The screen went blank.
“She doesn’t have a man,” I said.
Ella doesn’t believe in long-term relationships, they’re far too complicated. Typically, her boyfriends don’t last longer than a month or so; after that, she gets bored and gives up. She usually sees two or three guys simultaneously, though more recently she’s begun to find that too exhausting. Instead, she’s bought two additional apartments — in the wake of the financial crisis, she was able to pick them up relatively cheaply — so she now has three home addresses scattered around the city. Real estate is her current passion.
“She means me,” Theo said. “My last name is Mann. Ella and I have known each other professionally for years. She’s talking to me.”
It was only then that I realized something Theo already knew: “They think my house belongs to Ella.”
Theo raised an eyebrow.
I asked him when he’d figured it out.
“Last night, soon as I saw the video. Spui 13 is still a red flag for me, so I sent my colleague over to talk to you.”
Mimi was twenty-one, the same age as Ella and me, when she was awakened by a loud noise that October night, almost forty years ago. Her boyfriend Mark was a sound sleeper, which we felt at the time explained why she had gone down to Spui 13’s second floor alone to see what was causing the racket.
It came out during the trial that two men, brothers, had broken into the shop on the ground floor and climbed the stairs to our two-level apartment. One of the brothers put a knife to Mimi’s throat. “Just to scare her,” he told the judge. But then he raped her. And then the other brother took a turn, except he was so drunk he couldn’t come. That’s when — according to the second brother’s testimony — things got out of hand. He slit Mimi’s throat with a single sweep of his own blade. Meanwhile, the first brother went up to the third floor and beat Mark to death with a bicycle chain.
Theo Mann was a young patrolman at the time. His supervisor recognized in him a talent for detective work and brought him along to the scene. The murders of Mimi and Mark, he told me, remained one of the grisliest crimes of his long career. What he saw that night, the butchery of two people around the same age as himself, had stayed with him for all the years that had followed.
“Mimi was my cousin,” I told him that afternoon, after we watched the video.
I didn’t have to think about it for long when I heard that the building was going to be auctioned off. Ella was the one who first found out about it, of course — I never hear about things like that. “Buy it,” she’d said, but without putting too much pressure on me. And you don’t have to know much about real estate to understand that a property like that one — a sweet little house, the smallest on the Spui — doesn’t come on the market often.
“Unusual,” Theo remarked tactfully. “Most people wouldn’t want a house with that history.”
Mimi’s parents — who had died a year after the murders; of grief, my mother always said — had tried to buy it at the time, to prevent strangers from moving in. But the owner, a notorious slumlord, hadn’t even responded to their repeated offers.
“It used to be our house,” I said, “a long time ago. Ella and I squatted there.”
If that weekend had unfolded differently, it would have been our dead bodies the young Theo would have investigated. Ella and I had wanted to get away for a few days to London, but we didn’t dare leave the house empty — we were afraid other squatters would take it over, or the owner would send in a goon squad to secure it. We’d almost given up on our plans when Mimi, who had moved to Groningen to attend the university there, announced that she and Mark would be happy to come down to Amsterdam to house-sit.
“Ella and I were questioned,” I said, “but I don’t think it was you.”
Theo let that pass. “You haven’t been living there for long, I understand.”
“It seems longer, but I only moved in yesterday.”
“From where?”
“From a marriage to an architect who treated me like I was one of his designs.”
With a scarf wrapped around my head, I strolled home through the crowded Leidsestraat, lingering here and there like a tourist and barely recognizable. No one would know that I had just been to the police station. Not that it mattered, but my invisibility made me feel better.
Turning off the Kalverstraat onto the Spui, I tried to ignore the people with cameras. There were three of them right in front of me, and at least five more taking snapshots or videos with their phones — there are always people with cameras on the Spui, but that day there were more of them than usual. In an attempt to convince myself that I was completely relaxed, I went into the Esprit store and bought a shoulder bag I didn’t want. With my old one stuffed inside the new one, I forced myself not to run across the street to my house. Scared on my own square.
Before I left the station, Theo had asked if I was okay, if there was someone who could come and stay with me. I’d lied to both questions. I couldn’t think of a soul I wanted to see, except for Ella.
I shot both of the front door’s dead bolts — with Ella’s key in the hands of her kidnapers, the fancy three-point lock my insurance company had recommended was now worthless — went upstairs, checked all the windows on the second floor, then up another flight of steps to the bedroom I hadn’t yet slept in. I turned on the radio to drown out the sounds from the street and fell into an exhausted sleep in my new bed.
In the middle of the afternoon, I called a locksmith and then the realtor on the corner of the Spuistraat.
“I have a house for sale.”
“We’ll be happy to help you,” the person who answered the phone told me. “May I send my colleague out to have a look, perhaps sometime around the end of this week?”
As soon as I mentioned the address, he proposed moving the preliminary visit to the following day.
“I’d like someone to come today,” I said. “Tonight, if necessary.”
“I need you to see something else,” Theo had told me, after I’d watched the video for the third time. “Can you keep this quiet?”
Keeping quiet was a skill I had mastered during the years of my marriage. I nodded.
He slid a sheet of paper across the table. “This was delivered this morning.”
It was a short list of demands, addressed to The Owner, who was ordered to put Spui 13 up for sale. A particular realtor was indicated, complete with phone number. Even the name of the ultimate purchaser — J. de Vries — and the sales price were specified.
“So they know Ella doesn’t own the house,” I said.
“Or they realized it after kidnapping her,” said Theo.
“No, they kidnapped her because she’s famous.”
“That can’t be the only reason.”
Theo asked from whom I’d purchased the building.
“A homesick American. I can send you his contact information if you want it.”
“Please, although I don’t see a link from him to Ella,” said Theo.
“She was at a real-estate auction when she found out Spui 13 was coming on the market. Does that help?”
After that came a formal interrogation. We went to another room; the woman detective who had visited me the previous evening sat in. Theo wanted to hear all about Ella and me, about my family connection to Mimi, about my purchase of Spui 13. I explained how Ella had handled the bidding for me at the auction, how brilliant she was.
“Why didn’t the American just use a realtor?” he asked.
“He wanted it over and done with, without a lot of hoopla. That’s the advantage of an auction sale,” I explained. “According to Ella.”