Текст книги "The Goldfinch "

Автор книги: Donna Tartt

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Chapter 12.

The Rendezvous Point

i.

THE DAYS LEADING TO Christmas were a blur, since thanks to illness and what amounted to solitary confinement I soon lost track of time. I stayed in the room; the Do Not Disturb sign stayed on the door; and television—instead of providing even a false hum of normalcy—only racketed-up the variform confusion and displacement: no logic, no structure, what was on next, you didn’t know, could be anything, Sesame Street in Dutch, Dutch people talking at a desk, more Dutch people talking at a desk, and though there was Sky News and CNN and BBC none of the local news was in English (nothing that mattered, nothing pertaining to me or the parking garage) though at one point I had a bad start when, flipping through the channels past an old American cop show, I stopped astonished at the sight of my twenty-five-year-old father: one of his many non-speaking roles, a yes-man hovering behind a political candidate at a press conference, nodding at the guy’s campaign promises and for one eerie blink glancing into the camera and straight across the ocean and into the future, at me. The multiple ironies of this were so layered and uncanny that I gaped in horror. Except for his haircut and his heavier build (bulked up from lifting weights: he’d been going to the gym a lot in those days) he might have been my twin. But the biggest shock was how straightforward he looked—my already (circa 1985) criminally dishonest and sliding-into-alcoholism father. None of his character, or his future, was visible in his face. Instead he looked resolute, attentive, a model of certainty and promise.

After that I switched the television off. Increasingly, my main contact with reality was room service, which I ordered up only in the blackest pre-dawn hours when the delivery boys were slow and sleepy. “No, I’d like Dutch papers, please,” I said (in English) to the Dutch-speaking bellhop who brought up the International Herald Tribune with my Dutch rolls and coffee, my ham and eggs and chef’s assortment of Dutch cheeses. But since he kept turning up with the Tribune anyway, I went down the back stairs before sunrise for the local papers, which were conveniently fanned on a table just off the staircase where I didn’t have to pass the front desk.

Bloedend. Moord. The sun didn’t seem to rise until about nine in the morning and even then it was hazed and gloomy, casting a low, weak, purgatorial light like a stage effect in some German opera. Apparently the toothpaste I’d used on the lapel of my coat had contained peroxide or some other bleaching agent since the scrubbed spot had faded to a white halo the size of my hand, chalky at the outer edges, ringing the just-visible ghost of Frits’s cranial plasma. At about three thirty in the afternoon the light began to go; by five p.m. it was black out. Then, if there weren’t too many people on the street, I turned up the lapels of my coat and tied my scarf tight at the neck and—taking care to keep my head down—ducked out in the dark to a tiny, Asian-run market a few hundred yards from the hotel where with my remaining euros I bought pre-wrapped sandwiches, apples, a new toothbrush, cough drops and aspirin and beer. Is alles? said the old lady in broken-sounding Dutch. Counting my coins with infuriating slowness. Click, click, click. Though I had credit cards I was determined not to use them—another arbitrary rule in the game I’d devised for myself, a completely irrational precaution because who was I kidding? what did it matter, a couple of sandwiches at a convenience shop, when they already had my card at the hotel?

It was partly fear and partly illness that clouded my judgment, since whatever cold or chill I’d caught wasn’t going away. With every hour, it seemed, my cough got deeper and my lungs hurt more. It was true about the Dutch and cleanliness, Dutch cleaning products: the market had a bewildering selection of never-before-seen items and I returned to the room with a bottle featuring a snow white swan against a snow-topped mountain and a skull-and-crossbones label on the back. But though it was strong enough to leach the stripes out of my shirt it wasn’t strong enough to lift the stains at the collar, which had faded from liver-dark blobs to sinister, overlapping outlines like bracket fungi. For the fourth or fifth time I rinsed it, eyes streaming, then wrapped it and tied it in plastic bags and pushed it to the back of a high cupboard. Without something to weigh it down, I knew it would float if I dropped it in the canal and I was afraid to take it to the street and shove it in a rubbish bin—someone would see me, I’d be caught, this was how it would happen, I knew it deeply and irrationally like knowledge in a dream.

A little while. What was a little while? Three days tops, Boris had said at Anne de Larmessin’s. But then he hadn’t factored in Frits and Martin.

Bells and garlands, Advent stars in the shop windows, ribbons and gilded walnuts. At night I slept with socks, stained overcoat, polo-neck sweater in addition to coverlet since the counterclockwise turn of radiator knob as advertised in the leather-bound hotel booklet didn’t warm the room enough to help my fever aches and chills. White goosedown, white swans. The room reeked of bleach like a cheap Jacuzzi. Could the chambermaids smell it in the hall? They wouldn’t give you more than ten years for art theft but with Martin I’d crossed the border into a different country—one way, no return.

Yet somehow I’d developed a workable way of thinking about Martin’s death, or thinking around it, rather. The act—the eternity of it—had thrown me into such a different world that to all practical purposes I was already dead. There was a sense of being past everything, of looking back at land from an ice floe drifted out to sea. What was done could never be undone. I was gone.

And that was fine. I didn’t matter much in the scheme of things and Martin didn’t either. We were easily forgotten. It was a social and moral lesson, if nothing else. But for all foreseeable time to come—for as long as history was written, until the icecaps melted and the streets of Amsterdam were awash with water—the painting would be remembered and mourned. Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world.

An act of God: that was what the insurance companies called it, catastrophe so random or arcane that there was otherwise no taking the measure of it. Probability was one thing, but some events fell so far outside the actuarial tables that even insurance underwriters were compelled to haul in the supernatural in order to explain them—rotten luck, as my father had said mournfully one night out by the pool, dusk falling hard, smoking Viceroy after Viceroy to keep the mosquitoes away, one of the few times he’d tried to talk to me about my mother’s death, why do bad things happen, why me, why her, wrong place wrong time, just a fluke kid, one in a million, not an evasion or cop-out in any way but—I recognized, coming from him—a profession of faith and the best answer he had to give me, on a par with Allah Has Written It or It’s the Lord’s Will, a sincere bowing of the head to Fortune, the greatest god he knew.

If he were in my shoes. It almost made me laugh. I could imagine him holed up and pacing all too clearly, trapped and prowling, relishing the drama of the predicament, a framed cop in a jail cell as portrayed by Farley Granger. But I could imagine just as well his second-hand fascination at my plight, its turns and reversals as random as any turn of the cards, could imagine only too well his woeful shake of the head. Bad planets. There’s a shape to this thing, a larger pattern. If we’re just talking story, kid, you got it. He’d be doing his numerology or whatever, looking at his Scorpio book, flipping coins, consulting the stars. Whatever you said about my dad, you couldn’t say he didn’t have a cohesive world view.

The hotel was filling up for the holidays. Couples. American servicemen talking in the halls with a military flatness, rank and authority audible in their voices. In bed, in my opiated fevers, I dreamed of snowy mountains, pure and terrifying, alpine vistas from newsreel films of Berchtesgaden, great winds that crossfaded and blew with the windwhipped seas in the oil painting above my desk: tiny tossed sailboat, alone in dark waters.

My father: Put down that remote control when I’m talking to you.

My father: Well, I won’t say disaster, but failure.

My father: Does he have to eat with us, Audrey? Does he have to sit at the table with us every fucking night? Can’t you make Alameda feed him before I get home?

Uno, Battleship, Etch-A-Sketch, Connect Four. Some green army figures and creepy-crawly rubber insects I’d got in my Christmas stocking.

Mr. Barbour: Two flag signal. Victor: Require Assistance. Echo: I am altering my course to starboard.

The apartment on Seventh Avenue. Rainy-day gray. Many hours spent blowing in and out monotonously on a toy harmonica, in and out, in and out.

On Monday, or maybe it was Tuesday, when I finally worked up the nerve to pull up the blackout shade, so late in the afternoon that the light was going, there was a television crew on the street outside my hotel waylaying Christmas tourists. English voices, American voices. Christmas concerts at Sint Nicolaaskerk and seasonal stalls selling oliebollen. “Almost got hit by a bicycle but apart from that it’s been a fun time.” My chest hurt. I drew the blackouts again and stood in a hot shower with the water beating down until my skin was sore. The whole neighborhood sparkled with fairy-lit restaurants, beautiful shops displaying cashmere topcoats and heavy, hand-knit sweaters and all the warm clothes I’d neglected to pack. But I didn’t even dare phone down for a pot of coffee thanks to the Dutch-language newspapers I’d been thrashing through since well before sunrise that morning, one featuring a front page photo of the parking garage with police tape across the exit.

The papers were spread on the floor on the far side of my bed, like a map to some horrible place I didn’t want to go. Repeatedly, unable to help myself, in between drowsing off and falling into feverish conversations I wasn’t having, with people I wasn’t having them with, I went back and scoured them over and over for Dutch-English cognates which were few and far between. Amerikaan dood aangetroffen. Heroïne, cocaïne. Moord: mortality, mordant, morbid, murder. Drugsgerelateerde criminaliteit: Frits Aaltink afkomstig uit Amsterdam en Mackay Fiedler Martin uit Los Angeles. Bloedig: bloody. Schotenwisseling: who could say, although, schoten: could that mean shots? Deze moorden kwamen als en schok voor—what?

Boris. I walked to the window and stood, and then walked back again. Even in the confusion on the bridge I remembered him instructing me not to call, he’d been very firm on the point though we’d parted in such haste I wasn’t sure he’d explained why I was supposed to wait for him to contact me, and in any case I wasn’t sure it mattered any more. He’d also been very firm on the point that he wasn’t hurt, or so I kept reminding myself, though in the swamp of unwanted memories that bombarded me from that evening I kept seeing the burnt hole in the arm of his coat, sticky black wool in the roll of the sodium lamps. For all I knew, the traffic police had caught him on the bridge and hauled him in for driving without a license: an admittedly shitty break, if indeed the case, but a lot better than some of the other possibilities I could think of.

Twee doden bij bloedige… It didn’t stop. There was more. The next day, and the next, along with my Traditional Dutch Breakfast, there was more about the killings on the Overtoom: smaller column inches but denser information. Twee dodelijke slachtoffers. Nog een of meer betrokkenen. Wapengeweld in Nederland. Frits’s photograph, along with the photos of some other guys with Dutch names and a longish article I had no hope of reading. Dodelijke schietpartij nog onopgehelderd… It worried me that they’d stopped talking about drugs—Boris’s red herring—and had moved on to other angles. I’d set this thing loose, it was out in the world, people were reading about it all over the city, talking about it in a language that wasn’t mine.

Huge Tiffany ad in the Herald Tribune. Timeless Beauty and Craftsmanship. Happy Holidays from Tiffany & Co.

Chance plays tricks, my dad had liked to say. Systems, spread breakdowns.

Where was Boris? In my fever haze I tried, unsuccessfully, to amuse or at least divert myself with thoughts of how very likely he was to show up at just the moment you didn’t expect him. Cracking his knuckles, making the girls jump. Turning up half an hour after our state issued Proficiency Exam had begun, widespread classroom laughter at his puzzled face through the wire reinforced glass of the locked door: hah, our bright future, he’d said scornfully when on the way home I’d tried to explain to him about standardized tests.

In my dreams I couldn’t get to where I needed to be. There was always something keeping me from where I needed to go.

He had texted me his number before we left the States, and though I was afraid to text him back (not knowing his circumstances, or if the text could be traced to me somehow), I reminded myself continually that I could reach him, if I had to. He knew where I was. Yet, hours into the night, I lay awake arguing with myself: relentless tedium, back and forth, what if, what if, what harm could it do? At last, at some disoriented point—night light burning, half-dreaming, out of it—I broke down and reached for the phone on the nightstand and texted him anyway before I had the chance to think better of it: Where are you?

Over the next two or three hours I lay awake in a state of barely controlled anxiety, lying with my forearm over my face to keep the light out even though there wasn’t any light. Unfortunately, when I woke from my sweat-soaked sleep, somewhere around dawn, the phone was stone dead because I’d forgotten to switch it off, and—reluctant to negotiate the front desk, to ask if they had chargers for loan—I hesitated for hours until finally, mid-afternoon, I broke down.

“Certainly, sir,” said the desk clerk, hardly looking at me. “United States?”

Thank God, I thought, trying not to hurry too much as I walked upstairs. The phone was old, and slow, and after I plugged it in and stood for a while, I got tired of waiting for the Apple logo to come up and went to the minibar and got myself a drink and came back and stared at it a bit more until at last the lock screen came up, old school photo I’d scanned in as a joke, never had I been so glad to see a picture, ten year old Kitsey flying midair at the penalty kick. But just as I was about to type in the pass code, the home screen popped off, then fizzed for about ten seconds, bands of black and gray that shifted and broke into particles before the sad face came on and clicked with a queasy down-whir to black.

Four-fifteen p.m. The sky was turning ultramarine over the bell gables across the canal. I was sitting on the carpet with my back against the bed and the charger cord in my hand, having methodically, twice, tried all the sockets in the room—I’d switched the phone on and off a hundred times, held it to the lamp to see if maybe it was on and the display had just gone dark, tried to re-set it, but the phone was fried: nothing happening, cold black screen, dead as a doornail. Clearly I’d short-circuited it; the night of the garage it had gotten wet—drops of water on the screen when I took it from my pocket—but though I’d had a bad minute or two waiting for it to come on, it had seemed to be working just fine, right up until the moment I tried to put a charge in it. Everything was backed up on my laptop at home, apart from the only thing I needed: Boris’s number, which he’d texted me in the car on the way to the airport.

Water reflections wavering on the ceiling. Outside, somewhere, tinny Christmas carillon music and off-key carolers singing. O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, wie treu sind deine Blätter.

I didn’t have a return ticket. But I had a credit card. I could take a cab to the airport. You can take a cab to the airport, I told myself. Schiphol. First plane out. Kennedy, Newark. I had money. I was talking to myself like a child. Who knew where Kitsey was—out in the Hamptons, for all I knew—but Mrs. Barbour’s assistant, Janet (who still had her old job despite the fact that Mrs. Barbour had nothing much she needed assisting with, any more), was the kind of person who could get you on a plane out of anywhere with a few hours’ notice, even on Christmas Eve.

Janet. The thought of Janet was absurdly reassuring. Janet who was an efficient mood system all her own, Janet fat and rosy in her pink shetlands and madras plaids like a Boucher nymph as dressed by J. Crew, Janet who said excellent! in answer to everything and drank coffee from a pink mug that said Janet.

It was a relief to be thinking straight. What good was it doing Boris, or anyone, me waiting around? The cold and damp, the unreadable language. Fever and cough. The nightmare sense of constraint. I didn’t want to leave without Boris, without knowing if Boris was okay, it was the war-movie confusion of running on and leaving a fallen friend with no idea what worse hell you were running into, but at the same time I wanted out of Amsterdam so badly I could imagine falling to my knees upon disembarkation at Newark, touching my forehead to the concourse floor.

Telephone book. Pencil and paper. Only three people had seen me: the Indonesian, Grozdan, and the Asian kid. And while it was quite possible Martin and Frits had colleagues in Amsterdam looking for me (another good reason to get out of town), I had no reason to think the police were looking for me at all. There was no reason they would have flagged my passport.

Then—it was like being struck in the face—I flinched. For whatever reason I’d been thinking that my passport was downstairs, where I’d had to present it at check-in. But in truth I hadn’t thought of it at all, not since Boris had taken it away from me to lock in the glove box of his car.

Very very calmly, I set down the phone book, making an effort to set it down in a manner that would look casual and unstudied to some neutral observer. In a normal situation it was straightforward enough. Look up the address, find the office, figure out where to go. Stand in line. Await my turn. Speak courteously and patiently. I had credit cards, photo ID. Hobie could fax my birth certificate. Impatiently, I tried to beat back an anecdote Toddy Barbour had told at dinner—how, upon losing his passport (in Italy? Spain?) he’d been required to haul in a flesh-and-blood witness to vouch for his identity.

Bruised inky skies. It was early in America. Hobie just breaking for lunch, walking over to Jefferson Market, maybe picking up groceries for the lunch he was hosting on Christmas Day. Was Pippa in California still? I imagined her tumbling over in a hotel bed and reaching sleepily for the telephone, eyes still closed, Theo is that you, is something wrong?

Better a fine and talk our way out of it in case we are stopped.

I felt ill. To present myself at the consulate (or whatever) for a round of interviews and paperwork was asking for far more trouble than I needed. I hadn’t put a time limit on waiting, on how long I would wait, and yet any movement—random movement, senseless movement, insect-buzzing-around-a-jar movement—seemed preferable to being cooped up in the room even one minute more, seeing shadow people out of the corner of my eye.

Another huge Tiffany ad in the Tribune, bringing me Season’s Greetings. Then on the opposite page a different ad, for digital cameras, scrawled in artsy letters and signed Joan Miró:

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life

Centraal Station. European Union, no passport control at the borders. Any train, anywhere. I pictured myself riding in aimless circles through Europe: Rhine falls and Tyrolean passes, cinematic tunnels and snowstorms.

Sometimes it’s about playing a poor hand well, I remembered my dad saying drowsily, half asleep on the couch.

Staring at the telephone, lightheaded with fever, I sat very still and tried to think. Boris, at lunch, had spoken of taking the train from Amsterdam to Antwerp (and Frankfurt: I didn’t want to go anywhere near Germany) but, also, to Paris. If I went to a consulate in Paris to apply for a new passport: maybe less likelihood of connection with the Martin stuff. But there was no getting away from the fact that the Chinese kid was an eyewitness. For all I knew I was on every law-enforcement computer in Europe.

I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face. Too many mirrors. I switched off the water and reached for a towel to pat my face dry. Methodical actions, one by one. It was after nightfall when my mood always darkened, when I began to be afraid. Glass of water. Aspirin for my fever. That too always began to climb after dark. Simple actions. I was working myself up and I knew it. I didn’t know what warrants Boris had out on him but though it was worrying to think he’d been arrested, I was a lot more worried that Sascha’s people had sent someone else after him. But this was yet another thought I could not allow myself to follow.

ii.

THE NEXT DAY—CHRISTMAS Eve—I forced myself to eat a huge room-service breakfast even though I didn’t want it, and threw away the newspaper without looking at it since I was afraid if I saw the words Overtoom or Moord one more time there was no way I could make myself do what I had to. After I’d eaten, stolidly, I gathered the week’s accumulation of newspapers on and around my bed and rolled them up and put them in the trash basket; retrieved from the cupboard my bleach-rotted shirt and—after checking to see the bag was tied tight—slipped it into another bag from the Asian market (leaving it open, for carrying ease, also in case I happened to spot a helpful brick). Then, after turning up my coat collar and tying my scarf over it, I turned around the sign for the chambermaid, and left.

The weather was rotten, which helped. Wet sleet, blowing in sideways, drizzled over the canal. I walked for about twenty minutes—sneezing, miserable, chilled—until I happened upon a rubbish bin on a particularly deserted corner with no cars or foot traffic, no shops, only blind-looking houses shuttered tight against the wind.

Quickly I shoved the shirt in and walked on, with a burst of exhilaration that sped me four or five streets along very rapidly, despite chattering teeth. My feet were wet; the soles of my shoes were too thin for the cobblestones and I was very cold. When did they pick up the garbage? No matter.

Unless—I shook my head to clear it—the Asian market. The plastic bag had the name of the Asian market on it. Only a few blocks from my hotel. But it was ridiculous to think this way and I tried to reason myself out of it. Who had seen me? No one.

Charlie: Affirmative. Delta: I am proceeding with Difficulty.

Stop it. Stop it. No going back.

Not knowing where a taxi stand was, I trudged along aimlessly for twenty minutes or more until finally I managed to flag down a taxi on the street. “Centraal Station,” I told the Turkish cab driver.

But when he left me off in front, after a drive through haunted gray streets like old newsreel footage, I thought for a moment he’d taken me to the wrong place since the building from the front looked more like a museum: red-brick fantasia of gables and towers, bristling Dutch Victoriana. In I wandered, amidst holiday crowds, doing my best to look as if I belonged and ignoring the police who seemed to be standing around nearly everywhere I looked and feeling bewildered and uneasy as the great democratic world swept and surged around me once more: grandparents, students, weary young-marrieds and little kids dragging backpacks; shopping bags and Starbucks cups, rattle of suitcase wheels, teenagers collecting signatures for Greenpeace, back in the hum of human things. There was an afternoon train to Paris but I wanted the latest one they had.

The lines were endless, all the way back to the news kiosk. “This evening?” said the clerk when I finally got to the window: a broad, fair, middle aged woman, pillowy at the bosom and impersonally genial like a procuress in a second rate genre painting.

“That’s right,” I said, hoping I didn’t quite look as sick as I felt.

“How many?” she said, hardly looking at me.

“Just one.”

“Certainly. Passport please.”

“Just a—” voice husky with illness, patting myself down; I’d hoped they wouldn’t ask—“ah. Sorry, I don’t have it on me, it’s in the safe back at the hotel—but—” producing my New York State ID, my credit cards, my Social Security card, pushing them through the window. “Here you go.”

“You require a passport to travel.”

“Oh, sure.” Doing my best to sound reasonable, knowledgeable. “But I’m not leaving till tonight. See—?” indicating the empty floor at my feet: no luggage. “I’m seeing my girlfriend off, and since I’m here I thought I’d go ahead and get in line and buy the ticket if that’s all right.”

“Well—” the clerk glanced at her screen—“you have plenty of time. I’d suggest you wait and purchase your ticket when you return this evening.”

“Yes—” pinching my nose, so I wouldn’t sneeze—“but I’d like to purchase it now.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

“Please. It’d be a huge help. I’ve been standing here for forty-five minutes and I don’t know what the lines will be like tonight.” From Pippa—who had gone all over Europe by rail—I was fairly sure I remembered hearing they didn’t check passports for the train. “All I want is to buy it now so I have time to run all my errands before I come back this evening.”

The clerk looked hard at my face. Then she picked up the ID and looked at the picture, then again at me.

“Look,” I said, when she hesitated, or seemed to hesitate: “You can see it’s me. You have my name, my Social Security card—here,” I said, reaching in my pocket for pen and paper. “Let me duplicate the signature for you.”

She compared the two, side by side. Again she looked at me, and the card—and then, all at once, seemed to make up her mind. “I can’t accept this documentation.” Pushing my cards back to me through the window.

“Why not?”

The line behind me was growing.

“Why?” I repeated. “It’s perfectly legitimate. It’s what I use in lieu of passport to fly in the U.S. The signatures match,” I said, when she didn’t answer, “can’t you see?”

“Sorry.”

“You mean—” I could hear the desperation in my voice; she was meeting my gaze aggressively, as if defying me to argue. “You’re telling me I’ve got to come all the way back here tonight and stand in line all over again?”

“Sorry, sir. Can’t help you. Next,” said the clerk, looking over my shoulder at the next passenger.

As I was walking away—pushing and bumping my way through crowds—someone said behind me: “Hey. Hey, mate?”

At first, disoriented from the ticket window, I thought I was hallucinating the voice. But when, uneasily, I turned, I saw a ferret-faced teenager with pink-rimmed eyes and a shaved head, bouncing up and down on the toes of his gigantic sneakers. From his darting side-to-side glance I thought he was going to offer to sell me a passport but instead he leaned forward and said: “Don’t try it.”

“What?” I said uncertainly, glancing up at the policewoman standing about five feet behind him.

“Listen, mate. Back and forth a hundred times when I had the thing, and they never checked once. But the one time I didn’t have it? Crossing into France? They locked me up, didn’t they, France immigration jail, twelve hours with they rubbish food and rubbish attitude, horrible. Horrible dirty police cell. Trust me—you want your documents in order. And no funny shit in your case either.”

“Hey, right,” I said. Sweating in my coat, which I didn’t dare unbutton. Scarf I didn’t dare untie.

Hot. Headache. Walking away from him, I felt the furious gaze of a security camera burning into me; and I tried not to look self-conscious as I threaded through the crowds, floating and woozy with fever, grinding the phone number of the American consulate in my pocket.

It took me a while to find a pay phone—all the way at the other end of the station, in an area packed with sketchy teenagers sitting in quasi-tribal council on the floor—and it took even longer for me to figure out how to make the actual call.

Buoyant stream of Dutch. Then I was greeted by a pleasant American voice: welcome to the United States consulate of the Netherlands, would I like to continue in English? More menus, more options. Press 1 for this, press 2 for that, please hold for operator. Patiently I followed the instructions and stood gazing out at the crowd until I realized maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to let people see my face and turned back to the wall.

The telephone rang so long I’d drifted off into a dissociated fog when suddenly the line clicked on, easy American voice sounding fresh off the beach in Santa Cruz: “Good morning, American Consulate of the Netherlands, how may I help you?”

“Hi,” I said, relieved. “I—” I’d debated giving a false name, just to get the information I wanted, but I was too faint and exhausted to bother—“I’m afraid I’m in a jam. My name is Theodore Decker and my passport’s been stolen.”

“Hey, sorry to hear that.” She was keying in something, I could hear her on the other end. Christmas music playing in the background. “Bad time of year for it—everyone travelling, you know? Did you report to the authorities?”