Герман Кох - Amsterdam Noir

We roll down the grass and Patrick steers the Focus to the left and onto the footpath that runs along the shoreline, past the tall letters they put there — I am sterdam, with the I and the am in red and the sterdam in white, so it sort of says, I am Amsterdam , ha ha, so the tourists who accidentally wind up out here know they’re really still in the city — and across the water I can see the apartments on Ruimzicht where we used to think the rich people lived and now there’s a bag on the rear seat beside me with two million euros in it.

“Where we gonna go , man?” asks Sayid, turning to me from the front seat. Then he looks past me to see if the Dodge is still there, but the Dodge has been rammed by tram 17. A kid on a bike in front of us swerves out of our way and onto the grass. From the light we’re shining on him, I can tell our right headlight is out.

I got the piece in my right hand, and with my left I pat my pants pockets ’cause that’s what I always do when I’m thinking. I can feel my keys, and in my head I go through it: my place, my aunt’s place, the storage unit. The storage unit. We have a storage unit for the shit my old man sells at the market, and that’s the perfect place to hide a bag full of money, in the middle of all those other bags that look exactly the same. I say we’re going to the storage unit. I rest the barrel of the gun on Patrick’s shoulder and tell him we gotta go to Slotervaart.

He says he’ll decide where we gotta go. “My life is meaningless now,” he says.

“You’re full of shit, man,” says Sayid.

Patrick comes to a stop on the sidewalk when we’re back on Meer en Vaart. In front of us there’s a row of duplexes that must have been pretty nice once upon a time, but now their balconies are all overflowing with crap. There are lights on in a couple of the apartments, though most people ain’t home yet. Most people are still in their cars on either side of us. Everyone who passes stares at us: a car parked on the sidewalk, only one headlight working.

“My life is meaningless,” Patrick says again. “I was saving up so I could ask Linda to marry me. But now I don’t trust her.”

Sayid and me both look at Linda. She stares right back at us. “What?” she says. “I did what you told me. I can totally be trusted.”

I ask her if she’s sure she don’t want to marry this guy. She shakes her head. He sees her do it in the rearview mirror.

Sayid asks, “Pat, how much you saved?”

“Twelve thousand,” he says.

“He’s got twelve thousand euros saved,” I tell Linda.

“How much did you want to have before you asked me?”

“Twenty thousand.”

“That’s a lot of money,” says Linda.

“I’ll never get it now,” says Patrick. “I’m out of a job.”

“That’s a shame,” says Linda.

I say he needs to head for Slotervaart.

Patrick looks back at Linda. “You don’t think twelve thousand’s enough?”

She’s sitting next to a bag with two million in it. Patrick told us he carries two million every trip. She shrugs. “Maybe.”

Sayid and I look at each other. I can see from his face he’s trying not to laugh. I can also see from his face he’s trying not to cry. He’s scared.

In the mirror, I can glimpse what’s happening on Patrick’s face too. He’s gotta figure this shit out, but he don’t know how. “Come on, Pat,” I say, “be smart. We’re gonna stash this bag someplace safe. You’re gonna lose your job anyway, we might as well be smart, right?”

He turns around in his seat and looks at me. He says I’m right. We might as well be smart, he says.

He sits up straight.

“Let’s go to Slotervaart,” I say.

“Let’s not go to Slotervaart,” says Patrick, and I can hear from his robot voice I might as well stop telling him where to go, even with the gun I got from Abdulhamed stuck in his ear. He inches his Ford Focus into the traffic on Meer en Vaart and heads back in the direction of Osdorpplein.

I look off to the right, at the Sloterplas, that weird manmade lake in the middle of Amsterdam New-West you have to drive all the way around to get anywhere. When we were kids, we used to swim there, because our parents wouldn’t give us money for the public pool where all the white kids went, so us brown kids were the poor schmucks who had to settle for the dirty green water of the lake. Us poor schmucks with our brown skin who loved the white kids, because the white kids got to go to their activities in their old man’s car, activities maybe their old man took them to because us brown kids were hanging out on all their streets and squares.

Poor schmucks , I think, looking at the Sloterplas while Patrick drives, this weird autistic guy, my pal beside him, me on the backseat with some dumb bitch and a bag filled with two million euros. Two million. Two hours ago we were at Mickey D’s and we were poor, because we weren’t smart enough like our cousins who went to good schools and applied for a hundred jobs at banks and insurance companies and finally got a job at the hundred-and-first place they tried because they had brown skin and funny names, but now that they finally got those jobs they had a future. The fuckers.

My future sits in a laundry bag on the backseat of a Ford Focus, and I’m sitting right beside it. Maybe I’ll buy an apartment in one of those new buildings off the Ruimzicht, tucked in among the white families, and I’ll laugh when the white realtor’s eyes go all wide when I dump payment in full on his desk. Cash money.

“Patrick,” says Sayid. “ Patrick. ” He looks at me and I shake my head — Patrick ain’t listening no more. Sayid grabs the piece out of my hand and curses and sticks it in Patrick’s face, and Patrick’s hands tighten on the wheel and he stares right through the gun. “Here,” says Sayid, “here, look , there’s bullets in here and I’m gonna blow your fuckin’ head off.”

Patrick lifts his right hand from the wheel and rips the piece out of Sayid’s hand. He glances at it, clicks off the safety, aims at Sayid, and then there’s a big bang that makes Linda and me cup our hands over our ears and there’s smoke and the stink of cordite and Sayid is screaming and there’s a hole in the side window with a ring of blood all around it. Sayid goes on screaming. “You cocksucker!” he shouts. “Cocksucker!” He covers his face with his hands, covers his mouth and nose, and he looks at me and pulls his hands away and his nose ain’t there no more and he asks how bad it is while the blood runs into his mouth.

I don’t know what to say.

“ How bad is it?”

“Your nose,” I say. “It’s your nose.”

“ How bad is it?”

“Your nose is — Jesus, it’s sort of gone, G.”

Linda pukes into the bag of money.

Patrick drives. “I’m sorry,” he says to Sayid. “I was trying to blow your head off.” He holds the wheel with his left hand, the piece in his right. He checks his mirror and says the Dodge is back. I turn around but don’t see it. “There,” he says, and he nods at the bike path between the road and the lake, and there’s the Dodge, zigzagging a little, probably the tram threw off its alignment.

“Who’s in there?” I ask.

Patrick says he already told us. “The people I work for. Worked.”

Sayid whines, his hands cupped over his face. “I gotta go to the hospital,” he cries. “I really gotta go to the hospital, man.”

Patrick looks at Linda in his mirror and says her name.

She looks back at him.

“You think twelve thousand’s enough?”

She stares past Sayid at the hole in the passenger window and the blood all around it. “No,” she says, “not anymore.”