Герман Кох: Amsterdam Noir

“We grab the bag now?” asks Sayid.

I look at him. I say we get in the car and make him drive to a good place.

Sayid asks what’s a good place. He says we can just as easy grab the bag of money now and head for our scooters.

I look across the street at our scooters parked in front of Van Vliet. I say Sayid’s idea would call too much attention to us. “We were gonna do that, we should’ve parked the scooters on this side of the street.”

“Come on, gangster, you didn’t think about that?”

I tell him to shut up, okay? “Come on,” I say, “let’s climb in.” I go up to the passenger side of the Focus and yank on the back door handle, but the back door is locked. Sayid bumps into me. I look at him. Linda’s still standing there with her ass in the air.

“What the fuck, gangster?” says Sayid.

I grab the piece from my waistband, circle around to the driver’s side, and pull Linda out of the way. She gives another little scream. I touch the front end of the gun to her head and tell Patrick to unlock the doors.

“Three hundred,” Linda says.

Patrick looks from me to Linda, scared-like. “Don’t hurt her,” he says, and I hear the locks pop up. I pull the driver’s-side back door open and nod to Sayid he should get in on the other side, next to Patrick, and I shove Linda into the car and she yells not so hard or she’ll go straight to five hundred. I get in after her and put the gun to the back of Patrick’s head and tell him to drive.

He doesn’t react.

He’s got his hands on the wheel, but he don’t do nothing.

I glance to my right. Linda looks kind of cramped, pressed up against this big laundry bag. Nylon, colored vertical stripes. My old man uses the same kind of bags to store the stuff he sells at the open-air market.

So that’s the cash.

Patrick just sits there.

I tap the back of his head with the end of the gun barrel. “Pat,” I say, “drive.”

He says he’s not afraid of me.

Sayid, sitting next to him, looks from him to me and back again.

“Pat,” I say, “you gotta drive.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” he says again, like the weird robot he is. I figure that’s another reason he got this gig with the Pakis. He’s so white he’ll never get pulled over, and he’s a weird robot you can’t scare.

I point the piece at Linda.

Patrick watches in the rearview mirror. “Don’t hurt her,” he says.

I tell him Linda wants to marry him, but I’ll blow her brains out if he doesn’t drive.

Patrick starts the Focus and drives, and Linda says now she wants a thousand euros.

Patrick drives, and Sayid looks at me and says, “Where we going, man? Where the fuck we going ?”

I say we need to find a good place.

Sayid says I ain’t given this enough thought. “Shit, G, you shoulda thought about this.”

“You didn’t think about it either, did you?”

He says he ain’t the brains of the outfit.

I say I never said I was neither.

Linda sighs.

“Turn right,” I tell Patrick, but he doesn’t listen. He keeps going straight.

I push the gun into the back of his neck. I tell him he better listen or I’ll blow his brains out.

He don’t react, just drives straight ahead. We come to the intersection with Meer en Vaart, and he finally pulls into the right lane. Off to the left are the new apartments where the rich white people live. To the right are the old buildings on the Ruimzicht where they used to live.

“Okay, good,” I say.

“I’m not doing it because you say so,” he says. “I’m doing it because it’s my job.” He turns onto Meer en Vaart, the cop shop on the right, and I jerk the piece down behind his seat. I tell him in a second I’ll aim it back at his head.

Sayid turns around and rests his arm on the back of his seat and glares at me. “In a second you’ll aim back at his head?”

“Come on, gangster, we know Patrick, right?”

He says what difference does that make. “For fuck’s sake, man, we’re ripping him off!”

Patrick says he knows us too.

“That’s logical,” I say. “We all know each other.”

He says that means we’ll have to kill him. Otherwise, he’ll turn us over to the cops. He downshifts for the red light at the Osdorpplein.

Sayid looks at me and nods. “He’s right,” he says.

Patrick drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “I have to do my job,” he says.

I push the gun deeper into his neck. “Pay attention,” I say. “Make a right.”

“I’m going straight,” he says. “I’m going to the Lelylaan, and then I’m getting on the ring road, and then I’m driving to Rotterdam.”

A car pulls up beside us, so I lower the piece again. The light turns green, and Patrick drives straight ahead.

I tell him, “It’s time for you to get scared, Patrick.”

“I’m scared already,” he says. “But not of you.” He looks in his rearview mirror.

“What?” says Sayid.

I turn around and see a big black Dodge Ram behind us. It’s so close all I can see is the front grill.

“The fuck,” I say. “Who’s that? Who the fuck is that , Patrick?”

“That’s the people I work for.” He drives on, doing exactly the speed limit. Ahead of us is the back edge of the Osdorpplein, where a little while ago we were sitting at Mickey D’s, which we never should have left. We definitely shouldn’t’ve done this . To our left is the narrow side of the Sloter Lake. The water is black as death.

“Speed up,” I say. “ Now!”

He says he’s going to do his job just the way they told him.

“Patrick, I got a fucking gun here.”

He says he’s not afraid of my gun.

Behind us, the Dodge Ram’s engine races.

Linda screams again — I forgot all about her. I point the piece at her. “Patrick,” I say, “I’m gonna shoot Linda in the face. Now go .”

Patrick hits the gas. Linda and I are thrown back in our seats, and she swats the piece aside. “Just stop it,” she says. Then she turns to the laundry bag behind her and unzips it. Bundles of pale purple paper: five-hundred-euro notes. “What’s all this?”

“It’s money,” says Patrick.

I look behind us. We’re about sixty feet ahead of the Dodge, but he’s coming up fast. Patrick’s Ford Focus is about as speedy as a horse and buggy.

Patrick runs a red light and somebody honks. He turns left into the Lelylaan. He looks over his shoulder at Linda and says he took this job for her. “I’m doing this for you, Linda.”

Linda, meanwhile, is holding one of the bundles of money in her hands. “There has to be at least ten thousand euros here,” she says. “At least .”

The Dodge is right behind us again, its motor growling.

I take the packet of bills away from Linda and stuff it in my jacket pocket. “You get two hundred,” I say.

The Dodge comes up and nudges our rear bumper.

I see Patrick looking at her in the mirror, and he says, “Are you getting paid for this?”

“Of course,” she says.

Patrick jerks the wheel to the left and we shoot off the asphalt onto the tram tracks that run down the middle of the Lelylaan. Both the 1 and the 17 trams use these tracks but we’re in luck, they’re unoccupied at the moment. Off in the distance, though, I see a blue tram coming our way, and the Focus skids across the rails and bottoms out, steel scraping steel, but we keep on going and bounce onto the asphalt on the other side of the tramline where the traffic’s coming toward us from the city center, and the cars jam on their brakes, their headlights lighting up the inside of the Focus. We go off the road onto the grassy hill that slants down to the lake, then roll down the slope doing at least fifty. I look back, and the Dodge is coming after us, but the tram that was approaching is there now and it smashes into the side of the Dodge and I think about a story I heard once about how some tram conductors, who get a week off to recover after an accident, don’t bother to stop when there’s a car in their way. I practically shit my pants, but I’m still thinking about that story.