Choke Point

Grace doesn’t know if it’s her being Chinese, or the EU credentials, but no one at the health clinic attempts to stonewall her. She asks for and is given a printout of the emergency admission records for Kahil Fahiz. It goes too easily, a rarity. She commits the home address to memory, along with a mobile number. A few minutes later, she has entered them both into her phone. Without Sonia Pangarkar’s tendency toward graphic journalism she would not have known the hospital. But now all that’s left is navigating her way through a busy city, finding bridges across canals, and wending her way toward the address.

When mapped, Amsterdam sits like the left half of a bike wheel with crepe paper woven through the spokes; the crepe paper is the canals, with Centraal Station as the wheel’s hub. Over the centuries, the city has expanded ever outward from the thirty blocks of its central historic district—devoted entirely to tourism, the canals lined with picturesque three-story Dutch timber and Tudor houses—to a postwar district of nearly identical brick and white-trim apartment complexes. These outer neighborhoods, all identical, stretch for miles in every direction.

Grace double-checks not only the building number, but the street name. The architecture and street layout are so homogeneous as to be dizzying.

No one answers her repeated tries on the Fahizes’ door. The first hiccup. She tries the phone number but gets voice mail in Farsi. She understands this. She imagines no matter how many times she called, it would go to voice mail. The victim of a beating, Fahiz will strive to remain as anonymous and invisible as possible. Because of this, she has her work cut out for her. But a person has to work.

The third neighbor she tries cringes at the mention of Fahiz’s name; a reaction to his face following the beating, or his personality? She tells Grace of a shisha café, La Tertulia, that Fahiz frequents. How this woman knows this, or whether it’s accurate, is anybody’s guess. She asks directions, thanks the woman and heads off. She pauses at the bottom of the stairs; the neighbor is still watching her. There seems to be a question hanging between them—as if Grace forgot to ask this woman something. It’s a strange and haunting feeling, and she can’t shake it for the entire walk to the café.

La Tertulia is located on the ground floor of a brownstone. The smell of cannabis overwhelms as Grace enters, despite what are supposed to be vaporless pipes. New Age murals cover the walls—whales in blue oceans—with cannabis plants spreading above the couches and opium beds that proliferate. It’s a pot shop primarily aimed at tourists, but there appear to be locals in residence as well, some of whom are of Middle Eastern descent and are smoking tobacco, not cannabis, from hookahs. The piped-in music reminds Grace of massage spas. A waitress with three studs in her lower lip and blue dye streaking her dark hair waves Grace toward a beanbag.

She thanks the girl, speaking Dutch, but heads directly to two men in the corner, one of whom has a face like a punching bag.

“Mr. Fahiz?” She speaks English first.

Fahiz looks up at her with mild interest. He has sleepy, dark eyes, a heavy shadow of beard, expressive thick eyebrows and a full head of hair. He’s easily seventy years old.

Not the man described in Sonia Pangarkar’s article.

Not by a long shot.