The Dutch sure know how to live, Tinker decided, tipping his chair back against the half-panelled wall.
A litre of fresh draught Heineken in one hand and a glowing cone-spliff in the other was proof positive. His latest ride, shining through the coffee house window on a street barred to cars, confirmed it.
One of the consolations for getting older is the bigger toys. One hundred cubic inches of V-twin was a tad overkill, especially in Amsterdam where pedal-power held sway, but out on the autobahns his Super Vee could crank it on with the big dogs. Not that a loony biker just off the ferry fazed the locals one jot, used as they were to drug cafes and whores openly displaying their charms in storefront windows.
Tinker glanced at the clock, and smiled wistfully. Jan could be rolling in the door any minute now—apart from the fact that was twenty-five years ago and he was serving life without parole. Tinker felt he had to re-visit the old rendezvous and sit at their table whenever he was passing through the ‘dam. You leave parts of yourself in special places and they call you back to their shining moment; they beckon from your youth—why resist what made you. Sentimentality is a middle-aged muse, but Tinker let it take him back to older, wilder days when the Rookies was a pub and before the Leidseplein became a tourist trap. Tinker’s first night in the ‘dam all those years ago, he’d run into Jan right here–and finally come up against someone crazier than himself.
The hash-spiked spliff performed its magic, and he recalled the time they found out that the Rotterdam Harley dealer was lumbered with a bunch of ex-police K-models that nobody wanted. Jan talked the boss into a two-for-one deal, plus some desperately needed performance parts installed with a full service.
They toured Europe, and riding hotted-up cop bikes with Dutch plates they pretty much got away with murder.
Tinker smiled as the memories had their little play and took another leisurely swallow on his Heine; funny how beer always tastes better close to the brewery. He recalled some of their epic beer-cellar brawls and high-speed pursuits, usually with him right behind Jan, who was always faster, tougher–and the one who started it.
Tinker sighed. Another, more thoughtful pull on the spliff, and he watched smoke rise to dissipate itself on the nicotine-stained ceiling. Memories were going sour. Their parting of the ways wasn’t really about the girl… what was her name? It was just that Jan was a runaway hell-bound train, and Tinker had decided to get off.
Tinker sighed, the spliff went out. He left it in the ashtray alongside his helmet and gloves while he went to the can. Okay, he’d performed his little ritual; now it was piss, swill the last of the ale, then blast off to Tony Leenes, his Indian dealer buddy in Lemmer.
Returning, Tinker was mildly irritated to see someone sitting at his table. It wasn’t like the place was crowded, and he had marked his spot. Some old guy in a wheelchair and all hunched over. Maybe it’s the crip’s regular table now, Tinker figured, taking his seat.
He reached for his beer and the big roach. “Okay if I smoke?” he asked, huffily polite.
“Don’t care if you bursted into flames, Tinkerbell,” whispered a voice from the past.
The roach fell from Tinker’s fingers, and he stared at the stranger’s face.
“Jan?” Tinker gasped. Jan had been two years older than him; now it looked more like twenty, and none kind.
“Christ, it is you!” Tinker blurted out, and then lowered his voice. “You’re not on the lam, are you?” A big, foreign, hairy biker found smoking dope with a disguised, escaped, well–murderer–wasn’t swift even in easygoing ‘dam.
Jan, or his ghost, peered at him from behind thick, tinted glasses. He didn’t look to have any hair under the toque, or fat under his parchment skin, or long for this world.
“Yes, I… I Jan Kramer.” The familiar voice hacked with painful laughter. “I look in my rear-view mirror, and Tinkerbell is there no more.”
Thank Christ, thought Tinker, remembering the rumours that had come his way after their split-up. Jan became a Dutch Emmett Grogan, a real Jack-the-Lad in full performance mode. Drugs, outlaw clubs, heavy shit going down. Still, Jan had been like a brother once, and that’s a brother always. Goes for double when a brother’s down this low.
“Jan, you crazy fucker,” marvelled Tinker, clapping him on an emaciated shoulder to confirm his reality. “Forget our bygones, lemme buy my old riding buddy a beer ‘n a hooter of hash.”
A thin hand waved at the fresh-squeezed orange juice before him. “No alcohol, no drugs, definitely not the crazy fucking.” A pale smile flitted across his ravaged face. “Compassionate release. They ‘re letting me die on my own time to save themselves the trouble of burial.”
Hard to lie with the truth staring you in the face.
The truth was Jan looked like Rock Hudson’s zombie.
“Hey, Jan,” Tinker jollied, knocking on the beer-ringed tabletop for luck like they used to. “Remember. Never say die.”
Jan just looked at him from bone-tired eyes; just looked. A giggle of girls over by the pinball machines underscored the silence that fell between them.
“You were always too soft, Tinkerbell. How you say? Away with the fairies,” Jan wheezed. “That was why you quit; too much of thinking, not enough the doing.”
I could figure the writing on the wall, thought Tinker, but only said. “The fast life was your open road–I just couldn’t keep up.”
Jan’s laughter was painful to hear, like an echo lost in a hollowed-out chest.
“Not even on the same bikes or the same girls.”
Tinker had to smile, it was true. Jan had such a big life force, events just gravitated around him: women, adventures, and casualties. Jan never seemed to get hurt, and so self-possessed he could always charm his way out. It was scary to see him barely flickering in the ashes of a once-perfect body.
“Hey, Jan,” Tinker cajoled. “It’s never too late for hope.”
His gaunt companion raised the juice in a mock toast. “But always too early for death, yes? Your timing though, it is just right.”
Tinker didn’t like the sound of that, gypsy riders aren’t meant to be predictable. “In time for what, exactly?” he asked.
Jan smiled an off-centre grin. “Who do you think? I hear you develop the second sight, a regular little Harry Potter, no?”
Tinker re-lit his spliff and looked casually round the bar, he didn’t like going into the ‘sight in public. It looked too much like a seizure, and people tended to stuff his wallet between his teeth, assuming they didn’t run off with it.
The barman was explaining to a tourist that he couldn’t sell him a whole ounce, much to the amusement of the local barflies. A rasta was putting the make on some Swedish blonde over in the corner. Tinker could just hear that old story–“Hey mon, yo not prejudiced or sumthin?” Over the other end, one of the teen gigglers had detached herself from the games and was heading towards their table, probably to bum a florin. Tinker tried to ignore her, but panhandlers always zeroed in on him.
“No, Jan,” she said coming up behind them. “Tinker doesn’t need his sight; I’m here.”
The toke caught in Tinker’s throat. He knew that voice–it was from the grave.
Jan pulled off his glasses with a shaking hand and stared hard at the teenybopper in her punk threads as she helped herself to a seat. That blanched Goth make-up wasn’t, anymore than those kohl-rimmed eyes were a girl’s. Girls are human. Jan nodded slowly–they’d met.
“Jeez… ack… Death.” Tinker struggled to speak. “Do you have to sneak up like that?”
Jan found voice, and a trace of his old spirit. “Of course she does, even when she’s expected,” he croaked, “But I see you two have already met. I’d not thought you kept such dangerous company, Tinkerbell.” He waved three thin fingers at the barman.
“Jenevar, doubles.”
Death put her pretty head on one side; she liked the brave ones, the wild men. “Well, maybe for just one—while you boys talk over old times.”
Last words, thought Tinker, stifling a groan. I’m the wrong side of a bloody confessional here.
The gins arrived. Tinker immediately shot his back, followed by a chaser of beer. Death emptied hers into Jan’s orange juice with lady-like prissiness and leaned back, looking speculatively around the room. Jan took a lingering sip of jenevar and rolled it around in his mouth.
“First in fifteen years,” he muttered, and took another. “Better I should have stuck to booze, it don’t carry viruses.” He pulled up the sleeve of his loose jacket; the old needle-scarred veins were white lines on the highway to hell. “Of course it could have been the ‘boys’ inside–we shared them too. Different world in there, Tinkerbell.”
Tinker fiddled with the roach, pricks in arm or arse were never part of his comfort zone. He’d heard rumours of bad stuff, but Jan had been like an older, wilder brother and Tinker had preferred his memories. Denial had come easier than sitting facing this picture of Dorian Gray. Listening to it all spew out.Death, on the other hand, never turned a jet-black hair. She’d heard it all in every language and convolution. Boring. Whatever.
“I can’t complain, life was good till I turned it bad,” Jan continued. “Just one regret.” He looked at his hands holding the shooter of gin, pale translucent skin stretched over bone. “Remember Marlene?”
That was her name, Tinker thought. Dirty Lilee; what a body.
“She was the wild one, no? We even fought over her; kinkier the better for Lilee.” Jan’s eyes were hollower than his laugh. “Our last time, she thought it was just the ‘rough scarfing’. But I’d found she was ratting me out to a business rival. I –we–had been using heavily and life wasn’t worth much. It was the way she’d have wanted to go.” He smiled thinly. “I can think of worse.”
Tinker’s chair clattered as he half-rose to his feet with clenched fists.
“You strangled Marlene while you were screwing her?”
Jan looked up at him without emotion. “Just one more body they never found; I was not even charged.” He motioned weakly for Tinker to sit down. “You were right to leave me; I’d only have damned you too.”
“Hey, that stuff’s no joke,” cautioned Tinker. “I sort of got into magic over the years, and I’ve seen hell. You’re not gonna like it.”
Jan smiled sadly. “But perhaps I have looked into it longer than you.” He turned to Death, a black and white picture of teenage ennui sipping at her gin and orange.
“Time for a last wish, yes?”
“Jan did buy you that drink,” Tinker pointed out, knowing Death abhorred an un-discharged debt to the quick. He’d decided he owed Jan one too, a last one for an old brother. “If it’s in my power, let me grant the wish.”
Tinker kicked the big, Chevy-based Vee into roaring life, and then stepped back—kicking himself. Jan insisted on getting from his chair to the saddle unaided and just sat there, grinning like a skull and blipping the throttle.
“I give Lilee your regards, Tinkerbell,” Jan said, and clasped him by the wrist in their old shake. The last time had been like this too–Jan off on a highway to hell with the bike and the girl.
Jan turned to Death. “So, come on baby, we ride to your place, no?”
Death hopped on, hitching up her leather mini. “I give the directions now, Jan.” She liked big motorcycles, they put many fine young men her way. “Don’t frown like that, Tinker, I won’t let him wreck your baby. Ciao.”
Away in a screech of rubber and scatter of bicycles down Korte Leidse Dwarsstraat. Tinker winced, hearing the poor engine howl and transmission clang at a missed shift, and then he couldn’t see it anymore. He’d just turned back to the coffee house when a distant, final scream of abused rubber ending in a loud splash, stopped him in his tracks.
Tinker sighed, went inside, and got on the phone to Tony. “Hey, buddy, Tinker here…spot of bike bother… yeah, I know it’s a long way… bring the truck with the power- winch and grapple…”
Tony eventually stopped laughing. Tinker hung up the phone and sat at a window table. He ordered a black coffee, and watched life go slowly by on pedals.
