Adios Muchachos (16 page)

Chapter
Thirty-Two

November 9, 0800 hours

Karl Bos was in his office signing documents and handing them absentmindedly to an assistant, who slipped them, one by one, into a transparent folder. When the last one was put away: “Ms. Castillo, if there’s anything that urgently requires my personal attention, I’ll be in the conference room with Mr. King and Mr. van Dongen; otherwise, I am not to be disturbed.”

The oval table was littered with pads, ballpoints, telephones, water bottles, coffee cups. The three men sat there, trying to dispel the tension. Victor smoked, van Dongen stared at the ceiling, and Karl Bos poked at his palm computer and made notes in silence. Just as Bos was looking at his wristwatch for the hundredth time, the telephone rang.

“Yes!”

A second later, he arched his eyebrows and nodded to the others to let them know that it was the call they had been waiting for. He made the shape of a woman in the air and shaped his lips to form the word “woman.”

“Yes, I understand.”

Dressed like a chubby American tourist, with the corresponding wig and sandals, Alicia exaggerated a Mid-western accent and pinched her nose to distort her voice. “Will you be prepared to make the payment on the seventeenth?”

“Yes, the money will be ready.”

“Who will be making the payment? Remember, it must be someone we know.”

“Yes, of course. The payment will be made by our Mr. van Dongen.”

“Ah, good. The nose with the man attached.” In spite of himself, Karl Bos sneaked a peek at Jan van Dongen as the caller continued: “Please remember that you are to prepare four hundred packs containing one hundred bills each.”

“Yes.”

“No consecutive serial numbers.”

“Understood.”

“That will come to about one hundred pounds; so calculate the volume and get the right size bag.”

“Yes, that will be fine, but we will need to see a picture of Mr. Groote holding today’s or tomorrow’s newspaper.”

“A photo? That should be no problem, but I’ll have to consult with my associates.”

The line went dead.

“I think they’re going to accept the part about the picture,” Bos said, making the thumbs up sign to Jan. “It was a good idea, Jan.”

Van Dongen smiled, satisfied.

“Well,” Bos stood and recovered the cigarette holder he had left in the ashtray when the phone rang, “the ball is in our court, for now; so let’s get moving. They want the money in four hundred packages of hundred-dollar bills, and it has to be ready by the seventeenth.”

Fiddling with a ruler and a ten-dollar bill he had just retrieved from his wallet, van Dongen calculated, mumbled, scribbled, mumbled again, and announced: “We’ll be needing a volume of about a seventh of a cubic meter.”

“What’s that in measurements,” Victor asked, “so I can go out and buy it?”

“We’re going to have to get a strong man to tote a hundred pounds around,” commented Bos.

“Yeah, I have some weights at home, Jan, if you think you’ll need them,” Victor joked.

Chapter
Thirty-Three

November 9,1200 hours

A man with long black hair and a thick moustache was presenting his receipt at the Foto Centro shop on Twenty-third Street. The girl gave him an envelope; he paid and walked out into the noonday sun. It was a scorcher.

November 9, 1300 hours

The clerk at the Triton Hotel looked up at the man who had given him the passport to verify that it was the same Spanish-looking gentleman in the picture.

“Welcome to our hotel, Señor Groote; we wish you a pleasant stay with us.”

Walking out of the hotel with the keys that would be used on the following day, the dark Groote-persona got into the waiting car and it took off. Turning onto Fifth Avenue on the way back to the house, the man removed the wig and moustache, stuffed them into a briefcase, and proceeded to wipe the grease paint off his face.

“That was a masterpiece of acting and disguise,” Alicia commented, looking through the pictures. “I almost didn’t let you back in the car.”

“Yes, it did work rather well,” Victor said, smiling.

Chapter
Thirty-Four

November 9, 1500 hours

Alicia and Victor had almost succeeded in defrosting Rieks. Stretched out on a deck chair by the pool, Groote was wearing the straw hat that people in the country used to protect themselves from the implacable rays of the sun. Victor approached the body and poked it in several places to see how far the thawing had gone—it would not do to break off a piece.

About ten minutes later, Alicia came out of the house carrying a large pail of steaming water. “Well, do we start to wash him, or what?”

Victor nodded and Alicia began scrubbing Rieks with a large bath sponge and detergent to get all the dark make-up off of the parts of the body that would appear in the picture.

“Watch out you don’t rip any of the skin off of his face—” Victor started.

“OK, that’s it! Who died and made you boss?” Then, looking at Rieks: “Never mind the joke! Just get over here and give me a hand with the washing.” She cut off her invective to ask, “And why would the skin come off?”

“They say that when a person is frozen you can break pieces off them because they get so brittle, and the same goes for the skin. I mean, that’s what they say up in the friggin’ Yukon.”

“Isn’t he thawed out?” Alicia asked.

“Not entirely … and it’s better that way because otherwise he would be all floppy and impossible to manage.”

“All right, let’s see if we can do this before he starts stinking.”

“I don’t think—” Victor began.

“Don’t think. And don’t talk to me,” Alicia interrupted. “Yuk! In a few minutes he’s going to stink, and that’s that.”

When they got through with the bath, Victor took Rieks by the armpits, Alicia grabbed him by the ankles, and together they somehow managed to load him into the funereal wheelbarrow. Victor turned his back on the wheelbarrow and pulled it rickshaw-fashion to avoid seeing Rieks any more than he had to. As Victor pulled the wheelbarrow into the house, Rieks’s head fell out over the end and began to bob. Alicia, who was following close behind, made the rest of the walk into the house bending over to hold up Rieks’s head. She was relieved that Victor couldn’t see her because she would have been hard-pressed to explain what she was doing.

Dressing the body in the kind of attire people at the company were used to seeing him in was hard enough, but the fun really began when it was time to arrange him into a believable position for the photo session.

Sitting him in a chair was easy. With a rope tied around his lower stomach and around the back of the chair, they were able to prevent him from sliding onto the floor. The rope under his armpits was a bit more difficult, since it couldn’t appear in the picture; they had to cut holes in the shirt and jacket just behind the arms so that they could run the rope through the clothing and tie the ends around the back of the chair.

Although they now had the corpse in a seated position, the head still flopped forward onto the chest. Victor taped a broomstick to the back of the chair and was able to tie a lock of Rieks’s hair to the stick.

“There! We have it,” Victor exclaimed, victorious.

“Yeah,” added Alicia, “now all we have to do is give him a different expression.”

“Different like what?”

“Different like he is
alive
, that’s what.”

“Well, you’re going to have to apply a little make-up and then I’ll tape his eyes open,” Victor said, solving the problem with no apparent difficulty.

Of course, things are never that easy. The pieces of tape made Rieks look like a dead ringer for Ari Onassis, and every few seconds the corpse would direct a mischievous wink at them. They finally wound up using cyanoacrylate super glue. That didn’t solve the problem of the eyeballs, but, hey, you can’t win them all.

Victor took the first Polaroid and waited for the image to emerge. And there it was … a perfect picture of a corpse tied to a chair.

“Let’s try putting his elbows up on the table. That’s more natural,” Alicia suggested.

“Great. You get under the table and hold his arms by the elbows. I’ll loosen the rope so he can lean forward a little. No, wait!” Victor ordered, running into the kitchen and returning with two pieces of a broken mop stick. “I’m going to put these sticks through the sleeves so you can shift his forearms into different positions.”

When everything was ready, Victor stepped back to gain perspective. “Yes, that looks almost natural.” And then to Alicia: “Hold on down there. I’m going to hang a sheet as a backdrop to hide anything identifiable.” Victor put up the sheet, grabbed the Nikon, and started shooting. “OK, now see if you can get his right arm up a little … That’s fine … Hold it … Now the left …”

Under the table, Alicia was sweating buckets and was disgusted with handling the corpse, but imagining Rieks like a muppet with a nodding head also had her on the verge of hysterical laughter.

“That’s great … Now some profile shots …”

Victor had gotten off about sixty of the seventy-two split-frame pictures when the weight of the leaning corpse began to push against the table, and the whole package—body, newspaper, broom sticks, and all—landed in a heap on top of Alicia, who stopped laughing barely long enough to scream, “Get him off me! Get him off me!”

“All right, all right,” Victor said, trying not to laugh, “I think we got it.”

“You’d better hope so, because there isn’t going to be another take.”

Chapter
Thirty-Five

The following day, Karl Bos’s secretary found a manila envelope on the floor in front of the office door. She set it aside, and as soon as Mr. Bos was settled in for the day’s work, she brought it to him. Bos opened the envelope, stared hard at the picture of Rieks, and, wiping a tear from his eye, said, “Ms. Sanchez, please have Mr. van Dongen and Mr. King come to my office.”

“Look at our poor Rieks,” he said, showing the picture to Victor and van Dongen and hardening his face to avoid another tear in the presence of his business associates.

Jan van Dongen took the photograph in his hands and immediately began to shake his head. He pursed his lips and continued shaking his head. “Why didn’t they take a front view? This really scares me,” he said, continuing to shake his head.

Bos took the picture again and asked, “What’s wrong, Jan?”

When Victor came in a second later, Bos handed him the photo and asked him what he thought.

“You can’t see his eyeballs,” van Dongen insisted. “This might very well be a picture of a corpse.”

“I don’t think so, Jan,” Victor said. “After so many days … I don’t know how they could possibly—”

“That’s what I think,” Bos interrupted. “Don’t ask me how; I don’t know how. What I do know is that there is nothing in this photograph that tells me that Rieks is still alive, and that terrifies me.”

“They could have drugged him,” Victor suggested.

“Or they might have beat him in the face,” Bos added.

“Or they might have killed him,” van Dongen insisted.

Victor looked over van Dongen’s shoulder at Bos, shrugging his shoulders and arching his eyebrows to suggest that Jan’s suspicions were paranoid exaggerations.

In the pantry beside the suite of offices occupied by the company, Hendryck Groote’s uniformed waitress set three cups of coffee on a tray and started for the door to the main office. On the way she heard Bos’s boisterous laugh and smiled. Seeing the smile on the face of the receptionist, she winked in friendly complicity and walked on. When she heard the second and third laughs, she could resist no longer and started laughing herself, along with the receptionist.

You could not blame them. When Karl Bos laughed, everyone heard. His laughter would reverberate through walls and down hallways, sparing no one from its joyous contagion. When the boss was happy, everyone laughed, because the redheaded, fiftyish giant had a naïve and childish laugh that no one could listen to without reacting.

As the waitress entered the office, she also heard the quieter laugh of Victor King, the good-looking one, and saw that Mr. van Dongen was standing before the other two, telling them some story she could not understand.

“Smoked eels with mango sauce? You’re shitting us, Jan; no one could eat that.”

“What did you say the aunt’s name was?”

“Cornelia,” van Dongen replied, straight-faced. She’s Rieks’s father’s elder sister and she’s completely mad. She delights in torturing her guests with her culinary atrocities.”

“And the Tropical Baltic was her invention?”

“Of course; who else? And she always tells her guests the story about how one of the chefs at the Waldorf Astoria was so impressed that he asked her to give him the recipe and sign a release so he could add it to his repertoire.”

“Ha ha ha! The guy has to be the biggest ball-breaker in New York City.”

“Nah, never happened; the old lady’s a psychopathic liar.”

“Ha ha ha, oh, oh.” The giant gasped for a breath of air to go on laughing.

The maid left with the tray as discreetly as she could. The receptionist, dying to know what was going on, looked at her imploringly.

“They were speaking English and you know I don’t understand a word …”

Back in the office, Victor was asking van Dongen, “Do you think Rieks remembers the name of the concoction?”

“Naturally, Vic,” van Dongen assured him. “You know how Rieks loves to pull pranks. Whenever he was in one of his sadistic moods, he would take guests out to aunt Cornelia’s for some Tropical Baltic.”

Bos’s guffaws again reverberated off the walls of the office, his face redder than usual and a rebellious lock of hair jiggling on his forehead.

“So, what’s your idea, Jan?” he asked, still laughing and wiping his fogged glasses.

“Simple, Karl: When the kidnappers call tomorrow, we ask them to have Rieks tell them the name and ingredients of Aunt Cornelia’s greatest creation. They can easily ask him and then tell us.”

Victor agreed with emphatic nods. “Great! If we get the right answer, we’ll know for sure that Rieks is still alive and well.”

“A brilliant idea,” Bos seconded, letting out another guffaw.

That evening, as he was driving into his garage, Jan realized that he had made a mistake. The eel and mango dish Aunt Cornelia had invented was not called the Tropical Baltic, but the Tropical Boreas. He recalled that Cornelia had also invented a cold codfish soup with akee, rum, and chile peppers that she had christened Caribbean Baltic. In her twenty-year retirement in Curaçao after the death of her cherished husband, Cornelia found pleasure in concocting culinary fantasies that had something of her homeland and something of her beloved Caribbean.

Rieks had sprung the Caribbean Baltic on his guests several times. “If you stayed away from the akee and chile peppers,” the guests always said, “the soup itself was quite edible.”

If nothing else, that probably said a lot about Dutch cuisine.

In Jan’s mind, the confusion between Baltic and Boreas was a logical terminological mistake. He considered calling Bosand Victor to rectify the error, but thought it would not be worth the trouble. Rieks would give them the right name.