“They busted Schubski and Oosterbaan,” The Surinamer said, cupping a cautious hand over his mouth.
“I don’t want to know anything about their personal lives,” the banker in Riga snapped. “The only thing that concerns me is their accounts. Anything else?”
“No. That’s it for today.”
The banker grunted and hung up without saying good-bye.
The employees of the Latvian Overseas Bank didn’t go out of their way to be cordial. They didn’t have to be.
The Surinamer lifted a finger to summon a waiter.
Mijneer?” “
The Surinamer ordered a beer on tap.
The waiter returned three minutes later with a brimming glass of Amstel. The Surinamer didn’t usually drink beer when he was making his calls; it was too diuretic. But the day was warm and talking had made him thirsty.
The call from the woman in Brazil came in right on time, at 11:25. She started talking as soon as she recognized his voice.
“Where’s my money?”
“We’ve got a problem, Carla. The cops busted Arie Schubski.”
Carla-or whatever her name really was-remained silent for a moment. The line didn’t. The Surinamer could hear static and crackling.
“You still there?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Is he likely to talk?”
“Not Arie.”
“How about that little princess he lives with?”
“Frans Oosterbaan.” The Surinamer snorted contemptuously. “Yeah, him.”
“One time,” The Surinamer said, “I dropped by to pick up some of our money. Arie wasn’t home, so I had a little chat with Frans, told him if he ever shot off his mouth about me, I’d get him, cut off his balls, and let him bleed to death. Before our conversation, I was worried he might break if the cops bent him far enough. That’s why I figured we had to talk.”
“And now?”
“Now, I’m no longer worried.”
“Good. How about finding me another distributor?”
The Surinamer had been waiting for the question. He took another sip of beer, letting her think he was considering it.
“Now that the heat is on,” he said, “the new guy’s gonna want a bigger percentage.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“What do you mean by that?” The Surinamer said sharply, even though he knew exactly what she meant by that.
“Now that the heat is on,” she said, “the price of my work just went up by fifty percent. Go ahead and find me somebody. We’ll work it out.”
“I’m on it,” The Surinamer said.
The Dutch cops were on it too.
That morning, all of Smit’s calls were being recorded. He’d been tripped up by an instance of what Hoofd Inspecteur Kuipers liked to call dumb luck.
A little over four weeks earlier, a water pipe had broken in the apartment where The Surinamer kept his answering device. After repeated and unsuccessful attempts to contact someone living in the apartment, the manager of the building asked the police to force the door.
After a short discussion between a judge and the landlord’s lawyer, the proper paperwork was issued. The cops called a locksmith. Why break down a door when you don’t have to? The locksmith made short work of getting them into the place. The maintenance people repaired the broken pipe and departed.
The police stayed. They were intrigued by the sole contents of an otherwise empty apartment: an answering machine sitting in the middle of the living room floor.
Research revealed that the individual who’d rented the flat had been doing so for nineteen months and had been dead for a year and a half. The rent, however, was still being paid directly into the landlord’s postgiro out of a numbered account in Riga.
It was time to bring in Hoofd Inspecteur Kuipers.
Kuipers listened to the greeting on the machine, a teenage voice reciting a series of numbers in English. The numbers began with the digits zero and six and totaled ten in number, leading Kuipers to conclude (1) that the digits were the number of a cellular telephone, (2) that the answering device was an anonymous way of divulging it, and (3) that anyone who took such precautions was up to no good.
Kuipers tried calling the number, but a recorded voice informed him that the phone was either switched off or out of service. There was no voice mail.
Rather than meddle with the equipment, he gave instructions to keep the place under discreet surveillance, to make a duplicate key for the lock and to erase all evidence of a visit. Two days later a kid showed up and recorded a new number. They followed him back to his home and put a man to watch him, but they didn’t pick him up. They made a note of the new number, but they didn’t dial it. They simply put a tap on it.
Within a week, Kuipers had discovered (1) that his suppositions were correct, (2) that the man using the phones was Martin Smit, aka The Surinamer, and (3) that he was switching the phones on only minutes before using them.
“ Martin Smit, eh?” K uipers said after he’d studied the transcript of the first series of calls. He was talking to Inspector Guus Hein, his principal assistant. “Well, well. Not just drugs any more. That lowlife scum has diversified. And now we know why we never get any useful information from the taps we have on his other numbers. The scumbag set up a whole alternative system of communication. His associates call the answering device and get a new contact number every week.”
“You want to put surveillance on Smit?” Hein asked.
“Certainly not. It might spook him.”
During the following weeks, they recorded Smit receiving calls to four successive numbers. He took care to make few outgoing calls and kept the incoming ones to a minute or less. On the fourth of May, they registered an incoming from a woman he addressed as Carla. She began by dunning him about money and went on to pester him about a distributor, an affair in which he told her he’d made little progress. He asked her to drop her price. She said she wouldn’t, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t working. She was stockpiling material, and if he didn’t get his ass in gear she’d take measures to find someone else.
The police managed to get a trace, but it led to a prepaid cell phone in Brazil, which wasn’t a lot of help.
As soon Kuipers had finished reading the transcript, he picked up the phone and asked for a few minutes with his boss, Albertus Montsma.
Two hours later, Kuipers and Montsma were sitting across a desk from each other.
“I think you can safely assure the burgemeester,” Kuipers said, “that the videos aren’t being produced here, only the copies.”
“Thank God for that,” Montsma said.
Amsterdam depended heavily on tourism. Sex and drugs were among the attractions, but the city fathers underplayed them. They preferred to present the city as a family destination and would not look kindly upon a revelation that snuff videos were being produced in their midst. Distribution of the damned things was bad enough.
“Some of the worst,” Kuipers said, “are coming from Brazil.”
He told his boss about the telephone call, adding that the woman had spoken in English and that her English was fluent.
“That young fellow, Costa,” Montsma said, “Is he still here?”
“The Brazilian? Yes, he’s still here. I just saw him downstairs, talking to Hugo de Groot. You want him involved?”
“I know his uncle,” Montsma said.
“His uncle?”
“Mario Silva, Chief Inspector of the Brazilian Federal Police. He’s a good cop.”
Kuipers grunted. Coming from Bert Montsma, a good cop was high praise.
“You think Costa might be of some help?” he said.
“I don’t know,” Montsma said, “but I’m sure his uncle will be. Let’s get the young man up here, shall we?”
Hector Costa was a slim fellow of slightly below average height. His mother was Mario Silva’s sister and only sibling; Hector, her only child.
His father, Claudio, an architect, had been thirty-four years old when he was shot to death. Hector, now thirty-two, looked nothing like him. Claudio’s eyes had been blue. Hector’s were black. Claudio had been fair-skinned. Hector, like the rest of the Silva family, was dark, so dark that his mother’s ancestors had been suspected of Moorish blood. And Moorish blood had not been a good thing to have in sixteenth-century Portugal.