The House of Dolls (2 page)

A shrug.

‘Then I expect you to do a better job than I did. You must excuse me.’ He rose from the bench seat, stretched his arms, took out a set of keys. ‘I have to go . . .’

‘Do you think you’ll see him here, then? Is it as easy as that? He’ll walk in and you’ll know.’

Her words seemed to disappoint him.

‘No,’ Vos replied. ‘But I want him to see me. Good day, Aspirant Bakker. I wish you well in your career.’

Then he plugged the earphones back into the phone, put them in his ears, and left.

Jimmy Menzo sat in a cold basement by the grey-brown bulk of the Oude Kerk. The faint drone of a pipe organ made its weedy way through the high slatted window. Outside, in the shadow of the squat church, the first morning whores writhed behind the glass of their cabins, waving their come-on gestures to the tourists wandering wide-eyed down the street.

Some stopped. Some walked on into the coffee shops. Doped or screwed, he got into their wallets either way. The city was a money machine. His. Not going to change.

Menzo had fled the slums of Surinamese when he was nineteen, abandoning the squalor of South America for the Netherlands, a harsh new world he entered with nothing more than a handful of guilders in his pocket, two powerful scarred fists and a head full of envy and ambition.

Two decades on he lived in a mansion near the waterfront, not far from the red-light district with his coffee shops and brothels, his cabins for rent to the freelance hookers and, most profitable of all, his hands around the drug supply chains threading through the area the locals called De Wallen.

From Centraal station in the north to Spui, from Nieuwmarkt to Damrak, the heart of Amsterdam belonged to the man who’d left the hovels of Paramaribo with nothing but some ragged clothes and a few hundred US dollars ripped off a failed coke shipment.

He’d earned this prize. Fought for it. And good fortune had put his one last rival, Theo Jansen, in jail.

That was two years before. Twenty-four months had passed in which Menzo battled night and day to seize every last fragment of Jansen’s empire, changing loyalties through money, through persuasion, through hard fists or the barrel of a gun when needed.

It was war of a kind and, like most modern conflicts, this one would never end.

Now a couple of kids fidgeted across the table from him. About the age Menzo was when he first turned up in Holland touting a fake passport and a forged work permit. Ugly like him, brutal, looking for opportunity. From Surinamese, once a little piece of Holland on the edge of South America. Short, stocky wannabe thugs not long arrived in town, one dressed in a shiny blue tracksuit, the other in red.

Four weapons on the battered wooden table. Two machine pistols, a couple of semi-automatic Walther P5s, the same kind the police used. Which was no coincidence, not that he said.

The two hunched, scared figures opposite couldn’t stop looking at them.

‘We’d planned on staying longer.’ The blue one. The bravest.

Menzo threw a briefcase on the table, opened it. They went quiet, stared at the spread of green money.

‘Fifty thousand US dollars. A couple of Antilles passports. Two tickets to Cape Town. Business class.’

‘Business class,’ red kid repeated, reaching for the case.

A bronchial, smoker’s laugh. Menzo was about the same size, pug-like and thuggish, strong, not one to shirk a fight. Pockmarked surly face. Narrow eyes. Swarthy skin.

He passed over a sheet of paper with Miriam’s tidy, female handwriting on it. A Prinsengracht address.

‘Miriam can fill you in. Afterwards you go here. It’s a shop. There you get the money. And the tickets.’

They looked at the paper like dumb school kids given impenetrable homework.

‘When can we come back?’ blue kid asked.

‘You don’t. You take the money and do what I did. Make your own way. I’ve friends over there. They can get you started.’

The two kids looked at each another.

‘What kind of shop?’ the red one asked.

Menzo liked their idiot questions, rifled through the pockets of his jacket. Black silk suit, sharp, tapered, tight. Made for him by a tailor in Bangkok where he went for business and a little pleasure.

Two business cards, the same pretty picture on the front. A miniature Amsterdam canal mansion in wood. Tiny pink chairs with tinier figures on them.

Poppenhuis aan de Prinsengracht
.

The Doll’s House on the Prinsengracht. He gave the kids a card each.

‘Dolls?’ red kid asked.

‘Don’t worry,’ Menzo told him. ‘They’re not there any more. Someone got rid of all the pretty things a while back.’

‘I got a sister here,’ the blue one said. ‘She just came out. Working in one of your restaurants. She needs me. If I leave—’

‘I’ll look after your sister. Make her manager. Give her a bar. Or something.’

A big, friendly smile.

‘Ask anyone. You do what Jimmy Menzo asks and no one ever touches you. I look after my own. Even when they’re someplace else.’

‘We’ve got a choice?’ blue kid asked quickly and Menzo thought maybe he’d underestimated this Surinamese brat, new off the plane, two hits to his name, police chasing him up and down the mainland and the Caribbean.

‘Sure you’ve got a choice.’

He lit a cigarette, listened to the asthmatic tones of the distant church organ. It was spring outside. Still cold with squally rain between brief spells of sun.

He took away the briefcase, put it on the floor. Their eyes were on the weapons.

Menzo got up from his seat, smiled at them. Launched himself at the table, seized the nearest machine pistol in his right fist. Waved the barrel in red kid’s face, then the blue. Laughing all the while.

‘Miriam?’ he yelled.

The door opened. Taller than Menzo, physique of a basketball player. Just touching thirty. Long face, one quarter Chinese she said and he believed it. A Trinidad girl, she barely spoke Dutch. Just English.

‘What?’ she asked.

Brown fur coat. What kind he didn’t know or care. She got all the money she wanted. Gave plenty in return.

‘These boys aren’t up to it,’ Menzo said. ‘Drive ’em to the station. Put ’em on a train somewhere. They’re pissing me off.’

The Surinamese brats shuffled on their seats, dumb young eyes on each other.

The woman walked up, threw some filthy English insults in their direction, glared at them with her big white staring eyes.

‘Fifty thousand dollars? How much you punks make back in Paramaribo?’

Silence.

She leaned over them. There was a presence to her, both enticing and threatening. Menzo loved the way she could scare a man and make him want her at the same time.

The kids were shivering. More than they did for him.

‘How . . . much . . . ?’ Miriam wanted to know.

‘Money’s no good if you don’t get to stay alive,’ blue kid mumbled.

Her long fingers wound into his lank, greasy hair, shook his head. Hard. Menzo watched, chuckled.

‘You get to stay alive, boy!’ she yelled at them. ‘More alive than we ever was when we showed up here. You get to live somewhere warm and cheap and sunny. Where no one knows who you are. How hard can it be?’

Their eyes were on the floor. Menzo put the long black weapon back on the table next to the others.

‘Not hard at all,’ he said then opened the case again, plucked a wad of the dollar bills, waved them in their faces.

‘What are we supposed to do?’ red kid asked.

Battle won.

‘Whatever Miriam tells you. Flight goes to London at six o’clock. You’re in Cape Town for breakfast. Looking at a new life.’

He patted the black gun.

‘You hear that? A new life. A little gratitude wouldn’t go amiss.’

Menzo waited. Miriam Smith waited, standing back on her heels, folding her arms through the brown fur coat.

‘Thanks,’ said red kid obediently.

‘Yeah,’ said the blue one and stared at the cold stone floor.

As usual Sam had stayed with the woman Vos had befriended in the security office. He retrieved the little dog, said thanks, then led him outside. The rain was holding off. He placed the white and tan fox terrier in the front basket of his rusting black pushbike, adjusted the plastic windscreen at the front, pulled two elastic bands out of his jacket pocket and snapped them round the bottom of his wide, unfashionable, creased and shabby jeans to keep them out of the chain.

Zappa had given way to Van Halen. He pulled out the phones and stuffed them into his pockets. One look at his jeans, the decrepit black bike, the dog in the front. Then he set off into the morning traffic for the ten-minute ride to the houseboat on the Prinsengracht.

Cyclists and trams. Cars and motorbikes. Baffled tourists wandering among them all, not knowing which way to look.

He’d asked Frank de Groot straight out: was there any news of Anneliese? The smallest piece of evidence to link her with the Prins girl apart from a doll? The silence that followed said everything.

Just eighteen months old, the dog circled the basket three times then settled, got bored and, as the bike picked up speed past Leidseplein, rose to his haunches, put his long nose and beard into the wind, turning from side to side with delight, mouth open, white teeth in an apparent grin.

The first spot of rain and he’d be back behind the windscreen. But spring was beginning to peek out from behind the grey shroud of winter. The lime trees showered the streets with their feathery seeds like tall statues scattering pale-green confetti for a wedding to come. The dog would enjoy his second lazy summer on the water, basking amidst the ragged vegetable and flower pots on the deck, enjoying the attentions of camera-happy tourists. More anonymously, Vos would too. And before the year was out the boat would be finished finally. He could try to think about what might come next.

A furious ringing of bells from behind, an exchange of cross words in English. Then, as he entered the long straight cycle path that ran alongside the canal, Laura Bakker pedalled briskly to his side muttering curses about tourists.

She was riding a rusty olive-green granny bike with high handlebars, sitting stiff-backed, a strand of red hair escaping to blow behind her in the spring breeze. The grey trouser suit looked as if it belonged in the 1970s. So, in a way, did Laura Bakker.

One hand, he saw, worked her phone. Talking while she rode, not looking where she was going. Or, worse, texting. As he watched the thing nearly fell from her grasp. She only stopped it with the sudden, informed response of someone who recognized how truly clumsy she was.

‘Vos! Vos!’ Bakker cried when she’d got firm hold of the phone again. ‘Listen to me! Stop, will you? Commissaris de Groot wants to see you to discuss this in person.’

A pleasure boat slowed on the canal. A pack of people in the front started taking pictures of them. Sam, paws on the front basket, little head into the breeze, shook his fur like a model posing for the camera.

‘Why on earth did De Groot send you? Of all people?’ Vos asked, keeping his eyes on the path ahead.

‘What’s wrong with me?’ She looked offended. ‘Just because I’m from Dokkum . . . it doesn’t mean I’m a moron.’ A glance towards Marnixstraat. ‘Whatever anyone thinks.’

‘I didn’t say that,’ Vos muttered then wove through a crowd of visitors wandering across the cycle track and quickly rode on.

‘Your dog’s very cute,’ Bakker noted as she caught up again. A smile then. For a moment she looked like a naive student fresh out of college trying to persuade the world at large to take notice and treat her seriously.

‘You don’t know him,’ Vos said.

‘I always wanted a pet.’

He stiffened with outrage.

‘A pet? Sam’s not a pet.’

Laura Bakker seemed worried she might have offended him.

‘What is he then?’

The gentle rise of a bridge approached. Vos pedalled harder, left her behind again, took his hands off the handlebar, throwing up both arms in despair.

The tourists tracking them on the canal launch loved this even more. An argument among locals. A lover’s tiff even.

She was back by his side quickly, more of her red hair free now, flying back beyond her shoulders.

‘This is childish,’ Laura Bakker declared.

‘Being pursued along the canal by a wet-behind-the-ears junior. That’s childish,’ he complained, and realized how petulant he sounded. ‘Arrest me and have done with it.’

‘I can’t arrest people. I’m not allowed. Commissaris de Groot doesn’t believe Katja’s trying to extort money from anyone. He thinks this is to do with your daughter’s case . . .’

Enough. He put out a hand to steady the dog then brought the bike to a sudden halt. The little animal yapped gleefully as if this were all a game.

‘I told you. Frank called me this morning,’ he repeated as Laura Bakker stopped by his side. ‘No one demanded a ransom for my daughter. No one gave me the chance to save her. If—’

‘Did you have much money?’

‘I’d have found it. If he’d asked. But he didn’t. For that or anything else. Anneliese was there one day. Then . . .’

Three years the coming July. It might have been yesterday. Or another lifetime altogether. Tragedy occurred outside normal time, everyday conventions. It possessed a bewildering ability to fade and grow brighter simultaneously. There was no such thing as closure. That was claptrap for the counselling services. Only a pain so insistent it eventually became familiar, like toothache or the ghostly ache of a missing limb.

‘I’m fed up arguing,’ she said briskly. ‘Commissaris de Groot says he needs your help. You and him are supposed to be friends. It’s not like it’s the only thing he’s got on his mind.’

Vos growled, a habit he’d picked up from the dog, then started pedalling again. She kept up, legs pumping at a steady, leisurely pace, big boots occasionally slamming against the frame. A gawky, awkward young woman. The kind of clumping, bumbling ingénue from the provinces that Marnixstraat’s hardened city officers would pounce on and devour in an instant.