The Night Ferry

1

In our second year at university in London Cate missed a period and thought she was pregnant. We were synchronized—same time, same place, same moods. I can’t remember which of her bad boyfriends had breached her defenses, but I remember her reaction clearly enough. Panic.

We did a home pregnancy test and then another. I went with her to the family planning clinic, a horrible green building in Greenwich not far from the observatory. Where time began, life ended.

The nurse asked Cate some questions and told her to go home and wait another seven days. Apparently, the most common reason for a false negative is testing too early.

Her period arrived.

“I might have been pregnant and miscarried,” she said afterward. “Perhaps if I had wanted it more.”

Later, apropos of nothing, she asked, “What do they do with them?”

“With what?”

“With the aborted babies.”

“They don’t call them babies. And I guess they get rid of them.”

“Get rid of them?”

“I don’t know, OK?”

I wonder if a scare such as this, a near miss, came back to haunt her during the years of trying to fall pregnant. Did she tell Felix? Did she wonder if God was punishing her for not loving the first one enough?

I remember the name of the bad boyfriend. We called him Handsome Barry. He was a Canadian ski instructor with a year-round suntan and incredibly white teeth. What is it about male ski instructors? They take on this God-like aura in the mountains as if the rarefied air makes them look more handsome or (more likely) women less discerning.

We were working during the Christmas break at a ski lodge in the French Alps in the shadow of Mont Blanc (which didn’t ever throw a shadow since the clouds never lifted).

“Have you ever seen a Sikh ski?” I asked Cate.

“You can be the first,” she insisted.

We shared a room in Cell Block H, the nickname for the staff quarters. I worked as a chambermaid five days a week, from six in the morning until mid-afternoon. I rarely saw Cate who worked nights at a bar. She practiced her Russian accent by pretending to be Natalia Radzinsky, the daughter of a countess.

“Where on earth did you sleep with Barry?” I asked.

“I borrowed your house key. We used one of the guest suites.”

“You did what?”

“Oh, don’t worry. I put down a towel.”

She seemed more interested in my love life. “When are you going to lose your virginity?”

“When I’m ready.”

“Who are you waiting for?”

I told her “Mr. Right,” when really I meant “Mr. Considerate” or “Mr. Worthy” or any “mister” who wanted me enough.

Maybe I was my mother’s daughter after all. She was already trying to find me a husband—my cousin Anwar, who was reading philosophy at Bristol University. Tall and thin with large brown eyes and little wire spectacles, Anwar had great taste in clothes and liked Judy Garland records. He ran off with a boy from the university bookshop, although my mother still won’t accept that he’s gay.

Ruiz has scarcely said a word since our flight left Heathrow. His silences can be so eloquent.

I told him that he didn’t have to come. “You’re retired.”

“True, but I’m not dead,” he replied. The faintest of smiles wrinkled the corners of his eyes.

It’s amazing how little I know about him after six years. He has children—twins—but doesn’t talk about them. His mother is in a retirement home. His stepfather is dead. I don’t know about his real father, who’s never come up in conversation.

I have never met anyone as self-sufficient as Ruiz. He doesn’t appear to hunger for human contact or need anyone. You take those survivor shows on TV where people are separated into competing tribes and try to win “immunity.” Ruiz would be a tribe of one—all on his own. And the grumpy old bugger would come out on top every time.

Amsterdam. It makes me think of soft drugs, sanctioned prostitution and wooden shoes. This will be my first visit. Ruiz is also a “Dutch virgin” (his term, not mine). He has already given me his thumbnail appraisal of the Dutch. “Excellent lager, a few half-decent footballers and the cheese with the red wax.”

“The Dutch are very polite,” I offered.

“They’re probably the nicest people in the world,” he agreed. “They’re so amenable that they legalized prostitution and marijuana rather than say no to anyone.”

For all his Gypsy blood Ruiz has never been a wanderer. His only foreign holiday was to Italy. He is a creature of habit—warm beer, stodgy food and rugby—and his xenophobia is always worse the farther he gets from home.

We managed to get bulkhead seats which means I can take off my shoes and prop my feet against the wall, showing off my pink-and-white-striped socks. The seat between us is empty. I’ve claimed it with my book, my bottle of water and my headphones. Possession is nine-tenths of the law.

Outside the window the Dutch landscape is like an old snooker table, patched with different squares of felt. There are cute farmhouses, cute windmills and occasional villages. This whole below-sea-level thing is quite strange. Even the bridges would be underwater if the dikes ever failed. But the Dutch are so good at reclaiming land that they’ll probably fill in the North Sea one day and the M11 will stretch all the way to Moscow.

On the journey from the airport our taxi driver seems to get lost and drives us in circles, crossing the same canals and the same bridges. The only clue we have to Cate’s movements is the tourist map of central Amsterdam and a circle drawn around the Red Tulip Hotel.

The desk clerk greets us with a wide smile. She is in her mid-twenties, big boned and a pound or two away from being overweight. Behind her is a notice board with brochures advertising canal boat cruises, bicycle tours, and day trips to a tulip farm.

I slide a photograph of Cate across the check-in counter. “Have you seen her?”

She looks hard. Cate is worth a long look. The woman doesn’t recognize her.

“You could ask some of the other staff,” she says.

A porter is loading our cases onto a trolley. In his fifties, he’s wearing a red waistcoat stretched tight over a white shirt and a paunch, putting the buttons under pressure.

I show him the photograph. His eyes narrow as he concentrates. I wonder what he remembers about guests—their faces, their cases, the tips they leave?

“Room 12,” he announces, nodding vigorously. His English is poor.

Ruiz turns back to the desk clerk. “You must have a record. She might have stayed here during the second week of February.”

She glances over her shoulder, worried about the manager, and then taps at the keyboard. The screen refreshes and I glance down the list. Cate isn’t there. Wait! There’s another name I recognize: “Natalia Radzinsky.”

The porter claps his hands together. “Yes, the countess. She had one blue bag.” He measures the dimensions in the air. “And a smaller one. Very heavy. Made of metal.”

“Was she with anyone?”

He shakes his head.

“You have a very good memory.”

He beams.

I look at the computer screen again. I feel as though Cate has left me a clue that nobody else could recognize. It’s a silly notion, of course, to imagine the dead leaving messages for the living. The arrogance of archaeologists.

The Red Tulip Hotel has sixteen rooms, half of them overlooking the canal. Mine is on the first floor and Ruiz’s room is above me. Sunlight bounces off the curved windows of a canal boat as it passes, taking tourists around the city. Bells jangle and bike riders weave between pedestrians.

Ruiz knocks on my door and we make a plan. He will talk to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND), which deals with asylum seekers in the Netherlands. I will visit Hassan Khan’s last known address.

I take a taxi to Gerard Doustraat in a quarter known as de Pijp, or “the Pipe” as my driver explains. He calls it the “real Amsterdam.” Ten years ago it had a seedy reputation but is now full of restaurants, cafés and bakeries.

The Flaming Wok is a Chinese restaurant with bamboo blinds and fake bonsai trees. The place is empty. Two waiters are hovering near the kitchen door. Asian. Neat, wearing black trousers and white shirts.

From the front door I can see right through to the kitchen where pots and steamers hang from the ceiling. An older man, dressed in white, is preparing food. A knife stutters in his hand.

The waiters speak menu English. They keep directing me to a table. I ask to see the owner.

Mr. Weng leaves his kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel. He bows to me.

“I want to know about the people who were living upstairs.”

“They gone now.”

“Yes.”

“You want to rent frat? One bedroom. Very crean.”

“No.”

He shrugs ambivalently and points to a table, motioning me to sit, before he orders tea. The waiters, his sons, compete to carry out the instructions.

“About the tenants,” I say.

“They come, they go,” he replies. “Sometimes full. Sometimes empty.” His hands flutter as he talks and he clasps them occasionally, as if fearful they might fly away.

“Your last tenants, where were they from?”

“Everywhere. Estonia, Russia, Uzbekistan…”

“What about this boy?” I show him the charcoal drawing of Hassan. “He’s older now. Sixteen.”

He nods energetically. “This one okay. He wash the dishes for food. Others take food from bins.”

The green tea has arrived. Mr. Weng pours. Tea leaves circle in the small white cups.

“Who paid the rent?”

“Pay money up front. Six months.”

“But you must have had a lease.”

Mr. Weng doesn’t understand.

“A contract?”

“No contract.”

“What about the electricity, the telephone?”

He nods and smiles. He’s too polite to tell me that he doesn’t have an answer.

I point to the girl in the drawing and take out the photograph of Samira. “What about this girl?”

“Many girls in and out.” He makes a circle with his left forefinger and thumb and thrusts a finger through the hole. “Prostitutes,” he says apologetically, as though sorry for the state of the world.

I ask to see the flat. One of his sons will show me. He takes me through a fire door that opens into an alley and leads me up a rear staircase to where he unlocks a door.

I have been in depressing flats before, but few have disheartened me as quickly as this one. It has one bedroom, a lounge, a kitchen and a bathroom. The only furniture is a low chest of drawers with a mirror on top and a sofa with cigarette burns.

“The mattresses were thrown away,” Mr. Weng’s son explains.

“How many lived here?”

“Ten.”

I get the impression he knew the occupants better than his father.

“Do you remember this girl?” I show him the photograph.

“Maybe.”

“Did she stay here?”

“She visited.”

“Do you know where she lives?”

“No.”

The tenants left nothing behind except a few cans of food, some old pillows and a couple of used international phone cards. There are no clues here.

Afterward, I catch a taxi and meet Ruiz at a bar in Nieumarkt, a paved open square not far from the Oude Kerk. Most of the outside tables are empty. It is getting too late in the year for backpackers and American tourists.

“I didn’t think you were going to buy one of those, sir,” I say, pointing to his guidebook.

“Yeah, well, I hate asking directions,” he grumbles. “I’m sure someone is going to say, “You want to go where?” That’s when I’ll discover I’m in the wrong bloody country.”

A couple at the next table are locals. They could be having an argument or agreeing completely. I can’t tell.

“The Dutch can squeeze more vowels into a sentence than anyone else in the world,” says Ruiz, too loudly. “And that Dutch ‘j’ is a deliberate bloody provocation.”

He goes back to his guidebook. We’re sitting on the western flank of the red light district, in an area known as de Walletjes (the Little Walls).

“That building with all the turrets is the Waag,” he explains. “It used to be a gatehouse to the old city.”

A young waitress has come to take our order. Ruiz wants another beer, “with less froth and more Heineken.” She smiles at me sympathetically.

Opening his marbled notebook, Ruiz relates how Hassan and Samira Khan were smuggled across the German border into the Netherlands in the luggage compartment of a tourist coach in April 2005. They were taken to an application center at Ter Apel and were interviewed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Hassan claimed to be fifteen and Samira seventeen. They told the authorities they were born in Kabul and had spent three years living in a refugee camp in Pakistan. After their mother died of dysentery, their father, Hamid Khan, took the children back to Kabul where he was shot dead in 1999. Hassan and Samira were sent to an orphanage.

“That’s the story they told in every interview, together and independently. Never wavered.”

“How did they get here?”

“Traffickers, but they both refused to name names.” Ruiz consults his notebook again. “After they were screened, they were housed at a center for underage asylum seekers operated by the Valentine Foundation. Three months later they were moved to the campus at Deelen where 180 children are housed. In December last year both their visas were revoked.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. They were given twenty-eight days to leave the Netherlands. An appeal was lodged but they disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“Not many of these people hang around to get deported.”

“What do you mean ‘these people’?”

Ruiz looks at me awkwardly. “Slip of the tongue.” He pauses to sip his beer. “I have the name of a lawyer who represented them. Lena Caspar. She has an office here in Amsterdam.”

White froth clings to his top lip. “There’s something else. The boy made an earlier North Sea crossing. He was picked up and sent back to the Netherlands within twenty-four hours.”

“Guess he tried again.”

“Second time unlucky.”