Her gaze went sly. ‘How do I know you’re not a cop, or one of the people who hurt Nic?’
‘If I was a cop, I’d arrest you and take you down to the station,’ Jack said. ‘If I was your enemy, I would not pour you vodka.’
‘You waited a long time to come.’
‘The people who shot me killed Nic,’ he said. ‘I just got out of the hospital. You see the news last night?’
‘Yes.’ She blinked at him and then sipped the vodka as though it would sharpen her recollections rather than dull them. And maybe, Jack thought, they would. ‘Yes. I remember you. Nic’s friend. At the coffee shop. The smart boy from Hong Kong.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Yes. All right. Give me some more.’
He dribbled more vodka into the glass, feeling guilty with each chug of the clear liquid. No vodka like morning vodka, he thought. She drank it down, wiped her mouth with an age-spotted hand. ‘I can’t help you. The police came. They took all the computers. They said there were dirty pictures on them, and they said Nicky had hacked into the police’s own computers.’ She threw up her hands. ‘He’s dead. No one cares about his reputation any more except me.’
‘Well, I do. Do you remember him having a notebook, maybe one that he would have hidden?’
She blinked, considered, drank more of the vodka. These seemed new questions to her, Jack thought, ones the police hadn’t asked.
He poured another few fingers of vodka into the glass. ‘This notebook will protect you and it will protect me. Think.’
‘But you know him and his computers. He did everything on them.’ She blinked again, slurped more of her poison. ‘But he asked me to go to the store, just this once, and buy a red notebook and tape, something he needed for writing and photos. We didn’t have any photo albums. Not after Nic’s father left. I don’t like them.’
A few photos still dotted Nic’s room but Jack noticed he hadn’t seen any in this room, or the outer room. A lot of painful history in this apartment, he thought. That he understood. ‘So Nic asked you to buy a notebook for him.’
‘Yes, a big one, and it was red.’
‘Can you tell me where it is?’
‘No.’
Jack thought his patience would explode and scatter his brains around the bedroom. He took a calming breath. She was old, drunk, grieving, and she was his only hope.
‘Did the police search the entire apartment?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did they give you a list of what they took?’
She considered this. ‘Yes. They did.’
‘Where is it?’
‘I don’t know’, and then a rare neuron fired. ‘I signed it on the kitchen table.’
Jack got up and shuffled among the debris on the table. Found it: a list from the Amsterdam Police Department, offering an inventory of what they had seized. Four laptops, two desktop computers, financial files, cell phones. Jack wondered if any record there would lead back to him. It made him feel as though time were moving faster. He felt feverish. But there was no mention of a notebook. The police hadn’t taken it.
‘I have to know where that notebook is.’ He tried to keep the panic out of his voice.
She had followed him out of the bedroom. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t have any money, do you? Or income, now that Nic is dead.’ It was a brutal truth.
She didn’t look at him. ‘Nic made so much I didn’t have to work.’
Because corporate espionage, spamming and porn paid so well. Jack pitied her. If he sold the notebook, he would have to make sure she got some of the money. ‘Think. Where would Nic have hidden the thing that mattered to him most? Did he have a storage unit? Another apartment? Anywhere?’
‘No, no.’
‘They said he did videos.’ Jack had to tear the words out of his mouth. ‘Um, illegal ones. Did he have a place where he might have filmed them?’
She bit her lip and he could see that if she’d known about her son’s horrible activities she’d chosen to ignore them. She sat down.
‘Mrs ten Boom. Please.’
‘He told me… he had stopped doing that.’ Her lips tightened into a line. ‘He promised me.’
‘Where?’
‘He had an apartment… he paid cash for it. I think under a different name.’
‘Do you know where it is?’
‘Well, he never took me there,’ she said with some indignation. ‘But once… long ago, I followed him. He told me he’d quit, I wanted to be sure. It was like an addiction, you see.’
The irony seemed lost on her. ‘So I followed him and I saw another man bring three teenage girls to his door… ’ She blinked. ‘I came home and I had a drink and… ’ She left the sentence unfinished. But he could guess that painful moment would have been when her drinking started in earnest.
He said nothing for a long minute. He’d thought this woman a stupid old drunk and now he had an idea of what the knowledge of her son’s crimes had done to her.
‘He was my baby. Every person who does wrong in this world, they were once someone’s baby. Full of hope and promise. He was so smart. Where did I go wrong? Where did I bend him the wrong way?’
‘Nothing he did is your fault,’ Jack said. ‘Trust me on this one.’
She heaved a deep sigh and it seemed to take an effort to tear the words out of her chest. ‘I can take you there.’ She got up and went to the kitchen drawer. She pulled it free and turned it over. Under it was a key, taped into place. ‘This is it,’ she said. ‘This is the only one we’ve got.’
Jack was afraid to take the bus or the train with his face in the day’s papers so he’d borrowed Ricki’s little car.
‘He was such a smart boy. Like his father. Nic was always good at math, I was terrible at numbers. He got fired from his computer jobs, though. He was smarter than his bosses, they didn’t like him.’
Jack didn’t respond to this hollow praise. He turned into a parking lot down from a series of apartment complexes. The neighborhood was bad, and graffiti in a half-dozen languages marred the walls. Jack felt sick. Nic traded filth. Jack didn’t want to be here. If he’d known this about Nic he never would have worked with him. But what was done was done, and so now he had to see this through.
The address was an apartment in a section of De Pijp that retained the original gritty feel of the neighborhood, untouched by the gentrification that had pervaded this part of Amsterdam in recent years. The halls were clean, but they smelled of cigarette smoke and a heavy, delicious scent of Turkish food cooking. Jack and Mrs ten Boom walked up the stairs and found the door. Jack slid the key in and unlocked it and stepped inside, Mrs ten Boom following him, a slight humming noise coming from her throat.
She was afraid of what they might see here.
Jack did a quick survey of the small, cluttered apartment. In the kitchen were bottles of whisky. And cans of soda and bags of candy. Lures? Or bribes? The apartment made his skin itch with distaste.
He poured Mrs ten Boom a generous shot of whisky and turned on the TV to distract her. It was hooked up to a DVD player, and a children’s show was already loaded, bright colored dancing flowers and music. Jack thought he would vomit. He quickly switched the television to a news network.
‘Here, Mrs ten Boom, have a seat.’ Best if he searched alone, he thought.
Jack began a methodical search of the apartment. He started in the bedroom, going through every lining of clothing, every container in the closet, every box under the bed. Nic had weapons hidden in this place: a 9mm Glock, a Beretta pistol, a hunting knife with a wicked looking edge. Jack put those in a separate box.
He tore apart the mattress, dismantled the bed, pulled the headboard free. In the bedroom closet was a set of expensive camera gear. He searched through the equipment bags. Nothing. He tore up the carpet. Nothing.
A bubble of panic rose in his chest.
He finished in the bedroom. He went into the bathroom, searched every inch. He found a thousand euros hidden in a large plastic aspirin bottle. He went and pushed the cash into Mrs ten Boom’s hands; she stared at it in surprise, then put it in her pocket.