“Not on his part. It wasn’t personal. Just business.”
Marta snorted, and gave Roselia a look that would freeze water. “You lied to me,” she said. “You lied to both of us.”
“Yeah,” Roselia said, “I lied.” She didn’t seem to be in the least embarrassed. “Mostly, I just tell the girls I have jobs for them in hotels and restaurants. But I knew that wouldn’t work with you and your friend. You had too much class. I still can’t figure out why you were sleeping on that beach. Want to tell me?”
“No.”
“Not even if I tell you where your girlfriend is?”
Marta thought about it. “Then, yes,” she said. “You first.” Roselia stared at her for a long moment as if she was reflecting on the benefits of honesty.
“Okay,” she said at last. “The Goat sold her.”
“Sold her? Sold Andrea?”
Roselia nodded.
“Almost every new girl we get tells us she’s a virgin. They think it will protect them. It doesn’t, but we always check.”
“What’s that got to do with Andrea?”
“She wasn’t a virgin, so there wasn’t going to be any auction. Then, too, she was too old for-”
“Old? Andrea’s eighteen.”
“Yeah, like I said, too old. Men come to us for the younger girls. It’s our specialty, so to speak. Your turn. Why were you sleeping on that beach?”
Marta took a deep breath. “My parents locked me up,” she said. “They didn’t want me to see Andrea again, said I was too young to commit myself. And Andrea’s parents didn’t approve of our relationship. They wouldn’t let us stay at her place.”
“So you ran away, and you had no place to sleep except for the beach?”
Marta ground the sole of her sandal into one of the dead cockroaches on the floor and nodded.
“And now you’re wishing you’d stayed home,” Roselia said. Marta looked up and met her eyes. “No,” she said. “I’m wishing you’d left us alone.”
“Too late for that, querida.”
Roselia’s smile had a sharp edge.
“Not too late,” Marta said. “The cops are looking for me, and when they find me-”
Roselia laughed out loud.
“What a little dreamer you are,” she said. “You’ve been gone for a couple of months. By now, the cops have forgotten all about you.”
Marta shook her head.
“They haven’t, and they won’t. They’ll keep looking, because my grandfather will make sure they keep looking.”
“And who’s he? The President of the Republic?”
“He’s Roberto Malan.”
She expected Roselia to look shocked, but Roselia gave her another one of those smiles.
“Malan the big-time deputado?”
“Yes.”
“And I’m Princess Diana,” Roselia said.
“I’m not kidding.”
“Me neither. That whole business about me being killed in Paris was a lie. Dodi and I have an apartment on the square in front of the Teatro Municipal, and after you’ve been auctioned off, maybe I’ll let you fuck him. Meantime”-she got up and fished her keys out of her pocket-“you’ll be sitting here playing with yourself, eating bread, and drinking water. Pound on the door when you change your mind.”
“I’m not going to change my mind.”
“Oh, yes, you are. Believe me.”
This time, Marta didn’t say a word when Roselia got up to go. She was damned if she was going to let the bitch know she was starting to cry.
Chapter Five
AMSTERDAM
Aspirant Jan Bentinck was twenty-two and in his third and final year at the police academy. The current stage of his training involved a series of one-on-one sessions with an experienced officer. When Bentinck’s instructor told him he’d drawn Piet Kuipers, he also told him it was a stroke of luck. Kuipers was thought to be the best investigator in the whole Korps Landelijke Politiediensten and known as a man who enjoyed sharing his knowledge.
Kuipers worked out of a cramped space in the headquarters building on the Elandsgracht. His tiny cubicle had only one redeeming feature: a window with a view over the canal and the busy Nassaukade.
Kuipers offered Bentinck coffee, then began a lengthy lecture into which the investigator wove examples from past successes. But when he saw the young man’s eyes glazing over, he took pity upon him.
“What I’m about to tell you is confidential. You’re to keep your mouth shut on this one.”
“Ja, mijneer,” Bentinck sat up straighter in his chair. Kuipers had his full attention.
“The bomb that blew up that tram took a postal truck along with it.”
“I saw the pictures in De Telegraaf, mijneer. Mail was all over the street.”
“It was, and much of it was recovered. Among the stuff gathered up were a number of envelopes, each containing a single DVD. They were being shipped to addresses all over the world. You know what a snuff video is?”
“Snuff videos? I think I might have heard something, but…”
“It’s a video where a person’s life is snuffed out,” Kuipers informed him.
“I thought that was an urban legend.”
“It’s not. The Russians have been doing it for some time and so have the Thais. The DVDs we apprehended begin with a man and woman engaging in sex. They end with her murder.”
Kuipers described the murder in some detail.
Bentinck blinked. His pale skin turned even paler.
“We discovered the crime quite by chance,” Kuipers continued. “A few of the envelopes were badly damaged, their addresses illegible. A postal inspector took one of them home in the hope that, if he played it, it might give him enough information to return it to the sender. The poor fellow made the mistake of watching it while he was eating dinner.”
“Were you able to trace the material?”
“There were no return addresses, and there was nothing else inside the envelopes, just the DVDs.”
Kuipers opened his desk drawer and took out a plastic evidence envelope. “This,” he said, “is one of them.”
Bentinck took the DVD and studied it. The grooves reflected a rainbow of light. He turned it over to look at the other side.
“No label,” he said.
“And here’s what it was being shipped in,” Kuipers said, handing him another plastic sheath.
Bentinck examined both sides of the manila envelope through the plastic. The side with the address was scorched.
Kuipers leaned back in his chair and made a steeple with his fingers.
It was time to drive the lesson home.
“Name the five most important elements in the resolution of any crime,” he said.
Kuipers turned red and proffered, “Persistence, good forensics, deduction…”
Kuipers smiled and said, “Good. But here are the two most important: dumb criminals and dumb luck. The operative word is ‘dumb’. Dumb criminals talk about what they did. Dumb criminals don’t cover their tracks; they leave things behind, they leave witnesses.”
“And dumb luck?”
“Dumb luck is what we need when the criminals aren’t dumb. Take a look at these.”
Kuipers bent over and took four mailing envelopes, each in its own protective cover, out of a cardboard box. He lined them up in front of Bentinck as if he was laying out a game of solitaire.
Bentinck studied the envelopes. Each of them was scorched in the area of the address, but otherwise…
And then he got it. “They were all franked at the same post office.”
Kuipers beamed. “Bravo. They were. It’s on the Kloveniers-burgwal, just off the Nieuwmarkt. It’s one of the smallest post offices in the city. All the envelopes were part of the same mailing.”
“So you… we went to the post office?”
“We did. Dumb luck: a clerk remembered.”
“He was actually able to remember a single customer based on the mailing envelopes alone?”
“Dumb luck,” Kuipers repeated, “The individual in question was a flikker. The postal clerk shares his sexual preference. The suspect has been making shipments at the same post office for the last couple of years. The clerk remembered his name, a first name only: Frans.”
Kuipers tapped an identikit composite that had been on his desk all the time. He twirled it around so that Bentinck could get a better look.