HE LINCOLN TOWN CAR was circling the block—but when the driver stopped for us, it was not Gyuri but a guy I’d never seen, with a haircut that looked like someone had administered it to him in the drunk tank and piercing, polar-blue eyes.

Boris introduced us in Russian. “Privet! Myenya zovut Anatoly,” said the guy, extending a hand slurred with indigo crowns and starbursts like the patterns on Ukrainian Easter eggs.

“Anatoly?” I said cautiously. “Ochyen’ priyatno?” A stream of Russian followed, of which I understood not a word, and I turned to Boris in despair.

“Anatoly,” Boris said pleasantly, “does not speak one stitch of English. Do you, Toly?”

In answer Anatoly gazed at us seriously in the rear view mirror and made another speech. His knuckle tattoos, I was pretty sure, had jailhouse significance: inked bands indicating time sentenced, time served, time marked in accretions like rings on a tree.

“He says you are pretty speaker,” said Boris ironically. “Well-schooled in politeness.”

“Where is Gyuri?”

“Oh—he flew over yesterday,” Boris said. Scrabbling in the breast pocket of his jacket.

“Fly? Fly where?”

“Antwerp.”

“My painting’s there?”

“No.” Boris had retrieved two sheets of paper from his pocket, which he scanned in the weak light before passing one to me. “But my flat is in Antwerp, and my car. Gyuri is picking up the car and some things and driving to meet us.”

Holding the paper to the light, I saw that it was a printout of an electronic ticket:

CONFIRMED

DECKER/THEODORE DL2334

NEWARK LIBERTY INTL (EWR) TO AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS (AMS)

BOARDING TIME 12:45A

TOTAL TRAVEL TIME 7 HRS 44 MINS

“From Antwerp to Amsterdam is only three hours’ drive,” said Boris. “We will arrive at Schiphol about same time—me, maybe an hour after you—I had Myriam book us on different planes. Mine connects through Frankfurt. Yours is direct.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes—well, as you see, it does not leave us much time—”

“And why am I going?”

“Because I may need some help, and do not want to bring anyone else in on this. Well—Gyuri. But I did not tell even Myriam purpose of our trip. Oh, oh, I could have,” he said, interrupting me. “It’s only—fewer people know of this, the better. Anyway you must run in and get your passport and what cash you can lay hands on. Toly will drive us to Newark. I—” he patted the carry-on, which I had only just noticed in the back seat—“I am all ready. Will wait in the car for you.”

“And the money?”

“What you have.”

“You should have told me earlier.”

“No need. The cash—” he was rooting around for a cigarette—“well, I would not kill yourself with that. Whatever you have, whatever’s convenient—? Because, is not important. Is mostly for show.”

I took my glasses off, polished them on my sleeve. “Excuse me?”

“Because—” knocking himself with the knuckles on the side of his head, gesture of old, blockhead—“because I plan to pay them, but not the full amount requested. Reward them for stealing from me? Because why then won’t they rob and steal from me whenever they want? What kind of a lesson is this? ‘This man is weak.’ ‘We can do what we like to him.’ But—” crossing his legs spasmodically, patting himself down for a light—“I want them to think we are willing to pay the whole thing. Possibly you want to stop at a machine and get money—we can do that on the way, or at the airport maybe. They will look nice, the new bills. I think you are only allowed to bring ten thousand currency in, to EU—? But I will rubber-band the extra and carry in my case. Also—” offering me a cigarette—“I do not think it is fair for you to come up with the whole sum. I will supply more cash once we get there. My gift to you. And bank draft, as well—at any rate, bad paper for bank draft—bad deposit slip, bad check. Brass-plate bank down in the Caribbean. Looks very good, very legitimate. I do not know how well that part is going to work out. We will have to play it by ear. No one with any brains is going to accept bank draft instead of cash for something like this! But I think they are inexperienced, and desperate, so—” he crossed his fingers—“I am hopeful. We will see!”

ii.

WHILE ANATOLY CIRCLED THE block, I ran into the shop and grabbed all the unbanked cash to hand without counting it, somewhere in the neighborhood of sixteen thousand. Then I ran upstairs and—while Popper paced and circled, whining with anxiety—threw a few things into my bag: passport, toothbrush, razor, socks, underwear, first pair of suit trousers I found, couple of extra shirts, sweater. The Redbreast Flake tin was at the bottom of my sock drawer and I grabbed it up too and then dropped it and shut the drawer on it, quick.

As I hurried down the hall, dog at my heels, Pippa’s Hunter boots standing outside her bedroom door brought me up sharply: their bright summer green fused in my mind with her and with happiness. For a moment I paused, uncertain. Then I went back to my room, got the first edition of Ozma of Oz and dashed off a note so quickly I didn’t have time to second-guess. Safe trip. I love you. No kidding. This I blew dry and tucked in the book, which I placed on the floor by her boots. The resulting tableau on the carpet (Emerald City, green wellies, Ozma’s color) was almost as if I’d stumbled on a haiku or some other perfect combination of words to explain to her what she was to me. For a moment I stood in perfect stillness—ticking clock, submerged memories from childhood, doors opening to bright old daydreams where we walked together on summer lawns—before, resolutely, going back to my room for the necklace which had called to me in an auction house showroom with her name: lifting it from its midnight velvet box and, carefully, draping it over one of the boots so a splash of gold caught the light. It was topaz, eighteenth century, a necklace for a fairy queen, girandôle with diamond bow and huge, clear, honey-colored stones: just the shade of her eyes. As I turned away, averting my gaze from the wall of her photos opposite, and hurried down the stairs, it was almost with the old childhood terror and exhilaration of having thrown a rock through a window. Hobie would know exactly how much the necklace had cost. But by the time Pippa found it, and the note, I would be long gone.

iii.

WE WERE LEAVING FROM different terminals, so we said our goodbyes on the curb where Anatoly dropped me. The glass doors slid with a breathless gasp. Inside, past security, on the shiny floors of the predawn concourse, I consulted the monitors and walked past dark shops with the metal gates pulled down, Brookstone, Tie Rack, Nathan’s hot dogs, bright seventies music drifting into consciousness (love… love will keep us together… think of me babe whenever…) past chilly ghost gates that were roped and empty except for college kids sprawled full-length and drowsing across four seats at a time, past the lone bar that was still open, the lone yogurt hut, the lone Duty Free where, as Boris had repeatedly and with some urgency advised me to do, I stopped for a fifth of vodka (“better safe than sorry… booze only available in the state controlled shops… maybe you want to get two”) and then all the way to the end to my own (crowded) gate filled with dead-eyed ethnic families, backpackers cross-legged on the floor, and stale, oily-faced businessmen on laptops who looked like they were used to the drill.

The plane was full. Shuffling on, crowds in the aisle (economy, middle of the row, five across), I wondered how Myriam had managed to get me a seat at all. Luckily I was too tired to wonder about much else; and I was asleep almost before the seat belt light went off—missing drinks, missing dinner, missing the in-flight movies—waking only when the shades were pulled up and light flooded the cabin and the stewardess came pushing her cart through with our pre-packaged breakfasts: chilled twig of grapes; chilled cup of juice; lardy, yolk-yellow, cellophane-wrapped croissant; and our choice of coffee or tea.

We’d arranged to meet in baggage claim. Businessmen silently grabbed up their cases and fled—to their meetings, their marketing plans, their mistresses, who knew? Loudly shouting stoner kids with rainbow patches on their backpacks jostled each other and tried to snatch duffels that weren’t theirs and argued about which was the best wake-and-bake coffeeshop to hit in the morning—“oh, guys, the Bluebird, definitely—”

“no, wait—Haarlemmerstraat? no, I’m serious, I wrote it down? It’s on this paper? no, wait, listen guys, we should just go straight there? because I can’t remember the name but it opens early and they have awesome breakfasts? And you can get your pancakes and OJ and your Apollo 13 and vape up right at the table?”

Off they trooped—fifteen or twenty of them, carefree, lustrous-haired, laughing, hoisting their backpacks and arguing about the cheapest way to get into town. Despite the fact that I had no checked baggage, I stood in the claim area for well over an hour, watching a heavily taped suitcase circle round and round forlornly on the belt until Boris came up behind me and greeted me by throwing his arm around my neck in a choke hold and trying to step on the back of my shoes.

“Come on,” he said, “you look awful. Let’s get something to eat, and talk! Gyuri’s got the car outside.”

iv.

WHAT I SOMEHOW HADN’T expected was a city prinked-up for Christmas: fir boughs and tinsel, starburst ornaments in the shop windows and a cold stiff wind coming off the canals and fires and festival stalls and people on bicycles, toys and color and candy, holiday confusion and gleam. Little dogs, little children, gossipers and watchers and package bearers, clowns in top hats and military greatcoats and a little dancing jester in Christmas clothes à la Avercamp. I still wasn’t quite awake and none of it seemed to have any more reality than the fleeting dream of Pippa I’d had on the plane where I’d spotted her in a park with many tall fountains and a Saturn-ringed planet hanging low and majestic in the sky.

“Nieuwmarkt,” said Gyuri as we came out on a big circle with a turreted fairytale castle and—around it—an open air market, cut evergreens lightly frosted with snow, mittened vendors stamping, an illustration from a children’s book. “Ho, ho, ho.”

“Always a lot of police here,” said Boris gloomily, sliding into the door as Gyuri took the turn hard.

For various reasons I was apprehensive about accommodations, and ready to make my excuses in case they involved anything like squatter conditions or sleeping on the floor. Luckily Myriam had booked me a hotel in a canal house in the old part of town. I dropped my bags, locked the cash in the safe, and went back out to the street to meet Boris. Gyuri had gone to park the car.

He dropped his cigarette on the cobblestones and dashed it under his heel. “I’ve not been here in a while,” he said, his breath coming out white, as he looked round appraisingly at the soberly clad pedestrians on the street. “My flat in Antwerp—well it is for business reasons I am in Antwerp. Beautiful city too—same sea clouds, same light. Someday we will go there. But I always forget how much I like it here as well. Starving to death, you?” he said, punching me in the arm. “Mind walking a bit?”

Down narrow streets we wandered, damp alleys too narrow for cars, foggy little ochreous shops filled with old prints and dusty porcelains. Canal footbridge: brown water, lonely brown duck. Plastic cup half-submerged and bobbing. The wind was raw and wet with blown pinpricks of sleet and the space around us felt close and dank. Didn’t the canals freeze in winter? I asked.

“Yes, but—” wiping his nose—“global warming, I suppose.” In his overcoat and suit from the previous night’s party he looked both completely out of place and completely at home. “What a dog’s weather! Shall we duck in here? Do you think?”

The dirty canal-side bar, or café, or whatever it was, had dark wood and a maritime theme, oars and life preservers, red candles burning low even in the daytime and a desolate foggy feel. Smoky, muggy light. Water droplets condensed on the inside of the windowpane. No menus. In back was a chalkboard scrawled with foods unintelligible to me: dagsoep, draadjesvlees, kapucijnerschotel, zuurkoolstamppot.

“Here, let me order,” said Boris, and proceeded to do so, surprisingly, in Dutch. What arrived was a typically Boris meal of beer, bread, sausages, and potatoes with pork and sauerkraut. Boris—happily gobbling—was reminiscing about his first and only attempt to ride a bicycle in the city (wipeout, disaster) and also how much he enjoyed the new herring in Amsterdam, which fortunately wasn’t in season since apparently you ate it by holding it up by the tail fin and dangling it down into your mouth, but I was too disoriented by my surroundings to listen very closely and with almost painfully heightened senses I stirred at the potato mess with my fork and felt the strangeness of the city pressing in all around me, smells of tobacco and malt and nutmeg, café walls the melancholy brown of an old leather-bound book and then beyond, dark passages and brackish water lapping, low skies and old buildings all leaning against each other with a moody, poetic, edge-of-destruction feel, the cobblestoned loneliness of a city that felt—to me, anyway—like a place where you might come to let the water close over your head.

Before long Gyuri joined us, red-cheeked and breathless. “Parking—bit of a problem here,” he said. “Sorry.” He extended his hand to me. “Glad to see you!” he said, embracing me with a genuine-seeming warmth that startled me, as if we were old friends long separated. “Everything is okay?”

Boris, on his second pint by now, was holding forth a bit about Horst. “I do not know why he does not move to Amsterdam,” he said, gnawing happily on a hunk of sausage. “Constantly he complains about New York! Hate hate hate! And all the holy while—” waving a hand at the canal outside the fogged window—“everything he loves is here. Even the language is same as his. If he really wanted to be happy in the world, Horst? To have any kind of joyful or happy life? He should pay twenty grand to go back to his rapid detox place and then come here and smoke Buddha Haze and stand in a museum all day long.”

“Horst—?” I said, looking from one to the other.

“Sorry?”

“Does he know you’re here?”

Boris gulped his beer. “Horst? No. He does not. It is going to be much, much easier if Horst learns about all this after. Because—” licking a dab of mustard off his finger—“my suspicions are correct. Fucking Sascha who stole the thing. Ulrika’s brother,” he said urgently. “Which with Ulrika puts Horst in bad position. So—much better if I take care of it on my own, see? I am doing Horst a favor this way—favor he won’t forget.”

“What do you mean, ‘take care of it’?”

Boris sighed. “It—” he looked around to make sure no one was listening, even though we were the only people in the place—”well, it is complicated, I could talk for three days, but I can also tell you in three lines what has happened.”

“Does Ulrika know he took it?”

Rolled eyes. “Search me.” A phrase I had taught Boris years ago, horsing around at my house after school. Search me. Cut it out. Smoky desert twilight, shades drawn. Make up your mind. Let’s face it. No way. Same shadows on his face. Gold light glinting off the doors by the pool.

“I think Sascha would have to be very stupid to tell Ulrika,” said Gyuri, with a worried expression on his face.

“I don’t know what Ulrika knows or does not know. Has no relevance. She has loyalty to her brother over Horst, as she has shown many and many times over. You would think—” grandly signalling the waitress to bring Gyuri a pint—“you would think Sascha had sense to sit on it for a while, at least! But no. He can’t get a loan on it in Hamburg or Frankfurt because of Horst—because Horst would hear of it in one second. So he has brought it here.”

“Well look, if you know who has it we should just call the police.”

The silence, and blank looks that followed this, were as if I’d produced a can of gasoline and suggested lighting ourselves on fire.

“Well, I mean,” I said defensively, after the waitress had arrived with Gyuri’s beer, set it down, left again, and neither Gyuri nor Boris had spoken a word. “Isn’t that the safest? And easiest? If the cops recover it and you have nothing to do with it?”

Ding of a bicycle bell, woman clattering by on the sidewalk, rattle of spokes, witchy black cape flying behind.

“Because—” glancing between them—“when you think of what this picture has gone through—what it must have gone through—I don’t know if you understand, Boris, how much care has to be taken even to ship a painting? Just to pack it properly? Why take any chances?”

“This is my feeling exactly.”

“An anonymous call. To the art-crimes people. They’re not like the normal cops—no connections with the normal cops—the picture is all they care about. They’ll know what to do.”

Boris leaned back in his chair. He looked around. Then he looked at me.

“No,” he said. “That is not a good idea.” His tone was that of someone addressing a five year old. “And, do you want to know why?”

“Think about it. It’s the easiest way. You wouldn’t have to do a thing.”

Boris set his beer glass down carefully.

“They’d have the best chance of getting it back unharmed. Also, if I do it—if I call them—shit, I could have Hobie call them—” hands to head—“any way you look at it, you wouldn’t be putting yourselves at risk. That is to say”—I was too tired, disoriented; two pairs of Dremel-drill eyes, I couldn’t think—“if I did it, or someone else not a part of your, um, organization—”

Boris let out a shout of laughter. “Organization? Well—” shaking his head so vigorously the hair fell in his eyes—“I suppose we count as organization, of sorts, since we are three or more—! But we are not very large or very organized as you can see.”

“You should eat something,” said Gyuri to me, in the tense pause that followed, looking at my untouched plate of pork and potato. “He should eat,” he said to Boris. “Tell him to eat.”

“Let him starve if he wants. Anyway,” said Boris, grabbing a chunk of pork off my plate and popping it in his mouth—

“One call. I’ll do it.”

“No,” said Boris, glowering suddenly and pushing back in his chair. “You will not. No, no, fuck you, shut up, you won’t,” he said, lifting his chin aggressively when I tried to talk over him—Gyuri’s hand on my wrist very suddenly, a touch I knew very well, the old forgotten Vegas language of when my dad was in the kitchen ranting about whose house it was? and who paid for what?—

“And, and,” said Boris imperiously, taking advantage of a lull in my response he was not expecting, “I want you to stop talking this stupid ‘call’ business right away. ‘Call, call,’ ” he said, when he got no answer from me, waving his hand back and forth ridiculously in the air as if “call” were some absurd kiddie word that meant ‘unicorn’ or ‘fairyland.’ “I know you are trying to help but this is not helpful suggestion on your part. So forget it. No more ‘call.’ Anyway,” he said amiably, pouring part of his own beer into my half-empty glass. “As I was explaining to you. Since Sascha is in so big hurry? Is he thinking clearly? Is he playing more than one, or maybe two moves ahead? No. Sascha is out of towner. His connections here are poisonous to him. He needs money. And he is working so hard to stay clear of Horst that he has wandered smack into me.”

I said nothing. It would be easy enough to phone the police myself. There was no reason to involve Boris or Gyuri at all.

“Amazing stroke of luck, no? And our friend the Georgian—very rich man, but so far from Horst’s world and so far from art collector, he did not even know of picture by name. Just a bird—little yellow bird. But Cherry believes he is telling the truth that he saw it. Very powerful guy in terms of real estate? Here and in Antwerp? Plenty of paper and father to Cherry almost, but not person of great education if you understand me.”

“Where is it now?”

Boris rubbed his nose vigorously. “I do not know. They are not going to tell us that, are they? But Vitya has got in touch to say he knows of a buyer. And a meeting has been set up.”

“Where?”

“Not settled yet. They have already changed the location half a dozen times. Paranoid,” he said, making a screw-loose gesture at the side of his head with his hand. “They may make us wait a day or two. We may know only an hour before.”

“Cherry,” I said, and stopped. Vitya was short for Cherry’s Russian name, Viktor—Victor, the Anglicized version—but Cherry was only a nickname and I didn’t know a thing about Sascha: not his age, not his surname, not what he looked like, nothing at all except that he was Ulrika’s brother—and even this was uncertain in the literal sense, given how loosely Boris threw around the word.

Boris sucked a bit of grease off his thumb. “My idea was—set up something at your hotel. You know, you, American, big shot, interested in the picture. They”—he lowered his voice as the waitress switched his empty pint for a full one, Gyuri nodding politely, leaning in—“they would come to your room. That’s how is done usually. All very businesslike. But”—minimal shrug—“they are new at this, and paranoid. They want to call their own location.”

“Which is?”

“Don’t know yet! Didn’t I just say? They keep changing their mind. If they want us to wait—we wait. We have to let them think they are boss. Now, sorry,” he said, stretching and yawning, rubbing a dark-circled eye with a fingertip, “I am tired! Want a nap!” He turned and said something to Gyuri in Ukrainian, and then turned back to me. “Sorry,” he said, leaning in and slinging his arm around my shoulder. “You can find your way back to your hotel?”

I tried to disengage myself without seeming to. “Right. Where are you staying?”

“Girlfriend’s flat—Zeedijk.”

“Near Zeedijk,” said Gyuri, rising purposefully, with a polite and vaguely military air. “Chinese quarter of the old times.”

“What’s the address?”

“Cannot remember. You know me. I cannot remember addresses in my head and like that. But—” Boris tapped his pocket—“your hotel.”

“Right.” Back in Vegas, if we ever got separated—running from the mall cops, pockets full of stolen gift cards—my house was always the rendezvous point.

“So—I’ll meet you back there. And you have my phone number, and I have yours. Will call you when I know something more. Now—” slapping me on the back of the head—“stop worrying, Potter! Don’t stand there and look so unhappy! If we lose, we win, and if we win, we win! Everything is good! You know which way to go to get back, don’t you? Just up this way, and left when you get to the Singel. Yes, there. We will speak soon.”

v.

I TOOK A WRONG turn on the way to the hotel and for several hours wandered aimlessly, shops decorated with glass baubles and gray dream alleys with unpronounceable names, gilded buddhas and Asian embroideries, old maps, old harpsichords, cloudy cigar-brown shops with crockery and goblets and antique Dresden jars. The sun had come out and there was something hard and bright by the canals, a breathable glitter. Gulls plunged and cried. A dog ran by with a live crab in its mouth. In my light-headedness and fatigue, which made me feel drastically cut off from myself and as if I were observing it all at a remove, I walked past candy shops and coffee shops and shops with antique toys and Delft tiles from the 1800s, old mirrors and silver glinting in the rich, cognac-colored light, inlaid French cabinets and tables in the French court style with garlanded carvings and veneerwork that would have made Hobie gasp with admiration—in fact the entire foggy, friendly, cultivated city with its florists and bakeries and antiekhandels reminded me of Hobie, not just for its antique-crowded richness but because there was a Hobie-like wholesomeness to the place, like a children’s picture book where aproned tradespeople swept the floors and tabby cats napped in sunny windows.

But there was much too much to see, and I was overwhelmed and exhausted and cold. Finally, by accosting strangers for directions (rosy housewives with armloads of flowers, tobacco-stained hippies in wire-rimmed glasses), I retraced my path over canal bridges and back through narrow fairy-lit streets to my hotel, where I immediately changed some dollars at the front desk, went up for a shower in the bathroom which was all curved glass and voluptuous fixtures, hybrid of the Art Nouveau and some icy, pod-based, science fiction future, and fell asleep face down on the bed—where I was awakened, hours later, by my cell phone spinning on the bed table, the familiar chirrup making me think, for a moment, I was at home.

“Potter?”

I sat up and reached for my glasses. “Um—” I hadn’t drawn the curtains before I fell asleep and reflections of the canal wavered across the ceiling in the dark.

“What’s wrong? Are you high? Don’t tell me you went to a coffee shop.”

“No, I—” Dazedly I slid an eye around—dormers and beams, cupboards and slants and—out the window, when I stood, rubbing my head—canal bridges lighted in tracework, arched reflections on black water.

“Well I’m coming up. You don’t have a girl up there, do you?”

vi.

MY ROOM WAS TWO different elevators and a walk from the front desk, so I was surprised how quickly the knock came. Gyuri, discreetly, went to the window and stood with his back to us while Boris looked me over. “Get dressed,” he said. I was barefoot, in the hotel robe and my hair standing on end from falling asleep straight out of the shower. “You need to clean up. Go—comb your hair and shave.”

When I emerged from the bathroom (where I’d left my suit hanging to let the wrinkles fall out) he pursed his lips critically and said: “Don’t you have anything better than that?”

“This is a Turnbull and Asser suit.”

“Yes but it looks like you slept in it.”

“I’ve been wearing it a while. I have a better shirt.”

“Well put it on.” He was opening a briefcase on the foot of the bed. “And get your money and bring it here.”

When I came back in, doing up my cufflinks, I stopped dead in the middle of the room to see him standing head bent at the bedside, intent upon assembling a pistol: snapping a pin with a clear-eyed competence like Hobie at work in the shop, pulling back the slide with a forceful true-to-life quality, click.

“Boris,” I said, “what the mother fuck.”

“Calm down,” he said to me, with a sideways glance. Patting his pockets, taking out a magazine and popping it in: snick. “Is not what you think. Not at all. Is just for show!”

I looked at Gyuri’s broad back, perfectly impassive, the same professional deafness I sometimes turned away to assume, in the shop, when couples were bickering over whether to buy a piece of furniture or not.

“It is just—” He was snapping something back and forth on the gun, expertly, testing it, then bringing it up to his eye and sighting it, surreal gestures from some deep underlayer of the brain where the black and white movies flickered twenty-four hours a day. “We are meeting them on their own ground, and they will be three. Well, really only two. Two that count. And I can tell you now—I was a little worried Sascha might be here. Because then I couldn’t go with you. But everything has worked out perfectly, and here I am!”

“Boris—” standing there, it had crashed in on me all at once, in a sick rush, what a dumb fucking thing I’d stepped into—

“No worries! I have done the worrying for you. Because—” patting me on the shoulder—“Sascha is too nervous. He is afraid to show his face in Amsterdam—afraid it will get back to Horst. For good reason. And this is very very good news for us.

“So.” He snapped the gun shut: chrome silver, mercury black, with a smooth density that blackly distorted the space around it like a drop of motor oil in a glass of water.

“Don’t tell me you’re taking that,” I said, in the incredulous silence that followed.

“Well, yes. For holster—to keep in holster only. But wait, wait,” he said, lifting a palm, “before you start—” although I wasn’t talking, I was only standing there blank with horror—“how many times do I have to say it? Is only for looks.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Dress-up,” he said briskly, as if I had not spoken. “Pure make-believe. So they will be worried to try something if they see it on me, okay?” he added, when I still stood staring. “Safety measure! Because, because,” he said over me, “you are the rich man, and we are the bodyguards and this is how it is. They will expect it. All very civilized. And if we move our coat just so—” he had a concealed-carry holster at his waist—“they will be respectful and not try anything. Much more dangerous to wander in like—” he rolled his eyes around the room in the manner of a daffy girl.

“Boris.” I felt ashen and woozy. “I can’t do this.”

“Can’t what?” He pulled back his chin and looked at me. “Can’t get out of the car and stand with me for five minutes while I get your fucking picture for you? What?”

“No, I mean it.” The gun was lying on the bedspread; the eye was drawn to it; it seemed to crystallize and magnify all the bad energy humming in the air. “I can’t. Seriously. Let’s just forget it.”

“Forget?” Boris made a face. “Don’t do this! You have brought me over here for nothing and now I am in a pinch. And now—” flinging out an arm—“last minute, you start making conditions and saying ‘unsafe, unsafe’ and telling me how to do things? Don’t you trust me?”

“Yes, but—”

“Well, then. Trust me on this, please. You’re the buyer,” he said impatiently, when I didn’t answer. “That’s the story. It’s been set up.”

“We should have talked about this earlier.”

“Oh, come on,” he said in exasperation, picking the gun off the bed and sticking it into the holster. “Please do not argue with me, we are going to be late. You would never have seen it at all, if you stayed in the bathroom two minutes longer! Never known I had a weapon on me at all! Because—Potter, listen to me. Will you listen, please? Here is all that will happen. We walk in, five minutes, stand stand stand, we do all the talking, talk only, you get your picture, everyone is happy, we leave and we go get some dinner. Okay?”

Gyuri, who had moved over from the window, was looking me up and down. With a worried frown, he said something to Boris in Ukrainian. An obscure exchange followed. Then Boris reached to his wrist and began to unbuckle his watch.

Gyuri said something else, shaking his head vigorously.

“Right,” said Boris. “You are right.” Then, to me, with a nod: “Take his.”

Platinum Rolex President. Diamond-crusted dial. I was trying to think of some polite way to refuse when Gyuri pulled the whopping bevel-cut diamond off his pinky and—hopefully, like a child presenting a home-made gift—held them both to me on his open hands.

“Yes,” said Boris when I hesitated. “He is right. You do not look rich enough. I wish we had some different shoes for you,” he said, looking critically at my black monk straps, “but those will have to work. Now, we will put the money in this bag here”—leather grip, full of stacked bills—“and go.” Working quickly, clever hands, like a hotel maid making a bed. “Biggest bills on top. All these nice hundreds. Very pretty.”

vii.

OUT ON THE STREET: holiday splendor and delirium. Reflections danced and shimmered on black water: laced arcades above the street, garlands of light on the canal boats.

“This is all going to be very easy and comfortable,” said Boris, who was clicking around on the radio past Bee Gees, past news in Dutch, in French, trying to find a song. “I am counting on the fact that they want this money quick. Sooner they get rid of the picture—less chance running crossways of Horst. They will not be looking too closely at that bank draft or deposit slip. That six hundred thousands figure is all they will see.”

I was sitting alone in the back seat with the bag of money. (“Because, you must accustom yourself, sir, to being distinguished passenger!” Gyuri had said when he circled around and opened the back door of the car for me to get in.)

“You see—what I hope will fool him—deposit slip is perfectly legitimate,” Boris was saying. “So is bank draft. It is just from bad bank. Anguilla. Russians in Antwerp—here too, on P. C. Hooftstraat—they come here to invest, wash money, buy art, ha! This bank was fine six weeks ago but it is not fine now.”

We were past the canals, past the water. On the street: multicolored neon angels, in silhouette, leaning out from the tops of the buildings like ship figureheads. Blue spangles, white spangles, tracers, cascades of white lights and Christmas stars, blazing, impenetrable, no more to do with me than the implausible pinky diamond glittering on my hand.

“See, what I have to tell you,” said Boris, forgetting the radio and turning to address me in the back seat, “I want to tell you not to worry. With all my heart,” he said, knitting his eyebrows and reaching out encouragingly to shake my shoulder. “Everything is fine.”

“Piece of cake!” said Gyuri, and beamed in the rear view mirror, happy to have produced the phrase.

“Here is plan. Do you want to know the plan?”

“I guess I’m supposed to say yes.”

“We are dropping the car off. Out of the city a bit. Then Cherry will meet us at location, and drive us to meeting in his car.”

“And this is all going to be peaceful.”

“Absolutely. And because why? You have the cash! That’s all they want. And even with fake bank draft—good deal for them. Forty thousand dollars for no work? Not much! Afterwards—Cherry will leave us back off at the garage, with the picture—and then—we go out! we celebrate!”

Gyuri muttered something.

“He is complaining about the garage. Just so you know. He thinks it is a bad idea. But—I do not want to go in my own car, and last thing we need is to get hit with a parking ticket.”

“Where is the meeting?”

“Well—bit of a headache. We have to drive out of the city and then back in. They insisted on their own place and Cherry agreed because—well, really, it is better. At least, on their ground, we can count on no interference from the cops.”

We had gotten to a lonelier stretch of road, straight and desolate, where the traffic was sparse and the streetlamps were farther apart, and the bracing crack and sparkle of the old city, its lighted tracery, its hidden design—silver skates, happy children beneath the tree—had given way to a more familiar urban bleakness: Fotocadeau, Locksmith Sleutelkluis, signs in Arabic, Shoarma, Tandoori Kebab, gates down, everything closed.

“This is the Overtoom,” said Gyuri. “Not very interesting or nice.”

“This is my boy Dima’s parking garage. He has put out the Full sign for tonight so no one to bother us. We will be in the long term—ah,” he screamed, “blyad,” as a honking van cut in front of us from nowhere, forcing Gyuri to swerve and slam on the brakes.

“Sometimes people here are little bit aggressive for no reason,” said Gyuri gloomily as he put on his blinker and made the turn into the garage.

“Give me your passport,” Boris said.

“Why?”

“Because, am going to lock it in the glove box for when we get back. Better not to have it on you, just in case. I am putting in mine, too,” he said, holding it up for me to see. “And Gyuri’s. Gyuri is honest born American citizen—yes,” he said, over Gyuri’s laughing interjection, “all very nice for you, but for me? very very hard to get an American passport and I really do not want to lose this thing. You know, don’t you Potter,” he said, looking at me, “that you are required now by law in Netherlands to carry ID at all times? Random street checks—non-compliance punished. I mean—Amsterdam? What kind of police state thing is this? Who would believe it? Here? Me—never. Not in one hundred years. Anyway”—shutting and locking the glove box—“better a fine and talk our way out of it than the real thing on us if we are stopped.”

viii.

INSIDE THE PARKING GARAGE, which vibrated depressingly with olive-green light, there were a number of empty spaces in the long-term area despite the Full sign. As we nosed into the space a man in a sports coat lounging against a white Range Rover threw his cigarette in a spit of orange cinders and walked toward the car. His receding hairline, his tinted aviators and his taut military torso gave him the wind-whipped look of an ex-pilot, a man who monitored delicate instruments at some test site in the Urals.

“Victor,” he said, when we got out of the car, crushing my hand in his. Gyuri and Boris received a thump on the back. After terse preliminaries in Russian, a baby-faced curly-headed teenager climbed out of the driver’s seat and was greeted, by Boris, with a slap on the cheek and a jaunty seven note whistle: On the Good Ship Lollipop.

“This is Shirley T,” he said to me, rumpling the corkscrew curls. “Shirley Temple. We all call him that—why? Can you guess?”—laughing as the kid, unable to help it, smiled in embarrassment, displaying deep dimples.

“Do not be deceived by looks,” said Gyuri to me quietly. “Shirley looks like baby but he has as much onions as any of us here.”

Politely, Shirley nodded at me—did he speak English? it didn’t seem so—and opened the back door of the Range Rover for us and the three of us climbed in—Boris, Gyuri, and me—while Victor Cherry sat up front and talked to us from the passenger seat.

“This should be easy,” he said to me formally as we pulled out of the garage and back out onto the Overtoom. “Straightforward pawn.” Up close his face was broad and knowing, with a small prim mouth and a wry alertness that made me feel somewhat less agitated about the logic of the evening, or the lack of it: the car changes, the lack of direction and information, the nightmare foreignness. “We are doing Sascha a favor and because of that? He is going to behave nice to us.”

Long low buildings. Disjointed lights. There was a sense that it wasn’t happening, that it was happening to someone who wasn’t me.

“Because can Sascha walk in bank and get a loan on the painting?” Victor was saying, pedantically. “No. Can Sascha walk in a pawn shop and get a loan on the painting? No. Can Sascha due to circumstances of theft go to any of his usual connections from Horst and get a loan on the painting? No. Therefore Sascha is extremely glad of the appearance of mystery American—you—who I have hooked him up with.”

“Sascha shoots heroin the way that you and I breathe,” said Gyuri to me quietly. “One stitch of money and he is out buying big load of drugs like clockwork.”

Victor Cherry adjusted his glasses. “Exactly. He is not art lover and he is not particular. He is utilizing picture like high interest credit card or so he thinks. Investment for you—cash for him. You front him the money—you hold the painting as security—he buys schmeck, keeps half, steps on the rest and sells it, and returns with double your money in one month to pick up the painting. And if? In one month he does not return with double your money? The painting is yours. Like I said. Simple pawn.”

“Except not so simple—” Boris stretched, and yawned—“because when you vanish? and bank draft is bad? What can he do? If he runs to Horst and calls for help on this one he will have his neck broken for him.”

“I am glad they have changed the meeting place so many times. It is a little bit ridiculous. But it helps because today is Friday,” said Victor, taking off his aviators and polishing them on his shirt. “I made them think you were backing out. Because they kept cancelling and changing the plan—you did not even arrive until today, but they do not know that—because they kept changing the plan I told them you were tired and nervous of sitting around Amsterdam with suitcase of green waiting to hear from them, you’d re-banked your moneys and were flying back to U.S. They did not like to hear that. So—” he nodded at the bag—“here it is the weekend, and banks are closed, and you are bringing what cash you have, and—well, they have been talking to me plenty, lots of time on the phone and I have met with them once already down in a bar in the Red Light, but they have agreed to bring the painting and make the exchange tonight without prior meeting of you, because I have told them your plane leaves tomorrow, and because they have fucked around on their end it is bank draft for the balance or nothing. Which—well, they did not like, but they accepted as proper explanation for bank draft. Makes things easier.”

“Much easier,” said Boris. “I was not sure how bank draft was going to go over. Better if they think the bank draft is their own fault for dicking around.”

“What’s the place?”

“Lunchcafe.” He pronounced it as one word. “De Paarse Koe.”

“That means ‘the Purple Cow’ in Dutch,” said Boris helpfully. “Hippie place. Close to the Red Light.”

Long lonely street—shut-up hardware stores, stacks of brick by the side of the road, all of it important and hyper-significant somehow even though it was speeding by in the dark much too fast to see.

“Food is so awful,” said Boris. “Sprouts and some hard old wheat toast. You would think hot girls go there but is just old gray-head women and fat.”

“Why there?”

“Because quiet street in the evening,” said Victor Cherry. “Lunchcafe is closed, after hours, but because semi-public nothing will get out of control, see?”

Everywhere: strangeness. Without noticing it I’d left reality and crossed the border into some no-man’s-land where nothing made sense. Dreaminess, fragmentation. Rolled wire and piles of rubble with the plastic sheeting blown to the side.

Boris was speaking to Victor in Russian; and when he realized I was looking at him, he turned to me.

“We are only saying, Sascha is in Frankfurt tonight,” he said, “hosting party at a restaurant for some friend of his just got out of jail, and we are all of us confirmed on this from three different sources, Shirley too. He thinks he is being smart, staying out of town. If it gets back to Horst what has happened here tonight he wants to be able to throw up his hands and say, ‘Who, me? I had nothing to do with it.’ ”

“You,” said Victor to me, “you are based in New York. I have said you are an art dealer, arrested for forgery, and now run an operation like Horst’s—much smaller scale in terms of paintings, much larger in terms of money.”

“Horst—God bless him,” said Boris. “Horst would be the richest man in New York except he gives it all away, every cent. Always has. Supports many many persons besides himself.”

“Bad for business.”

“Yes. But he enjoys company.”

“Junkie philanthropist, ha,” said Victor. He pronounced it philanthropist. “Good they die off time to time or who knows how many schmeckheads crammed in that dump with him. Anyway—less you say in there, the better. They will not be expecting polite conversation. This is all business. It will be fast. Give him the bank draft, Borya.”

Boris said something sharp in Ukrainian.

“No, he should produce it himself. It should be from his hand.”

Both bank draft, and deposit slip, were printed with the words Farruco Frantisek, Citizen Bank Anguilla, which only increased the sense of dream trajectory, a track speeding up too fast to slow down.

“Farruco Frantisek? I’m him?” Under the circumstances it felt like a meaningful question—as if I might be somehow disembodied or at least had passed beyond a certain horizon where I was freed of basic facts like identity.

“I did not choose the name. I had to take what I could get.”

“I’m supposed to introduce myself as this?” There was something wrong with the paper, which was too flimsy, and the fact that the slips said Citizen Bank and not Citizen’s Bank made them look all wrong.

“No, Cherry will introduce you.”

Farruco Frantisek. Silently I tried the name out, turned my tongue around it. Even though it was a hard name to remember, it was just strong and foreign enough to carry the lost-in-space hyperdensity of the black streets, tram tracks, more cobblestones and neon angels—back in the old city now, historic and unknowable, canals and bicycle racks and Christmas lights shaking on the dark water.

“When were you going to tell him?” Victor Cherry was asking Boris. “He needs to know what his name is.”

“Well now he knows.”

Unknown streets, incomprehensible turns, anonymous distances. I’d stopped even trying to read the street signs or keep track of where we were. Of everything around me—of all I could see—the only point of reference was the moon, riding high above the clouds, which though bright and full seemed weirdly unstable somehow, void of gravity, not the pure anchoring moon of the desert but more like a party trick that might pop out at a conjurer’s wink or else float away into the darkness and out of sight.

ix.

THE PURPLE COW WAS on an untravelled one-way street just wide enough for a car to go through. All the other businesses around—pharmacy, bakery, bike shop—were shut tight, everything but an Indonesian restaurant on the far end. Shirley Temple let us off out front. On the opposite wall, graffiti: smiley face and arrows, Warning Radioactive, stenciled lightning bolt with the word Shazam, dripping horror-movie letters, keep it nice!

I looked in through the glass door. The place was long and narrow, and—at first glance—empty. Purple walls; stained glass ceiling lamp; mismatched tables and chairs painted kindergarten colors and the lights low except for a grillside counter area and a lighted cold case glowing in back. Sickly house plants; signed black-and-white photo of John and Yoko; bulletin board shaggy with leaflets and flyers for satsangs and yoga classes and varied holistic modalities. On the wall was a mural of the Tarot arcana and, in the window, a flimsy computer-printed menu featuring a number of Everett-style wholefoods: carrotsoup, nettlesoup, nettlemash, lentil-nutspie—nothing very appetizing, but it made me remember that the last honest-to-God, more-than-a-few-bites meal I’d eaten had been the take-out curry in bed back at Kitsey’s.

Boris saw me looking at it. “I am hungry too,” he said, rather formally. “We will go get a really good dinner together. Blake’s. Twenty minutes.”

“You’re not going in?”

“Not yet.” He was standing slightly to the side, out of view of the glass doors, looking up and down the street. Shirley Temple was circling the block. “Don’t be here talking to me. Go with Victor and Gyuri.”

The man who sloped up to the glass door of the cafe was a scrawny, sketchy, twitchy-looking guy in his sixties, with a long narrow face and long freak hair past his shoulders and a peaked denim cap straight from Soul Train 1973. He stood there with his ring of keys and looked past Victor to me and Gyuri and seemed undecided whether to let us in. His close-set eyes, his brushy gray eyebrows and his puffy gray moustache gave him the look of a suspicious old schnauzer dog. Then another guy appeared, much much younger and much much bigger, half a head taller even than Gyuri, Malaysian or Indonesian with a face tattoo and eyepopping diamonds in his ears and a black topknot on the crown of his head that made him look like one of the harpooners from Moby Dick, if one of the harpooners from Moby Dick had happened to be wearing velvet track pants and a peach satin baseball jacket.

The old tweaker was making a call on his mobile. He waited, his eyes cagily on us the whole while. Then he made another call and turned his back and walked away into the depths of the lunchcafe, talking, palm pressed to cheek and ear in the manner of a hysterical housewife while the Indonesian stood in the glass door and watched us, unnaturally still. There was a brief exchange and then the old tweaker returned and with wrinkled brow and seeming reluctance began fumbling with the key ring, turning the key in the lock. The minute we were in he began yammering to Victor Cherry and throwing his arms about, while the Indonesian strolled over and leaned against the wall with his arms folded, listening.

Some disturbance, definitely. Discomfort. What language were they speaking? Romanian? Czech? What it was about I had not a clue but Victor Cherry seemed cold and annoyed while the old gray-head tweaker grew more and more agitated—angry? no: irritable, frustrated, wheedling even, a whine climbing in his voice, and all the time the Indonesian kept his eyes on us with the unsettling stillness of an anaconda. I stood about ten feet away and—despite Gyuri, with moneybag, pressing in on me much too close—put on a self-consciously blank expression and pretended to examine the signs and slogans on the wall: Greenpeace, Fur-Free Zone, Vegan Friendly, Protected by Angels! Having bought enough drugs in enough dodgy situations (cockroach apartments in Spanish Harlem, piss-smelling stairwells in the St. Nicholas projects), I knew enough not to be interested, since—in my experience anyway—transactions of this nature were mostly the same. You acted relaxed and disengaged, didn’t talk unless you had to and spoke in a monotone when you did, and—as soon as you got what you came for—left.

“Protected by angels, my ass,” said Boris, in my ear, having sidled up noiselessly on my other side.

I said nothing. Even all these years later, it was all too easy for us to fall into the habit of whispering with our heads together like in Spirsetskaya’s class, which seemed like not a good dynamic in the situation.

“We are on time,” said Boris. “But one of their men has not shown. That is why Grateful Dead here is so jumpy. They want us to wait till he comes. It is their own fault for changing the meeting place so often.”

“What’s going on over there?”

“Let Vitya handle it,” he said, poking his shoe at a desiccated furball on the floor—dead mouse? I thought, with a start, before realizing it was a chewed-up cat toy, one of several strewn across the floor beside a clumped and piss-darkened cat tray which lay half-hidden, turds and all, at the base of a table for four.

I was wondering how a dirty cat tray placed where diners were likely to step in it was possibly convenient in terms of food-service logistics (not to mention attractive, or healthful, or even legal) when I realized the talking had stopped and the two of them had turned to Gyuri and me—Victor Cherry, the old tweaker with a wary expectant look, stepping forward, his eyes darting from me to the bag in Gyuri’s hand. Obligingly Gyuri stepped forward, opened it, set it down with a servile bow of his head, and stepped away for the old guy to look at it.

The old guy peered in, nearsightedly; his nose wrinkled. With some peevish exclamation he looked up at Cherry, who remained impassive. Another obscure exchange ensued. The grayhair seemed discontented. Then he closed the bag and stood up and looked at me, eyes darting.

“Farruco,” I said nervously, having forgotten my last name and hoping I would not be required to produce it.

Cherry gave me a look: the papers.

“Right, right,” I said, reaching in the top inside pocket of my jacket for the bank draft and the deposit slip—unfolding them, in what I hoped was a casual way, checking them out before I handed them over—

Frantisek. But just as I was extending my hand—bam, it happened like a gust of wind that blows through the house and slams a door loudly in a direction where you aren’t expecting it—Victor Cherry stepped fast behind the grayhair and whacked him on the back of the head with the pistol butt so hard his cap flew off and his knees buckled and down he went with a grunt. The Indonesian, still in his wall-slouch, seemed as startled by this as I was: he stiffened, our eyes connected in a sharp what the fuck? jolt that was almost like a glance between friends, and I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t moving away from the wall until I looked behind me and saw to my horror that Boris and Gyuri both had guns on him: Boris neatly resting the butt of the pistol in the cup of his left palm and Gyuri, one-handed, with the bag of money, backing out the front door.

Disconnected flash, someone flitting from the kitchen in back: youngish Asian woman—no, a boy; white skin, blank frightened eyes sweeping the room, Ikat print scarf, long hair flying, just as quickly gone.

“Someone’s in back,” I said rapidly, looking around, every direction, room wheeling around me like a carnival ride and heart beating so wildly I couldn’t make the words come out quite right, I wasn’t sure if anyone heard me say it—or if Cherry heard, at any rate, since he was hauling the grayhair up by the back of his jeans jacket, catching him in a chokehold, pistol at his temple, screaming at him in whatever Eastern-European tongue and jostling him to the rear as the Indonesian un-slouched himself from the wall, gracefully and carefully, and looked at Boris and me for what seemed like a long time.

“You cunts are going to be sorry for this,” he said quietly.

“Hands, hands,” said Boris cordially. “Where I can see them.”

“I don’t got a weapon.”

“Right there anyway.”

“Right you are,” said the Indonesian, just as cordially. He looked me up and down with his hands in the air—memorizing my face, I realized with a chill, image straight to data file—and then he looked at Boris.

“I know who you are,” he said.

Submarine glow of the fruit juice cooler. I could hear my own breath going in and out, in and out. Clang of metal in the kitchen. Indistinct cries.

“Down, if you please,” said Boris, nodding at the floor.

Obligingly the Indonesian got to his knees and—very slowly—stretched himself full length. But he didn’t seem rattled or afraid.

“I know you,” he said again, voice slightly muffled.

Fast darting movement in the corner of my eye, so fast I started: a cat, devil black, like a living shadow, darkness flying to darkness.

“And who am I then?”

“Borya-from-Antwerp, innit?” It wasn’t true that he didn’t have a weapon; even I could see it bulging at his armpit. “Borya the Polack? Giggleweed Borya? Horst’s mate?”

“And so if I am?” said Boris genially.

The man was silent. Boris, tossing the hair out of his eyes with a flick of his head, made a derisive noise and seemed about to say something sarcastic but just then Victor Cherry came out of the back, alone, pulling what looked like a set of flexcuffs out of his pocket—and my heart skipped to see, under his arm, a package of the correct size and thickness, wrapped in white felt and tied with baker’s twine. He dropped a knee in the Indonesian’s back and began to fumble with the cuffs at his wrists.

“Get out,” said Boris to me, and then, again—my muscles had locked up and hardened; he gave me a little push—“Go! get in the car.”

Blankly I looked around—I couldn’t see the door, there wasn’t a door—and then there it was and I scrambled out so fast I slipped and nearly fell on a cat toy, out to the Range Rover puffing at the curb. Gyuri was keeping watch out front, on the street, in the light drizzle which had just begun to fall—“In, in,” he hissed, sliding into the back seat and waving me to come in after him, just as Boris and Victor Cherry burst out of the restaurant and hopped in too and off we drove, at a sedate and anticlimactic speed.

x.

IN THE CAR, OUT on the main road again, all was jubilation: laughter, high fives, while my heart was slamming so hard I could barely breathe. “What’s going on?” I rasped, several times—gulping for breath and looking back and forth between them and then, when they kept ignoring me, babbling in a percussive mix of Russian and Ukrainian, all four of them including Shirley Temple: “Angliyski!”

Boris turned to me, wiping his eyes, and slung his arm around my neck. “Change of plans,” he said. “That was all on the fly—improvised. We could have asked for nothing better. Their third man didn’t show.”

“Catching them short-handed.”

“Flatfooted.”

“Pants down! On the crapper!”

“You”—I had to gasp to get the words out—“you said no guns.”

“Well, no one got hurt, did they? What difference does it make?”

“Why didn’t we just pay?”

“Because we lucked out!” Throwing up his arms. “Once in a lifetime chance! We had the opportunity! What were they going to do? They were two—we were four. If they had any sense, they should never have let us inside. And—yes, I know, only forty thousand, but why should I pay them one cent if I don’t have to? For stealing my own property?” Boris chortled. “Did you see the look on his face? Grateful Dead? When Cherry whipped him back of the dome?”

“You know what he was complaining about, the old goat?” said Victor, turning to me jubilantly. “Wanted it in Euros! ‘What, dollars?’ ” imitating his peevish expression. “ ‘You brought me dollars?’ ”

“Bet he wishes he had those dollars now.”

“I bet he wishes he kept his mouth shut.”

“I’d like to hear that phone call to Sascha.”

“I wish I knew the name of the guy. That stood them up. Because I would like to buy him a drink.”

“Wonder where he is?”

“He is probably at home in the shower.”

“Studying his Bible lesson.”

“Watching ‘Christmas Carol’ on television.”

“Waiting at the wrong place, most like.”

“I—” My throat was so constricted I had to swallow to speak. “What about that kid?”

“Eh?” It was raining, light rain pattering on the windshield. Streets black and glistening.

“What kid?”

“Boy. Girl. Kitchen boy. Whatever.”

“What?” Cherry turned—still winded, breathing hard. “I didn’t see anyone.”

“I didn’t either.”

“Well, I did.”

“What’d she look like?”

“Young.” I could still see the freeze-frame of the young ghostly face, mouth slightly open. “White coat. Japanese-looking.”

“Really?” said Boris curiously. “You can tell apart by looking? Like where they are from? Japan, China, Vietnam?”

“I didn’t get a good look. Asian.”

“He, or she?”

“I think is all girls that work in the kitchen there,” said Gyuri. “Macrobyotik. Brown rice and like that.”

“I—” Now I really wasn’t sure.

“Well—” Cherry ran his hand over the top of his close-cropped hair—“glad she ran, whoever, because you know what else I found back there? Sawed-off Mossberg 500.”

Laughter and whistles at this.

“Shit.”

“Where was it? Grozdan didn’t—?”

“No. In a—” he gestured, to indicate a sling—“what do you call it. Hanging under the table, in some cloth like. Just happened to see it when I was down on the floor. Like—looked up. There it was, right over my head.”

“You didn’t leave it there, did you?”

“No! I wouldn’t have minded to take it except was too big and had my hands full. Unscrewed it and knocked the pin out and threw it in the alley. Also—” he pulled a silver snub-nosed pistol out of his pocket, which he passed over to Boris—“this!”

Boris held it up to the light and looked at it.

“Nice little conceal-carry J-frame. Ankle holster in those bell bottom jeans! But to his misfortune he was not quick enough.”

“Flexcuffs,” said Gyuri to me, with slightly inclined head. “Vitya thinks ahead.”

“Well—” Cherry wiped the sweat from his broad forehead—“they are light and slim to carry, and they have saved me many times shooting people. I do not like to hurt anyone if I don’t have to.”

Medieval city: crooked streets, lights draped on bridges and shining off rain-peppered canals, melting in the drizzle. Infinity of anonymous shops, twinkling window displays, lingerie and garter belts, kitchen utensils arrayed like surgical instruments, foreign words everywhere, Snel bestellen, Retro-stijl, Showgirl-Sexboetiek.

“Back door was open to the alley,” said Cherry, elbowing off his sports coat and swigging from a bottle of vodka which Shirley T. had produced from under the front seat—hands a bit shaky and his face, the nose particularly, glowing a flagrant, stressed-out, Rudolph red. “They must have left it open for him—their third man—to come in at the back. I closed it and locked it—made Grozdan close and lock it, gun to his head, he was snivel and crying like baby—”

“That Mossberg,” Boris said to me, accepting the bottle passed over the front seat. “Evil dirty thing. Sawed off—? sprays pellets here to Hamburg. Aim it way the fuck away from everyone and still you will hit half the people in the room.”

“Good trick, no?” said Victor Cherry philosophically. “To say your third man is not there? ‘Wait five minutes, please’? ‘Sorry, mix up’—? ‘He will be here any moment’? While he is all the time in back with the shotgun. Good double cross, if they had thought of it—”

“Maybe they did think of it. Why else have the gun back there?”

“I think we had a narrow miss, is what I think—”

“There was one car pulled up front, scared Shirley and me,” said Gyuri, “while you were all in there, two guys, we thought we were in the shit but was only two gays, French guys, looking for restaurant—”

“—but no one in the back, thank God, I got Grozdan on the floor and cuffed him to radiator,” Cherry was saying. “Ah, but—!” he held up the felt-wrapped package—“first. This. For you.”

He handed it over the seat to Gyuri, who—gingerly, with his fingertips, as if it were a tray he might spill—passed it to me. Boris—downing his slug, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand—chucked me gaily in the arm with the bottle while humming we wish you a merry Christmas we wish you a merry Christmas

Package on my knees. Running my hands all around the edge. The felt was so thin that I sensed the rightness of it immediately with my fingertips, the texture and weight were perfect.

“Go on,” said Boris, nodding, “better open it, make sure it’s not the Civics book this time! Where was it?” he asked Cherry as I began to fumble with the string.

“Dirty little broom closet. Piece-of-shit plastic briefcase. Grozdan took me right to it. I thought he might fuck around a bit but burner at the head was all it took. No sense getting popped when all that good space cake still around for the taking.”

“Potter,” said Boris, trying to get my attention; and then again: “Potter.”

“Yes?”

Lifting the briefcase. “This 40 rocks is going to Gyuri and Shirley T. Keeping them green. For services rendered. Because it is thanks to these two that we did not pay Sascha one cent for the favor of stealing your property. And Vitya—” reaching across to clasp his hand—“we are more than equal now. The debt is mine.”

“No, I can never repay what I owe you, Borya.”

“Forget it. Is nothing.”

“Nothing? Nothing? Not true, Borya, because this very night I carry my life because of you, and every night until the last night…”

It was an interesting story he was telling, if I’d had ears to listen to it—someone had fingered Cherry for some unspecified but apparently very serious crime which he had not committed, nothing to do with, perfectly innocent, the guy had rolled for reduced prison time and unless Cherry, in turn, wanted to roll on his higher-ups (“unwise to do, if I wish to keep breathing”), he was looking at ten sticks and Boris, Boris had saved the day because Boris had tracked down the slimebag, in Antwerp and out on bail, and the story of how he had done this was very involved and enthusiastic and Cherry was getting choked up and sniffing a bit and there was more and it seemed to involve arson and bloodshed and something to do with a power saw but by that point I wasn’t hearing a word because I’d gotten the string untied and streetlights and watery rain reflections were rolling over the surface of my painting, my goldfinch, which—I knew incontrovertibly, without a doubt, before even turning to look at the verso—was real.

“See?” said Boris, interrupting Vitya right in the heat of his story. “Looks good, no, your zolotaia ptitsa? I told you we took care of it, didn’t I?”

Running my fingertip incredulously around the edges of the board, like Doubting Thomas across the palm of Christ. As any furniture dealer knew, or for that matter St. Thomas: it was harder to deceive the sense of touch than sight, and even after so many years my hands remembered the painting so well that my fingers went to the nail marks immediately, at the bottom of the panel, the tiny holes where (once upon a time, or so it was said) the painting was nailed up as a tavern sign, part of a painted cabinet, no one knew.

“He still alive back there?” Victor Cherry.

“Think so.” Boris dug an elbow in my ribs. “Say something.”

But I couldn’t. It was real; I knew it, even in the dark. Raised yellow streak of paint on the wing and feathers scratched in with the butt of the brush. One chip on the upper left edge that hadn’t been there before, tiny mar less than two millimeters, but otherwise: perfect. I was different, but it wasn’t. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.

“Ah, beautiful,” said Gyuri amiably, leaning in to look at my right side. “So pure! Like a daisy. You know what I am trying to express?” he said, nudging me, when I did not answer. “Plain flower, alone in a field? It’s just—” he gestured, here it is! amazing! “Do you know what I am saying?” he asked, nudging me again, only I was still too dazed to reply.

Boris in the meantime was murmuring half in English and half Russian to Vitya about the ptitsa as well as something else I couldn’t quite catch, something about mother and baby, lovely love. “Still wishing you had phoned the art cops, eh?” he said, slinging his arm around my shoulder with his head close to mine, exactly as when we were boys.

“We can still phone them,” said Gyuri, with a shout of laughter, punching me on the other arm.

“That’s right, Potter! Shall we? No? Maybe not such a good idea any more, eh?” he said across me, to Gyuri, with a raised eyebrow.

xi.

WHEN WE TURNED IN TO the garage and got out of the car everyone was still high and laughing and recounting bits and pieces of the ambush in multiple languages—everyone except me, blank and echoing with shock, fast cuts and sudden movements still reverberating from the dark at me and too stunned to speak a word.

“Look at him,” said Boris, breaking short from what he was saying and knocking me in the arm. “He looks like he just had the best blow job of his life.”

They were all laughing at me, even Shirley Temple, the whole world was laughter bouncing fractal and metallic off the tiled walls, delirium and phantasmagorica, a sense of the world growing and swelling like some fabulous blown balloon floating and billowing away to the stars, and I was laughing too and I wasn’t even sure what I was laughing at since I was still so shaken I was trembling all over.

Boris lit a cigarette. His face was greenish in the subterranean light. “Wrap that thing up,” he said affably, nodding at the painting, “and then we will stick it in the hotel safe and go and get you a real blow job.”

Gyuri frowned. “I thought we were going to eat first?”

“You are right. I am starving. Dinner first, then blow job.”

“Blake’s?” said Cherry, opening the passenger door of the Land Rover. “An hour, say?”

“Sounds good.”

“Hate to go like this,” Cherry said, plucking at the collar of his shirt, which was transparent and stuck to him with sweat. “Then again I could use a cognac. Some of the hundred-euro stuff. I could install about a quart right now. Shirley—Gyuri—” he said something in Ukrainian.

“He is saying,” said Boris, in the burst of laughter that followed, “he is telling Shirley and Gyuri that they are buying the dinner tonight. With—” Gyuri triumphantly hoisting the bag.

Then—a pause. Gyuri looked troubled. He said something to Shirley Temple, and Shirley—laughing at him, deep peachy dimples—waved him off, waved off the bag that Gyuri tried to offer, and rolled his eyes when Gyuri offered it again.

“Ne syeiychas,” said Victor Cherry irritably. “Not now. Divide it later.”

“Please,” said Gyuri, offering the bag one more time.

“Oh, come on. Divide it later or we’ll be here all night.”

Ya khochu chto-by Shirli prinyala eto, said Gyuri, a sentence so plain and so earnestly enunciated that even I, with my lousy Russki, understood it. I want that Shirley takes it.

“No way!” said Shirley, in English, and—unable to resist—darted a glance at me to make sure I’d heard him say it, like a kid proud of knowing the answer in school.

“Come on.” Boris—hands on hips—looked aside in exasperation. “Does it matter who carries in their car? One of you is going to make off with it? No. We are all friends here. What will you do?” he said, when neither of them made a move. “Leave it on the floor for Dima to find? One of you decide please.”

There was a long silence. Shirley, standing with arms folded, shook his head firmly at Gyuri’s repeated insistence and then, with a worried look, asked Boris a question.

“Yes, yes, fine with me,” said Boris impatiently. “Go ahead,” he said to Gyuri. “You three go together.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am positive. You have worked enough for tonight.”

“You’ll manage?”

“No,” said Boris, “we will two of us walk! of course, of course,” he said, shushing Gyuri’s objection, “we can manage, go on,” and we were all laughing as Vitya and Shirley and Gyuri too waved us goodbye (Davaye!) and hopped in the Range Rover and drove away, up the ramp and out to the Overtoom again.

xii.

“AH, WHAT A NIGHT,” said Boris, scratching his stomach. “Starving! Let’s get out of here. Although—” he glanced back, knotted brow, at the Range Rover driving off—“well, no matter. We will be fine. Short hop. Blake’s is easy walk from your hotel. And you,” he said to me, nodding—“careless! You should tie that thing up again! Don’t just carry it wrapped with no string.”

“Right,” I said, “right,” and I circled to the front of the car so I could rest it on the hood while I fumbled for the baker’s twine in my pocket.

“May I see?” said Boris, coming up behind me.

I drew back the felt, and the two of us stood awkwardly for a moment like a pair of minor Flemish noblemen hovering at the margin of a nativity painting.

“Lot of trouble—” Boris lit a cigarette, blew the smoke in a sidestream away from the picture—“but worth it, yes?”

“Yes,” I said. Our voices were joking but subdued, like boys uneasy in church.

“I had it longer than anyone,” said Boris. “If you count the days.” And then, in a different tone: “Remember—if you feel like, I can always arrange something for money. Only one deal, and you could retire.”

But I only shook my head. I couldn’t have put into words what I felt, though it was something deep and primary that Welty had shared with me, and I with him, in the museum all those years ago.

“Was just kidding. Well—sort of. But no, seriously,” he said, rubbing his knuckles on my sleeve, “is yours. Free and clear. Why don’t you keep for a while and enjoy, before you return to museum people?”

I was silent. I was already wondering how exactly I was going to get it out of the country.

“Go on, wrap it up. We need to get out of here. Look at it later all you want. Oh, give it here,” he said, snatching the string from my clumsy hands; I was still fumbling, trying to find the ends—“come on, let me do it, we’ll be here all night.”

xiii.

THE PAINTING WAS WRAPPED and tied, and Boris had tucked it under his arm and—taking a last draw on his cigarette—had stepped around to the driver’s side and was about to get in the car when, behind us, a casual and friendly-sounding American voice said, “Merry Christmas.”

I turned. There were three of them, two lazy-walking middle-aged men drifting along a bit bemusedly with the air of having come to do us a favor—it was Boris they were addressing, not me, they seemed glad to see him—and, skittering slightly in front of them, the Asian boy. His white coat was not a kitchen worker’s coat at all but some asymmetrical thing made out of white wool about an inch thick; and he was shivering and practically blue-lipped with fright. He was unarmed, or seemed to be, which was good, because what I mainly noticed about the other two—big guys, all business—was blued handgun metal glinting in the sleazy fluorescents. Even then, I didn’t get it—the friendly voice had thrown me; I thought they’d caught the boy and were bringing him to us—until I looked over at Boris and saw how still he’d gone, chalk-white.

“Sorry to do this to you,” said the American to Boris, though he didn’t sound sorry—if anything, pleased. He was broadshouldered and bored-looking, in a soft gray coat, and despite his age there was something petulant and cherubic about him, overly ripe, soft white hands and a soft managerial blandness.

Boris—cigarette in mouth—stood frozen. “Martin.”

“Yeah, hey!” said Martin genially, as the other guy—gray blond thug in a pea coat, coarse features out of Nordic folklore—ambled straight up to Boris, and, after grappling around at Boris’s waistband, took his gun and passed it over to Martin. In my confusion I looked at the boy in the white coat but it was like he’d been struck on the head with a hammer, he didn’t seem any more amused or edified by any of this than I was.

“I know this sucks for you,” said Martin—“but. Wow.” The low key voice was a shocking contrast to the eyes, which were like a puff adder’s. “Hey. Sucks for me too. Frits and I were at Pim’s, we weren’t expecting to get out. Nasty weather, eh? Where’s our white Christmas?”

“What are you doing here?” said Boris, who despite his overly still air was as afraid as I’d ever seen him.

“What do you think?” Jocular shrug. “I’m surprised as you, if it makes any difference. Never would have thought Sascha had the balls to call in Horst on this. But—hey, fuck-up like this, who else could he call, I guess? Let’s have it,” he said, with an affable tick of the gun, and with a rush of horror I realized he was pointing the gun at Boris, gesturing with the gun at the felt-wrapped package in Boris’s hands. “Come on. Give it over.”

“No,” said Boris sharply, shaking the hair from his eyes.

Martin blinked, with a sort of befuddled whimsy. “What’s that you say?”

“No.”

“What?” Martin laughed. “No? Are you kidding me?”

“Boris! Give it to them!” I stammered, as I stood frozen in horror, as the one named Frits put his pistol to Boris’s temple and then caught Boris by the hair and pulled his head back so sharply he groaned.

“I know,” said Martin amicably, with a collegial glance at me, as if to say: hey, these Russians—nuts, am I right? “Come on,” he said to Boris. “Let’s have it.”

Again Boris moaned, as the guy yanked his hair once more, and from across the car threw me an unmistakeable look—which I understood just as plainly as if he’d spoken the words aloud, an urgent and very specific cut of the eyes straight from our shoplifting days: run for it, Potter, go.

“Boris,” I said, after a disbelieving pause, “please, just give it to them,” but Boris only moaned again, despairingly, as Frits jammed the gun hard under his chin and Martin stepped forward to take the painting from him.

“Excellent. Thanks for that,” he said bemusedly, tucking his gun under his arm and beginning to pluck and fumble with the string, which Boris had tied in an obstinate little knot. “Cool.” His fingers weren’t working very well, and up close, when he’d reached to take the painting, I’d seen why: he was high as a kite. “Anyway—” Martin glanced behind him, as if wanting to include absent friends on the joke, then back with another bemused shrug—“sorry. Take them over there, Frits,” he said, still busy with the painting, nodding at a shadowy, dungeon-like corner of the garage, darker than the rest, and when Frits turned partly from Boris to gesture at me with the gun—come on, come on, you too—I realized, cold with horror, what Boris had known was going to happen from the moment he saw them: why he’d wanted me to run for it, or at least to try.

But in the half-moment as Frits was motioning to me with the gun, we’d all lost track of Boris, whose cigarette flew out in a shower of sparks. Frits screamed and slapped his cheek, then stumbled back grappling at his collar where it had lodged against his neck. In the same instant Martin—distracted with the painting, directly across from me—looked up, and I was still looking at him blankly across the roof of the car when I heard it, to my right, three fast cracks which made us both turn quickly to the side. With the fourth (flinching, eyes closed) a warm spray of blood thumped across the car roof and struck me in the face and when I opened my eyes again the Asian kid was stepping back horrified and drawing a hand down his front in a bloody smear like a butcher’s apron and I was staring at a lighted sign Beetaalautomaat op where Boris’s head had been; blood was pouring from under the car and Boris was on the ground on his elbows, feet going, he was trying to scramble up from the floor, I couldn’t tell if he was hurt or not and I must have run around to him without thinking because the next thing I knew I was on the other side of the car and trying to help him up, blood everywhere, Frits was a mess, slumped against the car with a baseball-sized hole in the side of his head, and I’d just noticed Frits’s gun lying on the ground when I heard Boris exclaim sharply and there was Martin, tight-eyed with blood on his sleeve, hand clamped to his arm and fumbling to bring up his gun

It had happened before it even happened, like a skip in a DVD throwing me forward in time, because I have no memory at all of picking the pistol off the floor, only of a kick so hard it threw my arm in the air, I didn’t really hear the bang until I felt the kick and the casing flew back and hit me in the face and I shot again, eyes half-closed against the noise and my arm jolting with every shot, the trigger had a resistance to it, a stiffness, like pulling some too-heavy door latch, car windows popping and Martin with an arm coming up, exploding safety glass and chunks of concrete flying out a pillar and I’d got Martin in the shoulder, the soft gray cloth was drenched and dark, a spreading dark stain, cordite smell and deafening echo that drove me so deep inside my skull that it was less like actual sound striking my eardrums than a wall slamming down hard in my mind and driving me back into some hard internal blackness from childhood, and Martin’s viper eyes met mine and he was slumped forward with the gun propped on the roof of the car when I shot again and hit him above the eye, red burst that made me flinch and then, somewhere behind me, I heard the sound of running feet slapping on concrete—the boy, white coat running to the exit ramp with the painting under his arm, he was running up the ramp to the street, echoes reverberating in the tiled space and I almost shot at him only somehow it was a completely different moment and I was facing away from the car, I was doubled over with my hands on my knees and the gun was on the ground, I had no memory of dropping it although the sound was there, it was clattering to the floor and it kept on clattering and I was still hearing the echoes and feeling the vibration of the gun up my arm, retching and doubled over, with Frits’s blood crawling and curling on my tongue.

Out of the darkness the sound of feet running, and again I could not see, or move, everything black at the edges and I was falling even though I wasn’t because somehow I was sitting on a low stretch of tiled wall with my head between my knees looking down at clear red spit, or vomit, on the shiny, epoxy-painted concrete between my shoes and Boris, there was Boris, winded and breathless and bloody, running back in, his voice was coming from a million miles off, Potter, are you all right? he’s gone, I couldn’t catch him, he got away

I drew my palm down my face and looked at the red smear on my hand. Boris was still talking to me with some urgency but even though he was shaking my shoulder it was mostly mouth movements and nonsense through soundproof glass. The smoke from the fired gun was oddly the same bracing ammonia smell of Manhattan thunderstorms and wet city pavements. Robin’s egg speckles on the door of a pale blue Mini. Nearer, creeping dark from under Boris’s car, a glossy satin pool three feet wide was spreading and inching forward like an amoeba, and I wondered how long before it reached my shoe and what I would do when it did.

Hard, but without anger, Boris cuffed me with his closed fist on the side of the head: an impersonal clout, no heat about it at all. It was as if he were performing CPR.

“Come on,” he said. “Your specs,” he said with a short nod.

My glasses—blood-smeared, unbroken—lay on the ground by my foot. I didn’t remember them falling off.

Boris picked them up himself, wiped them on his own sleeve, and handed them to me.

“Come on,” he said, catching my arm, pulling me up. His voice was level and soothing although he was splattered with blood and I could feel his hands shaking. “All over now. You saved us.” The gunshot had set off my tinnitus like a swarm of locusts buzzing in my ears. “You did good. Now—over here. Hurry.”

He led me behind the glassed-in office, which was locked and dark. My camel’s-hair coat had blood on it, and Boris took it off me like an attendant at a coat check, and turned it inside out and draped it over a concrete post.

“You will have to get rid of this thing,” he said, with a violent shudder. “Shirt too. Not now—later. Now—” opening a door, crowding in behind me, flipping on a light—“come on.”

Dank bathroom, stinking of urinal cakes and urine. No sink, only a bare water spigot and a drain in the floor.

“Quick, quick,” said Boris, turning the faucet full pressure. “Not perfection. Just—yeow!” grimacing as he stuck his head under the spout, splashing his face, scrubbing it palm down—

“Your arm,” I found myself saying. He was holding it wrong.

“Yes yes—” cold water flying everywhere, coming up for air—“he winged me, not bad, only a nick—oh God—” spitting and spluttering—“I should have listened to you. You tried to say! Boris, you said, someone back there! In the kitchen! But did I listen to you? Pay attention? No. That little fucker—the Chinese kid—that was Sascha’s boyfriend! Woo, Goo, I cannot remember his name. Aah—” sticking his head under the faucet again, burbling for a moment as the water streamed over his face—“—bloo! you saved us Potter, I thought we were dead.…”

Standing back, he scrubbed his hands over his face, bright red and dripping. “Okay,” he said, wiping the water out of his eyes, slinging it away, then steering me to the pounding faucet, “now, you. Head under—yes yes, cold!” Pushing me under when I flinched. “Sorry! I know! Hands, face—”

Water like ice, choking, it was going up my nose, I’d never felt anything so cold but it brought me around a bit.

“Quick, quick,” said Boris, hauling me up. “Suit—dark—doesn’t show. Nothing we can do about the shirt, collar up, here, let me do it. Scarf is in the car, yes? You can wind it around your neck? No no—forget it—” I was shivering, grabbing for my coat, teeth ringing with cold, my whole upper body was soaked through—“well, go ahead, you’ll freeze, just keep it turned to lining side out.”

“Your arm.” Though his coat was dark and the light was bad I saw the burnt skid at his bicep, black wool sticky with blood.

“Forget it. Is nothing. My God, Potter—” starting back to the car—half running, me hurrying to keep up, panicked at the thought of losing him, of being left. “Martin! That bastard is a bad diabetic, I have been hoping he would die for years. Grateful Dead, I owe you too!” he said, tucking the snub nose in his pocket, then—from the handkerchief pocket of his suit—drawing a bag of white powder which he opened and tossed down in a spray.

“There,” he said, dusting his hands off with a lurching back step; he was ash white, his pupils were fixed and even when he looked up at me, he seemed not to see me. “That is all they will be looking for. Martin will be carrying too, all junked up, did you notice? That was why he was so slow—him and Frits too. They were not expecting that call—not expecting to go to work tonight. God—” squeezing his eyes shut—“we were lucky.” Sweaty, dead pale, wiping his forehead. “Martin knows me, he knows what I carry, he was not expecting me to have that other gun and you—they were not thinking of you at all. Get in the car,” he said. “No no—” catching my arm; I was following him to the driver’s side like a sleepwalker—“not there, it’s a mess. Oh—” stopping, cold, an eternity passing in the flickering greenish light—before wobbling around for his own gun on the floor, which he wiped clean with a cloth from his pocket and—holding it carefully, between the cloth—dropped on the ground.

“Whew,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “That will confuse them. They will be trying to trace that thing for years.” He stopped, holding his nicked arm with one hand: he looked me up and down. “Can you drive?”

I couldn’t answer. Glazed, dizzy, trembling. My heart, after the collision and freeze of the moment, had begun to pound with hard, sharp, painful blows like a fist striking in the center of my chest.

Quickly, Boris shook his head, made a tch tch sound. “Other side,” he said, when I, feet moving of their own accord, followed him again. “No no—” leading me back around, opening the front passenger door and giving me a little shove.

Drenched. Shivering. Nauseated. On the floor: pack of Stimorol gum. Road map: Frankfurt Offenbach Hanau.

Boris had circled around to the car, checking it out. Then, gingerly, he came back to the driver’s side—weaving a bit; trying not to step in blood—and sat behind the wheel and held it with both hands and took a deep breath.

“Okay,” he said, on a long exhale, talking to himself like a pilot about to take off on a mission. “Buckle up. You too. Brake lights working? Tail lights?” Patting his pockets, sliding up the seat, turning the heater up to High. “Plenty of gas—good. Heated seats too—will warm us up. We can’t be stopped,” he explained. “Because I cannot drive.”

All sorts of tiny noises: creak of seat leather, water ticking from my wet sleeve.

“Can’t drive?” I said, in the intense ringing silence.

“Well, I can.” Defensively. “I have. I—” starting up the car, backing out with his arm along the seat—“well, why do you think I have a driver? Am I this fancy? No. I do have—” upheld forefinger—“drunk-driving conviction.”

I closed my eyes to keep from seeing the slumped bloody mass as we drove past it.

“So, you see, if they stop me they will run me in and this is what we do not want to happen.” I could barely hear what he was saying over the fierce buzzing in my head. “You will have to help me out. Like—watch for street signs and keep me from driving in bus lanes. The cycle paths are red here, you are not supposed to drive on them either so help me watch for those too.”

On the Overtoom again, heading back into Amsterdam: Locksmith Sleutelkluis, Vacatures, Digitaal Printen, Haji Telecom, Onbeperkt Genieten, Arabic letters, lights streaking, it was like a nightmare, I was never going to get off this fucking road.

“God, I better slow down,” said Boris somberly. He looked glassy and wrecked. “Trajectcontrole. Help me watch for signs.”

Blood smear on my cuff. Big fat drops.

“Trajectcontrole. That means some machine tells the police you are speeding. They drive unmarked cars, a lot of them, and sometimes they will follow a while before they stop you although—we are lucky—not much traffic out this way tonight. Weekend, I guess, and holiday. This is not exactly Happy Christmas neighborhood out here if you get me. You understand what just happened, don’t you?” said Boris, heaving for breath and scrubbing his nose hard with a gasping sound.

“No.” Somebody else talking, not me.

“Well—Horst. Both those guys were Horst’s. Frits is maybe only person in Amsterdam he knew to call on such short notice but Martin—fuck.” He was speaking very fast and erratically, so fast he could barely get the words out, and his eyes were flat and staring. “Who even knew Martin was in town? You know how Horst and Martin met, don’t you?” he said, half-glancing at me. “Mental home! Fancy California mental home! ‘Hotel California,’ Horst used to call it! That was back when Horst’s family was still talking to him. Horst was in for rehab but Martin was in because he is really, truly nuts. Like, eyestabber kind of nuts. I have seen Martin do things I really do not like to talk about. I—”

“Your arm.” It was hurting him; I could see the tears glittering in his eyes.

Boris made a face. “Nyah. This is zero. This is nothing. Aah,” he said, lifting his elbow up so I could wrap the phone charger cable around his arm—I’d yanked it out, wrapped it twice above the wound, tied it tight as I could—“smart you. Good precaution. Thanks! Although, no need really. Just a graze—more bruised than anything, I think. Good this coat is so thick! Clean it out—some antibyotic and something for pain—I’ll be fine. I—” deep shuddering breath—“I need to find Gyuri and Cherry. I hope they went straight to Blake’s. Dima—Dima needs a heads-up too, about the mess in there. He will not be happy—there will be cops, big headache—but it will look random. There is nothing to tie him to this.”

Headlights sweeping past. Blood pounding in my ears. There weren’t many cars on the road but every one that passed made me flinch.

Boris moaned and dragged his palm across his face. He was saying something, very speedy and agitated. “What?”

“I said—this is a mess. I am still figuring it out.” Voice staccato and cracked. “Because this is what I am wondering now—maybe I am wrong, maybe I am paranoid—but maybe Horst knew all along? That Sascha took the picture? Only Sascha brought the picture out of Germany and tries to borrow money on it behind Horst’s back. And then when things go wrong—Sascha panics—who else could he call? of course, I am just thinking out loud, maybe Horst didn’t know Sascha took it, maybe he would never have known if Sascha hadn’t been so careless and dumb as to—Goddamn this fucking ring road,” said Boris suddenly. We had gotten off the Overtoom and were circling around. “Which is the direction I want? Turn on the Nav.”

“I—” fumbling around, incomprehensible words, menu I couldn’t read, Geheugen, Plaats, turning the dial, different menu, Gevarieerd, Achtergrond.

“Oh, hell. We will try this one. God, that was close,” said Boris, taking the turn a little too fast and sloppy. “You have some minerals, Potter. Frits—Frits was out of it, nodding practically, but Martin, my God. Then you—? Coming around so brave? Hurrah! I did not even think of you there. But there you were! Say you never handled a firearm before?”

“No.” Wet black streets.

“Well, let me tell you something that will maybe sound funny? But—is a compliment. You shoot like a girl. You know why is a compliment? Because,” said Boris, with a giddy, feverish slur in his voice, “in situation of threat, male who never fired weapon before and female who never fired weapon before? The female—so Bobo used to say—is much more likely to drop her mark. Most men? want to look tough, have seen too much movies, get too impatient and pop their shot off too fast—Shit,” said Boris suddenly, slamming on the brakes.

“What?”

“We don’t want this.”

“Don’t want what?”

“This street is closed.” Throwing the car in reverse. Backing down the street.

Construction. Fences with bulldozers behind them, empty buildings with blue plastic tarps in the windows. Stacks of piping, cement blocks, graffiti in Dutch.

“What are we going to do?” I said, in the paralyzed silence that followed, after we’d turned down a different street that seemed to have no streetlights at all.

“Well—no bridge here that we can cross. And that’s a dead end, so…”

“No, I mean what are we going to do.”

“About what?”

“I—” My teeth were chattering so hard I could barely get the words out. “Boris, we’re fucked.”

“No! We are not. Grozdan’s gun—” awkwardly he patted his coat pocket—“I’ll drop it in the canal. They can’t trace it back to me, if they can’t trace it back to him? And—nothing else to tie us. Because my gun? Clean. No serial. Even the car tires are new! I’ll get the car to Gyuri and he’ll change them tonight. Look here,” said Boris, when I didn’t answer, “don’t worry! We are safe! Shall I say it again? S-A-F-E” (spelling it out clumsily on four fingers).

Hitting a pothole, I flinched, unconsciously, a startle reaction, hands flying up to my face.

“And why, more than anything? Because we are old friends—because we trust each other. And because—oh God, there’s a cop, let me slow down.”

Staring at my shoes. Shoes shoes shoes. All I could think, when I’d put them on a few hours before I hadn’t killed anybody.

“Because—Potter, Potter, think about this. Listen for one moment please. What if I was a stranger—someone you did not know or trust? If you were driving from garage now with stranger? Then your life would be chained with a stranger’s forever. You would need to be very very careful with this person, long as you live.”

Cold hands, cold feet. Snackbar, Supermarkt, spotlit pyramids of fruit and candy, Verkoop Gestart!

“Your life—your freedom—resting on a stranger’s loyalty? In that case? Yes. Worry. Absolutely. You would be in very big trouble. But—no one knows of this thing but us. Not even Gyuri!”

Unable to speak, I shook my head vigorously at this, trying to catch my breath.

“Who? China Boy?” Boris made a disgusted noise. “Who’s he going to tell? He is underage and not here legally. He does not speak any proper language.”

“Boris”—leaning forward slightly; I felt like I was going to pass out—“he’s got the painting.”

“Ah.” Boris grimaced with pain. “That is gone, I’m afraid.”

“What?”

“For good, maybe. I am sick over that—sick in my heart. Because, I hate to say it—Woo, Goo, what’s his name? After what he saw—? All he will think about is himself. Scared to death! People dead! Deportation! He does not want to be involved. Forget about the picture. He has no idea of its true value. And if he finds himself in any kind of fix with the cops? Rather than spend one day in jail even? All he will want is to get rid of it. So—” he shrugged woozily—“let’s hope he does get away, the little shit. Otherwise very good chance the ptitsa will end up thrown in canal—burned.”

Streetlights glinting off the hoods of parked cars. I felt disincarnate, cut loose from myself. How it would feel to be back in my body again I couldn’t imagine. We were back in the old city, cobblestone rattle, nocturne monochrome straight out of Aert van der Neer with the seventeenth century pressing close on either side and silver coins dancing on black canal water.

“Ach, this is closed,” groaned Boris, jerking to a stop again, backing up the car, “we must find another way.”

“Do you know where we are?”

“Yes—of course,” said Boris, with a sort of scary disconnected cheerfulness. “That’s your canal over there. The Herengracht.”

“Which canal?”

“Amsterdam is an easy city to get around,” Boris said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “In the old city all you have to do is follow the canals until—Oh, God, they closed this off too.”

Tonal gradations. Weirdly enlivened darks. The small ghostly moon above the bell gables was so tiny it looked like the moon of a different planet, hazed and occult, spooky clouds lit with just the barest tinge of blue and brown.

“Don’t worry, this happens all the time. They are always building something here. Big construction messes. All this—I think is for a new subway line or something. Everyone is annoyed by it. Many accusations of fraud, yah yah. Same in every city, no?” His voice was so blurry he sounded drunk. “Roadwork everywhere, politicians getting rich? That is why everyone rides a bike, it is quicker, only, I am sorry, I am not riding a bicycle anywhere one week before Christmas. Oh no—” narrow bridge, dead halt behind a line of cars—“are we moving?”

“I—” We were stopped on a pedestrian footbridge. Visible pink drops on the rain-splashed windows. People walking back and forth not a foot away.

“Get out of the car and look. Oh, hang on,” he said impatiently before I could pull myself together; throwing the car into Park, getting out himself. I saw his floodlit back in the headlights, formal and staged-looking amidst billows of exhaust.

“Van,” he said, throwing himself back in the car. Slamming the door. Taking a deep breath, bracing his arms out straight against the steering wheel.

“What is he doing?” Glancing side to side, panicked, half expecting some random pedestrian to notice the bloodstains, rush at the car, bang at the windows, throw open the door.

“How should I know? There are too many cars in this fucking city. Look,” said Boris—sweating and pale in the lurid tail lights of the car in front of us; more cars had pulled up behind, we were trapped—“who knows how long we will be here. We are only few blocks from your hotel. Better you should get out and walk.”

“I—” Was it the lights of the car in front of us that made the water drops on the windshield look quite so red?

He made an impatient flicking movement of the hand. “Potter, just go,” he said. “I don’t know what is going on with this van up here. I’m afraid the traffic police will show up. Better for us both if we are not together just now. Herengracht—you cannot miss it. The canals here run in circles, you know that, don’t you? Just go that way—” he pointed—“you will find it.”

“What about your arm?”

“It’s nothing! I’d take off my coat to show you except is too much trouble. Now go. I have to talk to Cherry.” Pulling his cell phone from his pocket. “I may have to leave town for a little while—”

“What?”

“—but if we don’t speak for a bit, don’t worry, I know where you are. Best if you don’t try to call me or get in touch. I’ll be back soon as I can. Everything will be okay. Go—clean up—scarf around the neck, up high—we will speak soon. Don’t look so pale and ill! Do you have anything on you? Do you need something?”

“What?”

Scrabbling in his pocket. “Here, take this.” Glassine envelope with a smeared stamp. “Not too much, it is very very pure. Size of a match head. No more. And when you wake up, it will not be quite so bad. Now, remember—” dialing his phone; I was very conscious of his heavy breathing—“keep your scarf high up at your neck and walk on the dark side of the street as much as you can. Go!” he shouted when still I sat there, so loudly that I saw a man on the pedestrian walk of the bridge turn to look. “Hurry up! Cherry,” he said, slumping back in his seat in visible relief and beginning to babble hoarsely in Ukrainian as I exited the car—feeling lurid and exposed in the ghastly wash of headlights from the stalled vehicles—and walked back over the bridge, the way we’d come. My last sight of him, he was talking on the phone with the window rolled down and leaning out, in extravagant clouds of auto fume, to see what was going on with the stalled van ahead.

xiv.

THE SUBSEQUENT HOUR, OR hours, of wandering the canal rings hunting for my hotel were as miserable as any in my life, which is saying something. The temperature had plunged, my hair was wet, my clothes were soaked, my teeth were chattering with cold; the streets were just dark enough that they all looked alike and yet not nearly dark enough to be roaming around in clothes bloodied from a man I’d just killed. Down the black streets I walked, fast, with oddly confident-sounding heel taps, feeling as uneasy and conspicuous as a dreamer wandering naked in a nightmare, staying out of the streetlights and trying hard to reassure myself, with dwindling success, that my inside-out coat looked perfectly normal, nothing unusual about it at all. There were pedestrians on the street, but not many. Afraid of being recognized, I’d removed my glasses since I knew from experience that my glasses were my most distinctive feature—what people noticed first, what people remembered—and though this was unhelpful in terms of finding my way it also gave me an irrational sense of safety and concealment: illegible street signs and fogged streetlamp coronas floating up isolated out of the dark, blurred car lights and holiday tracers, a feeling of being viewed by pursuers with an out-of-focus lens.

What had happened was: I’d overshot my hotel by a couple of blocks. Moreover: I was not used to European hotels where you had to ring to get in after a certain hour, and when at last I splashed up sneezing and bonechilled to find the glass door locked, I stood for some indefinite time rattling the handle like a zombie, back and forth, back and forth, with a rhythmic, locked-in, metronome dumbness, too stupefied with cold to understand why I couldn’t get in. Dismally, through the glass, I gazed through the lobby at the sleek, black desk: empty.

Then—hurrying from the back, startled eyebrows—neat dark-haired man in dark suit. There was an awful flash where his eyes met mine and I realized how I must look, and then he was looking away, fumbling with the key.

“Sorry, sir, we lock the door after eleven,” he said. Still averting his eyes. “It’s for the safety of the customers.”

“I got caught in the rain.”

“Of course, sir.” He was—I realized—staring at the cuff of my shirt, splatted with a browned blood drop the size of a quarter. “We have umbrellas at the desk should you require them.”

“Thanks.” Then, nonsensically: “I spilled chocolate sauce on myself.”

“Sorry to hear that, sir. We’ll be happy to try to get it out in the laundry if you like.”

“That’d be great.” Couldn’t he smell it on me, the blood? In the heated lobby I reeked of it, rust and salt. “My favorite shirt too. Profiteroles.” Shut up, shut up. “Delicious though.”

“Happy to hear it sir. We’ll be happy to book you a table at a restaurant tomorrow night if you like.”

“Thanks.” Blood in my mouth, the smell and taste of it everywhere, I could only hope he couldn’t smell it quite so strongly as me. “That’d be great.”

“Sir?” he said as I was starting off to the elevator.

“Sorry?”

“I believe you need your key?” Moving behind the desk, selecting a key from a pigeonhole. “Twenty-seven, is it?”

“Right,” I said, at once thankful he’d told me my room number and alarmed that he’d known it so readily, off the top of his head.

“Good night sir. Enjoy your stay.”

Two different elevators. Endless hallway, carpeted in red. Coming in, I threw on all the lights—desk lamp, bed lamp, chandelier blazing; shrugged my coat on the floor, and headed straight for the shower, unbuttoning my bloodied shirt as I went, stumbling like Frankenstein’s monster before pitchforks. I wadded the sticky mess of cloth and threw it into the bottom of the bathtub and turned on the water as hard and hot as it would go, rivulets of pink streaming beneath my feet, scrubbing myself with the lily scented bath gel until I smelled like a funeral wreath and my skin was on fire.

The shirt was a loss: brown stains scalloped and splotched at the throat long after the water ran clean. Leaving it to soak in the tub, I turned to the scarf and then the jacket—smeared with blood, though too dark to show it—and then, turning it right side out, as gingerly as I could (why had I worn the camel’s-hair to the party? why not the navy?) the coat. One lapel was not so bad and the other very bad. The wine-dark splash carried a blatting animation that threw me back into the energy of the shot all over again: the kick, the burst, trajectory of droplets. I stuffed it under the tap in the sink and poured shampoo on it and scrubbed and scrubbed with a shoebrush from the closet; and after the shampoo was gone, and the bath gel too, I rubbed bar soap on the spot and scrubbed some more, like some hopeless servant in a fairy tale doomed to complete an impossible task before dawn, or die. At last, hands trembling from fatigue, I turned to my toothbrush and toothpaste straight from the tube—which, oddly enough, worked better than anything I’d tried, but still didn’t do the job.

Finally I gave it up for useless, and hung the coat to drip in the bathtub: sodden ghost of Mr. Pavlikovsky. I’d taken care to keep blood off the towels; with toilet paper, which I compulsively wadded and flushed every few moments, I mopped up, laboriously, the rusty smears and drips on the tile. Taking my toothbrush to the grout. Clinical whiteness. Mirrored walls glittering. Multiple reflecting solitudes. Long after the last tinge of pink was gone, I kept going—rinsing and re-washing the hand towels I’d sullied, which still had a suspicious flush—and then, so tired I was reeling, got in the shower with water so hot I could barely stand it and scrubbed myself down all over again, head to toe, grinding the bar of soap in my hair and weeping at the suds that ran into my eyes.

xv.

I WAS AWAKENED, AT some indeterminate hour, by a bell buzzing loudly at my door which made me leap up as if I’d been scalded. The sheets were tangled and drenched with sweat and the blackout shades were down so I had no idea what time it was or even if it was day or night. I was still half asleep. Throwing on my robe, cracking the door on the chain I said: “Boris?”

Moist-faced, uniformed woman. “Laundry, sir.”

“Sorry?”

“Front desk, sir. They said you asked for laundry pickup this morning.”

“Er—” I glanced down at the doorknob. How, after everything, could I have neglected to put out the Do Not Disturb sign? “Hang on.”

From my case I retrieved the shirt I’d worn to Anne’s party—the one Boris said wasn’t good enough for Grozdan’s. “Here,” I said, passing it to her through the door and then: “Wait.”

Suit jacket. Scarf. Both black. Did I dare? They were wrecked-looking and wet to the touch but when I switched on the desk lamp and examined them minutely—specs on, with my Hobie-trained eye, nose inches from the cloth—no blood to be seen. With a piece of white tissue, I dabbed in several places to see if it came away pink. It did—but only the faintest bit.

She was still waiting and in a way it was a relief, having to hurry: quick decision, no hesitating. From the pockets I retrieved my wallet, the damp-but-amazingly-intact Oxycontin which I’d slipped into my pocket before the de Larmessin party (Did I ever think I’d be grateful for that hard time-release matrix? No) and Boris’s fat glassine envelope before handing suit and scarf over as well.

Closing the door, I was suffused with relief. But not thirty seconds later a murmur of worry crept in, worry which rose to a shrieking crescendo in moments. Snap judgment. Insane. What had I been thinking?

I lay down. I got up. I lay back down and tried to go to sleep. Then I sat up in bed and in a dreamlike rush, unable to help myself, found myself dialing the front desk.

“Yes Mr. Decker, how can I help you?”

“Er—” squeezing my eyes shut tight; why had I paid for the room with a credit card? “I was just wondering—I just sent a suit out to be dry cleaned, and I wonder if it’s still on premises?”

“Sorry?”

“Do you send the laundry out to be done? Or is it done on site?”

“We send it out, sir. The company we use is very reliable.”

“Is there any way you could see if it’s gone out yet? I just realized that I need it for an event tonight.”

“I’ll just check sir. Hang on.”

Hopelessly, I waited, staring at the bag of heroin on the nightstand, which was stamped with a rainbow skull and the word AFTERPARTY. In a moment the desk clerk came back on. “What time will you be needing the suit, sir?”

“Early.”

“I’m afraid it’s already gone out. The truck just left. But our dry cleaning is same-day service. You’ll have it this afternoon by five, guaranteed. Will there be anything more, sir?” he asked, in the silence that followed.

xvi.

BORIS WAS RIGHT ABOUT his dope, how pure it was—pure white, a normal sized bump knocked me cockeyed, so that for an indeterminate interlude I drifted in and out pleasantly on the verge of death. Cities, centuries. In and out I glided of slow moments, delightful, shades drawn, empty cloud dreams and evolving shadows, a stillness like Jan Weenix’s gorgeous trophy pieces, dead birds with bloodstained feathers hanging from a foot, and in whatever wink of consciousness that remained to me I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from all humankind until the very end: no pain, no fear, magnificent detachment, lying in state upon the death barge and receding into the grand immensities like an emperor, gone, gone, observing all the distant scurryers on shore, freed from all the old human pettiness of love and fear and grief and death.

When the doorbell shrilled into my dreams, hours later, it might have been hundreds of years, I didn’t even flinch. Amiably I got up—swaying happily on air, supporting myself on bits of furniture as I walked—and smiled at the girl in the door: blonde, shy-seeming, offering me my clothes wrapped in plastic.

“Your laundry, Mr. Decker.” As all the Dutch did, or seemed to do, she pronounced my surname “Decca,” as in Decca Mitford, once-upon-a-time acquaintance of Mrs. DeFrees. “Our apologies.”

“What?”

“I hope there’s been no inconvenience.” Adorable! Those blue eyes! Her accent was charming.

“Excuse me?”

“We promised them to you at five p.m. The desk said not to put it on your bill.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” I said, wondering if I should tip her, realizing that money, and counting, was much too much to think about, and then—closing the door, dropping the clothes on the foot of the bed and making my unsteady way to the night table—checked Gyuri’s watch: six-twenty, which made me smile. To contemplate the face-clawing worry the dope had saved me—an hour and twenty minutes of anguish! Frantic, phoning the front desk! envisioning cops downstairs! flooded me with Vedic serenity. Worry! What a waste of time. All the holy books were right. Clearly ‘worry’ was the mark of a primitive and spiritually unevolved person. What was that line from Yeats, about the bemused Chinese sages? All things fall and are built again. Ancient glittering eyes. This was wisdom. People had been raging and weeping and destroying things for centuries and wailing about their puny individual lives, when—what was the point? All this useless sorrow? Consider the lilies of the field. Why did anyone ever worry about anything? Weren’t we, as sentient beings, put upon the earth to be happy, in the brief time allotted to us?

Absolutely. Which was why I didn’t fret about the snippy pre-printed note Housekeeping had slid under my door (Dear Guest, we made an attempt to service your room but were unfortunately unable to gain access to…), why I was more than happy to venture into the hall in my bathrobe and waylay the chambermaid with a sinister armload of waterlogged towels—every towel in the room was soaked, I’d rolled my coat in them to help press the water out, pinkish marks on some of them that I hadn’t really noticed before I—fresh towels? Certainly! oh, you forgot your key sir? you’re locked out? Oh, one moment, shall I let you back in? and why, even after that, I didn’t think twice about ordering up from room service, indulgently permitting the bellboy to enter the room and wheel the table right to the foot of the bed (tomato soup, salad, club sandwich, chips, most of which I managed to throw right back up again half an hour later, the pleasantest vomit in the world, so much fun it made me laugh: whoopsy! Best dope ever!) I was sick, I knew it, hours of wet clothes in zero-fahrenheit weather had given me a high fever and chills, and yet I was much too grandly removed from it to care. This was the body: fallible, subject to malady. Illness, pain. Why did people get so worked up about it? I put on every piece of clothing in my suitcase (two shirts, sweater, extra trousers, two pairs of socks) and sat sipping coca-cola from the minibar and—still high and coming down—fell in and out of vivid waking dreams: uncut diamonds, glittering black insects, one particularly vivid dream of Andy, sopping wet, tennis shoes squelching, trailing water into the room behind him something not quite right about him something weird looking little bit off what’s up Theo?

not much, you?

not much hey I heard you and Kits were getting married Daddy told me

cool

yeah cool, we can’t come though, Daddy’s got an event at the yacht club

hey that’s too bad

and then we were going somewhere together Andy and me with heavy suitcases we were going by boat, on the canal, only Andy was like no way am I getting in that boat and I was like sure I understand, so I took apart the sailboat screw by screw, and put the pieces in my suitcase, we were carrying it overland, sails and all, this was the plan, all you had to do was follow the canals and they’d take you right where you wanted to go or maybe just right back where you started but it was a bigger job than I’d thought, disassembling a sailboat, it was different than taking apart a table or chair and the pieces were too big to fit in the luggage and there was a huge propeller I was trying to jam in with my clothes and Andy was bored and off to the side playing chess with someone I didn’t like the looks of and he said well if you can’t plan it out ahead of time, you’ll just have to work it out as you go along

xvii.

I WOKE WITH A snap of the head, nauseated and itching all over like ants were crawling under my skin. With the drug leaving my system the panic had roared back twice as strong since clearly I was sick, fever and sweats, no denying it any more. After staggering to the bathroom and throwing up again (this, not a fun junkie throw-up, but the usual misery), I came back in my room and contemplated my suit and scarf in plastic at the foot of the bed and thought, with a shiver, how lucky I was. It had all turned out okay (or had it?) but it mightn’t have.

Awkwardly, I removed suit and scarf from the plastic—the floor underneath me had a drowsy, nautical roll that made me grab for the wall to steady myself—and reached for my glasses and sat on the bed to examine them under the light. The cloth looked worn but otherwise okay. Then again, I couldn’t tell. The cloth was too black. I saw spots, and then I didn’t. My eyes still weren’t working quite right. Maybe it was a trick—maybe if I went down to the lobby I’d find cops waiting for me—but no—beating this thought back—ridiculous. They’d keep the clothes if they’d found anything suspicious on them, wouldn’t they? Certainly they wouldn’t return them pressed and cleaned.

I was still out of the world halfway: not myself. Somehow my dream of the sailboat had bled through and infected the hotel room, so it was a room but also the cabin of a ship: built-in cupboards (over my bed and under the eaves) neatly fitted with countersunk brass and enamelled to a high nautical gloss. Ship’s carpentry; deck swaying, and lapping outside, the black canal water. Delirium: unmoored and drifting. Outside, the fog was thick, not a breath of wind, streetlights burning through with a diffuse, haggard, ashen stillness, softened and blurred to haze.

Itching, itching. Skin on fire. Nausea and splitting headache. The more sumptuous the dope, the deeper the anguish—mental and physical—when it wore off. I was back to the chunk spewing out of Martin’s forehead only on a more intimate level, inside it almost, every pulse and spurt, and—even worse, a deeper freezing point entirely—the painting, gone. Bloodstained coat, the feet of the running-away kid. Blackout. Disaster. For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing—to break bonds stronger than the temporal—was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair.

My dad at the baccarat table, in the air-conditioned midnight. There’s always more to things, a hidden level. Luck in its darker moods and manifestations. Consulting the stars, waiting to make the big bets when Mercury was in retrograde, reaching for a knowledge just beyond the known. Black his lucky color, nine his lucky number. Hit me again pal. There’s a pattern and we’re a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do), you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you’d ever looked at or thought of as light.