The Wrong Girl (2 page)

Between sessions on the computer and web chats with his many contacts across the world, Kuyper would sometimes walk down into the little square and take a coffee there, stare at the grim features of the man who gave away the New World’s most important foothold and wonder what he’d make of the twenty-first century. Stuyvesant’s early fortifications in America were now Wall Street; his canal became Broad Street and Broadway. The man they called ‘Old Silver Leg’ for his prosthetic limb lay buried in the vault of a church in Manhattan’s Bowery – once his
bouwerij
, a farm – on the site of the former family chapel. Kuyper had wandered there during the Occupy Wall Street protests and camped nearby for a while. He’d stared at the plain stone plaque in the west wall that marked the old man’s resting place, thinking about the distance from there to here.

Yet for most of the citizens of the twenty-first century Peter Stuyvesant was nothing more than a brand of cigarette. Such was history.

‘Henk!’ His wife’s voice rose from the floor below, shrill and anxious. She always struggled with occasions. ‘We’re ready. Are you coming or not?’

‘Not,’ he whispered to the busy screen.

Sunday and the contacts never ended. There were seven emails in his inbox. Two from The Hague. Two from America. Three from the Middle East.

He heard her stomping up the stairs. Kuyper’s office was in the building’s gable roof beneath the crow steps. Tiny with a view out onto the cobbled street and the children’s playground that occupied the open space behind the West-Indisch Huis. The pulley winch above the windows was principally decorative now, but it had probably sat there for three centuries at least. He liked this room. It was private, cut off from the rest of the house. A place he could think.

‘Are . . . you . . . coming . . . ?’

She stood in the doorway wearing a too-short winter coat, hand on the lintel, Saskia by her side. Renata Kuyper was Belgian, from Bruges. They met when he was on a mission to Kosovo one scorching summer. She was a student on a research project, pretty with short brunette hair and an animated, nervy manner. It was a brief and passionate courtship conducted in hot hotel rooms that smelled of cedar wood and her scent. Outside the Balkan world was slowly rebuilding itself from the nightmare of civil war.

Henk Kuyper barely noticed. They were in love, desperately so. Then, in the middle of that frantic summer, her widowed father died suddenly. The news came in a phone call while they were in bed. After that she clung to Henk. Within the space of three months they were married. Another three months back in Amsterdam, Renata pregnant, trying to come to terms with the idea of being a wife and mother in a bustling, unfamiliar city where she had no friends.

‘Are you coming, Daddy?’ Saskia repeated.

Eight years old, nine in January. Pretty much the picture of her mother. Narrow pale face. High cheekbones. Blonde hair that would one day turn brunette like Renata’s. Eyes as blue and sharp as sapphires. Didn’t smile so much which was like her mother too. But that was the family now.

‘Thing is, darling . . .’ He got up from the desk and crouched in front of her, touched her carefully brushed hair. It was important to look your best when you met Sinterklaas and his little black imps. ‘Daddy’s got work to do.’

On paper Kuyper was a consultant in environmental affairs. His speciality was ground pollution issues, a subject he’d studied at university. Sometimes in person, he travelled to assignments mostly in Third World countries, a few of them perilous. But that was just a job. Words to put on a business card. He spent at least half his time anonymous on the Net, offering advice in activist forums on everything from fracking to biofuels and genetically modified crops. Attacking those in industry and on the right. Starting bush fires in some places. Putting them out in others. Always under the same anonymous online identity, one he’d picked deliberately: Stuyvesant. He even used a portrait of the old man as his avatar.

Saskia came up to him at the desk, a big pout on her face.

‘Don’t you want to see Sinterklaas at all?’

He just smiled.

She started to count on her gloved fingers.

‘You missed him on the boat. You missed him when he was riding his horse . . .’

His wife was staring at him.

‘You can stop saving the world, Henk. For one day. Be with your family.’

Kuyper pushed back his glasses and sighed. Then pointed at the computer.

‘Besides . . . you know I’m not good with all those people around. Crowds . . .’ He touched his daughter’s cheek. ‘Daddy doesn’t like them.’

The little girl stamped her feet and wrapped her skinny arms around herself, tight against the bright-pink jacket he’d bought her the week before. My Little Pony. Her favourite from the books and the TV. He reached out and squeezed her elbow.

‘Sinterklaas came early and brought you that, didn’t he?’

‘No.’ The pout got bigger. ‘You did.’

‘Maybe I’m Black Pete. In disguise.’ He gestured at the door. ‘Go on. Tonight we can have pizza. I’ll make it up. Promise.’

He listened as they made their way down the narrow staircase. One set of footsteps heavy, one light. Then he rolled his chair to the window and looked out into the street. His wife was pushing the expensive cargo trike he’d bought them. Orange. The colour of the Netherlands. She climbed on the saddle. Saskia parked herself in the cushioned kid’s area at the front she called the ‘bucket’.

His phone went. The call didn’t take more than a minute.

Across the road he saw his first Black Pete. There’d be hundreds roaming the city, baffling every foreigner who stumbled upon them. Anyone could hire the costume, find some make-up and scarlet lipstick. Put on the stupid wig, the frilly jacket, the colourful trousers, the gold earrings. Then buy a bag of sweets from a local shop and hand them out to anyone they felt like.

Online some of his contacts had whined about them. How they were racist stereotypes. Kuyper had done what he liked to do on the web: put people right. Black Pete probably had nothing to do with Africa. The idea stemmed from an older, darker tradition rooted in something more mysterious than mere geography. One theory was they represented devils, enslaved by Saint Nicholas in the name of good.

He wasn’t entirely sure any of this was accurate. But he liked to correct people all the same.

As he watched a second colourful figure emerged from the side of the Herenmarkt. It looked as if this one had been hiding behind the children’s slides there. Waiting for someone.

Saskia waved and shouted something. He could hear her excited cry rise up from the cobbled street.

The new one wore dark green, a brown cap, pink feather in it. He didn’t smile at all.

If he heard the girl Black Pete didn’t show it. He pushed a rusty bike along the street then walked inside the ancient iron pissoir that stood at the end of Herenmarkt by the bridge that led over the Brouwersgracht into the city.

Kids don’t always get what they ask for, Henk Kuyper told himself. And went back to his messages.

By the time they got to Leidseplein and the climax of the parade Bakker was very glad they hadn’t brought Sam. She was a country girl from Dokkum, in Amsterdam only since the spring. Back home she’d watched the Sinterklaas parade on TV once or twice. Nothing prepared her for the reality.

The city had turned into a single, happy throng of humanity. From the waterfront to the centre the masses stretched, then out to the museums and the Canal Ring. Old and young with glitter and decorations in their hair. Fathers with toddlers perched on their shoulders. Mothers holding up tiny babies too young to understand what the noise and colour were all about. Everyone fighting for a glimpse of Sinterklaas himself, a red-robed figure astride a tall white horse moving down Rokin, waving to the crowds.

Vos and Van der Berg must have worked this day countless times. They knew where to stand, what to do. Listen to the radio mostly, stay at the edge of the multitude. Watch for pickpockets, drunks and doped-up pests. Then carefully weed them out of the equation.

One light-fingered Black Pete was already in custody, lifted by Van der Berg with extraordinary delicacy as the man tried to wriggle the wallet out of the back pocket of a man fool enough to wear nothing but a sweatshirt and jeans for the day. They’d been more generous towards the beer-filled fools who were making genial nuisances of themselves. A quick nod from Van der Berg, a backup word from Vos, a filthy glance from Bakker and the idiots were on their way.

Uniformed officers were handling the visible side of the police operation – guiding people into the allotted areas, keeping them back from the route the Sinterklaas parade was taking through the heart of Amsterdam. It was containment, not control. Three hundred thousand people . . . no police force in the world could hope to do more.

They’d now followed the parade on its last loop, to Leidseplein. It was twenty past three. In ten minutes Sinterklaas would be here, to be welcomed by the mayor. Then at four he’d address the children of the city from the theatre balcony and after that everyone would begin to go their own way, to the hot dog stands, the sweet stalls and the shops. Then finally, satisfied, to home.

Vos and Van der Berg were talking cheerily to a man in a clown costume who could barely stand, telling him to go home and lie down.

A meal with these two men. Usually they seemed to live off bar snacks and beer. She couldn’t imagine what Vos meant by ‘proper dinner’. Or what kind of restaurant he liked. It was seven months since they met during the doll’s house case. She was now a full member of his plain-clothes team. They were close somehow. As much friends as colleagues. Vos did that to everyone. She felt sorry for him. In a way, she suspected, he felt sorry for her as a solitary young woman from outside town with few friends in Amsterdam.

Fewer than he knew. None, if she was honest.

She was starting to wonder where she’d spend Christmas – in Amsterdam or home in Dokkum – when she heard a rising angry voice behind and turned to look. A tall woman in an expensive-looking, fashionable coat was berating a uniformed female officer about something, her right hand clinging tightly to a bored-looking young girl in a bright-pink jacket with ponies on it.

Bakker ambled over, flashed her ID, smiled and offered to help.

‘Why won’t you listen to me?’ the woman said, getting madder by the second. ‘There’s something wrong here.’

Oude Nieuwstraat was a five-minute walk from the Kuypers’ house in Herenmarkt. A narrow, ancient lane behind the Singel canal. Hanna Bublik, just nine months in the city after fleeing Georgia, lived there with her eight-year-old daughter Natalya in the gable room on the top floor of a narrow terrace building near Lijnbaanssteeg. Their home was scarcely bigger than Henk Kuyper’s office, two single beds, a bathroom and toilet shared with a young Filipina woman, Chantal Santos, who lived on the floor below.

At first glance during the day it seemed a pedestrian street much like any other in Amsterdam: locked-up bikes, a corner grocer, a couple of coffee shops, some adult stores. Around the corner in Spuistraat you could eat Thai, sign up for Scientology, catch a tram or walk to the city museum. But there were too many large, blank windows in Oude Nieuwstraat for it to be a normal part of the city. The authorities had designated this the Singelgebied, a second red-light district after the larger De Wallen. Cheaper, more often used by a few locals. Plenty of cabins for rent.

Hanna knew the afternoon was going to be taken up with Sinterklaas. So, eager to make what money she could, she’d left her daughter with the Santos girl that morning and chanced on a few hours in the nearest free unit she could find.

Two customers. One Danish, one from London. Quick, easy, casual business. After costs she was seventy euros in pocket. Enough to see Natalya through the afternoon.

This year, starting with Sinterklaas, she’d know a happy Christmas. That was a promise Hanna had made herself. Natalya was just a baby when the Russians and the Ossetians entered their home city of Gori during the brief South Ossetia war. Her husband, Natalya’s father, died in the fighting. He was a baker from a village near the border. His relatives didn’t want to know his Georgian wife and child when he was dead. Her own family, who’d never liked the idea she’d married an Ossetian, felt the same way. Poverty and desperation finally drove her west, hitching with her daughter across Europe. Finally doing what it took to keep them in food.

‘Mum,’ Natalya said, trying on her new jacket. ‘Where’d you get this?’

Pink. My Little Pony patterns on the fabric. Natalya was growing. Asking questions. Starting to understand things. The Dutch authorities treated them with respect. She was going to a good school, quickly learning the language, English too. But still they lived in a tiny room on the top of a building in the middle of a red-light district while Hanna worked afternoons and nights, six days a week usually.

‘I found it. Maybe some rich people didn’t like it.’ A smile. ‘Do you?’

The little girl beamed back. Blonde hair. Pale, smart face. Children were shaped by the world they experienced. In her eight years Natalya Bublik had lost an adoring father, her home, been rejected by both sides of her family, seen her mother reduced to prostitution on the road.

She knew a lie when she heard it. Knew when to ignore it too.

Natalya hugged the jacket, the most expensive piece of clothing she’d ever had. In six months it would be too small for her. Her mother would be wondering how to earn the money to replace the thing.

There was an easier answer beckoning. Chantal Santos kept pushing it at her. Stop working the cabins alone, as a freelance. Sign up with the Turk who had connections throughout the area. Cem Yilmaz, a big, muscular hulk with a fancy apartment near Dam Square and a route into all the high-class escort services in town. Yilmaz controlled much of the top end of the sex trade. Through the Santos girl he’d promised he could double the amount she earned, for half the time on her back or on her knees.

‘Let’s go, Mum,’ Natalya said and took her mother’s hand.