He went inside one of the doors close to the corner. A sign announced a watch repair shop called, in tribute to his craft and his adopted homeland’s national color, CLOCKWORK ORANGE. He closed the door behind him.
I crossed to the door, counted to thirty. It opened up onto the ground-floor business: a tiny old CD and record shop, where the guitar riffs of an old Clash album drilled the smoke-scented air. In the store a bored punk sat at the cash register, waiting for punk rock to come back. Stairs led up to the Clockwork Orange. I went up and tested the door. It swung open. He hadn’t locked it, because his hands were full of bags.
I stepped inside. I saw Gregor setting the bags on a wooden counter. Glass counters showed vintage and collectible watches. A table, covered with black velvet, held a snowfall of gleaming gears, and next to them lay watch-repair tools, craftsman’s tools, laid out in straight lines, ready for work. Gregor was very good at bringing order to chaos.
I shut the door behind me.
He turned and stared at me for twenty long seconds, and then he said, “I know you.” He had seen me only a few times, but watchmakers are detail people. “From Prague.” He did not look overjoyed. “You knew the Vrana brothers.”
“Yes. They tried to cheat me. But I guess I wasn’t as pissed about it as their partners were.” The Vranas had been the morons trying to grab from me money that didn’t exist, for goods that didn’t exist, and the sting I’d run helped the Company empty their bank accounts. Their business partners took it hard. They expressed their disappointment with an ax.
“They buried them in a single coffin,” Gregor said. “No need for two.”
Gregor had been a bit player with the Vranas, a guy whose business they used as a cover to mule goods out of eastern Europe to Britain.
“I remember you were always worried you’d catch a cold. You like the climate in Amsterdam better?” I asked.
“It’s hardly tropical, but I sneeze less.” He was nervous because he couldn’t know what role I’d played in the death of the men he’d known. His eyes narrowed. “Samson from Toronto. Is that still your name?”
I smiled. “It’s the only one I got.”
He didn’t smile back. He tested whether I was armed by saying, “I need a lozenge,” and slowly reaching into his pocket. I tensed but I didn’t pull a gun yet. Gregor pulled out a package of garlic lozenges. He slid one between his thin lips.
A test. I wasn’t here to kill him. I was here either to offer a deal or get information. He’d provided the setup for the smuggling route for the fake uranium, but, since it was never smuggled, the Company had decided to leave him alone, in play, to be useful again. But he’d moved to Amsterdam for what I guessed was a fresh start. Amsterdam had better smuggling routes, and more of them, tied back to the massive port in Rotterdam.
“How do you like Amsterdam?” I said.
“Lovely. The Dutch are very pleasant people.” He sucked hard on the lozenge, drawing out every bit of the garlic’s restorative powers. “They have an excellent health-care system.”
I gestured at the small shop, brimming with inventory. “Business looks good.”
He shrugged. “Watches are a leftover from an analog world. Books, records, movies, everything goes digital.” He sniffled, clicked his tongue. “But analog watches, people still like them. They are both necessity and luxury. We must always know what time it is and we must look good doing it.” He cleared his throat, wiped at his lip with the back of his hand. “How may I help you?” Like I was here to look at his Rolexes.
You don’t ever answer a question when asked. At least, a man like the one I was pretending to be wouldn’t. Instead I invaded his privacy. I peeked inside the bags. Party stuff, for a kid, a girl. Napkins, plates, wrapped candies. “A party?”
“I married a woman here four months ago. I have a stepdaughter. My life is… calmer. I don’t think I can be of help to you, Samson. I am no longer connected.”
“You have a website for your little watch business, Gregor. You probably do a lot of international trade here—ordering from Switzerland for inventory, and shipping goods all over Europe. Great front for smuggling.”
“Get out. I don’t know what you mean.” A touch of panic bruised his voice.
“Oh, I can get out. I could head straight to the Czech embassy and tell them that one of their wayward sons has set up business in this nice country and maybe, if they don’t want to be embarrassed by whatever idiot scheme you’re up to these days, they should keep a careful eye on you. Look very carefully at your books, at your shipping manifests, see where your customers are.”
“I don’t smuggle no more. I am legit now.”
“Hard to make a living with used watches.”
I opened up my wallet. Pulled out and inspected an impressive wad of euros, courtesy of Mila. Everyone has a price.
Gregor looked at the thickness of the wad and stopped ordering me out.
“I need to find someone, Gregor.” I pulled a photo from my pocket. It was a print of the scarred man from the video of Yasmin at the Centraal Station. “Now. I need to know if you’ve seen this man.” I handed him the photo.
Gregor didn’t push it back right away and say don’t know him. That would have been too obvious a lie. He inspected him the way he might peer at damaged gearwork, a narrow pianist’s finger tracing the circle of the man’s face. Finally he said, “I don’t know this man.”
“Think. I don’t want your stepdaughter’s birthday present to be finding out that her shiny new dad used to be a smuggler. Or still is.”
“She wouldn’t mind me being gone. She acts like she’s allergic to me.” But Gregor studied the picture again. “I don’t know him. But this man I know.”
“Who?”
He looked at me. I peeled off a couple of bills and slid them onto the counter.
“Him. The big man with the dye job. Behind the first guy you pointed at.”
I looked at the picture. A few feet behind the scarred man was a big, broad-shouldered man with dyed white hair. He looked as though he might have Asian ancestry, mixed with European.
“Him I know,” Gregor said. The edge of the photo trembled ever so slightly as he tucked it back into my hand. Watchmaker hands don’t tremble.
“Do they owe you money?” he asked, and that was his second mistake. He wanted to know why I was looking for the blond. So he could tell the blond about it.
“Who is he, Gregor?”
“Uh, I have to think about his name.” He backed away, toward the gear table.
“No more money. Who is he, Gregor?”
“Tell me first why you are looking for these men.”
“I have a business proposition for them.”
“You can take their picture but not walk up and introduce yourself? I don’t know, this looks like a police photo. It’s been cropped.” Of course it had. I’d cropped out Yasmin.
“Gregor, just tell me the blond’s name and where to find him.”
“The blond—look, I’ll do you a favor and give you some advice. Stay the hell away from him. Whatever job you’ve got lined up, find someone else.”
I stepped forward and said, “Tell me.”
“No, no. If I tell you, then I’ve sent you to him. That means he comes to see me. No thank you.” Terror colored his tone. “He cuts up people who get in his way. No. I’m a family man. I’ll tell you his name, but you can get someone else to put you close to him. Not me.”
I touched his shoulder.
And he tried to slice my throat open.
29
THE BLADE WAS A SMALL THING; but then, so is a vein. I wasn’t sure if it was part of his watch-mending gear or if it was simply a weapon he kept close at hand. I heard the hiss it made as it sliced the air and I flinched back and it parted only the air close to my skin.