Page 33 of The Expat Affair

It’s only thirteen minutes before the cops arrive, but we pack as much as we can into those thirteen minutes. Fleur sits us down at the table behind the glass—me on the stool at the far end, Willow next to me with a sniffling Sem clinging to her chest—and walks us through what happens next.

“Here we go,”

she says as heavy boots clatter up the stairs. “Just tell them what we talked about and everything will be fine.”

Easy for her to say. Fleur is a Prins, and it’s not like Willow and I were given much of a choice. We were fed our scripts and swallowed them whole, too traumatized to come up with a believable alternative or even think through the scenarios that would end in the detective not slapping on handcuffs. Willow gives me an encouraging nod, and I nod back even though . . . holy shit. I am so not prepared for this.

Detective Boomsma is the first to appear, trailed by a half dozen cops and more behind them still on the stairs. He takes his time as he moves across the space, pausing to study the dust tracks on the floor, the big arched window minus its pane, the carnage four stories below. I made the mistake of looking out that same window, so I know the horror of what’s down there. Lars, his eyes open and mouth agape, lying on a messy pool of blood and brains, glass shards glittering like diamonds all around.

At least Sem didn’t see that part. Willow kept him far, far away from that window, and she made sure he didn’t see anything that happened right after it, either. She slipped his processors into her pocket the second that shot rang out, and she kept his face buried in her coat. From the moment Lars went sailing through the window, Sem didn’t hear or see a thing, which means he can’t be a witness.

Neither can Ingrid. She vanished right around the time that Lars did, when gravity tugged him to the ground. I think of his face just before it disappeared from view, and a shudder runs down my spine.

Detective Boomsma peels away from the other officers and makes his way slowly to the kitchen, pausing in the doorway to fiddle with his phone. I register his familiar frame as he moves to the table, the long limbs and hardened eyes as he tosses his phone to the table. On the screen, Voice Memos is recording everything.

“Tell me what happened. In English, please.”

That last bit is for me, I know, not so much so that I can understand, but more so I can dispute any stories that stray from the truth—which I most definitely won’t be doing. This is Fleur’s show, and I’m happy to let her take the lead.

In a calm, controlled voice, she spouts off the tale we agreed to for the detective, a short and dirty summary of the events that led to a man falling four stories to his death. I watch the detective’s face the whole time, and I can’t tell if he thinks it’s the most cockamamie story he’s ever heard, or the most brilliant.

When she’s done, Detective Boomsma sits silently for a few seconds, staring out the window Lars busted through only moments before, blinking at the blue sky and clouds as if trying to put them together, all these puzzle pieces that are not quite seamless.

Finally, he turns back to the table.

“So let me get this straight. Lars found and forced her here at gunpoint. On the way, he ordered her to summon Willow, who just happened to be having lunch with Sem and Fleur and a bag of fifty lab-grown diamonds in her pocket.”

The three of us give him a simultaneous nod.

“And what’s Lars’s connection to again?”

“Lars killed Xander,”

Fleur says. “He knew about the diamonds and went there to steal them. But he didn’t realize was asleep in the bedroom until he saw it on the news. He tracked her down because he thought she could help him get more.”

This isn’t exactly true. Lars denied killing anyone, but he’d already proven to be a thief and a liar; why not a murderer, too? He didn’t seem all that torn up about Xander’s death, only that someone else got to his precious diamonds first—unless he was lying about that, too. It seemed like a good bet to blame Lars for everything, and as Fleur pointed out in those thirteen minutes, he isn’t exactly able to dispute that.

“The diamonds from Xander’s safe.”

“I assume so, yes. Lars didn’t define which diamonds or how many.”

Fleur shifts in her chair, crossing and uncrossing her legs. “All I know is that when Willow and I got here, he held us at gunpoint because he wanted more.”

“I see,”

the detective says, eyeing me. “How did he know you could summon Willow?”

This is one point Fleur didn’t think to cover, and I suffer through a flash of red-hot panic before I manage to stitch together an answer. “I’m not entirely sure, but I’m guessing because he was the one tracking me.”

It’s a bit of a gamble, insinuating that the trackers were planted by Lars and not Ingrid, but I’m counting on Ingrid being smart enough to have masked her identity when she plunked down the money to buy them. She even said it at one point, that trackers are notoriously hard to trace. Either way, Ingrid won’t be calling up the detective anytime soon to dispute my story, and it certainly makes sense that the trackers could have belonged to Lars. The detective motions for me to keep going.

“Lars said he’d been watching me for a while. It’s possible he saw me with Willow on the day of Xander’s funeral. We had drinks near the station. We took the same train back to Amsterdam. If he was tailing me that day, he would have seen us together.”

“Tell me again how the victim fell through the window.”

“Lars charged me,”

Fleur says, sounding annoyed to have to repeat herself. “He wanted the diamonds, and there was a scuffle. Surely you can’t expect me not to fight back.”

I don’t have time to explain the nuances of the Dutch legal system, Fleur said to me in these thirteen minutes, but in my country you can’t take a hockey stick to a criminal’s head and expect to get away with it. Self-defense is allowed, but it must be in proportion to the attack, and you must use a lesser form of violence whenever possible. Shoving a man out a fourth-store window is not a lesser form of violence.

But Lars had a gun, I argued.

Yes, but so did you.

After that I shut up. This is Fleur’s kingdom; the rest of us are simply living in it.

The detective purses his lips. “A scuffle.”

Fleur nods.

“Between you and a man twice your size.”

She nods again. “I pushed him off me. He lost his footing. The next thing I knew he . . .”

She cringes, flapping a hand in the general direction of the window.

Stick as close as possible to the truth, Fleur said over and over in those thirteen minutes. People will swallow a lie when it’s concealed in truth.

The detective looks to Willow and me, and we back Fleur up with another nod.

“But you’re the one who called ,”

he says to Willow. “You had her number.”

“Yes. We exchanged numbers that day on the train. Fleur was a few minutes late for our lunch, so I called to catch up.”

Willow is the one who pointed out a potential flaw in this part of the story. If the detective looks into the call logs, he’ll see that it wasn’t a call but a voicemail. One I’ve already deleted from my phone, though I’m assuming it’s still floating around somewhere for the detective to pluck from a virtual cloud. Fleur swears she can make the voicemail disappear, but we didn’t have time to discuss the details.

“And the guns?”

Plural. One still clutched in Lars’s fist down on the docks, the other lying on the floor where I flung it after shooting out that arched window. It wasn’t all that difficult to dream up that part of the story—that when Fleur tossed the diamonds into the air, when Lars dove for them, the second gun dropped out of his pocket. Lars was so distracted by the sparkle, he didn’t even notice, but I did. I picked up the gun and boom.

“I didn’t know the gun was going to shoot. I thought you had to pull back on the little hook thing first.”

I wriggle my thumb like it’s working a hammer, which the striker-fired handgun Willow handed me doesn’t have. I racked the slide and fired in one smooth motion, and I hit my target dead on. The detective was right about Americans and their guns. I’ve been shooting paper plates in the backyard since I was seven. “I guess it’s a good thing the bullet hit the glass, and not a person.”

Detective Boomsma’s expression stays carefully blank. “I guess it is.”

Honestly, Fleur and I couldn’t have coordinated any better if we’d spent days hammering out a plan. The second Lars went after those stones, our eyes met across the dust-filled space. She saw Willow’s gun in my hand. I saw the sun break through the clouds through the arched window, lighting up Lars’s back as he plucked diamonds out of the dirt. I aimed and Fleur charged. The bullet shattered the glass at the same time Lars’s body sailed through it, all that fabulous hair flying, floating against a bright blue sky. A beautiful, choreographed dance, and Fleur and I didn’t have to say a word.

“A couple of plot holes, though,”

the detective says, and I have to work hard to keep my face straight. Plot holes. We had thirteen minutes to stitch together this story; of course there are plot holes. I stare at the detective and tell myself to breathe.

He pokes up a thumb. “First of all, Lars didn’t murder Xander. A Polish man did, a known contract killer with a penchant for strangling his victims with zip ties. He was seen in Amsterdam the day before Xander’s murder, and the next morning on a bridge crossing the Amstel, upstream from where the body was found. By the time we made the connection to the murders, the assassin was long gone.”

Fleur frowns. “Contract for who? Who was this assassin working for?”

The detective turns his death stare on her. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

“Me? I’m not the detective in this scenario. You are.”

“Maybe it’ll help if I tell you that Polish police have reported a huge influx of diamonds hitting the black market there. Uncertified. Untraceable. We’re operating under the assumption that it’s how the assassin was paid, with diamonds.”

That shuts Fleur up. She shakes her head, and I see it then—the tiniest flash of a realization before she blinks it away. A contract killer, paid in diamonds. Hired by someone she knows, someone close.

Meanwhile I’m thinking: What are the odds? A contract killer creeping through the penthouse mere minutes before Lars did, murdering Xander with a zip tie while I slept in the next room, using his sawed-off finger to empty the safe down the hall. Two thieves, two close brushes with death while I was unconscious. I know the bedroom was dark. I know I didn’t make a peep. But wouldn’t a diamond thief look in every cabinet and drawer and nightstand? Wouldn’t a trained killer think to sweep all the rooms for potential witnesses?

Or maybe this, too, is one of the detective’s plot holes. Maybe I’ll never know why the killer missed me, but for now, I only know it’s too much. Information overload. I can’t keep straight what I’m supposed to know and not know. Stick to the story, Fleur insisted over and over, and I’m telling you, no one but us will know. I clamp my mouth shut, too terrified to say another word.

Because I’m not going to be the one to let slip what really happened here. I’m not going to accidentally admit that we’re on the hook for larceny, possession of an illegal weapon, conspiracy to murder, murder, and probably a bunch of other charges we haven’t even thought of yet. This story we’re spinning is both a cover and a pact: if one of us goes down, we all do. Lying to a police officer is the least of our worries.

Fleur sighs, and she arranges her expression into something softer. “Detective, I know you’re doing your job here, but can we continue this conversation tomorrow? As you can see, my nephew is traumatized, and honestly, so am I. I would very much like to get home to my family.”

The detective stares at the back of Sem’s head, and I can practically hear him turning our story over in his mind, looking for cracks where the pieces don’t quite line up—and there have got to be plenty. There’s no way we’ve thought of all the things that could trip us up in those thirteen panicked minutes. Yet again, Fleur is right; we need to get out of here, to regroup and go over things with a calmer, less hurried mind. We need more time to sort through the facts, pick at the evidence, weave the loose ends into our reality.

I see it on his face, his decision to let us go for now settling in. “I’ll want to talk to you again. All three of you. Separately.”

The last word is both a weapon and a warning. This isn’t over, only a reprieve. The detective wants to talk to us separately.

“Of course. I’ll have my attorney reach out first thing tomorrow.”

Fleur rises from her chair, and the rest of us follow suit.

We file down the stairs and out of the building, and it’s all I can do not to sprint to Fleur’s car, parked a block away, a dark Range Rover with leather seats as soft as butter. She starts the engine and cranks up the heat, flicking the buttons for the seat warmers, pressing the gas pedal until the air in the vents turns warm. And all the time, none of us says a word.

“Papa will call Arthur,”

Fleur says finally, her voice loud in the quiet space. She nods at me in the front seat next to her, at Willow and Sem huddled behind. “He’ll push him to close the investigation for the House’s sake. Arthur will do it for Papa.”

“The police chief,”

Willow offers up before I can ask. She reaches around Sem for the seat belt and gives it a generous tug. “The two of them are friends.”

Willow’s father-in-law is friends with the police chief. Of course he is.

Still.

“But what if—”

“Papa will handle it.”

“Okay, but the detective won’t—”

“Papa will handle it.”

She says it with so much vehemence, so much conviction, that I don’t waste any more breath arguing back. I don’t know Fleur very well, but I know her type. She’s the female version of Barry, all arrogance and blustery entitlement, and why wouldn’t she be? Fleur is a Prins. Her father is friends with the chief of police. If he says Arthur will close the investigation before the detective can crack open our lies, then he’ll close the investigation. Period, end of story.

Fleur shoves the car into Drive and pulls into traffic, and I sink into the warm leather of her passenger’s seat, watching the scenery fly by. Maybe it’s because she’s telling me what I want to hear, or maybe I was with Barry long enough to believe in the Prins power of persuasion, but for the first time in what feels like months, I take a breath big enough to reach the bottom of my lungs.

It’s good to be a Prins, even if only by association.