Герман Кох - Amsterdam Noir

When did it start? How long has this been going on?

It surprised me to realize that I wasn’t really even all that surprised. That’s right, I could even start to understand it a little. Ex-wife of criminal serving solid time sets out to start a new life, to forget the past. And then, one day, a journalist comes to visit. A crime journalist who is planning to write a book about her husband — her ex-husband. He is not entirely unhandsome, he’s charming, patient — not hotheaded, not like him , she thinks, and she brushes the thought aside as quickly as it arises.

On his third visit, the journalist brings her flowers, on the fourth a box of chocolates. She notices, despite herself, that she has started to enjoy his visits more and more, that she spends more time in front of the mirror, pins her hair up and then lets it fall; when the doorbell rings, she moistens her lips with the tip of her tongue.

This time he has brought along a bottle of wine, the apartment is a little less well-lit than during his previous visit; on the coffee table which she’s set with a bowl of nuts and blocks of cheese with mustard, a candle is burning.

“What did you say again, when do you have that weekend leave?” he asked me the last time we sat in the visiting area, after the guard announced we had two minutes left.

“Two weeks from now.”

“And how long have you got?”

“Three days. It’s a weekend furlough, right? Like it says. Out on Friday afternoon, back again on Monday morning.”

Verhoeven took a deep breath, stood up from his chair, took his jacket off the backrest. “I’d really like to check out a few places with you,” he said, watching the guard from the corner of his eye. “I think you know which places I mean.”

“Sure.” I wondered whether he was going to say it — whether he would dare to.

He dared; he just came out and said it: “And please, don’t go anywhere near Chiara. Try not to take any unnecessary risks, you know what I mean. Leave her alone.”

I looked at him, blinked once, not because I felt the need to blink, but because I thought it would put him at ease.

A lion — but a tame lion, napping in the sun. A nice lion: oh yeah, I could be real nice, charming, purring quietly and nuzzling up to my keeper, like a lion in the zoo. Or no, better yet, in a circus: the lion tamer cracks his whip in the sand and I jump through a hoop of real fire, night after night, I eat sugar cubes from his hand and let him scratch me behind the ears. I purr and I smile, a nice tame lion, but only in the knowledge that, one day, when he sticks his head in my mouth again before a breathless crowd, I’m going to snap my jaws shut. He will know, he’ll feel it; maybe at first, when he can’t pull his head back out, he’ll think there’s been some misunderstanding. But there has been no misunderstanding. The children will be the first to start screaming, then the women, the men will gag, the barf will splatter all over the bleachers, here and there some cold-blooded type will go on filming with his smartphone so we can all watch it again later on YouTube; how I spit out the lion tamer’s half-chewed head somewhere in a corner of the cage — maybe the snack was a little stale, it’s certainly not something I’m going to swallow, it might upset my stomach.

“She’s got a restraining order,” I said. “And I’ll be wearing an ankle monitor.”

I’d checked it out already on Google Maps: as long as I stayed on Pythagorasstraat, I was safely outside the area of the court injunction, just barely. It was only about fifty yards’ difference: as soon as I turned the corner of Pythagorasstraat and entered Copernicusstraat, my ankle monitor would send out a signal and an alarm would go off somewhere.

That’s how I imagined it, at least: there’s this central tracking room with computers, the ankle-monitor tracking room, manned by no more than two people. One of them has just ordered a pizza and the other has gone outside for a smoke. I turn into Copernicusstraat, an alarm goes off in the tracking room, it takes a moment for the ankle-monitor tracker who stayed inside to figure out which of the maybe fifty or sixty roaming monitors has been activated. Twenty, thirty seconds, maybe? Not much longer than that, I figure, but in those twenty or thirty seconds I’ve already left Copernicusstraat and am heading up Archimedesweg, toward Molukkenstraat. When I pass under the steel train trestle, the tracking room loses the signal for a bit, the colleague has come back from his cigarette break in the meantime, now they’ve got video too.

“He disappeared... there,” the one says; he points at the screen.

The other guy taps a few keys on the console and now, at the top of the screen, my first and last name appear. And who knows, maybe other things too — I’ve never been in a tracking room like that, all I can do is guess.

My age. My offense. The length of the term I’m serving. Armed and dangerous , yeah, maybe it says that too. I’ve always liked that phrase, though in my case it could be misleading: it might make people think that, when I’m walking around without a gun, I’m not dangerous.

The blinking dot now reappears on the far side of the trestle.

“Where’s he going?” asks the colleague who was just outside for a smoke.

Then the bell rings. “I bet that’s my pizza,” the other man says.

For a moment they stand there, wavering. Just how serious is this? It’s not the first time someone with an ankle monitor has entered forbidden territory. Nine times out of ten, they turn around and go back after a minute or so, to the area where they’re allowed to be. In the background, we hear the opening jingle for the weekend soccer recap on Studio Sport . The timing is perfect: at the very start of the first highlight, a slice of pizza can move from box to mouth.

I stop, turn around, walk back to the trestle.

“Look, he’s realized, he’s going back.” The bell rings again, more impatiently this time. “Could you answer that? It’s my pizza.”

The blinking dot disappears beneath the bridge, disappears completely.

“What do we do? Report it? Send a car out?”

“Hold on a minute. If he comes back out on the right side, it’s a false alarm. They don’t like that much.”

I wait under the bridge, I count to twenty, more or less as long as it would take me to come back out on the right side again. But above all I wait to hear if they’ve done anything yet. If I can hear a siren in the distance.

If I do, I’ll call it off. Tomorrow is another day. But if things stay quiet, I’ll wait those twenty seconds and race out from under the bridge, into the new neighborhood. I’ve already looked at it at least a hundred times on Google Street View — this neighborhood wasn’t there yet when I disappeared from public life — and I could find the door to her building in a flash, even blindfolded. I figured it out. Less than two minutes. I’m an athletic person, I’ve been training, I stopped smoking ten years ago. Within ninety seconds, I’ll be at the door. I’ll ring the bell — not hers, the neighbors’ on the floor above or below her.

Hello?

It’s your neighbor from the ground floor, they left a package with me yesterday, it’s for you.

At a household appliance store on Linnaeusstraat, I checked out a few of the carving knives in the display case. If I wanted a better look, I’d have to ask the salesgirl to unlock the case for me.

I was going to have to rely on my own strength — I could do it with my bare hands if necessary. And maybe it wouldn’t be necessary. I thought about how I would put my foot in the door, the panic in her eyes.

Just want to talk to you for a moment, I’d say. If you’re smart, you’ll keep calm and let me in.