Герман Кох: Amsterdam Noir

The officer had short hair and wore a light-blue shirt with dark-blue epaulets. Dared handed over his passport. The officer examined it, looking back and forth between the document and the man who had presented it — checking the photo, Dared supposed.

He had just killed a man.

Anyone else would be flushed, shaking in his boots.

But Dared was completely calm. No regrets, no remorse. The only thing he felt was an incredible lightness, the burden he had borne for years at last lifted from his shoulders.

Smiling, the officer returned his passport. “Have a nice stay, sir,” he said.

Dared moved on toward baggage claim. When he found the correct carousel, the conveyor belt had just begun to spit up its load of luggage. The passengers from his flight jostled for position, anxious to collect their possessions and be on their way. Dared ignored the pushing and shoving. It was as if he was wearing protective armor. As he worked his way closer to the belt, he glanced around. Somewhere among that sea of suitcases and garment bags and shrink-wrapped cardboard cartons must be a bag belonging to the Bull. How long would it be before someone found him in the bathroom? Was anyone waiting for him? Would anyone miss him? Dared couldn’t imagine the man had friends or family.

He claimed his suitcase and headed for the green Nothing to Declare sign. A customs agent nodded him through. He walked on.

The arrivals hall was mobbed. Children with balloons, mothers and fathers, a young man with a bouquet of red roses, all searching eagerly for their loved ones.

Dared wondered if someone from the conference would come to fetch him. He’d e-mailed the organizers this morning from Paris to inform them that he’d be on the evening flight, but he’d had no response. He scanned his surroundings. There was a shop selling blue Delft plates and other souvenirs. On the walls, huge posters showed windmills and fields of red and yellow tulips and canal houses and Rembrandt’s Night Watch .

This time, Dared decided, he would go to the Rijksmuseum and see the famous painting for himself.

He was about to give up hope of being met when he saw her. A pretty young woman with long blond hair and green eyes. She was holding a sign with his name printed on it in large capital letters.

Waving, he approached her. “Hello,” he said, “I’m Dared.”

“Hi, Dared.” She had a lovely smile. “I’m Saskia. Welcome to Amsterdam.”

Centrum

April 2016

Ella disappeared on the day I began to live alone in the heart of the city after thirty years of marriage. The day I returned to where I came from, to the person I used to be.

I knew something was up when she didn’t drop by as we’d agreed, but I drew the wrong conclusion from her absence. Ella is always on time, unless a major story breaks. Then she vanishes, and no one can reach her. That’s the way it goes in her line of work.

I decided to consider her nonappearance Lesson #1 in my New Life course, so I threw on a jacket, checked myself in the mirror, and — passing through the living room where Mimi had fought for her life — left the house and walked over to the Athenaeum Bookstore on the corner, as I’d done so many times in the past.

Even before my move, I’d decided not to have anything delivered to my new digs, so that at least once a day I’d have to get out of the house. I bought a newspaper from a girl who could have been me back then: eighteen, maybe nineteen years old, working part-time for extra cash to supplement whatever academic scholarship she was getting. I grew up behind a counter, so I knew the drill. In the four years I worked at the Athenaeum, I dealt with unkempt punks and unwed mothers, sold newspapers in six languages and hash brownies. Over and above my paltry salary, I had the opportunity to meet famous writers like Harry Mulisch and John Irving, the crown princess incognito, and the king of the squatters in full regalia. Everyone who was anyone and everyone who was no one came to the Athenaeum — and there I stood in the middle of it all.

This part of the city is now clean and predictable, all the anarchy of the olden days long gone. The bookstore no longer shows customers with lousy taste the door, and Het Lieverdje — the beloved bronze statue of a cheerful boy of the streets — has survived the Provo riots, the happenings, even its own kidnapping. After eleven occupations by students, the University of Amsterdam’s Maagdenhuis remains stately and forgiving, true to the line from the Gospel According to Mark carved into its lintel: Suffer the little children to come unto me. The square has been newly repaved with stones and is ringed by stuccoed and lacquered buildings — an open invitation to a comfortable and carefree life.

I should have been relieved that day — and happy — but what I felt when I slipped my key into the outer door was alienation. As if I no longer belonged on the “village green,” as Ella used to call the Spui.

I climbed the stairs and let myself into my new home, settled onto my new couch with a bag of chips and the paper, clicked on my new television for company, and fell asleep.

A call from the police awoke me. Apparently my ex had given them my number.

A moment later, although the camera connected to my new doorbell wasn’t yet working properly, I recognized over the intercom the same female voice I’d just heard on the phone. She must have called from across the street, or right in front of my door. I was surprised to see that she was alone; perhaps the police only travel in pairs on TV shows. Ella knows that sort of thing.

She was the one who’d given me the courage to leave my husband, to return to my old stomping grounds. She had kept me grounded as I ripped myself free of the suffocating relationship I had too long confused with love. She’d never pressured me, had always been understanding — though it was true there’d been times she’d impatiently stamped her foot, frustrated with my hesitations and delay.

Of the two of us, Ella is the strong one, the independent one, the determined one, the one who’s always ready to lend a helping hand to a friend in need. I am the quiet one, the timid one, the mouse. It takes awhile to discover that there’s more to me than meets the eye. That’s the way it was even when we were childhood friends in the Haarlemmerstraat, skipping rope on the narrow sidewalk in front of our fathers’ shops.

“We take this matter very seriously,” the detective said.

“This matter” was a video that had been delivered to De Telegraaf — one of Amsterdam’s largest daily newspapers — a few hours earlier.

“Was it a message from Ella,” I asked, “or from someone else, about her?”

Instead of responding to my question, the detective posed one of her own: what was Ella working on?

I never know what Ella’s working on, I answered honestly. Nobody knows what Ella’s working on — that’s why she’s so good at what she does. Her secrecy, Ella says, is what allows her to do her job: her silence protects her sources, her family, her friends... and herself.

“We were going to watch a movie,” I said, nodding at the Blu-ray of The Graduate on the coffee table, “to christen my new house.”

We only watch The Graduate on special occasions. The first time, at the Tuschinski, we were fifteen, maybe sixteen, and we dreamed of growing up to be Joan Baez. Mimi was still with us then. Before we even left the theater, the three of us agreed that we instead wanted to grow up to be Katharine Ross. Ella was already on her way, with that thick brown hair. When we were forty, we saw The Graduate again, now through the eyes of mature women. Ten years later, we watched it a third time, and last year we’d planned yet another showing to celebrate our making it to sixty despite all the cigarettes we’d smoked. That screening never happened, though, since Ella was on the road for the newspaper and I was busy explaining to my husband what an insufferable ass he had become.