“We are dropping the car off. Out of the city a bit. Then Cherry will meet us at location, and drive us to meeting in his car.”
“And this is all going to be peaceful.”
“Absolutely. And because why? You have the cash! That’s all they want. And even with fake bank draft—good deal for them. Forty thousand dollars for no work? Not much! Afterwards—Cherry will leave us back off at the garage, with the picture—and then—we go out! we celebrate!”
Gyuri muttered something.
“He is complaining about the garage. Just so you know. He thinks it is a bad idea. But—I do not want to go in my own car, and last thing we need is to get hit with a parking ticket.”
“Where is the meeting?”
“Well—bit of a headache. We have to drive out of the city and then back in. They insisted on their own place and Cherry agreed because—well, really, it is better. At least, on their ground, we can count on no interference from the cops.”
We had gotten to a lonelier stretch of road, straight and desolate, where the traffic was sparse and the streetlamps were farther apart, and the bracing crack and sparkle of the old city, its lighted tracery, its hidden design—silver skates, happy children beneath the tree—had given way to a more familiar urban bleakness: Fotocadeau, Locksmith Sleutelkluis, signs in Arabic, Shoarma, Tandoori Kebab, gates down, everything closed.
“This is the Overtoom,” said Gyuri. “Not very interesting or nice.”
“This is my boy Dima’s parking garage. He has put out the Full sign for tonight so no one to bother us. We will be in the long term—ah,” he screamed, “blyad,” as a honking van cut in front of us from nowhere, forcing Gyuri to swerve and slam on the brakes.
“Sometimes people here are little bit aggressive for no reason,” said Gyuri gloomily as he put on his blinker and made the turn into the garage.
“Give me your passport,” Boris said.
“Why?”
“Because, am going to lock it in the glove box for when we get back. Better not to have it on you, just in case. I am putting in mine, too,” he said, holding it up for me to see. “And Gyuri’s. Gyuri is honest born American citizen—yes,” he said, over Gyuri’s laughing interjection, “all very nice for you, but for me? very very hard to get an American passport and I really do not want to lose this thing. You know, don’t you Potter,” he said, looking at me, “that you are required now by law in Netherlands to carry ID at all times? Random street checks—non-compliance punished. I mean—Amsterdam? What kind of police state thing is this? Who would believe it? Here? Me—never. Not in one hundred years. Anyway”—shutting and locking the glove box—“better a fine and talk our way out of it than the real thing on us if we are stopped.”
viii.
INSIDE THE PARKING GARAGE, which vibrated depressingly with olive-green light, there were a number of empty spaces in the long-term area despite the Full sign. As we nosed into the space a man in a sports coat lounging against a white Range Rover threw his cigarette in a spit of orange cinders and walked toward the car. His receding hairline, his tinted aviators and his taut military torso gave him the wind-whipped look of an ex-pilot, a man who monitored delicate instruments at some test site in the Urals.
“Victor,” he said, when we got out of the car, crushing my hand in his. Gyuri and Boris received a thump on the back. After terse preliminaries in Russian, a baby-faced curly-headed teenager climbed out of the driver’s seat and was greeted, by Boris, with a slap on the cheek and a jaunty seven note whistle: On the Good Ship Lollipop.
“This is Shirley T,” he said to me, rumpling the corkscrew curls. “Shirley Temple. We all call him that—why? Can you guess?”—laughing as the kid, unable to help it, smiled in embarrassment, displaying deep dimples.
“Do not be deceived by looks,” said Gyuri to me quietly. “Shirley looks like baby but he has as much onions as any of us here.”
Politely, Shirley nodded at me—did he speak English? it didn’t seem so—and opened the back door of the Range Rover for us and the three of us climbed in—Boris, Gyuri, and me—while Victor Cherry sat up front and talked to us from the passenger seat.
“This should be easy,” he said to me formally as we pulled out of the garage and back out onto the Overtoom. “Straightforward pawn.” Up close his face was broad and knowing, with a small prim mouth and a wry alertness that made me feel somewhat less agitated about the logic of the evening, or the lack of it: the car changes, the lack of direction and information, the nightmare foreignness. “We are doing Sascha a favor and because of that? He is going to behave nice to us.”