new shapes, like a child’s plane or tank or wall made from the little plastic blocks.
But because the glue of the bricks is temporary, they can be isolated. Where you cannot break a wall, you can shatter a single brick. I just needed to find the right brick.
I sat and I drank a soda at an outside table at a café near the sprawling street bazaar of the Albert Cuyp Market, on the south side of Amsterdam, in the dim gleaming sunlight. The air smelled of fish, of herbs, of flowers. I read a Dutch paper and tried to put myself in the mind of Peter Samson, the Canadian smuggler I was on a Company job a year earlier. Samson was a nice guy as smugglers went: paid his fees, paid his bribes, didn’t kill people. I’d stung two Ukrainian weapons traffickers who were attempting to ship contraband uranium to a radical group in New York. The uranium turned out to be fake (counterfeited by them), as was the radical group (counterfeited by me). Samson was held blameless in the grapevine of the criminal community when the two men ended up dead in a Prague apartment, killed by their business partners who didn’t take their failure well. They were screwed by their carelessness and greed and breaking of the bare-bones trust. Networks form because of necessity and a distant trust.
As Samson, I would still be distantly trusted by the man I wanted to see. I’d found him by calling my old contacts in Prague and learning that one of them had moved six months ago to lovely Amsterdam.
I was on my third soft drink when he came ambling along, walking past the tent stalls, shoulders hunched, a cigarette dangling from his mouth like a long, broken fang. I’d positioned myself because I figured he would come this way, through the street market, to reach his little store. I could imagine the smell of the lavender oil in his hair, the slightly rotten smell of garlic on his breath. I remembered he chewed garlic lozenges with enthusiasm because he was scared of colds.
He went inside one of the doors close to the corner. A sign announced a watch repair shop called, in tribute to his craft and his adopted homeland’s national color, CLOCKWORK ORANGE. He closed the door behind him.
I crossed to the door, counted to thirty. It opened up onto the ground-floor business: a tiny old CD and record shop, where the guitar riffs of an old Clash album drilled the smoke-scented air. In the store a bored punk sat at the cash register, waiting for punk rock to come back. Stairs led up to the Clockwork Orange. I went up and tested the door. It swung open. He hadn’t locked it, because his hands were full of bags.
I stepped inside. I saw Gregor setting the bags on a wooden counter. Glass counters showed vintage and collectible watches. A table, covered with black velvet, held a snowfall of gleaming gears, and next to them lay watch-repair tools, craftsman’s tools, laid out in straight lines, ready for work. Gregor was very good at bringing order to chaos.
I shut the door behind me.
He turned and stared at me for twenty long seconds, and then he said, “I know you.” He had seen me only a few times, but watchmakers are detail people. “From Prague.” He did not look overjoyed. “You knew the Vrana brothers.”
“Yes. They tried to cheat me. But I guess I wasn’t as pissed about it as their partners were.” The Vranas had been the morons trying to grab from me money that didn’t exist, for goods that didn’t exist, and the sting I’d run helped the Company empty their bank accounts. Their business partners took it hard. They expressed their disappointment with an ax.
“They buried them in a single coffin,” Gregor said. “No need for two.”
Gregor had been a bit player with the Vranas, a guy whose business they used as a cover to mule goods out of eastern Europe to Britain.
“I remember you were always worried you’d catch a cold. You like the climate in Amsterdam better?” I asked.
“It’s hardly tropical, but I sneeze less.” He was nervous because he couldn’t know what role I’d played in the death of the men he’d known. His eyes narrowed. “Samson from Toronto. Is that still your name?”
I smiled. “It’s the only one I got.”
He didn’t smile back. He tested whether I was armed by saying, “I need a lozenge,” and