The Expats (38 page)

That whole spontaneous Saturday night had been carefully orchestrated. That attempted mugging was play-acted, a sham.

This had all started a quarter-year ago.

Dexter was hiding something—was it really fifty million stolen euros?—and these FBI agents were tight on his tail. They were following his every move, through Luxembourg and Belgium and into Holland, now tracking him around Amsterdam. They were closing in on something, unwilling to allow Dexter out of sight for a weekend. Why?

The boys spilled out of the chocolate shop, victorious, their booty held aloft—“Mommy! Look!”—eager to show their mother what their father had allowed them to choose, innocent and naive.

Kate smiled down at her children, but she was shivering with cold and terror. “That’s great, sweetie.”

Whatever was going on, it felt like it was drawing to an end. Kate certainly hoped it wouldn’t be a violent end. But she had to be prepared.

KATE WAS ALONE, stopped in the middle of a bridge, looking up at the spectacular sky: the deep rich blue damask of dusk, the fast-moving
puffy clouds, layers of whites and silvers and grays piled atop one another. The lights were on in the windows, on the fronts of bicycles, reflecting in the water.

Dexter had taken the boys back to the hotel for a predinner pay-per-view; they weren’t meeting his tiresome friend Brad until eight.

On the far side of the bridge, the last of the boutiques fell away, like the end of a commercial stretch on a suburban road, the final Sizzler and Meineke under streetlights before the dark countryside. The funk of marijuana drifted from a pair of dreadlocked teens.

Kate found a bank, entered the small vestibule with the ATMs. She ignored the cards in their slits in her wallet, the everyday cards. Instead she reached her thumb into an interior pocket, a half-dozen pieces of plastic there, things she didn’t need to carry in Europe, but did: laminated American Social Security card, old office ID, gym membership. And the bank card, the checking account in her old name. The account Dexter didn’t know about.

She withdrew the limit: one thousand euros.

She also withdrew the maximum from their joint Luxembourg account, another thousand. She took cash advances from two credit cards, a thousand apiece.

Back in the street, the red lights began to appear, the women large and unattractive, southeast Asians, garters and high heels and sagging breasts spilling out of ornate lace.

Kate found a convenience store. She bought a packet of plastic bags, a roll of tape, a bottle of water. She was thirsty, nervous.

The streets grew narrower and the storefront windows denser, six girls in quick succession, good-looking dark-haired Europeans; then around the corner a few Africans, full-lipped and big-bottomed. There appeared to be departments. Like a department store.

She entered a well-lit café, clean and safe-looking from the outside, but rougher within. She ordered a Coke, left her coins on the bar, drank it quickly. She walked to the rear, found the sign for the toilet, pointing down a creepy-looking winding staircase. There were a couple men down there, a shady transaction, the stench of secrecy.

“Excuse me,” she said, sidling past, locking the door. She took the baggies out of her coat pocket, tore one off along the perforation, tossed the remainder in the bin. She removed her wad of large-denomination bills. Peeled off a few hundreds, shoved those in her right pocket; some twenties were in her left. She put the balance of the four thousand euros into the bag. She pressed the air out, folded the packet tightly, wound it up in tape.

She sat down on the toilet. Pulled off her left boot. When she crossed her legs, she always did it right over left. She didn’t know if she’d be crossing her legs—she didn’t know how the hell this was going to go down, if at all. But better safe than sorry.

The boot had a low heel, but it would do. At the rear of the sole, back behind the arch, where the leather sole rose to meet the rubber-bottomed heel, there was ample space. In this space, she taped her compressed bagful of cash.

Outside again, men were shuffling their feet, making fleeting eye contact through the red miasma and the glinting expanses of velvet-framed glass. There were boisterous teenagers, groups of three or four, outdoing one another in bravado to compensate for inexperience. Besuited middle-aged men, some furtive, others brazen—regulars, or simply beyond caring what strangers thought, secure in the knowledge that here, everyone was pursuing their own agenda. Not unlike everywhere.

The coffee shops were full and loud and rank smelling, the pungent pot wafting through doorways and lingering on sidewalks.

A young man met her eye, a come-on to something. She considered and dismissed him, kept walking.

Along another canal, this one very different from what she’d seen of upscale Amsterdam, lined with sex shops and nightclubs and red-lit windows. The sound of drunken laughter spilling out of a bar, Australian-accented English, the titter of embarrassed women.

Another man made eye contact, this one older, harder. He nodded at her, and she nodded back. He said something in Dutch, and she slowed down, but didn’t respond.

“You lookin’ for sometin’?” West Indian accent, far from home. So was she.

“Yeah.”

Gold tooth glinting. “What dat?”

“Something special,” she said. “Something steel. With lead.”

His smile disappeared. “Can’t ’elp you wit’ dat.”

She reached into her pocket, removed a twenty. “Who can?”

“Go see Dieter. Up dere.” Inclining his head, dreadlocks tumbling.

She continued up the sidewalk beside the narrow canal, the sounds and smells close beside her. In front of a live-sex club, promotional posters leaving no doubt about the show, a man in a shiny black suit, pointy-toed shoes, narrow leather tie, carefully watching everyone come and go. He met Kate’s eye.
“Guten tag.”

“Hi. You Dieter?”

He nodded.

“I’m looking for something. A friend told me you could help. It’s steel.”

Dieter looked confused. “Is a stolen thing?”

“No,” she said. “Steel. Metal.” She raised her hand, pointed at him with her forefinger, thumb straight up in air. Winked the thumb. Bang.

Dieter understood, shook his head. “Not possible.”

She took two blue twenties out of her pocket, offered them. He grimaced, didn’t accept the money, shaking his head again.

Kate retrieved another bill, this one a hundred.

Dieter glanced at the green piece of paper, easy to instantaneously assess the denomination. “Follow me,” he said, folding his hand around the bill. He walked quickly, looking both ways again and again, ill at ease on a non-sex-trade mission. Across a bridge, down a narrow crowded street, attractive whores in every window, a popular stretch, the
Billboard
Top 40 section of the district, no specialty tastes here. A turn into a darker and smaller street, an alley really, just a couple red lights here, long stretches of brick wall.

Dieter stopped at a red window, and Kate stopped alongside him. The pretty blonde inside looked at him, and at Kate, then opened her door wordlessly. Smells of incense and cigarette smoke and ammoniac disinfectant. Dieter walked past the girl and her sordid little room, her neatly made bed framed in mirrors. The girl didn’t meet Kate’s eye.

They walked down a narrow hall, cheap wallboard, unadorned. At the end of the hall, a rickety staircase, low-ceilinged, badly lit.

Kate was getting nervous. She stopped walking.

“Come.” A quick wave, not particularly reassuring. “Come.”

They climbed the stairs, turned on a treacherous landing, climbed again to another recently constructed hall. The cheap flooring was vibrating, and Kate could make out a thumping hip-hop bass, and now vocals, a growling basso, and now synthesizers, the music growing louder, its English lyrics distinct, vulgar and brutal.

Kate stepped down off the carpeting and onto a tile floor, a wider hall, taller ceilings, moving from a slum to a mansion, somehow tucked away in here, a pair of large doors, paneled and painted, Dieter glancing back at her, then pushing the doors open—

Kate took in the anarchy of the tremendous room at a glance. Couches and settees and chaises, coffee tables and Persian rugs, tasseled lamp
shades on alabaster bases, marble fireplaces and massive windows fronting onto the canal, a half-dozen girls in various states of undress, one of them with her head in the lap of a tattooed and pierced and furious-looking man, her head being thrust down and yanked up by the ears, and, in the middle of it all, a bright orange head, bent over a mirror-topped coffee table, then rising, throwing itself back, sucking the white powder in and shaking his head, long stringy hair slapping his face.

“Ahhhhhh!” he yelled. “It’s fookin’ bootiful.” He wiped his nose, looked at Kate, then at Dieter. “ ’Oo’s this coont, then?”

Dieter shrugged. “She looks for something.”

“You know ’er, then?”

“Not at all.”

“Ookay, then.”

Dieter shrugged, turned, and left, closing the doors behind him, glad to be rid of Kate and her disquieting inquiry.

“Angelique? Check ’er.”

The girl rose languidly, six feet tall, topless, wearing nothing but panties and stilettos. The redheaded man watched her, his eyes filled with lust. Angelique was a fantastic specimen, not more than seventeen years old. She frisked Kate, then sauntered away, back to her chaise and her magazine.
Vogue
. A naked girl reading a fashion magazine.

“What you woont, then?”

“I want a piece.”

The tattooed man seemed to be finishing up, pumping the girl’s head up and down furiously, while she gagged and gulped and tried not to whimper.

“Ah woont a piece, too.” He grinned. “You ’ere to gi’ me a piece o’ yoour poosy? Tha’s nice ah-you.”

Kate smiled broadly. “I want a fucking gun, you stupid Scottish prick.”

“Ahhhh,”
moaned the other man.

“Whot? You listen ta this, Colin?”

“Ahhhhhhhhh.”
Colin bunched the girl’s hair in fistfuls. “Doon’t intrup me, Red.”

“A fookin gun, you say?”

Kate didn’t respond.

“Whot are you, soom kinda fookin bobby? Where’s your wire?”

“No wire.”

“Show me, then.”

Kate looked him in the eye; he didn’t blink.

“Or git the foock oout.”

She waited another beat, another two, eyes glued, before she slowly took off her jacket, and dropped it to the floor, still staring straight at him.

She pulled her sweater over her head in one swift motion, her hair staticky. Reached behind her, unzipped her skirt, let it fall to the floor. She stepped out of it, hands on hips.

“You American?” he asked.

Kate was now wearing nothing except boots and underwear. She didn’t answer.

“The rest.” He flicked his fingers at her. “Take off the rest.”

“Fuck you.”

“Whot you need a gun foor?”

She wanted desperately to put her clothes back on, but she also felt a small victory with every passing second that she kept them off, gathering strength from her humiliation.

“Colin? Whot we got fer ’er?”

Colin was zipping up his black jeans, walking over, shirtless, his whole torso covered in an indecipherable jumble of faded ink. He leaned over the mirror-topped table and took a bump. Then he rose, walked across the room. Opened a desk drawer, looked inside.

“Beretta,” Colin said.

“Oooh.” Red smiled. “That’s a nice goon. Just foound that on the street last week.”

Kate didn’t want to hear what bullshit story he was peddling to disavow this weapon.

“Let me see it.”

In one fluid motion Colin popped the clip out of the Beretta and tossed the gleaming steel fifteen feet across the room, a perfect throw to Kate, who caught the thing easily. She took a moment to examine the weapon, partly to examine it, partly to convince Red that she was not to be fucked with. The 92FS was the Toyota Corolla of handguns. This one seemed to be in fine condition.

“Two thousand,” she said. She didn’t want to ask his price, didn’t want to give Red the opportunity to frame the negotiation. The eventual price was pure negotiation, not tethered to any objective value. It could be worth fifty euros or twenty thousand; it was worth the intersection
of whatever he could get her to pay with whatever she could get him to accept.

“Git the foock ootta ’ere. The price is ten.”

She bent forward, picked up her skirt. Zipped it.

“Eight,” he said, and she knew she would win. She put back on her sweater.

“Twenty-five hundred.” She pulled her hair out of the collar.

“Git the fuck oout, you foockin coont.”

She picked up her jacket, pulled it on.

“I woont take a penny less than five.”

“I’ll give you three.”

“Foock you.”

She shrugged, turned away.

“Four,” he said.

“Thirty-five hundred. Take it.” She smiled. “Or leave it.”

He tried to stare her down, but then realized it was futile.

“Thirty-five hundred,” he said. “
Ploos
a bloo job.”

She couldn’t help but laugh. “Fuck you,” she said.