62

THE NEXT DAY, we waited in the rain, just north of Paris. It had taken us nearly five hours to drive south from Amsterdam, to the locale August had given me. It was early afternoon and the day was gray and sodden. Piet sat next to me, sharpening his wakizashi sword on a whetstone. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke. It made the flesh on my neck jerk. How sharp could you make a sword?

The sweatshop was off the E19/E15 expressway, hidden in a gray huddle of buildings. I wondered how pleasant it would be to be rid of Piet. Very soon, I thought. Very soon. We sat and watched absolutely nothing happen at the sweatshop. Hours passed; twilight began to approach.

“How does a Canadian soldier get into this business?” Piet asked, breaking the silence.

I glanced at him. “I was bored. How did you get into trafficking women?”

He smiled. “I needed money for art school.”

“I didn’t expect that answer.”

“An annoying percentage of young people in Amsterdam harbor a secret desire to be Van Gogh or Rembrandt. Anyway, I knew a guy. A friend of my mom’s. He needed help getting girls to Holland. I helped him buy a van so we could move them, and eventually I took over the route.”

“Took over?”

“He got married and thought he shouldn’t traffic girls no more. What, you thought I’d killed him?”

“Yes.”

“No. Known him since I was twelve.” He rubbed at his bottom lip. “He owns a coffee shop now.”

I really didn’t want to know Piet as a person, but some instinctive need to understand took control. So I asked, “Why the sword?”

“The sword is who I am.”

“But it makes you memorable. I thought the idea was to stay under the radar.”

“It honors my mother.”

“She was Japanese?”

“Yeah. She came here for love. Boyfriend brought her, dumped her, she stayed.”

I remembered Nic called Piet a whoreson. Perhaps he meant it as more than an insult, as a description. His mom might have been a worker in the Rosse Buurt; many of the women there were not Dutch.

“I thought I wanted to study art, do Japanese-style stuff, like netsuke or watercolor painting. My mother did that in her spare time.” He shrugged. “But art school didn’t work out. They hated me there and a girl made trouble for me. Assholes. So I left.”

I had not thought of Piet as someone with smothered dreams. He read my expression. “Eh, you thought I was just a snake.” He laughed.

“Well, I—”

“Man, we’re all snakes. Gregor likes to pretend he’s shed his skin, been reborn as an honest soul, but his scales are still there. And I suspect you’re a very crafty snake, Sam.”

I shrugged. “Sure. I got run out of the army. I spoke some Czech from my grandmother’s side of the family. I couldn’t find a real job in Prague so I made my own there. So you went straight from art school into trafficking?”

“Not right away. I used to do contract work for the police department in Amsterdam, designing their websites and brochures,” he said. He gave a long, low laugh. “Then I saw how much the opposition paid.”

I glanced at him. “That’s a switch.”

“You make serious money by being a player. If I’d stayed with the police, then I would have been a cog in their operation. I paid attention. I wanted to own cogs—not be one.”

“So you picked girls for your commodity.” My mind kept saying shut up, but it was a strange thought to sit here, making conversation with a monster in the shape of a man.

He shrugged. “Good profit margin. Growing demand. Not likely to run out of raw materials.”

It was brutally cold accountancy. I wondered if it was a sort of twisted revenge on his mother. “You sell people, Piet.”

“You sound like a schoolmaster.” He shrugged. “I think of it as selling comfort and convenience.”

“Not to the people you sell.”

He flicked a smile. “They don’t have money. They don’t count.” The smile turned greasy. “You know, they live better here, even as whores, than they do back home. I’ve done them a favor, I have.”

“It would be one thing if they chose it. But most don’t.”

He gave me a look of disapproval. “I didn’t know I’d offended your sacred morals.”

I had overstepped. I could show my loathing for him when I killed him, not before. “I just think counterfeit merchandise is a lot easier to control than people.”

“I like the control.” His voice became a low slur of gravel. “You should try it. I’ll treat you to the choicest morsels from my next batch from Moldova. Got some girls coming in four days, an order from a house in London. You and me, we can break one of the girls in. You get a taste for this business, then fake goods will pale.”

If I looked at him I would kill him on the spot. And I needed him. So I watched the sweatshop parking lot.

He misinterpreted my silence. “Ah. Maybe you don’t like the girls. We get boys, too, not so many, but I know a couple of boys back in Amsterdam you might like—”

“No, thank you,” I said. “Not interested.”

“You’re weird,” he said, “worrying so much about people. Other people don’t matter; all that matters is you. You judge me. But you are no different than me, Sam. You lie, you kill when you have to, you live under a false name. I never shot anyone down the way you did Nic.”

“I did you a favor with Nic.”

“True.” He rubbed his lip. “I keep thinking that I will be arrested any moment, because I don’t know what he was transmitting, or who he was talking to. I need a big payday, Sam. I need to be able to run and hide. That’s a great luxury, to hide well. That’s the mark when you’re not a pawn no more, when you’re a player.”

“Tell me about Edward,” I said. “Is he a player or is he more?”

“What do you mean, more?”

“You said he’s moving experimental weapons.”

“I think he’s pulling corporate espionage—stealing from one company to sell to another.”

“What’s he want to put into this shipment, Piet?”

“Not for you to worry about.”

“If we get caught I’d like to know what I’m serving time for.”

“You’ll never see the light of day if we get caught on this job.” Piet’s gaze went back to the warehouse. “Ach, hello.”

A truck, marked with a stylized lion and dragon, pulled into the back of the warehouse where the sweatshop sat. Three Chinese men spilled out. Two wore black trench coats. Another, more portly, wore a regular tan jacket and blue jeans. He walked to the bay of the warehouse.

The two in trench coats stayed close to the truck.

“Let’s go,” Piet said.

“No,” I said. “They’ve got shotguns under the coats.”

“How can you tell?”

“See the way the fabric bulges, right below the arm? One guy was riding in the cab, but the second came out of the truck itself. They won’t go into the building. They’re guards.”

“Well, what are we supposed to do?”

“We can’t grab the truck here. They’re picking up extra goods—they’ve already dropped off fake cigs along the route. We go in now, while they’re parked at a friendly spot, the Lings get a phone call.”

“Not if we kill them all.”

“I didn’t sign on for a massacre,” I said. “And it’s bad business practice.” Interference with profit was the only argument that might sway Piet. “The Lings would start hunting for us fast. We need to tackle the truck crew alone.”

“So how do we steal the shipment?”

“We don’t,” I said. “We hijack it.”