Читать книгу The Double Eagle - James Twining - Страница 21

Amsterdam, Holland

21st July – 4:40pm

Cindy and Pete Roscoe were enjoying themselves. London had been impressive, Paris beautiful, but Amsterdam was fun. The coffee shops, the girls in the windows, the canals. It was as different from Tulsa, Oklahoma as it was possible to be. Hell, the concierge at their hotel had even tried to sell them some pot. They’d both pretended to be shocked but secretly they were pleased. It had made their trip seem somehow more authentic.

Amsterdam was also a special place for Cindy, whose grandparents had fled from Holland in the 1930s. She had endured an emotional visit to Anne Frank’s house the day before.

‘That poor sweet girl,’ she had sobbed into Pete’s strong arms, her mascara dissolving into spidery streaks across her face as the other tourists thronged around them.

Today was their last day and after a fortnight of trekking round museums and across cites, they had agreed that a relaxing guided tour around the canals was the perfect way to round off their trip before the long flight home. Ten minutes in, clad in matching Dallas Cowboys jackets with the open-topped canal boat slicing through the city and the tour guide pointing out the various sights, they knew that it had been a great idea.

Cindy, as usual, was armed with a guidebook of biblical proportions, a parting gift from her emotional mother at the airport that she now believed to be the gospel on all things European. Such was her faith in its pronouncements that she had developed an annoying habit of matching any guide’s commentary to that of her book and then whispering to Pete if they got something wrong, or even worse, omitted some crucial fact.

Pete, meanwhile, had mastered a knack of nodding and making the appropriate noises while only half listening to his wife. His priority, instead, was to capture as much of their trip as possible on film. So while Cindy had her nose buried in a book, Pete had his eye firmly glued to the viewfinder of the tiny digital video camera that nestled in his broad hands.

He had even developed his own dizzying cinematic style, his camera swooping up and down buildings, or suddenly panning in or out, the image uncertain and jumpy. This time, as they went under a bridge, Pete attempted a particularly ambitious shot, zooming out from the detail at the top of a building down to a wide angle shot of the canal. He then tracked slowly across, until he had framed the rows of seats ahead of him and the tour guide standing right at the front of the canal boat. He smiled. She was cute.

Suddenly, something at the edge of the viewfinder caught his eye. An ex-cop, Pete had learnt to recognise when things did not look quite right and instinctively he moved the camera to the right so that the tour guide’s face now only took up half the screen.

It was not the agitated man with the tanned face and the shaved head in the phone box just before the next bridge who looked out of place, but rather the two men in dark suits that had just stepped out of the large black Range Rover and were walking towards him. There was a repressed energy in their walk, an assured confidence in their manner that reminded Pete of a dog walking at the very limit of its leash, tugging on its owner’s arm. These two were about to cut themselves loose.

He zoomed in on the phone box, past the tour guide’s face, just as the man in it saw the two approaching figures. The phone instantly fell out of his hand and his head jerked from side to side, as he weighed his options. But Pete could see that he’d noticed them too late. Hemmed in by the phone box on one side and the men on the other, he clearly had nowhere to go.

As the two men approached him, their backs came together like heavy black curtains, blocking Pete’s view. He kept the camera trained on them, hardly daring to blink in case he missed something. Suddenly their shoulders parted and Pete got a glimpse of the man, his eyes wide with terror, a hand pressed over his mouth to stifle his screams. An arm was raised and a long serrated blade flashed in the sun, hovering for a few seconds, its shiny surface silhouetted against the cobalt sky, before swooping down and diving into the man’s chest. He collapsed, lifeless.

The boat was almost level with the two men now and Pete widened his shot as they hunched over the body and went through his pockets. But just then, at the very moment that he was going to get slightly ahead of them and catch their actual faces, the boat went under a low brick bridge and they were lost from view. When Pete emerged the other side, his camera poised, the two men and the car were gone.

‘Holy shit. D’ya see that?’ Pete whispered to his wife, his mouth dry with fear and excitement. He kept the camera trained on the receding image of the corpse that lay slumped in the embrace of the phone box’s shadow.

‘Oh I know honey, isn’t it bad?’ Cindy said shaking her head disapprovingly. Her hooped earrings bounced merrily against her orange cheeks. ‘That was where Van Gogh used to live and she didn’t say a thing!’