The Double Eagle (25 page)

3:21
P.M.

T
hey walked past the buzzing open-air cafés and ten-dollar caricaturists on Rembrandtplein, the air reverberating to faded Beatles songs and South American pipe music played by groups of itinerant street musicians. Then they cut across onto Singel, a human statue dressed as the Tin Man standing at the corner, his body shifting robotically every time change was thrown into the bowl at his feet. Finally, they made their way up Raadhuisstraat onto Prinsengracht.

Jennifer read the names aloud off the street signs fixed high above their heads, contorting her tongue around the clearly unfamiliar spelling and pronunciation. And all around them, the canal sparkled in the sunlight like a dew-covered spider’s web.

Amsterdam’s crescent-shaped city center was laid out in the seventeenth century, its canals originally a defense from invasion. As its importance as a trading port grew, so did the network of narrow streets and canals that fanned out from this crescent, a series of concentric circles that ended in squares where the city gates would have stood and been locked every night. Those gates were long gone now, and many canals had been filled in with the advent of the motor car and the desire to make the city more accessible to traffic. But the city remains unique, the Venice of the North, as it is often called. Four hundred stone bridges still cross over one hundred kilometers of canal, a delicate skeleton of water that binds the city together.

It was nearly five years since Tom had last been in Amsterdam. He’d been casing a job, of course. He’d taken the time back then to commit the city to memory as he did whenever he was planning a job in a new place. Its streets and landmarks, its shortcuts, its bars and restaurants, its idioms and idiosyncrasies. Its secrets. From his perspective, it was all about minimizing the risks, about getting the job done and getting away safely. Now that knowledge was rapidly being excavated from the archive of his mind.

It was obvious where the murder had taken place. A large white plastic tent had been hastily erected on the pavement, covering the phone booth and an area of about five feet around it like a temporary shrine, shielding it from curious eyes. The irony of that played around the edges of Tom’s consciousness. Steiner’s actual death caught on video, the scene of his death zealously guarded. Surely, if anything, it should have been the other way round.

The tent was itself encircled by a series of steel barriers, their thick metal bars interwoven with a series of white signs shouting
POLITIE
in large blue letters. Blue-and-white crime-scene tape snapped in the wind like the ribbons on a kite.

They approached the barrier and checked the street in both directions, but no one seemed to be guarding the tent, certainly not the police. Tom called out to make sure, but there was no answer from inside. Two girls, studs driven into their lower lips and noses, angry tattoos snaking across their midriffs and emblazoned up their backs, approached them, arguing. As they walked past, Tom casually checked his wrist as if they were waiting for someone who was late, before realizing that he’d left his watch back at the hotel. The girls didn’t seem to notice and when the sound of their voices had faded away, he nodded at Jennifer. Almost as one, they vaulted the metal barrier and slipped under the entrance flap to the tent.

Inside, the late-afternoon sun fought its way through the thick white plastic with a sickly glow. The air was heavy and wet, like a neglected greenhouse. On the floor, sawdust—now dried into thick black clods—had been scattered to soak up Steiner’s blood. The raw, sordid smell of death crawled over everything.

As all over Amsterdam, the back wall of the phone booth had been decorated with a collage of garish and explicit cards advertising strip shows, sex lines, and prostitutes.
Naughty Schoolgirl Needs Spanking
one claimed,
Leather Lover Likes Licking
another promised. It was a smorgasbord of sex; each girl pictured was more attractive and with bigger breasts than the next. Every whim catered for, every fantasy only a phone call away.

Stepping right into the phone booth, the shattered handset still dangling from its cable, Tom studied each of them carefully.

“Are you that bored?” Jennifer joked, the hollow echo of her voice throbbing in the deadened stillness of the tent.

“Not exactly,” he replied without looking up. “I’m just thinking that if he wrote something down, he might have just grabbed the nearest available piece of paper. There’s nothing on any of these, though.” He examined each one in turn. “But look. There’s a card missing here.” He pointed to where the back of the phone booth was showing through the dense patchwork of cards, a solitary island of black plastic amid a sea of naked flesh. “Are you sure they didn’t find a card or something on the floor?”

“The file would have said.”

“Well…that’s it, then.” His voice conceded defeat. “If he did write on one of these it must have blown away. Maybe he wasn’t writing at all. I guess we need to look somewhere else.”

He looked away, his face creased in disappointment. But then something caught his eye. A small flash of white—nothing more than a fleck. Stepping closer, he could see that it was the corner of a card that had fallen down the back of the phone.

He took his sunglasses off his head and using one of the rubberized arms, teased the corner out until he was able to pinch it between his thumb and forefinger. He drew it up into the open, the paper slick between his perspiring fingers.

It featured a blond girl wearing nothing but cowboy boots and hat, her breasts partially concealed by the invitation to
Ride Me, Cowboy!
Tom held the card up to the gap on the phone booth wall. It fit perfectly.

“I think we just got lucky.” He smiled.

“What does it say?” Jennifer stepped toward him.

She squinted at what had been hastily scrawled in the top left corner of the card. Numbers of some sort. Tom read them out: 0090212.

“What do you think it means?”

“I’m not sure.” Tom fluttered the front of his shirt to try and get some air to circulate against his skin. The plastic tent was trapping the heat like a sauna, the hot air slopping over them both like the backwash from a jet engine.

“An address, or a zip code?” she suggested eagerly. “Or a safe deposit box number?”

“Perhaps.” Tom was hesitant. “But you know in Europe double-oh is the international access code, not oh-one-one like in the States. It could be a phone number.”

“So what’s ninety and two-one-two?”

“Well, two-one-two is New York, isn’t it? But the country code for the U.S. is one not ninety, so that doesn’t make sense.”

“Isn’t that a list of country codes there?” Jennifer pointed at a laminated poster to the left of the phone. She ran her finger down the list, muttering under her breath every so often.

“It’s only got the major countries here, so it might not have it. China eighty-six…India ninety-one…Mexico fifty-two…Here we go. Turkey ninety. It’s Turkey.”

“Of course.” Tom snapped his fingers and grimaced in frustration.

“What?”

“I’d forgotten. Two-one-two is the city code for Istanbul.”

“So what are you saying? That maybe Steiner was in the middle of writing someone’s number down when he got killed?”

Tom agreed with a nod.

“Could be.”

“Maybe he was still searching for a buyer. Maybe he’d found someone there that was interested.”

Tom shrugged, his voice skeptical.

“In Istanbul? It’s possible, I guess. But it’s not an obvious place.”

“Well, can’t we find out who the most likely buyers are out there? If there isn’t a big list it should make it easier.”

“I guess so.”

A shadow fell over the tent, a dark silhouette projected against the white plastic that grew smaller as its owner drew closer.

“Wie is daar?”
the shadow barked.

“Shit.” Tom slipped the card in his pocket and quickly searched for a way out. There was none. The tent had been firmly anchored to the ground, its skirt flush to the pavement.

A large gloved hand slipped through the doorway and gripped the entrance flap. Tom knew that this was not good. They’d used Jennifer’s contacts to bypass customs, taking a small, rarely patrolled road over the border. Technically, as in France, they had entered the country illegally.

What’s more, Tom had ensured that they did not have to fill out a registration card at the hotel, normally mandatory for all guests, the details uploaded onto national police databases every night. That was also illegal. Neither of them could afford a run-in with the law, not at this stage. The list of possible options ran through his head. In the end, only one was practical.

He grabbed Jennifer and kissed her.