Page 29 of The Expat Affair
My cellphone rings one last time in Lars’s hand, then flips Willow’s call to voicemail.
“What’s the code?”
Lars says, and he doesn’t have to ask me twice. His other hand is still holding the gun, and he’s aiming it at my face.
“0-2-1-9-8-8.”
My birth month and year, programmed in my new phone. Old habits die hard, I guess.
He ticks it in and the lock screen dissolves. “Call her back.”
“And say what?”
“I don’t know. See what she wants.”
“Probably just to talk. Willow is a friend.”
Friend might be overstating things, but I don’t really have a good alternative. She’s someone I talked to a couple of times, who poured me full of wine and warned me of dangers she didn’t quite define, though as it turns out, she wasn’t wrong. I really wish she’d been faster getting me that gun.
“She called you”—he taps a finger to the screen—“three times in a row. Seems like she wants more than just to talk.”
The phone buzzes in his hand, not with another call but a voicemail hitting the system. He taps Play and puts it on speaker, and Willow’s voice fills the room and my head.
Hey, , I really wish you’d pick up the phone because I need help, and I’m counting on you to get this on time. I’m standing outside a warehouse near the station, where Fleur is holding Sem. She picked him up from school and then brought him here, and she won’t tell me why. I have no idea what I’m about to walk in to, only that I’m going in there to get him back. If you don’t hear from me in the next twenty minutes or so, call your detective friend and give him this address: Van Diemenstraat 408. Tell him a child’s life is in danger and to hurry.
There’s so much to latch on to here. First of all, Fleur took Sem. She kidnapped her own nephew.
Lars leans over and grabs my sneaker from the floor, then tosses it at my head. “Let’s go.”
I don’t have to ask where we’re going, but I can’t imagine what Lars thinks we’ll find when we get there. Three members of the Prins family, sure, but what’s he going to do, hold them for ransom in exchange for the missing diamonds? Like I tried to tell him last night, whoever has those stones is long gone.
I wriggle my sneaker onto my foot. “Okay, but can I at least pee first? And I wouldn’t say no to a slice of toast.”
Lars sighs, gesturing to the hall with his gun. “Toilet, but hurry.”
In the bathroom, I empty my bladder and look around for anything I can use as a weapon, but toilets in this country are the size of a coat closet and there’s not much here. A container of liquid hand soap, a grimy toilet brush in a plastic stand, a perpetual calendar Ingrid uses to keep track of birthdays hanging from a nail in the wall. I stash the calendar behind the toilet, then wriggle the nail from the plaster. It’s two centimeters long at best, but I press the end to a finger pad and it’s sharp enough to draw blood.
Lars raps on the door with the gun, two hard and metallic pops against wood that make me jump a good inch off the floor. “What’s taking so long?”
“Okay, okay.”
I flush and drop the nail into my pocket, pushing it with a finger all the way to the bottom where it’s level with the seam. “I’m coming.”
I open the door to find two bodies, Lars and a stony-faced Ingrid, waiting for me in the hall.
“You.”
I stab a finger at her face. “You put all those trackers in my stuff, didn’t you? Of course you did. You had plenty of access.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She makes sure to hold my gaze when she says it, but I see all the other signs. The way she curls her hands into fists to pop her thumbs, the way her voice drifts higher than usual. Barry used to have the same tells whenever he was lying. Ingrid put those trackers in my things. She worked with Xander. Though I still don’t see what my role is in their plan.
And Lars?
“So what, the two of you are working together now?”
Ingrid makes a throaty sound that says, not a chance.
Lars shakes his head.
“Then how did you know she was working with Xander?”
“It’s my business to know everything about my targets.”
He grabs me by the arm and shoves me in the direction of the door. “Here’s what’s going to happen. The three of us are going to walk calmly and quietly down the stairs and out the front door. If you talk to anybody on the way, I’ll shoot you. If you signal them or even look at them funny, I’ll shoot you. Do you see where I’m going with this? One of you does anything other than walk and look straight ahead, you’re both dead. Understood?”
Ingrid and I exchange a look, then bob our heads in a simultaneous nod.
“What about the reporters?” I say.
He wags my phone in the air. “You just tweeted a picture of yourself standing in line at the Rijks.”
The picture was from a couple of weeks ago, and all it would take is for one of the reporters to zoom in on the tickets in my hand, and they’ll see the date and time. One detail-oriented journalist to figure out they’ve been sent on a wild goose chase. Let’s just pray one of them is smart enough to check.
“Let’s go,”
he says, gesturing to the door with the gun. “My car is parked around the corner.”
Silently, Ingrid and I file out the door and start the long trek down the stairs.
About halfway down, a door pops open at the end of the stairwell, an elderly neighbor grabbing the mail someone had dropped by his door. He greets us in Dutch, and it sounds friendly enough, but there’s still a gun pointed at our backs so Ingrid and I don’t look his way. We stare straight ahead and keep moving. The neighbor picks up his mail and goes back inside, closing the door with a click.
“Good girls,”
Lars says, sticking close to our heels.
The reporters are long gone by the time we step outside and follow Lars’s directions to the left. His car is just where he said it would be, wedged between a dusty van and a tree on the next street. It’s also surprisingly nice for someone who introduced himself as a starving artist, a four-door Tesla, but then again, Lars has been lying to me since the beginning.
He orders me behind the wheel and Ingrid to the passenger’s seat, then drops into the back seat, scooting to the very middle. He taps the gun against our biceps, both a reminder and a warning. First mine, then Ingrid’s.
“Start the car. Plug in the address. Van Diemenstraat 408.”
I hit the brake and look for a button, but there’s no need. The car fires up and Google Maps pops up on the screen. Ingrid enters the address, and the system spits out the route, a twisty tour along the edges of the city to the houthavens. A solid fifteen minutes with traffic, and I think of Willow, the gravity of the situation dragging down her voice as she tells me to call the detective. I just hope that whatever we find there, it’s not too late.
I put the car in reverse and ease out of the parking spot, slamming the brakes to let a biker pass. Once he’s gone, I back out and wriggle the car into Drive.
“At least tell me why,”
I say, sparing a glance at Ingrid while I follow the little blue line to the next corner, where it directs me to take a left. “What did you and Xander need me for? What was the plan here?”
She gives a pointed look to Lars over her shoulder, but he must want to know, too, because she turns back with a sigh. “Xander was spooked. He said someone at Prins knew what we were doing. He didn’t dare to meet face-to-face anymore. He wasn’t meeting with any of his people, apparently. He said we needed to find another way to communicate, another way to get the stones from him to me.”
“Only Xander died before you two could use me as a mule.”
Ingrid doesn’t respond. She stares out the windshield and presses her lips into a tight line.
“He didn’t? How?”
She glances over with a roll of her eyes. “He put them in a lipstick tube and dropped it in your bag for me to remove the second you got home.”
She twists around on the seat to face Lars. “And before you start, I don’t have those diamonds. They were stolen. I’m guessing by you.”
It takes me a couple of beats to catch up. Ingrid is referring to the break-in, and it was diamonds—not cash—that disappeared from her room. No wonder she clammed up as soon as the police arrived. No wonder she got so mad when I asked her if she was insured. How do you insure stolen diamonds?
The navigation dumps me onto a wider road, two lanes flanked by bike paths and separated by two sets of tram tracks. It’s a lot to keep an eye on, especially when there’s a gun pointed at the back of my head. I grip the steering wheel, and it’s a good thing the speed limit is a snail’s pace, because after Ingrid’s little tidbit, my mind is spinning with more than traffic.
Ingrid, who pointed me to Tinder and helped me craft my profile. Who yanked my phone from my fingers and selected things like age, height, location, and maximum distance from the apartment we shared. Who would have told Xander all those things about me to help him zero in on my profile. Maybe he got lucky, or maybe he swiped for days. Either way, I’m guessing they also had a backup plan.
But the more pressing point is, Xander didn’t want to date me. He wanted to drop diamonds in my pockets and use me to courier them to Ingrid. I think of the way he didn’t take his eyes off me at the bar and later the restaurant, leaning in as he peppered me with questions about my work, my travels, my life. He laughed at my jokes, made me feel funny and interesting. He made me feel beautiful. It was a classic case of love bombing, but Xander didn’t like me, he was manipulating me.
A biker comes out of nowhere, swerving over the line as it merges into the thick stream of bicycles pedaling next to us in the bike lane. I see it in my periphery and overcorrect, almost sideswiping a tram in the process.
“Watch out!”
Lars shouts from the back seat, and I slam the brakes, both from the volume and the pressure of holding the car steady between moving objects on both sides. Ingrid squeals and grabs the door handle.
“I’ve never driven in Holland before, okay?”
I say, my gaze flitting from tram to bike to the Opel riding its brakes in front of me. “How do you people do this? Your streets are like a freaking obstacle course.”
The light flips to red and I hit the brakes again, breathing a sigh of relief at the chance to regroup. I slow to a stop behind the Opel, Ingrid’s earlier words bubbling up in my head. She said that she and Xander wanted to use me to communicate. “Communicate how? What, did Xander drop a note for you in my bag?”
“No, on your Instagram.”
I think back to his flurry of likes on pictures going back months. But there was only one he commented on, the shot of me in front of the butterfly mural in Nashville. Nice wings, he wrote. Next time you go to Music City #ImIn.
And then there was Ingrid, commenting on every picture I posted, fragments of run-on English that felt random and often a little confusing. I brushed it off to her clunky language skills, but now I’m thinking of the comment she posted on the picture of me in that necklace, three fire emojis followed by words I didn’t understand at the time: #readywhenyouare.
He’s in. She’s ready when he is. I’m a fucking idiot.
By now we’re on the north side of town, where the iconic facades of stair-step rooflines with white piping have fallen away into something grittier. Big modern buildings dingy with soot, a maze of dark bridges and tunnels. The navigation system points us down one where passenger trains rumble overhead, the tracks leading to and from Central Station. We come out the other side into an area that looks nothing like the Amsterdam I’m used to seeing. Spacious. Modern and bright. A mix of new homes and old industrial warehouses, plenty of water and sky.
A couple more turns, and Lars shoves his upper body in the space between us, the gun resting on the console. “Find a parking spot. It’s just up there.”
He juts the gun at an ugly square building of yellow brick. I find a spot a hundred meters further down and squeeze the Tesla in. Lars orders us to sit tight while he pulls up the parking app on his phone and pays for an hour’s time, and the absurdity hits me. A criminal who’s afraid of a parking ticket.
Ingrid swivels around in her seat, a rush of vehement Dutch I take to be a plea for him to let her go. He points the gun at her forehead, and she shuts up.
He swings the barrel to mine. “You know the rules.”
I shift on the seat, and the flimsy nail in my pocket pokes me in the thigh. I’ve brought a nail to a gun fight. I nod.
“Then let’s go.”
With no other choice, Ingrid and I clamber out of the car and let Lars march us inside.