The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam (8 page)

“Why not?”

“He did not say.”

“You knew he was a thief?”

“Of course. It is why I knew him,” he said, with a note of
surprise.

“And it didn’t make you suspicious that he wanted to hire
someone else?”

“A little, oui. But many men lose their courage.”

“You figured that was what it was?”

“Twelve years, it is a long time, no?”

I sat up in my chair and gripped the receiver closer to my ear.
“What’s this about twelve years Pierre?”

“You do not know?”

“Know what? Was he inside?”

“He did not tell to you?”

“No, he didn’t,” I said, reaching for my pen and testing the ink
on the top sheet of my manuscript. “What was he in for?”

“Why, he killed a man.”

“Murder?”

“Non. This man, he try to be a hero – to stop Michael taking his
diamonds.”

“So he was a jewel thief?” I asked, meanwhile sketching the
outline of a prone body with a question mark planted right in the
centre of it.

“Diamonds, Charlie. This is what he would steal. Only
diamonds.”

“And someone tried to stop him?”

“A guard, oui.”

“And he killed him?”

“It seemed so.”

I thought about that for a moment. About the man I’d sat
opposite in the poorly lit café. About how he’d seemed just about
as normal as you could imagine. Not a convict, I wouldn’t have
said. Not a killer.

“Where was this?” I asked, sketching out a diamond roughly the
size of the body I’d drawn.

“In Amsterdam.”

“And he went to a Dutch prison?”

“Oui.”

“They didn’t deport him?”

“What is this deport?”

“Throw him out of the country. Send him back to the States. I
thought that was what happened.”

“This I do not know.”

I went over the hook of the question mark again with my pen,
building on the layers of ink until the lines became blurred. Then
I ground the biro around and around the dot.

“Pierre, did he tell you anything about the job? Did he want you
to sell something on?”

“Non. Mais – it was not diamonds?”

“No. It was monkeys.”

“Monkeys?”

“Figurines,” I said, casting the pen aside and rubbing at my
eyes. “Cheap-looking. A set of three. One covers his eyes, one
covers his ears, one covers his mouth. You’ve heard of them?”

“But of course.”

“You figure they could be worth much?”

“I do not know. It would depend on many things.”

“Worth killing for?”

“He killed?”

“Not this time,” I said, then sighed. “The thing is, he’s in
hospital, Pierre. And he’s none too healthy from what I can make
out. I’m really not sure what you’ve got me involved in here.”

“This I did not know,” he said, in a wistful tone. “It saddens
me to hear it. He was someone I could trust. Like you.”

“I’ve never killed a man.”

“Non. But what can I do?”

“You can find out about these monkeys. See if there’s a market
for them.”

“But of course. It is nothing. I will begin right away.”

“And Pierre, no more giving my name to people. Especially not
convicted killers.”

I hung up and drummed my fingers on my manuscript, syncopating
my thoughts. Three monkeys, three burglars, three men in the café.
Everything in sets of three, like a combination lock I didn’t know
the sequence for. And how many deaths so far? Almost two that I
knew of. I just hoped there wouldn’t be a third.

∨
The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam
∧

A
short while later,
I called Victoria and got straight into it.

“Listen, I’ve been thinking,” I said. “What if there were two
briefcases?”

“Go on.”

“Well, supposing Faulks could get his hands on a second
briefcase and plant that in Nicholson’s study.”

“An identical briefcase.”

“Exactly. Remember, Faulks is trying to open the safe when he
hears Nicholson come in, and so he hides in the closet. But let’s
say this time he leaves the door open a bit so he can see exactly
what kind of make the briefcase is.”

“And he can also see who the killer is. Which ends your book on
page 10.”

“Stupid ef me. So try this. Faulks gets the make of the
briefcase from someone at the police station, maybe one of the
female officers, in return for a steak dinner. It’s a common make,
so he goes out and buys a copy.”

“Except if the
real
briefcase is with the police, and if
everyone knows it, including Nicholson, they’ll also know it’s a
plant.”

“Damn.”

“And the briefcase is only part of it, Charlie. You need the
hand. You need to pop open that case and thrust that bloody hand
right in Nicholson’s face. In the reader’s face, too. That’s your
climax.”

“So I get another hand.”

“Another hand? How are you going to do that? Cut off Arthur’s
left one?”

“No of course not. What about Arthur’s niece, the actress?
Suppose she isn’t an actress so much as a special effects
designer?”

“You want a prosthetic hand?”

“It’s not so much I want one,” I said. “I just thought maybe it
could work.”

“But you still don’t have your second briefcase, or at least any
way of matching the original that makes sense.”

“Granted, it needs some finessing.”

“I’ll say.”

I breathed heavily into the telephone receiver. “You know, these
are not the easy words of encouragement I was seeking.”

“Well guess what, you didn’t give me the complete solution I was
seeking, either. So it appears we’re both disappointed.”

“Hmm.”

“Although I am glad to hear from you. I’ve been worried.”

“Sweet.”

“It’s true. Tell me, how are things?”

“Thieving things?”

“What else?”

“Well, they’re interesting, I guess. Or complicated, depending
on your perspective.”

“Enlighten me.”

And so I did. I told Victoria about my visit from Inspector
Burggrave of the Dutch police, about my conversations with Marieke
and Pierre, and what I’d learned about the American. In fact, I
breezed through it all as if it was a familiar pitch for a new
novel I’d been plotting out and when I was done she said, “So he’s
a burglar too. It’s odd that he hired you.”

“Isn’t it?”

“You really think his nerve had gone?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “What do you think?”

“Well, it’s difficult without meeting him, of course.”

“Of course.”

“But it does seem odd that he had enough nerve to plan a theft
but not enough to carry it through.”

“My thoughts exactly. And he killed a man, Victoria. If he’d had
some kind of conversion in prison, maybe I could believe it, but a
born again convict doesn’t get out and start planning a new
job.”

“I don’t like that at all, the fact he killed a man. Put that
with the gun you found in the apartment and you’ve, well, you’ve
got a handful of people who are capable of really hurting
someone.”

“By breaking fingers and beating skulls, you mean?”

“Quite. So what about the
blonde
,” she said, layering the
word with contempt. “What does she have to say?”

“Her name’s Marieke, as well you know. And to be honest I don’t
think she told me everything she could have.”

“They never do.”

“Blondes?”

“Femme fatales, Charlie.”

“She’s hardly that!”

“She’s the nearest thing you’ve got. It all makes you wonder,
doesn’t it, what Faulks might do in your situation?”

“Faulks wouldn’t be in my situation. At this rate, I’d rewrite
the opening chapters to give him some more clues to go on. Think
about it: the man who knows everything is in a coma, the femme
fatale, as you call her, is holding out on me.”

“In every conceivable way.”

“Funny. What else? Oh yes, Pierre, who got me into this mess in
the first place, knows just about as much as I do, maybe even less.
And then there’s the rogue intruder, who I don’t have a hope of
tracking down.”

“Plus the wide man and the thin man. Who sound more like a
comedy duo every minute, by the way.”

“And finally the monkeys.”

“About which you don’t have a monkeys.”

“Ba-da-boom.”

“That was one of the thin man’s best lines.”

“From their successful Blackpool season?”

“No doubt.” She sighed. “So what are you going to do?”

“Sorry?”

“What’s the next step to solving all this?”

“Who said anything about solving anything?”

“Nobody did. I just thought you might want to look into what
happened. Honour among thieves and all that.”

“Right. The thing is, I need to look out for myself here, Vie.
And it strikes me the absolute best thing I can do right now is
keep my name out of this mess. So I’m going to finish my book and
then I’m going to work out where I’m off to next and that’s
it.”

“You are thinking of moving on then?”

“Once the book is done, yes.”

“Well, have you considered London? We could have a conversation
in person for once.”

“And remove my air of mystery? Let you put a face to my
name?”

“Charlie,” Victoria said, as if I was a touch slow, “I’ve seen
your jacket photo a hundred times, remember?”

“Oh yes,” I told her. “I forgot.”

∨
The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam
∧

A
fter I was through
talking to Victoria, I played around with some more plot ideas for
a while but I didn’t come up with anything new to solve the
briefcase problem, at least nothing sensible. The truth was I was
forcing things, trying to complete a book that wasn’t ready to be
finished just yet. Somewhere, deep in my subconscious, my mind was
toying with the puzzle I’d set it and in time, though I had no idea
when, the brilliant solution would surely come racing through the
channels in my mind, like a kid running to show his parents the
jigsaw he’s just completed. Until then, though, I would just have
to wait.

So I dropped my pencil and booted up my laptop and connected to
the Internet and gave into my curiosity. Once I was online, I
called up Wikipedia and typed in the words ‘Three Wise Monkeys’. I
clicked on ‘search’ and soon found the content I was after.

The three wise monkeys are a pictorial maxim.
Together they embody the proverbial principle ‘to see no evil, hear
no evil and to speak no evil.’ The three monkeys are:

• Mizaru, covering his eyes, who sees no evil;
  
• Kikazaru, covering his ears, who hears no evil; and
  
• Iwazaru, covering his mouth, who speaks no evil.
  

The source that popularised this pictorial maxim is a
17
th
century carving over a door of the famous
Toshogu shrine in Nikko, Japan. The maxim, however, probably
originally came to Japan with a Tendai-Buddhist legend possibly
from India via China in the 8
th
century (Yamato
Period). Though the teaching most probably had nothing to do with
the monkeys, the concept of the three monkeys originated from a
word play on the fact that zaru in Japanese, which denotes the
negative form of a verb, sounds like saru, monkey.

The idea behind the proverb was part of the teaching of god
Vadjra, that if we do not hear, see or talk evil, we ourselves
shall be spared all evil. This is similarly reflected in the
English proverb ‘Talk of the devil – and the devil appears’.

All of which, to paraphrase, seemed to be saying that the
message the monkeys had been intended to convey was that you should
stay out of things as much as possible. And who could argue with
that? Not me, for one. So I powered down my laptop and I put on my
coat and then I left my apartment with the intention of taking a
stroll around the neighbourhood before finding a local brown bar
where I could drink a few beers, get something to eat and maybe
strike up a conversation or two.

It was a fine plan, a great one even, but it fell apart the
moment I opened the front door of my building to find Inspector
Burggrave at the bottom of my steps. A uniformed colleague was
stood beside him and a marked police car was parked just
behind.

“Mr. Howard, you are under arrest,” he told me.

“But Inspector,” I said, “I didn’t even whisper your name.”

♦

Handcuffed in the rear of the police car, speeding through the
back streets of Amsterdam with strangers gawping at me, I wondered
if perhaps I should correct Burggrave. I hadn’t been
under
arrest
. I couldn’t be, not until he had
placed
me under
arrest in the first place. But on reflection, I decided that now
was not the time to quibble over English usage with a man who
seemed to have taken quite a severe disliking to me. Now was the
time to keep my own counsel.

It was just as well I had some counsel to fall back on, because
Burggrave did everything in his power to prevent me contacting a
lawyer and when, at last, one finally arrived at the police station
I was taken to, his English was very nearly as poor as my Dutch. To
begin with the three of us sat around an interview table in a
sparsely furnished room, arguing in Dutch and then somewhat more
and somewhat less broken English, about when I would be allowed my
first refreshment break. After ten minutes or so of this nonsense,
I finally made myself face Burggrave directly and said, in a
measured way, that I’d decided for the time being I would let
myself be interviewed without my lawyer present. And at that point,
we paused for a refreshment break.

When we resumed, Burggrave was accompanied by the same uniformed
officer who had been present at my arrest. He also had a paperback
book in his hand. Burggrave threw the book down onto the table in
front of me and I picked it up and fanned the pages, as if I was
deciding whether or not to devote the next two hours of my life to
reading it. I already knew what happened, though, because it was my
first mystery novel,
The Thief and the Five Fingers
, written
by Charles E. Howard and available at all good book shops.