Ridley Pearson - Choke Point

“The neighborhoods are not impoverished, Mr. Steele. Amsterdam is a city of immigrants—but only for the past three centuries. Do your research! Mark got a story he didn’t ask for. It’s as simple as that. He’s a control freak. If he assigns the story, it has value. If it’s brought to him in a meeting and discussed, it has value. If it shows up in his in-box unassigned . . .”

“What editor can work that way?”

“Now you’re sounding like Sonia.”

“You have my card.”

She fingers it, flicking the corner. “Yes.”

Grace doesn’t know if it’s her being Chinese, or the EU credentials, but no one at the health clinic attempts to stonewall her. She asks for and is given a printout of the emergency admission records for Kahil Fahiz. It goes too easily, a rarity. She commits the home address to memory, along with a mobile number. A few minutes later, she has entered them both into her phone. Without Sonia Pangarkar’s tendency toward graphic journalism she would not have known the hospital. But now all that’s left is navigating her way through a busy city, finding bridges across canals, and wending her way toward the address.

When mapped, Amsterdam sits like the left half of a bike wheel with crepe paper woven through the spokes; the crepe paper is the canals, with Centraal Station as the wheel’s hub. Over the centuries, the city has expanded ever outward from the thirty blocks of its central historic district—devoted entirely to tourism, the canals lined with picturesque three-story Dutch timber and Tudor houses—to a postwar district of nearly identical brick and white-trim apartment complexes. These outer neighborhoods, all identical, stretch for miles in every direction.

Grace double-checks not only the building number, but the street name. The architecture and street layout are so homogeneous as to be dizzying.

No one answers her repeated tries on the Fahizes’ door. The first hiccup. She tries the phone number but gets voice mail in Farsi. She understands this. She imagines no matter how many times she called, it would go to voice mail. The victim of a beating, Fahiz will strive to remain as anonymous and invisible as possible. Because of this, she has her work cut out for her. But a person has to work.

The third neighbor she tries cringes at the mention of Fahiz’s name; a reaction to his face following the beating, or his personality? She tells Grace of a shisha café, La Tertulia, that Fahiz frequents. How this woman knows this, or whether it’s accurate, is anybody’s guess. She asks directions, thanks the woman and heads off. She pauses at the bottom of the stairs; the neighbor is still watching her. There seems to be a question hanging between them—as if Grace forgot to ask this woman something. It’s a strange and haunting feeling, and she can’t shake it for the entire walk to the café.

La Tertulia is located on the ground floor of a brownstone. The smell of cannabis overwhelms as Grace enters, despite what are supposed to be vaporless pipes. New Age murals cover the walls—whales in blue oceans—with cannabis plants spreading above the couches and opium beds that proliferate. It’s a pot shop primarily aimed at tourists, but there appear to be locals in residence as well, some of whom are of Middle Eastern descent and are smoking tobacco, not cannabis, from hookahs. The piped-in music reminds Grace of massage spas. A waitress with three studs in her lower lip and blue dye streaking her dark hair waves Grace toward a beanbag.

She thanks the girl, speaking Dutch, but heads directly to two men in the corner, one of whom has a face like a punching bag.

“Mr. Fahiz?” She speaks English first.

Fahiz looks up at her with mild interest. He has sleepy, dark eyes, a heavy shadow of beard, expressive thick eyebrows and a full head of hair. He’s easily seventy years old.

Not the man described in Sonia Pangarkar’s article.

Not by a long shot.

Knox walks along the avenue, Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal, beneath an oppressive quicksilver marine layer that makes everyone look small, the tram and cabs toylike. The only relief to the impervious gray comes in the form of an occasional umbrella—of little use against the steady mist. He wears nondescript brown shoes, blue jeans and a tan Scottevest windbreaker with sixteen zippered internal pockets all containing various necessities. A roll of coins to palm in a fistfight. A penlight. A pack of waterproof matches. A pick gun for the occasional locked door. A sewing kit in case he’s wounded. That he blends in is never in question. The Detroit Tigers cap helps to hide his face with its two-day beard and Tunisian tan. He passes a dozen of himself. Keeps his right shoulder to the storefronts to reduce his exposure. Uses reflections off the glass to his advantage.

The coffee shop is abuzz with conversation as he enters. This is his fifth visit here in as many days and it’s always the same. The crowd is a sprinkling of tourists on top of a foundation of firmly rooted locals. English is spoken as much as Dutch. There is an intensity to the conversation that one doesn’t hear as much in the U.S. The women look masculine in their short haircuts. Only the piercings give them away. Knox is a fan of femininity, and mourns its passing.

He finds a chair at a table occupied by a young couple, and installs himself. A waitress with a lip stud and midnight purple eye shadow takes his order for an espresso. Knox pulls out his mobile—an iPhone on a prepaid SIM—and sends a text across the room. Of the twenty or so in the café, twenty or so have their phones out. Including Sonia.

Wait for signal. Leave cafe. Take tram to Centraal. Take 13 to Westermarkt. Proceed south on Keizersgracht to the Dylan Hotel. Wait in the lobby.

He hits SEND, his eyes straying over the balcony. Knox uses the camera to surreptitiously get a closer look, just as he used it a day earlier to capture her number as her phone rebooted. Her elegant fingers with their close-clipped black polished nails nudge her phone almost absentmindedly as the text comes through. She eventually drags the phone to a reading distance, and—if he had to guess—she reads the message twice.

His camera is on his lap by the time her head snaps up and she scans the room. He can only wonder what she’s experiencing. He’s banking on a journalist’s curiosity; an investigative reporter’s paranoia; a woman’s intuition. Given the controversy of the topic she’s been covering, and the unfortunate outcome for at least two of her sources, she must give weight to the possibility that she herself is being watched. He won’t know until he tries.

It’s everything he can do to keep himself in the chair. Time crawls. The overhead fans spin more slowly. He sees every twitch of character on every face, hears the scrape of chair legs on marble, the sputter of lips sipping steaming coffee. She’s on heightened alert, observing everything taking place in the café. She not only awaits the signal mentioned in the message, but wants to identify who’s responsible.

Knox waits. He’s in the business of opportunity. He stands. Lets a girl screen him. Crosses to the man with the heavy eyebrows and expressionless face.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Knox says, reaching his target. He speaks English.

He fires off a photograph. A volley of four flashes burst, blinding the man.

“Thank you!” he says. He moves and takes another picture, placing himself between the man tailing Sonia and the door.