Page 66 of The Expat Affair

I stop at number 467, a wide four-story canal house of black-painted brick with white trim, twice the width of the houses on either side. The building belongs to a man named Jan Visser. The upstairs apartments he rents out for an ungodly monthly rate, but the whole ground floor is reserved for him, for a tiny apartment at the back and the rest an ancient, dusty shop filled with mirrors. Suspended from chains hanging from the ceiling, leaning in stacks against every wall, smothering every table and vertical surface. The most exquisite mirrors in all of northern Europe.

Jan’s mirrors hang in castles and mansions all over the world. They hang in penthouses in New York and Tokyo and Beijingand in the villas lining the streets in Amsterdam Zuid, including Thomas’s. Jan’s mirror is the eighteenth-century masterpiece of gilded wood and smoky glass hanging above the side table in the hall, my favorite piece in the whole house.

But that mirror is not how I know Jan. Xander introduced us last fall, after I asked him to grow those diamonds. Jan and Xander were well acquainted with each other, because Jan knows how to make diamonds disappear.

There’s no bell beside the double doors, and I know from experience not to bother with the handles because they’re locked. With all those contraband stones Jan keeps buried in jars and boxes in the back room, he isn’t the most trusting guy.

This is it, though, the store the PI told Thomas about in the Nine Streets, the one secretly dealing in stolen diamonds. They were off by only a couple of blocks.

I pin the umbrella handle under an arm, wriggle my cell from my pocket, and fire off a text.I’m here.Open up.

The diamonds are also the reason for the German shepherd sleeping on a tartan pillow just inside the door, though Gijs is more for form than function these days. He’s almost as old as Jan, with the same questionable hearing and bum hip. I tap the glass, but Gijs doesn’t lift his head.

At the back of the store there’s movement, Jan shuffling from the workshop overlooking the generous backyard, his old body stooped and limping. He skirts around a giant table covered with antique pots and bowls, a row of old-school bikes, outside-sized trees in giant teak pots, and it takes him an eternity to reach the front, for him to sort through his keys. After forever, he peels opens the door.

I fold my umbrella and step inside, and Jan’s face crinkles into a smile. We exchange the standard three kisses on the cheeks.“So lovely of you to drop by,meissie. Coffee?” He locks the door behind me and reaches for his cane.

“Coffee would be perfect, thanks. How’ve you been?” I wedge my umbrella in a corner, leaving it to drip on the mat.

He makes a phlegmy sound deep in his throat, one that I take fornot so hot, and motions me deeper into the warehouse. His pace is painfully slow—thump shuffle, thump shuffle. I make a quick pit stop at Gijs, who is panting at me in recognition but too lazy to get up from his bed, then I match my steps to Jan’s.

“Bored out of my mind,” he says. “Nothing is moving right now, not with two people dead and the cops everywhere. I’m sure you’ve heard about the raid. One of the kitschy stores around the corner that charges a hundred bucks for a perfumed candle. If you ask me, that’s the real crime.”

I hadn’t heard about the raid, but I’m not all that surprised. If Thomas’s private investigator had intel that brought him here, to the Nine Streets, the police will have had the same info. They would have followed the same trail. If Jan is smart, he’s emptied his back room of everything but mirrors.

“At least it wasn’t a grenade on the stoop,” he says. “That would have been really bad.”

I give him a wry smile, because he’s not wrong. Grenades are a favorite mob calling card, left on the doorsteps of restaurants and stores as both a threat and a warning. Whenever the police or heaven forbid a passer-by stumbles upon one, they shutter the store for months.

We come into the workshop, a long space that runs along the entire back of the building, where dozens of mirrors in various states of repair lie on wheeled tables, topped with paint pots and brushes on rags. Shelves cover the far wall, lined with a disarray of supplies in antique glass jars, plaster and clay and gold leafing,agate for polishing. Jan explained the process to me once, a long lecture on the ancient techniques and products he uses to painstakingly restore the glass and frames, and I have to give it to him, his mirrors really are spectacular.

He points me to a round table by the kitchenette, then pours two steaming cups of coffee and carries them over. He sinks onto the chair across from me. “Now. Tell me what was so important that you had to see me today.”

“I need a gun.”

Jan huffs a breathy laugh. “You Americans and your guns. Do you even know how to shoot one?”

“Stop being difficult and just tell me where I can buy one.”

“How soon you need it?”

“Quickly. Immediately.” I pat the pocket of my coat, the thick wad of bills sitting inside. “I brought cash.”

Jan reaches down the table for a spiral notebook, then scribbles an address on the top sheet, rips it off, and passes it to me. “Ask for Maksim. I’ll let him know you’re on your way. What else?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard about the diamonds that disappeared from Xander’s safe the night he was killed.”

Beyond the missing necklace, the reports have been rather vague about what kind or how many, as I’m guessing nobody but Xander knew what was in there. All those diamonds the Asian lab tucked into their legit shipments to House of Prins and intercepted by Xander, but how many stones? How many shipments? Perhaps a Cullinan or two or nine? Now that Xander’s dead, there’s no one to do inventory except the person who emptied the safe.

But when it comes to black market stones, Jan has his ear to the ground. He knows all the players, gets wind of who’s moving which merchandise. If those diamonds from Xander’s safe have made their way to the market, Jan will know where they are, who’s got them.

Jan takes a noisy sip of his coffee. “Sure, I heard.”

“Twelve of my diamonds were in his safe. The ones Xander grew to match these.”

I tug a stack of papers from my bag and push them across the table, copies of the GIA certifications for stones in pieces Thomas has given me over the years. A pair of solitaire earrings, the stones seven carats apiece. A pendant in the shape of a pear, the diamond big and bright canary yellow. The six-carat diamond, bright and internally flawless, in my engagement ring. Another ring with a cluster of cushion and brilliant-cut diamonds arranged into an elaborate flower, with a whopping nineteen-carat total weight. This last one will be the most difficult to replicate, but I don’t want to replicate any of these pieces. I only want Jan here to switch out the stones.

He looks at the papers, but he doesn’t reach for them.

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