She rubbed the ball of her foot against his leg and Stein began thinking of the mile-high club and converting feet to meters but the movement came in response to an announcment in Dutch over the intercom.
“That means me,” Jana said. She extracted those lithe limbs from the blanket. She nodded that she’d be back soon but Stein doubted it. His thoughts became more focused as preparations began for their descent into Schipol Airport. He knew that a long delayed, long avoided moment of truth was approaching that would define what kind of a man he had grown into. In protesting the Vietnam War he had risked the bite of tear gas and Billy club. Yes, he had led protests. Yes, he had hunger-struck, yes, he had draft-resisted, Yes he had bedeviled authority, exposed hypocrisy; all of which were admirable. But he had not fought. He had not faced the possibility of death. He had been, for all of his bravado, for all of his audacious demonstrations, as safe and immune to the infliction of real harm as any pentagon general.
He had no idea now what awaited him on the ground; whether Goodpasture had tracked Nicholette’s killers to Amsterdam or fled here from them. If her killers were here and meant to do danger to Brian, it meant that Stein would be in their crosshairs as well. But he couldn’t think of it that way. He had to think that they would be in his. That he was the hunter and they were the prey. He wondered how he would perform under life-and-death pressure. He pictured himself as a high diver wondering as he peered down at the distant water from the top of the cliff, whether he was still as good as he once had been, and thinking, perhaps foolishly, that yes, yes he just might be.
Captain Verheoff set the 747 down on runway number three. The passengers were thanked for flying KLM and informed that the local time was some number of hundred hours and that there were very, very few degrees Celsius outside. Stein looked at his watch but it was a meaningless gesture. After an eleven-hour flight across nine time zones and not having slept in God knows how long, his biorhythms were so askew he could have laid eggs. In the arrival terminal he telephoned the number for the taxi that Schwimmer had given him. Rather he had someone do it for him.
He sailed through Customs. The inattention to him by authority was becoming irksome. Didn’t they know who he once was, for God’s sake? Jana, the stewardess, waved a cheery goodbye as she strode across the lobby, linked at the elbow to Captain Verheoff. The pilot looked just like his voice: tall, grey and surgeonly in his uniform, but with a slightly odd walk like he was trying to shake something out of his undershorts.
Stein potted a taxi driver in the lobby holding a handwritten sign bearing his name transliterated into Shtejne but close enough. He pushed through the revolving door and was hit by a blast of air so cold it had to be a mistake. He batted his chest with his crossed arms as he ran to the car and got inside. “No coat?” the driver said.
“I live in L.A. We forget that the rest of the world has weather.”
The road layout into town followed the route of the concentric circles of century-old canals. Trams and bicycles were the primary vehicles. Cars had to create their own lanes, which they did with kaleidoscopic mayhem. It was hard to tell in the diffused, weak winter light but Stein guessed it was probably around noon. They chugged along the banks of the Singelgracht Canal passing the Rijksmuseum, which held nearly all of Van Gogh’s paintings. They took a hard right across the bridge at Nieuwe Speigelstraat, which ran smack into the one-way Prinsengracht and turned into the flow of traffic that proceeded onto the broad Leidseplein, penetrating into the inner circle of the city.
A throng of young people was gathered in the Dam Square making music. They were not the hippies of Stein’s day, rather well heeled nouveau Euroscuff. The whole feel of the city had changed. Young money had found it. Across the park facing the Palais Royale was the venerable Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky. The cabbie drove up to the front door and stopped.
“This is it.”
“This is what?”
The driver showed Stein the written address.
“I can’t be staying here-I do battle with the people who stay in places like this.”
“You have an envelope for me.”
It was too cold to argue and Stein handed the driver the packet of cash. A doorman led him inside and looked down his nose at Stein’s hemp rucksack. Stein was pleased to note that at last he was being seen as a disturbance. Entering the lobby of the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky was like being transported into a lost world. The place had been built when the empire of Austria-Hungary dominated Europe. The legendary Winter Garden restaurant, with its high-glassed roof, looked like the waiting room of the Vienna Train Station. James Joyce had stayed here in the 1920’s and fifty years later, Mick and Bianca. It wasn’t the Youth Hostel, that was for damn sure.
“It’s YOU!” Goodpasture sailed into the lobby on a zephyr of glee. He clapped Stein around the shoulder and spun him around. “Would you look at this place! Can you believe something like this still exists? Judging by Goodpasture’s ebullient mood Stein reckoned that poor boy must not have heard about Nicholette and that he would be charged with the sad duty of telling him. He waited for Goodpasture to settle down for a moment, then placed his hand on his arm.
“There’s something you need to know about and it’s not good.”
Goodpasture sobered. “You mean Nikki. Yeah. I know. That’s horrible.”
Yeah, that’s horrible? Stein thought. Is this the way a person reacts to his girlfriend being murdered? But before he could say anything the bellman was there, pushing before him an elegant cart built to accommodate the trunks and footlockers that accompanied traveling aristocracy. He lifted Stein’s hemp rucksack by a shoulder strap, using two fingers the way one might hold a rat, and then wheeled the cart to one of the sixteen elevators.
Goodpasture was excited again. “Wait till you see these rooms.”
The glitz of the suite that Goodpasture had booked offended Stein nearly as much as the young man’s cavalier attitude about Nicholette. The bathtub was the size of a lap pool. There were two four-poster beds. Persian rugs. It commanded a view over the square and the royal palace. Once the bellman had shown Stein all the amenities (towel warmers, all three TVs) and had departed (well-tipped), Goodpasture accelerated again into a whirlwind of energy.
“Dig this. I’ve got you set up as ‘The High Exalted Cannabis Cup Magistrate,’ which means you will have access to every bud in competition! If my orchids are here, and I know they are, those suckers are going to be so busted!” He draped a ribbon around Stein’s neck with a judge’s gold credential dangling at the bottom. “Anyone who pays the hundred bucks can be a regular judge. But there’s only one High Exalted Magistrate.”
Stein took him seriously to task. If the kid was saying Stein was his role model, that gave him the right to interfere. “I don’t get it. Your girlfriend gets murdered and your prime thoughts are with your missing weed? You fly off to Amsterdam, and then you fly me to Amsterdam to help you find it? Don’t you find that behavior just the slightest bit… disproportional? She died trying to protect you.”
Stein’s diatribe left Goodpasture perplexed. It took him a few moments to sort it out. “Were you under the impression that Nikki and I were a couple?”
It irked Stein that Goodpasture would try to conceal that. “Brian. She made it pretty obvious.”
“We were great friends,” Goodpasture said, “but not that way.”
Stein drilled through the sincere geology of Goodpasture’s expression for the topographical error. He was sure Nicholette had referred to Brian as her boyfriend. But now as he replayed the conversation in his mind he realized that the words she actually used were, “I believe you know a friend of mine.” Friend. But surely in that coy, italicized way she said it she had meant to convey boyfriend. Or had he presumed just that? But no. No no no. There were the hourly phone calls she had made to him. The knowing where he was. The unconcealed concern. The very act of seeking help when she feared he was in danger. Who else would do such a thing but a lover? Stein’s thoughts played across his face before he even spoke.