Felix lived on the second floor of a building whose ground level had originally served as a sort of workshop for a company that manufactured lampshades. The company’s name still appeared on the gable in white script letters. At the time he moved in, the garage was being used to house a street organ belonging to the previous tenant, an old friend of Felix’s grandmother. When he left for a nursing home, Felix finagled permission to move into his apartment. Not long after that, the street organ disappeared, and he was permitted — for an extra monthly fee — to take over the ground floor. These days, a storage area like that was worth its weight in gold. Hardly a week went by that he wasn’t asked to sublet part of the space. His upstairs neighbor had long been permitted to stash his bicycle there and Felix had graciously agreed to continue that arrangement, and he had more recently succumbed to a plea from a couple who lived across the street and pedaled their kids to school and other activities on a traditional Dutch cargo bike, which had to have someplace to sit when it wasn’t doing taxi duty. In point of fact, he had succumbed to the wife after first refusing an identical request from the husband. Felix thought the husband, who claimed to be some kind of financial consultant, was a bit of a bullshitter, and — as a cop — he didn’t care for bullshit.
With a little maneuvering, it was possible to squeeze both his Cordoba and the cargo bike into the space. The upstairs neighbor complained that this made it practically impossible for him to get his bicycle in and out, but he was one of those Amsterdammers who have raised complaining practically to an art form.
Felix saw that the woman from across the street was standing beside her cargo bike, her back to him, and he got out of his car to see if she needed help.
“You just getting back or heading out, Iris?” he asked.
His voice startled her, and she whirled to face him. “Felix! Have you heard the news?”
“Are congratulations in order?”
He knew she was being considered for a promotion to a senior position at the bank where she worked, but various factors were delaying a final decision. Maybe she’d finally gotten the approval she was hoping for.
But he let go of that idea when he saw the expression on her face.
“You haven’t heard,” she said, and began to cry.
“Hey, what’s wrong?”
She was still wearing her work clothes, and she wiped away tears with the sleeve of her gray pin-striped suit. What could have happened? One of the kids fell down the stairs? Her husband got caught messing around with one of her girlfriends?
“Fetty’s dead.”
“Dead?” He felt a shock ripple through his body, and for a moment he found that he couldn’t breathe. Fetty couldn’t possibly be dead. He had a thick wad of cash for her inside his jacket pocket.
His hand went to his chest, and he felt the bulge of the money. Was it possible for a pile of bills to have stabbed him? The pain slowly ebbed.
“What are you saying? Fetty’s dead?”
“It’s so awful!”
She had no idea how awful it was. The lottery money belonged to Fetty, the neighbor he’d expected to see leaning out her window. It was no wonder she was called Fetty. She was shapeless and fat from head to toe, and she could barely make it down the stairs to the street. Felix was one of the neighbors who ran regular errands for her. Aunt Corrie, who lived right next door, helped with the everyday chores, and Felix took care of Fetty’s weekly luxuries. Every Saturday, he stopped at the cigar store to buy her two packs of Stuyvesants. Filtered, she always reminded him, as if she was afraid the company might have suddenly started manufacturing unfiltered Stuyvesants. So, two packs of smokes, with filters, a copy of the weekly magazine My Secret, and two scratchers. The lottery tickets always had to be Lucky Sevens, because — according to her — that was her lucky game.
Her invariable habit was to open one of the packs of cigarettes in his presence and offer him the first Stuyvesant, which he always politely refused, at which point she lit it and smoked it herself, taking shallow puffs that she immediately exhaled. One of his aunts had smoked exactly the same way.
The next part of their Saturday-afternoon ritual was her asking him for a coin, which she would use to eagerly attack her scratchers. Meanwhile, Felix would page listlessly through the new issue of the magazine, which seemed more often than not to be filled with stories of pregnant women who weren’t sure if the baby was their husband’s or the neighbor’s and other nonsense that would, in his opinion, have been better kept secret.
Their routine usually ended with Fetty’s disappointed cry: “No luck!” This time, though, their visit had unfolded differently.
Felix thought at first that she’d had a heart attack. But her explosive reaction turned out to be pure excitement, not a medical emergency.
“Felix, look! Two fifty-thousands! My God, all those zeroes! And look, the last number ends with zeroes too. It can’t be another fifty thousand, can it? I can’t look. You finish it for me.”
He had scratched away the last bit of foil, and the two of them sat there and stared at the winning ticket looking back up at them from the table. The winning ticket Felix had taken to The Hague and cashed in for his housebound neighbor.
“It’s a winner! A winner!” Fetty had screamed, and she’d grabbed Felix by the arms, hauled him up from his chair, and danced around him like a schoolgirl. “We won! We won!”
Later, he’d run into Aunt Corrie on the street. “You two were certainly kicking up a rumpus,” she’d said. “I was afraid the glasses in my kitchen cabinets would get smashed. Did she have a little too much to drink, Felix?”
“Now, Corrie, the woman’s entitled to a little fun once in a while,” he’d said. And that was where he’d left it. He wasn’t going to tell the neighborhood Fetty’d won fifty thousand euros.
“Vladimir’s still at the police station. I thought you were him a minute ago. Why are you wearing your uniform? He called me and told me he had to go with the detectives, so I should pick Max up from his piano lesson. I wasn’t expecting to go out again, I didn’t even have time to change. I just put on some sneakers, and here I am. I must look ridiculous.”
Felix had noticed the bright red sneakers. They were indeed a sight, but he was more interested in her husband.
“You’re telling me Fetty didn’t just die on her own? And Vladimir had something to do with it?”
“No, of course not. He just found her. And then the police came.” She hesitated. “Is it true Fetty came into a lot of money? Vladimir said he heard she won the lottery.”
Felix had worried Fetty wouldn’t be able to keep her good fortune to herself. “Was Fetty killed?” he asked. “Is that why the detectives were here?”
Iris began to cry. “I don’t know,” she said. “Aunt Corrie told Vladimir she thought Fetty was in clover. I’m not sure what that means — I still don’t understand a lot of your Amsterdam slang. I just want to know when Vladimir’s coming home. He called me at work, I was in the middle of a meeting. He said there was a funny little car outside the building, a handicapped car. What are those things called?”
“You mean a Canta?”
“That’s it. He thinks we ought to buy one, because you can park on the sidewalk, then we wouldn’t need to bother you with the cargo bike. What am I supposed to say to that? Anyway, I was in a meeting, I couldn’t really talk. And then he called back and said he had to go with the policemen because they found Fetty dead.”
“They?”
“Him, I mean. But I don’t know for sure. All I know is Max is waiting. I have to call his piano teacher. But first I want to hear Vladimir’s voice.” She looked straight at him, wiping tears from her eyes with her sleeve. “Felix, can you call the station for me? You’re a cop. Maybe they’ll tell you something.”