“But why? Why is it dangerous here?” She looks straight into his eyes for the first time and sees his years of madness. “Why?” she repeats.
Waldemar’s chin trembles and he glances away, because he can’t handle her innocence and fear. He sighs and manages to put into words the thing he has never wanted to say: “A girl was killed in this room. Someone like you. A beautiful, sweet girl. Didn’t they tell you that when they brought you here?”
A shiver goes through her body. “No, he didn’t say anything. Here?”
“Yes, in this room. In that corner. I’m sorry. No one can ever come here again.”
Waldemar wipes the tears from his eyes, shakes his head, and suddenly grabs her by the arm. “You have to leave here. Now.”
He takes her to the door and opens the curtains. A prostitute on the other side of the narrow passage sees Waldemar pull Katja from her room with a crazed expression and drums angrily on her own window.
“You have to leave here. It isn’t safe, it’s not safe here,” he mutters urgently, unaware of the commotion unfolding around him. Aaron, who has just walked into the passageway with a fresh group of tourists, stops, so as not to put his clients at risk. The drumming prostitute pushes an alarm button. Lights flash, and a siren drowns out everything else in the street. People cover their ears, but Waldemar sees, hears, feels nothing. He drags Katja through the passageway, convinced that the devil is at her heels. He pushes people aside; Aaron tumbles against the wall, his hat rolls away, its feather crushed by someone’s shoe.
Waldemar plows through the tourists, and there stands Ivan. Immovable, unwilling to lose his newest acquisition because of the district’s village idiot. His hand rests loosely in his trendy designer bag, his joint dangles from his mouth, a disdainful smile rests on his lips.
Waldemar’s desperate eyes are focused on the light at the end of the passageway. He runs straight ahead and crashes into Ivan, knocks him into the passage wall. Waldemar hesitates, growls like a wounded animal, and looks back — not at Ivan, from whom he now has nothing to fear, but at Katja. She runs surprisingly quickly in her high heels; he scarcely needs to pull her along. The light comes closer. Waldemar turns back once more, they’re almost there, and now he pulls his daughter close. This time he’s there in time to save her, and she knows it, because she hugs him tightly and smiles. The white light dances like a spirit at the end of the passageway.
“Go!” screams Waldemar, as they finally burst onto the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, and the tourists and junkies and johns scatter out of their way. “Go, my darling sweetheart!”
Their hands part. His daughter runs, runs, runs, and when she is almost out of sight, he sees her ascend, lift up into the sky.
Waldemar can still feel her warmth in his hands, and he watches her rise up with a smile.
In the passageway, Aaron finally spots his hat on the ground. When he reaches for it, his gaze falls on Ivan, who is sitting under the graffitied wall. Ivan stashes his switchblade back in his bag, but Aaron sees it, glimpses the red on its blade. Slowly, Aaron picks up his hat, smoothes its feather as best he can, and returns it to his head. He hoists his staff and slams the end of it against Ivan’s head, and the pimp loses consciousness and collapses to the ground like a rag doll. Aaron grumbles with satisfaction as he hears the first sirens approaching. He regathers his flock, who have observed his actions with alarm, and they follow him out of the alley, silent, impressed.
On the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, Waldemar takes a few uncertain steps, and then his knees buckle and he falls. Instinctively, he places his hands on his stomach, and, when he looks down, sees blood seeping between his fingers. Thick drops fall on the cobblestones.
He topples onto his back and is soon surrounded by shocked prostitutes, a coffee shop bouncer, a dozen tourists, and three drunken English hooligans, one of whom, well-meaning, tries to drape his jacket over Waldemar’s head.
Waldemar fends them off with some difficulty. He turns his eyes to the gates of hell, sees that the red light above his daughter’s room is out, and dies, suffused with satisfaction.
Part II
Kiss Me Deadly
The Tower
by Hanna Bervoets
Van der Pekbuurt
“Is this your first visit?” the girl in the red jacket asks.
The elevator ride is apparently part of the attraction. Gita hadn’t realized that, hadn’t expected there to be an operator in the car with her.
She nods, and the girl smiles. “This is the fastest elevator in Western Europe,” she says. “It only takes fifteen seconds to get to the top. You should look up.”
The girl cranes her head back, and Gita follows her example, but she’s not sure what to do with her hands. Oddly enough, she misses her rolling suitcase — its handle has been the only thing she’s had to hold on to this evening. She checked it when she came in from the street, though, handed it off to a girl whose hair was tied back in exactly the same ponytail worn by this child who stands beside her. Gita watched her tuck it away in a corner, with another suitcase and two carry-ons, the luggage of others just arrived from Schiphol or on their way there. She wonders if anyone can tell from her appearance. Can the bag-check girl and the elevator girl see that she’s a local, not a tourist?
Tourists, Schiphol... at the thought of the airport, Gita feels nauseous, although that might just be the light show, as bright images flicker along the car’s ceiling: the three Xs from Amsterdam’s coat of arms, the Dutch flag, a tree, a cat, a skull — is that really a skull? — a house, a child, something blue, something red, an orange dog, a pink smiley.
“We’re there,” the girl says.
The silver doors whoosh open. The observation deck is larger than Gita had imagined it would be.
“We’re open for another hour. If you have a ticket for the swing, though, you’ll have to hurry — it closes at nine.”
Gita nods, and the girl retreats into the elevator. Does she still tip her head back when she’s alone?
It’s peaceful up here on the roof. A couple strolls along the railing to her right, two teenage girls take selfies with the city spread out below them in the gathering dusk. A boy standing beside the huge steel swing wears the same red jacket as the girl in the elevator and looks at her questioningly. She shakes her head.
Of course, she thinks. Of course there’s hardly anyone here tonight: it’s almost dark, it’s drizzling, it’s practically freezing — but, God, the view is gorgeous.
You can see for miles in every direction, despite the fence on the other side of the railing. The fence is six feet tall, she got that tidbit from Femke. The couple, an older man and woman in white sneakers — probably Americans — examines a signboard with a line drawing of Central Station and other landmarks. But the station’s not very interesting anymore, since the grand renovation it’s actually quite ugly, and Gita finds the other landmarks — the Old Church, the Palace on the Dam, the Stock Exchange — equally unappealing, so she walks around to the far side of the roof for the view of Amsterdam-North.
And there is the neighborhood where she grew up. The streets, the houses, the trees, all laid out in miniature; she can hold a streetlight between her thumb and forefinger. From the ferry dock, the Buiksloterweg ambles northeast, then, just past Pussy Galore, forks off to the right. To the left, it changes its name to the Ranonkelkade and then the Van der Pekstraat, a caterpillar with fat legs extending to either side. The legs are the Anemoonstraat, the Oleanderstraat, the Jasmijnstraat, the Heimansweg.