The Treachery of Russian Nesting Dolls

CHAPTER 18

I watched De Vroom scoop up his girls, one in each arm, and extort a big kiss hello from them in front of the Cake Whisperer. He did not extort a similar kiss from the lovely woman who’d agreed to watch over his daughters, though she looked as though she wouldn’t have minded if he had done so.

As the scene unfolded, I considered what I’d deduced from my interview with De Vroom. Iskra had lied and told Sasha that the Turk was obsessed with her to placate him when he pressed her to explain why she seemed so frightened. That was my previous conclusion and I still believed it. The person whom she feared was someone else.

And now I was confident that person wasn’t De Vroom. He was a widower with two small children. And he was a cop, for God’s sake. Unless he was a serial killer at large, which was basically a zero probability, why on Earth would he have committed such a gruesome murder, one that excised the same body parts that gave him so much pleasure?

No, I thought. Someone else had been even more obsessed with her, and that other person was the one that she’d feared, the one that had killed her. And she hadn’t dared reveal that person’s identity to Sasha, the Turk, Sarah Dumont, or anyone else.

After watching the family reunion, I bounded around the corner toward my hotel. A minute later, I received a text message from Simmy inquiring if I was available for dinner tonight. He wanted me to give him an update on the case. I responded in the affirmative, and after he told me when and where, I found myself comparing Simmy to De Vroom as eligible bachelors. There was no comparison whatsoever, of course, because one man was upset at the mere prospect of my impersonating a prostitute, while the other one frequented them with no remorse. There was the matter of money, too, and all the lifestyle and security that it afforded. Both of these matters were secondary to how a man made a woman feel about herself, because all the gold in the world couldn’t compensate a woman for voluntarily entering or remaining in an abusive marriage. That I knew from personal experience.

A blur flashed on my left. Someone slammed into me.

I careened toward the right of the sidewalk, momentum taking me sideways, no idea what was happening.

A second blur appeared at my right.

I collided with a concrete statue. Except it wasn’t a statue, it was a man, made of flesh, blood and bone, wearing a charcoal business suit. He grabbed me by the scruff of my collar as though I were his kitten, covered my mouth to muffle my screams with his other hand, and dragged me into an alley. The other blur caught up to us and grabbed my legs. Together they lifted me into the air and carried me deeper into the alley.

I thrashed with my arms and legs, tried to wriggle free and kick myself loose from my assailants but my efforts were to no avail.

Hadn’t a pedestrian or a driver seen me?

The alley looked familiar, like the one I’d just passed with De Vroom.

De Vroom, I thought. He was less than a block away around the corner. If I could just break free…

I kicked and thrashed again but accomplished nothing. I could see my assailants clearly now, both in nicely fitted suits and dark glasses, athletic men in the prime of their lives. They had square chins and blank stares.

A third man came out of nowhere and opened a door. This one had lines in his face and thinning hair. The other two brought me inside and third one closed the door behind us.

The room contained a collection of garbage barrels and bins, and maintenance tools such as brooms, blowers and snow shovels, and buckets of dirt and salt. It was the perfect place to deposit a corpse, I thought, and that was as much thinking as I was capable of mustering under the circumstances.

And the circumstances quickly unfolded to be among the most horrific I’d ever experienced.

The three men removed all my clothes.

They didn’t say a word and they didn’t touch my body in a provocative fashion. In fact, they seemed completely detached as though they were performing a standard procedure according to some sort of guide book. I would have taken a measure of comfort in this observation if I wasn’t scared shitless that I was about to be violated and killed.

And then when I was naked, they let me slip out of their grasp and released me onto the ice cold cement floor. The hand that had been covering my mouth slipped away. I worked my lips and teeth free from stiffness, but I knew better than to risk incurring their cumulative wrath by screaming.

I scurried back against one of the garbage cans like a cat looking for a wall for protection and folded my arms over my breasts. But two of the men hoisted me up to my feet by my arms, exposing them again. And then the third man—the leader—opened a switchblade and placed the blade just beneath my left nipple.

“Such tits,” he said, in fluent Russian.

I wanted to spit in his face, bury my fingernails in his eyes, and kick him in the balls, all at the same time. But I also wanted to survive this ordeal so I opted to keep my mouth shut instead.

“You’re not safe in Amsterdam,” he said. “Not in the daylight, not in the night time. We’ll leave you your mobile so you can call the airline and go back to New York right away. If you don’t there will be a next time. And if there’s a next time, we’ll leave you the phone again. Problem is, you won’t have a tongue to speak with or fingers to use it. You see, one way or another, you’re going to leave this country and not come back.”

They stuffed me into one of the garbage bins, threw my cell phone and handbag inside, and wheeled me out into the alley. The sound of a bolt slamming shut and a key turning in a lock followed, and then I heard several sets of footsteps grow increasingly faint until the alley turned quiet.

I sat curled in the garbage trying not to vomit from the rancid smell of decaying foodstuff. Once I couldn’t hear footsteps I counted to ten for good measure—as slowly as I could but undoubtedly faster than I realized—and then pushed up with all my might.

The hard plastic cover swung up and over the side. I stood up straight but there was no way for me to extricate myself from the bin—it was too tall for me to climb out, too narrow for me to swing my legs up. The air felt frigid against my naked, sweaty body. I could see daylight down at the end of the alley where a strip of sidewalk was visible. The thought of someone walking by and catching a glimpse of me, a living monument to disposable refuse, induced new found levels of self-loathing.

I deflected a bolt of anxiety and realized what I needed to do.

I rocked sideways back and forth until the bin toppled to the ground. I kept my head up, sustained a blow to my side and ribs, and slithered out of the can still breathing and without harming myself. Then I quickly closed the bin, rolled it against the wall and took cover behind it. Yes, I was squatting so that nothing other than my feet touched the concrete. No, there were no cardboard boxes, plywood remnants, or swaths of stray cloth conveniently available so that I could kneel, let alone an empty garbage bag that I could use to cover my body. The Dutch kept their country clean, even the back alleys.

Tears spilled from my eyes. Some women might have been embarrassed about this, but I was used to it. My brain released the water behind my eyes at a rate commensurate with my flow of adrenaline under adverse emotional circumstances. It didn’t make me any less capable of conquering them. And as for appearances, any woman with a fresh face suffering my current fate was either professionally trained to handle such a situation or deeply troubled.

My decision tree flashed before me. The imaginary branches sprouted with alternative courses of action.

The mere exercise calmed my nerves and helped steady my breathing. Analyzing problems and finding solutions was my joy. This was home.

I always started from scratch, always began by avoiding the simplest of assumptions. I ruled out nothing.

Q1: Run out into the street naked and hope a kind person helps me?

A: High probability police are called no matter what explanation I give. If the police get involved, my mental health could be questioned given I’ve already been arrested for prostitution. Deportation possible to probable, interruption of my investigation highly likely.

Negative.

Q2: Call Simmy for help?

A: He’s my client and he’s Simmy. I’d rather die.

Negative.

Q3: Call De Vroom for help?

A: He’s a cop accountable to his hierarchy with two kids who depend on the income his career provides. This time he might really have me thrown out of the country.

Negative.

Q4: Call hotel for help?

A: Hotel would need to cover its ass in case I’m a risk to myself, their other guests, or Amsterdam. High probability cops get involved, which is unfortunate because this solution is the easiest on my pride and ego.

Negative.

Q5: Who the else can I call?

A: The contrarian’s solution. So unimaginable it must be the right move. The only person I know in Amsterdam whose opinion of me is irrelevant to me, and also someone I can be certain will not go to the police.

Analysis complete.

Solution found.

The only remaining question was whether my potential savior was still in the city.