Page 8 of The Expat Affair

“Oh, look,”

Fleur says as we come into their parents’ living room. “It’s darling baby brother here to save us from ourselves.”

She’s immaculate as usual, in monochromatic burgundy down to her shoes and nail polish. Even the lipstick lining the edge of her wineglass matches—and by the looks of things, it’s not her first.

I shoot Thomas a commiserating look. There was a time when we could laugh about his sister’s backhanded digs, but those days are in the past. His eyes look everywhere but at mine lately, and there’s a rigid politeness to his posture that I haven’t seen since that first day at the restaurant. I don’t know when this happened, exactly, or how, but it’s been this way for longer than I’d care to admit.

We start with his mother standing by the windows, the glass lit up with a view of the glittering Amstel canal. Uniformed servers skim the edges of the room, offering up complicated hors d’oeuvres from silver trays: tiny bite-sized quiches filled with leek and Italian ham, ornate cucumber slices topped with crème fra?che and beluga caviar. Sem turns up his nose at the food, flopping instead onto a chaise with my iPad—minus the messaging app.

Not that there have been any new messages, not on my cellphone and not on the burner, either. Even worse, when I copied the number into the burner and hit Call, I was greeted by a recording: Dit nummer is niet in gebruik.

This number has been disconnected.

I’m not foolish enough, though, to think that’s the end of things. The person behind those texts knows my cellphone number. He thinks I owe him diamonds. This is like the quiet hours after a devastating earthquake. You just know there will be aftershocks.

“Hello, Mama,”

Thomas says, giving his perfectly coiffed mother the standard Dutch greeting, three kisses to the cheeks. “You’re looking particularly lovely tonight.”

Anna bats away the compliment with a tut, even though everybody here knows she’s never looked anything short of immaculate. Tweed Chanel hanging from birdlike shoulders. Flawless makeup. Hair like she spent the entire afternoon in a salon, which she does every two weeks to ensure her highlights stay fresh, four different shades of blond that curl perfectly around her face. She pats him on the cheek and turns to me.

“, darling.”

It’s darling now, but it only took forever and I’m still not convinced she means it. Anna only tolerates me because I gave her a grandchild. “I’m so glad you and the boys could make it.”

Her Dutch is slow and perfectly enunciated, but I still need a second or two of processing time to translate her words in my head. Even in a foreign language, though, I know a dig when I hear one.

I smile and respond in my best Dutch. “Thank you for having us. Everything smells delicious.”

She gives a nod of approval at my correct grammar, and then another as her gaze wanders down my outfit, a burgundy cashmere sweater over tan suede pants she recognizes from a boutique on the Beethovenstraat. The smile sticks to her cheeks, though, when she gets to my shoes, clunky brown combat boots that squeak when I walk. Dior makes a similar pair, but these are knockoffs, and a million times more comfortable. Anna sees them for what they are, a clear sign that while I’m able to mostly look the part, I’m not quite willing to commit.

I excuse myself and make the rounds, doling out hellos to Thomas’s sister and her husband, Roland, their preteen twin girls, Yara and Esmée, ending with the most important stop, at Willem’s wingback chair under the antique mirror, a twin to ours. Kissing the ring, I once called it, but Thomas didn’t share in the humor. For a Prins, there’s nothing funny about these Sunday suppers.

By the time I make it back around to Anna, she’s sidling up to Sem. “Sem, lieverd, the girls are putting together a puzzle in the upstairs study. Wouldn’t you prefer to play with them?”

The girls are a good eight years older than Sem, who isn’t crazy about either of them. He says they treat him like a baby.

Sem doesn’t lift his gaze from his iPad. BrainCraft, by the looks of things.

Anna turns to me with a frown. “Does he do this at home, too?”

This, as in ignore when people are talking to him.

If I had the patience and the vocabulary, I’d explain for the millionth time that Sem isn’t like her other grandkids, that while his cochlear implants have helped significantly, he still can’t always distinguish Anna’s voice from all the other noises.

The cooks banging around in the kitchen.

The living room filled with six adults, their words tumbling over each other in a competition to be Loudest Prins.

Gregory Porter playing on the Sonos speakers, a music choice that Anna thinks makes her painfully hip.

In order to respond, Sem needs to know that someone is talking to him.

He needs eye contact and visual cues, facial expressions and body language, and an unobstructed view of their lips.

Anna knows this, but for some reason, she refuses to remember.

Thomas appears at my side just then. He drapes a hand over Sem’s shoulder, waiting until he looks up. “I hear the cookies are ready for decorating. Want to see if the chef needs some help?”

Sem might have not gotten all of that, but he definitely got the word cookies. His face brightens, and he tosses the iPad to the couch.

Anna gestures the server over, ordering her to leave the tray and take Sem from the room. I don’t stop either of them, even though I know there’ll be more icing in my son’s belly than on the cookies, that the sugar will keep him hyped up until well past his bedtime. I let him go because I understand what Thomas and Anna are doing: clearing the room of child-sized ears, even ones that don’t pick up on every conversation.

As soon as they’re gone, my father-in-law, Willem, clears his throat, a dramatic gesture that calls this meeting to order. “I spoke to Arthur this afternoon. He gave me an update.”

I frown, trying to place the name. Thomas sinks onto one of the plush velvet couches, and I claim the spot next to him.

Willem is back in his usual chair, a modern wingback of wine-colored velvet, one liver-spotted hand clutching his glass. He rolls his drink around a solitary ice cube, one of the cylindrical ones his staff makes from imported mineral water.

“Arthur says the building’s security cameras are useless. They were set up to be live stream only, meaning the doorman can watch things as they happen on the screen behind the reception desk, but the cameras don’t feed to a computer. There’s no hard drive where the footage is saved. Apparently, the company that installed the system never finished the job. They’ve been trying to get them to come back for months now.”

At least I think that’s what he says. My brain stumbled on a couple of the words, but I’m pretty sure I got the full picture. When it comes to Dutch, I understand a lot more than I can say.

“Typical.”

Anna rolls her eyes. “People in this country don’t want to work these days. They just want things handed to them.”

She says this despite a house filled with an army of staff, or the fact that she’s never lifted even one of her manicured fingers to hold down a job herself. It’s a common refrain from the Dutch privileged class, especially since the pandemic. Taxes are too high. People are too lazy. Stop using my money to pay them to stay home. The first time I heard it roll off her lips, I wanted to scream.

“What about the doorman, didn’t he see anything? Is he a potential witness?”

Fleur, God bless, keeping the conversation on point.

Willem shakes his head. “Not the doorman, not any of the building’s staff. None of the neighbors noticed anything out of the ordinary that night. Except for the woman who reported him dead, the police have zero witnesses.”

Fleur throws her hands up in disgust. “Why have cameras if they don’t record? Why have a doorman if he’s going to sleep on the job? At this rate, it could be anybody who took those stones. It could have been a junkie off the street.”

We’re talking about the missing diamonds again, and not the fact that a man was murdered. I tip up my wine, an ice-cold Sancerre that feels so good hitting my system it’s a little frightening.

Next to Fleur on the loveseat, her husband, Roland, mirrors her exasperated expression. He’s not the type of man I would have put with a woman like her, a bombshell heiress who’d look more at home next to a billionaire businessman, or maybe a professional footballer. Roland is the exact opposite, a spindly guy with thinning hair and cheekbones so sharp they look carved from stone. He doesn’t say much, but then again, he doesn’t have to. Roland is a baron, and his family owns half the countryside in Limburg.

Willem takes a pull from his drink, then puts the glass down carefully. “Arthur is investigating everyone connected with both the security company and the building, and he’ll let me know the second his background checks produce anything suspicious.”

“I’m sorry,”

I say, glancing back and forth between Thomas and his father. “Who is Arthur?”

“Arthur Pronk, head of police for Amsterdam. We were in the corps together.”

Of course they were. Every Prins going back generations was a member of the Studentencorps, the oldest fraternity in Holland and a veritable network of who’s who in business and politics. Willem is a member. Fleur and Roland are members. Only Thomas is not.

“What about police cameras on nearby streets?”

Fleur says, moving things along. “I assume they’ve looked at those, too?”

She looks at Thomas as she says it, even though the question is clearly meant for their father. It’s him she’s always trying to impress, his footsteps she’s always trying so hard to step in—the corps, an MBA from Erasmus in Rotterdam, a newly renovated villa in nearby Blaricum that’s been featured in international design magazines. And three years ago, as thanks for her efforts, Willem bypassed Fleur to appoint the younger Thomas CEO of House of Prins. Why? Who the hell knows. Thomas was as surprised as anyone.

Thomas leans forward on the couch, shifting to face his sister. “My understanding is that most police cameras are in the center of the city, in Oost and De Pijp, where crime is more concentrated. Not in Zuid, at least not further south than the Van Baerlestraat. There’s a map of the cameras on the city website.”

Fleur huffs a frustrated sigh. “Neighbors, then. Local shops. Plenty of people and businesses allow police to look at their camera feeds. Somebody must have seen something.”

“What about the woman?”

I say, and every head swivels to me. The sudden attention, all those probing Prins eyes, makes me stumble over my words. “There was a woman. In Xander’s apartment when he was killed. An American expat. She found him.”

Willem sets his glass onto the side table with a thunk. “Yes, the whole world has seen the picture of her in that necklace, and if Xander were here, I’d fire him for a second time, but Arthur’s men will deal with that girl. Until they come up with enough evidence to make an arrest, though, we can’t sit still.”

An electrical current zaps through me, shooting my back straighter. Fire Xander for a second time, and which we is he referring to? The Prins family? The House of Prins? Both, probably.

But more importantly: “Deal with her how?”

I say it in clear, full-throated Dutch, but Willem ignores me.

“We need to be very clear about what happened here. Where is the statement, Thomas? Where are the talking points? We should have had both these things days ago.”

My chest gives a little quake and I try again, directing my question this time at my husband. “Thomas, how will Arthur deal with her?”

He taps my knee, a silent signal we’ll talk about it later. “I’ll write up both tonight,”

he says to Willem, his marching orders clear. “As soon as we leave here, I’ll do it immediately.”

Fleur whips out her iPhone, tapping at the screen with her thumbs, holding the mic up to her mouth. “It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that we announce the untimely passing of one of our esteemed employees, Xander van der Vos. The House of Prins is deeply saddened by his tragic death. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family and friends.”

She smiles at her father, then Thomas. “If you want, I can email you a copy.”

Roland looks impressed. Thomas tosses back his wine. In the Prins family, sibling rivalry runs deep.

“Shouldn’t we also say something about the Cullinans?”

Thomas says, plunking down his empty glass. A server scurries forward to refill it.

The Cullinans, ten flawless diamonds cut from a stone that Willem’s great-great-grandfather once pilfered from a Praetorian mine. Hendrik Prins, the original diamond thief, smuggled the rock back to Amsterdam and cut it to chunks of what’s now known as the Prins cut, then used his booty to position himself as the city’s premier diamond house.

And now, nine of them are missing, vanished last summer from the Prins vault in what police are calling the heist of the century. How? Nobody knows. Even now, police are stumped.

“What about them?”

Fleur asks, at the same time Willem barks, “Absolutely not.”

“I think we have to,”

Thomas says, throwing up his hands. “The media can’t get enough of the missing Cullinans, and now there’s that necklace floating around the internet and reports of diamonds missing from Xander’s apartment. They’re going to link the stories, especially if they find out I fired him.”

At that, my head whips to Thomas. “You fired Xander? Why? When?”

“Three days ago, and for theft, essentially.”

Thomas pushes his glasses up with a knuckle, and I don’t have to count back on my fingers to know that three days ago is the same night Xander was killed. Looks like I’m not the only one in this relationship with secrets. “I found extra diamonds in the shipments from our Asian lab, way more than Xander had officially sourced and not listed on any of the waybills. I’m pretty sure he was selling them under the table.”

Thomas’s tone is calm, but for a company like Prins, where every diamond, no matter the quality or the size, goes through multiple levels of security, a situation like the one he’s describing is a five-alarm fire. Prins stones do not go unaccounted for on a waybill. A shipment doesn’t arrive with more diamonds than on the order. When Thomas discovered that discrepancy, he would have lost his mind.

But more to the point, selling siphoned diamonds under the table sounds very much like something Xander would do.

“So make sure the press doesn’t find out, then,”

Willem says, in a tone I’ve heard him use on chauffeurs and household staff and now on his son. “And while you’re at it, make sure they don’t link the stories.”

“How? People are going to hear the words missing diamonds and automatically think of the Cullinans.”

Thomas is not wrong. The Cullinans are iconic, the House’s flagship stones carted out only for the most special occasions. Even now, almost seven months later, the tiniest updates on their whereabouts still make the front page of every newspaper, and rumors are still flying on every tabloid and social media site. It was Frederik Albers, the diamond trader Thomas fired last fall. Or an Italian jeweler who was either pushed or leapt from a hotel rooftop the day before Christmas, depending on who you want to believe. Xander had been at House of Prins for only six months before they vanished from the vault. No way he’s going to escape the scrutiny.

Still. The Prins vault isn’t some muddy river in the middle of nowhere, where you can drop a gigantic rock in your pocket and wander off like Hendrik once did. There are rules and regulations around handling stones, protocols to track them whenever they’re removed from their drawer in the vault, which you can’t open without a Prins. Willem. Thomas. Fleur. They’re the only ones who know the code.

Willem takes a pull from his drink, then puts the glass down carefully. “Whatever diamonds Xander had in his apartment, whatever the killer managed to take on his way out the door, they were not stones from the Prins vault, and they most certainly were not the Cullinans. I need you to make that very clear.”

“How do I do that?”

“By spinning the story. By distracting them with another one. The insurance company is already being difficult enough. The last thing we need is another reason for them to delay the payout.”

Diamonds pulled from African dirt. Diamonds grown in a sterile lab. Diamonds cut from the Cullinan stone and vanished into thin air. A man can be killed with a zip tie in his own shower, and every conversation still revolves around diamonds.

“And for God’s sake,”

Willem says, picking up his glass, “do not let anyone find out that you fired Xander.”

Thomas leans forward on the couch, directing his next words at his father. “I’m telling you, Xander didn’t get his hands on any of the mined stones. The mined stones are all accounted for. Every single one.”

“Except for nine of the Cullinans,”

Fleur reminds him, her words a projectile, a reminder of everything they’ve lost.

He sighs, long and stoic. “Xander is gone, Fleur. Can we leave the I-told-you-sos alone now?”

I’m unsure if gone means dead or fired, though it’s probably not relevant here. What’s relevant is that Thomas fired Xander for theft hours before a killer snuck into his penthouse and strangled him with a zip tie. I wonder if the police know any of this.

“I told you hiring that man was a mistake,”

Fleur says. “I told you a lab-grown line would devalue the House of Prins.”

Roland dips his head in agreement. Fleur could have said anything—that Xander was a luminary, that he was a scoundrel and a thief, that unicorns exist and the earth is flat—and Roland would back her up on it. It’s why she’s stayed married to him all this time, because the man is like a mime, mirroring her moods and gestures and facial expressions. He’s basically her, which is why she keeps him around. With them, it’s always two against one.

A muscle works in Thomas’s jaw, but he manages to keep his cool. “The House was already in free fall, Fleur, long before I took charge. You’ve seen the balance sheets. We need the customers the lab-grown line is bringing in or we will die.”

“Fake stones are not the answer,”

Fleur says, her voice rising in a common refrain. “Lab diamonds are poisoning the mined diamond supply. By capitulating, we are essentially shooting ourselves in the foot.”

Thomas gives an emphatic shake of his head. “They’re not fake, and we’re not capitulating, we’re being smart. Income from lab-growns has grown more than four hundred percent in the past year alone across the board, in every country including the Netherlands. How is it capitulating for us to benefit from that trend?”

“Income is not the same as profit, Thomas. Surely your precious Nyenrode taught you that.”

Nyenrode, one of the best business schools in Holland, but a constant source of tension between Thomas and Fleur. Thomas was expected to follow in Willem and Fleur’s footsteps at Erasmus, but he chose Nyenrode. His last little protest before falling in line for the Prins baton.

“Children, please,”

Anna huffs, holding up a perfectly manicured hand, her nails painted the exact same shade of dusty pink as her lipstick. “Can we not do this again? Think of your father’s heart.”

At that, all eyes go to Willem, who since retirement has gained a few extra kilos around his middle, sure, but is otherwise perfectly healthy. He brushes off her words with an animated grunt.

“Whatever happens, Xander’s death must not reflect badly on the House,”

Willem says, picking a nonexistent piece of lint from the chair’s armrest. “I need you to make sure our hands stay clean. And if Xander’s death has anything to do with Prins or the lab-grown line . . .”

Willem doesn’t finish, but the message is clear.

Fix it, Thomas. Fix what you broke.

“Dinner is served,”

the chef says, appearing like magic in the doorway to save us from ourselves. Next to her, a hyped-up Sem bounces on his toes. There’s a streak of blue icing on his ear, a blob of something yellow and shiny in his hair. He clings to her with a sticky hand.

Silently, we file into the dining room and to our regular seats, Anna and Willem at the heads, Thomas and Fleur each at their father’s elbows, their spouses on the other side. I help Sem onto his chair before sinking into mine across from Roland and the girls, and it occurs to me I should probably be appalled at my in-laws’ callous response to a man’s brutal death, but I’m not.

For a Prins, diamonds always come first.