I knelt at the altar rail. He stepped in front of me and offered his blessing. “You always did trust the wrong people, my son,” he said, crossing my forehead with his thumb.
“Don’t I know it.”
“Who’s hunting you this time? The usual suspects?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t stick around long enough to find out, but I’ve got a couple of ideas.”
A guided tour moved down the aisle behind us, and a woman speaking German was spouting facts about the church’s hand-carved choir screen. When they were out of earshot, I whispered, “You got my message. Thanks.”
“You mean the one about being in deep shit or the one about making a purchase?” He chuckled. “A bit of both, I guess, huh?”
“We both know you wouldn’t have it any other way, Rog.”
“As long as the money’s right.” He blessed me again and started to turn away, saying, “Meet me in the sacristy.”
He was still chuckling as he walked back across the altar and disappeared through a door carved of some exotic wood that reminded me of Brazilian cherry.
I made the sign of the cross, got up, and circled the altar to a side door that led me straight into the sacristy. Roger was throwing off his vestment. Underneath it he wore blue jeans and a plaid shirt. There was a bottle of altar wine standing alongside a set of glass cruets, and he took a long, satisfying swallow. He smacked his lips and set the bottle back down.
He must have seen the disgusted look on my face, because he said, “Being a man of the cloth is tough work. Hell, what do think this wine is for? Follow me.”
We walked to the back of sacristy. A set of double doors opened into a closet filled with vestments: chasubles, cassocks, stoles. Roger pushed them aside, and not with a particularly delicate touch. Behind the vestments hung a burlap curtain. Behind the curtain was a slab of thick wood equipped with a handgrip: a door. What the hell was a door doing at the back of the vestment closet in the sacristy of a five-hundred-year-old church? I was about to find out.
Beyond the door lay a pitch-black tunnel, but there was a pair of gas lanterns, which Roger struck up with a Bic lighter.
“Hold these,” he said, thrusting the lanterns into my hand. He turned back, rearranged the closet and curtain, and reset the door. He grabbed one of the lanterns and headed down a tunnel built from heavy timbers and blocks of stone. “Watch your step.”
He meant that literally, because less than ten seconds later we were descending a staircase made from roughshod lumber that looked as old as the church.
“What is this place?”
Roger grunted. “This church has gone up in smoke more than a couple of times, and it hasn’t always been an act of God or a forgotten holy candle that caused it. Amsterdam may seem like the picture of peace and neutrality, but if you think the Catholics haven’t been prepared for the occasional hostilities over the centuries, think again.”
“This leads back to the canals, doesn’t it?” I said. My logic was astounding, and obviously Roger thought so as well, because he answered with another less-than-reverent grunt. “So how’d an American expatriate with a suspect history find out about this place, Rog?” It wasn’t really important, but my curiosity was getting the better of me.
“Two years ago I was minding my own business at a tavern in the old city when a guy sat down on the bar stool next to me. We got to talking. He’d been the caretaker of the church grounds since he was sixteen. Six beers later and he was telling me all his dirty little secrets, including the one about the imfamous sacristy tunnel. I toured it a couple of days later. Never know when you’ll need an exit strategy.”
We stopped talking. The tunnel leveled out. It smelled of mold and condensation. The ceiling dripped. I counted 687 paces. The door at the base of the staircase was a sheet of steel and badly rusted.
Roger took a deep breath, cracked the door, and peered out. A shock of blue and perfectly placid water stretched out across Singelgracht, the innermost canal in Amsterdam’s magical ring of canals. I stepped up next to him and looked out. A dagger of ivory moonlight speared the water, and a line of houseboats was moored along the banks. Far more inviting was the twenty-two-foot-long motorboat tied up to a concrete landing no bigger than my back porch back home.
“Our ride,” Roger said. “Climb aboard.”
Three steps took me from the tunnel to the landing and into the hull of the boat. The outboard, I noticed, was a meticulously clean and highly polished two-horsepower Tohatsu. Leave it to Roger. He never settled for anything but the best, even if the launch looked like it would capsize in a light summer breeze.
I took a seat in the stern. Roger pulled the tunnel door closed behind him. He climbed aboard, positioned himself next to the tiller, and kicked the engine to life. It purred like a kitten.
“It’s a twenty-minute ride,” he said. “Let’s hope we don’t have to outrun anyone.”
CHAPTER 9
Roger piloted the launch away from the church dock and into the murky waters of Singelgracht. Houseboats crowded the canal as they did all the waterways in Amsterdam. I was grateful for the company — you didn’t launch an attack from a houseboat — but I surveyed every one of the boats as if the rule was just made to be broken.
We passed Durgerdam on the left. A lighthouse perched on a steel-girder lattice, a sentinel of days gone by and a monument to Holland’s perpetual battle with the sea.
He steered the dinghy into IJmeer, a lake and bird sanctuary, and eased back on the throttle. A family of ducks gave us a wide birth. Geese squawked and scattered.
“I’ll bet you’re sorry right about now that you chose Amsterdam for your coming-out party, huh, Jake?” Roger chuckled softly.
“Hell, man, I’ve worked with the MEK a dozen times in the past. So have you,” I answered. “And I’m going to need them once I get where I’m going.”
“It’s not the MEK, Jake. At least it’s not Moradi. But he’s getting old. Hard to know who to trust these days. Me, I couldn’t care less about the politics.”
“Good,” I said.
I studied the lowland terrain that seemed to stretch far into the night, like a shadow at the edge of dawn. Egrets stalked along the shore. Cars and trucks scurried on the roads, busy as ants. Something in the op had already soured, and the danger reeked like a toxic odor. Roger had always been a man to think on the fly — hell, that’s what had kept him alive during some of the most harrowing dogfights in air force history — so I appreciated his sense of style in slipping out of Amsterdam via the water.
“Politics or not, I know enough about your MO over the years, Jake. I don’t give a damn what you’re up to, you know that, but it doesn’t take much to connect the dots, I guess you know that, too.”
A pelican bobbed in the water right in front of us, a head-on collision in the making. At the last second, it burst into the air, a blur of white-and-brown feathers skimming skyward.
I reached inside my coat and withdrew an envelope. I tossed it in Roger’s direction and said, “See what you can connect with this.”
Roger let the tiller have its own way for a moment and used both hands to collect the envelope. He hefted it, giving the weight of it his professional appraisal, and eyed me slyly. He opened the flap and peeked inside. His posture stiffened just slightly, which was a good sign coming from a man who had seen as much as Roger had seen, and a soft whistle wafted across the water. He closed the envelope and took control of the tiller again.