After Helmer's cafe, Bakker brought Harvey Wall back to his hotel to get a change of jeans which were now torn from tackling the thief. Bakker waited outside in his car.
As he passed the front desk, the receptionist called him over.
"Mr. Wall, there is a message for you," he said.
Harvey took the note out of the small envelope. Please call nurse van der Kalk when you get this. A Dutch mobile number was written at the bottom of the note.
Up in his room he called the nurse as he rooted through a drawer for a fresh or pair of jeans. He could not remember the names of the nurses he had met at a hospital which made it impossible to put a name to the face, but hoped it was the nurse who lived in Greenwich Village. She was cute.
He got a voice mail in Dutch. He did not recognize the female voice. Maybe it was one of the other nurses he met as he worked his way through the hospital. He waited for the beep then left his cell phone number for her to call. He would try again later after he had shaken off Bakker and returned to the hotel for a shower. The bar downstairs was an ideal place to meet, then it would be just a couple of steps away from a night of love and fun.
Since he arrived in Amsterdam he had not been in the mood for female company, but after he had met all those nurses the flame was reignited. Wall checked his watch. It was time to get back to the station and brief Ribb, then attend a presentation Ribb had set up in the canteen.
Back at the station Wall was pleased Bakker never mentioned the cafe incident. They were given a rundown of the information other detectives had collected on the case, but it basically amounted to nothing. Wall tried to think how he would tackle this in New York, but Ribb was following all the rules and could not be faulted. There were now more than seventy detectives working on all angles of the investigation and Wall couldn't see anything they had missed. Ribb had deserved more credit than he had given him. He was dealing with a phenomenon unheard of in any part of the Western world. It would have stumped his captain back in New York just as much as Ribb right now.