Герман Кох - Amsterdam Noir

Theo Mann was a young patrolman at the time. His supervisor recognized in him a talent for detective work and brought him along to the scene. The murders of Mimi and Mark, he told me, remained one of the grisliest crimes of his long career. What he saw that night, the butchery of two people around the same age as himself, had stayed with him for all the years that had followed.

“Mimi was my cousin,” I told him that afternoon, after we watched the video.

I didn’t have to think about it for long when I heard that the building was going to be auctioned off. Ella was the one who first found out about it, of course — I never hear about things like that. “Buy it,” she’d said, but without putting too much pressure on me. And you don’t have to know much about real estate to understand that a property like that one — a sweet little house, the smallest on the Spui — doesn’t come on the market often.

“Unusual,” Theo remarked tactfully. “Most people wouldn’t want a house with that history.”

Mimi’s parents — who had died a year after the murders; of grief, my mother always said — had tried to buy it at the time, to prevent strangers from moving in. But the owner, a notorious slumlord, hadn’t even responded to their repeated offers.

“It used to be our house,” I said, “a long time ago. Ella and I squatted there.”

If that weekend had unfolded differently, it would have been our dead bodies the young Theo would have investigated. Ella and I had wanted to get away for a few days to London, but we didn’t dare leave the house empty — we were afraid other squatters would take it over, or the owner would send in a goon squad to secure it. We’d almost given up on our plans when Mimi, who had moved to Groningen to attend the university there, announced that she and Mark would be happy to come down to Amsterdam to house-sit.

“Ella and I were questioned,” I said, “but I don’t think it was you.”

Theo let that pass. “You haven’t been living there for long, I understand.”

“It seems longer, but I only moved in yesterday.”

“From where?”

“From a marriage to an architect who treated me like I was one of his designs.”

With a scarf wrapped around my head, I strolled home through the crowded Leidsestraat, lingering here and there like a tourist and barely recognizable. No one would know that I had just been to the police station. Not that it mattered, but my invisibility made me feel better.

Turning off the Kalverstraat onto the Spui, I tried to ignore the people with cameras. There were three of them right in front of me, and at least five more taking snapshots or videos with their phones — there are always people with cameras on the Spui, but that day there were more of them than usual. In an attempt to convince myself that I was completely relaxed, I went into the Esprit store and bought a shoulder bag I didn’t want. With my old one stuffed inside the new one, I forced myself not to run across the street to my house. Scared on my own square.

Before I left the station, Theo had asked if I was okay, if there was someone who could come and stay with me. I’d lied to both questions. I couldn’t think of a soul I wanted to see, except for Ella.

I shot both of the front door’s dead bolts — with Ella’s key in the hands of her kidnapers, the fancy three-point lock my insurance company had recommended was now worthless — went upstairs, checked all the windows on the second floor, then up another flight of steps to the bedroom I hadn’t yet slept in. I turned on the radio to drown out the sounds from the street and fell into an exhausted sleep in my new bed.

In the middle of the afternoon, I called a locksmith and then the realtor on the corner of the Spuistraat.

“I have a house for sale.”

“We’ll be happy to help you,” the person who answered the phone told me. “May I send my colleague out to have a look, perhaps sometime around the end of this week?”

As soon as I mentioned the address, he proposed moving the preliminary visit to the following day.

“I’d like someone to come today,” I said. “Tonight, if necessary.”

“I need you to see something else,” Theo had told me, after I’d watched the video for the third time. “Can you keep this quiet?”

Keeping quiet was a skill I had mastered during the years of my marriage. I nodded.

He slid a sheet of paper across the table. “This was delivered this morning.”

It was a short list of demands, addressed to The Owner , who was ordered to put Spui 13 up for sale. A particular realtor was indicated, complete with phone number. Even the name of the ultimate purchaser — J. de Vries — and the sales price were specified.

“So they know Ella doesn’t own the house,” I said.

“Or they realized it after kidnapping her,” said Theo.

“No, they kidnapped her because she’s famous.”

“That can’t be the only reason.”

Theo asked from whom I’d purchased the building.

“A homesick American. I can send you his contact information if you want it.”

“Please, although I don’t see a link from him to Ella,” said Theo.

“She was at a real-estate auction when she found out Spui 13 was coming on the market. Does that help?”

After that came a formal interrogation. We went to another room; the woman detective who had visited me the previous evening sat in. Theo wanted to hear all about Ella and me, about my family connection to Mimi, about my purchase of Spui 13. I explained how Ella had handled the bidding for me at the auction, how brilliant she was.

“Why didn’t the American just use a realtor?” he asked.

“He wanted it over and done with, without a lot of hoopla. That’s the advantage of an auction sale,” I explained. “According to Ella.”

“That’s the connection,” said Theo’s colleague.

He nodded. “Yeah, I think Ella’s kidnapper must have seen her at the auction. Was there a lot of interest? Did she get in a bidding war with someone else?”

Ella had bid so strategically that the other potential buyers dropped out quickly. Later, after too much prosecco at the Luxembourg, I asked her if she’d ever considered leaving journalism for the world of real estate. She looked at me, half smiling, took another sip, and said, “An interesting thought.”

Obviously, what I really wanted to know was if she was researching a story about the Amsterdam real-estate market. But I didn’t ask, because I know Ella would rather die than say a word about whatever she’s working on.

I told Theo and his colleague about the impact the murders of Mimi and Mark had had on our lives. How fear had held us in its grip for years and how, as an antidote against the poison of the atrocity, we had become more ourselves than we had previously been. Already an extrovert, Ella had chosen to fight crime with pen in hand and welcome the limelight, while I — the introvert — had abandoned my dream of becoming the same type of Dutch-language teacher I had once had myself in order to avoid standing in front of groups of students. I withdrew further and further from the world and took refuge in the privacy of a home office, surrounded by manuscripts I was paid to proofread.

“I wanted to go back to Spui 13 to keep Mimi’s memory alive,” I said, acknowledging the guilt that had never left us. “I suppose that sounds crazy.”

Theo almost shook his head.

“The American completely renovated the building,” I went on. “It doesn’t look anything like the way it was.”

When Theo brought his questioning to a close, I asked him something that had been burning in my throat for the last hour: “Are you sure the guys you arrested really did it?”