Choke Point (4 page)

K
nox has never been in a newsroom before. His only impressions are from the movies—the noise, the confusion of dozens of reporters in small cubicles, phones ringing, pages running up and down aisles. About the only thing that matches with the image now in front of him is the glass wall at the end of the room beyond which are the offices of various editors, including the editor in chief. It’s quiet, subdued, many of the cubicles empty. It has to do with the world economy, the state of the newspaper business. If once this newsroom thrived, it does no longer.

“Emily Prager?”

The woman who looks up at him is tired and needs to wash her hair. A package of nicotine gum rests by her keyboard, along with a blue spongy ball and a black hair tie.

He introduces himself as John Steele, the freelance photographer who called looking for Sonia Pangarkar. The receptionist told him where to find her. “You said you might be able to help me find her.”

“I did not expect a visit.”

“I can be impulsive.”

“I told you: she’s not coming into work right now. She’s taken a leave. I’m sorry.”

“A leave, or on holiday?”

“She and Mark had a falling out. Our city editor.”

“Over?”

“Not for me to say.” Her eyes tell him she’s uncomfortable speaking to him here. “You’ll need to take that up with her.”

“Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

“No, thank you.”

“Please.”

She lowers her voice as her eyes appraise him. “Sonia is sometimes a little too independent—a little too creative for Mark.”

“The sweatshop article. The girl. That’s exactly why I’m here.”

“She was assigned a piece on medical care. It’s not exactly what she filed.”

“But a strong piece just the same.”

“But Mark . . . he writes the paychecks. He knows what he wants. He and Sonia . . . believe me, they have both benefited from the other, but it is push and pull with them. Right now, Mark is pushing. So is Sonia. So, her leave of absence.”

“The car bombing didn’t carry her byline.” Knox had a crash course in journalism over the phone with a friend at the
Detroit Free Press
. He hopes to hell he has his lexicon straight. He feels he’s inching closer to something, doesn’t want to give himself away.

“No.”

“And that upset her.”

Emily Prager’s consternation gives way. “There’s a Starbucks on the corner. Ten minutes.”

After twelve minutes he’s beginning to worry, but she arrives soon thereafter, a sweater around her shoulders. She orders a coffee and waits for it, and joins him at a small table. The place is jumping. The streets are busy.

“Look,” she says, “it’s not like I have a lot to say to you.”

“Yet here we are.”

“I Googled your work. It’s good. You’re good.”

Dulwich and the Hong Kong office have made John Steele credible. “Her phone number?”

She appraises him. “I don’t think so.”

“You could text her for me. Let her know I’d like to meet with her.”

“I could, but I won’t. Sonia doesn’t need a photographer, she needs time away. This story got to her. It happens.”

“Good photographs carry a story,” he says. “From the moment I read her piece . . .” He shakes his head. “You could just let her know I’m available.”

“I can’t get involved.” Again, she studies his face. This time her expression softens. “There is a café on the corner of Paleisstraat and Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. Southwest corner, close by to the tram stop. I forget the name of it. We have met there several times. Couches. Lamps. More like a home than these Starbucks,” she says. “She favors it.”

“I’ll give you my number.” He pulls out a business card for John Steele, circles the mobile number in pen, and passes her the card. He compliments himself for having the cards made. Best thirty euros he’s spent.

“I won’t,” she says.

“You might.”

“It’s personal for her. For Sonia. There was a niece, I believe it was. It’s a mistake to allow that into your stories. Mark knows that. Sonia should. But that’s the thing about the personal—it creeps in, and you don’t see it for what it is.”

Knox thinks about Tommy, and his heart is heavy. “A niece.”

“In India. Similar circumstances.”

Knox senses her reluctance. Isn’t going to push.
Similar circumstances.
The words swim around.

He says, “She’s going to freelance the story.”

“It happens.”

“And the paper?”

“Mark won’t like it. He’ll throw a fit. But in the end, Sonia will win. Sonia always wins. She’s very, very good. A reporter like her comes around only a few times a generation. The language skills. The people skills. Aggressive to the point of dangerous. To herself. To others. She is pretty enough for television, but has not given into it fully yet. She dabbles, for her own amusement. She is still a writer first.” She drinks the coffee, her eyes searching him over the rim expectantly.

She looks like she’s beginning to enjoy this.

“It’s a compelling story,” he says. “Child labor. Poor working conditions. Impoverished neighborhoods. Unwanted immigrants. Why would an editor turn away from that?”

“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.”

G
race 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.

K
nox 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.

He sees his plan has worked perfectly. Sonia is outside and moving across the street.

Her tail realizes she’s gone.

Too late.

Knox uses the iPhone’s camera to take a photo of the Nikon’s small display. He texts the photo to Grace.

Sonia boards a tram. Her tail is too late.

—

G
RACE’S PHONE
BUZZES
in her right hand. Even though she expects the text, the sensation nonetheless startles her. Standing outside Centraal Station, she feigns studying the tram schedule display. Her jaw lifted, her eyes are nonetheless trained on the faces of all the passengers disembarking a Line 5 tram. She raises the phone to where she can see Knox’s photo of the man in the café, while studying the faces of those departing the tram.

She slips her iPhone into her black leather bag.

The area outside the station is jammed. Busier than she’d expected. She works to filter out the noise and confusion, to focus. She’s noticed three pairs of police on patrol. One is behind and heading away from her. Another to her left dealing with a vagrant. The third pair enters the station.

And yet, despite the chaos, there is something reassuring that everyone has a place to be, a place to go, a schedule to keep.
If only the world were more like a train station,
she thinks. When had the comforting sense of order been replaced by randomness?

Sonia appears from the door of the number 5 tram, as expected. She has a beautiful face: wide-set dark eyes, gorgeous Indian skin. She’s shorter than Grace expected, perhaps her same height, wearing a soft purple scarf over her head, designer blue jeans and a flowing top beneath a tailored brown leather coat. She doesn’t hurry, doesn’t look back. Grace has the sense she’s paying attention to her surroundings. Her body language is magnificent, that of a bored commuter, but a close look at her eyes tells the observer she is alert and busy-minded. Grace is immediately impressed.

A half dozen outdoor platforms serve the station. Platform 4 is currently serving Line 13.

Sonia is following Knox’s directions to the letter.

Grace waits, sipping a coffee and swallowing her impatience. It is a deficiency her trainers have worked hard to remove. Not easily done. But she has learned to overcome it with small tricks, aware of its destructiveness.

Sonia’s tail appears only minutes later on the next number 5. He’s a clever one, this bastard. He inspects the schedule display, turns around. Grace does as Knox asked. She moves toward him and they collide. Her coffee spills across him.

“Shit,” he curses in Dutch-accented English.

As Grace catches sight of Sonia climbing onto the number 13 tram, she rattles off an apology in Mandarin. She’s brushing his side now, feeling a lump under his coat that is the weapon, down his leg as she kneels. He swipes at her hands, not wanting the contact. The delay is effective. At least twenty seconds and counting. She is telling him in Mandarin that she wishes to pay for the stains she has created. She proffers euros he has no use for, making sure that he knocks them from her hands in the process of his refusal. Making a scene. Forty seconds. Fifty. Head held low in an act of contrition, when the real point is to keep him from getting a good look at her. There may be cause for them to meet later. Grace cannot afford to be recognized.

It’s over quickly. He steps out of the puddle and makes physical contact with her as he pushes her aside in his disgust. A simple shove to the shoulder, but she goes over like a feather duster, impressed. He’s on the scent like a hound, pulled by the same string that aimed him at Platform 4. She could follow, but Knox has instructed her not to, and though it was difficult at first, she has learned to trust his areas of expertise. She has come to respect, even admire, his abilities—his street savvy, his people instinct, his understanding of crowds. He is capable of things most people don’t ever think of. But she does think of these things because she has been trained to, because it interests her. She enjoys the role of the predator, the voyeur, the phantom. She thrives in shadow. This man understands these worlds in ways others do not; there is much to learn from him, though she is loath to admit it. It comes to him naturally, a second nature; he’s like a natural-born musician who doesn’t understand his own talent. But she understands for him. She knows what he does not: that there are few like him, that he teaches without meaning to, that he can frighten with a look, calm with a word or two. For now, she is content to follow his lead in some areas while making sure he never thinks she is. So she lets the tail go. The minute delay was all that was asked of her and she has accomplished it. The rest is now on Knox’s meeting with Sonia. Grace can get back to what she does best—though what exactly that is, she’s still working out.