“That’s him,” he said.
Bentinck studied the likeness. Frans looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties. He had curly blond hair combed straight back, an earring, a weak chin, and a petulant mouth.
“We figured he had to be living in the neighborhood of the post office,” Kuipers said. “It helped that he had a penchant for wearing bright pink. People remembered him. His last name is Oosterbaan. We tracked him to a canal house on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal.”
“And arrested him?”
“Not yet. We’re going to roust him out of bed in the dead of night. It’s more of a psychological shock that way, makes people more likely to tell us things. Want to come along?”
The first report shocked Arie Schubski awake, causing him to sit bolt upright. Then there was another bang followed by a clatter. Arie threw the covers aside and leaped out of bed.
By the time he’d opened the bedroom door, dark figures were already sprinting up the staircase: men in police uniforms, carrying guns. He slammed the door and tried to lock it, but he wasn’t quick enough. They forced it open.
The guns had spotlight-type devices mounted above the barrels. Two of the beams focused on him. The cop behind one said, “Hands up. Don’t move unless you want to get shot.”
Arie lifted his hands.
Frans stared straight in front of him like a deer in headlights. He held the covers up to his chin as if for protection.
“We’re talking to you too, mijneer. Hands up.” The polite form of address didn’t match the speaker’s tone of voice.
Hesitantly, Frans raised his hands, dropping the covers, exposing his hairless chest.
They pulled him out of bed, put him next to Arie, and slapped handcuffs on them both.
“How many other people in the house?” one of the cops asked.
Frans spoke in a high-pitched and terrified voice. “No one. No one else,” spilling his guts before the cops had even started serious interrogation.
Arie knew right then that Frans was going to cause serious problems.
They split them up, keeping Frans in the bedroom, leading Arie into his office where windows overlooked the street. The street was in the heart of the Zeedijk, Amsterdam’s red-light district. The house had been standing there for well over three hundred years. The law wouldn’t allow Arie to make any modifications to the facade, but he’d gutted the interior and rebuilt it to suit his tastes and needs.
He was going to miss it.
On the floor above him, the top floor, was the heart of his business: one large room with tape players, format converters, DVD burners, and computers that controlled them all. He could make copies from DVDs, but he could also make them from Betacam tapes, both SP and digital, and in Secam, PAL, and NTSC. And that’s all he did: copy and mail. Once they found that out, the cops were going to grill him for the names of the producers, but the cops were going to be disappointed. And that meant they were going to get angry, which meant that the judge would probably throw the book at him. He might get as much as ten years, but he was prepared for that, prepared as anyone could be without it actually having happened.
You couldn’t run a business like Arie’s without confronting the reality that, someday, you were going to be raided by the police. Well, now it was over. Now, he could relax. No more fear. The money was safely squirreled away. A few years in jail wouldn’t kill him. He might even get away with less than ten, if Frans would only keep his mouth shut.
Martin Smit lived in a spacious apartment about three kilometers away from Arie Schubski’s canal house. The duplex was just off the Leidseplein and had cost him just short of three million Euros, all paid in cash.
Smit had been born in Suriname, but he harbored no memory of the place, nor any desire to go back.
During the last few weeks leading up to the 25th of November, 1975, the day the country would receive its independence, the government of The Netherlands, in a gesture typical of a land famed for political correctness, offered Dutch citizenship to those inhabitants of the colony able to reach the Fatherland prior to Independence Day. Half of the population of Suriname took them up on their offer, and much of the other half might have done so if they’d had money to pay for a flight.
Before 1974, a black face like Smit’s had been a rarity on the streets of Amsterdam; by November of the following year, there were neighborhoods, like the Bijlmermeer, where you saw nothing else.
Smit arrived speaking only Sranang Tongo, but he quickly mastered Dutch and breezed through the country’s school system (ten years of it, anyway) before he got bored and quit. By then, his speech was indistinguishable from that of any other Amsterdammer.
At fourteen, he’d already begun dealing drugs. By the time he was thirty, Smit, now known to most as The Surinamer, had become the head of a criminal enterprise called the Rakkers, an organization almost as international as Royal Dutch Shell or Philips.
The Rakkers’ main business was the production and distribution of methylenedioxymethamphetamine, better known as Ecstasy, but they also served as middlemen for criminal enterprises across the globe. If you wanted something, they were the people who knew where to find it. A murder for hire? They could locate the man (or woman) who’d commit it for you. Drugs of any nature? They knew where to go. They profited by putting criminals into contact with criminals and by promoting transactions. That was how the Surinamer had come to be acquainted with Arie Schubski.
Arie, who had begun his business dealing exclusively with pornography, had been receiving an ever-increasing number of requests for snuff videos. No one would be crazy enough to try to make them in The Netherlands. The country was too small, the cops were too good, and the disappearance of protagonists would quickly be noticed. But if Arie could find foreign producers, the potential for profit was great.
He called the Surinamer and invited him for coffee.
Smit used the Rakkers to put the word out. As a worldwide supplier of Ecstasy, the gang had relationships far and wide, contacts in Thailand, in Russia, in Brazil, all of them places where people might be able to get away with killing people for other people’s amusement. And, when Schubski met their price, some of them started doing just that.
The producer in Moscow was a nightclub owner who ran girls on the side. The one in Bangkok was an opium exporter, who drew his protagonists from across the border in Cambodia. The woman in Manaus was someone Smit had sold a number of false passports to, who’d indicated she was open to any profitable proposition.
But now the shoe was on the other foot.
Arie Schubski’s arrest had made the front page of De Telegraaf. The Surinamer hadn’t found it necessary to read the whole article, just enough of it to discover what the cops had found.
Arie and his little friend Frans would obviously be going away for a long time. They wouldn’t need The Surinamer’s help any more.
But the suppliers would. If they were going to stay in business, they were going to need a new distributor. And Martin Smit, The Surinamer, intended to furnish one.
Chapter Six
The smell of fresh coffee, beer, and poffertjes -sugared pancakes-hung over the terrace of the American Hotel on the Leidseplein. The place was packed, but the Surinamer had been lucky. He’d captured a table that put his back to the wall of the building, as far as was physically possible from the passing streetcars. A hundred meters to his right, tourists were lining up for the canal tours. Others were flocking over the bridge toward the Rijksmuseum on the Stadhouderskade. Amsterdammers, enjoying an unprecedented seventh straight day of sunshine, were on the terrace in force. Most of the voices around him were Dutch and, like him, many were talking on their cell phones.