Page 3 of The Expat Affair

I’m seated on a bar stool at the far end of a juice shop in Amsterdam Zuid, a freebie bottle of foamy green liquid clutched in a fist, waiting for the cops to arrive.

The place isn’t very busy, but it’s the same handful of people filling the tables and lingering near the register as when I ran inside, screaming for someone to call the police.

Between sips from their bottles and paper cups, they toss me noticeable, curious glances. Looks like they’re waiting for the cops, too.

At the front of the shop, a man pushes through the door.

He’s in plain clothes, dark jeans, and a fitted gray shirt over battered Nike sneakers, but I know a cop when I see one.

This one looks like the TV version of a cop, tall and a gritty kind of handsome, with a swagger and square jaw the camera loves.

He stops at the counter for a quick discussion with the girl manning the register, and she points him my way.

She knows why he’s here, that it’s me he’s here for.

The cop turns, our eyes meet, and I sit up straighter on my chair.

“Arie Boomsma, detective with the Amsterdam Police,”

he says as soon as he’s close enough, and in English, thank God. His words are heavy with a Germanic accent. “I understand you were witness to a murder.”

I drop my hand in his outstretched palm, big as a dinner plate, and squeeze harder than necessary because I’ve lived here long enough to know that in Holland, that’s how you set the tone.

The one with the strongest handshake wins, and this guy just won by a mile.

I slide my throbbing hand under my thigh, trying not to wince.

“ Dumont. And I’m not a witness, at least not technically. When I walked into the bathroom, Xander was already dead.”

I shudder as the last word leaves my mouth because I was in the same room as a fingerless corpse. I puked a puddle on the marble by his feet. My underwear is still lying somewhere on his bedroom floor. My DNA is all over the scene.

“Do you want to talk here?”

He gestures vaguely to the shop behind him, to the people trying very hard not to stare. “We could go to the bureau if you prefer.”

Something about the way he says it feels like a challenge, or maybe it’s my history with interrogation rooms in police stations. Either way, I give an immediate shake of my head.

“Here’s fine.”

Detective Boomsma pats his pockets until he finds the lump he’s looking for, an ancient iPhone with a scratched and cracked screen.

He swipes through the apps and taps Record on Voice Memos, settling the phone, screen up, on the bar between us.

“Perhaps you could start at the beginning.”

So I do.

I tell him about last night’s drinks that turned into dinner that turned into me staying the night.

I tell him about waking up this morning to the sound of the shower, and my spontaneous decision to join Xander.

About the horror of finding him there—face purple, eyes bulging, tongue limp and discolored from the zip tie strapped around his neck like a tourniquet.

I say these words, and it hits me all over again: Xander is dead, and I was there.

“You woke up to the sound of the shower,”

Detective Boomsma says, “but not the actual struggle?”

It’s a thought that’s occurred to me, as well, and more than once. A man Xander’s size would have put up one hell of a fight. His fall would have shaken the floorboards. I was drunk last night, but I wasn’t that drunk. How did I not hear anything?

At the register, an apron-clad cashier puts down the basket of oranges in her hand, watching me with undisguised curiosity. She only heard part of the story when I burst inside, the frantic bits and pieces I relayed to the 1-1-2 operator. Now she’s eager for the rest.

I turn back to Detective Boomsma. “We don’t know for sure that there was a struggle.”

“I’ve been doing this job for long enough to know with absolute certainty that there was a struggle. Any man surprised by their attacker will put up a fight the second he realizes his life is in danger. And Mr. Van der Vos was a large man. Well over two meters. How much do you think he weighed, ninety kilos?”

Ninety kilos is some two hundred pounds, which seems about right. But still. The detective seems to be waiting for more from me, an estimate, maybe, or a wild guess. This feels like a test.

“Miss Dumont, how much did Mr. Van der Vos weigh?”

I clear my throat. “I couldn’t say. Our activities didn’t exactly include a weigh-in.”

The detective quirks a brow, but he’s wise enough not to touch that one.

“Regardless, it would have taken a lot of muscle to overpower a man his size, which means his attacker must have been just as large, and while the struggle might have been quick, it certainly wouldn’t have been silent. There would have been shouts. Grunts. Bodies slamming against walls, falling to the floor. A fight to the death between two ninety-kilo men. You can see where I’m going with this.”

Yes, I can see where he’s going, and I know how this looks. A strange girl sleeping in a man’s bed, oblivious while he’s being tortured to death in the next room. It looks like I’m lying, or at the very least, hiding something.

I shut my eyes and try to picture how it happened. Xander’s body slick with soap, his handsome face tilted up to the spray when someone came up on him from behind.

“Maybe he was washing his face,”

I say, opening my eyes, “or, I don’t know, rinsing the shampoo from his hair. Maybe he didn’t know what was happening until there was a zip tie strapped around his neck and boom, no more air. And you can stop looking at me like that, Detective, because I promise you there’s not a woman on this planet who doesn’t think someone will choose that exact moment when she’s rinsing the soap from her eyes to rape or stab or strangle her.”

The girl behind the register catches my eye, and I can tell she agrees.

Detective Boomsma lifts a neutral shoulder. “That is all possible, yes, but one of the bodies still crashed to the ground. It’s strange that you didn’t hear it.”

My cheeks go hot because the detective’s point is valid. It is strange. All those minutes I wasted pacing Xander’s floor, trying to make sense of the fact that he was dead, trying to cram that awful fact into my brain, I was too stunned to think this very thing. How did I not hear his big body fall?

“I already told you we’d had a lot to drink. We went to bed really late and I’m a hard sleeper. There’s a solid wall separating the bedroom from the bathroom. Whatever noise Xander made in there, I didn’t hear it over the shower. Or maybe I heard something, because I remember startling awake. Something woke me up.”

“A thud? A shout?”

“A thud, maybe. I think I would have remembered a shout. Or maybe it was a door closing, or footsteps. I wish I could be more helpful.”

I hate the way my voice sounds, so desperate and unsure. I want to go back and try those words all over again, in a calm and matter-of-fact tone. The detective looks like he isn’t buying it, and honestly, why should he? I don’t understand how I didn’t hear anything, either.

“Over the course of the evening, how much would you say you had to drink?”

I pause. I’ve always hated this question, the way it always comes with an undertone of judgment. I could play the number of drinks down, but there were witnesses to last night’s boozing, bartenders and waiters and the people sitting all around us, and we weren’t subtle about it. We were loud and having a good time.

“More than I usually do,”

I say, and that part at least is the truth. “We’d been out since 7:30.”

“How much?”

I shrug. “A couple of drinks at the bar, a bottle of wine with dinner, champagne on Xander’s terrace. But I made sure to drink lots of water, too. And I ate, so it’s not like I drank all that on an empty stomach.”

“Any drugs? Weed, shrooms, cocaine, pills?”

“I know what drugs are, and no.”

I frown. “No drugs.”

He flashes what appears to be an apologetic smile. “Sorry, but you wouldn’t be the first American tourist to come here for the drugs. But even without them, that’s a lot of alcohol in a fairly petite frame. You must have been quite drunk.”

Wasted, though I hold back on offering up that truth.

Yes, I drank more than I should have, certainly more than is wise for a person my size.

Yes, after midnight the edges of the evening turn slippery and vague, but are there any black holes? Any blank spots in my memory where I might not have noticed a killer tiptoeing from room to room? Also yes, as much as I’m reluctant to admit it.

Everything after the champagne is a bunch of random snippets for me to puzzle together.

There are plenty of blank spots.

“We were both drunk, yes. We passed out pretty hard. And before you ask, I don’t know what time Xander was killed, or how long he’d been in the shower. I only know that when I woke up at just before eight, the water was already running. Still hot, too.”

“We don’t have boilers like in the States. Our water heaters are gas-fired, meaning the hot water never runs out.”

He pauses, regarding me. “It just seems very unlikely.”

I shrug again, both shoulders hiking high enough to touch my ears. “I don’t know what to tell you, Detective. I’m a really heavy sleeper.”

“No. I mean it seems unlikely that someone would go to the trouble of murdering Xander and not you. Especially seeing as you are a witness.”

“I just told you I was asleep. I didn’t witness anything but the aftermath.”

He doesn’t respond to that, just sits there and watches me for so long it becomes uncomfortable. Detective Boomsma doesn’t believe me. He thinks I’m lying, that I know more than I’m telling. He thinks I’m holding something back, which I suppose I am.

“Are you in the Netherlands as a tourist?”

he asks. “Or are you here on a more permanent basis?”

“I have a DAFT visa, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

The Dutch American Friendship Treaty, an agreement that allows Americans to live and work in Holland as long as they remain gainfully self-employed—though so far, the gainfully part is up for debate. Freelancing is turning out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be.

“So you’ve been to the IND.”

The Dutch immigration services. He pauses to receive my nod. “Then we have already collected your fingerprints when you gave your biometrics. But a DNA sample would be helpful. You can give one at the station.”

“I puked all over the bathroom floor, Detective. You can mop my DNA sample off the marble.”

“We would still need an official swab to match with your . . . sample, as well as whatever other evidence we find at the scene. That way we can rule you out.”

Or box me in. A cool breeze whispers up the back of my neck, a warning to tread carefully.

“And if I say no?”

“That is certainly your right. But it would be easiest for both of us if you cooperate. It will only take a few minutes.”

Not a threat, exactly, but I can read between the lines. He’ll visit a judge, get a subpoena—do they even call them subpoenas in the Netherlands?—and force me. Another mountain of attorney fees I can’t afford, when I still haven’t paid off the first pile.

Then again, surely this conversation can only have convinced this man that I cannot be guilty. After all, he’s the one who brought up Xander’s size, a good two heads taller than me, in the same breath he called me petite. I could barely reach both hands around Xander’s neck without a stepladder, much less climb up his soap-slicked body and overpower him with something as flimsy as a zip tie. Giving the police my DNA will help them cross me off the list of suspects.

Still.

“I left my bike in town last night. Xander and I walked home from the restaurant.”

“I’ll give you a ride.”

I can’t imagine anything I want to do less than climb in this man’s car and let him drive me to the station. I look around, and every eye in the place is on me. The girl manning the row of blenders, the apron-clad cashier, a cluster of people waiting in line. They’re all looking at me. Waiting to see how I will respond.

And this is where my pride gets the better of me.

Because while it’s true that I’ve got nothing to hide, after this past year, I have a whole hell of a lot to prove.

“Fine. Let’s go.”

I grab my things and push to a stand, then with the entire shop watching, I follow the detective out the door.

The police station is bright and modern and rank with fear—or maybe that’s mine, the sickly, shaky aftermath of a body depleted of adrenaline. My head throbs with it, and from what’s shaping up to be an especially wicked hangover. My stomach churns as I follow the detective through the lobby and down a hallway of tired, gray linoleum, and I tell myself to breathe.

Now that he’s done hurling questions at me, Detective Boomsma is a man of few words. This way. Through here. Please have a seat. I sink onto one of two chairs, blinking around the plain white room. A table, a door, and little else.

The detective disappears, and my mind flashes to the last time I was alone in one of these rooms, white and bare, with cameras in the corners and a steel door that locks from the outside. At least this cop said please.

Not for the first time, I wonder about the wisdom of forking over my DNA, if it will clear me like the detective insinuated or come back to haunt me later. As an American, I should know better. The right to remain silent. The right to have an attorney present. Rights that, like my green eyes and the birthmark on my right shoulder, are ingrained in my DNA, which the detective wants me to willingly let someone swab from the inside of my cheek.

The woman who steps into the room looks more like a girl, her face scrubbed clean of any makeup, her dark hair pulled into a ponytail so severe it puckers the skin of her temples. She drops a single sheet of paper on the desk along with a pen.

“Read and sign at the bottom, please.”

I scan the form, a longwinded narrative in British English that the samples are mine, that I am giving them willingly. I pick up the pen and scribble my name and the date on two matching lines.

Why? Because I’ve lived here for all of two months. Because I don’t know a single attorney, or even how to go about finding a decent one who works for peanuts, because that’s about the only thing I can afford.

I tell myself I did nothing wrong. I called the police and reported the murder, as is my civic duty. I’ve been a willing participant in answering any questions they have. When the woman picks up the swab, I open my mouth wide. When she’s done, the detective appears like magic.

“I take it we’re done here?”

I say, reaching for my bag, which I’d dropped on the floor. “I have to go. I have work.”

This isn’t exactly accurate. I have a two-thousand word fluff piece about a wellness center near Maastricht that could use some polishing and vague plans to scroll through the freelancing sites, Fiverr and Upwork and Guru and a dozen other smaller ones, praying that someone might be looking for an unknown, inexperienced travel writer willing to sling words for cheap. Other than that, and a mountain of laundry, and my afternoon run through the Vondelpark, there’s not a whole lot on today’s agenda.

Detective Boomsma steps aside to let the technician disappear out the door. “We’re done. You’re free to go.”

“And my phone?”

He leans a shoulder against the wall and folds his arms across his chest, looming above me, above the table. “Your phone was found at the crime scene, which unfortunately means that it’s evidence.”

“For how long?”

He gives me what I’ve come to refer to as a Dutch shrug, a gesture that can mean anything from I don’t know to Who cares?

“I need a phone, Detective. If for no other reason than to call myself an Uber.”

Also, I’m not entirely sure where I am. The last thing I recognized on the drive here was a stretch of condo and office buildings that towers over the A-10, which means we’re outside the ring. I’m pretty sure there’s a Metro station nearby, but my pass is in the cardholder on the back of my phone, along with my debit card. Without those, I have no way to get home.

He pushes off the wall, holding out a business card he pulls from his pocket. “Please let me know if you have plans to leave Amsterdam.”

“I live here, remember? I’d show you my residency permit, but it’s in the card holder on the back of my phone.”

And then the rest of what he said hits me, the part about not leaving Amsterdam.

“Hang on, are you telling me I’m not allowed to leave at all? For how long?”

“Until I tell you otherwise.”

I think about Xander and his finger, about my DNA on his floor and headed to a petri dish somewhere at a police laboratory. About the Dutch judiciary system and the state of Dutch prisons. I hear they’re a lot nicer than their American counterparts, but I still don’t want to go to one.

“But I’m a travel writer. My job requires me to go to the places I’m writing about. Am I . . .”

I hear it then, the catch in my voice, the way it’s shaking despite my every attempt to hold it level. I pause to get myself under control. “Am I a suspect?”

“That’s not what I said. I’m merely asking you to let me know if you need to leave the country.”

“How am I supposed to let you know anything if I don’t have a phone?”

“I’m sure you’ll find a way.”

When I don’t take his proffered card, he drops it to the table.

The reality of the situation settles over me again—not only that Xander is dead, but that it just as easily could have been me.

That his killer could have flipped on the lights and seen me lying there, my hair spread out across Xander’s pillow.

Could have just as soon strangled me, too. My fingertips flutter to the side of my neck, grazing over skin that’s soft and smooth.

I slide the card into my bag, and the surge of bravado I felt back in the juice shop has all but melted away. Detective Boomsma opens the door, a silent gesture that I’m free to go.

Outside, I stand in a slice of shade and stare at traffic, trying to figure out where I am.

This is not the charming Amsterdam I’ve come to know and love, not the hodgepodge rows of gingerbread buildings lining the glittering canals.

This is modern, industrial, ugly Amsterdam, a million miles away from that view from Xander’s sleek penthouse and the feeling of endless possibility.

I tell myself that despite everything, I can still do this.

No—not just that I can but should.

That’s what happens when you survive a terrifying brush with death, you are obliged to live the hell out of your life.

I should still push forward with my Eat, Pray, Love era.

Should still say yes to adventure.

Reboot myself as someone who doesn’t just fall into a marriage because all her friends are doing it or because her mother expects it of her; not someone clinging to her small-town, country club life because she doesn’t know any better and change is terrifying.

Who doesn’t let life happen to her, but makes her own life happen.

A bus zooms past, stirring up a pile of trash and leaves that rain like confetti over the busy street.

I turn left, then right, then left again, pointing myself toward what I think—I hope—is the city center.

2.0 can find her own way home.