He looked discreetly over at de Smet’s men. “Yes, sir. Are they annoying you?”
“They mean well,” I said, “but sometimes this famous-author business can be exhausting. Could you just delay them at the door for a few seconds so I can get upstairs to my room to take a nap without being accosted by any more autograph hounds?”
“You’d be surprised how long I can delay them,” Rutger said.
“You’ve always been so kind,” I said, toddling slowly up the stairs. “That is why I stay here.”
I walked through the front door as de Smet’s men were approaching the stairs. I caught a glimpse of Rutger spreading his arms wide and stopping them in their tracks. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Are you registered guests?”
“Out of my way,” the first thug said, shoving him hard.
But it’s not easy pushing a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound doorstop out of the way. Rutger pushed back.
The thug threw a punch. I darted into the lobby and looked back. Rutger was bleeding from the nose. But he wasn’t down. He wrapped both his arms around the attacker and started blowing his whistle.
A second doorman, two bellmen, and a parking valet jumped into the fray, and suddenly all the palatial grandeur and European civility of the Amstel Hotel had disintegrated into a brawl.
I didn’t stick around to see how it turned out. De Smet’s men wouldn’t be held back for long. I bolted across the marble floor of the lobby to the rear door and exited into the hotel garden.
From there I ran along the riverbank, turned right on Sarphatistraat, and caught a cab back to my little bed-and-breakfast in Chinatown.
I looked out the rear window as the Amstel faded into the distance.
Someday I’d like to come back here, I thought. I’ll bring Katherine. And a serious tip for Rutger the doorman.
Chapter 69
Diederik de Smet was more treacherous than I had expected. I knew he would have me tailed, but the fact that his men beat up the doorman at the Amstel meant they had been ordered not to lose me. Their instructions had probably been to follow me to my room and grab the diamonds. So much for honor among thieves.
I took a cab to the Prins Hendrikkade dock at five-thirty—two hours before departure.
The excursion was a dinner cruise, so people were encouraged to come early—and buy lots of drinks. I bought a ticket and went on board. The entire dining area was enclosed in glass. Several couples had already commandeered the primo window-seat tables.
I spotted a tiny table right next to the swinging kitchen door, where the clatter of pots and pans and the constant waiter traffic would take most of the romance out of a dinner cruise.
It was perfect for me—in the corner, with a clear view of the dock, the gangplank, and the entire dining room.
I ordered a club soda from the bar and took a stroll around the boat. Most of it was under glass, but there was some deck space for people who wanted to fill their lungs with the fresh night air.
None of de Smet’s men had shown up yet. I was betting that two of them were still hanging out at the Amstel, waiting for me to come down from my room.
At 7:15 I spotted de Smet on the dock. He was wearing black jeans and a black leather jacket and had a black duffel bag slung over his shoulder. I had no doubt that he would show me the money. But I was pretty sure he didn’t plan for me to get off the boat with it.
He bought a ticket but didn’t board yet.
A minute later, two of his men from the Café Karpershoek arrived. They bought tickets and stood a few yards away from de Smet, pretending not to know him, having a smoke and a chat.
Finally, the two punks who had followed me to the Amstel showed up. They didn’t buy tickets. One of them picked up a brochure and tried to look fascinated by it. Four brutes with a passion for dinner cruises? The rest of the passengers were all boy-girl couples. How dumb did de Smet think I was?
At 7:20 de Smet gave the signal, and his two hulks came on board. They stood at the front of the dining room and began eye-searching all the tables. As soon as one of them spotted me, he gestured to the other, who dialed his cell phone. I watched as de Smet took the call, smiled, and came on board.
Chapter 70
At 7:30 on the dot, the boat pulled away from the dock, and de Smet slithered into the dining room. He caught my eye, then headed directly for my table, all smiles.
“Yitzchak,” he said, shaking my hand.
“Diederik,” I responded. We were obviously now on a first-name basis.
He looked around the room. “This is an inspired place to meet,” he said. “Crowded, but nobody will bother us, and we can enjoy a nice leisurely dinner while we do business.”
You’re so full of shit, I thought. “I’m so glad you like it,” I said.
“How did you come to think of it?” he asked.
“My late wife and I took this same dinner cruise along the canals fifty years ago,” I said. “I’m only in Amsterdam for a brief time, and I couldn’t leave without coming back here.”
“A sentimental diamond merchant,” he said.
“Guilty as charged,” I said.
It was partly true. In an uncharacteristic fit of sentimentality I had transferred the diamonds to a small Adidas sports sack. Zelvas’s doctor bag had changed my life, and I wanted to hang on to it as a memento.
“But I’m also practical,” I said. “Let’s get down to business.”
I set the bag of diamonds on the table.
De Smet took it, then passed his much larger duffel to me.
I opened it and looked inside. It was filled with purple five-hundred-euro banknotes.
“Would you like to count it?” de Smet asked.
“Yes,” I said, and stood up. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. That should give you time to inspect the stones. I won’t be far.”
The men’s lavatory was at the opposite end of the dining room but still easy to see from where de Smet was sitting. He didn’t plan on letting me out of his sight. I took the bag into the lav and locked myself in a stall.
I had no plans to count the money. Now that de Smet had the diamonds in his hands, I wouldn’t have time. I set the duffel bag on the floor and climbed over the divider into the empty stall next to it. I stepped onto the toilet lid and crouched down.
Twenty seconds later, through the crack between the stall door and the wall, I saw de Smet’s two heavies walk in.
They looked at the two stalls, ignored the one that appeared empty, and leveled their guns at the one with the locked door and the duffel bag on the floor.
They pumped half a dozen suppressed rounds right where they expected me to be sitting counting the money.
One of them kicked open the stall door. I bet he was real surprised to find it empty. But I never got to see his face.
I stood up on the toilet lid in the adjacent stall and fired a bullet straight down into his skull. Then I shot his partner.
I jumped down and retrieved the duffel bag, which was sticky with blood. I stepped over the bodies and walked to the bathroom door. I opened it a crack. I could see de Smet sitting at his table, waiting for his men to bring back his seven million.
I pulled out my cell and quickly sent a text. I had a partner—and we had a plan.
Then I bolted through the bathroom door and ran for the deck.
De Smet saw me. He jumped up and followed in a big hurry.
Most people were in the dining room, but there were a few couples strolling along the deck, oohing and aahing at the illuminated bridges and the brightly lit houses along the canal.
I crashed into them, knocking down one poor guy. De Smet was right behind me, the bag of diamonds in one hand, a gun in the other.
He began firing on the run, not even bothering to aim.
Glass shattered and wood splintered. My fellow passengers screamed and ducked for cover.
I raced down the deck like a broken-field runner dodging tacklers, only I was avoiding bullets.
De Smet
was right behind me. “You’re way out of your league, old man,” he yelled. “Give me the bag.”
“And then what? Are you going to throw me over the side?” I said as I climbed onto the rail on the port side of the boat. “Why don’t I save you the trouble?”
And I jumped overboard.
I landed on a pile of rafts that a friend of mine named Kino had tied together to break my fall. I had just texted him from the bathroom. He was my partner for this getaway.
“Well, look who dropped in,” he said as he gunned the engine and a sleek Stingray Cuddy/Cruiser barreled down the canal.
Within seconds, the lights of the cruise ship and the outraged screams and wild gunshots coming from de Smet faded into the distance.
“How’d it go?” Kino yelled over the roar of the three-hundred-horsepower dual prop.
“I got paid; he got what he paid for,” I said. “Seems incredibly fair to me.”
“Sounds like a perfect evening,” Kino said
“It was, but then it got wet. Very wet,” I said.
Kino shrugged. “Shit happens.”
“Yeah, it does,” I said.
I reminded myself not to explain it quite that way to Katherine when—that was, if—I ever saw her again.
Chapter 71
What can I say about Kino? My buddy is an ex-Marine who left the service with a chest full of medals, got engaged to the daughter of a millionaire real-estate developer in Hong Kong, and could have spent the rest of his life in Fat City. But he missed getting shot at.
So Kino went back into combat, and over the next eight years got wounded five times, each one for a different foreign government.
I’ve never met anyone happier about his work.
He’s five foot four and a hundred and fifty pounds of solid muscle—though he swears that at least five pounds of it is shrapnel.
“You won’t have to bury me when I die,” he always says. “Just take me to a salvage yard.”
He’s worked in dozens of hot spots around the world but decided to live in Holland because “it’s the most tolerant damn country on the whole damn planet.”
As soon as the cruise ship was out of sight, he slowed the Stingray down to a safe, respectable canal speed.
There was a compact little sleeping cabin below the deck, where I shucked my clothes, peeled off my old-man face, and washed up. My Red Oxx Sky Train bag with my clothes was waiting for me, and I put on jeans, a clean shirt, sneakers, and a Windbreaker.
I went back up on deck. Kino had pulled into a dock and was tying the boat down.
“Abandon ship,” he said.
I grabbed my Red Oxx and the duffel bag, and we walked to his car.
“Where to?” he asked.
“There’s a bank on Vijzelstraat. I have a deposit to make.”
“It’s almost nine p.m. Good time to avoid the crowd,” he said, laughing, as we headed out. “So how’s your old man?”
“I spoke to him the other day,” I said. “He said something about wanting grandkids.”
“Did you explain that’s not something you can do on your own?”
He made small talk as we drove, never asking me what went down on the cruise boat or what was in my duffel bag. It’s something you learn in the corps. Respect the other guy’s personal boundaries.
The bank was next door to an Indonesian restaurant on a wide, busy street. Kino parked directly in front. “I’ll wait here till you’re inside,” he said.
“You don’t need to do that,” I said. I thanked him for his help, unzipped the duffel, and pulled out a stack of bills.
He waved me off. “What do I look like, a mercenary?”
“I came into some serious money,” I said. “I want to spread it around.”
“Put it in a college fund for those grandkids,” he said.
“Thanks.” I opened the car door and got out.
“Semper fi, bro,” he said.
“Right back at ya,” I said.
The lobby of the bank was well lit, and I walked up to the double glass doors and rang the after-hours bell.
A young man in khakis and an open-collar shirt unlocked the door.
“I’m Matthew Bannon,” I said.
“We’ve been expecting you, Mr. Bannon,” he said. “I’m Jan Schoningh. Come on in.”
The bank was twenty-first-century techno architecture—mostly steel and glass—and completely devoid of old-world charm. But they still adhered to that old-world banking tradition that states, “We’re always open late for a guy who shows up with a shitload of cash.”
I expected Schoningh to escort me to a private office where I’d meet some venerable old guy in an expensive suit, but I guess these days it’s the young bankers who get to stay late and service the late-night clientele.
There was a cashier waiting to count the money.
“This is Katje,” Schoningh said.
Katje was blond with a knockout smile and a no-nonsense approach to handling seven million bucks.
She dumped the money on a table, unbanded the packets, and ran the bills through a machine.
Then she ran them through a second time.
The total came to $7,024,362.18. The exchange rate had shifted a few tenths of a point in my favor.
I guess you’d say I was rich. Mr. Schoningh did not seem overly impressed, though. “Do you want to deposit the entire amount?” he asked.
“Everything but eighty thousand euros.”
Katje counted out the money and put it in a pale yellow bank envelope for me. We spent another twenty minutes filling out papers, and then Schoningh escorted me to the front door.
Kino was still parked outside.
He rolled down the window and called out to me. “Hey, Matthew, you need a ride to the airport?”
“You didn’t have to wait. I could’ve caught a cab.”
“Cabs are expensive,” he said. “Get in, kiddo. I’m damn happy to do it.”
And he was. I think the only thing that would have made Kino happier was if Marta Krall had still been around, taking shots at us.
Chapter 72
The next available flight to New York wasn’t until two o’clock the next afternoon. That left me with seventeen hours to cool my jets at the airport.
But life changes when you have money. Maybe it can’t buy happiness, but it sure as hell can get you where you want to go in a hurry.
Kino dropped me at the General Aviation Center. Two minutes later I was walking across the tarmac with Captain Dan Fennessy, pilot of the Falcon 900EX jet I had chartered.
By the time we got to the plane, I knew everything I needed to know about him. He’d been a pilot for thirty years, got laid off by Delta two years ago, and was happy to give me a bargain rate of only seven thousand dollars an hour so he wouldn’t have to deadhead back to the States.
I paid cash.
The copilot was in the cockpit. “Where would you like to land?” he asked. “JFK, Newark, or Teterboro?”
“For forty-nine thousand bucks, I’d like to land on the corner of Bleecker and Perry in the West Village,” I said.
The two flyboys laughed, and I opted for Teterboro, a small general aviation airport in New Jersey used mostly by corporate jets and small private planes.
“Good choice,” Fennessy said. “Much less hassle with customs.”
He gave me a short tour of the aircraft, pointing out the amenities and explaining emergency procedures.
“You have fourteen seats to choose from, Mr. Bannon,” he said. “Too bad there’s only one of you.”
I’m sure it was his standard icebreaker. I didn’t correct him, but as far as I was concerned, he had two passengers—Matthew Bannon and the Ghost. And Vadim Chukov was determined to kill us both.
I sat down in a window seat and buckled myself in. Five minutes later we were wheels up.
If the Ghost had been calling the shots, we’d have been heading anywhere but New York. The Ghost was hardwired to be as emotionally detached a
s humanly possible. With the Russian mob after him, and seven million dollars in the bank, he would gladly disappear and start a new life elsewhere.
On the other hand, there was Matthew Bannon, the passionate, caring, wannabe artist, whose mission would be to fly home, win back Katherine’s heart, and live happily ever after.
But there was a third choice. And after a lot of soul-searching, that’s the one I finally made.
I was going back because I had screwed up the best relationship I’d ever had and I needed to apologize.
I was going back because, even though Chukov would be gunning for Matthew Bannon, I had put Katherine’s life in danger, and I had to make sure that she was okay and that she stayed that way.
The old me never would have been on that plane. I was always so careful, so self-involved. But something had changed me. Actually, someone had changed me. Katherine. I loved her desperately. I didn’t want to lose her. I wanted to set things right, and then maybe, just maybe, start my life over again.
Was that too much to ask? Probably, yeah.
Chapter 73
The Falcon touched down at Teterboro at a few minutes after 10 p.m.
The customs and immigration agent who met our plane checked my passport and asked me why I went to Paris, Venice, and Amsterdam.
“I’m an artist on tour,” I said.
He stifled a yawn. My name wasn’t on his watch list, so he stamped my passport and sent me on my way.
A customs agent asked me if I had anything to declare.
“Only that I’m happy to be back in the good old U.S. of A.,” I said.
He nodded like he’d heard it before. “Welcome home,” he mumbled.
And that was it. Maybe in these times of young rock stars and baby-faced Hollywood celebrities, nobody wonders why a thirty-year-old in jeans and sneakers flies in from Europe on his own charter jet. Or maybe it was the end of a long day and nobody gave a shit.
Captain Fennessy had ordered a town car for me, and the driver took the Jersey Turnpike to the Lincoln Tunnel, then went down Ninth Avenue to Bleecker.