Fourteen

A jolt of adrenaline propelled Stein into the hall. At the same time that his brain knew it could not possibly be Nicholette, every other system in his body ordered Go. Find. See. Get. The corridor was deserted, but the scent hung keenly in the air. Stein felt a peripheral sense of motion to his left. The impression of a trailing garment disappearing down an adjoining corridor. He broke into a trot down the carpeted hallway. The plush pile felt firm and resilient. To his pleasant surprise, so did his calf muscles. He felt no sharp, crumbling pain. No ache of rust and gravity. No shock of protest from the shallow cavity of his chest. He imagined himself a Lakota brave running tirelessly through woods and plains, his body its own vehicle.

That feeling lasted about fifteen feet.

As he approached the T‑shaped intersection he heard the elevator door slide open in the corridor to his left. He tried to accelerate but his breath was now wheezing through constricted passageways and his legs had taken on weight. He latched onto the edge of the wall and used it to whip himself around the blind corner. The elevator doors were closing. “Hold it, please,” he called out but to no avail..

Brushing aside the internal voice that repeated “what are you doing?” at each new escalation of the insanity, Stein pulled open the heavy metal door to the fire stair and vaulted into the passageway. The stair went straight down then hooked a hundred and eighty degrees to the left. He grabbed the guardrail and yanked himself hard into each turn. He was wearing only his jeans and a flannel shirt over his 1969 Mets T‑shirt, but he broke a sweat as he hit the seventh floor landing. Air was not plentiful. He wanted to stop at each floor and run into the corridor in hopes of having gotten there before the elevator. But the thought of just missing it again and losing those precious seconds kept him going. He staked everything on the hope that it would stop at enough floors for him to beat it down to the lobby. He thought of himself as John Henry battling the steel‑driving machine. Then he remembered that John Henry dies at the end of that song.

He reached the mezzanine and jumped down the last three steps and pushed forcefully through the door into the lobby. In other cities people might have looked askance at a wild, disheveled creature bursting out of the catacombs. But Amsterdamers during Cannabis Cup season took such occurrences as matter‑of‑fact. He heard an elevator bell ping. The sound came from his left, which puzzled him because his inner compass told him it should be to his right. But he followed his ears. The light for floor #2 was illuminated in the bank above the elevator door, and Stein positioned himself in front of the doors that would open in a moment. But instead, the light indicating floor #3 went on. It was going up, not coming down. In a panic he spun around and saw that another elevator car had preceded him down and its passengers were dispersed into the lobby.

He had not won the race with the machine after all. There was kaleidoscopic motion all over the lobby, a universe of particles simultaneously expanding and contracting. He didn’t know what he was looking for. But amidst the sea of scents and pipe tobacco and shoe leather and artificial heat, Stein sniffed out that floating Jet Stream of aroma that had guided him. His neck swiveled until he locked in on the source. The glimpse of a woman hurrying out the front door, a trailing arm, the back of a leg.

Stein hastened across the voluminous lobby, trying not to be too conspicuous The front door opened before him. He barely noticed the frigid street air. He saw the woman scurrying across the street in the brief lull of oncoming traffic, and getting into a taxi. Her profile was framed for an instant in the passenger‑side window. A jaunty fur cap and her drawn up collar covered most of her features. It wasn’t much past noon but the sun was already at a low angle and shone directly into the window. The taxi eased into the flow of traffic. Stein ran into the street and waved his arms like discouraged semaphore flags. He looked desperately for another taxi but they were all engaged.

A delivery boy of about nineteen stopped in front of the hotel and braced his bicycle into the rack. Stein grabbed him. “Do you speak English?” Stein demanded.

Yes.

“Do you want a hundred dollars?”

Yes.

A moment later Stein was pedaling the thin‑wheeled bicycle in pursuit of the taxicab and the kid was putting Stein’s money into his pocket, probably wondering why somebody would pay a hundred dollars for a free city bike. Traffic was heavy and the taxi could not get far ahead. Nor could Stein quite catch up to it. Clusters of cyclists trailed behind the buses and trams like pilot fish. He ducked his head to try to avoid the wind. The moisture in his eyes was freezing over. His nostrils crackled. He pulled his flannel shirt tight around his body. Frostbite seemed inevitable but just then the cab got stopped at a red light at the next intersection. Stein pedaled madly between lines of traffic and nearly caught up. But the light turned green before he reached them, and the cab turned parallel to the frozen Herengracht Canal.

Stein’s hands and his crotch were completely numb. A cold steel ingot was expanding through his rib cage. He couldn’t feel the handlebars or his ass on the seat and was on the verge of turning back. But he caught sight of the taxi again. It was turning around and heading up the hill toward him. But its flag was up and its passenger seat was vacant. She must just have gotten out where the cab made the U‑turn. Stein pedaled down the ramp into the lower roadway.

A stone staircase led to the bridge that crossed the canal. Young and old skaters were gliding across the canal’s frozen surface using the ice as a means of travel. He compared this to pampered Ange‑lenos driving their cars to their expensive gyms and fighting to get the closest parking spot to save walking a few extra steps.

He saw her coat first, trailing out behind her. Her hands were clutched to the small of her back. She skated out toward the center of the canal, then folded her full‑length camel coat into a square and placed it on the ice. Underneath it she was wearing a gold jacket and gold pants. She began to skate figures using the coat as the axis of her circles. Her movements were precise. Her arms maintained elongated positions; her eyes followed her fingertips. She skated backwards on one long egret leg, the elevated limb reaching straight back at ninety degrees, then arching higher as her back bowed and the blade of her skate bisected the sky.

Stein was not the only spectator mesmerized. Other skaters stopped to watch her display. Spewing flumes of shaved ice, she spun to an abrupt stop in front of her folded coat, picked it up and tucked it under her arm, and, the cadenza over, skated with sublime ease of purpose upstream.

The medicinal power of lust restored circulation to Stein’s extremities. He noticed for the first time that a saddlebag was draped across the back tire frame of his newly purchased bicycle. He unfastened the Velcro fasteners and reached inside. There was a green lightweight Israeli army jacket tucked away, which he immediately put on. A pair of gloves was in the pocket; a scarf and wool hat stuffed into the sleeve. How nice to have noticed these items before, he thought.

He set off along the narrow footpath that ran adjacent to the canal. It was frozen hard, bounded on the left by the canal and on the right by a waist‑high stone wall. He ran a few strides but the air hit his lungs like spikes of liquid Freon. A trio of aldermen clad in long black coats and friars’ hats skated past. He pushed himself onward into the wind for another two hundred yards until his legs became sodden pilings and his will dissolved. The skater had long since disappeared around the bend in the canal. Stein was going so slowly that even the power of reason had caught up with him. What the hell was he doing? Chasing an apparition? Exorcising his guilt through ordeal? It wasn’t going to change anything.

He walked slowly back in the direction he had come. In the concave curve of his spine, an interpreter of body language would read defeat and resignation. The wind was at his back and the return trip seemed to take almost no time. His profound relief at finding his way was quickly replaced with the feeling indoctrinated at a young age to Jewish males: If getting back was this easy, he had not gone far enough. And what would he have said to the skater even if he had caught up? Oh hello, do you speak English, you smell good? It was absurd.

The bicycle that he had left carelessly unlocked was standing unmolested. Traffic on this side of the canal flowed one‑way, and he carried his bike across a footbridge to the opposite side. There, his inner guidance system told him the road was heading in the general direction of the hotel. He pedaled over cobblestones that rattled his kidneys and sent pains up through his knees. He recognized no landmarks, but he felt he could intuit his way back through the winding concentric byways. Twenty minutes later he knew he was hopelessly lost.

He found himself at a glass front triangular building that bore an unpretentious sign reading ‘Sensi Seed Bank’. As a matter of principal, Stein avoided places that other people thought of as shrines, and The Sensi Seed Bank was one of those places. But he had to check it out, even if it was just to get directions and out of the cold for five minutes.

Like most conventional nurseries, it had a section containing fertilizers, soil enhancers, weed killers and the like, another with equipment‑shovels, hoes and watering apparatus. The one minor exception was that all the seeds and plants for sale were strains of cannabis, and all the apparatus was designed specifically for its cultivation. An entire section was devoted to hydroponic cultivation. On display were low‑amperage lighting fixtures, carbon dioxide fans, thermometers, pH testers, products for control of aphid, fungus and mildew. Stein recognized highly sophisticated extensions of the gadgets he and his boys had improvised thirty years ago. Amidst the proliferation of books and pamphlets on the subject, every back issue of High Times and all Ed Rosenthal’s books were on display, plus Stein’s own protean work, Smoke This Book. His opinion of them softened. He took off his gloves and warmed his hands under a grow light.

Right out in the open, casual as if they were drinking coffee, people of all ages and hues were sampling the buds that constituted the Sensi Seed Bank’s official entry into this year’s Cannabis Cup competition. There was the perennial favorite, “Northern Lights,” winner in three successive years in the pure Indica division. They also had entered “Early Girl,” a potent medium yield with a hashy taste and aroma, an ideal choice for balcony growing, and the crowd pleasing “Super Skunk,” a more aromatic descen‑dent of the popular Mendocino “Skunk #1.”

Stein could not stop his mind from working even though he professed disinterest. It was an intellectual exercise now, nothing more, but even a superficial glance told Stein that none of these buds were Goodpasture’s. The conformations of his orchids were so distinctive; the tight weave of the flower, the long, graceful, conical shape, and of course its aroma of spice and honey and sea air. He was sure these people ran too classy an enterprise to rely on theft. But you have to confirm the legitimate before you can pursue the suspicious.

There were piles of glossy color brochures and annotated maps to all the other forty‑eight coffeehouses whose goods were entered in the competition. Stein got his bearings and saw that his pedaling had taken him neither closer nor farther from the hotel, but in tandem. He mapped out a bike route that would take him past a dozen of these shops on the way back to the hotel. At every stop, groups of people were sampling and discussing the philosophical merits of each strain: the taste going down, the feeling in the lungs, the properties of the high. There was nothing furtive or paranoid about it like there’d be in the States.

“Whoa! Sorry man, I didn’t know.” He practically genuflected. “There’s only one of those badges.”

He pedaled from cafe to cafe. Nothing resembling Goodpas‑ture’s weed was among the selections offered by the Siberie Coffee Shop. Nor was it at Lucky Mothers, the Sisterhood Coffee Shop, nor at Boven Kamer, which sported a psychedelic painting of the cosmos on its ceiling and a huge Afghanistani hookah. It was not at de Dampkring nor at cozy Picasso’s nor at spacious Free City, whose walls were a collage of found objects‑boxing gloves, a sled, a birdcage.

The shortened northern winter light began to wane. Stein was cold and weary and dispirited. He had somehow thought that by placing himself into the equation, some inner magnetism would have led him to stumble on success. It had always been that way. In all of his past capers he had just put himself into the flow of events with the faith that good things would happen to good people, and they nearly always did.

Then, anyway.

Now continued to be another story.

He made one last stop before pedaling the final leg back to the hotel. The vestibule of the Open Doors Coffeehouse rubbed Stein the wrong way. The art was too self‑consciously artsy. A trophy case displaying previously won Cannabis Cups from the mid‑nineties was too prominently situated. It would have been like going to Raquel Welch’s house and seeing awards for best tits displayed on her mantle. Stein ordered a hot chocolate and made a superficial examination of the buds on display. They were overwrought overgrown, overproduced overpriced and overpackaged. Tourist stuff.

The waitress who brought him his cocoa asked if he’d like to try one of their house specialties. She was a tall, slender nineteen year‑old Susan Sarandon type wearing a silk blouse and no bra. Her English was slightly accented, incredibly sexy. “We have many interesting varieties,” she said. “You won’t be disappointed.”

He didn’t know why he needed to lecture her, it just came out. “Actually you don’t have any interesting varieties here. They’re all bred for show. Your Indica has fat leaves but less cannabinoids. Your Early Girl was harvested a week early. Quick lick, no stick. You’re skimping on phosphorus and nitrogen in your hydroponics, going for height at the expense of depth.” He took a sip of his drink. “And your hot chocolate is from a mix.”

He reached into his pocket for money to pay the check. His fingers were still thick from the cold and the bill slipped through them. He bent to pick it up from behind his bar stool. When he came back to upright he was flanked by two men who had been standing nearby and overheard his diatribe. One of them said to the waitress, “We’ll take care of this,” and glided up to Stein, smooth as shaving gel. He sported a ‘50s style buzz cut and wore a ’70s Nehru jacket. “You sound quite knowledgeable,” he said.

Stein already regretted the whole ridiculous demonstration. “I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” the other one said. He wore a Yosemite Sam sweatshirt that had been ironed. His hair was carefully messed. He introduced himself as Dan Wylie. His partner with the buzzcut and Nehru jacket was Ray Phibbs. Where had Stein heard those names? Wylie and Phibbs? His mind felt sluggish. Phibbs was distracted momentarily by a statuesque black African girl walking a long diagonal across the room with her equally tall, icy blue‑eyed Danish model girlfriend. “There goes twelve feet of wasted leg,” he sighed.

Yosemite Sam tugged on the sleeve of his partner’s Nehru jacket. “I think we know what he’s looking for, don’t you?” Without much subtlety he tried to guide his partner’s gaze away from the blips of every attractive woman who crossed his radar screen to the badge around Stein’s neck, which for his own amusement Stein had decided to flaunt instead of hide. Then it hit him. Yosemite Sam. Wylie and Phibbs. Winston’s old lady at the community center had told him they were selling overseas superweed. All his circuitry came to Red Alert.

“What makes you think I’m looking for anything?” Stein vamped.

“I’ve generally found that everyone is looking for something.” Despite the Yosemite Sam shirt, Wylie seemed to be the brains of the duo. He nodded to the waitress, who had stationed herself the perfectly discreet distance away. “Alysha, please take a silver box down for this gentleman.” Stein was escorted to their office. They seemed to be going for a look somewhere between a New Orleans whorehouse and a college frat house, though it may have been the unintentional product of their two personalities. There were plush, silk divans and ergonomic office chairs, 1880s oil lamp replicas and a wide screen TV.

“Nice,” said Stein.

“We like to treat special people in a special way.”

There was a soft knock on the door and Alysha was admitted. She looked less sure of herself here in the power chamber. She placed a small silver box in Wylie’s hand, then withdrew. Once the door had closed behind her, Wylie opened the box and proffered its contents. Stein half expected an engagement ring. But nestled in a bed of plush velvet was a beautifully manicured, identical twin sister of the bud that Goodpasture had given him.

“We call it the ‘Holy Grail’,” Yosemite Sam smiled.

Stein felt his heartbeat rev with the thought that he might be sitting between Nicholette’s killers. His mental projectionist threw up a reel of the two of them astride Nicholette’s bound, naked body, forcing her head under the faucet. He remembered the mental exercise his old pal Shmooie the Buddhist had taught him to modulate his pulse and he brought himself under its control. He mustn’t leap to conclusions. He must go from one stepping‑stone to the next. What did he actually know?

They had a bud of Goodpasture’s weed. No‑they had a bud that looked like Goodpasture’s weed. And even if it was an authentic Goodpasture orchid, and even if they were the two lawyer types Winston’s Old Lady had described, it did not mean that they were the pair who had stolen it. They could easily be the unsuspecting victims of the original thieves. Or the second or third or fourth parties down the line of distribution. But none of that was probable. Not given the time frame of events.

“Holy Grail,” Stein repeated without missing a beat. “Good name.”

“The vessel of truth,” Phibbs advertised. “In cannabis veritas.”

Stein lobbed them a softball to see if they were for real. “Tell me about its genealogy.”

“We’ve told the story so many times,” said, Yosemite Sam, with an air of world‑weariness.

“It’s all in the brochure,” said Crewcut.

It took Stein four seconds to eliminate the possible‑though‑unlikely chance that Wylie and Phibbs had independently evolved, designed, cultivated, and hybridized a strain of cannabis identical to Goodpasture’s. Growers were like fishermen. They loved to tell their stories. These guys had their thumbs in a lot of places, but topsoil wasn’t one of them.

“Did you have any trouble getting it out from L.A.?” Stein casually asked.

“Why would you think it came from L.A.?” Yosemite Sam said.

Stein smiled enigmatically.

“What’s with all the questions?” steamed Phibbs. “Just smoke the shit and you’ll know everything you need to know.”

Wylie apologized for his partner. “He’s still annoyed at the two lesbians.”

Stein hinted that there might be some profitable enterprise in the near future. “Provided there was sufficient quality and quantity to justify the venture.”

“I doubt that would be an impediment,” Wylie assured him.

Stein stood to leave and carefully closed the silver box. “I trust you won’t object to my sharing this with my associates.”

“You mean you want to take it?” Phibbs blurted.

“We’d be delighted,” said Wylie, who had seen the badge and knew what it meant.

Early northern winter dusk had descended upon the city as Stein pedaled back to the Krasnapolsky. He left the bicycle with the doorman and stumbled gratefully into the warmth of the lobby, beating his sides with his arms like a distressed penguin. He took the elevator to his room and locked the door behind him. He had to be sure about this.

He took Goodpasture’s birthday bud out of its nest in his rucksack and placed it on the smooth, polished surface of the ebony coffee table. He then unclasped the silver box he had taken from Crewcut and Yosemite Sam and placed their bud alongside. Their color was identical, their shape and configuration as well. Their leaf structure and the veining of their resins reinforced the superficial evidence. He carefully clipped away from theirs the same amount he had sampled out of the original. He held the buds in either hand and then reversed them. They registered the same heft, the same density. Their aroma, a fingerprint as specific as the signature fragrance of any wine, was identical.

His mind began to churn again. Getting Wylie and Phibbs to return the stolen booty under the threat of exposure and complete loss of face was the easy part. Goodpasture would be happy. Schwimmer’s patients in the AIDS hospice would be happy. But how to connect them to Nicholette’s murder? That was the question. He called Goodpasture’s room but voicemail kicked in, so he left a cryptic message to the effect that, “On the matter of authorship of a certain property, I have acquired evidence which supports your contention. I’ll be in if you wish to discuss it.”

Stein was still half‑frozen from the bike ride. He stripped down and turned the hot shower on full blast. Just before he stepped in he heard a boisterous knock. He wrapped himself in a towel and padded back into the living room and opened the door. Goodpasture stood alongside a woman in her early twenties. She was wearing black silk pants and an off‑the‑shoulder top that gave the imagination a terrific starting point.

“Harry, this is Alex. Alex, I want you to meet my hero and mentor, Harry Stein, who I’m hoping from the phone message I just heard is no longer cheesed at me.”

She glanced down toward the towel tied precariously around Stein’s waist. “It looks like we’re about to meet him at any moment,” she quipped.

Stein had inhaled a breath of her the moment the door opened. It was the scent he had been chasing all afternoon.

“Harry? You’re embarrassing her.” Stein realized he had been staring at the girl for several seconds.

“You didn’t happen to be skating today on the Prinengracht?” he asked.

Her eyes opened wide. “How would you know that?”

“I told you he was amazing,” Goodpasture beamed.

The scent of Nicholette was all over her. But there was more, some tenuous connection. Something in the way she moved her head? The natural ease with which her body compensated for the change in weight. A movement of light crossed the plane of her cheekbones and in that snap of the shutter he saw it. The proof sheet he had found at Nicholette’s. “Nikki and Alex.” Alexandra. Alex.

“You shot a layout with Nicholette Bradley for David Hart.”

Her eyes blinked. “How would you know that?”

“You’re the Espe New Millennium girl.”

“How do you know that?” She was freaking. “It’s supposed to be secret.”

“Is that your real hair?”

The girl flared. “Who sent you?”

“I did.” Goodpasture was delighted as a child with a new piece of Mylar at Stein’s display.

Stein was engulfed in Alex’s tantalizing fragrance. “You smell just like she did.” Alexandra did not draw back. She was not a woman intimidated by men, Stein touched her hair and sniffed her hand, recognizing what had arrested him. “Oh yes,” she said. “It’s haunting, isn’t it?”

“They gave you a few bottles in advance for doing the shoot?”

She nodded. That was what Stein had smelled on Nicholette. It was not her inherent scent, it was Paul Vane’s intoxicating creation, being marketed as Espe New Millennium shampoo. It disquieted him to understand that his strongest memory of Nicholette wasn’t Nicholette at all. It left him with nothing tangible of her to hold.

“I’m sorry about Nicholette. You were close friends?”

“She was like a big older step sister.”

“Don’t get all choked up about it.”

“What I reveal to the camera is for me to decide.”

“Am I the camera?”

“Aren’t you?

Goodpasture was not used to waiting in the background. “Harry. Your message said you found something.”

Stein’s mind zigged away from Wylie and Phibbs and zagged to the pair of beautiful people standing before him. Who knew what went on in the souls of the privileged? The lives of beautiful people were so different from the rest of the world. They were always the sought after, never knowing the pain of the supplicant. They held an instinctive proprietary right to everything they saw. No barriers for them between want and have. And if they wanted something Nicholette had? They had access, they had Nicholette’s trust. Maybe the missing weed was a smoke screen for the oldest story in the book‑two women in love with the same man. Alex, the new young thing, ousting Nicholette, the old young thing, not only as the Espe girl, but also as Goodpasture’s number one gal pal? Steam billowed out from the open bathroom door. Stein used it as a distraction to get time alone. He had to hide these thoughts.

“Look,” he said, “I’m half naked here. The sight of it is probably destroying this poor girl’s sex drive for life. Let me take a quick shower and I’ll pop by to your room and we’ll talk.”

He escorted them to the door and once they were gone, enclosed himself inside the bathroom and held onto the sink while the horrendous scenario resumed its display in his mind. What if Nicholette did not surrender the New Millennium crown as easily as Paul Vane said she did? Maybe it had to be wrested from her grasp. Not to mention losing her friend‑boy to her ambitious little younger figure‑skating protege?

If Alex and Goodpasture had come to Nicholette’s late at night, she would certainly have let them in. Stein recalled seeing no broken windows or kicked‑in doors, no forced entry of any kind on his way to discovering her lifeless body. But what motive could there have been? What was he missing? If there had been any ill feeling it would have emanated from Nikki, not from Alex. She was the only one losing anything. Ditto the boy friend. Stein could possibly visualize Alex, with her model’s detachment, watching Nicholette squirm and die. But not Brian. Whatever shortcomings of youth his character possessed, murder was not one of them. He refused to believe he could be that wrong about a person. And if he was, if he was misjudging Goodpasture’s character so profoundly, then he deserved whatever consequences came to him.

No. He ruled them out. It had to be Wylie and Phibbs. Stein could see them doing those awful things to her. It made him sick to his stomach to visualize that scene, and he forced it to be projected on his mental screen from a distance.

In the shower, he let the torrent of hot water permeate his bones and felt his own weariness. He soaped himself down with the hotel’s complimentary lotion. He lathered his hair and rinsed as per the directions on the shampoo tube. Wet hair thoroughly. Lather. Rinse. Repeat if desired. Should he repeat, he mused? Was he desired? He was sleeping standing up. His mind was going into dream mode. He girded himself and cut the hot water, letting a blast of cold shock him back into linear.

A nagging thought tugged at him. How would Wylie and Phibbs have gained access to Nicholette’s home? She didn’t know them. He’d return to that thought in a moment. The phone was ringing as he came back into the bedroom.

“Is she there with you,” the female voice demanded. It was a familiar voice but he couldn’t quite place it out of context. “Harry, I swear if she is there I will castrate and kill you.”

He felt his blood chill.

“Hillary. What’s happened? Tell me. What’s happened?”