“If we have so much time, why did I have to run like hell from Paris all the way up here? In a goddamn snowstorm.”
“The express train was late.”
“Obviously.”
The first man drank more Heineken from his heavy tulip-shaped glass. He was as unpleasant in appearance as he was in tone of voice. His face was dark and his cheeks were hollow. He had black eyes set deeply into his dark features. Nothing in his appearance spoke of aggression or prominence — Antonio had a weak chin and his lips were thin. Yet it was not a weak face, merely one of stony silence and of secrets.
“The job, Penev.”
“Have another drink.”
“What is the job?”
“It’s a complicated business, comrade.”
The implied familiarity of “comrade” annoyed Antonio but he said nothing. He rapped on the bar with the stem of the glass to summon the bartender, who was in another room. The windows of the bar rattled in the wind.
“I can take care of it.”
“That’s why we sent for you.”
Antonio smiled. “Something kinky in it?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps it will be in time.”
“Where’s the damned barman?” Antonio rapped the glass on the wood again. He was called Antonio but that was not his name. He had once been baptized and given a name that had been placed on a parish register in the city of Reggio Calabria, where he had been born. But that book had long been stolen and the name had been expunged from the Italian records kept in Rome and now he was Antonio to all who dealt with him. A sweet name, one of his girls had said. Like the sweet smell of flowers at funeral.
The bartender — short and dark and sullen — appeared in a doorway and again Antonio rapped his glass on the wood. The bartender made a face and walked slowly behind the counter.
“Do you want another?” he asked in Dutch, though both men had been speaking English.
Penev glanced up sharply, understood the reprimand in the change of language, and replied in Dutch.
“Another then,” the barman said to Antonio, switching back to English.
“What do you think I want in a place like this? Unless you have girls.”
“That is rude,” the Dutchman said with typical Amsterdam bluntness. For a moment, Antonio merely stared at him as though he were a gray mouse who had blundered into a warm room. Antonio’s black eyes chilled. The barman turned away, picked up a green bottle beneath the counter, placed it on the bar and opened it. He stared back at Antonio.
“What are you waiting for? A tip? Just put it on my bill.”
In a moment, they were in the room alone again.
“What is the business then, Penev?”
“Two matters, one simple, the other more complicated.”
“Where?”
“The first hit is in Dublin. In the next two days. Definitely before Thursday. Do you understand?”
“How does it happen?”
“Accident. If possible. Very much an accident.” The Rubens figure of Penev smacked his lips over a gin-and-tonic in front of him. He sipped. “The target is not a player, it shouldn’t be too difficult.”
“And the other?”
“Very much a player. In Helsinki. You do the Dublin business first and then Helsinki.”
“You couldn’t have picked someplace warm, could you?”
Penev did not smile. Despite his girth and external pleasantness, he had no sense of irony or sarcasm. He was a station agent for the Bulgarian Secret Police (External), and the principal northern European contractor for special jobs that called for freelance help. Antonio was a freelance assassin and terrorist who had proved reliable in other matters. The Bulgarian Secret Police was the choice assassination tool used by the Soviet Committee for State Security, the KGB.
“Are the matters linked?”
“That is my understanding, but I have not been told too much. It is not necessary for you to know too much.”
“I’ll decide that, Penev,” Antonio said. “What is the Dublin target?”
“Nonplayer. A priest. About seventy years old. Everything is in the file.”
“How do I kill him?”
“The method is yours. There won’t be enough time to set up anything elaborate. The umbrella trick might be—”
“No. I don’t want to get that close. I’ll think of something.”
“The player in Helsinki…”
“Good. What about him?”
“Make that any way you want.”
“Who is he?”
“Middle-aged. Professional player.”
“Not on contract?”
“An organization man.” Penev sipped again at the gin.
“I could cut off his balls and put them in his mouth.” Antonio smiled and Penev blanched. “I did that once in Marseilles. Not your business then. I was hitting for the Mafia; they wanted to kill an informer. It’s slang, you don’t understand, but it would be hard to translate. The bird sings, the informer sings. Well, the worst part was finding the bird. They wanted it done fast and I said, ‘Well, I don’t have the time to go and get a bird and kill it and then keep it around just to put in this guy’s mouth when I hit him.’ So I thought I’d just put his balls in his mouth. It worked out.”
“Nothing like that.”
“Well, I could just garrote him. Or do a cutting.”
“I do not need to know the details.”
“At the embassy?”
“No. Presidentti Hotel. His photograph is in the second envelope. When you’re finished going over the material, get rid of them.”
“Of course.”
“Standard contract—”
“Expenses.”
“Yes. The whole thing should not take more than a week.”
Again, the windows rattled in reminder of the storm still beating outside. The city seemed poised between light and dark. In a little while, in the tangle of streets near the Nieuwmarkt and off the Zeedijk across the canal from the old Victoria, the whores would be waking up and having their meager breakfasts in small, drafty rooms, explaining matters to their pimps and protectors. The bars would be open, waiting for the girls of the district — and the boys who served the same purposes for some — and for the customers, culled from half-a-hundred countries, who knew what they wanted to buy in Amsterdam. For all its culture and art museums, it was still the old port city on a hard, gray, perpetually angry sea where the sailors had always taken their pleasures roughly. A sort of bitter melancholy lingered in the city, frozen between the maritime past of great Dutch empires and the empty present of life in a beautiful city that had lost its sense of joy beyond existing another night in the red-light districts, beyond surviving a few small pleasures of purchased touch, warmth, whispers.
“Why is it connected?”
“Why do you want to know, Antonio?”
“Because it’s my skin, isn’t it? Because I’ve played you fair in the past but I don’t always trust you, you know?”
Penev did not speak.
“The Turk did the hit on the pope for your people—”
“That is not proven.”
“And I’m not a lawyer.” Antonio sneered. “I wouldn’t have taken a job like that.”
“Would you be afraid?”
“Yes.”
“Of your soul?” Penev smiled.
“What? To kill a pope? That wouldn’t mean much. It was done all wrong. The Turk was a fool to trap himself in St. Peter’s Square. And I wouldn’t have trusted you people. Not on a hit that was so large. You were going to kill him if he escaped.”
“We keep our word.”
“A Bulgarian has no honor.”
“And you? What are you?”
“How is this connected?”
“There won’t be any problem in Dublin. If it works out, you might have to go back to Ireland in two weeks to finish… some matters.”
“And I don’t see why you don’t take care of the Helsinki business yourself. You must have a hundred Soviet agents in that city.”
“I have my orders. We want an independent contract with a freelance.”