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.
In her pockets we found a key to a bicycle lock, a plastic tram card, a wrapped peppermint from a restaurant, and a torn ticket stub for the Pathé De Munt’s showing of 12 Years a Slave. I’d seen that movie myself. It had disturbed me. Black people in America were treated like animals. Nadia’s ticket brought back the powerful scenes of torture.
At the Meer en Vaart police station, my report got a lukewarm reception. They wanted to know if I’d visited the parents yet. That task fell to me, since I was “one of them,” as the guys put it, and better suited to deliver the terrible news. My colleagues automatically assumed I must know every Moroccan in the city. You knew one, you knew ’em all, right? That was why I’d been hired in the first place, wasn’t it, to put my Mocro background to good use, to offer the police an entrée into what was otherwise for them a closed-off world. Around the station they spoke of affirmative action, but never when I was within earshot. I got that from Ali, who was Turkish and told me everything. “They have loose lips when I’m around,” he said. “It’s not like they want me to hear it. It’s just they don’t even notice I’m there anymore.”
How was I supposed to tell the family their daughter had been found facing Mecca? There was no question of rape. Her carefully manicured nails had jagged tips, as if she’d been trying to escape, like a rabbit clawing its way out of a burrow that had suddenly flooded. I couldn’t get that image out of my head, but I wouldn’t share it with her parents.
Talking to them was supposed to help us find a starting point for our investigation, some clue that would eventually lead us to the killer.
When Nadia’s father let me in, I expressly asked that his wife — who was watching from the kitchen — join us, and then I took them aside to break the news. “She was lying with her head toward Mecca,” I consoled them. “Under the eyes of her Creator, she became the victim of a terrible crime. He sees all.”
We sat there for a time, in silence, staring at nothing. No one moved. There were no questions. There were tears, there was weeping.
Nadia’s mother got up to make tea.
Then the father said, “The Creator has taken her to His bosom. May Allah receive her with mercy.”
We drank tea.
I asked Nadia’s parents for her bank statements. They had no such documents. They had nothing belonging to their daughter. The mother talked about her, the father sat silently by. He looked like my father. At that age, they all look like my father. Worn out by life. The subsidized housing in which they had lived for so long had aged them. Not enough space. What I had feared turned out to be the case: they had little or no knowledge of their daughter’s life.
I knew girls Nadia’s age — I’d dated some of them — and they all lived double lives. What they were up to outside the home was terra incognita to their parents. They never revealed who they hung out with, what they did.
This gave Nadia’s killer a definite advantage.
Her parents kissed my cheeks when I left. They had appreciated my understanding of their situation. But it hadn’t gotten me anywhere. Somehow, though, I had enjoyed my time with them. I was convinced I would be able to solve the case. They reminded me of my own parents, except mine would never have given me such a warm welcome. Who needs or wants a cop in the family?
One of my colleagues complimented me: “You fit right in. We couldn’t do that. You made real contact with them.” I was an outsider accepted into the police force’s inner circle specifically because I was an outsider. If it all turned out right, I’d be a hero. If I failed, the fault would be entirely mine.
“We didn’t get anywhere,” I said. “They don’t know their own daughter.”
“It had to be someone in her circle who did it,” Ali said drily. “What did you find in her phone?”
“Girl stuff. Nothing suspicious.”
“Then she must have had another one. Her killer must have taken it.” Ali proposed a hypothesis: “She was cheating on her boyfriend — or pretending to — and he caught on. She was a smart girl, plenty smarter than he. Maybe she texted him at the hookah bar. Maybe he was stoned. Anyway, he got pissed off. Arranged to meet her outside the city, said there was something he had to show her. She was naive, right, didn’t have it in her just to break up with him. Figured she’d do him this one last favor. Girls like her are experts at confusing the issue. This’ll make the investigation more complicated. Even her best girlfriends didn’t know her secrets. There are girls like her all over this neighborhood, all coy and shy inside the family but vamps and divas out on the town. On their way home, they change back into whatever’s acceptable. And nobody has a clue what they’re up to.”
I gazed at him. Ali thinks fast, talks fast, forgets fast.
“Bullshit,” I said.
“You’ll see. It’s complicated, boss.” He held up his hands and moved them apart. “Think big.”
What was she doing out there in the dead of night, on the border between the city and the countryside? What was a beautiful young woman looking for in one of the loneliest parts of Amsterdam? What was she thinking?
Back at the station, I printed out my report, stapled the pages together, and dropped it in my out-box. Perhaps the results of the DNA testing would be helpful. If she’d fought her killer — and it looked that way to me — some traces should have been left behind.
For the rest of the day, I lost myself among the shoppers. It was spring, the sun wouldn’t set until late, there were plenty of people out and about. It didn’t feel like Amsterdam. No tourists. No canals. No women in summer dresses walking their dogs. It felt like a different city in a different country, where there was so much space and light that it was easy for the population to act as if no one else existed. Here and there I spotted pretty girls waiting for a tram. For the longest time, I used to suppress the urge to talk to girls like that. Until, one day, I decided that it really didn’t matter what happened. Sometimes they’d ignore you, and then you’d feel like shit for a while. Sometimes they’d welcome your advances, and that could be the start of something very nice. I no longer suppressed the urge. But here in New-West, I had to be careful. I was somebody here.
Downtown, I used to go after pickpockets — I was good at it, it was an exciting period, I still think about it every day. The time before my transfer to Meer en Vaart was like a dream. I did great among the shoplifters, because I wasn’t your typical undercover cop. With my three-day stubble, my worn leather jacket, my beat-up sneakers, I could have been an illegal alien on the make. There in Amsterdam’s crowded streets, I could use my appearance to capture guys with criminal intentions.
I was the child of Moroccan immigrants who’d been visibly shocked when I told them I’d been accepted into the police academy. They warned me about flying bullets and murders, told me I’d never be home for dinner, which would make it hard to develop a good relationship with a peaceful girl. Emotional blackmail. I figure a little blackmail can be a sign of love, but too much blackmail can scar you. There’s a thin line between a little and too much. I have to admit that I carried the scars, though I tried not to make a big deal of it.