The Klm Royal Dutch passenger jet rose up off the tarmac at LAX, banked over the Pacific, and established its flight plan that would take it across Canada, Newfoundland, the North Atlantic, then down over Western Europe into Amsterdam. The aircraft weighed seven hundred thousand poundsat take off, carried forty-eight thousand gallons of fuel and consumed four gallons per each mile during its eleven-hour flight. There were three hundred eighty-seven pillows and blankets, six tons of food and equipment, three hundred and ninety-one frozen meals. Thirteen liters of hard liquor had been loaded aboard plus two hundred forty-three liters of wine and beer, sixty-seven of tea and eighty-four liters of coffee. The captain was Jan Verheoff. The film was Jumanji. Stein did not watch it.
He thought that he had to be insane to be flying a quarter of the way around the world on a whim. At first he had flatly refused. Schwimmer had not begged or cajoled or offered the crown to Caesar a third or second time. He had shrugged his shoulders, as if to acknowledge Stein’s response was neither a surprise to him nor a matter of much importance but rather a diplomatic courtesy that had to be observed before putting the real plan into motion. Stein had to follow him down the hall through the lobby and into the parking lot to get a reaction. “You put a Stop Payment on my check? You disappear? You don’t tell me one goddamn thing that you know. Then you expect me to fly across the universe because you say he says he wants me there? This is bullshit!” In the end, with all of Stein’s ranting and railing, it was obvious to anyone half-listening that he already knew he was going.
Lila had risen to the occasion like a friend. Like a really good friend. Like- he hated to acknowledge it because it made him feel like he was taking advantage of her or squandering a good thing-like a steady, solid committed long-term life companion. She made the drive back to Los Angeles utterly guilt-free, devoid of complaint, knowing not to ask for any more information than she was given.
Once back at Stein’s she had packed a suitcase for him while he tried to find his passport. She had made a list of things she would take care of, which included collecting his mail, taking care of Watson and providing a contingency plan for Angie to stay at her house in case Stein was detained in Holland. She even headed off what appeared from his facial expression-tilted head, soft smile of wonderment-was going to be a sentimental declaration from Stein. “In moments like this,” she said, “love is better than being in love.” Stein agreed and loved her more for knowing that any declaration he made would have come out of a moment of weakness, and would be enforceable maybe legally but not in any way that really mattered. The practical side of her added, “Of course how many moments like this are there?”
Dr. Alton Schwimmer’s social affect had undergone no miraculous conversion now that he and Stein were officially allies. He remained dour and irascible. He had dispensed information in the tiniest doses, as if it were a precious commodity that needed to be husbanded over a long winter. Stein had still been unable to pry a gramsworth of new information from him-just that everything would be made clear when he arrived. He had given Stein two envelopes containing small quantities of Dutch currency and the telephone number of a taxi whose driver would be expecting Stein’s call and who would know where to take him.
“You’re still acting like I’m the enemy,” Stein groused. Schwimmer looked for a moment like he was going to respond but dismissed the thought.
Six hours after take-off with the plane racing over the Atlantic at five-hundred miles per hour in pursuit of tomorrow, most of the passengers were asleep, their bodies Salvidor Dali’d into surreal fluid shapes dangling over the armrests or contorted against a shaded window. Stein’s shade was up. He couldn’t sleep. He watched an earlobe of moon that hung outside the window nestled between underlit clouds.
Stein hadn’t anticipated the strength of the feelings his returning to Amsterdam would engender. He had found something there that had defined his life. The sixties had happened to him there. In Amsterdam. When migrating hippies were shunned by most European cities as deterrents to tourism Amsterdam welcomed them. The Dutch were cool people. While they shared the Germans’ Teutonic love for order and cleanliness, they possessed a rogue chromosome in the deep end of their gene pool that gave them a goofy sense of humor in place of the need to exterminate people. Living below sea level must have taught them the futility of legislating against nature. Every night in Dam Square, sleeping bags opened out from the center fountain to the edge of the square like a giant mandala. The police were not concerned by the sounds of singing and guitars, the commingling bodies or the wafting aromas of Acapulco Gold, or the soft, sweet, orange hash from Lebanon, or the hard black, bricks from Afghanistan. It was there that he became Stein. All the goofy antics of the time, which for most people was a costume they put on for a while and then, after Stein went back to being their real selves. For Stein it was his life.
In the Autumn of ‘69, after Woodstock, after the moon walk, after Chappaquiddick, after Helter Skelter, either by coincidence or through a preordained Harmonic Convergence, Stein and Winston and five or six of their buddies had found themselves in Amsterdam, each of them happening to have with him a bud of the best weed they had smoked that year. Sitting in lofty judgment like the World Court of Cannabis, they awarded each other prizes for best in show. The following year without any of them mentioning it, leaving it in the hands of the universe to decide if it would become a tradition, they all convened again. Plus a few friends.
The year after that a hundred people showed up. This was no Woodstock II. There was no promotion. No hype. The people who knew just knew. They came with buds of the best weed they had found. People stayed high for record amounts of time. Prodigious quantities of Dutch chocolates were consumed. Contests evolved with gonzo prizes. An emperor was crowned. The crown was smoked. They knew with absolute certainty that the changes they were making in the world would last forever, that this was merely the dawn of the Age of Aquarius and that they were the first generation that would never grow old.
Thirty years later, now at the dawn of the false millennium, the festival had become so corrupted and commercialized, so mainstream and institutional it was like Disney Times Square. According to the brochure in the airline seat pocket, forty coffee houses were entered in this year’s competition. There were more than six hundred judges. Morley Safer, for God’s sake, was doing a segment on it for 60 Minutes.
He pictured Hillary in those days, dressed in her peasant blouse and perpetual smile. They were uncorrupted embryos, cells in the hippie jet stream that wafted down over Spain to Morocco, east across the Greek islands and Turkey through the Hindu Kush to Katmandu. “A long way to go for a shortcut to Enlightenment,” the people who did not go had scoffed. Stein and Hillary had been inseparable, revolving around each other like twin stars. It bewildered Stein now to wonder where all that heat and fire between them had gone.
He had tried several times to explain to Angie why he and her mother had gotten divorced, what had gone wrong. But he could describe it only in metaphors about adjacent raindrops on opposite side of the Continental Divide or comets whose orbits just touched for a brief moment on their ways to opposite sides of the Galaxy. But none of this explained to her why people married, had children, and then broke each other’s hearts.
Stein hadn’t slept in days but his mind was too wired to surrender now. Lila had told him it was good for his circulation to walk while flying. So he took an excursion up the aisle to the back end of the plane. A cute, dark-haired flight attendant had taken her shoes off and was curled up in a window seat. Her lapel button said “Jana.” She patted the seat alongside her and invited him to sit down. “You are coming to Amsterdam for the Cannabis Cup?” she asked, though it was more of a friendly presumption of fact than a question.
“Why would you think that?” he flirted. “I’m a respectable citizen.” He waited for her to laugh at the word ‘respectable,’ as an acknowledgment of how anti-establishment he was sure he looked. “I’m kidding,” he had to say, and attributed her gaffe to the language barrier
“You American lawyers like to pretend to be radicals,” she said
“You think I’m a lawyer? Oh, man! That hurts.” He played up the pouting.
“So you are not a lawyer.”
“The exact opposite of a lawyer.” Whatever in the hell that meant. He took his shoes off and brazenly pulled some of her blanket over his feet.
“Are you high already?” she scolded. “And you don’t offer me any?
“After we land that might be arranged.”
She rubbed the ball of her foot against his leg and Stein began thinking of the mile-high club and converting feet to meters but the movement came in response to an announcment in Dutch over the intercom.
“That means me,” Jana said. She extracted those lithe limbs from the blanket. She nodded that she’d be back soon but Stein doubted it. His thoughts became more focused as preparations began for their descent into Schipol Airport. He knew that a long delayed, long avoided moment of truth was approaching that would define what kind of a man he had grown into. In protesting the Vietnam War he had risked the bite of tear gas and Billy club. Yes, he had led protests. Yes, he had hunger-struck, yes, he had draft-resisted, Yes he had bedeviled authority, exposed hypocrisy; all of which were admirable. But he had not fought. He had not faced the possibility of death. He had been, for all of his bravado, for all of his audacious demonstrations, as safe and immune to the infliction of real harm as any pentagon general.
He had no idea now what awaited him on the ground; whether Goodpasture had tracked Nicholette’s killers to Amsterdam or fled here from them. If her killers were here and meant to do danger to Brian, it meant that Stein would be in their crosshairs as well. But he couldn’t think of it that way. He had to think that they would be in his. That he was the hunter and they were the prey. He wondered how he would perform under life-and-death pressure. He pictured himself as a high diver wondering as he peered down at the distant water from the top of the cliff, whether he was still as good as he once had been, and thinking, perhaps foolishly, that yes, yes he just might be.
Captain Verheoff set the 747 down on runway number three. The passengers were thanked for flying KLM and informed that the local time was some number of hundred hours and that there were very, very few degrees Celsius outside. Stein looked at his watch but it was a meaningless gesture. After an eleven-hour flight across nine time zones and not having slept in God knows how long, his biorhythms were so askew he could have laid eggs. In the arrival terminal he telephoned the number for the taxi that Schwimmer had given him. Rather he had someone do it for him.
He sailed through Customs. The inattention to him by authority was becoming irksome. Didn’t they know who he once was, for God’s sake? Jana, the stewardess, waved a cheery goodbye as she strode across the lobby, linked at the elbow to Captain Verheoff. The pilot looked just like his voice: tall, grey and surgeonly in his uniform, but with a slightly odd walk like he was trying to shake something out of his undershorts.
Stein potted a taxi driver in the lobby holding a handwritten sign bearing his name transliterated into Shtejne but close enough. He pushed through the revolving door and was hit by a blast of air so cold it had to be a mistake. He batted his chest with his crossed arms as he ran to the car and got inside. “No coat?” the driver said.
“I live in L.A. We forget that the rest of the world has weather.”
The road layout into town followed the route of the concentric circles of century-old canals. Trams and bicycles were the primary vehicles. Cars had to create their own lanes, which they did with kaleidoscopic mayhem. It was hard to tell in the diffused, weak winter light but Stein guessed it was probably around noon. They chugged along the banks of the Singelgracht Canal passing the Rijksmuseum, which held nearly all of Van Gogh’s paintings. They took a hard right across the bridge at Nieuwe Speigelstraat, which ran smack into the one-way Prinsengracht and turned into the flow of traffic that proceeded onto the broad Leidseplein, penetrating into the inner circle of the city.
A throng of young people was gathered in the Dam Square making music. They were not the hippies of Stein’s day, rather well heeled nouveau Euroscuff. The whole feel of the city had changed. Young money had found it. Across the park facing the Palais Royale was the venerable Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky. The cabbie drove up to the front door and stopped.
“This is it.”
“This is what?”
The driver showed Stein the written address.
“I can’t be staying here-I do battle with the people who stay in places like this.”
“You have an envelope for me.”
It was too cold to argue and Stein handed the driver the packet of cash. A doorman led him inside and looked down his nose at Stein’s hemp rucksack. Stein was pleased to note that at last he was being seen as a disturbance. Entering the lobby of the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky was like being transported into a lost world. The place had been built when the empire of Austria-Hungary dominated Europe. The legendary Winter Garden restaurant, with its high-glassed roof, looked like the waiting room of the Vienna Train Station. James Joyce had stayed here in the 1920’s and fifty years later, Mick and Bianca. It wasn’t the Youth Hostel, that was for damn sure.
“It’s YOU!” Goodpasture sailed into the lobby on a zephyr of glee. He clapped Stein around the shoulder and spun him around. “Would you look at this place! Can you believe something like this still exists? Judging by Goodpasture’s ebullient mood Stein reckoned that poor boy must not have heard about Nicholette and that he would be charged with the sad duty of telling him. He waited for Goodpasture to settle down for a moment, then placed his hand on his arm.
“There’s something you need to know about and it’s not good.”
Goodpasture sobered. “You mean Nikki. Yeah. I know. That’s horrible.”
Yeah, that’s horrible? Stein thought. Is this the way a person reacts to his girlfriend being murdered? But before he could say anything the bellman was there, pushing before him an elegant cart built to accommodate the trunks and footlockers that accompanied traveling aristocracy. He lifted Stein’s hemp rucksack by a shoulder strap, using two fingers the way one might hold a rat, and then wheeled the cart to one of the sixteen elevators.
Goodpasture was excited again. “Wait till you see these rooms.”
The glitz of the suite that Goodpasture had booked offended Stein nearly as much as the young man’s cavalier attitude about Nicholette. The bathtub was the size of a lap pool. There were two four-poster beds. Persian rugs. It commanded a view over the square and the royal palace. Once the bellman had shown Stein all the amenities (towel warmers, all three TVs) and had departed (well-tipped), Goodpasture accelerated again into a whirlwind of energy.
“Dig this. I’ve got you set up as ‘The High Exalted Cannabis Cup Magistrate,’ which means you will have access to every bud in competition! If my orchids are here, and I know they are, those suckers are going to be so busted!” He draped a ribbon around Stein’s neck with a judge’s gold credential dangling at the bottom. “Anyone who pays the hundred bucks can be a regular judge. But there’s only one High Exalted Magistrate.”
Stein took him seriously to task. If the kid was saying Stein was his role model, that gave him the right to interfere. “I don’t get it. Your girlfriend gets murdered and your prime thoughts are with your missing weed? You fly off to Amsterdam, and then you fly me to Amsterdam to help you find it? Don’t you find that behavior just the slightest bit… disproportional? She died trying to protect you.”
Stein’s diatribe left Goodpasture perplexed. It took him a few moments to sort it out. “Were you under the impression that Nikki and I were a couple?”
It irked Stein that Goodpasture would try to conceal that. “Brian. She made it pretty obvious.”
“We were great friends,” Goodpasture said, “but not that way.”
Stein drilled through the sincere geology of Goodpasture’s expression for the topographical error. He was sure Nicholette had referred to Brian as her boyfriend. But now as he replayed the conversation in his mind he realized that the words she actually used were, “I believe you know a friend of mine.” Friend. But surely in that coy, italicized way she said it she had meant to convey boyfriend. Or had he presumed just that? But no. No no no. There were the hourly phone calls she had made to him. The knowing where he was. The unconcealed concern. The very act of seeking help when she feared he was in danger. Who else would do such a thing but a lover? Stein’s thoughts played across his face before he even spoke.
“I know,” Goodpasture said. “Everybody says we’re perfect together. I just wasn’t attracted to her in that way.”
Stein looked rightfully dubious.
“Of course. She’s beautiful. I can see that. But you can only love who you can love. I’m sure women have loved you where you didn’t feel the same even if you wished you could.”
Stein’s mind drifted to the person in his life who fit that description. “I guess it’s possible,” he conceded.
“We tried, but…” Goodpasture let the thought drop away. It’s still hard for me to believe it happened.” His cool exterior cracked for the first time and gave Stein a glimpse inside. “And the way it happened. Who would do such a thing?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out”
Goodpasture poured a glass of water from the delicate Oriental pitcher that sat glistening with condensation on the oak side table. He passed the glass to Stein and poured another for himself. He sat on armrest of the sofa. Now it was he probing fault lines. “I thought you came here to find my weed.”
“Brian. Whoever killed Nicholette was trying to extract your secrets from her. We both know that.”
“What secrets?”
“They stole the golden egg. Now they want the goose that laid it.”
“Why would they need that?”
“Don’t be deliberately dense, Brian. It offends me. They want you for the same reason America wanted Werner Van Braun. You have the product. You have the know-how.”
“Werner Van Braun? Who are you talking about?”
“Oh Jesus, are you that young? There was something called World War II? There were these German rocket scientists. Never mind. The point is she died being loyal to you. You owe her that much.”
Goodpasture gave up the pretense and surrendered to honesty. “All right, Harry. May I please call you Harry? I don’t mean it as disrespect.”
“Call me what the hell you want. Stop bullshitting with me.”
“I just thought if you saw the connection between Nikki and my weed it would be outside the NO DANGER zone and you wouldn’t come. Forgive me for underestimating you.”
“You don’t get it. She came to me for help, Brian. When I said no, I violated every principle I ever believed in. I fucked up. Nothing I can do will ever unfuck me. But I’m going to keep trying until it starts to feel a little bit better.”
Goodpasture nodded like he had seen this sort of thing before. “People fall in love with her quickly,” he said.
“I’m not talking about love, Brian. I’m talking about principle!”
“Yes, that’s definitely what you’re talking about.” Goodpasture reached into the leather pouch slung over his shoulder. “I want you to see that I have principles too.” He handed Stein a chunk of hundred dollar bills.
“I owe you this for bringing you here under false pretenses. And also for underestimating you.”
Stein fanned it and guessed there were fifty. He put it in his pocket with no pretense of declining the offer. “Not to mention the little matter of a stopped check.”
Goodpasture winced. “Sorry about that. It was somebody else’s idea.”
“What’s the deal on that guy anyway? He’s got the sense of humor of turpentine.”
“He does have his social liabilities. But, you know, what he does. You’ve seen those people. The government makes ‘life’ a holy grail until people get old or sick. Then they’re dumped into the same crap heap as old refrigerators. Do you know what they spend on law enforcement trying to stop us from bringing in a little weed? Wouldn’t it be better to spend that same money on life enhancement?”
“You don’t need to sell me on the cause. I’m just saying about your doctor friend. Get him a colonoscopy, man. Unclog his sorry ass.” Goodpasture smiled and tipped his water glass to Stein as a toast. And then Stein was all business. “I have two days here before I’m back on daddy duty. There are forty some-odd cafes with buds entered for the Cannabis Cup. We can split the work. You go to half, I go to half? We find the one that matches yours and-no, wait. You’re right. I have to go to them all. They’d know who you are and hide the stuff if they saw you waltz in. All right.” He girded himself to go into action. His legs didn’t quite get the message and buckled. He had to brace himself from tipping over.
Goodpasture guided him to the bed. “Plan A is for you to take a nap. Your eyes are falling out of your face. It’s probably yesterday or tomorrow for you.”
The mention of a nap brought the exiled thought of sleep tumbling back into Stein’s consciousness and he instantly craved it. Goodpasture stood and massaged the tight ligaments alongside Stein’s neck. “I’ll be back for you in a couple of hours.”
“Just one question. Why didn’t you tell Nicholette where you were going? Why make her worry like that?”
“She knew.”
“She knew?”
“Of course she knew.”
Goodpasture smiled at how blindly in love with Nicholette Stein was.
“She was an exceptional woman,” Stein said.
Goodpasture agreed. “She was.”
The door closed behind Goodpasture’s departure. Stein’s body dissolved down onto the luxurious feather bed. The pillow looked wide as the Appalachians. It beckoned him and he swooned. The wall mirror above the bureau reflected somebody’s elderly uncle. Only it was Stein. He had to look away. His rucksack was still hanging on the inside door handle. It had caught in the door jamb when Goodpasture left and air currents in the hallway had left the door partly ajar.
There was a rustling of motion passing the open door and perhaps that was what had caught his attention. But there was something else, more persuasive and more subtle. It was a smell, wafting in from the hallway. It had not been there before. Whoever had caused the sound of motion had left that scent in her wake. It made Stein’s entire body tingle from toe to scalp. He had smelled that scent on only one person in his life and there was no mistaking who that person was.
It was Nicholette.