The passengers had returned to their seats, the boat was picking up speed, it was time for her to get back to work. She ran her hands through her hair and grabbed a bottle of wine and began to refill glasses.
All she could see before her was Timo’s face as she had just now glimpsed it. Was his expression merely relaxed in sleep... or was it frozen in death?
He’s not dead, she thought. There’s nothing wrong. He shifted in his sleep a few times over the last four hours and wound up the way he was before.
For half a minute these thoughts calmed her, but then the panic reasserted itself. She kept on working, but she was on autopilot.
She heard Arno say something about the blue of the imperial crown and glanced outside. They were passing the Western Church. She shook her head. She had completely missed their transit from the Herengracht to the Prinsengracht. She tried to remember something of the last ten minutes, anything — an order, a glimpse of the canal — but her mind was completely blank.
Arno started talking about the Anne Frank House. In half an hour, they would be back at the pier. She would clean up faster than she’d ever cleaned before.
When they docked, Arno apologized and took off. His son was sick, he explained. Lisa forced herself to empathize. Inside her head, she caught herself praying that Timo was merely sick too. Perhaps he was unconscious. Was that possible? Some sort of temporary condition that would resolve itself the moment she shook him out of it?
As the passengers got to their feet and shrugged into their jackets, she reached for her phone. No calls, no messages. She speed-dialed Timo’s number. Then again, and again, and each time her call went to voice mail she had the same thought: I’ll never hear his voice for real again.
The boat was empty. Arno and Wim were gone. The rain had slackened, but the wind was stronger, and the Princess Beatrix thumped against the rubber bumpers. The dock was deserted, the café shuttered. A single light burned in the office, at the Damrak end of the pier.
Lisa raced up and down the aisle like a madwoman, brushing tricolored flags, brochures, and crumpled napkins from the tables. She scrawled the date on the front of an envelope and dumped the contents of the tip jar into it and licked the flap. She packed empty bottles and glasses into their crates and stacked the crates on the back deck, ready to be transferred to the trash cart. In five minutes she was finished — but she decided to call once more before jumping onto her bike.
Breathing heavily from exertion and nervousness, she pressed the icon beside Timo’s name and waited for the ring... and then her eyes narrowed. From somewhere in the distance came the sound of music. It was faint, barely audible beneath the wind, but it was unmistakably Eminem’s “Lose Yourself”—Timo’s ringtone.
A warm glow spread from the pit of her stomach up through her body, and she shivered with relief, her terror turned in an instant to joy.
Far ahead, past the row of darkened tour boats, she saw a figure step into the light from the office. It cast a long shadow that moved toward her. The guitar riff echoed off the wooden pier. She was still holding her phone to her ear, but it suddenly felt different against her skin. It was as if she were hugging Timo’s dear face to her own.
The music stopped as her call was answered.
“Hey,” she heard, and the phone almost dropped from her hand. It wasn’t Timo. It was Stefan’s soft, icy voice, and at the same moment she recognized his walk. “I see you,” he said. “Thanks for calling.”
She broke the connection.
“You should have seen this coming!” he shouted over the wind. “You’re next, darlin’, you hear me?”
Lisa pulled back behind the cabin door and peeked around the edge of its frame. Stefan had reached the Prince Claus, the next boat over from the Beatrix. He was gaining fast, his steps determined, staring straight ahead. It felt like he was staring right into her eyes.
She eased out of her heels.
“I’m going to reunite you with your boyfriend,” Stefan said coldly. “You two belong together!”
She reached behind her back and untied her apron. It dropped to the deck.
Stefan was at the bow of her boat. Carefully, without making a sound, Lisa slipped to the other side of the deck. She climbed onto one of the wooden benches, ducked down to stay out of sight. The wind ruffled the surface of the black water, stirring up tiny foam caps. Stefan was still talking, so loudly it sounded like he was standing right beside her.
“You dumped me, you fucking bitch! Now I’ll dump you! You’re gonna be fish food!”
There was the screech of metal on metal.
She raised a foot to the gunwale, her arms stretched out to the sides to maintain her balance. She brought up her other foot and stared down. She could smell the water’s chill.
“Look at me when I talk to you, bitch!”
She straightened, then pushed off with all the strength she could summon, as if she were diving into a pool at the start of a race.
She tucked in her chin, exactly as her swim coach had taught her, and the one second she hung in the air stretched out as if someone had adjusted the dials on the laws of nature.
Just out of reach, she could see Timo’s face, could see the two of them together, entwined on the couch in the living room of his houseboat.
The vision enveloped her like a thick warm blanket, and it was so beautiful, so grand, that when she hit the water she never even heard the shot.
The Girl at the End of the Line
by Abdelkader Benali
Sloten
A farmer found her with her head facing southeast, toward Mecca, as if in prayer. The stretch of reclaimed polder land is on the edge of the city, ringed by fields and narrow irrigation channels. Amsterdam’s last remaining milk cows graze in the marshy meadows. I sometimes bike out that way, when I’ve got nothing better to do. When my yearnings are too strong to ignore.
Geese — a constant nuisance at nearby Schiphol Airport — also feast on the grass. If there’s one good place in the city to dump a body, this is it. In my head, I divide Amsterdam into places where you can safely hide a body and places where you can’t. They told me it was my job to think like that. But it wasn’t just my job, it was my way of making sense of the world.
Somebody once left a tourist-office folder with information about the area at the station. Thanks to that, I knew more about the place than the rest of my colleagues put together. As I roamed around the scene, I felt myself dissolving into thin air, so that less and less of me remained.
This was where, in the olden days, criminals were exiled. They were forbidden to set foot back in the city. Out here, they were no longer Amsterdammers, they no longer existed. Someone had ruled that they were no longer permitted to exist.
Modern-day Amsterdam sees a murder victim a week, and that week it was her turn. I saw her in my mind’s eye, standing at the tram stop at the end of Line 1, beautiful, mortal. I thought of her as the girl at the end of the line, but she wasn’t really a girl; she was in her early twenties, a woman. In life, it would have been impossible to miss her. I thought she was lovely. Lovelier than I would ever dare to acknowledge.
A reminder of the city’s old border still stood there, a tall pole that had once held a road sign, rising out of the mist like a sternly pointing finger. The farmer found her body not far from the pole.
Nadia. A lovely name.
The pole was mentioned in the tourist-office folder. I was never good at history. Unless someone explained it to me, I couldn’t understand. But this interested me. Because it hit so close to home. Things that hit close to home give me a chilly feeling of excitement. Like a bucket of cold water flung in my face.
It had rained heavily. She lay on the wettest section of the farmer’s field, a worthless bit of land no one bothered with. Not too far off, the farmer kept llamas and horses. It was a desolate place. The trucks that rumbled by on the nearest road seemed to come from nowhere, heading for some other nowhere. Far off, jets rose from the airport’s runways. Something inside me said those planes were crowded with the guilty, but none of them knew what it was they were guilty of.