Dying Gasp (3 page)

Chapter Five

AMSTERDAM

A
SPIRANT
J
AN
B
ENTINCK WAS twenty-two and in his third and final year at the police academy. The current stage of his training involved a series of one-on-one sessions with an experienced officer. When Bentinck’s instructor told him he’d drawn Piet Kuipers, he also told him it was a stroke of luck. Kuipers was thought to be the best investigator in the whole
Korps Landelijke Politiediensten
and known as a man who enjoyed sharing his knowledge.

Kuipers worked out of a cramped space in the headquarters building on the Elandsgracht. His tiny cubicle had only one redeeming feature: a window with a view over the canal and the busy Nassaukade.

Kuipers offered Bentinck coffee, then began a lengthy lecture into which the investigator wove examples from past successes. But when he saw the young man’s eyes glazing over, he took pity upon him.

“What I’m about to tell you is confidential. You’re to keep your mouth shut on this one.”

“Ja, mijneer,” Bentinck sat up straighter in his chair. Kuipers had his full attention.

“The bomb that blew up that tram took a postal truck along with it.”

“I saw the pictures in
De Telegraaf
, mijneer. Mail was all over the street.”

“It was, and much of it was recovered. Among the stuff gathered up were a number of envelopes, each containing a single DVD. They were being shipped to addresses all over the world. You know what a snuff video is?”

“Snuff videos? I think I might have heard something, but . . .”

“It’s a video where a person’s life is snuffed out,” Kuipers informed him.

“I thought that was an urban legend.”

“It’s not. The Russians have been doing it for some time and so have the Thais. The DVDs we apprehended begin with a man and woman engaging in sex. They end with her murder.”

Kuipers described the murder in some detail.

Bentinck blinked. His pale skin turned even paler.

“We discovered the crime quite by chance,” Kuipers continued. “A few of the envelopes were badly damaged, their addresses illegible. A postal inspector took one of them home in the hope that, if he played it, it might give him enough information to return it to the sender. The poor fellow made the mistake of watching it while he was eating dinner.”

“Were you able to trace the material?”

“There were no return addresses, and there was nothing else inside the envelopes, just the DVDs.”

Kuipers opened his desk drawer and took out a plastic evidence envelope. “This,” he said, “is one of them.”

Bentinck took the DVD and studied it. The grooves reflected a rainbow of light. He turned it over to look at the other side.

“No label,” he said.

“And here’s what it was being shipped in,” Kuipers said, handing him another plastic sheath.

Bentinck examined both sides of the manila envelope through the plastic. The side with the address was scorched.

Kuipers leaned back in his chair and made a steeple with his fingers.

It was time to drive the lesson home.

“Name the five most important elements in the resolution of any crime,” he said.

Kuipers turned red and proffered, “Persistence, good forensics, deduction . . .”

Kuipers smiled and said, “Good. But here are the two most important: dumb criminals and dumb luck. The operative word is ‘dumb’. Dumb criminals talk about what they did. Dumb criminals don’t cover their tracks; they leave things behind, they leave witnesses.”

“And dumb luck?”

“Dumb luck is what we need when the criminals aren’t dumb. Take a look at these.”

Kuipers bent over and took four mailing envelopes, each in its own protective cover, out of a cardboard box. He lined them up in front of Bentinck as if he was laying out a game of solitaire.

Bentinck studied the envelopes. Each of them was scorched in the area of the address, but otherwise . . .

And then he got it. “They were all franked at the same post office.”

Kuipers beamed. “Bravo. They were. It’s on the Kloveniers-burgwal, just off the Nieuwmarkt. It’s one of the smallest post offices in the city. All the envelopes were part of the same mailing.”

“So you . . . we went to the post office?”

“We did. Dumb luck: a clerk remembered.”

“He was actually able to remember a single customer based on the mailing envelopes alone?”

“Dumb luck,” Kuipers repeated, “The individual in question was a
flikker
. The postal clerk shares his sexual preference. The suspect has been making shipments at the same post office for the last couple of years. The clerk remembered his name, a first name only: Frans.”

Kuipers tapped an identikit composite that had been on his desk all the time. He twirled it around so that Bentinck could get a better look.

“That’s him,” he said.

Bentinck studied the likeness. Frans looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties. He had curly blond hair combed straight back, an earring, a weak chin, and a petulant mouth.

“We figured he had to be living in the neighborhood of the post office,” Kuipers said. “It helped that he had a penchant for wearing bright pink. People remembered him. His last name is Oosterbaan. We tracked him to a canal house on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal.”

“And arrested him?”

“Not yet. We’re going to roust him out of bed in the dead of night. It’s more of a psychological shock that way, makes people more likely to tell us things. Want to come along?”

T
HE FIRST report shocked Arie Schubski awake, causing him to sit bolt upright. Then there was another
bang
followed by a clatter. Arie threw the covers aside and leaped out of bed.

By the time he’d opened the bedroom door, dark figures were already sprinting up the staircase: men in police uniforms, carrying guns. He slammed the door and tried to lock it, but he wasn’t quick enough. They forced it open.

The guns had spotlight-type devices mounted above the barrels. Two of the beams focused on him. The cop behind one said, “Hands up. Don’t move unless you want to get shot.”

Arie lifted his hands.

Frans stared straight in front of him like a deer in headlights. He held the covers up to his chin as if for protection.

“We’re talking to you too, mijneer. Hands up.” The polite form of address didn’t match the speaker’s tone of voice.

Hesitantly, Frans raised his hands, dropping the covers, exposing his hairless chest.

They pulled him out of bed, put him next to Arie, and slapped handcuffs on them both.

“How many other people in the house?” one of the cops asked.

Frans spoke in a high-pitched and terrified voice. “No one. No one else,” spilling his guts before the cops had even started serious interrogation.

Arie knew right then that Frans was going to cause serious problems.

T
HEY SPLIT them up, keeping Frans in the bedroom, leading Arie into his office where windows overlooked the street. The street was in the heart of the Zeedijk, Amsterdam’s red-light district. The house had been standing there for well over three hundred years. The law wouldn’t allow Arie to make any modifications to the facade, but he’d gutted the interior and rebuilt it to suit his tastes and needs.

He was going to miss it.

On the floor above him, the top floor, was the heart of his business: one large room with tape players, format converters, DVD burners, and computers that controlled them all. He could make copies from DVDs, but he could also make them from Betacam tapes, both SP and digital, and in Secam, PAL, and NTSC. And that’s all he did: copy and mail. Once they found that out, the cops were going to grill him for the names of the producers, but the cops were going to be disappointed. And that meant they were going to get angry, which meant that the judge would probably throw the book at him. He might get as much as ten years, but he was prepared for that, prepared as anyone could be without it actually having happened.

You couldn’t run a business like Arie’s without confronting the reality that, someday, you were going to be raided by the police. Well, now it was over. Now, he could relax. No more fear. The money was safely squirreled away. A few years in jail wouldn’t kill him. He might even get away with less than ten, if Frans would only keep his mouth shut.

M
ARTIN
S
MIT lived in a spacious apartment about three kilometers away from Arie Schubski’s canal house. The duplex was just off the Leidseplein and had cost him just short of three million Euros, all paid in cash.

Smit had been born in Suriname, but he harbored no memory of the place, nor any desire to go back.

During the last few weeks leading up to the 25th of November, 1975, the day the country would receive its independence, the government of The Netherlands, in a gesture typical of a land famed for political correctness, offered Dutch citizenship to those inhabitants of the colony able to reach the Fatherland prior to Independence Day. Half of the population of Suriname took them up on their offer, and much of the other half might have done so if they’d had money to pay for a flight.

Before 1974, a black face like Smit’s had been a rarity on the streets of Amsterdam; by November of the following year, there were neighborhoods, like the Bijlmermeer, where you saw nothing else.

Smit arrived speaking only
Sranang Tongo
, but he quickly mastered Dutch and breezed through the country’s school system (ten years of it, anyway) before he got bored and quit. By then, his speech was indistinguishable from that of any other Amsterdammer.

At fourteen, he’d already begun dealing drugs. By the time he was thirty, Smit, now known to most as The Surinamer, had become the head of a criminal enterprise called the Rakkers, an organization almost as international as Royal Dutch Shell or Philips.

The Rakkers’ main business was the production and distribution of methylenedioxymethamphetamine, better known as Ecstasy, but they also served as middlemen for criminal enterprises across the globe. If you wanted something, they were the people who knew where to find it. A murder for hire? They could locate the man (or woman) who’d commit it for you. Drugs of any nature? They knew where to go. They profited by putting criminals into contact with criminals and by promoting transactions. That was how the Surinamer had come to be acquainted with Arie Schubski.

Arie, who had begun his business dealing exclusively with pornography, had been receiving an ever-increasing number of requests for snuff videos. No one would be crazy enough to try to make them in The Netherlands. The country was too small, the cops were too good, and the disappearance of protagonists would quickly be noticed. But if Arie could find foreign producers, the potential for profit was great.

He called the Surinamer and invited him for coffee.

Smit used the Rakkers to put the word out. As a worldwide supplier of Ecstasy, the gang had relationships far and wide, contacts in Thailand, in Russia, in Brazil, all of them places where people might be able to get away with killing people for other people’s amusement. And, when Schubski met their price, some of them started doing just that.

The producer in Moscow was a nightclub owner who ran girls on the side. The one in Bangkok was an opium exporter, who drew his protagonists from across the border in Cambodia. The woman in Manaus was someone Smit had sold a number of false passports to, who’d indicated she was open to any profitable proposition.

But now the shoe was on the other foot.

Arie Schubski’s arrest had made the front page of
De
Telegraaf.
The Surinamer hadn’t found it necessary to read the whole article, just enough of it to discover what the cops had found.

Arie and his little friend Frans would obviously be going away for a long time. They wouldn’t need The Surinamer’s help any more.

But the suppliers would. If they were going to stay in business, they were going to need a new distributor. And Martin Smit, The Surinamer, intended to furnish one.

Chapter Six

T
HE SMELL OF FRESH coffee, beer, and
poffertjes
—sugared pancakes—hung over the terrace of the American Hotel on the Leidseplein. The place was packed, but the Surinamer had been lucky. He’d captured a table that put his back to the wall of the building, as far as was physically possible from the passing streetcars. A hundred meters to his right, tourists were lining up for the canal tours. Others were flocking over the bridge toward the Rijksmuseum on the Stadhouderskade. Amsterdammers, enjoying an unprecedented seventh straight day of sunshine, were on the terrace in force. Most of the voices around him were Dutch and, like him, many were talking on their cell phones.

“They busted Schubski and Oosterbaan,” The Surinamer said, cupping a cautious hand over his mouth.

“I don’t want to know anything about their personal lives,” the banker in Riga snapped. “The only thing that concerns me is their accounts. Anything else?”

“No. That’s it for today.”

The banker grunted and hung up without saying good-bye.

The employees of the Latvian Overseas Bank didn’t go out of their way to be cordial. They didn’t have to be.

The Surinamer lifted a finger to summon a waiter.

Mijneer?”
“

The Surinamer ordered a beer on tap.

The waiter returned three minutes later with a brimming glass of Amstel. The Surinamer didn’t usually drink beer when he was making his calls; it was too diuretic. But the day was warm and talking had made him thirsty.

The call from the woman in Brazil came in right on time, at 11:25. She started talking as soon as she recognized his voice.

“Where’s my money?”

“We’ve got a problem, Carla. The cops busted Arie Schubski.”

Carla—or whatever her name really was—remained silent for a moment. The line didn’t. The Surinamer could hear static and crackling.

“You still there?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Is he likely to talk?”

“Not Arie.”

“How about that little princess he lives with?”

“Frans Oosterbaan.” The Surinamer snorted contemptuously. “Yeah, him.”

“One time,” The Surinamer said, “I dropped by to pick up some of our money. Arie wasn’t home, so I had a little chat with Frans, told him if he ever shot off his mouth about me, I’d get him, cut off his balls, and let him bleed to death. Before our conversation, I was worried he might break if the cops bent him far enough. That’s why I figured we had to talk.”

“And now?”

“Now, I’m no longer worried.”

“Good. How about finding me another distributor?”

The Surinamer had been waiting for the question. He took another sip of beer, letting her think he was considering it.

“Now that the heat is on,” he said, “the new guy’s gonna want a bigger percentage.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“What do you mean by that?” The Surinamer said sharply, even though he knew exactly what she meant by that.

“Now that the heat is on,” she said, “the price of my work just went up by fifty percent. Go ahead and find me somebody. We’ll work it out.”

“I’m on it,” The Surinamer said.

T
HE
D
UTCH cops were on it too.

That morning, all of Smit’s calls were being recorded. He’d been tripped up by an instance of what Hoofd Inspecteur Kuipers liked to call dumb luck.

A
LITTLE over four weeks earlier, a water pipe had broken in the apartment where The Surinamer kept his answering device. After repeated and unsuccessful attempts to contact someone living in the apartment, the manager of the building asked the police to force the door.

After a short discussion between a judge and the landlord’s lawyer, the proper paperwork was issued. The cops called a locksmith. Why break down a door when you don’t have to? The locksmith made short work of getting them into the place. The maintenance people repaired the broken pipe and departed.

The police stayed. They were intrigued by the sole contents of an otherwise empty apartment: an answering machine sitting in the middle of the living room floor.

Research revealed that the individual who’d rented the flat had been doing so for nineteen months and had been dead for a year and a half. The rent, however, was still being paid directly into the landlord’s
postgiro
out of a numbered account in Riga.

It was time to bring in Hoofd Inspecteur Kuipers.

Kuipers listened to the greeting on the machine, a teenage voice reciting a series of numbers in English. The numbers began with the digits zero and six and totaled ten in number, leading Kuipers to conclude (1) that the digits were the number of a cellular telephone, (2) that the answering device was an anonymous way of divulging it, and (3) that anyone who took such precautions was up to no good.

Kuipers tried calling the number, but a recorded voice informed him that the phone was either switched off or out of service. There was no voice mail.

Rather than meddle with the equipment, he gave instructions to keep the place under discreet surveillance, to make a duplicate key for the lock and to erase all evidence of a visit. Two days later a kid showed up and recorded a new number. They followed him back to his home and put a man to watch him, but they didn’t pick him up. They made a note of the new number, but they didn’t dial it. They simply put a tap on it.

Within a week, Kuipers had discovered (1) that his suppositions were correct, (2) that the man using the phones was Martin Smit, aka The Surinamer, and (3) that he was switching the phones on only minutes before using them.

“
M
ARTIN
S
MIT, eh?”
K
uipers said after he’d studied the transcript of the first series of calls. He was talking to Inspector Guus Hein, his principal assistant. “Well, well. Not just drugs any more. That lowlife scum has diversified. And now we know why we never get any useful information from the taps we have on his other numbers. The scumbag set up a whole alternative system of communication. His associates call the answering device and get a new contact number every week.”

“You want to put surveillance on Smit?” Hein asked.

“Certainly not. It might spook him.”

During the following weeks, they recorded Smit receiving calls to four successive numbers. He took care to make few outgoing calls and kept the incoming ones to a minute or less. On the fourth of May, they registered an incoming from a woman he addressed as Carla. She began by dunning him about money and went on to pester him about a distributor, an affair in which he told her he’d made little progress. He asked her to drop her price. She said she wouldn’t, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t working. She was stockpiling material, and if he didn’t get his ass in gear she’d take measures to find someone else.

The police managed to get a trace, but it led to a prepaid cell phone in Brazil, which wasn’t a lot of help.

As soon Kuipers had finished reading the transcript, he picked up the phone and asked for a few minutes with his boss, Albertus Montsma.

T
WO HOURS later, Kuipers and Montsma were sitting across a desk from each other.

“I think you can safely assure the
burgemeester
,” Kuipers said, “that the videos aren’t being produced here, only the copies.”

“Thank God for that,” Montsma said.

Amsterdam depended heavily on tourism. Sex and drugs were among the attractions, but the city fathers underplayed them. They preferred to present the city as a family destination and would not look kindly upon a revelation that snuff videos were being produced in their midst. Distribution of the damned things was bad enough.

“Some of the worst,” Kuipers said, “are coming from Brazil.”

He told his boss about the telephone call, adding that the woman had spoken in English and that her English was fluent.

“That young fellow, Costa,” Montsma said, “Is he still here?”

“The Brazilian? Yes, he’s still here. I just saw him downstairs, talking to Hugo de Groot. You want him involved?”

“I know his uncle,” Montsma said.

“His uncle?”

“Mario Silva, Chief Inspector of the Brazilian Federal Police. He’s a good cop.”

Kuipers grunted. Coming from Bert Montsma,
a good cop
was high praise.

“You think Costa might be of some help?” he said.

“I don’t know,” Montsma said, “but I’m sure his uncle will be. Let’s get the young man up here, shall we?”

H
ECTOR
C
OSTA was a slim fellow of slightly below average height. His mother was Mario Silva’s sister and only sibling; Hector, her only child.

His father, Claudio, an architect, had been thirty-four years old when he was shot to death. Hector, now thirty-two, looked nothing like him. Claudio’s eyes had been blue. Hector’s were black. Claudio had been fair-skinned. Hector, like the rest of the Silva family, was dark, so dark that his mother’s ancestors had been suspected of Moorish blood. And Moorish blood had not been a good thing to have in sixteenth-century Portugal.

In those days, the country was under the Spanish yoke and subject to the Spanish Inquisition. Moorish blood was regarded as a sign of less than complete devotion to the true faith, and less than complete devotion to the true faith could be fatal. To escape distrustful inquisitors, the Silvas had left their native country and moved to Brazil, a melting pot where the prejudice against darker skin was less strong and the Inquisition less pervasive.

They chose São Paulo as their new home. It wasn’t a city then, not even a village, just a frontier outpost founded by the Jesuits for the express purpose of converting the Indians. The place grew little over the next one hundred and fifty years, remaining a sleepy hamlet well into the eighteenth century. That changed when the Europeans developed a passion for coffee. The soil and climate around São Paulo were found to be ideally suited to the new crop. The great coffee barons became cash-rich. They had money to invest, and many of them invested it in manufacturing. By the mid-twentieth century, the city had become the premier industrial center, the largest city in the country.

And the most dangerous.

Hector’s maternal grandfather had been shot to death by bandits in 1978, just two years after Hector was born. His grandmother, raped by the same individuals and forced to watch her husband’s murder, lost all interest in life and didn’t survive the year.

The incident motivated Mario, Hector’s uncle, to give up a promising career as a lawyer and join the federal police.

Nine years later, his nephew had been moved in the same direction.

On a sunny Saturday morning, Hector’s parents were driving to a shopping center. His father, Claudio Costa, was behind the wheel. Hector was in the back seat. He’d been playing with a toy, a Rubik’s cube, when he heard a voice.

“Hand over your watch.”

A man was standing just outside, pointing the barrel of a gun at his father’s head. They were stopped at a traffic light, locked in by other automobiles. The day was hot. The car had no air-conditioning. The windows were open.

The watch, his mother told him later, was a family heirloom. His father was reluctant to give it up. Twenty years on, as an experienced cop, Hector would have recognized the man with the gun as a drug addict, trying to gather enough money for his next fix. At the time, he just thought the man was scary. His mother folded the newspaper she’d been reading over her lap, thereby concealing her wedding ring. The ring was the only jewelry she ever wore on the street.

“Claudio,” she said, keeping her voice low and steady, “give him the watch.”

Almost everyone in the extended family had been robbed at one time or another. If it wasn’t some kid threatening you with a sliver of glass, or a gang with clubs and rocks, it was someone like this: a frightened little man with bloodshot eyes, a two-day growth of beard, and a revolver that was trembling in his hand.

Claudio took his hands off the steering wheel, as if he was going to unfasten the clasp on his watch, but then he swiveled to his left and made a grab for the revolver. The man stepped backward. There was a loud explosion, louder than any firecracker Hector had ever heard. His father flew backward, as if someone had given him a push.

Hector stared at the shooter, and for a moment they locked eyes. Then the man was putting the weapon into a canvas bag and backing away.

He looked down at his father. Blood covered the front of his shirt. Sucking noises were coming out of a hole in his chest. Hector’s mother was saying “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,” over and over. Hector leaned over the seat, buried his nose in his mother’s neck, and tried to comfort her.

The sucking noises stopped.

K
UIPERS ASKED
H
ector how he liked Amsterdam. Hector said he liked Amsterdam very much. Montsma asked him if the conference on the suppression of the drug trade had been useful. Hector said it had. Then, unlike Brazil where the pleasantries would have gone on for at least another five minutes, they got down to business.

“You heard about that bomb, the one set off by a group calling itself Justice for Islam?” Kuipers asked.

Hector nodded. “Terrible thing,” he said, wondering why they wanted to talk to him.

“The bomb,” Kuipers said, “also took out a mail truck. The explosion blew mail all over the street.” He paused.

Hector waited for him to get to the point.

“Among the scattered envelopes,” Kuipers continued, “were a number of DVDs. The newspapers are calling them ‘videos that are pornographic in nature’, but that’s not the half of it. They were snuff videos. The action was all covered in one shot, no cuts, and at the end there was something . . . convincing. Proof that the action wasn’t faked.”

Hector frowned. “Proof? What kind of proof?”

“After the murderer strangled her,” Kuipers said, “he cut off her head with an ax.”