said amiably, pouring part of his own beer into my half-empty glass. “As I was explaining to you. Since Sascha is in so big hurry? Is he thinking clearly? Is he playing more than one, or maybe two moves ahead? No. Sascha is out of towner. His connections here are poisonous to him. He needs money. And he is working so hard to stay clear of Horst that he has wandered smack into me.”
I said nothing. It would be easy enough to phone the police myself. There was no reason to involve Boris or Gyuri at all.
“Amazing stroke of luck, no? And our friend the Georgian—very rich man, but so far from Horst’s world and so far from art collector, he did not even know of picture by name. Just a bird—little yellow bird. But Cherry believes he is telling the truth that he saw it. Very powerful guy in terms of real estate? Here and in Antwerp? Plenty of paper and father to Cherry almost, but not person of great education if you understand me.”
“Where is it now?”
Boris rubbed his nose vigorously. “I do not know. They are not going to tell us that, are they? But Vitya has got in touch to say he knows of a buyer. And a meeting has been set up.”
“Where?”
“Not settled yet. They have already changed the location half a dozen times. Paranoid,” he said, making a screw-loose gesture at the side of his head with his hand. “They may make us wait a day or two. We may know only an hour before.”
“Cherry,” I said, and stopped. Vitya was short for Cherry’s Russian name, Viktor—Victor, the Anglicized version—but Cherry was only a nickname and I didn’t know a thing about Sascha: not his age, not his surname, not what he looked like, nothing at all except that he was Ulrika’s brother—and even this was uncertain in the literal sense, given how loosely Boris threw around the word.
Boris sucked a bit of grease off his thumb. “My idea was—set up something at your hotel. You know, you, American, big shot, interested in the picture. They”—he lowered his voice as the waitress switched his empty pint for a full one, Gyuri nodding politely, leaning in—“they would come to your room. That’s how is done usually. All very businesslike. But”—minimal shrug—“they are new at this, and paranoid. They want to call their own location.”
“Which is?”
“Don’t know yet! Didn’t I just say? They keep changing their mind. If they want us to wait—we wait. We have to let them think they are boss. Now, sorry,” he said, stretching and yawning, rubbing a dark-circled eye with a fingertip, “I am tired! Want a nap!” He turned and said something to Gyuri in Ukrainian, and then turned back to me. “Sorry,” he said, leaning in and slinging his arm around my shoulder. “You can find your way back to your hotel?”
I tried to disengage myself without seeming to. “Right. Where are you staying?”
“Girlfriend’s flat—Zeedijk.”
“Near Zeedijk,” said Gyuri, rising purposefully, with a polite and vaguely military air. “Chinese quarter of the old times.”
“What’s the address?”
“Cannot remember. You know me. I cannot remember addresses in my head and like that. But—” Boris tapped his pocket—“your hotel.”
“Right.” Back in Vegas, if we ever got separated—running from the mall cops, pockets full of stolen gift cards—my house was always the rendezvous point.
“So—I’ll meet you back there. And you have my phone number, and I have yours. Will call you when I know something more. Now—” slapping me on the back of the head—“stop worrying, Potter! Don’t stand there and look so unhappy! If we lose, we win, and if we win, we win! Everything is good! You know which way to go to get back, don’t you? Just up this way, and left when you get to the Singel. Yes, there. We will speak soon.”
v.
I TOOK A WRONG turn on the way to the hotel and for several hours wandered aimlessly, shops decorated with glass baubles and gray dream alleys with unpronounceable names, gilded buddhas and Asian embroideries, old maps, old harpsichords, cloudy cigar-brown shops with crockery and goblets and antique Dresden jars. The sun had come out and there was something hard and bright by the canals, a breathable glitter. Gulls plunged and cried. A dog ran by with a live crab in its mouth. In my light-headedness and fatigue, which made me feel drastically cut off from myself and as if I were observing it all at a remove, I walked past candy shops and coffee shops and shops with antique toys and Delft tiles from the 1800s, old mirrors and silver glinting in the rich, cognac-colored light, inlaid French cabinets and tables in the French court style with garlanded carvings and veneerwork that would have made Hobie gasp with admiration—in fact the entire foggy, friendly, cultivated city with its florists and bakeries and antiekhandels reminded me of Hobie, not just for its antique-crowded richness but because there was a Hobie-like wholesomeness to the place, like a children’s picture book where aproned tradespeople swept the floors and tabby cats napped in sunny windows.
But there was much too much to see, and I was overwhelmed and exhausted and cold. Finally, by accosting strangers for directions (rosy housewives with armloads of flowers, tobacco-stained hippies in wire-rimmed glasses), I retraced my path over canal bridges and back through narrow fairy-lit streets to my hotel, where I immediately changed some dollars at the front desk, went up for a shower in the bathroom which was all curved glass and voluptuous fixtures, hybrid of the Art Nouveau and some icy, pod-based, science fiction future, and fell asleep face down on the bed—where I was awakened, hours later, by my cell phone spinning on the bed table, the familiar chirrup making me think, for a moment, I was at home.
“Potter?”
I sat up and reached for my glasses. “Um—” I hadn’t drawn the curtains before I fell asleep and reflections of the canal wavered across the ceiling in the dark.
“What’s wrong? Are you high? Don’t tell me you went to a coffee shop.”
“No, I—” Dazedly I slid an eye around—dormers and beams, cupboards and slants and—out the window, when I stood, rubbing my head—canal bridges lighted in tracework, arched reflections on black water.
“Well I’m coming up. You don’t have a girl up there, do you?”
vi.
MY ROOM WAS TWO different elevators and a walk from the front desk, so I was surprised how quickly the knock came. Gyuri, discreetly, went to the window and stood with his back to us while Boris looked me over. “Get dressed,” he said. I was barefoot, in the hotel robe and my hair standing on end from falling asleep straight out of the shower. “You need to clean up. Go—comb your hair and shave.”
When I emerged from the bathroom (where I’d left my suit hanging to let the wrinkles fall out) he pursed his lips critically and said: “Don’t you have anything better than that?”
“This is a Turnbull and Asser suit.”
“Yes but it looks like you slept in it.”
“I’ve been wearing it a while. I have a better shirt.”
“Well put it on.” He was opening a briefcase on the foot of the bed. “And get your money and bring it here.”
When I came back in, doing up my cufflinks, I stopped dead in the middle of the room to see him standing head bent at the bedside, intent upon assembling a pistol: snapping a pin with a clear-eyed competence like Hobie at work in the shop, pulling back the slide with a forceful true-to-life quality, click.
“Boris,” I said, “what the mother fuck.”
“Calm down,” he said to me, with a sideways glance. Patting his pockets, taking out a magazine and popping it in: snick. “Is not what you think. Not at all. Is just for show!”
I looked at Gyuri’s broad back, perfectly impassive, the same professional deafness I sometimes turned away to assume, in the shop, when couples were bickering over whether to buy a piece of furniture or not.
“It is just—” He was snapping something back and forth on the gun, expertly, testing it, then bringing it up to his eye and sighting it, surreal gestures from some deep underlayer of the brain where the black and white movies flickered twenty-four hours a day. “We are meeting them on their own
ground, and they will be three. Well, really only two. Two that count. And I can tell you now—I was a little worried Sascha might be here. Because then I couldn’t go with you. But everything has worked out perfectly, and here I am!”
“Boris—” standing there, it had crashed in on me all at once, in a sick rush, what a dumb fucking thing I’d stepped into—
“No worries! I have done the worrying for you. Because—” patting me on the shoulder—“Sascha is too nervous. He is afraid to show his face in Amsterdam—afraid it will get back to Horst. For good reason. And this is very very good news for us.
“So.” He snapped the gun shut: chrome silver, mercury black, with a smooth density that blackly distorted the space around it like a drop of motor oil in a glass of water.
“Don’t tell me you’re taking that,” I said, in the incredulous silence that followed.
“Well, yes. For holster—to keep in holster only. But wait, wait,” he said, lifting a palm, “before you start—” although I wasn’t talking, I was only standing there blank with horror—“how many times do I have to say it? Is only for looks.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Dress-up,” he said briskly, as if I had not spoken. “Pure make-believe. So they will be worried to try something if they see it on me, okay?” he added, when I still stood staring. “Safety measure! Because, because,” he said over me, “you are the rich man, and we are the bodyguards and this is how it is. They will expect it. All very civilized. And if we move our coat just so—” he had a concealed-carry holster at his waist—“they will be respectful and not try anything. Much more dangerous to wander in like—” he rolled his eyes around the room in the manner of a daffy girl.
“Boris.” I felt ashen and woozy. “I can’t do this.”
“Can’t what?” He pulled back his chin and looked at me. “Can’t get out of the car and stand with me for five minutes while I get your fucking picture for you? What?”
“No, I mean it.” The gun was lying on the bedspread; the eye was drawn to it; it seemed to crystallize and magnify all the bad energy humming in the air. “I can’t. Seriously. Let’s just forget it.”
“Forget?” Boris made a face. “Don’t do this! You have brought me over here for nothing and now I am in a pinch. And now—” flinging out an arm—“last minute, you start making conditions and saying ‘unsafe, unsafe’ and telling me how to do things? Don’t you trust me?”
“Yes, but—”
“Well, then. Trust me on this, please. You’re the buyer,” he said impatiently, when I didn’t answer. “That’s the story. It’s been set up.”
“We should have talked about this earlier.”
“Oh, come on,” he said in exasperation, picking the gun off the bed and sticking it into the holster. “Please do not argue with me, we are going to be late. You would never have seen it at all, if you stayed in the bathroom two minutes longer! Never known I had a weapon on me at all! Because—Potter, listen to me. Will you listen, please? Here is all that will happen. We walk in, five minutes, stand stand stand, we do all the talking, talk only, you get your picture, everyone is happy, we leave and we go get some dinner. Okay?”
Gyuri, who had moved over from the window, was looking me up and down. With a worried frown, he said something to Boris in Ukrainian. An obscure exchange followed. Then Boris reached to his wrist and began to unbuckle his watch.
Gyuri said something else, shaking his head vigorously.
“Right,” said Boris. “You are right.” Then, to me, with a nod: “Take his.”
Platinum Rolex President. Diamond-crusted dial. I was trying to think of some polite way to refuse when Gyuri pulled the whopping bevel-cut diamond off his pinky and—hopefully, like a child presenting a home-made gift—held them both to me on his open hands.
“Yes,” said Boris when I hesitated. “He is right. You do not look rich enough. I wish we had some different shoes for you,” he said, looking critically at my black monk straps, “but those will have to work. Now, we will put the money in this bag here”—leather grip, full of stacked bills—“and go.” Working quickly, clever hands, like a hotel maid making a bed. “Biggest bills on top. All these nice hundreds. Very pretty.”
vii.
OUT ON THE STREET: holiday splendor and delirium. Reflections danced and shimmered on black water: laced arcades above the street, garlands of light on the canal boats.
“This is all going to be very easy and comfortable,” said Boris, who was clicking around on the radio past Bee Gees, past news in Dutch, in French, trying to find a song. “I am counting on the fact that they want this money quick. Sooner they get rid of the picture—less chance running crossways of Horst. They will not be looking too closely at that bank draft or deposit slip. That six hundred thousands figure is all they will see.”
I was sitting alone in the back seat with the bag of money. (“Because, you must accustom yourself, sir, to being distinguished passenger!” Gyuri had said when he circled around and opened the back door of the car for me to get in.)
“You see—what I hope will fool him—deposit slip is perfectly legitimate,” Boris was saying. “So is bank draft. It is just from bad bank. Anguilla. Russians in Antwerp—here too, on P. C. Hooftstraat—they come here to invest, wash money, buy art, ha! This bank was fine six weeks ago but it is not fine now.”
We were past the canals, past the water. On the street: multicolored neon angels, in silhouette, leaning out from the tops of the buildings like ship figureheads. Blue spangles, white spangles, tracers, cascades of white lights and Christmas stars, blazing, impenetrable, no more to do with me than the implausible pinky diamond glittering on my hand.
“See, what I have to tell you,” said Boris, forgetting the radio and turning to address me in the back seat, “I want to tell you not to worry. With all my heart,” he said, knitting his eyebrows and reaching out encouragingly to shake my shoulder. “Everything is fine.”
“Piece of cake!” said Gyuri, and beamed in the rear view mirror, happy to have produced the phrase.
“Here is plan. Do you want to know the plan?”
“I guess I’m supposed to say yes.”
“We are dropping the car off. Out of the city a bit. Then Cherry will meet us at location, and drive us to meeting in his car.”
“And this is all going to be peaceful.”
“Absolutely. And because why? You have the cash! That’s all they want. And even with fake bank draft—good deal for them. Forty thousand dollars for no work? Not much! Afterwards—Cherry will leave us back off at the garage, with the picture—and then—we go out! we celebrate!”
Gyuri muttered something.
“He is complaining about the garage. Just so you know. He thinks it is a bad idea. But—I do not want to go in my own car, and last thing we need is to get hit with a parking ticket.”
“Where is the meeting?”
“Well—bit of a headache. We have to drive out of the city and then back in. They insisted on their own place and Cherry agreed because—well, really, it is better. At least, on their ground, we can count on no interference from the cops.”
We had gotten to a lonelier stretch of road, straight and desolate, where the traffic was sparse and the streetlamps were farther apart, and the bracing crack and sparkle of the old city, its lighted tracery, its hidden design—silver skates, happy children beneath the tree—had given way to a more familiar urban bleakness: Fotocadeau, Locksmith Sleutelkluis, signs in Arabic, Shoarma, Tandoori Kebab, gates down, everything closed.
“This is the Overtoom,” said Gyuri. “Not very interesting or nice.”
“This is my boy Dima’s parking garage. He has put out the Full sign for tonight so no one to bother us. We will be in the long term—ah,” he screamed, “blyad,” as a honking van cut in front of us from nowhere, forcing Gyuri to swerve and slam on the brakes.
“Sometimes people here are little bit aggressive for no reason,” said Gyuri gloomily as he put
on his blinker and made the turn into the garage.
“Give me your passport,” Boris said.
“Why?”
“Because, am going to lock it in the glove box for when we get back. Better not to have it on you, just in case. I am putting in mine, too,” he said, holding it up for me to see. “And Gyuri’s. Gyuri is honest born American citizen—yes,” he said, over Gyuri’s laughing interjection, “all very nice for you, but for me? very very hard to get an American passport and I really do not want to lose this thing. You know, don’t you Potter,” he said, looking at me, “that you are required now by law in Netherlands to carry ID at all times? Random street checks—non-compliance punished. I mean—Amsterdam? What kind of police state thing is this? Who would believe it? Here? Me—never. Not in one hundred years. Anyway”—shutting and locking the glove box—“better a fine and talk our way out of it than the real thing on us if we are stopped.”
viii.
INSIDE THE PARKING GARAGE, which vibrated depressingly with olive-green light, there were a number of empty spaces in the long-term area despite the Full sign. As we nosed into the space a man in a sports coat lounging against a white Range Rover threw his cigarette in a spit of orange cinders and walked toward the car. His receding hairline, his tinted aviators and his taut military torso gave him the wind-whipped look of an ex-pilot, a man who monitored delicate instruments at some test site in the Urals.
“Victor,” he said, when we got out of the car, crushing my hand in his. Gyuri and Boris received a thump on the back. After terse preliminaries in Russian, a baby-faced curly-headed teenager climbed out of the driver’s seat and was greeted, by Boris, with a slap on the cheek and a jaunty seven note whistle: On the Good Ship Lollipop.
“This is Shirley T,” he said to me, rumpling the corkscrew curls. “Shirley Temple. We all call him that—why? Can you guess?”—laughing as the kid, unable to help it, smiled in embarrassment, displaying deep dimples.
“Do not be deceived by looks,” said Gyuri to me quietly. “Shirley looks like baby but he has as much onions as any of us here.”
Politely, Shirley nodded at me—did he speak English? it didn’t seem so—and opened the back door of the Range Rover for us and the three of us climbed in—Boris, Gyuri, and me—while Victor Cherry sat up front and talked to us from the passenger seat.
“This should be easy,” he said to me formally as we pulled out of the garage and back out onto the Overtoom. “Straightforward pawn.” Up close his face was broad and knowing, with a small prim mouth and a wry alertness that made me feel somewhat less agitated about the logic of the evening, or the lack of it: the car changes, the lack of direction and information, the nightmare foreignness. “We are doing Sascha a favor and because of that? He is going to behave nice to us.”
Long low buildings. Disjointed lights. There was a sense that it wasn’t happening, that it was happening to someone who wasn’t me.
“Because can Sascha walk in bank and get a loan on the painting?” Victor was saying, pedantically. “No. Can Sascha walk in a pawn shop and get a loan on the painting? No. Can Sascha due to circumstances of theft go to any of his usual connections from Horst and get a loan on the painting? No. Therefore Sascha is extremely glad of the appearance of mystery American—you—who I have hooked him up with.”
“Sascha shoots heroin the way that you and I breathe,” said Gyuri to me quietly. “One stitch of money and he is out buying big load of drugs like clockwork.”
Victor Cherry adjusted his glasses. “Exactly. He is not art lover and he is not particular. He is utilizing picture like high interest credit card or so he thinks. Investment for you—cash for him. You front him the money—you hold the painting as security—he buys schmeck, keeps half, steps on the rest and sells it, and returns with double your money in one month to pick up the painting. And if? In one month he does not return with double your money? The painting is yours. Like I said. Simple pawn.”
“Except not so simple—” Boris stretched, and yawned—“because when you vanish? and bank draft is bad? What can he do? If he runs to Horst and calls for help on this one he will have his neck broken for him.”
“I am glad they have changed the meeting place so many times. It is a little bit ridiculous. But it helps because today is Friday,” said Victor, taking off his aviators and polishing them on his shirt. “I made them think you were backing out. Because they kept cancelling and changing the plan—you did not even arrive until today, but they do not know that—because they kept changing the plan I told them you were tired and nervous of sitting around Amsterdam with suitcase of green waiting to hear from them, you’d re-banked your moneys and were flying back to U.S. They did not like to hear that. So—” he nodded at the bag—“here it is the weekend, and banks are closed, and you are bringing what cash you have, and—well, they have been talking to me plenty, lots of time on the phone and I have met with them once already down in a bar in the Red Light, but they have agreed to bring the painting and make the exchange tonight without prior meeting of you, because I have told them your plane leaves tomorrow, and because they have fucked around on their end it is bank draft for the balance or nothing. Which—well, they did not like, but they accepted as proper explanation for bank draft. Makes things easier.”
“Much easier,” said Boris. “I was not sure how bank draft was going to go over. Better if they think the bank draft is their own fault for dicking around.”
“What’s the place?”
“Lunchcafe.” He pronounced it as one word. “De Paarse Koe.”
“That means ‘the Purple Cow’ in Dutch,” said Boris helpfully. “Hippie place. Close to the Red Light.”
Long lonely street—shut-up hardware stores, stacks of brick by the side of the road, all of it important and hyper-significant somehow even though it was