"I had to kill them," the murderer said. "Don’t you see? I didn’t have any choice. And now, I’m afraid, you have left me without a choice."

The knife was pointing right at my heart, as threatening as any gun would have been. The killer was maybe six feet away from me, but it would take only a second to cover that distance.

One second to close the gap between us, two seconds to raise the knife and plunge it into my chest, perhaps another half a minute for the blade to do its damage.

Which left me, I figured, with about 33 seconds left to live.

And that’s when I saw her, standing in the hallway, her head cocked prettily to one side and a question shining in her eyes. What the hell, I wondered, was she doing there?

And, much more to the point, what the hell would she do next?

While a pair of coeds I didn’t recognize were passing out the test papers, I printed my name and "History 527: Absolutism and Democracy" and "Final Exam" on the cover of my University of Michigan blue book and flipped it open. The eager beavers in the front rows were already scribbling, but I was hidden away at the back of the lecture hall, by the doors, and it'd be a couple minutes yet before the girls worked their way up to my neck of the woods. So I just sat there, watching Prof Harriman give us the eye and trying to convince myself not to worry.

Most of the professors under whom I’ve had the always dubious pleasure of taking classes have brought in elite squads of jackbooted grad-student storm troopers to proctor their exams for them, so they can hang out in their offices and sip sherry while we proles sweat through the mental obstacle courses they dream up for us, but not old D.S. Harriman. No, he was there himself, in living blubber, all 300 pounds of him. I think he really liked to watch us suffer.

He had on his usual size-87 dingy-gray suit – he only took about an 84, but he apparently subscribed to the "buy baggy" theory, so people would think he was busy losing weight – and, because it was final-exam day and a special occasion, his other tie, the one without the gravy stain. His bald head gleamed moistly under the fluorescent lighting of the hall, and his jowls quivered with delight as the first howls of anguish began to rise from the peanut gallery.

Rumor has it that the "D.S." in D.S. Harriman stands for something Biblical, something along the lines of David Samuel, but we history majors know better.

De Sade, that’s the nasty old bastard’s name. Has to be.

A pile of test booklets reached me from the right, and I took one and passed the rest on.

Here goes nothing, I thought, and, if I hadn't lapsed into fairly cynical agnosticism God knows how many moons ago, I’d’ve crossed myself and sent up a couple of Hail Marys, just to play it safe. As it was, I sighed out about six quarts of breath I hadn’t noticed myself holding and turned hopefully to the first question:

Discuss democratic theory – as evidenced in the writings of Jean Boudin, the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos and Doleman's Conference – to demonstrate that democracy is a justification for revolution.

"Mr. Farmer!" Harriman’s bloated baritone boomed at me from his lair at the front of the room. "You are not, I trust, discussing this examination with your neighbor?"

"No, sir!" I winced at the accusation. "Just talking to myself, sir. Sorry."

This was practically the truth. I had not been chatting with the dweeb beside me when Prof Harriman’s eagle eye had spotted my lips aflutter – perish the thought! But I hadn't really been talking to myself, either.

If the truth be told, I'd been petitioning my Maker, and what I'd been saying was, "Our Father Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy Name. . . ."

"Time, ladies and gentlemen."

I dropped my pen and looked up in shock. Was it two hours already? Must be: my hand felt like I'd had a hungry lab rat gnawing on it for about 15 minutes longer than forever.

And there in the distance stood Harriman, fat and rumpled and grinning from ear to ear. You’d swear the university paid him a bonus for every one of us he flunked.

He wasn’t flunking this boy, though, not this semester. The exam had been a mother, true, but I’d been ready for it. B- at the absolute worst, and, if the moon was in my seventh house and the Good Lord had been paying attention to my prayers, I might’ve even pulled myself an ace.

The damn thing was over with, at any rate, my final final of the term, so I was now officially on summer vacation, with nothing whatsoever scheduled until classes started up again in September – three lazy, hazy, crazy months in the future.

As they so aptly put it during the darkest days of the Reign of Terror: Lassez les bon temps roulez!

I tucked the test booklet inside my blue book, doubled-checked that my name was on the cover, and passed the package along towards the aisle.

Stood up and flexed my fingers, hoping to work some circulation back into my traumatized hand.

Wished a happy summer to a couple people I knew and started moving in the direction of the doors.

When a deep voice bellowed: "Mr. Farmer!"

Curse!

I turned back and looked down at him, and he was standing there on the stage, 30 rows before and below me, crooking his Jimmy Dean sausage of a finger with a fat smile on his face and an evil glint in his beady little eyes.

Now what?

He couldn’t think I’d really been asking someone for help, back at the beginning of the exam period, could he? No way: he didn’t know me well, but he knew me better than that. Well, then, what did the lousy glitter-dome want?

One way to find out, eh?

I fought against the current of escapees, feeling like one of those sockeye salmon heading towards the happy spawning grounds – only they gotta struggle upstream, don’t they, and I (hopefully not metaphorically, hopefully not for the third time) was going down.

By the time I reached him, I’d scared myself half to death. He thought he’d seen me cheating, the blankety-blanked jerk, and he was going to rip up my paper and make me take an alternate exam – or worse.

"Professor Harriman," I said in a rush, as soon as I got within range, "I – "

But he wasn’t sticking around for explanations. He turned away from me without a word and lumbered up the steps and out the back door of the lecture hall. I caught it as it was swinging shut behind him, and caught him as he was stuffing himself into the elevator.

We rode up to the fifth floor in silence; by then, I’d figured maybe I’d better keep my big mouth shut until I found out for sure what the old sleazeball was up to.

He waddled down the long corridor to his office, and from the looks of him you’d swear he’d completely forgotten about me. But he did hold the door open with a corny show of Old World politeness, and as he shooed me on in ahead of him I wondered if I would ever again emerge to greet the light of day.

Harriman’s "office" was actually just a miserable six-by-eight cubicle with a single grimy window overlooking the Quad and the other three walls lined floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves – except for the doorway, of course. There was a battered metal desk heaped high with books and papers, and a motheaten armchair with spots on it, and what had to be the original Underwood typewriter collecting dust on a wobbly stand placed at right angles to the desk. A faintly moldy smell hung in the air, and I wasn’t sure if it came from the books or the furniture – or, at these close quarters, from good old D.S. Harriman himself.

He waved me to the armchair cordially enough, and planted himself in the wide swivel number behind his desk, selected a pipe from a rack of them and stuck it between his teeth without lighting it.

"Coffee?" he suggested.

I scanned the office curiously. There was no percolater, there were no cups. As far as I knew, the only machine in the building was back down on the ground floor, near the elevator we’d come up in.

"Ah, no, thanks," I said.

"Mmmm. So, you’re all through for the summer, then, is that correct, Mr. Farmer?" I could hear him straining to sound like a human being, and I’ll tell you what: if that was his best shot, I was not impressed.

"Yes, sir," I said, holding up my end of the conversation.

"Do you have plans for your holiday?"

"Plans? Well, no, sir, not exactly. I’ll go home, I guess, see the folks. Pick up a job, maybe, if I can find something where I don’t have to say, ‘Do you want fries with that?’ 40 times an hour."

He leaned forward and dumped his elbows on his desk and his chins on his palms. "And your young lady? Patricia, I believe her name is?"

Now, how the hell did he know about Pat? She was an undergrad – in English, no less – and she wouldn’t set foot in the history department if Hurricane Andrew came to town and Angell Hall had the only storm cellar on campus. Who was this guy, a latter-day J. Edgar Hoover?

"We, ah, we came to a parting of the ways about three weeks ago, sir. I guess your sources are a little late with the information."

Harriman lifted one eyebrow – a neat trick, I grant him that – and rumbled, real man-to-man-like, "Problems?"

I sighed. "No, well, not exactly problems, Professor. We tried living together for a while, only she didn’t want to give up smoking and I didn’t want to give up breathing, that’s all, so we – "

" – came to a parting of the ways. I see."

"More or less, sir."

He sat there sucking on his unlit pipe, and one of those sickly silences fell upon us, like in "Casey at the Bat."

"Uh, Professor Harriman?" I said at last.

He straightened up, then, and put away the pipe. "I’m a nonsmoker myself, these days." He smiled ruefully, if the grotesque shape his lips twisted themselves into could be called a rueful smile. "Doctor’s orders, I’m afraid. But I don’t suppose you are particularly interested in the state of my heart and lungs. Let me tell you why I asked you up here this afternoon."

I waited for it.

"I am working on a book, Mr. Farmer – my eighth book, in point of fact. I have been fortunate enough to be able to conduct the lion’s share of my research right here at our Graduate Library." (The U of M’s Ann Arbor campus has three main libraries – the Graduate, the specialized Business Administration Library, and the Undergraduate – generally referred to as the GLib, the BAd, and the UGLi. Bah-dump-bump.) "There is, however, some intensive work to be done on site. The project will take approximately two weeks, and I had originally planned to handle it myself, this summer. But another of my perhaps too-cautious doctor’s orders prohibits me from undertaking the significant amount of travelling which would be required. I am therefore interested in contracting you, Mr. Farmer, to complete my researches for me. I will pay all of your expenses, of course, plus a stipend of, shall we say, $500 per week? I would require you to leave immediately, if these terms are acceptable to you – or as quickly as is feasible, if there are arrangements you must make before departing. You will be back in a fortnight, having earned the sum of $1000, which I shall pay to you in cash, half in advance, and you will still have the bulk of the summer at your disposal."

I’d like to be able to report that I took this all in my stride, but the truth is that I may have goggled just a bit. (Okay, a lot, maybe.) It took me a minute or two to mull the thing over, and, when I had it fairly well mulled, the only reply I could think of was, "Why me, Professor? I mean, it’s not like I’m the only one of your students with a head for research."

He smiled again – or at least that’s what I think it was supposed to be. "Certainly not, my boy. Anatomically speaking, that is. But your head, I’ve noticed, has for my purposes the distinct advantage of housing a brain of sorts."

A compliment from D.S. Harriman! Would wonders ever cease?

"Does my proposal appeal to you, Mr. Farmer?"

"Uh, yeah, well, sure." I didn’t much like agreeing with this overbearing doodah about anything, but, hey, he was talking a thousand American crabcakes, here. "Only, well, where is it you want me to go?"

"To a place called the Begijnhof, in Amsterdam."

I swallowed. "Amsterdam? You mean like upstate New York, right? Near Schenectady?"

"Don't be absurd," he said impatiently. "You know perfectly well that my field is European history. I mean like the Netherlands, Mr. Farmer. Near Belgium."

Somehow he didn’t seem quite as repulsive as usual when he said it.

A lemon-drop sun was working its way up a pale-blue sky when my plane left Detroit Metro for New York at 11 AM the next Saturday. By the time I caught my connecting flight at JFK, it was midafternoon and still sunny.

When we touched down at Schiphol Airport, eight hours and a six-hour time difference later, it was Sunday morning, and, on that side of the Atlantic, slate-gray clouds threatened rain and the sun was having trouble clearing customs.

I haven’t had occasion to do an awful lot of flying in my 24 years, so I haven’t seen an awful lot of airports. Those I have seen have all been pretty interchangeably awful, and Schiphol was no exception. Newsstands, duty-free shops, hordes of faceless people lugging luggage and renting Hertzes and either joyeously greeting or tearfully taking their leave of the hordes of faceless friends and relatives who were either joyeously picking them up or tearfully dropping them off. It wasn’t until I’d collected my first entry stamp in my brand-new rush-job passport and rescued my backpack from the carousel and walked beneath the green "Nothing to Declare" sign and out of the terminal that it really sank in that I was in Holland, in Europe, on soil more foreign than Canada for the very first time in my life.

Prof Harriman – that dear old benevolent soul, towards whom I was now feeling positively chummy – had made all kinds of arrangements for me, and all I had to do was find my way into town and check into my hotel.

There were a half-dozen off-white taxis pulled up outside the terminal doors, and I tapped meekly on the driver’s window of the first one in line.

The old-timer behind the wheel looked up from his newspaper and rolled down his window a couple inches. "Ja?"

"Ah, ‘scuse me. Do you, ah, do you speak English?"

He made a face. "No, young man. I do not speak English," he said, in perfect English. "This is Holland. I'm a Dutchman. I speak Dutch."

I ducked my head, embarrassed. "Right, stupid question, sorry. Listen, I need a ride downtown. Are you. . . ?"

He narrowed his eyes at my backpack. "You can better go with the KLM bus," he said. "It’s only six guilder to the Central Station."

Ever the practically bankrupt college student, I came this close to asking him to point me to the bus stop – but then I remembered D.S. Harriman was picking up the tab. "Well, okay," I said doubtfully, "if you don't want the fare. . . ."

He straightened up at that, tossed his paper on the passenger seat beside him and reached around to open the back door for me. "Of course I want the fare! You need a ride, I have a taxi. Jump in, young man, jump in!"

I shrugged out of my pack and swung it inside and climbed in after it.

"Where downtown?" the old guy said, as he dropped the cab into gear and pulled away from the curb.

The good professor had booked me a room at a place his travel agent had recommended, just a couple minutes’ walk from where I was going to be doing his research for him. "The Nova Hotel," I said, "in the" – I dug a slip of paper with the address on it out of my wallet – "oh, God, in the Nee-you-weh – "

"Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal." The cabbie nodded his approval. "Very nice. Not the Hilton, but nice. If you can afford there, you can afford the 30 guilder for the ride."

Thirty guilders sounded like a hell of a lot, but I did a rough mental calculation and figured it came out to about 19 bucks, a little less than I’d paid in New York for the transfer from LaGuardia to JFK.

"Does everybody here speak English?" I leaned forward and rested my elbows on the back of the driver’s seat, so I could talk with the cabbie over the hum of his engine and the steady drone of highway noise.

He lifted his right hand from the wheel and made one of those comme çi comme ça gestures. "Now, everybody? Not really. The kids don’t get it on school until they’re a year of 13, and the farmers don’t bother with it much, but city people know at least a little, sometimes a lot. We’re a small country, only 14 million of us. The rest of the world’s not going to bother learning our little kikker language, so we have to learn everyone else’s if we want to be able to communicate. English, French, German – we can overcharge you in lots of languages."

After maybe 15 minutes of flat farmland, we hit the outskirts of town. The old guy pointed out an enormous white convention center – the RAI, he called it, as proudly as if he’d built it himself – and later on the twin brick-and-slate steeples of the ornate Victorian Rijksmuseum. Then we started twisting through a maze of one-way streets, past endless rows of narrow four- and five-story brick houses with oddly shaped gables, over stubby bridges spanning a confusion of intersecting green canals. "A thousand bridges," the cabbie told me, "a hundred kilometers of canals. Some people call Amsterdam the Venice of the North, but they’re wrong. Actually, Venice is the Amsterdam of the South."

At last we pulled up in front of the hotel, across the street from the Scientology and Dianetics Center and next door to the Tingel Tangel Jazz Club. Half the signs in Amsterdam seemed to be in English, which was about half comforting and half disappointing. I paid off the driver with a bright orange-and-yellow banknote with a glorious sunflower on it, so pretty compared to our drab American greenbacks that I almost hated to part with it. He made change, and I tipped half of it back to him and asked him for a receipt. He scribbled out something about as legible as my doctor’s prescriptions, waved goodbye and tootled off, and I shouldered my pack and clambered down a couple stone steps to the Nova’s semi-sunken glass front door.

They were expecting me, and the receptionist checked me in and sent me on up in the elevator to a small but cozy room on the third floor. It had a single bed with a decent mattress and a reading light clipped to the headboard, it had a sink and towels and a closet and a miniscule bathroom with a toilet that if I sat on it my knees pressed up against the beige tiled wall, it had a drain set into the bathroom floor and a showerhead at eye level, which I guess was what the girl at the desk must have meant when she assured me there was a douche in the room. It wasn’t much, room 214 – that "2" threw me for a minute, until I remembered reading somewhere that what we Americans call the first floor the Europeans call the ground floor, and what we call the second floor they call the first floor, and so on, so that my third-floor quarters were on the European second floor, whence 214 – but it was clean and it was quiet and Professor Harriman was paying for it, so I’d be delighted to call it Home Sweet Home for the next two weeks.

I probably ought to have been jetlagged and groggy from all the travelling, but I was too excited about being in Amsterdam to sleep, so I unpacked my pack and cleaned up a little and caught the elevator back down to the lobby.

I’d read up on the city during the week it’d taken to push through my passport, and there was plenty I wanted to see, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to start out by getting my bearings, so I’d be ready to commence work in the morning.

The receptionist told me all I had to do was turn right and follow the tram tracks for a couple minutes, then make a left at the pianos, and I’d see a sign for the Begijnhof on the wall about 20 meters ahead on my left.

So I went out the door and up the steps and to my right, and followed the tram tracks past a cluster of little stamp shops on one side and the Amsterdams Historisch Museum on the other. One of the stamp shops, at the corner of Rosmarijnsteeg, was in a building that must have been close to collapse; it had been shored up with five thick logs with the bark still on them, bolted to a wooden platform 18 inches out from the side of the building at ground level and clamped to the brick wall six feet above my head with rusted iron braces. A bass-ackwards way of doing things, I thought – and yet the results seemed sturdy enough, and a damn sight cheaper than ripping the whole building down and starting over again.

A long yellow streetcar rumbled past, blue sparks spitting from its overhead wires. It stopped briefly to discharge and pick up passengers, and, when it rattled off again, I spotted the piano shop on the corner behind it.

Swinging around the corner, I found myself in a big, bustling square with a street sign telling me it was the Spui – although how that was supposed to be pronounced was completely beyond me. Spwee? Spewie? Spoy?

Whatever it was called, it was a lively place. First thing that caught my eye was the sea of white tables shaded by colorful Cinzano umbrellas spilling out across the sidewalk from a cafe to the east. An assortment of bookstores and restaurants lined the southern and western sides of the square, dominated by a bulky gray Universiteit van Amsterdam building. The Spui’s northern boundary, on my left, consisted of a row of 10 brick houses, and the tallest of them – five stories of red brick with a dozen white-trimmed windows and a pointed gable – had a stone bas-relief of a tall woman in a flowing white gown above its arched doorway and, off to one side, a blue-and-white sign reading "Begijnhof" with an arrow pointing to the door.

"Dis mus’ be da place," I concluded. And decided that, as long as I was in the neighborhood, I might as well stop in and introduce myself, if anyone was to home. There was no doorbell, though, and no knocker, and I was debating the advisability of pounding on the tall wooden door with my fists when a sweet old lady wheeling a battered all-white bicycle down the sidewalk stopped just behind me.

"Moet U d’rin?" she asked, or at least that’s what it sounded like.

"I’m sorry," I said, "I don't speak Dutch. Do you – ?"

She flashed me an understanding smile and broke in on me in heavily accented English: "You want to go inside, yes?"

"Yes," I agreed, "but, uh, how do I – ?"

"It isn’t locked," she said, that last word coming out lock-Ed. "You can go ahead in."

"Ah, it isn’t locked," I nodded. "But I – "

"No, it’s good, don’t worry. Go in, go in!"

I looked around the square, and no one was paying any attention to us. Shrugging, I tried the iron door handle. The old lady was right: it wasn’t lock-Ed.

"Go in," she said again, pushing air away from her with gnarled white hands.

It didn’t feel right, walking into somebody’s house unannounced like that, but the old girl didn’t seem especially senile, so I figured, hey, maybe she’s the cook or something, just do it.

Had I But Known at that moment what would happen over the next couple days, would I have gone on in, I wonder – or would I have turned around and collected my pack and caught the next plane back to the land of the free and the home of the Whopper?

Doesn’t matter, really. I didn’t know what was waiting for me within the walls of the Begijnhof, so I pushed open the wooden door and set foot into Wonderland.

I found myself in a dim-lit narrow hallway with a ceiling of intersecting Moorish domes of yellow brick and white stone trimmed with green. The walls were brick, the floor was stone inlaid with geometric mosaics. It was all straight out of the Arabian Nights, and, if Ali Baba had popped out of a jar of olive oil and stolen my watch, I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.

Behind me, the lady with the bicycle coughed meaningfully, and I excuse-me’d and stepped aside to let her pass. At the far end of the hall, maybe 30 feet from where I stood, she went down six stone steps and through a second doorway, wheeling her bike down a grooved wooden ramp which had obviously been set there for that purpose. I trooped along after her, down the steps and through the inner doorway and into the 17th century.

The street noise, the traffic, the rumble of the trams, the crowds – all gone. I was in a broad and peaceful courtyard, and I swear it was like that narrow hallway had carried me three centuries into the past. The old lady was pushing her bicycle along a dusty brick path lined with a dozen lovely two- and three- and four-story brick houses on the left, and open on the right for about 50 yards, at which point it curved right and lost itself behind a pretty country church with a tall brick bell tower capped with slate.

Dazed by the unexpected quiet, I started down the path. There was a bulky metal sculpture of a nun or something on my right, and up ahead I could see the dame with the bicycle turning in at a gate in the green picket fence which separated the tiny front yards of the houses from the path, and another old lady peered down at me suspiciously from the second-floor window of the second house on my left, but otherwise I seemed to have the entire place to myself.

Past the church, I could see that the path looped around a kite-shaped plot of grass, past more houses and the long blank north wall of the church and back to join up with itself again. In the center of the loop, the grassy area was raised slightly above ground level and set off by a low brick wall; the grass was sprinkled with clusters of white and purple narcissus and shaded by five tall chestnut trees.

So this, then, was the Begijnhof, this oasis of calm in the heart of the frantic city. This was where I’d be spending my working hours for the next couple weeks.

Not bad, m’lad!

I’d only planned on looking in for a minute and saying a quick hello, but, now that I was here, I couldn’t think of any particular reason for leaving. It was such a relaxing spot, such an idyllic place to be. Even the weather was cooperating: the clouds had lifted, and the sun was out at last. With what I’m sure must have been a sappy sort of grin on my face, I strolled around the perimeter of the central green, soaking up the atmosphere and the fresh scent of the summer flowers.

The houses were beautiful, each with its little garden and its gauzy white curtains behind white-trimmed windows. Most of them had their doors on the ground floor, but a couple had stone stairways with dark green railings leading up a flight to the main entrance, with a plainer door set into the side of the steps below. Bottom door for servants, I guessed, and top door for the family and its guests. Pretty fancy.

One of the houses wore an inscription carved into a thick granite lintel between its second- and third-floor windows: INIVRIA VLCISENDA OBLIVIONE. Latin, I conjectured, which was all Greek to me. Nearby, another house was dated: Anno 1660.

There was bird song in the air, and an occasional squawking and flap of wings. Pigeons waddled around with their beaks to the pathway, searching for lunch. If I listened carefully, I could just make out the passing of trams in the distance, but, except for that, it might as well have been anno 1660.

Back in front of the church after my circuit of the green, I looked the joint over more closely – and discovered to my surprise that the ornate letters etched into the stone above its wooden double doors read English Reformed Church, Anno 1607.

Even in here, even the church was in English!

A bronze plaque to the left of the doors confirmed it: "This church is believed to have been built in 1392," it said, in English capitals. "In 1607 it was given to English-speaking Presbyterians living in Amsterdam. It was enlarged in 1665. An extensive restoration was completed in 1975. An international Christian community continues to worship here."

I tried the doors, and they were unlock-Ed. There was a wood-panelled vestibule, and then the church proper, one large white room with an arched ceiling and blue support beams. The walls, incongruously, were lined with flags; I recognized the Stars and Stripes, the Maple Leaf, and the Union Jack, but there were half a dozen others I didn't know. Above the altar and beneath a stained-glass window showing a group of Pilgrims praying around the mainmast of a ship at sea was painted, in English, the legend, "Create in me a clean heart, O God."

There were 20 rows of plain wooden pews flanking an aisle that stretched from where I stood up to the altar, and a man in a lightweight gray suit with a turned-around collar was sidling up and down the narrow spaces between the rows gathering prayerbooks. Sunday services must have let out not long ago.

I’m not usually much of a Boy Scout, so I guess it was the general tranquility of the place that inspired me to do my good deed for the day. The minister was working the right side of the center aisle, so I took the left side and pitched in.

He noticed me, then, and flashed me a gracious smile. "That’s very kind of you," he called across the wide room.

"My pleasure."

We met up back by the vestibule door, where there was a wooden rack for the prayerbooks. A thicket of organ pipes gleamed proudly from its perch above the doorway.

"The Reverend William Llewellyn Jones, L.L.B., B.D., M.A.," he introduced himself, wiping his right hand on his trousers and holding it out to me, "although most everyone in my ‘flock,’ such as it is, calls me Reverend Bill."

We shook hands. "I’m John Lewis Farmer," I said, "B.A. and trying to finish my M.A., A.S.A.P. And, back where I come from, most everyone calls me Jack."

"You’re from America, then?" Reverend Bill’s accent was veddy veddy British. He was in his late 30s, I’d venture, a little shorter than my own 6’2", but thin where I’m, well, not thin and light-complected where I’m practically Mediterranean. He had clear brown eyes under fine eyebrows and a shock of sandy hair, a straight nose and a pleasant smile and a small black mole to the side of a weakish chin.

"Sure am," I admitted. "Battle Creek, Michigan, home of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and not a whole heck of a lot else. You're English, right?"

He wagged a chiding finger at me. "Welsh, if you please. There is a difference, you know, though not many of you Colonials seem to be aware of it. Is this your first visit to the Begijnhof?"

"Yeah, it is, actually. My first day in Amsterdam, too. First day in Europe, when you get right down to it."

"Your very first day on the Continent, and here you are!" He clapped his thin hands together at chest level and held them that way, beaming all over his pale face as if he’d just been elected Pope, or whatever it is Presbyterians get elected. "My, my. My, my, my! This is an honor. Are you on summer holidays, then? Just doing Holland, or is this one of those 11-countries-in-eight-weeks Grand Tours you Americans seem to enjoy so much. If it’s Sunday, this must be Amsterdam, that sort of thing?"

Anyone else and I’d probably have been offended, but Reverend Bill managed to come across as truly friendly, truly interested.

So I told him what I was here for, and he immediately took me by the elbow and steered me back out through the vestibule to the double doors. "If you're here for two weeks," he said, "we’ll have buckets of time to chat, but right now I suggest you pop over to the Wooden House and make the acquaintance of Gerrit Rombach. He was here for our little service just now, so I’m quite sure you’ll find him in. He’s in charge of the archives, you know, and I expect he’ll be delighted to meet you."

Gerrit Rombach, that was the man Professor Harriman had told me to see. I didn’t much feel like bugging him on a Sunday, but with Reverend Bill so pleased to be able to bring us together I figured I’d at least drop by for a second and let him know I’d arrived.

So I promised the good Rev I’d look him up for a cuppa and ambled back toward the Wooden House. It was the only wooden structure in the Begijnhof – everything else was brick – and the first building I’d passed on my way in, right across from the statue of the nun that’d been one of the first things I’d noticed after emerging from the time tunnel.

What I noticed now was not the metal sculpture, but the flesh-and-blond female heading for the entrance of the place next door to the Wooden House, where the same old lady I’d spotted earlier was still at her post in the second-floor window, looking out at the scene below as if she didn’t quite trust it.

The girl I had my eye on was no old lady. Far from it. She was my age, give or take, and about as pretty as a human being can get without the help of an airbrush. She had a soft oval face that didn’t need makeup and wasn’t wearing any, and sapphire eyes so blue I could feel their color from 20 feet away. Her long silken hair was tied back in a ponytail, and she wore a turquoise scarf salted with silver spangles around her neck and faded jeans over a black leotard which displayed curves that made my fingers tingle.

She saw me looking at her, and I guess she must have read mah mind, because I swear to God I saw her cheeks pinken as she passed through the green picket gateway of number 33 and let herself into the house. She turned around in the doorway and raised a hand and waved at me. Then, smiling, she closed the door behind her.

One flight up, the sainted old soul in the window was glaring at me with what I believe is called a moue of distaste. Actually, make that about a moue and a half. She must have been tuned in to the Farmer brainwaves, too, and I could see she didn’t much care for the way I’d been eyeballing her granddaughter. I raised a hand and waved at her, and went next door to the Wooden House whistling "Dixie."

It was really an attractive building, four stories high with the ground floor dressed in white stone behind a shallow garden crowded with two massive rhododendron bushes, and, upstairs, weathered boards stained black and dotted with double tiers of white-framed windows at the second and third floors – I’m talking American, here, if it’s all the same to you – and a simple triangular gable. Just above the deep-green front door, the words "het houten huys" were painted in black Olde English letters, with the three initial lower-case haitches highlighted in red.

I knocked on the door and heard someone bustling around inside. A minute later, it swung open to reveal a middle-aged Munchkin in the doorway. He was a burly gentleman, though short, with deep-set black eyes and graying hair combed across the top of his head in a futile attempt to make it look like he wasn’t a candidate for Minoxidil therapy. He was biting his lower lip as he stood there, and it was plain that he was upset about something. "It’s Sunday," he said, in English. I felt like I was wearing a sandwich board with "American Tourist!" on it in screaming Day-Glo capitals. "I’m closed today. You’ll have to come back another time."

"Mr. Rombach?" He’d been about to shut the door in my face, but he hesitated at the sound of his name. "I’m Jack Farmer, sir. Professor Harriman sent me? From the University of Michigan?"

His troubled face lit up. "Mr. Farmer! Mr. Farmer!" he cried, swinging the door wide and squeezing my hand like he was trying to get water out of it. "Je komt als geroepen, jongen! Come in!"

Excitedly pumping my right hand, Rombach pulled me inside what turned out to be a combination office and information center, sat me down at a plain deal table piled with little booklets in a dozen languages, introduced me to his midnight-black cat Dropje with an explanation that the name was Dutch for Licorice, and didn’t settle into a chair of his own until he’d brewed a big pot of tea and set a steaming cup in front of me.

"It’s nice, isn’t it?" he nodded encouragingly, before I’d even taken my first sip.

So I sipped, and it was pretty nice at that. Even the smell was nice, rich and fruity, and the taste was delicately sweet, although I hadn’t added any sugar to the cup.

"Mango tea," Rombach said, pushing the plate of cookies at my elbow a silly millimeter closer.

I took the hint. The cookies were nice, too. Sort of gingerbready, although not quite. Speculaas, according to Rombach, who jumped up again to rummage through a messy old rolltop desk in the far corner of the room. "Dexter called me last week," he muttered, as he pulled out sheaves of papers and ruffled through them and shook his head at them and shoved them back again. "I wrote it down, I know I have it here somewhere."

Dexter?

The reference confused me, but then suddenly I got it.

Glitterdome Harriman was a Dexter?

I almost choked on my tea, and, for something to do instead of laughing, I found and opened the English-language version of the Begijnhof’s information booklet. Dropje padded over and rubbed against my leg, and I flipped pages with one hand and stroked her deep soft fur with the other.

"The Beguines, or Sisters of St. Begga," I read, "came in 1346 from a village near Amsterdam to found a community in the city, and to be near the site of the Miracle of Amsterdam. . . ."

"Waar is die verdomte papiertje nou gebleven?" Rombach huffed.

"The Begijnjof is a treasure-house of 17th- and 18th-century architecture, for all the well-known types of Amsterdam gables are to be found here: step-gables, neck-gables, clock-gables. . . ."

Clock-gables? Well, frankly, my dear, I didn’t give a –

"Hebbes!" Rombach announced triumphantly, and he came barrelling back to the table with old Dexter Harriman’s message clutched in his chunky hands. He laid the slip of paper before me and stabbed a forefinger at it. "Here, look, he said me you would be here on donderdag – sorry, on Sursday – but today is already Sunday!"

So that’s what all the brouhaha was about. "Yeah, well, we thought at first I’d be coming in on Thursday," I explained, "but it took a few days longer than we expected to get my passport, so we had to change my ticket. I thought Professor Harriman called you to tell you about the delay, but – "

"Ah, I see. I see." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "But there has come up a problem, Mr. Farmer, an unexpected somesing. I have been asked to – how do you say it? – address, yes, I have been asked to address a conference at the university in Groningen, in the north of Holland. It’s a four-day meeting, it starts tomorrow morning, so I must go there today. I won’t be back in Amsterdam until Friday."

Ouch, that was a problem. I’d have to ring Dexter – Dexter! – and tell him it’d be most of a week before I’d be able to get started. Of course, if he was willing to spring for the extra expenses, that’d give me a couple days’ vacation time before I had to settle down to work. Things could certainly be worse.

"The committee only called me on Tuesday," Rombach was saying. "They had first another speaker planned, but he became – how do you say it? – hij is ziek geworden. He became ill, yes, so they asked me to replace him. I sought you would be here on Sursday and we would have time to make arrangements, so I accepted, but then it came Sursday and Friday and Saturday and you didn’t arrive, and it was too late for me to cancel from the conference, and – "

"Wait a minute, wait a minute!" I held up my hands. "What’s all this got to do with me?"

The hassled lines of his face cleared up. "Yes, of course, you don’t know it. I want you to come and stay in het houten huys while I’m away."

"Stay here? But – "

"I know, I know." He bobbed his head impatiently. "Dexter explained you it’s only old ladies who are allowed to live in ‘t Begijnhof. Even I have to have a woning outside, in the town."

Actually, Dexter hadn’t explained me any such thing. In fact, he hadn’t explained me much of anything: in his inimitably pompous style, he’d told me he wanted me coming into the place without any preconceived ideas about it. Sounded sort of dopey to me, since I was only here to do historical research, but, hey, he who pays the piper calls the tune, right? As long as Harriman remembered to fork over the second half of my 1000 clams, I didn’t care what he told me or didn’t tell me about the living conditions.

"But for five nights it’s no problem," Rombach went on. "Upstairs is a little room with ‘n bed, sometimes I take a nap in the afternoons if it’s not so busy. You can sleep up there, and there’s ‘n douche and a little kitchen in the back. I’ll leave all my keys with you, so you can do your work, and when I come again on Friday you can go back in your hotel."

"Well, that's very kind of you, Mr. Rombach," I stammered, "but – but you don’t even know me."

"Mr. Farmer," he said, tapping the prof’s message significantly, "I have known Dexter Harriman for more than 20 years. If he trusts you enough to send you here in his place, then I can trust you, too, I sink."

"Well, I – "

"And someone has to take care of Dropje," he added. "It’s impossible to go away for so long and leave her here alone."

"Yeah, well, I – "

He played his trump card. "Dexter is paying your expenses, isn’t he? So if you stay here, instead of in the hotel, you can put away the money you’re saving in your pocket." He tossed me a conspiratorial wink. "If you don’t tell Dexter, I won’t."

The crafty little bastard!

"Mr. Rombach," I said, "you just bought yourself a catsitter."

It didn’t take me long to repack my pack and check out of the Nova. They made me pay for a night’s lodging, although I hadn’t spent more than 20 minutes in the room altogether, but they agreed that at least that entitled me to drop by in the morning for breakfast.

I was back at the Wooden House by 2:30, and the first thing Gerrit Rombach wanted to do was run me next door and introduce me to the Wicked Witch of the West. "She’s ‘n – how do you say it? – an invalid, yes," he said. "She spends most of her time by the window, watching the people come and go. She’ll worry if she sees you coming in het houten huys after business hours; it’s better if we go there for just a few minutes and I explain her you’ll be taking care of Dropje for me."

The second-floor window was empty when we knocked at the dark-green door of #33, though, and it was the blonde in the sexy leotard who opened up for us. She had a fat textbook in her hand and a studious frown on her face when she came to the door, but she brightened up some when she saw us. Maybe she had a thing for short, burly, balding gentlemen in their fifties, but I’d like to think it was me who brought the smile to her lips, not Rombach.

They exchanged a few sentences in Dutch, and, listening to her speak that unfamiliar language, I noticed for the first time how musical it could be.

"The sister says Mevrouw Moen is sleeping," mine host translated, "but she will tell her everysing when she wakes up."

So this was the old lady’s sister, and not her granddaughter? No way, I thought, that does not compute: there had to be 50 years’ difference in their ages. And, anyway, Rombach had called her the sister. Was she supposed to be one of those St. Begga nuns, or what? She didn’t look nunnish in that shapely leotard and those tight jeans, but what do I know about European nunsmanship, you know?

"If you’d like to come back later," she said, and the way she tilted her head and let her voice ride up on the penultimate syllable punctuated the sentence with a question mark and turned it into an invitation. Her English, I was happy to hear, was flawless.

"Sure, I’d love to come back later," I nodded. "See you later." I waggled my fingers at her, and she remembered and waggled back and eased the door shut with a sparkle in those luminous sapphire eyes.

"What is she, a nun?" I asked, latching the green picket gate behind us.

"A nun? No, no, she’s a nurse, she takes care of Mevrouw Moen. Why do you – ? Ach, ja, natuurlijk! You don’t call them sisters in your country, do you?"

"Uh-uh. We don’t let ‘em dress like that, either."

He chuckled. "Yes, I’ve seen it on the American television programs. Your nurses always wear those awful white uniforms with too much stijfsel – how do you say it? – too much starch, yes, and those heavy white shoes and white stockings. Terrible, terrible."

Next door at the Wooden House, a stoop-shouldered old feller in worn but neatly mended work clothes was waiting by the front door. He seemed annoyed about something, and the second he saw us he pulled a battered pipe from beneath his bristly gray mustache and commenced to growling. I stood there like a bump on a log while they went at it, and, when Rombach finally had the old codger calmed down, he introduced him as Henk Kleijwegt, the Begijnhof’s caretaker and general handyman.

Some tourists had apparently eaten a picnic breakfast smack in the middle of the central green that morning – the bleaching green, he called it – leaving a mess behind, and Kleijwegt was agitating for larger and more numerous "Keep off the Grass" signs in a greater variety of languages. Rombach promised to take care of it as soon as he got back from the north of Holland, and explained that I was going to be in residence for the rest of the week. Kleijwegt didn’t seem any happier about that prospect than he’d been about the picnickers.

Back inside het houten huys, Rombach spent maybe 90 minutes familiarizing me with his archives, so I’d be able to locate the material I needed, and another quarter of an hour filling me in on Dropje’s idiosyncracies and showing me where her food was stashed. Once all that was taken care of, he handed over a ring of keys, and wrote down the phone number of the hotel where he’d be staying, and wished me luck, and was gone.

The cat mewled softly when he left us, and it was that sad sound more than anything else that brought home to me how very all-alone I suddenly was. I looked around the room at the masses of books and pamphlets that surrounded me, and it was sobering how empty the place felt without Gerrit Rombach fussing busily amidst the clutter.

Something brushed my leg, and I jumped about a third of a mile in the air – no, wait, make that a half a kilometer.

Dropje.

She miaowed, then arched her back and pressed up close again. A deep-throated purr rolled around inside her. I laid a hand on her side and felt her ribcage vibrate.

"You hungry, baby? Well, listen, it’s you and me against the world, here, Licorice. C’mon, I’ll fix you some dinner."

I gave her a bowl of munchables and some water, and she dug right in. Watching her gobble, I realized it was well past four and I hadn’t had anything but tea and cookies all day, not since the yellow stuff they’d identified as scrambled eggs on the plane this morning. I was beginning to crumble – I mean, except for a couple hours’ rack time in the air, I’d been up around the clock – but my stomach was letting me know that it was ready to have some attention paid to it.

What did people eat, here in Holland, though? And where did they go to get some?

I fished a windbreaker out of my pack, locked up the Wooden House, and set off in search of my first European meal.

I got as far as the inside entrance to the time tunnel, then stopped and turned around and looked back.

Mrs. Moen had not yet returned to her duty station.

Hmm, I thought.

There was no answer when I knocked at #33, though, and I had the unhappy thought that maybe the sister had gone home for the day. But then at last I heard footsteps, and the door swung open and there she was. She’d taken her hair out of the ponytail, and it danced around her shoulders and framed her face in honey.

"Hi," I said. I’ve always been known as a rather scintillating conversationalist. Keep the girls back home in stitches, I do. "I was just wondering if – "

"Yes, of course, come in!" A mischievous smile played across her lips. "I told Mevrouw Moen you’d be back. She’s awake, now, and I’m sure she’ll be very happy to meet you."

"No, well, you see, I – "

But I was stuttering at her back. I followed her down a hallway and up a narrow flight of stairs and back up the corresponding second-floor hallway to the bedroom at the front of the house.

"I came to see you," I whispered, as I edged past her into the room.

"I know," she whispered back, and, though she kept her face quite properly composed, there was laughter in her eyes.

I’d only anticipated finding one old woman lurking in the bedroom, but it turned out there were four of them: Mrs. Moen herself was in bed, propped up to a sitting position by about a half-dozen fat pillows, and the lady I’d seen earlier with the white bicycle and two others I didn’t know were ranged around her in matching wooden chairs. It was just like the Queen of Hearts and her court, and, the way she was glaring at me, I expected Mrs. Moen to start yelling "Off with his head!" at any moment.

Behind me, my lovely guide murmured a few words of Dutch and withdrew, leaving me to face the music on my own.

Some music.

"The Sounds of Silence," by Simon and Garfunkel and Garfunkel and Garfunkel.

All four of the ladies had delicate little china saucers on their laps, and delicate little china cups on their saucers, and delicate little expressions of distaste on their faces, like I was a particularly virulent strain of the HIV virus and they were scared to death they might catch me.

Well, three of them, anyway. The fourth one, the bicycle lady, was actually sort of sweet. She must have been somewhere in her sixties, but her skin was still smooth and youthful, except for her hands, which must have been 30 years older than the rest of her. She had clear gray eyes and what I think they call a retroussé nose and high cheekbones; her hair was a fugue of blacks and grays, trimmed short and lightly waved. She wore a plain gray skirt and a white blouse with ruffles at the throat, and she for one seemed more curious about me than ready to call for the exterminator.

She had some English, too, I remembered, so, when I finally broke the uncomfortable silence, it was to her I spoke.

"Ah, my name’s Jack Farmer," I said. "I come from America. You know, the United States? I’ll be staying next door in the Wooden House for a couple days, while Mr. Rombach’s away."

She gave me an encouraging smile and opened her mouth to reply, but, before she could get a word out, the crone in the bed jumped in.

"I am Mevrouw Moen, and this is my house," she said sourly. Her English was accented, but clear. Her voice was firmer than I’d expected, seeing as how she was supposed to be an invalid. I don’t know what was wrong with her, but her temper and her tongue at least seemed to be in perfect working order. "The Begijnhof is for women. I do not approve of a man sleeping here. If Gerrit Rombach was concerned about his cat, he could have left it with me."

I could see why he hadn’t, although the sister probably would have wound up doing the little work that was involved, anyway, if he had. I’ve never liked people who refer to babies and animals as "it."

"Ja, nou, Ans," the bicycle lady said soothingly, "het gaat maar om ‘n paar dagjes." Then she remembered I couldn’t understand her and gave me what must have been a translation: "It’s only going for a few days."

That consolation didn’t cheer Mrs. Moen up much, but whatever else she had to say about the matter she kept to herself. She was really an unattractive woman. Blowsy, sort of gone to seed, with rough features and deep frown lines and her thin lips set in a permanent scowl. Only her steel-gray hair and pale-green nightgown were carefully arranged, and I suspected the sister had been responsible for brushing and combing the former and washing and ironing the latter. The human race hadn’t done Mrs. Moen many favors during her seven decades on the planet, and she had clearly devoted her declining years to evening up the score.

"I am Ellen Antonie," the bicycle lady introduced herself, and, indicating the other two women, she presented them as Mevrouw Boonstra and Mevrouw de Klerk. "Mevrouw Boonstra, U spreekt geen Engels, as ik ‘t goed heb?"

Mrs. Boonstra put the tips of her fingers to her lips and giggled. "Geen woord," she said shyly. She was a tiny creature, with a network of fine lines that reminded me of fragile porcelain radiating from the corners of her mouth and eyes. Blue veins stood out along her legs and the sides of her neck and the backs of her slender hands, and even her hair had a blueish tinge to it. Her light-brown skirt and flowered blouse were lovingly cared for.

"Mevrouw Boonstra" – Ellen Antonie had to pause and search for the phrase she wanted – "she isn’t speaking any English. No words."

I grinned sheepishly at the lady in question. "I don’t speak any Dutch, either," I said, louder than I needed to. Why is it we treat people who don’t happen to know our language as if they're either deaf or retarded? If they don’t understand us at 10 decibels, they're not going to understand us any better at 60, are they? But, for some mysterious reason, we automatically pump up the volume, anyway. "I’m sorry."

She giggled again, shook her head, and retreated behind the protection of her teacup.

That left Mrs. de Klerk, who was probably the oldest of the four, a tall, reedy woman in fawn slacks and a loose-fitting shirt under a perfect cap of snow-white hair, her watery brown eyes magnified behind thick bifocals. Her lipstick and rouge were badly applied, and managed to emphasize the mannishness of her features, rather than softening them. When she spoke, her deep tones didn’t surprise me. "Rietje de Klerk," she admitted grudgingly. She seemed about as pleased to have me spending the week in the Begijnhof as that old debbil Moen.

So there we were, four Jills and a Jack, and I’ll tell you what: it was not a festive occasion. There were only three chairs available, there were only four cups, so the ladies of the club sat there sipping tea and giving me the eye, and I shifted my weight from foot to foot uneasily, feeling more or less like a museum exhibit that’s just turned out to be the work of a forger instead of an authentic Old Master.

Ellen Antonie made an effort to keep the conversation rolling, but she wasn’t getting a lot of help from her friends. She had the house six doors down from Mrs. Moen, she said, #27, while Mrs. Boonstra was in #19 at the far end of the bleaching green and, if I looked out the window, I could see Mrs. de Klerk’s place at #40, to the left of the time tunnel, with its back to the Spui. (I can’t figure out how to spell the way she pronounced it, but it came out sounding something like an Irishman saying "Spow" after biting into a lemon.)

Moen had lived in the Begijnhof the longest of the four, since the early ‘70s – although there were a number of women not included in the present company who’d been there even longer – and Boonstra was the new kid on the block, having arrived in 1981. The way Ellen Antonie explained it, when a resident died, her house reverted to a central organization, which quickly turned it over to whoever happened to be next on their waiting list of deserving local spinsters. What with Amsterdam’s chronic and critical housing shortage, the Begijnhof’s units were avidly coveted. Antonie herself had been on the list for eight years before she was offered #27, and she was one of the lucky ones: there were fewer than 50 houses in the complex, and at any moment there were literally hundreds of golden girls in third-floor walkups who would sell their souls for just a spot on the waiting list.

How come they didn’t stick several women into each house, I wondered, doubling or tripling or even quadrupling the possible population? From what I’d seen of them, the buildings were plenty big enough – and too big for a single individual to rattle around in alone.

Nobody had an answer to that one, and even Ellen Antonie seemed to find the suggestion scandalous. The Begijnhof houses had been one-woman residences ever since they were built for the original Beguines, the Sisters of St. Begga, and no one was about to start messing with three centuries’ worth of status quo.

I found all this pretty interesting, actually, and Ellen Antonie seemed to be enjoying the opportunity to practice her limited English – but Moen was getting huffier by the minute, and de Klerk was squirming uncomfortably in her chair, and poor Mrs. Boonstra just sat there with her empty cup on her lap, trying to pretend she wasn’t completely mortified by her inability to make any sense whatsoever out of the gibberish we were talking. There was a decided chill in the warm summer air: half a degree colder, and somebody’d’ve had to scrape the frost off Mrs. de Klerk’s glasses.

By the time I’d been there 15 minutes, I had the distinct feeling I’d overstayed my welcome by about a quarter of an hour, so I lied about what a pleasure it’d been meeting them all and started making I’m-afraid-I-must-be-going noises.

Ellen Antonie invited me to drop by #27 sometime and visit; she was the only one of them it really had been a pleasure meeting, and I promised her I would. Mrs. Moen and Mrs. de Klerk made a point of not seconding the bicycle lady’s hospitality, bless their imitation hearts, and of course Mrs. Boonstra didn’t have any idea what was going on. When she saw me centimetering towards the door, though, she looked so relieved I was afraid she’d have a coronary right then and there.

I made my escape, and, at the bottom of the stairs, I found the sister waiting for me. She was trying to keep a straight face, but as soon as she saw me she collapsed in silent laughter.

"You look like you’ve been in a war," she gasped. I did not return her smile, and she cupped her hands over her mouth and took in a breath and sighed it out again. When she dropped her hands, she was wearing a mask of exaggerated solemnity, but she was having trouble keeping it in place.

"I’m so sorry," she said. She was holding her breath, and the words came out half-strangled. "I just couldn’t resist bringing you up there. Can you forgive me?"

How could I not forgive her? She was so damn cute I wanted to run away to Rio with her, and forgiving her seemed like an important first step in that direction.

So I nodded and sniffed out a half-hearted laugh of my own, which was all it took to set her off again. Chuckles erupted, tears spilled, and before long she was hugging herself tightly and groaning in real pain. My dignity was fairly well shot by then, so I gave up and got hysterical right along with her.

I guess it was pretty funny.

When the sound of wooden chairs scraping wooden floor reached us from above, she grimaced and pointed at the ceiling and put a finger to her lips. I got the message: if we could hear them, chances were that they could hear us, too, so maybe we’d better cool it.

We cooled it, and, when Antonie, Boonstra and de Klerk came tramping down the steps in alphabetical order, we were the picture of two sober young people having an earnest discussion of European unification, or whatever it is that sober young people discuss earnestly in these troubled and troubling times.

The ladies traded polite Dutch with the sister, but I might as well have been the Invisible Man for all the attention I got – except, of course, for Ellen Antonie, who switched over to English for long enough to remind me of my promise to visit her. And then they were gone.

"See that?" I said. "The party just wasn’t any fun any more without me."

"I really am sorry," the sister murmured sympathetically. "Was it very awful?"

I made a face. "I would give it about a 9.9 on the scale of awfulness," I said. "Mrs. Antonie’s pretty friendly, but the other three?" I blew out air and shook my head. "Tigers. And I hate to break it to you, but your boss is the worst of the bunch."

She pursed her lips. "I know. I have to live with her, remember?" A sudden smile lit up the hallway. "She’s not always cranky, though. Only when she’s awake."

That seemed as good a time as any to pop the question, so I screwed my courage to the sticking-place and went for it. "Uh, listen," I said, "I was wondering. Would you do me a favor?"

"A favor?" She tilted her head to one side, curious.

"Yeah, well, the thing is, why I came over here in the first place was to ask you – "

I hesitated, tongue-tied.

"To ask me what?"

"Well, I’m brand-new here in Amsterdam, see, and it’s practically dinner time, and I haven’t hardly had a bite to eat all day, so I was thinking – well, like, I thought maybe you could recommend a restaurant I could go to."

A pair of brilliant sapphires glittered at me. "Of course," she said, "I’d be glad to. That’s not much of a favor, though, after what I put you through."

I swallowed and took the plunge. "I wasn’t finished. See, I don’t know my way around town at all, either, so I was hoping you could sort of show me how to get there. Have dinner with me, I mean. If you’d like to. If you can get away."

She leaned toward me and touched my arm. "I was afraid you weren’t going to ask me," she said. "Look, I’ve got Mevrouw Moen’s supper all ready for her. Let me bring it up and tell her I’m going out and get a sweater from my room, and I’ll be down in five minutes."

"So, listen, I can’t keep calling you ‘sister’ if we're going out to dinner together, can I? Haven’t you got like a name or something?"

We were just leaving the Spui behind us, following the tram tracks away from the direction of the Nova Hotel. The city must have been interesting, I guess, but who was interested? Not me. I was interested in the very pretty girl at my side, and, if you could see her, I know you’d understand.

"No, don’t call me sister," she agreed. "My name’s Yet. Yet Schilders."

"Yet?" I repeated.

"That’s right."

"You mean like Y-e-t, Yet?"

Her smile turned surprised. "No, no. Yay-e-t."

This was rapidly getting beyond me. "Yay, E.T.? What’s that supposed to be, three cheers for the aliens?"

It took her a second to get it, but she did get it, and groaned, then realized her original mistake and colored a bit. "Not yay," she said. "Djay."

"Oh, J! And in Dutch you pronounce it like a Y?"

She nodded. We were walking along a canal past some buildings, but don’t ask me for details.

"My name’s Jack," I said. "Jack Farmer. You’re not going to call me Yack, are you?"

She giggled. "In Holland, a jack" – she pronounced it "yack" and fingered the cloth of my windbreaker – "is one of these, not a name for a person."

"A jacket, yeah. And in America, a jet" – I said it "jet" and pointed at the contrail a miniature airliner was drawing across the sky far above us – "is one of those, and not a – "

" – not a name for a person." She finished the sentence before I could, laughing. I was liking her a lot. "We call those straaljagers." She shaded her eyes and watched the speck of plane pull its white smoke along behind it. "It’s a nice word, I think. Straal-jager. It means ‘sunbeam chaser.’"

"Sunbeam chaser. That is nice. So, listen, how about if I call you ‘Yet’ and you call me ‘Jack’? Will that work?"

"That sounds fine. Hello, Jack." She touched my hand briefly – which, oddly enough, was exactly what I was hoping she’d do. Some people would call that a coincidence. I call it communication, and I double dare you to prove it isn’t. "So, Jack," she said, "what kind of food do you want to eat?"

The waiter set a metal warming tray in the middle of our table and lit the pair of small round candles in its base, then went away and came back with enough food for a family of six. He was a dapper little Oriental in a spiffy tux, and he spread about 25 bowls filled with assorted colors of stuff I couldn’t put names to in front of us like it was the most normal thing in the world. Maybe it is, in Holland. But I was impressed enough to tear my eyes away from Jet and let her tell me what was what.

The various bowls of brown stuff were different kinds of meat, most of them smothered in pindasaus – which translates into English as peanut sauce and tastes a lot better than it sounds. The yellow stuff was a spicy cole slaw, and the crispy tan stuff was a giant shrimp cracker called kroepoek, and the white stuff was shredded coconut, and the stuff that looked like chicken and shish kebab and peanuts was chicken and shish kebab and peanuts. Jet called the shish kebab saté, and it too turned out to be yummy drenched in pindasaus.

I’d told her I wanted to try a really typical Dutch meal, and she’d beamed and said that meant we had to go to a Chinese restaurant and order off the Indonesian menu. While I was working that out, she took my arm and led me out of the sunlight into a shaded neighborhood of narrow one-way streets lined with houses that seemed shabbier than any I’d seen so far. This was the famous red-light district, she informed me, and I was as freaked out by the scenery outside Kwong Ming’s as I was by the pagodas and dragons and intricate fake-jade and fake-ivory carvings that decorated the inside.

I mean, I’d heard Amsterdam’s night life was pretty hot, but the red-light district went beyond what I’d expected. Just about every other structure was a sex club, with big plastic signs out front showing silhouetted couples doing it in an assortment of positions that ranged from the merely bizarre to the anatomically impossible, under headlines like NONSTOP HARDCORE LIFE SHOW and REAL LIVE FUCKY FUCKY. Then there were the porno movies, and the shop windows crammed full of vibrators and leather goods and candles shaped like erect phalluses, dozens and dozens of magazines with interchangeable cover pictures and such titles (all in English) as Split Beavers and High School Pussy and Deviate Thrills, inflatable plastic teenage girls with wide-open hungry mouths, pills and creams and lotions and sprays that advertised themselves as "potency extenders," Ben Wa balls and French ticklers and a really astonishing range of dildoes in every conceivable length and longer. Lots longer.

I’d never actually seen a dildo before. I’d never seen any of this junk before. It’s all available back where I come from, I’m sure, but they keep it hidden away behind painted-out windows so the kids don’t have to look at it and it doesn’t scare the horses. Here in Amsterdam, though, the governing philosophy seemed to be, "Thou shalt let it all hang out."

Speaking of which, the part that knocked me out the most was the meat markets. Everywhere we walked, scattered amongst the clubs and shops and movie houses and bars and Chinese restaurants were these big picture windows with honest-to-God red lights hanging above them and these teeny little roomlets behind them. Each room sported a sagging camp bed and a sink and a towel, and most of them held a bored female on a stool by the window, doing a crossword puzzle or knitting or reading a paperback novel. They came in all ages and shapes and sizes and colors and stages of undress, from emaciated girls of 16 with glazed eyes and needle tracks on the insides of their elbows to big fat mammas in their forties who licked their lips and jiggled their massive breasts in a grotesque mockery of sexual enticement as we strolled by. By the time we’d passed our fiftieth red light, the phrase "window shopping" had taken on a whole new meaning for me.

Jet – who’d grown up in this city – took it all in her stride, but I kept going "Jesus, look at that!" every time we turned a corner. It wasn’t until we were settled in the restaurant with cold beers in front of us that I was able to get my mind out of the gutter, off the meaningless sex of the red-light district and back where it belonged: on the lovely blond nurse sitting across from me – and, okay, I admit it, on the deeply meaningful sex our surroundings had me dying to have with her.

"So what’s a nice Dutch girl like you doing in a perverted place like Amsterdam?" I said. If I’d been around in the 1930s, I’d’ve probably been writing snappy dialogue for the movies instead of going into the history biz.

"You look good with a white mustache," Jet said. "Distinguished. Older."

"Older?" I set down my glass and wiped foam from my lip. "I’ll bet I’m older than you are. How old are you?"

She hesitated a moment before admitting to 24.

"Hmmm. Me, too. When are you going to be 25?"

"In January."

"Ha, gotcha!" I pointed a thumb at my chest and smirked. "September 13th. I am older than you are."

"September?" She sipped beer. "That makes you a virgin, doesn't it?"

"A virgin?" I was about to defend my manhood when I got it. "Oh, a Virgo. Yeah, that’s me." I put my elbows on the table and lowered my voice. "Don’t say that other word in this part of town, though, okay? You could give a guy a bad reputation."

Then the waiter showed up with our warming tray and our food, and we ordered more beer and downshifted from talking into eating.

I don’t know how we did it, but we polished off almost the entire rijsttafel between us. Rijsttafel, Jet told me, means "rice table," although she’d ordered ours with thick seasoned noodles called bami instead of rice. Once a month, she said, when she was in nursing school in Amstelveen, she’d come into one of Amsterdam’s 400 Chinese restaurants with the four other girls in her study group and split a rice table for three people five ways. We’d ordered the two-person meal, and left over less than they used to. I guess I really was hungry – and Jet packed away a pretty healthy share of cuisine herself.

Dessert was pisang goreng – halved bananas fried in a light batter and dusted with confectioner’s sugar – and sliced apples and oranges in syrup and a big pot of jasmine tea. Delicious.

And when we were finally ready to leave, just after nine – we’d been in there for more than three hours! – the bill came to something like $30, and Jet said that included sales tax and a tip! With prices that reasonable and Jet apparently enjoying my company as much as I was enjoying hers, I was having trouble coming up with one good reason not to spend the entire summer in the Netherlands.

She tried to pay half the check, but I wouldn’t let her. When she insisted, I got sneaky and told her there was no way in the world that the rijsttafel wasn’t going to be my treat, but I’d be happy to let her buy me dinner tomorrow night, if she wanted to.

She leaned back and folded her arms, which did very attractive things to the shape of her leotard. "I don’t know how Mevrouw Moen would feel about my going out two nights in a row," she said seriously.

I poured the last of the tea into our cups. "She’s a real slave driver, huh?"

Jet sighed. "Well, she is, really, but it’s not that. I live there with her, so I’m on call 24 hours a day if she needs me, but her condition is stable and I wind up with a lot of time to myself."

"What’s wrong with her, anyway?"

She pulled back her hair with both hands and stretched. That, too, did things to her shape that would have made her a hit behind any window in town. "It’s a combination of things. Her heart, mostly. Her legs. And zuikerziekte – what do you call that in English? Sugar sickness?"

"Diabetes?"

"Yes, that’s it. Diabetes. She doesn’t look too bad, for her age, but she’s really quite ill."

"And you don’t like to leave her alone," I concluded.

"No, no." She toyed with her cup. The tea was cold, by now, and not worth drinking. "I like to leave her alone. She’s not an easy woman to get along with. She just sits in that window all day, minding everybody else’s business and complaining."

"She has friends, though," I said, remembering the hen party that afternoon.

Jet frowned. "They’re not really friends, Jack. Mevrouw Antonie is so sweet, she’d visit Attila the Hun if he was laid up in bed. And Mevrouw Boonstra only comes because Mevrouw Antonie does; they’re very close. I don’t know why Mevrouw de Klerk was there today. She’s never been to the house before, that I know of. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen her before; she’s supposed to be a real hermit. But this afternoon she just showed up at the door – actually, I think Mevrouw Moen called her and asked her to come, but she didn’t tell me why. Mevrouw Antonie and Mevrouw Boonstra got there 10 minutes later, but I don’t know what they were doing there, either. They usually come by during the week; I think today was the first time they’ve been there on a Sunday."

"Uh-huh." I had my chin on my hands, and I was watching her turn her cup around on its saucer. "So what about dinner tomorrow night?"

She looked up at me, then, and the overhead lighting set reflected diamonds in with the sapphires.

"I’d like to, Jack," she said. "It’s just – oh, I don’t know how to explain it. I just finished school last December, and this is my first case. I’ve only been there four months. I think it’d be easier if she treated me nicer, but, since she doesn’t – "

I got the idea she wasn’t going to finish the sentence, so I did it for her: " – you feel guilty about leaving her."

She nodded unhappily. "I know it’s silly, but – "

"It’s not silly. I understand. Listen, do you want to get back there?"

She pushed away her cup and saucer decisively. "No, I don’t. I want to walk around with you and talk some more. I’m just not sure about tomorrow night, that’s all. I’ll have to think about it."

So we walked around and talked, and we hit a couple quiet, smoky bars and drank a couple more beers and talked some more. Jet herself was a nonsmoker, praise be, and I chalked up another point in her favor.

It was well after eleven by the time we got back to the Begijnhof, and I was really beginning to flag.

Still, I made it to the outer door of the time tunnel a step ahead of her and reached to open it for her with all the gallantry I could muster.

It wouldn’t budge.

"I thought this door was supposed to be unlocked," I protested.

"Not at night. The ladies would have a fit. There’s a caretaker who comes around at nine and locks it. Didn’t Mr. Rombach give you a key?"

"Henk Kleijwegt," I remembered. "Yeah, I met him. He seemed about as friendly as your boss and Mrs. de Klerk." I dug Gerrit Rombach’s keyring from my pocket, and Jet helped me find the one that fit the wooden door.

It was incredibly peaceful in the courtyard. Jet’s house and most of the others were dark, and the only illumination came from the old-style street lamps, which’d been converted from gas to electric, and the gibbous moon that hung above the chestnuts. The contrast between inside and outside – between the noise and bustle of a city that didn’t seem to realize it was late Sunday night and the gentle serenity of a lazy country village – was overpowering. I liked what I’d seen of Amsterdam so far, but I liked it in here a lot better.

I walked Jet to #33, through the gate in the picket fence and up to her doorstep.

"It’s been a lovely evening," she said, standing close to me in the moonlight. "Thank you."

"My pleasure," I said. "You’re welcome. Thank you."

I held out my hand, and she took it in both of hers and went up on her tiptoes and kissed me. It was a short kiss, but a warm one, and so unexpected it left me dazed.

"I usually take a walk while Mevrouw Moen has her lunch," Jet said softly. "Would you like to go with me tomorrow?"

"Yeah," I said, "a walk sounds great."

"I’ll come by and pick you up around noon, okay?"

"Around noon. Sure." She was still holding my hand. "I’ll be looking forward to it."

"Me, too." She let go of me, then, and found her key. "I’d better go up and make sure she’s sleeping comfortably. Goodnight, Jack."

"Goodnight," I said.

And then I was alone, gazing blankly at the dark-green door.

A week ago, I’d been back in Ann Arbor, cramming for final exams and wondering what to do with my summer – and now, one measly week later, here I was in Heaven, livin’ right next door to an angel.

I might have stood there all night, if it hadn’t been for the scream.

It was Jet who was screaming, and her shrill voice ripped the tranquil night to tatters.

The door was locked, but the knob rattled loosely in my hand, and one good shoulder-block was all it took to spring it. I pounded up the narrow stairs three at a time and found her in the old lady’s bedroom, beside the bed.

The lights were out and the room was dim, but the moonlight that filtered in through the gauzy white curtains was enough to show me the kitchen knife clutched tightly in Jet’s right hand. The blade and Mrs. Moen’s pale nightgown were black with blood.

"Oh, shit," I breathed.

It was not, perhaps, quite as snappy as my usual patter, but it was all I could think of at the moment, so I said it again.