Orest Stelmach - The Treachery of Russian Nesting Dolls

The best way to find someone who doesn’t want to be found is to make him search for you.

For an American woman in a foreign country, that can be problematic. Fortunately, I was in Amsterdam. Most people come to Amsterdam in search of something. You can find anything you want and all of it is legal. All I had to do to find the murder victim’s secret lover was to become what he wanted.

It took me four days to make the necessary arrangements. The biggest impediment to my mission was my American passport. The landlords who rented the type of office I needed leased space only to tenants with EU passports. I finally found one who was willing to make an exception in the spirit of international cooperation. My offer to pay a fifty percent premium in rent may have played a small role, too.

The landlady’s office was located on a canal with Venetian views and a pair of majestic white swans near a bar called the Black Tiger in the city’s oldest section. The landlady greeted me at the door with a chilling once-over that left me fearing I’d gone too far this time. She looked like a sewer-dwelling cannibal who’d snuck above ground to lure her next meal to her nest, latex skin stretched taut over a bare skeleton disguised by a designer suit. If her profit were threatened, I could picture her crossing the threshold from stark to stark raving mad and consuming my body. God only knew what she’d suffered to become the woman she appeared to be today.

I sat across from her at a barebones metal desk, gave her my passport, and answered questions about my background. Her English accent sounded Moroccan or Algerian, not Dutch. That made sense because she was probably connected to organized crime. A Netherlands crime organization was less like a Sicilian family and more like a social media network, a collection of nodes that called upon each other to help with the drug and sex trade throughout Europe. That didn’t make it any less dangerous when crossed.

After the landlady finished her questionnaire, she asked me to fill out some paperwork. Some parts were for her employers, others for the city of Amsterdam. Then she studied her notes like a teacher grading a test. When she was finished she perused them again, as though she couldn’t fail me but was looking for a reason to do so.

“Your application is in order,” she finally said, with a note of reluctance. “But I must ask you once more. Are you certain you want to do this?”

“I’m certain,” I said.

“You understand why I’m asking. We don’t get many women… many women like you.”

“Like me?”

She looked me over again to make her point.

I knew what she meant. I was educated, American, and over thirty.

“Yes. Women who answer questions with a question,” she said. “Women like you.”

“I told you. It’s a fantasy of mine. It’s on my bucket list.”

“Bucket list?”

“A list of things a person wants to do before she dies,” I said.

The landlady shook her head as though that made no sense. “You understand that the owners of this business are very serious men. If you are planning on conducting any illegal business from your office, they will deal with you quickly and severely.”

Her words jolted me. The warning didn’t surprise me, but the landlady’s blunt delivery hit me hard. Once again I wondered if I was being too brazen for my own good.

“I won’t be using the room to conduct any business other than the one for which it’s intended,” I said.

The landlord appraised me one more time. Her pen hovered over the signature page as though her instincts were warning her that I might have an ulterior motive. If those were, in fact, her instincts, they were spot-on.

“Seventy-five euro a night for ten nights,” she said.

“Agreed.”

“You pay every day by four o’clock.”

“No. I’m going to pay you in full right now. For all ten days.”

The landlord lifted her eyebrows a smidge. It was the first time I noticed she had any.

I pulled seven hundred and fifty euro from my wallet and placed them on her desk. She collected the money, signed the lease and gave me a copy.

I savored a rush of adrenaline. There was no turning back now. I was committed to my mission. And yet the walls closed in on me a bit, too. The process of renting an office had been very professional. I was here of my own volition and I’d been treated respectfully, by a woman, no less. Still, I detected an undercurrent of exploitation. It was as though a syringe had tapped my soul when I’d signed on the dotted line.

We walked across the canal and continued two blocks further to a parallel street. The Oude Kerk , the medieval city’s original stone church, stood in the center of a square. My new office was located on the periphery of the quaint, circular walkway surrounding the church. It faced the Puccini Bomboni chocolate shop at the base of the church’s towering steeple, and a small café with outdoor seating. I was dying to try a sea salt caramel truffle from Puccini but duty prevented me from consuming any chocolate for now. Duty was, indeed, a bitch. I glanced at my feet on and off as we circled around the church. The cobblestones along Oudekerksplein were notoriously uneven.

My office was located on the ground floor of an antique brick apartment building. We entered via a back door, passed a room with a vintage washer and dryer, and a dingy bathroom, and arrived at my new work place. It consisted of one room. A single bed occupied one corner. A high chair faced a floor-to-ceiling window. Its shade was pulled down. There was a second door beside the window. It opened onto the street.

The landlady pointed to a circular button attached to the wall.

“Panic button,” she said.

“Who’s going to come to my rescue?” I said.

“The Turk will come.”

“What does he look like?”

The landlady pressed the button.

I glanced at my watch to measure the response time. Twenty seconds later a man came thundering down the hallway into my office. He arrived with muscles bunched and eyes bent on rectifying a wrong. He resembled a pallet-flinging, bone-breaking longshoreman who had rendered cranes and robots unnecessary in his day. His face was the size of a dinner plate and as handsome as the pan in which the roast had burnt. He had to stoop to get into the room, and as soon as he opened his mouth to speak, the blast of garlic almost knocked me out.

He spoke in Dutch and the landlady answered him accordingly. He relaxed once he heard what she had to say, and gave me his version of the once-over.

“American?” he said.

The landlady had seen my passport. I couldn’t lie even though I wanted to for some reason, as though being an American put me at greater risk outside the borders of my home country. This, in turn, pissed me off.

“That’s right,” I said. “I’m an American.”

He nodded with an unsettling mixture of determination and glee. “Good,” he said, in decent English. “I’m going to be your first customer.” With that seemingly business-like proclamation, he turned and disappeared.

The mere prospect of his intentions trumped most of the trials and tribulations of my life and rendered them cake-eating celebrations. I had become too clever for my own good. In fact, I was insane. A sinking feeling gripped me.

The landlady handed me the key. “Good luck,” she said.