The Grijs Gander wasn’t just a dump bar. It was a karaoke bar. That made it about a thousand times more evil. Think American Idol, except that all the judges are drunk and might be handy with a knife.
It was only nine, early by Amsterdam standards. On the karaoke stage a drunken young Spaniard was slaughtering Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall” as his friends applauded. A few men stood in the back, playing pool; a few others sat in booths. Two young women sat at the bar with their young boyfriends. I cast my bartender’s eye over the drinks: most favored vodka or beer; no fancy cocktails. Then I profiled the room. This is a bartender skill. Trouble has nothing to do with gender or age or economic status.
It has all to do with where people sit, where their gaze goes. Most were here just to get drunk and sing and laugh at the bad singers. The pool players seemed to know each other, which made it less likely for cues to be swung like swords. One trouble spot was in the back; a group of big, dark-haired guys who spoke Turkish, and who kept scanning the bar as if waiting for a bubble of trouble to rise. The other was one of the young women on the opposite side of the bar, who looked exquisitely bored and kept glancing about the room as if looking for bigger muscles or a firmer ass or a brighter smile. Her checking out of the other men was pissing off the boyfriend.
Those were the hot spots, so I avoided both by sitting at the bar, facing the front and looking at the beer taps. I ordered a pint of Amstel. The bartender, a thin, sallow guy with five piercings in his left ear, brought it to me. He gave me the quickest of once-overs and set the beer in front of me. I slid the right amount of euros to him, rounded up for a small tip. He did not offer to start me a tab. I sipped, made eye contact with no one, and listened.
My Dutch wasn’t superb, but I’d spent four months in Suriname, the former Dutch colony in South America, so I had enough to get by, and with any language, hearing it spoken revives the command of it. My parents worked with Episcopal Relief—my father as an administrator and auditor of the charity’s funds and my mother as a pediatric surgeon specializing in cleft palates—and they and my brother Danny and I traveled the world for all my youth. My Spanish, Russian, and French were fluent, my Chinese and German okay. I could say I am an American and I need to call the embassy, in about three dozen languages, although that phrase would do me no good with Howell and the Company hunting me. I’d broken scores on speed of learning back in Langley’s language immersion programs, but I’d never studied Dutch that hard and I didn’t doubt that my words sounded ragged and colonial.
I heard a mix of tongues in the bar: Dutch, English (widely spoken in Amsterdam), French, Spanish. I gave the Turks a careful look again; they noticed me looking at them and I quickly put my gaze up to the moonwalking (or moonstumbling) Spaniard. I could wait in this drunken Babel for hours and Nic might not show up. And someone, someone in Dutch intelligence, was going through the Centraal Station bombing tapes and was going to see Yasmin Zaid enter the station with a backpack on her arm and then leave without it.
I had an overwhelming sense that my time was running out.
I had forgotten the virtue of patience. Spying was waiting. And the sudden dull weight of trying to find Nic hit me. But he was the only link I had to Piet, and Piet was linked to the scarred man and Yasmin. And the scarred man to Lucy.
This was the only chain I could tug on.
I sipped my way, slowly, through my beer. The next karaoke singer delivered an accurate version of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” that drew hearty applause, and then a drunken woman got the giggles halfway through a screech of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” She didn’t get booed because her top was tight and the crowd was more forgiving.
I hated this place. I missed the clean smells of Ollie’s bar. He was no doubt mad at me for running off. I missed hanging out with August. I hoped that Howell and the Company hadn’t leaned on him. Ollie knew nothing, not even that Mila played him for a friend. Interesting, though, that she’d been a regular visitor at Ollie’s. That couldn’t be coincidence, not with me getting a job there. Another thread to pull on, but later.
I watched one of the girls lean close to her date, nuzzle his cheek with a kiss.
I missed Lucy.
Third beer. You had to drink in a place like this. Order a soda or coffee and you were instantly noted as someone worried about keeping his senses. You were suspect. You had to drink.
The young woman with the roving eye was suddenly sitting next to me. “Don’t you want to sing?” she asked me in English, slurring her words. She hadn’t even tried Dutch with me. I guess I looked more American than I thought. I glanced over at the boyfriend. He watched me right back.
“I’d be out of tune,” I said.
“You and everyone else. Hmm. What should you sing?” She studied me, as though you could tell what a man’s musical taste was from his face. “Nirvana? You look a little angry.”
“Uh, no.”
“Ah.” Now a smile crept onto her face. “Prince, I think. I have a purple scarf you can borrow.”
“Maybe Radiohead.”
“They’re too solemn. Maybe Justin Timberlake? You could bring some sexy back.”
I didn’t look at her. The boyfriend had turned his attention to the stage. “No, I’m not a singer.”
“What are you then?”
“Just a guy having a beer who doesn’t want to sing and doesn’t want to talk. Sorry.”
Her smile turned to a frown. “Asshole. Faggot.”
“Go back to your boyfriend,” I said. “He’s willing to put up with your bad behavior. No one else will.”
She got up in a huff and then I saw a man had sat down two stools from me while the girl was chatting. Nic from Gregor’s phone, with his red ponytail and his dour face.
I moved my eyes back to the karaoke stage, where the crowd had turned on a Filipino guy singing a Kings of Leon song with hearty boos. He flipped off the crowd and an empty pint glass nearly hit him. The bartender started yelling at the offending table; they all shrugged like kids caught lobbing spitballs in class. The lazy bartender stayed behind the bar.
Either I was lucky, and Nic had decided to sit near me—or Gregor had warned him and given him a description of me, and he’d come to see who the hell I was.
I watched him from the corner of my eye and ordered another beer. I could see Nic pulling a smartphone from his pocket, studying it. He tugged nervously at the ponytail while he did so, thumbing through messages. He cursed quietly in Dutch and got up suddenly and headed for the bathrooms, which led into a hallway toward the back exit. He’d only drunk half his lager, so I followed him.
He turned into the bathroom and glanced back. He saw me. Knowing he was just going to the toilet, I would have retreated back to the bar. But now I couldn’t.
The bathroom was cleaner than the bar. Nic stood at a urinal, talking on the phone. I hate that. Don’t you think the other side can’t hear the crash of your pee against the porcelain?
I washed my hands, threw cold water on my face.
“I got the goods, the cops don’t know,” he said in English. He stopped talking. He finished and flushed the urinal and put the phone back in his pocket. Two of the Turks from the drunken table stood by the toilet stall, talking, smoking.
And they moved to block his way out. Sudden tension. Nic murmured words I couldn’t hear in Dutch; the men moved, but slower than they had to. They left. Nic rinsed his hands; there were no towels so he dried them on his jeans. I followed him at a distance.
He was already back on the cell phone when I got back to my pint. I was careful not to look at him, but movement caught my eye. The Turks at the far table were glaring at Nic, frowning, with a clear and ugly rage.