Герман Кох: Amsterdam Noir

On the day of Ella’s disappearance, we’d planned a catch-up Graduate to mark my independence — and, more than that, without either of us having said the words aloud, as a tribute to Mimi. After that, we were going to have dinner at Café Luxembourg, Ella’s favorite. That was all I had to offer the policewoman, I thought at the time.

The kidnapping made the evening news and was almost instantly a trending topic on Twitter. By the next morning, photos of the most famous crime reporter in The Netherlands were everywhere you looked. The banner headline on the front page of De Telegraaf , her employer, screamed, “WHO HAS OUR ELLA?” in oversized capitals.

I’d spent the night in a chair by the window, with all the lights out and the curtains open, waiting for some word from her, staring at the barred windows of the Esprit store across the road, at the soft glow of the streetlights, at the black-and-white neighborhood cat — officially the Luxembourg’s house cat, who lay deep in thought across the Begijnhof’s doorway — at the pedestrians, mostly solitary men who walked past my house from left to right or right to left without giving it a second glance. Some of them were visibly drunk, some hurried self-confidently by as if they were on their way to jobs that really mattered. Between two and five a.m., young women pedaled past on their bicycles, like Ella and I did years ago — without worry, without fear — until Mimi’s fate forever changed our relationship to our little corner of the city.

Ella sometimes jokes that if twenty-four hours go by and I haven’t heard from her, she’s probably lying at the bottom of the Amstel River with a bullet in her head. In that case, my instructions are to get in touch with Bert.

She says it lightly, and I know she is unafraid of the dangers that are such an integral part of her world, a world with which I am completely unfamiliar. She seems to enjoy the excitement, but when no one is paying attention — not even she herself — I think it gnaws at her. Anguish stalks her at the very moments when there’s nothing to be concerned about. When I stay over at her place, or when we share a room on one of our hiking trips, her nightmares keep me awake.

My ex, the son of a bitch, texted to warn me not to involve him in any way, shape, or form in that Ella business . Nobody seemed interested in how I was doing, another reminder of all the people who’d unfriended me. The one who walks away from a marriage is the one to blame, something like that. Only the publisher at the company for which I’ve been freelancing for years took the trouble the next morning to stop by. All he had to do was walk across the street, but his concern seemed genuine and I appreciated the support. We talked about Ella, and then — to convince ourselves that things couldn’t be as bad as they seemed — about a manuscript I was proofreading for him. Before he left, he congratulated me on my new home and my new life. “It’s so cozy here on the Spui,” he said.

And that was my welcome back to the neighborhood where, once upon a time, Ella and I had majored in the Dutch language at the University of Amsterdam, where, encouraged by our parents, we had escaped the humdrum fate of Haarlemmerstraat shopgirls to which, only a few decades earlier, we would have been doomed. Here, at this exact part of the city, our freedom began. Here, for us, the world began.

The morning after Ella’s kidnapping, it seemed as if the world converged on the Spui — I had to zigzag around knots of gawkers to reach the Heisteeg. On my way to the Lijnbaansgracht police station, I imitated the self-confident tread of the men at night: Here I come, and nothing bad can possibly happen to me . From the desk sergeant’s reaction to my name, I could see that any hope it had all been a misunderstanding was misplaced. There’s always that glimmer of hope when something awful happens, even though you ought to know better. Ella and I had experienced that with Mimi. But the desk sergeant knew exactly who I was and why I was there. There was no misunderstanding; it was all true.

The Telegraaf ’s editor-in-chief was the only person other than the detectives who had seen the video. I watched it three times that morning, together with a man who introduced himself as Theo, a detective in the major-crimes unit, not much older than me.

It opened with a shot of my house, filmed from across the street: a narrow building, not quite perpendicular to the ground, an unimportant afterthought compared to the chic art nouveau home next door. The camera zoomed in slowly on my front door. In the next shot, I was lugging two huge suitcases, tagging behind Ella, who wore a backpack and carried a smaller bag in her left hand and a key in her right. She opened the door, took a step back, made an exaggerated bow, and ushered me in with a sweep of her arm. It was funny: we looked like teenagers moving into a dorm. That was our way of dealing with the serious nature of the occasion.

The remaining shots were almost all of Ella. She’d been filmed on the way to my house, and coming out the front door, and walking along the Spui, probably heading back to her own apartment on the Singel. I laughed when I saw her wrestling with the lamp she’d bought as a housewarming gift and had planted in my still-empty living room to surprise me. For those few seconds, I could almost imagine I was watching a rerun of The Banana Splits .

Theo paused the video the second time we watched it.

“She had a key to your house?” he asked.

“She still does.”

He nodded and pressed play.

Ella, sitting at a wooden table, a white wall as backdrop. I was surprised to see how normal she appeared. It was like looking at the Ella who reports on a high-profile murder case, the Ella we all know from television: eloquent, informed, well put together. Her left eye was slightly squinted, the only clue to the nervousness she must have been feeling.

“This message is for my man,” she said, straight into the camera. “I’m fine, I’m getting enough to eat and drink, I’m not being mistreated.” She took a breath, cleared her throat, and continued: “I’m being held against my will. The conditions for my release will follow.”

The screen went blank.

“She doesn’t have a man,” I said.

Ella doesn’t believe in long-term relationships, they’re far too complicated. Typically, her boyfriends don’t last longer than a month or so; after that, she gets bored and gives up. She usually sees two or three guys simultaneously, though more recently she’s begun to find that too exhausting. Instead, she’s bought two additional apartments — in the wake of the financial crisis, she was able to pick them up relatively cheaply — so she now has three home addresses scattered around the city. Real estate is her current passion.

“She means me,” Theo said. “My last name is Mann. Ella and I have known each other professionally for years. She’s talking to me.”

It was only then that I realized something Theo already knew: “They think my house belongs to Ella.”

Theo raised an eyebrow.

I asked him when he’d figured it out.

“Last night, soon as I saw the video. Spui 13 is still a red flag for me, so I sent my colleague over to talk to you.”

Mimi was twenty-one, the same age as Ella and me, when she was awakened by a loud noise that October night, almost forty years ago. Her boyfriend Mark was a sound sleeper, which we felt at the time explained why she had gone down to Spui 13’s second floor alone to see what was causing the racket.

It came out during the trial that two men, brothers, had broken into the shop on the ground floor and climbed the stairs to our two-level apartment. One of the brothers put a knife to Mimi’s throat. “Just to scare her,” he told the judge. But then he raped her. And then the other brother took a turn, except he was so drunk he couldn’t come. That’s when — according to the second brother’s testimony — things got out of hand. He slit Mimi’s throat with a single sweep of his own blade. Meanwhile, the first brother went up to the third floor and beat Mark to death with a bicycle chain.