little chitchat. That’s all you got to do. You understand me?”

She says she understands me. She’s not retarded, she says.

“You’ll get your money tomorrow,” I say. I stay behind the van with Sayid, Linda goes to the curb, and she does just fine, plays a little with her phone, then looks up when she figures Patrick’s on his way. She makes like she spots him and waves, steps out in the street, and Patrick pulls up in front of the van.

“Shit, it’s working,” says Sayid. “Shit, man!”

Linda walks around the Focus to the driver’s side, where Patrick’s rolled his window down, and she leans in, her elbows on the window frame, her ass in those tight jeans sticking out behind her.

“We grab the bag now?” asks Sayid.

I look at him. I say we get in the car and make him drive to a good place.

Sayid asks what’s a good place. He says we can just as easy grab the bag of money now and head for our scooters.

I look across the street at our scooters parked in front of Van Vliet. I say Sayid’s idea would call too much attention to us. “We were gonna do that, we should’ve parked the scooters on this side of the street.”

“Come on, gangster, you didn’t think about that?”

I tell him to shut up, okay? “Come on,” I say, “let’s climb in.” I go up to the passenger side of the Focus and yank on the back door handle, but the back door is locked. Sayid bumps into me. I look at him. Linda’s still standing there with her ass in the air.

“What the fuck, gangster?” says Sayid.

I grab the piece from my waistband, circle around to the driver’s side, and pull Linda out of the way. She gives another little scream. I touch the front end of the gun to her head and tell Patrick to unlock the doors.

“Three hundred,” Linda says.

Patrick looks from me to Linda, scared-like. “Don’t hurt her,” he says, and I hear the locks pop up. I pull the driver’s-side back door open and nod to Sayid he should get in on the other side, next to Patrick, and I shove Linda into the car and she yells not so hard or she’ll go straight to five hundred. I get in after her and put the gun to the back of Patrick’s head and tell him to drive.

He doesn’t react.

He’s got his hands on the wheel, but he don’t do nothing.

I glance to my right. Linda looks kind of cramped, pressed up against this big laundry bag. Nylon, colored vertical stripes. My old man uses the same kind of bags to store the stuff he sells at the open-air market.

So that’s the cash.

Patrick just sits there.

I tap the back of his head with the end of the gun barrel. “Pat,” I say, “drive.”

He says he’s not afraid of me.

Sayid, sitting next to him, looks from him to me and back again.

“Pat,” I say, “you gotta drive.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” he says again, like the weird robot he is. I figure that’s another reason he got this gig with the Pakis. He’s so white he’ll never get pulled over, and he’s a weird robot you can’t scare.

I point the piece at Linda.

Patrick watches in the rearview mirror. “Don’t hurt her,” he says.

I tell him Linda wants to marry him, but I’ll blow her brains out if he doesn’t drive.

Patrick starts the Focus and drives, and Linda says now she wants a thousand euros.

Patrick drives, and Sayid looks at me and says, “Where we going, man? Where the fuck we going?”

I say we need to find a good place.

Sayid says I ain’t given this enough thought. “Shit, G, you shoulda thought about this.”

“You didn’t think about it either, did you?”

He says he ain’t the brains of the outfit.

I say I never said I was neither.

Linda sighs.

“Turn right,” I tell Patrick, but he doesn’t listen. He keeps going straight.

I push the gun into the back of his neck. I tell him he better listen or I’ll blow his brains out.

He don’t react, just drives straight ahead. We come to the intersection with Meer en Vaart, and he finally pulls into the right lane. Off to the left are the new apartments where the rich white people live. To the right are the old buildings on the Ruimzicht where they used to live.

“Okay, good,” I say.

“I’m not doing it because you say so,” he says. “I’m doing it because it’s my job.” He turns onto Meer en Vaart, the cop shop on the right, and I jerk the piece down behind his seat. I tell him in a second I’ll aim it back at his head.

Sayid turns around and rests his arm on the back of his seat and glares at me. “In a second you’ll aim back at his head?”

“Come on, gangster, we know Patrick, right?”

He says what difference does that make. “For fuck’s sake, man, we’re ripping him off!”

Patrick says he knows us too.

“That’s logical,” I say. “We all know each other.”

He says that means we’ll have to kill him. Otherwise, he’ll turn us over to the cops. He downshifts for the red light at the Osdorpplein.

Sayid looks at me and nods. “He’s right,” he says.

Patrick drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “I have to do my job,” he says.

I push the gun deeper into his neck. “Pay attention,” I say. “Make a right.”

“I’m going straight,” he says. “I’m going to the Lelylaan, and then I’m getting on the ring road, and then I’m driving to Rotterdam.”

A car pulls up beside us, so I lower the piece again. The light turns green, and Patrick drives straight ahead.

I tell him, “It’s time for you to get scared, Patrick.”

“I’m scared already,” he says. “But not of you.” He looks in his rearview mirror.

“What?” says Sayid.

I turn around and see a big black Dodge Ram behind us. It’s so close all I can see is the front grill.

“The fuck,” I say. “Who’s that? Who the fuck is that, Patrick?”

“That’s the people I work for.” He drives on, doing exactly the speed limit. Ahead of us is the back edge of the Osdorpplein, where a little while ago we were sitting at Mickey D’s, which we never should have left. We definitely shouldn’t’ve done this. To our left is the narrow side of the Sloter Lake. The water is black as death.

“Speed up,” I say. “Now!”

He says he’s going to do his job just the way they told him.

“Patrick, I got a fucking gun here.”

He says he’s not afraid of my gun.

Behind us, the Dodge Ram’s engine races.

Linda screams again — I forgot all about her. I point the piece at her. “Patrick,” I say, “I’m gonna shoot Linda in the face. Now go.”

Patrick hits the gas. Linda and I are thrown back in our seats, and she swats the piece aside. “Just stop it,” she says. Then she turns to the laundry bag behind her and unzips it. Bundles of pale purple paper: five-hundred-euro notes. “What’s all this?”

“It’s money,” says Patrick.

I look behind us. We’re about sixty feet ahead of the Dodge, but he’s coming up fast. Patrick’s Ford Focus is about as speedy as a horse and buggy.

Patrick runs a red light and somebody honks. He turns left into the Lelylaan. He looks over his shoulder at Linda and says he took this job for her. “I’m doing this for you, Linda.”

Linda, meanwhile, is holding one of the bundles of money in her hands. “There has to be at least ten thousand euros here,” she says. “At least.”

The Dodge is right behind us again, its motor growling.

I take the packet of bills away from Linda and stuff it in my jacket pocket. “You get two hundred,” I say.

The Dodge comes up and nudges our rear bumper.

I see Patrick looking at her in the mirror, and he says, “Are you getting paid for this?”

“Of course,” she says.

Patrick jerks the wheel to the left and we shoot off the asphalt onto the tram tracks that run down the middle of the Lelylaan. Both the 1 and the 17 trams use these tracks but we’re in luck, they’re unoccupied at the moment. Off in the distance, though, I see a blue tram coming our way, and the Focus skids across the rails and bottoms out, steel scraping steel, but we keep on going and bounce onto the asphalt on the other side of the tramline where the traffic’s coming toward us from the city center, and the cars jam on their brakes, their headlights lighting up the inside of the Focus. We go off the road onto the grassy hill that slants down to the lake, then roll down the slope doing at least fifty. I look back, and the Dodge is coming after us, but the tram that was approaching is there now and it smashes into the side of the Dodge and I think about a story I heard once about how some tram conductors, who get a week off to recover after an accident, don’t bother to stop when there’s a car in their way. I practically shit my pants, but I’m still thinking about that story.

We roll down the grass and Patrick steers the Focus to the left and onto the footpath that runs along the shoreline, past the tall letters they put there — I amsterdam, with the I and the am in red and the sterdam in white, so it sort of says, I am Amsterdam, ha ha, so the tourists who accidentally wind up out here know they’re really still in the city — and across the water I can see the apartments on Ruimzicht where we used to think the rich people lived and now there’s a bag on the rear seat beside me with two million euros in it.

“Where we gonna go, man?” asks Sayid, turning to me from the front seat. Then he looks past me to see if the Dodge is still there, but the Dodge has been rammed by tram 17. A kid on a bike in front of us swerves out of our way and onto the grass. From the light we’re shining on him, I can tell our right headlight is out.

I got the piece in my right hand, and with my left I pat my pants pockets ’cause that’s what I always do when I’m thinking. I can feel my keys, and in my head I go through it: my place, my aunt’s place, the storage unit. The storage unit. We have a storage unit for the shit my old man sells at the market, and that’s the perfect place to hide a bag full of money, in the middle of all those other bags that look exactly the same. I say we’re going to the storage unit. I rest the barrel of the gun on Patrick’s shoulder and tell him we gotta go to Slotervaart.

He says he’ll decide where we gotta go. “My life is meaningless now,” he says.

“You’re full of shit, man,” says Sayid.

Patrick comes to a stop on the sidewalk when we’re back on Meer en Vaart. In front of us there’s a row of duplexes that must have been pretty nice once upon a time, but now their balconies are all overflowing with crap. There are lights on in a couple of the apartments, though most people ain’t home yet. Most people are still in their cars on either side of us. Everyone who passes stares at us: a car parked on the sidewalk, only one headlight working.

“My life is meaningless,” Patrick says again. “I was saving up so I could ask Linda to marry me. But now I don’t trust her.”

Sayid and me both look at Linda. She stares right back at us. “What?” she says. “I did what you told me. I can totally be trusted.”

I ask her if she’s sure she don’t want to marry this guy. She shakes her head. He sees her do it in the rearview mirror.

Sayid asks, “Pat, how much you saved?”

“Twelve thousand,” he says.

“He’s got twelve thousand euros saved,” I tell Linda.

“How much did you want to have before you asked me?”

“Twenty thousand.”

“That’s a lot of money,” says Linda.

“I’ll never get it now,” says Patrick. “I’m out of a job.”

“That’s a shame,” says Linda.

I say he needs to head for Slotervaart.

Patrick looks back at Linda. “You don’t think twelve thousand’s enough?”

She’s sitting next to a bag with two million in it. Patrick told us he carries two million every trip. She shrugs. “Maybe.”

Sayid and I look at each other. I can see from his face he’s trying not to laugh. I can also see from his face he’s trying not to cry. He’s scared.

In the mirror, I can glimpse what’s happening on Patrick’s face too. He’s gotta figure this shit out, but he don’t know how. “Come on, Pat,” I say, “be smart. We’re gonna stash this bag someplace safe. You’re gonna lose your job anyway, we might as well be smart, right?”

He turns around in his seat and looks at me. He says I’m right. We might as well be smart, he says.

He sits up straight.

“Let’s go to Slotervaart,” I say.

“Let’s not go to Slotervaart,” says Patrick, and I can hear from his robot voice I might as well stop telling him where to go, even with the gun I got from Abdulhamed stuck in his ear. He inches his Ford Focus into the traffic on Meer en Vaart and heads back in the direction of Osdorpplein.

I look off to the right, at the Sloterplas, that weird manmade lake in the middle of Amsterdam New-West you have to drive all the way around to get anywhere. When we were kids, we used to swim there, because our parents wouldn’t give us money for the public pool where all the white kids went, so us brown kids were the poor schmucks who had to settle for the dirty green water of the lake. Us poor schmucks with our brown skin who loved the white kids, because the white kids got to go to their activities in their old man’s car, activities maybe their old man took them to because us brown kids were hanging out on all their streets and squares.

Poor schmucks, I think, looking at the Sloterplas while Patrick drives, this weird autistic guy, my pal beside him, me on the backseat with some dumb bitch and a bag filled with two million euros. Two million. Two hours ago we were at Mickey D’s and we were poor, because we weren’t smart enough like our cousins who went to good schools and applied for a hundred jobs at banks and insurance companies and finally got a job at the hundred-and-first place they tried because they had brown skin and funny names, but now that they finally got those jobs they had a future. The fuckers.

My future sits in a laundry bag on the backseat of a Ford Focus, and I’m sitting right beside it. Maybe I’ll buy an apartment in one of those new buildings off the Ruimzicht, tucked in among the white families, and I’ll laugh when the white realtor’s eyes go all wide when I dump payment in full on his desk. Cash money.

“Patrick,” says Sayid. “Patrick.” He looks at me and I shake my head — Patrick ain’t listening no more. Sayid grabs the piece out of my hand and curses and sticks it in Patrick’s face, and Patrick’s hands tighten on the wheel and he stares right through the gun. “Here,” says Sayid, “here, look, there’s bullets in here and I’m gonna blow your fuckin’ head off.”

Patrick lifts his right hand from the wheel and rips the piece out of Sayid’s hand. He glances at it, clicks off the safety, aims at Sayid, and then there’s a big bang that makes Linda and me cup our hands over our ears and there’s smoke and the stink of cordite and Sayid is screaming and there’s a hole in the side window with a ring of blood all around it. Sayid goes on screaming. “You cocksucker!” he shouts. “Cocksucker!” He covers his face with his hands, covers his mouth and nose, and he looks at me and pulls his hands away and his nose ain’t there no more and he asks how bad it is while the blood runs into his mouth.

I don’t know what to say.

“How bad is it?”

“Your nose,” I say. “It’s your nose.”

“How bad is it?”

“Your nose is — Jesus, it’s sort of gone, G.”

Linda pukes into the bag of money.

Patrick drives. “I’m sorry,” he says to Sayid. “I was trying to blow your head off.” He holds the wheel with his left hand, the piece in his right. He checks his mirror and says the Dodge is back. I turn around but don’t see it. “There,” he says, and he nods at the bike path between the road and the lake, and there’s the Dodge, zigzagging a little, probably the tram threw off its alignment.

“Who’s in there?” I ask.

Patrick says he already told us. “The people I work for. Worked.”

Sayid whines, his hands cupped over his face. “I gotta go to the hospital,” he cries. “I really gotta go to the hospital, man.”

Patrick looks at Linda in his mirror and says her name.

She looks back at him.

“You think twelve thousand’s enough?”

She stares past Sayid at the hole in the passenger window and the blood all around it. “No,” she says, “not anymore.”

“You think two million’s enough?”

“Two million? Where you gonna get that kind of money?”

I tell her there’s two million in the bag. “You stupid bitch,” I say.

“Don’t insult her,” says Patrick, and he glances over to the Dodge, which is keeping up with us on the bike path.

Sayid screams, his hands cupped in front of his face. “You stupid bitch!”

Patrick touches the barrel of the gun to Sayid’s head and pulls the trigger.

Explosion.

Cordite.

Sayid’s body slumps against the passenger door.

“Patrick,” I say. “Patrick.”

Linda sits pressed up against the backseat, her hands covering her eyes.

Patrick steers the Focus to the side of the road, bumps over the curb, and now he’s right next to the Dodge.

“I’ll shoot you later,” he tells me, “but I can’t do it now because you’re behind me.”

We’re driving parallel to the new boulevard that runs along the short side of the Sloterplas — before last year it was just trees here, with a walking trail between them, but they cut down the trees and now they got expensive tiles and benches — and Patrick runs the Focus into the side of the Dodge. The Dodge is much heavier than we are, except the tram must have shook it up because it smashes into one of the steel benches and comes to a stop. The streetlamps cast a soft glow on the boulevard’s tiles and on Sayid’s blood.

Patrick puts the Focus in park and gets out and comes after me, but I jerk away and pull Linda in front of me and she screams, and I smell her puke and I think she’s pissed herself. Patrick doesn’t shoot.

At first I don’t dare to look, but Linda pulls free and I see Patrick’s on the other side of the car now, the gun — my gun — aiming at the Dodge, and he fires three times.

Linda and me sit up straight, and we see somebody fall out of the Dodge. Then we look at each other, and then we both look at the laundry bag with the two million euros, the laundry bag I could have stashed with the bags of my old man’s shit in the storage unit. I try to wipe off Linda’s puke and Sayid’s blood. I grab the bag and she grabs it too, and I want to pull it away from her but two million euros is heavy, man. And for a second that’s the whole world, the backseat of the Focus and our four hands on that bag, all that money so close, and for that second it feels like I ought to kiss her like it’s a fucking movie. Then the door on her side swings open and Patrick yanks her out, and I’m so surprised I let go of the bag and it flies out with her.

I see Patrick drag Linda and the bag onto the boulevard and it’s like I’m in a long dark tunnel and the tunnel feels safe — just leave me right here — but then Patrick sees me. He hunkers down and holds the piece in both hands and aims at the tunnel, my tunnel, and he shoots — there’s a bang, but not so loud this time because I’m in my tunnel and he’s outside, and I think about that bang while my shoulder is blown to fragments. I drop onto a bench and I die. I think I’m dying. My buddy’s lying here in front of me and he’s already gone, and I’m on my way. I open my eyes and lie on my back and look upside down out of my used-to-be-safe tunnel — it seems so long ago now, that feeling of safety inside my tunnel.

Patrick says something to Linda. I can’t really hear it. She just squeals. She’s lying on the boulevard in the glow of the streetlamps and she’s squealing, and behind her I see the Sloterplas, its black water beautiful beneath the black winter sky, and I see the Dodge and the man who fell out of it, and he tries to sit up and he stares at me and I see the disappointment on Abdulhafid’s face.

“I didn’t know it was you,” I say softly, and he didn’t know it was me, either — all I told him was we were gonna score a hundred thou, he never thought I meant his two million.

Patrick stands up and grabs the bag of money and unzips it. “Two million,” he tells Linda, loud, “two million.”

She shakes her head, sobbing.

I hear him say he’s gonna ask her one more time. And then he asks her: “Linda, will you marry me?”

I hear her say no, soft, sobbing.

Patrick picks up the bag by its handles, and in the glow of the streetlamps I see him carry it to the water’s edge. He drops the bag on the ground, then grabs it by the bottom and flips it over, and I can’t see the bundles of five-hundred-euro notes drop into the lake but I think I can hear them, plop plop plop, quick splashes as the packets hit the water.

I laugh ’cause I still got one of the bundles in my pocket. How many bills are in a bundle like that? A hundred? I suck at math, but I figure it’s gotta be a shitload of money, right?

Patrick walks back to Linda, who’s lying on the ground weeping like a drama queen even though he ain’t even shot her, and he asks her if she sees what he gave up for her. “Did you see that? I did it for you. Will you marry me?”

“No.”

He grumbles and turns to Abdulhafid, who’s lying next to the Dodge and who I figure is already dead, but Patrick shoots him in the head with the piece the other Abdul loaned me.

The gun’s been used, so it’s gotta go in the lake. I laugh again. I remember our scooters parked in front of Van Vliet. It’ll be days before anyone finds them. I figured it would be professional to put them there. I laugh, and I keep on laughing.

Patrick hears me, and he comes back to the Focus, and I press my hand against my jacket pocket, against the bundle of five-hundred-euro notes, a hundred of them, that’s four zeroes, so fifty thousand euros, and I laugh because I’m dying richer than I ever lived.

Starry, Starry Night by René Appel & Josh Pachter

Museum District

Vincent slips his arm around Mila’s bare shoulder and pulls her close. “So many stars,” he whispers. “And so many more, so far away we can’t even see them. Thousands of planets, millions of light-years away. It’s unbelievable, isn’t it?”

Mila doesn’t reply. Not with words, anyway. She leans into him, kisses his neck, brushes his cheek with her lips, moves on to his ear, her hot tongue exploring its contours.

He groans with pleasure.

The two of them have been a couple for almost half a year. They met at the Escape, a nightclub on the Rembrandtplein, and their click was instant and overpowering. One of Vincent’s old buddies has a tattoo on his left bicep of a heart with an arrow through it, and that’s how Vincent feels, like there’s an arrow piercing his heart. Sometimes he has to stop himself from checking his chest to make sure he isn’t actually bleeding.

Everything changed for Vincent when he and Mila got together. For years, he’d been a hard-core party animal, and animal was the operative word: drunk with his pals every weekend, a steady diet of fights and vandalism and anonymous sex, anything for a laugh. His life was a carnival, illuminated by flashing neon, its soundtrack a pulsing heavy-metal beat. Hard to believe it was only last year that he, Roy, Marco, and Tommy had practically torn Greece apart during an alcohol- and drug-fueled summer trip to the islands. Jesus, you choked down the right cocktail of stimulants, you could party hearty for a week without sleep.

Now, tonight, Vincent gazes lovingly at his beautiful Mila. She looks awesome in a short leather skirt and low-cut tank top.

“Mmmm, don’t,” he murmurs. “You know that makes me crazy.”

There isn’t a hint of a breeze, nor a cloud in the sky, and he’s aware that the sultry summer evening only adds to the hunger he feels for her. He slides his left hand beneath Mila’s skirt and caresses the soft inside of her thigh, sneaking his fingers higher to brush the warm, moist cotton of her underwear. It’s absolutely silent in this dark corner of the Vondelpark. Now and then a bicycle whispers past in the distance, but this narrow side trail is completely deserted except for the two of them.

The very instant he has that thought, a runner in a fluorescent green shirt huffs by, but Mila doesn’t seem to notice the intrusion. Perhaps her eyes are closed. Here on this wooden bench... could they? No, you never knew who might appear out of nowhere, even at one a.m., like that jogger. The park used to be known as a meat market for gay guys on the make. Maybe it still is.

Mila licks his ear again. She sucks the lobe into her mouth and nibbles it gently. “You taste so good,” she breathes. He feels the faintest pressure of her teeth. “I could eat you up.”

His fingertips slip inside the elastic of her panties, and just as she bites down on his earlobe his cell phone rings.

“Ow!” he cries.

“Oh no,” says Mila, “did I hurt you?”

Vincent fumbles for his phone. On its screen he sees the word Senior.

“Crap, it’s my dad, I better take it.”

Mila wriggles a few inches away on the bench and straightens her skirt, as if she’s concerned her boyfriend’s father might see her.

“What’s up?” Vincent says.

There is a moment of silence at the other end of the line. Then he hears his dad’s cigarette-hoarsened voice bark, “You make your deliveries?”

Always checking up on him, like he’s a little baby, has to be watched every minute. Doesn’t the old man trust him? And anyway, what’s he doing up at this hour? Once you turn fifty, you’re supposed to be in bed by midnight, for Christ’s sake.

“Muntplein and Koningsplein are done,” Vincent says. “I’ll do Museumplein in the morning.”

“You were supposed to hit all three of them tonight.”

“What difference does it make? I’ll be there before they open tomorrow.”

“That’s not our agreement,” his father says. “First you promise me you’ll do it tonight, now you say tomorrow morning. I don’t nag you, next thing I know it’s afternoon and it’s still not done. We’ve been through this before, son.”

“Not for six months, we haven’t!”

It’s true that Vincent has messed up in the past. Before Mila, he broke pretty much every promise he ever made to the old man. But that was then. He’s a different guy now. Responsible. No more crazy parties, no drunken orgies, no pills, he hardly even drinks booze anymore, just a few beers when they go out to dinner. Mila has shown him he can live a better life. He has to behave himself, if he doesn’t want to go back to being a total loser.

And his dad’s business is a gold mine: kiosks on three squares in the heart of Amsterdam, perfectly placed to serve drinks and snacks to the city’s hordes of tourists. Someday, when Daddy Dearest lies down for the big sleep — and given the two packs of Camels a day the old man inhales, it will probably come sooner than later — the whole enterprise will belong to him, and he’ll live off the proceeds for the rest of his life... if he doesn’t screw it all up.

“I want that last delivery made tonight,” Vincent Senior grumbles. “You hear me, boy?”

“I...” He sees that Mila is eying him with concern. He presses the phone to his chest and explains what’s going on.

“Do what he tells you,” she says. “I understand.”

She understands. For the first time in his life, Vincent has found someone who actually understands.

When he puts the phone back to his ear, his father is still talking. “Sure, Dad, whatever you say,” he interrupts. “I’m on my way to Museumplein right now.”

The Museum Square is a ghost town at this hour — all that’s missing is a lonely tumbleweed blowing across the broad grassy area bordered by the Rijksmuseum to the northeast, the van Gogh and Stedelijk museums to the north, and the Concertgebouw to the southwest. The tourists are tucked away in their hotels, or hunched over glasses of beer in the brown cafés on and around the Leidseplein, or roaming the Red-Light District in search of excitement, adventure, action. But there is nothing for them here. The museums and the city’s concert hall are all long shuttered for the night. The occasional car engine rumbles from the Paulus Potterstraat, a knot of locals chatters as they glide along the Hobbemastraat behind the Rijks on their black bicycles, homeward bound, and then silence again descends... before being irrevocably broken by the arrival of three boisterous young men, twentysomethings, dressed almost identically in T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers. Two of the three sport shaggy haircuts, the third has shaved his head.

“Whaddaya wanna do, Tommy?” says the bald one, whose name is Roy. There is a tattoo of a heart and an arrow on his left arm.

“Marco,” says Tommy, “that cunt told you where the party is, right?”

“Yeah, lemme think. It’s around here somewhere.”

“Not in there.” Tommy waves at the looming bulk of the national museum, the Rijks. “You guys ever been inside that dump?”

“On a field trip once,” bald Roy shrugs. “I tried to ditch it, but they dragged me along. About a million stupid old paintings and whatever. Almost as boring as dinner with my folks.”

“That shit’s worth millions, though.”

“I wonder anybody ever broke in there? You got any idea, Marco?”

Marco shakes his head. He gazes thoughtfully at the gigantic building, scratches his armpit, and shrugs.

“Man,” says Roy, “I’m wasted. Let’s get a cab.”

“You see a cab around here?”

“Anyway, where we going? Why don’t you call her, Marco? You got her number back at the Jimmy Hoo, right?”

“Jimmy Woo.”

“Whatever. You call her, get the goddamn address. I’ma stretch out for a sec.”

Roy reaches halfway along the tall plastic letters that spell out I amsterdam — the I and the am in bright red, everything else a glossy white that almost glows beneath the starry sky — grabs the crossbar of the letter t, and hoists himself up to sit with his back against the t and his feet propped on the top of the s. The modern font of the letters clashes with the museum’s classical architecture, but who gives a shit, the tourist board put several of these fuckers up around the city for the American backpackers and middle-aged Germans and hordes of Japanese with their clicking camera shutters, and they lap it up like dogs attacking a bowl of kibble.

Marco reaches for his phone. “Shit, what was her name again?” He stares at the screen as if waiting for Siri to answer the question.

“I Amsterdam,” says Tommy, using the bottom curve of the s to boost himself up onto the big red m. “That doesn’t fucking mean anything.”

Roy laughs. “Look at the colors, asshole. Read the red letters twice — it says I am Amsterdam.”

“Bullshit,” Tommy responds. “Read the red letters twice, it says, I am I Amsterdam. Now who’s an asshole, asshole?” Then he shakes off the argument and says, “You got any left?”

“Any what? X?”

Tommy rolls his eyes. “No, any licorice. Asshole.”

Roy fishes a small metal box from the pocket of his jeans and shakes it, letting the others hear the rattle from within. He slides it open and sings, in off-key English, “The Candyman can, ’cause he mixes it with love and makes the world taste good.” He takes out a little yellow pill with a smiley face stamped on one side, swallows it dry, and tosses the box to Tommy.

Marco is scrolling through his contacts. “That guy she was with,” he says, more to himself than his friends, “Raffie? Robbie? Ronnie?”

A white delivery van with Van Galen lettered on its side turns from the Honthorststraat onto the square and pulls up beside the shuttered snack kiosk. Its headlights go out, the purr of its engine dies, the driver’s door swings open, and a thin figure emerges.

“Hey, look who’s here,” says Roy, his face lighting up in a grin. “It’s Vinnie Van and his minivan! Good ol’ Vinnie — shit, what’s he doing here in the middle of the night? C’mon, boys, let’s check it out.”

Marco puts away his phone. Roy drops down from his perch atop the t, Tommy rolls off the m and lands on his feet like a cat. The three of them advance toward the delivery van.

Vincent swings the van’s rear door open. He’ll lug everything over to the kiosk before unlocking it and stacking the goods inside. It’s a ten-minute job, tops. But that doesn’t much matter anymore, since Mila’s already home, probably fast asleep by now. He pushes two crates of soda cans together and slides them out, and that’s when he sees them coming toward him. Roy, Marco, and Tommy, now that’s a fine how-do-you-don’t. What are those jerks doing out here in the middle of the night? It’s like they’ve been waiting for him, but of course their appearance has to be pure coincidence.

“Vinnie Van,” says Roy cheerfully, “you’re workin’ late.”

“Yeah, restocking.”

Roy swings around in front of him, blocking his way.

“Move, will ya? I gotta take this stuff to the—”

“You forgot the magic word, Vinnie, my brother.”

Vincent is tired, not in the mood to fool around. “Please,” he says, swallowing his irritation. “If you don’t mind.”

“You see, boys?” says Roy. “Look how polite he can be. Our Vinnie’s grown up into a good little soldier.”

Vincent, burdened by the two heavy crates, heads for the kiosk’s back door. Roy takes a step closer, bumping into him, almost throwing him off balance.

“Watch where you’re going, Vinnie,” says Roy. “You clumsy piece of shit.”

Tommy and Marco stand there snickering stupidly, watching the comedy play out.

“We’re goin’ to a party,” says Marco. “You comin’ with, Vinnie? The more the merrier, right?”

Vincent holds his tongue. No matter what he says, they’ll take it the wrong way. He sets down his crates and returns to the van for two more.

“What’s the matter?” demands Tommy. “We ain’t good enough for you no more?”

“Maybe his fuckin’ girlfriend don’t like us,” Marco mutters. “Mila with the milky mammaries. You like to suck on those mammaries, Vinnie? She let you have a taste if you’re a good little boy?”

Vincent shakes off the insult and goes back to the van for two cardboard cartons of chips. He can feel his old gang fall into single file behind him, swinging their arms like apes in the zoo, their sneakers slapping on the pavement amid staccato bursts of laughter.

“You need some help handling those big boys, Vinnie?” says Roy, and Vincent isn’t sure if he means the boxes or Mila’s breasts.

“I bet he does,” says Tommy, going straight for the nastier of the two entendres. “I mean, anything more than a mouthful’s too much for one guy on his own, right, Vinnie?”

Vincent sets down the cartons by the kiosk’s back door, and when he straightens up and turns around, Roy is right there in his face, an evil gleam in his eyes. “I could use a snack and a Coke, Vinnie. What about you guys?”

“Sounds good,” Marco smirks, and Tommy nods eagerly.

“Whaddaya say, Vinnie? We’re still your buds, right?”

Vincent heads back to the van.

“Cat’s got his tongue,” says Roy.

“I want a snack and a Coke,” Tommy whines, imitating a child.

“You can spare a couple bags of chips and a couple Cokes for your best pals,” says Roy. “Remember that time in Crete when you puked all over your bed? Who cleaned that shit up for you, Vinnie? We did, remember? You were totally out of it.”

“Yeah,” says Marco, “and this is how you thank us?”

“Come on, man,” Tommy urges, “I’m thirrrrrsty.”

“We’ll help you unload the rest of this crap and then we’ll all head over to the party, have a couple real drinks, for old time’s sake,” Roy suggests.

Vincent shakes his head.

“We’ll catch a ride with you, Vinnie Van. Hey, check it out, I got some X for ya.” Roy holds out his metal pillbox, the yellow smiley faces glowing happily under the light of a billion stars, but Vincent turns away as if he hasn’t even noticed.

“Jesus, you got boring, Van Galen. This is all that fuckin’ Mila’s idea, right? You get high and the bitch won’t suck you off no more?”

Ignoring them, Vincent carries the last two boxes of snacks to the kiosk. Now there’s just a few crates of bottled beer left before he can move it all inside and then take off.

If these three clowns will let him. What did I ever see in these assholes? he wonders.

“How much you make doin’ deliveries, Vinnie?” says Marco. “Your daddy pay you decent, or you work for free ’cause you love him so much?”

Vincent doesn’t react.

“Remember when you used to bitch and moan about the old fucker?” says Tommy. “I never heard you say one nice word about him.” He reaches out and pushes Vincent’s shoulder, not hard, just enough to be annoying. “Now all of a sudden he’s your best friend?”

Roy moves to block Vincent’s access to the van’s back door. He’s gritting his teeth, his eyes are wide open and darting from side to side, the pupils huge and black and glittering.

Christ, Vincent thinks warily, he’s already tripping. He gestures at Roy to move, but the guy just stands there, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet.

“Please,” sighs Vincent. “Would you please let me through?”

Roy grins and steps aside, motioning Vincent forward. “Glad to oblige, Mr. Van Galen,” he says with exaggerated politeness. “I wouldn’t want to hinder you in the swift completion of your appointed rounds.”

Vincent doesn’t trust this, but he leans into the van and slides out two stacked crates of Heineken, the tourists’ idea of Holland’s finest. As he turns to the kiosk, the three boys close in around him. With the van at his back, there’s nowhere for him to go. He doesn’t know what they’re planning — he doubts they’re clearheaded enough to even have a plan — but they’re obviously not going to let him through.

Roy suddenly takes a step back, opening a path. Vincent starts forward, and Roy sticks out a leg and trips him.

Vincent falls, and the two crates of beer go flying, crashing down on the asphalt. His palms sting, and there is shattered glass everywhere, though he doesn’t seem to be bleeding. He looks up into the grinning faces of Roy, Marco, and Tommy from his hands and knees.

“Vinnie fall down, go boom?” says Roy, the picture of innocence, while his droogs giggle idiotically.

“Fucking assholes,” Vincent mutters under his breath as he examines the smashed beer crates.

“You oughta be more careful, pal,” grins Marco. “I think your shoelace came untied. That’s dangerous.”

“Dangerous,” Tommy echoes. “You better tie your shoelace.”

Picking carefully though the beer-splattered mess, Vincent sees that most of the bottles have broken. Shit, shit, shit. He gets slowly to his feet. “You stupid bastards,” he says. “You’re gonna have to pay for all this—”

Roy’s hand whips around behind his back and snakes something out of his rear jeans pocket. There is a metallic snick, and Vincent sees a long blade glitter coldly in the starlight. “Your fuckin’ shoelaces trip you up,” he says slowly, “and you think we’re gonna pay for it?”

Vincent puts out a hand to keep his old friend at bay, seemingly unaware of the broken bottle he is holding.

But Roy sees the threat and lunges toward him. Vincent jerks to the side, his hand flashing forward defensively.

There is a sudden scream, and for just a moment it is unclear which of them has made the sound, but it is both of them who have cried out, both who have been wounded.

They stand there in the Museumplein beneath the blanket of stars, swaying from side to side, Marco and Tommy looking on in dumbfounded horror.

A spray of arterial blood gushes from Roy’s throat, and there is hot pain on the side of Vincent’s head.

Roy drops his switchblade and crumples to his knees, clutching his neck in both hands, before toppling over.

“Holy shit,” Marco breathes. “Come on, Tommy, let’s get out of here.”

As if by magic, the two of them disappear, leaving Roy and Vincent behind.

Vincent gingerly touches the left side of his head, where blood streams from a deep gash left behind by Roy’s knife.

“You cut me!” he whimpers. “You fucking cut me!”

He collapses to the pavement and lies there weeping as Roy’s body trembles violently for a long moment and then grows still.

The two of them remain there, side by side like a pair of lovers, until Vincent hears the wail of approaching sirens through the starry, starry night.