Dared al-Saeed walked into the departure hall of JFK’s Terminal 4 and looked around. Four years ago, this was where he had arrived. Since that day, he hadn’t flown again. The thought of spending hours in the enclosed cabin of a plane filled with other passengers made him break out in a cold sweat.

He had long debated whether or not to accept the invitation to present at the medical conference. The location was what finally convinced him: Amsterdam. As a young student, he and his brother Mustafa had visited the city. The Red-Light District, the pot shops, the bars, the canals, the blond girls lying on the grass in the Vondelpark with their long bare legs. Amsterdam had been a hallucinatory experience for them both.

And now Mustafa was dead.

As were four hundred thousand of their countrymen.

While he, Dared, had survived.

He felt terribly guilty.

This trip would be a testament to his brother’s memory. And at the same time, it would give him the opportunity to overcome his fear of flying.

He checked in, followed the signs to passport control. The new president had complained about leaky borders and promised that — as soon as he moved into the White House — they would be dramatically tightened. But Dared didn’t notice much of a difference. No gray-suited men with earpieces, no police, no armed soldiers.

The immigration officer was a rosy-cheeked white man. Dared handed over his passport and green card. As the man examined the documents, Dared saw him frown for just a moment. Dared al-Saeed, born December 10, 1988, in Damascus, Syria. Permanent resident since 2015.

“I hope you thanked our previous president for this,” the agent remarked, returning the passport and laminated card. “Have a good trip.”

“Thank you,” Dared smiled in return.

Not everyone in the United States had lost their minds.

He checked the departure board and found that his flight, KL 6070, would leave from gate B32. There was a long line at the La Brea Bakery. His stomach clenched, and he suddenly felt dizzy. A panic attack. No coffee, then, and no sandwich. All these people, all this hustle and bustle. He couldn’t handle it. Maybe this trip wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Leaving the crowd behind, he crossed to his gate. He found a quiet place to sit, slid his laptop from his carry-on, and settled in to go over his presentation yet again. Slowly, he felt himself relax.

A voice on the PA eventually announced his flight.

It was just after four. Dared looked up. There weren’t many people in line at the gate. Aboard the Boeing, he found his window seat. There was no one else in his row. As the aircraft taxied out to the runway and the flight attendants delivered their safety instructions, he set his watch ahead to Central European Time.

The engines fired up, and the plane gained speed. Dared felt himself pressed back in his seat. There was no way out of it now — seven hours in the air. He wondered if he should take one Ambien or two.

The kidnapping made the evening news and was almost instantly a trending topic on Twitter. By the next morning, photos of the most famous crime reporter in The Netherlands were everywhere you looked. The banner headline on the front page of De Telegraaf, her employer, screamed, “WHO HAS OUR ELLA?” in oversized capitals.

I’d spent the night in a chair by the window, with all the lights out and the curtains open, waiting for some word from her, staring at the barred windows of the Esprit store across the road, at the soft glow of the streetlights, at the black-and-white neighborhood cat — officially the Luxembourg’s house cat, who lay deep in thought across the Begijnhof’s doorway — at the pedestrians, mostly solitary men who walked past my house from left to right or right to left without giving it a second glance. Some of them were visibly drunk, some hurried self-confidently by as if they were on their way to jobs that really mattered. Between two and five a.m., young women pedaled past on their bicycles, like Ella and I did years ago — without worry, without fear — until Mimi’s fate forever changed our relationship to our little corner of the city.

Maybe it was a mistake to go back to my old neighborhood on the very first day of a weekend leave. I could have been imagining it, but I seemed to read it off the faces of the people I came across on the street: how they glanced up at me, walked on, then took another look. I avoided the butcher shop and the bakery I used to go to. I bought a couple of buns, some sliced liver, and salted beef at the Albert Heijn on Christiaan Huygensplein — the girls at the registers were too young to remember, they were just as friendly to me as they were to everyone else.

When I walked into Elsa’s Café, though, conversations literally slammed to a halt. That’s what I was that first day: a conversation killer. I’m not a complete bonehead, I was more or less prepared for it, but it’s still weird when it actually happens. At Elsa’s they have these swinging doors, like a saloon in an old western. That’s the way it felt to me: as though I was coming through the swinging doors, six-guns drawn, to settle an old account. And in a certain sense I was, but not with the people who were there, not with anyone who was at Elsa’s right then.

I don’t know what I would have done, though, if he had been standing there, prattling at the bar with a beer in his hand. Then I wouldn’t have been fully accountable. In fact, I’ve never been accountable for my actions — not being accountable is the thin red line in my life that’s taken me everywhere, from the maximum-security facility to here again, now, in my old neighborhood.

It’s just after midnight, a warm spring night. Waldemar, a thickset man of fifty-eight, is standing on a bridge in the heart of Amsterdam’s Red-Light District. He’s carelessly stuffed his dark wrinkled shirt into his stained pants after rolling up the shirtsleeves a couple of times. The pants’ legs are too long and the cuffs, which drag across the cobblestones when he walks, are frayed. He leans forward against the handrail of the Bosshardt Bridge, named after the Salvation Army major who, for decades, helped the neighborhood’s weak and damned souls without worrying about their pasts.

Waldemar rocks slowly back and forth, to and fro, mumbling something incomprehensible under his breath. A tourist, Hiroki Ota, wearing a wool cap with flaps that say Amsterdam, stops a few yards away. He’s hiding a small camera in the palm of his hand and waiting for the moment when Waldemar’s worn-down soles lose their grip on the asphalt and the crazy old street person plunges headfirst into the murky water. He wouldn’t be the first simpleton in Amsterdam to suffer that fate and drown, but when the man hasn’t fallen in after rocking perhaps fifteen times, Hiroki gives up and walks on, disappointed. He disappears into the knot of people pushing their way through the busy Molensteeg.

Red lights and garish neon ads are reflected in the canal’s still water. Swans float by, slowly, elegantly, and drift beneath the bridge. They come to a halt in front of the Casa Rosso nightclub, vain and almost haughty as they wait for the bread that is thrown to them every evening. Crowds of tourists take photos of the unexpected and paradoxical scene: stately white lines of impalpable beauty on expansive black water, lit up by the simultaneously alluring yet merciless red neon lights of the prostitutes’ claustrophobic windows.

Waldemar has seen it all a hundred times. Silently he straightens his back and leaves the bridge, his gaze turned deeply inward, his bearing making him unapproachable; he thinks of his daughter, whom he’s missed for so long. He looks up only when he reaches the next corner. Rowdy students, unsuspecting tourists, a boisterous group of young women celebrating a bachelorette party all pass him by. He turns a corner into a passageway that leads to the next canal. No red lights here for a change, but a large, busy snack bar where a drunk boy with close-cropped hair and a dangling lower lip fruitlessly tries to insert a coin into a slot so he can open the vending machine’s window, within which an assortment of typical Dutch treats beckon. Behind the vending machine, a sweaty bearded man appears with a tray of fried snacks; with practiced movements, he quickly fills all the empty windows with freshly prepared food. Bold gulls swoop low through the street, waiting for a moment of relative quiet in the passageway so they can snatch up any fallen morsels. The boy takes a bite of his croquette, which is still too hot. Cursing under his breath, he keels forward, gasping for relief, and the food falls out of his mouth. He staggers on angrily, waving the hot croquette in his unsteady hand.

Emerging from the passageway, Waldemar comes out onto the next canal, the Oudezijds Voorburgwal. This has quite a different, almost peaceful look, dominated by the monumental Old Church, Amsterdam’s oldest building, which dates back to the year 1280, its tower illuminated in the evenings. A beacon of hope above a square kilometer of misery, which is how the local police have characterized the Red-Light District for years. Waldemar saunters past the church. The dark-skinned prostitutes preside over their domain in the small alleys surrounding the stately building, just like every other group that has its own space in the district: the S&M ladies, the Thai and Filipino transsexuals, the Chinese, the Eastern Europeans. And all of that spiced up by dozens of busy coffee shops, by a café where the Hells Angels meet, by the headquarters of the Salvation Army. Belief and sin go hand in hand here.

Waldemar knows it all. The entrance to the small passageway at the Oudezijds Voorburgwal is dark and oppressive, only illuminated halfway down by the red neon lights over the prostitutes’ doors. Waldemar assumes his usual spot across from the passage, a place where he can look into it without calling attention to himself. The world passes him by; it’s a day just like the hundreds of others he has spent there. And here comes Aaron, a man in his fifties, sporting an extravagant dark-gray beard and a velvet suit that could belong either to an old-time town crier or a member of Rembrandt’s Night Watch. A dashing hat with a long feather rests atop his head. He carries a wooden staff with a pennant, so he can be easily spotted in the busy crowd. This way, the tourists he is guiding can follow him with no trouble. Waldemar steps back a bit to make way for the guide and his entourage.

“We’ll begin here,” announces Aaron in practiced English. “This, esteemed public, is not only the Red-Light District’s narrowest street; it is the narrowest street in all of Amsterdam. Exactly three feet wide! Only three feet! The name is... De Trompettersteeg. Yeah, you try to pronounce that.” He falls silent, because he knows that laughter and murmuring will arise as the tourists actually try to say the passageway’s name.

An overly ambitious man with a face ruddy from drink begins to cough as he tries to push the last, so undeniably Dutch, syllable out of his throat.

“That G sound,” Aaron finally continues, as the exuberant group quiets down, “saved lives during the Second World War. The Germans couldn’t pronounce it, so the Resistance forced traitors and infiltrators to say the word Scheveningen, where the Sch sounds just like the G. Those who couldn’t do it properly were Germans and therefore risked losing their lives. So remember the name Scheveningen.”

Waldemar shakes his head benevolently as the flush-faced man is thumped roundly on his back after struggling to say the new word.

“Let’s go on,” instructs Aaron. “After we emerge through the passageway, be careful: the ladies are here to earn money, not to be ogled. And do you remember what I said at the start of the tour?”

The sightseers respond like good children on a school trip: “Don’t take photos!”

Waldemar mumbles the words along with them, checking his watch. He knows that this is the last group that will be led through the district tonight. The neighborhood is growing calmer, more shadowy, the night is asserting itself.

Aaron beckons again, and someone from the herd ventures a hesitant first step into the dark passageway, toward the red-lit and seductive temptations. “I’ll follow behind and continue my narration.”

“It’s like entering the gates of hell, where purgatory awaits you,” says the red-faced man, and his words hurt Waldemar. One by one, the tourists disappear into the passage. Aaron brings up the rear, his feather swaying above their heads, his staff tapping on the cobblestones.

“Why don’t you tell them what happened there!” yells Waldemar, but no one hears him because no sound issues from his mouth.

No fucking photo’s!! is misspelled on the passage’s wall; the big graffitied letters are meant to be artistic, but their message is clear. Of course, Aaron’s herd can’t help themselves. As soon as they reach the windows, they gape at the young women. The red lights hide all their flaws, and their white lingerie, which really doesn’t cover anything, shines brightly. The tourists stare and stare and stare.

“They’re actually quite pretty,” a woman whispers in surprise to her husband as they pass the voluptuous, beckoning bodies. He nods a bit too enthusiastically, to which she responds with a frown.

The red light is out at one of the windows; the paint is peeling, and the window is dirty and covered sloppily with brown packing paper from the inside. Aaron passes it by, as he’s passed it a hundred times before.

Waldemar lingers by the side of the canal for a long time.

Later, as the tourists tumble into their beds, what remains are the drunkards, the bullies, and the pimps, who appear like rats in the night to collect cash from their women.

Waldemar knows them all.

Johnny hadn’t wanted to wear his rain jacket that day. It had rained all week, fat drops pelting the windows, the bed of Johnny’s plastic dump truck filling with water — Gita hadn’t had the energy to bring it in from the backyard. Johnny shook his head angrily when she held the jacket up for him. He made a face like he’d swallowed something gross and growled what sounded like a no. It was only a few steps from the front door to the curb, where the school bus would stop, and, if he wanted, his teachers would let him stay indoors all day. Strictly speaking, he didn’t need the jacket, but Gita had just bought it and wanted to convince herself that the money hadn’t been wasted — it had cost more than she could really afford.

Their argument unfolded like most of their arguments. First Johnny began to scream, his eyes already tearing, his cheeks flushed, and then he started kicking. His flailing arms struck her in the face, but Gita knew he didn’t mean to hurt her. Finally, he broke out in uncontrollable sobs.

She was reminded of a video that had been going around on Facebook for weeks. A man tells his three-year-old daughter that steak comes from cows and the girl bursts out in tears. “Poor cows,” she whispers to the camera.

Every time Gita saw that clip, she felt a mixture of anger and jealousy. She was jealous of the parents, who had a healthy, beautiful little girl with two pigtails, a child who felt empathy for other living creatures. But she was mad at them too, for bragging so shamelessly about their blessings. Why would anyone be interested in the private happiness of strangers?

The bus stood outside her door for ten minutes that morning, two wheels up on the curb. When she couldn’t calm Johnny down, she bribed him with a prepackaged pancake. It was much too early for a treat — she could see Johnny’s nutritionist shake a finger — but what choice did she have? The bus was waiting, with other children aboard. Thank god Johnny stopped screaming the moment he heard the crinkle of the plastic wrapper.

“Sorry,” she told the frowning driver, when Johnny finally clambered up into the bus.

Later that day, she regretted the humbleness of her apology. She did what she could, damn it, and who was a school-bus driver to judge her? She wished she’d told him so, right to his face. But at the same time she felt guilty about the way she’d treated Johnny. She shouldn’t have insisted on the rain jacket. He was tired, he’d had a bad night, his day hadn’t even begun, and she was already nagging him. When she brought him home from Mireille’s that evening, she decided, she’d give him another pancake, just because.

Had she noticed Femke come into the café that morning?

Probably not. She can barely recall taking her order — the only reason she knows now that it had been an open-faced egg sandwich was that she remembers Femke saying, “You should leave off the dill,” when she paid for it. A typical remark, she would come to learn: Femke always spoke her mind, whether or not anyone had asked for her opinion. At first, Gita saw the trait as arrogance, until she realized that in a way it came from a desire to be helpful. Femke simply knew better than most other people, and with each observation about the things she ate and saw and did, Gita’s admiration for Femke’s knowledge and insight and pure bravado grew.

After the comment about the egg sandwich, though, Gita had merely nodded. She’s not from around here, she thought. She could tell from the woman’s long, formfitting raincoat, nothing like the shapeless things worn by the café’s usual customers. Before heading back out into the rain, Femke had tightened her belt, but Gita didn’t notice how slim she was until later that day, when the woman returned. Her raincoat was dry then, and so elegant that Gita wondered if it really was a raincoat, after all.

“I think I left my gloves here,” Femke said.

Now that they were standing face-to-face, Gita realized that the woman was beautiful. Maybe it was her makeup, she thought at the time. But four or five weeks later, Femke gave her an eyeliner pencil, the same kind she used herself, and it didn’t make Gita’s eyes any bigger or more attractive.

“I don’t think we found a pair of gloves,” said Gita, and she glanced at Sjors, who stood in the doorway to the kitchen, shaking his head.

Femke shrugged. “Might as well have a drink, since I’m here. Do you carry Macallan?”

She spent the rest of the afternoon at the bar, reading the newspaper, playing with her phone, asking questions whenever Gita had a free moment. About the café — “You didn’t have to close when they renovated the square?” — but personal things too: “Do you live in the neighborhood?”

Gita remembers finding their on-and-off conversation odd, but not unwelcome. When customers talked to her, they were mostly older gentlemen who did little more than order another drink. Femke was young — probably ten years younger than Gita — a member of a more interested generation. So when she suggested that Gita pour one for herself, Gita did something she’d never done before. She set a shot glass on the bar beside the register and filled it to the rim with whiskey.

She hadn’t had much to eat that afternoon. The guilty residue from the morning’s scene with Johnny stuck to her ribs like chewing gum, but the whiskey burned some of it away and gave her the courage to speak honestly for once. “Actually,” she heard herself say, “I don’t like the neighborhood as much as I used to. They promised us a whole new clientele after the renovation. But most of our regulars moved away, and we’re not good enough for the new residents. They like the trendy spots in the Van der Pekstraat, little bistros that serve soup, where the whole menu is soup and nothing but soup, you know what I mean? Can you believe anyone would come all the way up here to eat soup?”

Femke toasted her and sipped her whiskey.

Encouraged, Gita went on: “All those chichi places are the same: a brick wall, ferns, folding chairs, a wooden bar; it’s like you’re in a house that’s in the middle of being remodeled. They serve your drink in a mason jar instead of a normal glass, but it’s not like those jars ever actually held pears or peaches or whatever, they buy them brand new by the case. Did you ever try to drink out of one of those things? You’re lucky if you don’t spill all over yourself!”

Femke laughed and shook her head. “I’ll drink to that!” She emptied her glass in one swallow and leaned across the bar, her face only inches from Gita’s. Her heavy perfume reminded Gita of her father’s aftershave, with just a hint of Gauloises mixed in.

“We should go to one of those hip places sometime,” Femke whispered conspiratorially, “and sabotage the joint.”

Gita laughed, not sure if Femke was serious, too tipsy from her drink to come up with a witty response.

Femke rose from her stool and picked up her phone. “I’ll text you so you can let me know if my gloves turn up. What’s your number?”

Gita told her. It seemed natural but at the same time not, as if she’d eaten a piece of candy of a type she hadn’t tasted in years. When was the last time anyone had asked her for her phone number?

When she got to Mireille’s that evening, Johnny was parked in front of the TV. She’d hurried up the six flights of stairs and stood panting in the quiet living room; the ticking of the cuckoo clock was an almost sarcastic echo of her heartbeat. Johnny was watching Elmo. It was his favorite DVD, though Gita wished he would pick something else for a change. Elmo reminded her that Johnny never made any progress, which reminded her in turn that she never made any progress, trapped in a stuffy room where the light was always blue and Elmo endlessly showed off his brand-new shoes.

Mireille slouched in her armchair by the window, paging through a magazine.

“Sorry I’m so late,” said Gita.

“You couldn’t call?” Mireille snapped, not looking up. “Johnny was worried about you.” She nodded at the television: Johnny was glued to the screen, his mouth slightly open, as if this was the first time he’d ever seen Elmo’s big red feet. “I do this for you, you know,” Mireille muttered, struggling to her own feet. “You want Earl Grey or rose hip?”

Whiskey, Gita thought. Do you carry Macallan?

I was born over there, in the Dapperstraat. Over the years, I moved around the area and eventually landed here, on the fourth floor of a stately building on the east side of the park. I spend most of my time in an armchair just inside my living room window, looking out onto the park. Most of the city’s sounds fail to reach this high, and I content myself with observing the silent stories of the world outside my window. Some things are better without sound. Even violence seems peaceful when wreathed in silence. I have witnessed robberies and drunken brawls that suggest contemporary ballet, the dancers wheeling around each other with exaggerated, expressive movements. From my vantage point, these events are almost beautiful.

Anyway, I had a good idea why the detectives were at our door. See, the Chink’s been missing for five days now and the Mercury’s been shuttered, although the old gook normally opens up at noon ’cause he don’t miss a chance to cash in on the lunch trade. He didn’t tell me he was gonna be gone: no e-mail, no text, nothing.

When I showed up for work five days ago and he wasn’t there, I tried his doorbell — he lives upstairs from his snack bar/Chinese takeaway, see. I was only inside his apartment one time, and the stink of grease made me want to hurl. He really needs to do something about his ventilation.

So I got no response when I rang, and there wasn’t any lights on I could see. Pissed me off, because it was payday, and man does not live by tips alone. For the last couple months, the old guy and me have had a little side deal. “Call it hush money,” is the way he put it. I never asked for nothing extra. Didn’t need to. The old guy read in my eyes that I knew the score. I mean, I’m not stupid. He never should have asked me to fetch that box of croquettes from the freezer, the fool.

All those bricks of brown and white powder hidden among the frozen snacks and fries! Street value? I have no idea. Jesus. I mean, you want to play gangster, at least you could be a little careful about it. Fine, well, anyway, the way I saw it, we had us what you call a win-win situation there. And I could use the extra cash. Him too, apparently. The Mercury Snackbar on the Mercuriusplein ain’t exactly a gold mine, if you catch my drift. Until he gets the windows washed and loses those disgusting orange plastic stools and the greasy Formica countertop and does something about the ventilation, he pretty much needs a little sideline if he wants to stay afloat, you see what I’m saying?

I understand the Chink. He’s gotta think about his future. He’s not gonna wind up some old geezer wasting away in that pitiful apartment on the Mercuriusplein, not when he could live out his golden years in Malaysia or Hong Kong or Singapore or wherever the hell he comes from. Am I right? So I figured he emptied out his bank accounts and was having himself a roll in the hay with some Chinese hottie in a massage parlor off in Whereverland. I was actually kind of proud of him. I wasn’t worried about our deal, or about the cops implicating me in his drug trade, because there was absolutely no paper trail or anything else pointing my way. I’m the delivery boy for the Mercury Snackbar, and that is all I am.

Except, with those two cops standing there awkwardly at the door, I began to feel just a wee bit sweaty.

The older of the two — you could already see the male-pattern baldness making inroads on his temples — cleared his throat. “We’re sorry to bother you so early, but I’m afraid we have bad news. May we come in?”

No way, I thought. But Mom automatically took a step back. I could see her fear in the slump of her shoulders inside her pink robe. She grabbed my face and started whining like a wounded animal. “Where did I go wrong, Armin? You were always such a sweet little boy!” I was afraid she was about to keel over, so I slung an arm around her to keep her on her feet. I mean, I am the man of the house. But I guess I can’t blame her for projecting her shit onto me.

“Calm down, Ma,” I said. “Don’t worry. Let’s hear what the officers have to say.”

To make a long story short, the Chink was dead. At least the detectives thought it was the Chink they’d found hacked to bits and the bits deep-fried, “considering how close the dumpster in the Maanstraat is to the Mercury Snackbar, and his contacts in the Chinese tongs.” The only thing they could say for sure at this point was that what they had found was definitely human remains, though they were in such a state they weren’t sure it would ever be possible to positively identify the victim. Somebody from the neighborhood had called it in. His little Staffordshire terrier had started barking and howling when they came in sight of the dumpster. The smell was pretty ripe, they said.

The older detective must have seen the dismay in Mom’s eyes, ’cause all of a sudden he put a hand on her shoulder and said they were 99 percent sure it was the Chink, and they hoped the techs would come up with like a molecule of DNA that would lock in that last 1 percent. No such thing as a perfect crime, he said, puffing out his chest, “there’s usually a loose end or two, we know that from experience,” looking like he was starring in an episode of CSI, like he was some kind of a big shot. “We don’t want you folks to worry now, ma’am, do we? Tuindorp Oostzaan’s such a quiet little neighborhood, where nothing ever happens.” I could hear the contempt in his voice. On the downtown side of the IJ, they think we’re all hicks up here in Amsterdam-North.

So I told you I sort of freeze at times like this, right? My friends don’t call me Ice for nothing — after the old rapper/actor with the pigtail from Law & Order, you know? Maybe the story was a little too crazy to believe. Even Mom just stood there crying silently instead of busting out screaming. But I realized pretty quick that the cops weren’t out to tie me to whatever had gone down. When you’re in their headlights, you know it. They were pretty chill about the whole thing. Just said they’d appreciate whatever I could tell them about the Chink, seeing how I was the Mercury’s scooter boy and all — I wanted to correct them and say moped boy, but I didn’t think I ought to interrupt — and I saw the old guy pretty much every day, so maybe I could help them with their inquiries. I told them I thought the Chink was out of town for a couple days, he said something about needing a break, checking out the tulips at the Keukenhof, yadda yadda yadda, and running a Chinese takeout/snack bar in Tuindorp Oostzaan ain’t exactly what you call a sinecure, right? Meanwhile, the little gears in my head are spinning overtime, you know what I mean?

See, something told me maybe the deep-fried dead guy was not the Chink, after all.

Maybe I watch too many cop shows. On TV, nothing ever turns out the way you think it will, right?

But there was something else. Which is why I’m writing all this down, not as evidence but as a sort of testimony, in case something happens to me. For Mom’s sake, you with me? Ain’t nobody I love more than her, not even Miriam.

I pushed him through the door into Loetje, which has evolved over the years from a small café with billiards to a restaurant three times its original size — though sometimes you still have to wait an hour or more for a table. They were full that night, not even a couple of stools at the bar, but one of the servers recognized me and gestured it’d only be half an hour or so before we’d hit the top of the list.

A minute later, we were back on the sidewalk, each with a glass of beer, surrounded by half a dozen smokers — mostly thirtysomethings and fortysomethings — who I figured for realtors or some other well-paid professionals. Two of them were women, having a girls’ night out. Jacob gulped his brewski, alternating swallows with deep drags on a cigarette. Across the street, the Old Catholic Church loomed, swathed in darkness.

“Got a match?” came a voice from beside me.

I turned to say I don’t smoke but realized the guy was talking to Jacob, not me. He held a cigarillo between slender fingers.

“Sure,” said Jacob, reaching for his lighter. It took him three or four tries to produce a flame.

“Much obliged, friend,” said the man.

That friend seemed a little presumptuous, but Jacob smiled.

“These things taste better when lit with a wooden match,” the man said, exhaling smoke in the direction of the church. “But who carries those old-fashioned lucifers around in their pocket these days? I love the smell of them, though, that momentary blast of sulfur. Would you like to try one of mine?”

“Thanks,” said Jacob, and he lit the proffered cigarillo with the stub of his cigarette.

I hadn’t heard a polite word out of Jacob in quite some time — and spoken to a stranger, no less. I took a closer look at the man. He was not unattractive, with black hair slicked back to just below the collar of his obviously expensive jacket. All things considered, I would call him a rather elegant fellow.

“May I pose a question?” The stranger’s gaze flicked from Jacob to me to the other smokers. “Did any of you happen to know a gentleman who lived in this neighborhood, a certain Van der Meer?”

“Van der Meer,” said a smoker who had overconfidently left his jacket inside. “You mean the professor?”

“Indeed I do.”

“Don’t waste your time looking for him: he’s dead.”

The man nodded. “A heart attack, I know. Does his widow ever patronize this establishment?”

“Yolande?” said one of the women. “No, I haven’t seen her since he passed. When they used to eat here, I always looked the other way, and not just because he ordered his steak so rare the blood dripped all over his chin.”

“Gross,” said her girlfriend.

“I took a class from him once, and he was what you call a real skirt-chaser, totally annoying. I think she was one of his students — she was at least twenty years younger than him, maybe thirty.”

The man nodded again, and this time blew a perfect smoke ring that drifted lazily skyward.

“When he was out here smoking,” the woman went on, “I made sure to keep my distance. But I think he finally quit. The last few times I saw them here, he stayed inside. I’ll tell you, he seemed crankier about it every time.”

“They lived in a big house up the street, right where the Museum District begins,” said one of the men, grinding out a cigarette with his shoe. “It came on the market three days ago, and somebody bought it without even asking to see the inside. No surprise, really: this neighborhood’s red-hot.”

Two names were called, and most of the smokers took one last puff, stubbed out their cigarettes in the standing ashtray, and headed into Loetje.

The few who remained moved closer to the door and went on talking, which left Jacob and me alone with the stranger.

“I bought that house,” he said calmly. “I’ve been looking for a suitable home in the city for some time. I don’t care for hotels, I’d much rather have a place of my own.”

“Jeez,” said Jacob, and I thought I heard a note of admiration in his voice.

“You bought a house without checking out the inside?” I said. “That seems a little risky.”

“Oh, I know the place well — I paid a call there not long ago. It’s quite lovely, and there’s a marvelous art collection on the walls.”

“I assume the art doesn’t go with the property. Or are you some kind of dealer or collector?”

“Both,” he said with a smile. “Which is why I spend so much time traveling. When I finish my business here, I’ll return to my country house outside Seville. I may stop off in Paris, I have a little pied-à-terre on the Place Vendôme.”

He exhaled a plume of smoke that came straight at me and sent me into a fit of coughing.

“Please forgive my filthy habit,” he said. “I forget that others might not appreciate the bouquet of fine tobacco as much as I do. Van der Meer ultimately had a problem with it too, which is why he had to give up smoking. Of course, that wasn’t his only problem.”

“You mean his wife?” Jacob guessed.

“In a way. She was, as you heard a few moments ago, quite a bit younger than he. At first, that was precisely what attracted Van der Meer to her, but their situation changed as he got older, and for the last few years it had all become — how shall I say it? — rather disastrous.”

“What do you mean, their situation changed?” asked Jacob. “She didn’t stop being younger than him.”

“Yes, but that was the point, you see. He began to blame her for making him feel like an old man.”

“Sounds like she’s better off without him.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say better off.” The man grinned, and — unlike Jacob, who had unbuttoned his jacket — I suddenly felt a chill.

“Explain that,” I said.

The stranger flicked the stub of his cigarillo over the bike rack and into the darkness. “Well, I was sitting in a café, she happened to be sitting alone at the next table. She accidentally spilled her drink, I handed her a napkin, and — I don’t know why, but I seem to attract people with a need to get things off their chests. Or perhaps I’m attracted to them. In any case, she told me her story. The bottom line was that her husband was a sadist who was making her life hell. There was no way he would agree to a divorce, and she couldn’t possibly leave him, because she had nowhere else to go and she couldn’t support herself on her own — she was a French tutor, and not many children seem to select that language these days. How, she asked me, could she ever get free of him? Well, a nasty old man with a weak heart, the world certainly wouldn’t be any worse off without him.”

“Are you saying you offered to murder him?” asked Jacob eagerly.

“That’s a strong word, friend. I wouldn’t call it murder to send a man on his way without ever laying a finger on him. I asked her about his weaknesses, and she mentioned something I thought I could use.”

“And that was?”

“Religion.” The man took a fresh cigarillo from his inside pocket and waved it at the church. “Van der Meer was a devout atheist who seethed at the sight or sound of anything remotely pious. I immediately devised what seemed to me an appropriate plan, and I presented it to her. Might I trouble you again for a light, friend? And here, have another yourself.”

The man laid a hand on Jacob’s wrist. Neither of them paid me the slightest attention.

“That very evening, I appeared at their door. She admitted me, as prearranged. That in itself infuriated Van der Meer, the idea that she would permit a stranger to invade his sanctum. I informed him, quite humbly, that I was there to return a book. ‘A book?’ he said. ‘I never loan out my books.’ ‘I didn’t borrow it,’ I said, ‘I found it lying beside your trash can.’ I extended it to him, and he cried out in horror: ‘A Bible? What makes you think that belongs to me? I’ve never owned a Bible in my life!’ ‘That’s very strange,’ said I, ‘for your name is inscribed in it.’ His face turned bright red, and he shrieked, ‘Take it away! Remove that wretched volume from my sight!’ I said, ‘The seven plagues of Egypt will afflict you, brother, if you insult God’s word in such a detestable manner.’ He cursed at me and screamed, ‘Get out, you vile liar! Get out!’ I stood before him, opened the book, and showed him his name. And that was the coup de grâce. His eyes rolled up in their sockets, he shook uncontrollably, and he collapsed to the ground, stone dead. But let me tell you what happened next: his widow began to dance. She was now a wealthy woman, she exulted. She would sell the house, it would surely bring at least two million euros, she would travel to sunny climes, indulge herself in cruises, I can’t remember the full shopping list. I began to feel pity for the corpse. After this tasteless exhibition, she telephoned for an ambulance, her voice trembling, and — without so much as a thank you — showed me to the door.”

“Women,” sighed Jacob. “Such heartless creatures.”

“You are exactly right, friend. We must beware their treachery. Well, I offered 2.3 million for the house, and the paperwork awaits completion. The professor left behind no power of attorney, so the widow Van der Meer is required to make an appearance at the signing. And that will be difficult.”

“Is she already gone?”

“Not quite. Her... departure still needs to be attended to. I would value some assistance, and if you’re inclined to volunteer I will reward you more than generously. You seem to be a man with a gray future before him, yourself in some need of assistance. Am I correct, friend?”

“Gray?” said Jacob. “My future’s black, ebony. What can I do to help you?”

“This neighborhood is crowded with tourists, no one will notice two gentlemen strolling leisurely toward the Hobbemakade with a trunk on wheels. The canal there is surely sufficiently deep, and there are brief gaps in the traffic when the lights at the crossings turn red. She weighs 130 pounds at most, and is perhaps five feet nine or ten in height — or should I say that she was five-nine or -ten? I believe she must have been a jogger, since her long legs — once so alluring to Van der Meer’s goatish eyes — were too tightly muscled for an ordinary steak knife.”

“Jacob,” I said, filled with revulsion, “don’t listen to any more of this bullshit. Let’s go inside, I’m cold.”

“With the exception of a few soft spots, the rest is rather lean, tough meat. That particular part of the process is as yet incomplete, and I could certainly use your help there as well, my friend. It would be best, I think, to wait until the blood has fully coagulated. Van der Meer may well have decorated his home with the finest available artwork, but he doesn’t seem to have paid much attention to the outfitting of his bathrooms. There are a number of broken tiles in the floor, and those will have to be thoroughly scrubbed.”

“Jacob, seriously, don’t listen to this lunatic!”

“If we can’t fit her into the trunk, there’s also a carry-on bag with wheels that we can use.”

My name was called and, almost gagging, I said, “Please, Jacob, let’s go in.”

He didn’t react, his eyes and ears riveted on the stranger, who whispered, barely audibly, “It’s a nice little piece, the fabric is a Scottish tartan, so even if there is some blood, it won’t show.”

“Jacob, for God’s sake!”

“Yeah, I, ah, I’ll be right in,” he murmured distractedly.

They seated me at a little table by a window. I peered over the top of my menu and saw them standing there outside, their heads close together. When a server came to take my order, I told her I was waiting for someone. She asked if I wanted a drink, and I said I’d have a glass of the house white.

When I turned my attention back to the window, they were gone. I have to admit that it was cowardice that kept me in my chair. I couldn’t eat a thing, just sat there pouring glass after glass of wine down my throat. The place emptied out, the chairs were turned upside down and put on the tables, and I just sat there with no idea what to do.

One day, Saleem and I were on our way home. His uncle was visiting, and he’d brought with him a wrestling video featuring our hero, the Ultimate Warrior. As we chattered excitedly about the mythical man with the painted face who’d stolen our hearts, I spotted something in the distance I’d never seen before: an object shimmering like mercury streaked along the bike path, like Marvel’s Silver Surfer cruising from planet to planet on his cosmic surfboard. When I looked more closely, I realized to my disappointment that it was just an ordinary mortal on a racing bike. He approached us at dizzying speed, and — with his mirrored sunglasses, Spandex shirt and shorts, and futuristic bicycle — he was the closest thing to a professional cyclist the Bijlmer had ever seen. When he was thirty yards off, he began to slow down. He braked to a stop beside us and looked us up and down inquisitively. “Hey, boys,” he said, his tone friendly. “I saw you walking and thought, I bet those kids can help me.”

He removed his shades, and I stiffened at the sight of his eyes. Those steel-blue eyes. It was him! This was the same guy who, a few months earlier, breathing heavily and staring at me full of sick desire, had pulled his prick from his pants in the elevator. Did he recognize me too? I looked around, trying to decide which way we should run.

“I think I’m lost,” he said, smiling.

You are definitely lost, I thought. I elbowed Saleem, telling him without words to keep walking, but he just stood there, not taking the hint.

“Where you trying to get, mister?” asked Saleem politely.

The man eyed us, grinning. Anyone who saw him would have taken his expression as sympathetic, filled with warmth and humanity. But I knew the dark desires that hid behind it.

“I’m looking for the Hoogoord Apartments, but these buildings all look the same.” He began rubbing his upper thigh. And then I saw it: he had a huge boner, though he was totally casual about it, like it was built into his bike clothes and he always pedaled around the city that way. We had to get out of there. We had to get out of there right away! I poked Saleem again, harder. Pretty soon the guy would recognize me, and then he’d grab for me or...

“Hoogoord?” asked Saleem.

The man nodded patiently, and his grin broadened as my friend spoke.

“It’s in the Bullewijk,” said Saleem.

“Is that far from here?” the man asked sweetly, but I could tell he was faking, just waiting for the right moment to pounce. His hand slid to the inside of his leg, as if he wanted to call our attention to his wiener.

But Saleem was oblivious. “Not so far, not with a bike like that.”

I shoved him so hard he almost fell down.

“What’s your problem?” he demanded. “Why are you pushing me?”

I fought to keep my voice from trembling. “We have to go,” I said, loudly and clearly. “Your uncle... he’s waiting for us.”

The man looked right at me now, and it was as if an icy hand crept under my shirt and slid up my back.

“Metin, would you let me tell the man how to get to Hoogoord, please?” said Saleem, his voice overly articulate, as if to prove he wasn’t just some street rat. “My uncle can wait an extra minute.”

I pulled him close, put my mouth to his ear, and whispered, “He’s the guy I told you about, from the elevator!”

“Are you sure?”

I nodded, and said through clenched teeth, “Look at his shorts, dammit!”

And Saleem’s gaze finally dropped to the guy’s woody, still big as ever, probably stimulated by our innocence. Saleem’s breath quickened. “Shit,” he muttered, “we gotta get out of here.”

“I’ll go first,” I whispered. “You follow me.”

The man looked like he was about to dismount from his bike. “Something wrong, boys?”

“No,” I said flatly. “We have to go.”

“Yeah, we have to go,” repeated Saleem, his voice shaking. “And you” — for a second I worried my friend was about to panic — “you want to go that way.” He pointed back in the direction from which we’d come.

“That way?” the man asked.

I was sick with tension.

“Yeah, yeah,” Saleem stammered. He leaned into me and whispered, “Should we run?”

“Wait,” I said, though I didn’t know what we were waiting for. Maybe I didn’t want to throw the situation off balance. Maybe I was afraid the guy would lunge for us if we freaked out. “Just take it slow,” I said, barely audibly, and started off for Saleem’s building. “Come on,” I said, loudly now, “your uncle’s waiting for us.”

Saleem eyed the man nervously. “Sorry, mister, we gotta go.” But he stayed where he was, as if he needed the man’s permission to give up his role of helpful guide to the Bijlmer.

“Hey, fellas, what’s your problem?” The man suddenly grinned again. “You never seen a cock before?” He picked it up with his free hand, like he wanted to show us it was in good working order. “It’s a penis. Your daddy’s got one just like it. There’s nothing wrong with a penis, is there?”

Saleem took off, running like I’d never seen him run before. I set off after him, yet I could barely keep up.

“Hey, wait!” the man called after us. “You’re not upset, are you?” Next thing I knew, he was biking alongside me, totally relaxed, like he was cheering on a marathoner. “Boys, why are you running away?”

“Leave us alone!” Saleem shouted. “Leave us alone, you pervert!”

“What did I do wrong?” the man said. “I was just asking for directions.”

I sprinted as fast as I could go, but he stayed right beside me on his bike. “Hey, you look familiar, kid.” He stared at me intently. “Didn’t we share a pleasant moment in the elevator?” I tried to go faster. “Yeah, you’re the kid from the elevator!” His breathing suddenly grew heavier. “And now you’re running away.” He raised a hand. “Come on, kid, can’t we just talk for a minute? I’ve got a Nintendo at home with like a hundred games.”

I rocketed after Saleem, caught up to him, and passed him. I ran like a horde of hungry, hungry hippos were at my heels. I ran for my life. After maybe ten seconds, never slackening my pace, I risked a glance behind me, just at the moment the man gave up the chase. He braked to a stop and set off in the opposite direction, as if he’d decided at last to follow Saleem’s instructions.

I stopped running and bent over, gasping, my hands on my knees.

“What are you stopping for?” Saleem demanded.

“Gone... he’s gone.”

We walked on quickly, hearts pounding, looking back every couple of steps.

“We have to call the cops,” I said.

“First let’s tell my uncle,” said Saleem decisively.

Soon we arrived at Saleem’s building.

“I’ll call up and ask him to meet us when we get off the elevator.”

I wasn’t used to Saleem taking the lead — I was always the one who made the decisions in our friendship — but the role suited him surprisingly well. Saleem thumbed the intercom button longer than usual, then shouted that Uncle Imran should wait for us upstairs at the elevator door.

As we stepped into the car, I worried that the man might rush in behind us and pick up where he’d left off.

“Were you afraid?” asked Saleem, as the elevator finally jerked upward.

“No,” I lied.

The car came to a stop, and the door was ripped open. A giant with his head shaved bald stared in at us.

“Uncle Imran,” Saleem cried, “I am so happy to see you!”

His bulk filled the entire doorway, and his broad shoulders and huge forearms were those of a man who had been blessed with extraordinary strength. If I hadn’t known he was Saleem’s uncle, I would have shrunk back against the elevator wall.

“What has happened, Saleem?” His voice was youthful and soft, in contrast with his intimidating appearance. “Did someone hit you?”

“No, not that.”

“Then what?”

“There was a man... he showed us...”

“Showed you what? Just say it, Saleem!”

“He showed us his thing.”

“His thing?”

Saleem nodded.

“What else did he do?”

“He...” Saleem fell silent for a moment, and I wondered if I should take over the telling of the tale. Maybe Saleem didn’t dare bring up this sort of thing in front of his uncle. “He was touching it. And when we ran away, he followed us.”

“Where? Where is the bastard now?” There was rage in Imran’s voice. Rage and a determination to take revenge.

“He rode off on his bike.”

“Where to?”

“Toward Hoogoord,” said Saleem. “He was lost.”

The elevator car shuddered when Imran stepped inside. “We’ll find him.”

Imran must have been at least six foot three, and with his apelike hands he looked like a laborer who spent his working hours hauling blocks of granite. Saleem had told me he worked in a garage. He played cricket like every Pakistani man, but he also boxed, and he was a star in both sports. One day he’d knocked out his sparring partner even though the other man was wearing a helmet. Since then, no one would spar with him anymore.

“Take me to the place where you last saw him,” he said. “I’ll teach him a lesson.”

Saleem looked at me gleefully, but for some reason I felt uncomfortable. What would happen to the man if Imran found him? He wouldn’t just politely ask the guy to give up his dubious hobby. No, he’d probably feed him a knuckle sandwich.

“Which way?” asked Imran when we got out of the elevator. Saleem led the way, walking quickly. We passed a group of black boys who stared at us in awe. “What you looking at?” snarled Imran, and they immediately turned away.

We approached the path where Saleem and I had sprinted at least three hundred yards. “He followed us on his bike all this way,” said Saleem.

Imran laid a hand on my friend’s shoulder. “Listen, you point him out to me the second you see him. Don’t be afraid, he can’t hurt you now.”

But strangely enough, I wasn’t worried about the man on the bicycle anymore. I was worried about Imran, about what he would do to the man. I summoned all my courage and asked, “Uh, what are you going to do when you find him?”

Imran snorted. “Like I said, teach him a lesson.”

The way he pronounced the word lesson, his dark eyes flashing with determination, I knew it had to mean something painful, something accompanied by screams and desperate pleas. I flashed back to the gangster movies I’d seen, where things never ended well for people who were taught a lesson.

“But,” I said hesitantly, “shouldn’t we just call the cops?”

“The cops?” Imran guffawed. “No, we definitely should not call the cops.”

Encouraged by his laughter, I dared to ask: “Why not?”

He shook his head and spoke to Saleem in Urdu. From his tone, I gathered that his words meant something along the lines of: What are you doing mixed up with a sissy like this?

Imran gave me a penetrating look. “Listen, boy, the police don’t do anything but write reports. That’s all they’re good for.” He tugged at his beard as if he wasn’t completely satisfied with his explanation. “In Pakistan, the cops would beat the shit out of a bastard like this guy. Then he’d never do such a thing again.” He pounded his palm with his massive fist to emphasize the thoroughness of the Pakistani police. “But the Dutch cops will sit the guy down, give him a cup of coffee and a slice of cake, and talk the situation over with him, ask him why he did it, explain the rules, tell him little boys are fragile creatures, that sort of bullshit. And then the dirty pervert gives them an understanding nod, and they offer him a ride home. But I’m telling you: you don’t solve a sickness like this with polite conversation.” He snorted, probably with revulsion and not just because he had something stuck between his throat and his nose. “If I’ve learned anything these last years in Holland, it’s that you don’t trust family matters to the cops. Let them write their traffic tickets and sit behind their desks scratching their fat asses until it’s time to clock out for the day.”

“Uncle Imran,” Saleem said suddenly, “the same man frightened Metin in the elevator.”

“The same man? In your building? The goddamn shitbag!”

“He asked Metin if he’d ever seen a grown-up’s penis,” said Saleem, suddenly without shame. “And then he showed it to him.”

“The bastard!” snarled Imran. “And next time it’ll be you in the elevator with him, or your little brother.” A new sort of rage welled up in him. “Fucking hell, man! This is too much, this bloody pedophile has gone too far!”

As we walked on, Imran appeared more determined than ever. He was terrifying me.

After a while, Saleem said, “Here! This is where he talked to us.”

Imran examined the place as if there might still be traces of the man to be found. He scouted the area like a detective investigating a case. Then he crouched down and pulled a loose brick from the pavement. “Let’s go on,” he said, the brick clutched in his hand.

Two hundred yards farther, I almost choked with shock. The man we were looking for was sitting on a bench on a jetty overgrown with weeds, gazing out at the canal. His racing bike was leaning against the bench. I couldn’t believe my eyes. What was he still doing here? Why wasn’t he long gone? Why would he take such a risk?

One leg crossed casually over the other, he sipped from a clear plastic bottle. And as he sat there drinking peacefully, looking out at the water, apparently enjoying the afternoon sun, for a moment I couldn’t imagine there was anything really evil lurking within him. He was probably nothing more than an ordinary pencil pusher.

Saleem was a few yards out in front, and he hadn’t noticed the man through the high weeds. And though Imran was looking around alertly, he hadn’t yet seen him either.

What should I do? What else could I do but announce that I had spotted the guy we were searching for? Imran would make sure he never bothered us again. There’d be no reason for us to be afraid in our own neighborhood anymore. But what exactly would he do to the man? He’d said he would teach him a lesson, but did that mean just put the fear of God in him, or would he go further and work the guy over with his fists, like the Pakistani cops he had praised?

I hesitated and glanced at Imran, at the brick in his hand and the muscled arms that stretched the fabric of his tight black polo shirt. He walked clumsily for a boxer. He stomped his feet and looked more like a wrestler about to go on the attack.

What should I do? Saleem and his uncle had already gone past him. The man unfolded a paper sack and took out a piece of bread. He broke off a bit and tossed it into the canal. As the bread hit the water, a raft of ducks surrounded it with a great flapping of wings, but just before they got to it, a covert of greedy coots chased them off, their eyes red, their beaks sharp. The man was clearly enjoying the show, since he went on tossing bits of bread into the canal. Soon, a colony of seagulls joined the battle. The squawking and splashing got louder, swelled to a cacophony of sound. Saleem turned around to look, and his eyes slowly widened.

“That’s him!” he shouted. “Uncle Imran, there he is!”

Not asking if he was sure, Imran stepped from the pavement onto the strip of grass that bordered the canal. He marched heavily toward the jetty, began to run, like a warrior who’s suddenly recognized his enemy in the distance. He must have stepped on a pool of bird shit, because his legs flew out from under him and he lost his grip on his brick, which arced into the weeds. Imran’s huge body landed with such a loud thud that it attracted the attention of not only the man but also the coots and ducks and gulls. He hauled himself upright, roaring with anger. He brushed off his jeans, now spotted with greenish-brown stains, and, cursing, wiped the bird shit from his hands onto his pants. And then he set off again at top speed, aiming for the bicyclist. Like a gladiator confidently entering the arena for his final battle, he leaped onto the jetty, which creaked and wobbled beneath his weight, and flung himself at the man, who by now, shocked by Imran’s approach, had gotten to his feet and instinctively raised his hands.

Imran quickly grabbed the man by the front of his shirt and yanked him close. No one who might have witnessed such a scene would have expected the giant bald man to speak before punching his insignificant opponent’s lights out, yet that’s exactly what he did. Imran gestured wildly toward the two of us and demanded, “Why were you bothering these boys?” The question didn’t match his wrathful appearance. It was as if the gladiator had stopped himself at the last moment to make sure the figure who’d appeared out of the dust clouds of the Colosseum was in fact another gladiator and not some innocent deliveryman who’d accidentally stepped through an open doorway into the arena.

“Who, me?” the man mumbled.

“My nephew says you’ve been waving your dick in his and his friend’s faces.”

The man stared at us, astonished. “What? No! I... I only asked them for directions.”

Imran pulled him closer, and the man’s heels left the ground. He dangled on his tiptoes, like a doll. “Are you sure?” It wasn’t a question. It was a warning that threatened impending disaster, as if that hadn’t already been announced.

“I was lost! I swear, I was lost, I only asked the boys for help!”

Imran shook him violently. “Don’t lie to me, you bastard!”

“Let me go,” the man whined. “You’re hurting me. Let me go, I didn’t do anything!”

“You showed two little boys your fucking cock!” barked Imran. “And then you followed them, you pervert.”

The man tried to worm out of Imran’s grip, swatting ineffectually at the hand that held him tight. When that had no effect, he jerked away, screeching. His fluorescent bike shirt tore, and he fell backward, leaving Imran holding nothing but a scrap of fabric, glaring at it in confusion like he was doing an impression of King Kong. The man scrabbled away, trying to escape.

“You’re not going anywhere,” growled Imran. “I’m not finished with you.” He crouched down and grabbed the ripped shirt, but the man kept crab-walking backward, and the shirt tore off completely, leaving him naked from the waist up, flopping around on the jetty like a fish out of water, about to be gutted and fileted. Imran took hold of his wrist and hauled him to his feet as if he was weightless. The man struggled to get loose, pulling and hitting the hand that held him captive.

“Stop it!” Imran ordered, and he hit the man on the ear. “Stay still!”

But the man failed to obey, went on shrieking that Imran had to let him go.

Imran dealt a second blow to the bicyclist’s mouth with the back of his hand. The man cowered in Imran’s grip, his hands clapped over his lips, and then he seemed to go insane. He unleashed a fearsome cry, then sank his teeth into the hand that still held him and shook his head wildly, like a hungry caiman ripping the flesh of its prey in the brown waters of the Amazon.

It was weird to hear our mighty protector yelling like a wounded beast. His voice tormented, he snarled, “You’ll pay for that!” He balled his right hand into a fist and smashed it into the man’s left eye. There was the sound of bone cracking, and a hellish scream.

“My eye!” the man wailed. “My eye!”

At that moment, I felt an intense sense of pity for the man. I turned to Saleem, filled with concern, but he was hopping up and down, swinging his arms like a charged-up Roman citizen who’d spent the whole week looking forward to this battle and was now enjoying it to the max.

The man staggered, and only remained on his feet because Imran was holding him up. Suddenly Imran noticed that his hand was bleeding. He stared at it, unbelieving, his massive chest heaving. Then he returned his disgusted attention to the bicyclist and spat, “If you gave me AIDS, you fuck, I’ll kill you!”

Imran swiveled his torso and hip and let loose another right-handed wallop. This one caught the man full in the nose, and there came again the crunch of bone. The man sank to his knees.

We had to do something before Imran really did kill him. We had to stop the slaughter. I yelled at Saleem, but he didn’t react, just stood there transfixed by his uncle’s merciless attack. Maybe he was reminded of the many times we’d watched our hero, the Ultimate Warrior, on the mat. But this was no theatrical wrestling match: a human being was actually being torn apart, and all we could do was watch.

As Imran kicked the man in the ribs, I grabbed Saleem’s arm. “We have to stop him! He’s gonna kill the guy!”

Only then did Saleem face me, the color drained from his face. “Yeah,” he muttered, “but... what can we do?”

“Pull him off,” I said. I dragged Saleem onto the jetty. As we came up behind Imran, he kicked the guy again, then a third time. It sounded like all the air was leaking out of the man. I shoved Saleem forward and said, “Do something!” But he just stood there, watching his uncle go to town. So I pushed him aside and approached Imran myself.

“Stop,” I shouted, “you’re killing him!” But Imran seemed not to hear me.

And right then I heard a shout from the apartment building on the far side of the canal.

“Hey, stop it!” a voice called. “Leave the man be!”

That gave me the encouragement I needed. “Please,” I said, “stop, before you kill him. Have mercy!”

Imran whirled around, his expression furious, and when his eyes met first mine and then Saleem’s, it was as if the gladiator’s mask slipped from his face and he morphed back into a concerned uncle. Imran was still holding the bicyclist by a limp wrist. He glanced down at his victim one last time, then let him go. The man collapsed onto the jetty. His thin body convulsed.

Imran took a step toward us. “I’m sorry,” he said softly, “I... I lost control.” He looked at his bloody hand and wiped it on his shirt. “He shouldn’t have bitten me. I was only going to rough him up a little.”

The man dragged himself to a sitting position, looked around in a daze, and dropped his head to his knees. He sat there defeated, folded almost in half to protect his battered rib cage from further damage, his spine so slender it seemed it might snap in two at any moment. Again I felt pity wash over me.

Imran fetched his water bottle from the bench and held it out to him. “Drink.”

Without looking up, the man took the bottle. As he drank, blood dripped from his nose down his chin and onto his naked chest. I figured his nose must be broken. As if he’d only now noticed it, he waved at a fanny pack lying on the bench. I picked it up, unzipped it, and found a ring of keys, three foil-wrapped rubbers, lip balm, and a pack of tissues.

Groaning, the man got to his feet. He seemed only barely conscious, with nothing left to lose. One eye was puffed shut, his nose was unnaturally bent and continued to bleed. Not saying a word, he held out his hand to me, palm up. I hardly dared to look at him, but as I gave him the pack of tissues, I couldn’t avoid the sight of his chest all covered with blood. With a trembling hand, he pulled a tissue from the pack and pressed it to his nose. The white paper immediately reddened.

“You’ll never see me again,” he said. He dropped the bloody tissue to the jetty. “As far as I’m concerned, this never happened.”

Imran nodded. “None of it happened.”

The man picked up his water bottle, staggered to the bench for his fanny pack, and strapped it to his waist with some difficulty. Then, breathing heavily, he righted his bicycle and pushed it through the weeds to the path. Moaning, holding onto the handlebars with one hand, pressing the other to his ribs, he pulled himself onto his saddle.

Without looking back, he pedaled away.

Many of the streets in the Jordaan — Carnation, Laurel, Rose — are named after flowers. Misnamed, really, because the neighborhood was originally a wasteland, with long, narrow alleys and canals that dead-ended where the world-famous seventeenth-century Canal Ring begins. Nowadays, you need to be well-off to live in the shadow of the Western Church’s bell tower, since the realtors do their best to make it seem as if the Jordaan is a part of the Canal Ring.

If Felix leaned out his living room window, he’d be looking right at the church’s Westertoren, which for the older Jordaaners would be good reason to burst out in song. Ever since the neighborhood began to attract a demographic that was still disparagingly referred to as yuppies, the tower had been considered an annoyance, thanks to the fact that, every fifteen minutes, day and night, its carillon played a little tune. For the tourists, the tower was a beacon, guiding them to the Anne Frank House, which stood just around the corner from the church, on the Prinsengracht. Every day they lined up, waiting their turn to go inside, the line usually stretching along the canal to the tower. Felix’s across-the-street neighbor, who was generally to be found hanging out the front window of her apartment, observing the passing scene below, never ceased to be surprised by the enormous interest in the Frank family’s WWII hideout.

“There’s nothing to see in there,” she told anyone who would listen. “I should charge admission to come look at my house. I’d be rich!” She loved daydreaming of wealth, and the fact that Anne Frank had come to a tragic end — which gave the Frank House a dramatic attraction hers couldn’t hope to compete with — didn’t seem to interest her.

As he turned into his street, Felix wondered if he ought to honk his horn to notify his neighbor of his arrival. Probably not necessary, he decided. She peered out her window the whole damn day, so she’d be sure to see him. Especially today, since she knew where he had gone.

Except, to his surprise, she wasn’t at her usual post. When he pulled up to his garage door and, just to be sure, looked up, he saw that her window was closed. The garage door, on the other hand, stood wide open.

Felix lived on the second floor of a building whose ground level had originally served as a sort of workshop for a company that manufactured lampshades. The company’s name still appeared on the gable in white script letters. At the time he moved in, the garage was being used to house a street organ belonging to the previous tenant, an old friend of Felix’s grandmother. When he left for a nursing home, Felix finagled permission to move into his apartment. Not long after that, the street organ disappeared, and he was permitted — for an extra monthly fee — to take over the ground floor. These days, a storage area like that was worth its weight in gold. Hardly a week went by that he wasn’t asked to sublet part of the space. His upstairs neighbor had long been permitted to stash his bicycle there and Felix had graciously agreed to continue that arrangement, and he had more recently succumbed to a plea from a couple who lived across the street and pedaled their kids to school and other activities on a traditional Dutch cargo bike, which had to have someplace to sit when it wasn’t doing taxi duty. In point of fact, he had succumbed to the wife after first refusing an identical request from the husband. Felix thought the husband, who claimed to be some kind of financial consultant, was a bit of a bullshitter, and — as a cop — he didn’t care for bullshit.

With a little maneuvering, it was possible to squeeze both his Cordoba and the cargo bike into the space. The upstairs neighbor complained that this made it practically impossible for him to get his bicycle in and out, but he was one of those Amsterdammers who have raised complaining practically to an art form.

Felix saw that the woman from across the street was standing beside her cargo bike, her back to him, and he got out of his car to see if she needed help.

“You just getting back or heading out, Iris?” he asked.

His voice startled her, and she whirled to face him. “Felix! Have you heard the news?”

“Are congratulations in order?”

He knew she was being considered for a promotion to a senior position at the bank where she worked, but various factors were delaying a final decision. Maybe she’d finally gotten the approval she was hoping for.

But he let go of that idea when he saw the expression on her face.

“You haven’t heard,” she said, and began to cry.

“Hey, what’s wrong?”

She was still wearing her work clothes, and she wiped away tears with the sleeve of her gray pin-striped suit. What could have happened? One of the kids fell down the stairs? Her husband got caught messing around with one of her girlfriends?

“Fetty’s dead.”

“Dead?” He felt a shock ripple through his body, and for a moment he found that he couldn’t breathe. Fetty couldn’t possibly be dead. He had a thick wad of cash for her inside his jacket pocket.

His hand went to his chest, and he felt the bulge of the money. Was it possible for a pile of bills to have stabbed him? The pain slowly ebbed.

“What are you saying? Fetty’s dead?”

“It’s so awful!”

She had no idea how awful it was. The lottery money belonged to Fetty, the neighbor he’d expected to see leaning out her window. It was no wonder she was called Fetty. She was shapeless and fat from head to toe, and she could barely make it down the stairs to the street. Felix was one of the neighbors who ran regular errands for her. Aunt Corrie, who lived right next door, helped with the everyday chores, and Felix took care of Fetty’s weekly luxuries. Every Saturday, he stopped at the cigar store to buy her two packs of Stuyvesants. Filtered, she always reminded him, as if she was afraid the company might have suddenly started manufacturing unfiltered Stuyvesants. So, two packs of smokes, with filters, a copy of the weekly magazine My Secret, and two scratchers. The lottery tickets always had to be Lucky Sevens, because — according to her — that was her lucky game.

Her invariable habit was to open one of the packs of cigarettes in his presence and offer him the first Stuyvesant, which he always politely refused, at which point she lit it and smoked it herself, taking shallow puffs that she immediately exhaled. One of his aunts had smoked exactly the same way.

The next part of their Saturday-afternoon ritual was her asking him for a coin, which she would use to eagerly attack her scratchers. Meanwhile, Felix would page listlessly through the new issue of the magazine, which seemed more often than not to be filled with stories of pregnant women who weren’t sure if the baby was their husband’s or the neighbor’s and other nonsense that would, in his opinion, have been better kept secret.

Their routine usually ended with Fetty’s disappointed cry: “No luck!” This time, though, their visit had unfolded differently.

Felix thought at first that she’d had a heart attack. But her explosive reaction turned out to be pure excitement, not a medical emergency.

“Felix, look! Two fifty-thousands! My God, all those zeroes! And look, the last number ends with zeroes too. It can’t be another fifty thousand, can it? I can’t look. You finish it for me.”

He had scratched away the last bit of foil, and the two of them sat there and stared at the winning ticket looking back up at them from the table. The winning ticket Felix had taken to The Hague and cashed in for his housebound neighbor.

“It’s a winner! A winner!” Fetty had screamed, and she’d grabbed Felix by the arms, hauled him up from his chair, and danced around him like a schoolgirl. “We won! We won!”

Later, he’d run into Aunt Corrie on the street. “You two were certainly kicking up a rumpus,” she’d said. “I was afraid the glasses in my kitchen cabinets would get smashed. Did she have a little too much to drink, Felix?”

“Now, Corrie, the woman’s entitled to a little fun once in a while,” he’d said. And that was where he’d left it. He wasn’t going to tell the neighborhood Fetty’d won fifty thousand euros.

Mother says I have to take a shower. She says she can smell me, and that other people will say I stink and blame her. Mother’s been nagging me more and more lately. She says I eat too many eggs. Eggs are bad for my cholesterol, according to her. The blood vessels in my brain will get all sludgy. She also wants me to go back to getting my meds by injection, because the pill I’m supposed to take every week is bad for my stomach. I don’t like needles, and the pills never actually get to my stomach. I don’t need them anyway, but try explaining that to someone who believes God knows best and medication can make the negative thoughts in your head disappear.

Mothers. There ought to be a law.

Against mothers and caseworkers.

“Goodbody, every afternoon,” Arno began his usual spiel. After two years of it, Lisa didn’t even notice the joke anymore. Wim, their captain, steered the boat — long enough to hold eighty passengers, low enough to sail beneath the city’s innumerable bridges — past the train station. Back in the kitchen, Lisa pulled soft drinks from the fridge and arranged them on her cart.

“The Central Station is built on an artificial island,” Arno said, first in English, then in Dutch and French and German. “It was designed by the same architect who designed the Rijksmuseum, which is where you can find our most important Rembrandt paintings.”

Pulling the cork from a bottle of Chianti, Lisa glanced outside. The sky was gray, and there were wisps of mist along the embankment. When Arno paused for breath, she heard raindrops patter on the boat’s glass roof.

She thought back to that morning, that lovely morning with Timo. They hadn’t gotten out of bed until ten thirty. She’d cracked open a can of Jus-Rol croissants and slid them into the oven. They’d only been together for three months, but Lisa was already spending so much time at Timo’s place she had practically moved in. Her toiletries were in his bathroom, half her clothing hung in his wardrobe, she felt so comfortable she knew their relationship was the real thing.

“On your right is NEMO, the science museum, and underneath it is the highway to Amsterdam-North.”

The passengers gaped at the vast green building that rose up from the water like the prow of an enormous oil tanker.

When she was with Timo, she lost all sense of time. After breakfast, they’d put on Netflix and continued watching Stranger Things, the series they’d begun last night. When you were in love, all you wanted to do was snuggle up together, all day long. And so they did, until the middle of the afternoon, when Timo had pointed to his wristwatch and she realized it was past time for her to leave for work.

They continued along the river, “the majestic five-star Amstel Hotel on your left, the Rolling Stones’ favorite place to stay when they’re in town.” The passengers were always on the lookout for celebrities. In fact, was that Robbie Williams working up a sweat on the treadmill in the glass-walled fitness center? No, too tall. Probably just some businessman.

After they passed the hotel, the captain turned them around and set a course for the Herengracht. When she could make out the distant bridge that marked the entrance to the world-famous Grachtengordel — the Canal District — Lisa felt a rush of pleasure well up from deep inside her. Not because of the bridge or the canal, but because she knew it wouldn’t be long now before—

First, of course, would come the Willet-Holthuysen Museum with its imposing latticed windows to the right, and then “the relatively new Waldorf Astoria hotel” on the left, but after that it would be barely half a minute before Wim throttled back the Princess Beatrix almost to a standstill to give the passengers time to point their cameras off to the left for one of the cruise’s highlights: beneath the graceful stone bow of the bridge over the Reguliersgracht, six more bridges could be seen, each of them illuminated, stretching all the way south to the Lijnbaansgracht, seemingly stacked up one atop the other. Yes, the Seven Bridges did indeed make for a lovely picture.

Her own personal highlight came almost at the same moment as the photo op: some thirty yards before it, there was something to be seen that seven hundred bridges couldn’t compete with — as soon as the boat slowed down and the passengers turned their attention to the left, she could blow unseen kisses to the handsome young man on the old houseboat not six feet to their right. For those ten or fifteen seconds, it would be as if she was home, with Timo, done with work for the evening, and the love that would wash over her would be so intense, so delicious, it would carry her through the second half of the cruise.

They were almost there: the first passengers were getting to their feet, their phones at the ready, and Lisa turned to face the scene where, just a few hours earlier, she and Timo had relished their warm, sweet croissants. The skipper slowed the boat. Another fifteen yards, ten. She ran a hand through her hair. Five more yards, and she would be able to see into the living room. Three...

Lisa’s shoulders slumped. Timo wasn’t standing at the window, waiting for her. He was on the couch, asleep. The TV was still on. She sighed, but her disappointment quickly melted into tenderness. He’s even cute when he’s sleeping, she thought.

It was natural that her boyfriend would need to catch up on his sleep over the weekend. He rose at six every morning and put in at least fifty hours a week at work, sometimes sixty. His own ad agency — he’d wanted that since high school. There were times that he and his team slaved over a pitch until two in the morning.

Behind her, the cameras began to click. She turned around, and almost got a selfie stick in her face.

The Princess Beatrix returned to Pier F at five thirty. That gave Lisa half an hour to prepare the boat for the six o’clock cruise. She’d have to hurry. The moment the last of the four o’clock passengers were gone, she gathered up the empty bottles, dumped the trash in a large plastic bag, replaced the dirty place mats with fresh ones, checked the tables and the restroom. Arno helped her restock the drinks, and she wound up with a couple of minutes to sneak a cigarette on the back deck before the next load of passengers boarded.

In her pockets we found a key to a bicycle lock, a plastic tram card, a wrapped peppermint from a restaurant, and a torn ticket stub for the Pathé De Munt’s showing of 12 Years a Slave. I’d seen that movie myself. It had disturbed me. Black people in America were treated like animals. Nadia’s ticket brought back the powerful scenes of torture.

At the Meer en Vaart police station, my report got a lukewarm reception. They wanted to know if I’d visited the parents yet. That task fell to me, since I was “one of them,” as the guys put it, and better suited to deliver the terrible news. My colleagues automatically assumed I must know every Moroccan in the city. You knew one, you knew ’em all, right? That was why I’d been hired in the first place, wasn’t it, to put my Mocro background to good use, to offer the police an entrée into what was otherwise for them a closed-off world. Around the station they spoke of affirmative action, but never when I was within earshot. I got that from Ali, who was Turkish and told me everything. “They have loose lips when I’m around,” he said. “It’s not like they want me to hear it. It’s just they don’t even notice I’m there anymore.”

Linda climbs on behind me, and Sayid and me aim our scooters for the Osdorper Ban.

Here and there on the Ban are these clusters of shops. They got clusters like this all over Osdorp and the other New-West neighborhoods: used to be that the little groceries and cigar stores and bakeries were for the white people, but now the whites who still live in these parts go to the big supermarkets. So you got Turks roasting chickens on the sidewalks and stores selling hearing aids and Pakistani dry cleaners with their hawala banks in the back.

Patrick told Sayid and me he was making a run tonight. Patrick brags about shit like that, because he wants to impress us. He’s been bragging about shit like that for a couple months now, but we never took him serious until somebody said we oughta take him serious. Told us he’s been moving bags of cash back and forth between this one hawala here and another one in Rotterdam for months now, and he got the gig ’cause he’s about the whitest white guy ever lived, he even drives a fucking Ford Focus. He brags about it in this weird robot way he’s got, like he’s not really human, you know, and when we kid him about it, he’s the one laughs the loudest, but not exactly real, like he don’t know what’s funny and what ain’t, like he’s just guessing. He says he’s saving up so he can ask Linda to marry him. I say maybe he oughta try going steady before he starts talking about getting hitched, but he says he already thought it through, and in the movies girls go for romance and bust out crying if you ask ’em to marry you. So it’s better you ask ’em to marry you than go steady.

We park our scooters outside Snackbar Van Vliet. Sayid won’t go into Van Vliet, he says they cook the pork in the same fryers as the french fries, but it’s a good place to leave the scooters — there’s always scooters parked there, and I figure we better leave our scooters someplace they won’t stand out. I want to be professional about this, and I think that includes we put our scooters someplace they won’t stand out.

I tell Sayid and Linda we’ll wait across the street. Patrick will make his pickup at the dry cleaners, and then he has to take the ring road, so he’s gotta come right past here. There’s a parked van we can hang out behind. I tell Linda I’ll let her know when I see Patrick’s car, and I keep my eyes fixed on the dry cleaners. I check my phone and it’s almost five. It’s starting to get dark — it’s winter, but not cold. Feels like it’s gonna rain.

Without turning my head, I ask Sayid what’re the odds we’d get pulled over if we tried driving for the hawalas.

“One in four, gangster.”

“Maybe one in three,” I say. “That’s what you call racial profiling. What a world, right?”

“Are you two gangsters?” asks Linda.

I say society has made us gangsters. And then a blue Ford Focus pulls into the parking space in front of the dry cleaners.

“There he is,” I say.

Behind me, I hear Sayid puking. Linda gives out like a little scream. I shoot a quick glance over my shoulder and tell him he’s an asshole. I ask him does he want to be rich or not.

“I want to be rich,” he says.

I signal Linda to come closer. “You see that blue car? That’s him. So you step out in the street and wave him over, and when he rolls down his window you have a little chitchat. That’s all you got to do. You understand me?”

She says she understands me. She’s not retarded, she says.

“You’ll get your money tomorrow,” I say. I stay behind the van with Sayid, Linda goes to the curb, and she does just fine, plays a little with her phone, then looks up when she figures Patrick’s on his way. She makes like she spots him and waves, steps out in the street, and Patrick pulls up in front of the van.

“Shit, it’s working,” says Sayid. “Shit, man!”

Linda walks around the Focus to the driver’s side, where Patrick’s rolled his window down, and she leans in, her elbows on the window frame, her ass in those tight jeans sticking out behind her.

“We grab the bag now?” asks Sayid.

I look at him. I say we get in the car and make him drive to a good place.

Sayid asks what’s a good place. He says we can just as easy grab the bag of money now and head for our scooters.

I look across the street at our scooters parked in front of Van Vliet. I say Sayid’s idea would call too much attention to us. “We were gonna do that, we should’ve parked the scooters on this side of the street.”

“Come on, gangster, you didn’t think about that?”

I tell him to shut up, okay? “Come on,” I say, “let’s climb in.” I go up to the passenger side of the Focus and yank on the back door handle, but the back door is locked. Sayid bumps into me. I look at him. Linda’s still standing there with her ass in the air.

“What the fuck, gangster?” says Sayid.

I grab the piece from my waistband, circle around to the driver’s side, and pull Linda out of the way. She gives another little scream. I touch the front end of the gun to her head and tell Patrick to unlock the doors.

“Three hundred,” Linda says.

Patrick looks from me to Linda, scared-like. “Don’t hurt her,” he says, and I hear the locks pop up. I pull the driver’s-side back door open and nod to Sayid he should get in on the other side, next to Patrick, and I shove Linda into the car and she yells not so hard or she’ll go straight to five hundred. I get in after her and put the gun to the back of Patrick’s head and tell him to drive.

He doesn’t react.

He’s got his hands on the wheel, but he don’t do nothing.

I glance to my right. Linda looks kind of cramped, pressed up against this big laundry bag. Nylon, colored vertical stripes. My old man uses the same kind of bags to store the stuff he sells at the open-air market.

So that’s the cash.

Patrick just sits there.

I tap the back of his head with the end of the gun barrel. “Pat,” I say, “drive.”

He says he’s not afraid of me.

Sayid, sitting next to him, looks from him to me and back again.

“Pat,” I say, “you gotta drive.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” he says again, like the weird robot he is. I figure that’s another reason he got this gig with the Pakis. He’s so white he’ll never get pulled over, and he’s a weird robot you can’t scare.

I point the piece at Linda.

Patrick watches in the rearview mirror. “Don’t hurt her,” he says.

I tell him Linda wants to marry him, but I’ll blow her brains out if he doesn’t drive.

Patrick starts the Focus and drives, and Linda says now she wants a thousand euros.

The Museum Square is a ghost town at this hour — all that’s missing is a lonely tumbleweed blowing across the broad grassy area bordered by the Rijksmuseum to the northeast, the van Gogh and Stedelijk museums to the north, and the Concertgebouw to the southwest. The tourists are tucked away in their hotels, or hunched over glasses of beer in the brown cafés on and around the Leidseplein, or roaming the Red-Light District in search of excitement, adventure, action. But there is nothing for them here. The museums and the city’s concert hall are all long shuttered for the night. The occasional car engine rumbles from the Paulus Potterstraat, a knot of locals chatters as they glide along the Hobbemastraat behind the Rijks on their black bicycles, homeward bound, and then silence again descends... before being irrevocably broken by the arrival of three boisterous young men, twentysomethings, dressed almost identically in T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers. Two of the three sport shaggy haircuts, the third has shaved his head.

“Whaddaya wanna do, Tommy?” says the bald one, whose name is Roy. There is a tattoo of a heart and an arrow on his left arm.

“Marco,” says Tommy, “that cunt told you where the party is, right?”

“Yeah, lemme think. It’s around here somewhere.”

“Not in there.” Tommy waves at the looming bulk of the national museum, the Rijks. “You guys ever been inside that dump?”

“On a field trip once,” bald Roy shrugs. “I tried to ditch it, but they dragged me along. About a million stupid old paintings and whatever. Almost as boring as dinner with my folks.”

“That shit’s worth millions, though.”

“I wonder anybody ever broke in there? You got any idea, Marco?”

Marco shakes his head. He gazes thoughtfully at the gigantic building, scratches his armpit, and shrugs.

“Man,” says Roy, “I’m wasted. Let’s get a cab.”

“You see a cab around here?”

“Anyway, where we going? Why don’t you call her, Marco? You got her number back at the Jimmy Hoo, right?”

“Jimmy Woo.”

“Whatever. You call her, get the goddamn address. I’ma stretch out for a sec.”

Roy reaches halfway along the tall plastic letters that spell out I amsterdam — the I and the am in bright red, everything else a glossy white that almost glows beneath the starry sky — grabs the crossbar of the letter t, and hoists himself up to sit with his back against the t and his feet propped on the top of the s. The modern font of the letters clashes with the museum’s classical architecture, but who gives a shit, the tourist board put several of these fuckers up around the city for the American backpackers and middle-aged Germans and hordes of Japanese with their clicking camera shutters, and they lap it up like dogs attacking a bowl of kibble.

Marco reaches for his phone. “Shit, what was her name again?” He stares at the screen as if waiting for Siri to answer the question.

“I Amsterdam,” says Tommy, using the bottom curve of the s to boost himself up onto the big red m. “That doesn’t fucking mean anything.”

Roy laughs. “Look at the colors, asshole. Read the red letters twice — it says I am Amsterdam.”

“Bullshit,” Tommy responds. “Read the red letters twice, it says, I am I Amsterdam. Now who’s an asshole, asshole?” Then he shakes off the argument and says, “You got any left?”

“Any what? X?”

Tommy rolls his eyes. “No, any licorice. Asshole.”

Roy fishes a small metal box from the pocket of his jeans and shakes it, letting the others hear the rattle from within. He slides it open and sings, in off-key English, “The Candyman can, ’cause he mixes it with love and makes the world taste good.” He takes out a little yellow pill with a smiley face stamped on one side, swallows it dry, and tosses the box to Tommy.

Marco is scrolling through his contacts. “That guy she was with,” he says, more to himself than his friends, “Raffie? Robbie? Ronnie?”

A white delivery van with Van Galen lettered on its side turns from the Honthorststraat onto the square and pulls up beside the shuttered snack kiosk. Its headlights go out, the purr of its engine dies, the driver’s door swings open, and a thin figure emerges.

“Hey, look who’s here,” says Roy, his face lighting up in a grin. “It’s Vinnie Van and his minivan! Good ol’ Vinnie — shit, what’s he doing here in the middle of the night? C’mon, boys, let’s check it out.”

Marco puts away his phone. Roy drops down from his perch atop the t, Tommy rolls off the m and lands on his feet like a cat. The three of them advance toward the delivery van.