Герман Кох - Amsterdam Noir

“You think two million’s enough?”

“Two million ? Where you gonna get that kind of money?”

I tell her there’s two million in the bag. “You stupid bitch,” I say.

“Don’t insult her,” says Patrick, and he glances over to the Dodge, which is keeping up with us on the bike path.

Sayid screams, his hands cupped in front of his face. “You stupid bitch!”

Patrick touches the barrel of the gun to Sayid’s head and pulls the trigger.

Explosion.

Cordite.

Sayid’s body slumps against the passenger door.

“Patrick,” I say. “Patrick.”

Linda sits pressed up against the backseat, her hands covering her eyes.

Patrick steers the Focus to the side of the road, bumps over the curb, and now he’s right next to the Dodge.

“I’ll shoot you later,” he tells me, “but I can’t do it now because you’re behind me.”

We’re driving parallel to the new boulevard that runs along the short side of the Sloterplas — before last year it was just trees here, with a walking trail between them, but they cut down the trees and now they got expensive tiles and benches — and Patrick runs the Focus into the side of the Dodge. The Dodge is much heavier than we are, except the tram must have shook it up because it smashes into one of the steel benches and comes to a stop. The streetlamps cast a soft glow on the boulevard’s tiles and on Sayid’s blood.

Patrick puts the Focus in park and gets out and comes after me, but I jerk away and pull Linda in front of me and she screams, and I smell her puke and I think she’s pissed herself. Patrick doesn’t shoot.

At first I don’t dare to look, but Linda pulls free and I see Patrick’s on the other side of the car now, the gun — my gun — aiming at the Dodge, and he fires three times.

Linda and me sit up straight, and we see somebody fall out of the Dodge. Then we look at each other, and then we both look at the laundry bag with the two million euros, the laundry bag I could have stashed with the bags of my old man’s shit in the storage unit. I try to wipe off Linda’s puke and Sayid’s blood. I grab the bag and she grabs it too, and I want to pull it away from her but two million euros is heavy , man. And for a second that’s the whole world, the backseat of the Focus and our four hands on that bag, all that money so close, and for that second it feels like I ought to kiss her like it’s a fucking movie. Then the door on her side swings open and Patrick yanks her out, and I’m so surprised I let go of the bag and it flies out with her.

I see Patrick drag Linda and the bag onto the boulevard and it’s like I’m in a long dark tunnel and the tunnel feels safe — just leave me right here — but then Patrick sees me. He hunkers down and holds the piece in both hands and aims at the tunnel, my tunnel, and he shoots — there’s a bang, but not so loud this time because I’m in my tunnel and he’s outside, and I think about that bang while my shoulder is blown to fragments. I drop onto a bench and I die. I think I’m dying. My buddy’s lying here in front of me and he’s already gone, and I’m on my way. I open my eyes and lie on my back and look upside down out of my used-to-be-safe tunnel — it seems so long ago now, that feeling of safety inside my tunnel.

Patrick says something to Linda. I can’t really hear it. She just squeals. She’s lying on the boulevard in the glow of the streetlamps and she’s squealing, and behind her I see the Sloterplas, its black water beautiful beneath the black winter sky, and I see the Dodge and the man who fell out of it, and he tries to sit up and he stares at me and I see the disappointment on Abdulhafid’s face.

“I didn’t know it was you,” I say softly, and he didn’t know it was me, either — all I told him was we were gonna score a hundred thou, he never thought I meant his two million.

Patrick stands up and grabs the bag of money and unzips it. “Two million,” he tells Linda, loud, “ two million .”

She shakes her head, sobbing.

I hear him say he’s gonna ask her one more time. And then he asks her: “Linda, will you marry me?”

I hear her say no, soft, sobbing.

Patrick picks up the bag by its handles, and in the glow of the streetlamps I see him carry it to the water’s edge. He drops the bag on the ground, then grabs it by the bottom and flips it over, and I can’t see the bundles of five-hundred-euro notes drop into the lake but I think I can hear them, plop plop plop, quick splashes as the packets hit the water.

I laugh ’cause I still got one of the bundles in my pocket. How many bills are in a bundle like that? A hundred? I suck at math, but I figure it’s gotta be a shitload of money, right?

Patrick walks back to Linda, who’s lying on the ground weeping like a drama queen even though he ain’t even shot her, and he asks her if she sees what he gave up for her. “Did you see that? I did it for you. Will you marry me?”

“No.”

He grumbles and turns to Abdulhafid, who’s lying next to the Dodge and who I figure is already dead, but Patrick shoots him in the head with the piece the other Abdul loaned me.

The gun’s been used, so it’s gotta go in the lake. I laugh again. I remember our scooters parked in front of Van Vliet. It’ll be days before anyone finds them. I figured it would be professional to put them there. I laugh, and I keep on laughing.

Patrick hears me, and he comes back to the Focus, and I press my hand against my jacket pocket, against the bundle of five-hundred-euro notes, a hundred of them, that’s four zeroes, so fifty thousand euros, and I laugh because I’m dying richer than I ever lived.

Museum District

Vincent slips his arm around Mila’s bare shoulder and pulls her close. “So many stars,” he whispers. “And so many more, so far away we can’t even see them. Thousands of planets, millions of light-years away. It’s unbelievable, isn’t it?”

Mila doesn’t reply. Not with words, anyway. She leans into him, kisses his neck, brushes his cheek with her lips, moves on to his ear, her hot tongue exploring its contours.

He groans with pleasure.

The two of them have been a couple for almost half a year. They met at the Escape, a nightclub on the Rembrandtplein, and their click was instant and overpowering. One of Vincent’s old buddies has a tattoo on his left bicep of a heart with an arrow through it, and that’s how Vincent feels, like there’s an arrow piercing his heart. Sometimes he has to stop himself from checking his chest to make sure he isn’t actually bleeding.

Everything changed for Vincent when he and Mila got together. For years, he’d been a hard-core party animal, and animal was the operative word: drunk with his pals every weekend, a steady diet of fights and vandalism and anonymous sex, anything for a laugh. His life was a carnival, illuminated by flashing neon, its soundtrack a pulsing heavy-metal beat. Hard to believe it was only last year that he, Roy, Marco, and Tommy had practically torn Greece apart during an alcohol- and drug-fueled summer trip to the islands. Jesus, you choked down the right cocktail of stimulants, you could party hearty for a week without sleep.

Now, tonight, Vincent gazes lovingly at his beautiful Mila. She looks awesome in a short leather skirt and low-cut tank top.

“Mmmm, don’t,” he murmurs. “You know that makes me crazy.”

There isn’t a hint of a breeze, nor a cloud in the sky, and he’s aware that the sultry summer evening only adds to the hunger he feels for her. He slides his left hand beneath Mila’s skirt and caresses the soft inside of her thigh, sneaking his fingers higher to brush the warm, moist cotton of her underwear. It’s absolutely silent in this dark corner of the Vondelpark. Now and then a bicycle whispers past in the distance, but this narrow side trail is completely deserted except for the two of them.