Aat would do anything he could to help his friend, no matter what, no questions asked. A dozen years after Vientiane, Walter had located Aat’s brother who panicked and ran from an unpaid gambling debt. It hadn’t occurred to Jan van de Steen that his brother’s reputation alone protected him from any real harm. Three weeks after he fled Holland, Walter found him in Canada, returned him to his brother’s care and into the arms of his grateful wife and children. Walter refused to take a fee, even expenses. “We’re friends,” was all he said to Aat. And now Walter asked the Dutchman for a favor-check out Bergen op Zoom to see if Harry Levine was there. Walter gave his friend no details, no reason, no explanation. These things were not required. Van de Steen said he would call back when he knew something. When he did, less than an hour later, he laughed. Harry Levine had indeed gone to Bergen op Zoom and-this is what Aat van de Steen found so funny-he registered at a hotel under his own name. Walter thanked him and said, “Aat, I’ll call you when I get there.”
“Ik zal je meenemen naar Yab Yum dan krjg je de beurt van je leven!” said the Dutchman. “How wonderful it will be, my friend.” Walter looked at the phone in his hand and chuckled. He understood nothing van de Steen said, but he had heard of the Yab Yum, the most elegant and expensive of Holland’s brothels.
Late that same afternoon, Walter left Billy’s, rode the ferry over to the Rock and flew from St. Thomas to New York, where he boarded a Lufthansa flight to Amsterdam, with a stop at Frankfurt. He slept most of the way across the Atlantic. He liked Lufthansa’s Business Class. He’d flown it before. They let you sleep unless you specifically asked to be awakened. Unlike so many other carriers, that practically insisted you partake of each and every service offered with your $12,000 round trip, the Germans were content to let you spend five-hundred bucks an hour to sleep. In his younger days, there had been a time when Walter was a terrified flyer. Back then, he couldn’t help it. He always considered the serious possibility of a fiery crash, ending, naturally, in his own death. Before he met Gloria, such thoughts afflicted him whenever he boarded a commercial flight. In his opinion every plane he got on could quite easily go down. One time, he flew from Detroit to Chicago on an airplane that also had onboard the entire Detroit Pistons basketball team. It was a short flight, not much more than a half-hour in the air, and the weather was perfect. But for the whole way he pictured the headlines in the next day’s Chicago Tribune: Detroit Pistons Die in Plane Crash. Buried deep in the story, he saw the sentence: Among the dead was an unidentified man. It was strange, he thought, he never once worried about flying in an open helicopter in Vietnam, with bullets and rockets whizzing by all around him. But once he headed into the Friendly Skies, the worst-case scenario came immediately to mind. As time went by, he lost that fear. Once, he even helped Gloria to fly comfortably, and she was as scared a flyer as ever bought a ticket. Now, only the tiniest remnant of his fear of flying remained.
No matter how he felt about his flight, landing at Schiphol, Amsterdam’s airport, was always a pleasant event. There were some airports-they were everywhere it seemed-where the landing pattern required a corkscrew approach to a runway devilishly nestled between jagged mountain peaks. He still hated that. Schiphol, on the other hand, was in a country that didn’t appear to have a hill more than ten or fifteen feet high anywhere. The airport had once been a lake. The Dutch drained it, at the beginning of the twentieth century, constructing a complicated pattern of small canals, irrigation ditches and pumping stations that spread for miles. Land reclamation was a high art in the Netherlands and Schiphol provided a canvas the whole world could admire. The lakebed, dry as it could be, at first became a military base. It was turned into a wartime airport during World War One. Because, in truth, it was little more than a mud field, French pilots who never liked it at all called it Schiphol-les-bains. The name stuck for many years until state-of-the-art renovation made it suitable for the modern fleets of passenger jets and prepared Schiphol Airport to become the busiest in Europe.
What with the change in time zones from America to Europe, turning one day into another just by, arbitrarily it seemed, skipping the night, plus Dutch Customs being very touchy in the midst of continued terrorist threats, and then a change of trains in Rotterdam, it wasn’t until late afternoon, technically the next day in Holland, that Walter arrived in Bergen op Zoom. Door-to-door, the trip had taken more than 30 hours. Despite sleeping across the Atlantic, he was tired, but he had work to do and no time for rest. There weren’t many hotels to stay in. Aat had told Walter he found him at the first place he looked. Walter was not surprised. Harry Levine was no different from the rich kids who ran away from Houston or Kansas City or wherever their parents lived, to New York City. They always took a room at The Plaza. Maybe figuring that Harry Levine would go to Bergen op Zoom wasn’t easy, but once done, finding him there was child’s play.
At the Mercure de Draak, just as Aat had reported, Walter found Harry Levine registered under his own name. Harry was an innocent, a babe in the woods. He carried a passport saying he was Harry Levine. So, what other possibility was there? It probably never occurred to him to try to register under another name. Walter had seen people who were pretty good at running and hiding make the same mistake many times. He called Harry’s room from a house phone in the lobby. “Mr. Levine’s room, please,” he asked the operator. “Yes sir,” she said, and an instant later the phone rang.
“Hello,” said Harry, tentatively. He had considered not answering at all.
“I’m Walter Sherman. I’m coming up.” Harry started to say something. Walter cut him off. “Not on the phone. I’ll be right up.”
“Nice to meet you too,” said Walter incredulously, shaking Harry’s hand. Christ! he thought. This guy greeted me with a “glad to meet you . ” Nobody’s glad to meet anyone under circumstances like these. A worried Walter wondered what he had gotten himself into.
“Call down to the desk and tell them you’re checking out. Throw your stuff together. Let’s get out of here.” He stood there and looked at him-Harry Levine, target. He looked pretty much like his photos, every bit the average American male in his thirties. A little taller, a little darker and a little better looking perhaps, but easy to spot, for sure. If those looking for him had any sense of what they were doing, they would find him in no time.
Not everyone Walter had searched for looked like their photographs. Often, the pictures he was given were too old to be of much use. This was especially so with teenagers. A family photo of a fourteen-year-old girl-one taken at home with the whole family gathered around a Thanksgiving meal or a Christmas tree-bears little resemblance to the same girl, three years later, sexed-up, high as a kite, with a couple of new piercings, a tattoo and colored hair. Over many years, many cases, Walter had developed quite a skill identifying live people from photographs that would be useless to others. The fact that the others always seemed to include the authorities had guaranteed a brisk marketplace, a deep vein in Walter’s gold mine of a profession. He really could do what others couldn’t. Some pictures of some targets never went far away. Walter had never really gotten over being fooled so badly by the photos of a man he looked for, and eventually found, four years ago. Leonard Martin was his name and every cop in America was trying to catch him. Martin fooled them all and Walter had allowed himself to be buffaloed just like they were. That wasn’t supposed to happen. The pictures of Leonard Martin and the real Leonard Martin were so dissimilar… Just thinking about it bothered him all over again-Leonard Martin, Michael DelGrazo, the cowboy with the floppy hat… Sonofabitch, he thought. Here I am standing in the doorway of Harry Levine’s room in one of the oldest hotels in the world, and all I’m thinking about is-Leonard Martin.