“Do you believe that explanation?” I demanded.
The realtor didn’t respond. Instead, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, he asked if I had any questions about the formal settlement. He knew I knew he was just an errand boy.
I told him I wanted to sign the papers as soon as possible.
“They’ve proposed the middle of next week.”
“Make it sooner. And I want a guarantee from the bank.”
“I’ve already got it,” he said.
Something the realtor said got me thinking, and Bert agreed with me that it was strange.
“No one would talk about ‘your loss’ in a situation like this,” Bert said. “Compensation for damages or inconvenience, that I would have bought.”
Today, as I look back and try to figure out when and how things went wrong, it seems to me that this choice of words, which sounded almost intentional, was a clue. I still can’t figure out, though, how we could have made better use of it.
The contract seemed perfectly straightforward. Bert — who like Ella had connections with the Amsterdam police — forwarded the buyer’s address and passport number to Theo.
“This Jan de Vries — that’s his full name — is seventy-four and a filthy-rich old geezer,” Bert told me, after an hour of research. “I can’t find anything unusual about him, which is unusual all by itself. They know him on the business desk. A smooth operator, avoids publicity.”
“I want you to go with me to the signing,” I said that evening, as he stood in the kitchen slicing vegetables for a ratatouille. “But of course you already know that.”
There was no way Bert would have allowed me to go by myself, so the next afternoon we strolled arm-in-arm to the realtor’s office around the corner. Theo had suggested I think of it like any other business transaction, so that’s what I did. There’d be plainclothes cops in the area, he assured me, quiet and invisible, ready to step in if they were needed.
The prospective purchaser of my house wore a fine Italian suit — Corneliani, Bert told me later. His face seemed vaguely familiar, like other people with money and power. The realtor asked him if he’d read the contract carefully.
The man nodded.
“Any questions or amendments?”
We both shook our heads.
After we signed, the realtor quite properly congratulated de Vries on his purchase and me on my sale.
“Now I have a question,” I said to de Vries. “Why did you want me out? Why couldn’t I go on living there?”
De Vries, the realtor, and Bert all looked at me with raised eyebrows.
De Vries got up, gave the realtor an ice-cold glare, and headed for the door.
“When will Ella be released?” I called after him.
He turned and said, “You never should have bought that building in the first place.”
And he left the office.
Bert was furious at me. Theo too, though he did a better job of holding it in. They were right, of course: I should have just played the game for the sake of Ella’s safety. However, a week later — as promised — a new video was delivered to De Telegraaf. Bert and I watched it together with Theo at the Lijnbaansgracht police station.
No Ella. Where I’d expected to see her face, light with relief, I saw instead myself, in tears, Bert’s arm around me. We were crossing the Spui, approaching my house. Bert squeezed my shoulder, I wiped my cheeks. Without our noticing, someone had managed to film us on our way back from the realtor’s office. The video ended with one sentence of typed text: She will be released the day after the closing.
That evening, I thanked Bert for taking care of me by cooking dinner for once. We raised more than one glass to Ella’s upcoming release, but we didn’t talk about it much, as if our words might jinx her. After the third toast, I dared to ask when he planned to publish his story.
“Pretty soon. It’s almost done. When they let her go, she’ll call you first, then me. As soon as I hear from her, I’ll post the article online. We’ll save her piece for the print edition. That’ll be the most important account, obviously.”
In his journalist’s mind, he was already looking beyond the actual release. That didn’t surprise me: Ella is exactly the same.
Movers came to put my things in storage, and I carried a suitcase of clothes and toiletries to Ella’s apartment on the Singel without looking back.
I didn’t want to go to the closing, and I could have given a notary my power of attorney. But I went. The buyer ignored my stare, signed the final papers, and left without a word.
I walked back to the Spui for a sort of final goodbye, and saw him sitting on a bench outside the bookstore.
“Do you have a place to go,” he asked, getting slowly to his feet, “or will you squat again?”
It was only then that I recognized him from all those years ago. Jan de Vries had begun his career as a slumlord on the Spui.
“I didn’t like the two of you then,” he said, “and I don’t like you now.”
And he turned away and crossed the square to a chauffeured limo that was waiting for him.
The brothers who murdered Mimi and Mark had told the truth. They weren’t Hells Angels, and what happened wasn’t an initiation gone out of control. They’d been hired to toss a pair of squatters out of a house, and that was what had gone out of control.
Theo cursed up a storm, immediately assigned a team of detectives to investigate de Vries, and promised me the man would never get away with it. That was a comforting thought, although I knew it was an empty promise as long as Ella was still in the man’s hands.
Bert rewrote his lead and came up with a new headline: “REAL-ESTATE MAGNATE SUSPECTED OF SPUI MURDERS.”
The article would go live the moment Ella was released.
After the closing, I decided to clean Ella’s apartment, just to have something to do. The next morning at daybreak, I began preparing for her return.
April 2017
It’s now a year since Bert’s article nailed the ex-slumlord to the cross. After he published it, he went on to write an entire series of stories about the Amsterdam real-estate mafia, partly with the help of Ella’s notes.
But Theo Mann was unable to keep his promise: Jan de Vries made a clean getaway before the police showed up to arrest him. He’s now living large — and not exactly incognito — in a country that has no extradition treaty with The Netherlands.
On the first Sunday of every month, early in the morning, while the city sleeps, I’ve gotten into the habit of walking down the Spui and along the Rokin to the Doelensluis, where I can stand on the bridge and watch the Amstel River flow slowly by.
It’s been so long since I last heard from Ella that I imagine her prediction must have come true.
This story was inspired by an actual Amsterdam murder case.
Ankle Monitor
by Herman Koch
Translated by Sam Garrett
Watergraafsmeer
Maybe it was a mistake to go back to my old neighborhood on the very first day of a weekend leave. I could have been imagining it, but I seemed to read it off the faces of the people I came across on the street: how they glanced up at me, walked on, then took another look. I avoided the butcher shop and the bakery I used to go to. I bought a couple of buns, some sliced liver, and salted beef at the Albert Heijn on Christiaan Huygensplein — the girls at the registers were too young to remember, they were just as friendly to me as they were to everyone else.