Turn of the Cards Read Free Page B

himself.
    Then came the last couple of years, when Mark learned what it was like when they really were after you.
    Henk nodded suddenly, with a grunt that made it sound as if his neck were a rusty hinge, releasing Mark from the bonds of his eyes.
    “I’ve caught him,” he said, with a brown-toothed grimace Mark suspected was a smile.
    “Who, man?”
    “That old bastard de Groot, down the block.”
    De Groot was Henk’s archenemy. He was an artist, at least to the extent that every few weeks he’d splash some paint on a canvas and then get the Arts Ministry to pay him a totally optimistic price to stick it in one of these enormous warehouses they maintained for the purpose. He was in fact more or less a contemporary of Mark’s landlord, and belonged to some rival anarcho-faction that the kabouters had splintered into. Mark had a suspicion Henk’s real grievance was that he himself couldn’t get registered to sell his modeling-clay sculpture to the Ministry, and he suspected his rival of blackballing him.
    “What’s he done, man?” Mark asked.
    “He has violated our fair-housing laws. He’s renting to an Indonesian family, and he has too many of them crammed in that tiny flat.” He spat on the stairs. Mark yanked his foot up in alarm and almost toppled over. “Exploiter. He won’t get away with it; I’ve notified the authorities.”
    “So, like, what happens to the Indonesians?”
    “Certainly, they shall move out.”
    “You mean they’re gonna get thrown out on the street?”
    The glare returned. “Their rights must be protected. Obviously you don’t understand.”
    “I guess I don’t, man.”
     
    Mark’s flat was stuffy with the rising heat of mid-afternoon, up in the attic beneath the bell-gabled roof. He opened the front window and walked back through the apartment.
    It was narrow but not really small. The canal-front houses were surprisingly deep, and the flat ran all the way to the rear of the building, a succession of rooms strung together in what Mark thought of as shotgun style. In the bathroom all the way back Mark opened the other window to let the rank Amsterdam breeze in.
    As he returned to his living room, Mark took out his wire-rim glasses and put them on. It wasn’t vanity that made him leave them off when he was out; he was a skinny six-four American, which did not make him the least conspicuous person in the world. Not wearing the glasses was at least a gesture in the direction of not being spotted by hostile eyes. For a man whose Secret Ace Identity once consisted of dressing up in a purple Uncle Sam suit and matching stovepipe hat, it was a pretty comprehensive gesture.
    It didn’t seem to have worked, though. He made himself a cup of coffee and sat on the sill of the open window. Right over his head a massive wooden hoist beam jutted from the face of the house. All the old-time grachtenhuizen had them. People rigged blocks-and-tackles to them when they had to move things in and out of the upper floors. You didn’t want to try wrestling a piano up those stairs, or anything less wieldy than a loaf of bread.
    He was careful not to knock over the window box. It was crowded with red and yellow tulips he’d brought on a day trip to the country, just like the boxes on all the sills on the block and, as far as he could tell, in the whole damn country.
    He wasn’t, in retrospect, sure what he’d expected to find in Amsterdam — a sort of Hippie Heaven on Earth, perhaps, with naked people chasing each other happily through the streets and screwing in the fountains to the tune of the Dead and the Lovin’ Spoonful, all seen through a blue-green scrim of pot smoke. The actuality was staid: a lot of neat reserved plump people who left their front curtains open so you could admire the crowded coziness of their living rooms — Bourgeois Paradise in all truth, though with the occasional startling tangent.
    On the other hand, after the never-ending adrenal nerve-whine of palace life and