boasted fake attics and intricate entablatures. Festoons hung from simple brick.
Behind the houses, he knew, discreet hofjes, or inner courtyards, were hidden
away. To the extent that the burghers of Amsterdam’s golden age prided
themselves on their simplicity, it was an ostentatious simplicity.
Janson strode down the street, attired in a light zippered jacket and sturdy
brogues, like so many of his fellow pedestrians. He kept his hands in his
pockets, and his eyes regularly scanned his surroundings. Was he being followed?
So far, there was no sign of it. Yet he knew from experience that if his
presence was detected, a team could be assembled and deployed with impressive
rapidity. Always have a backup plan: Demarest had said that, and however
appalling its source, the injunction had served him well. File it next to
Management Secrets from Genghis Khan, Janson reflected bitterly.
A few blocks from the so-called golden curve, he encountered a cluster of
houseboats, anchored on the rust-and-silt-tinctured waters of the canal. These
floating domiciles had been a feature of Amsterdam since the 1950s, the result
of a housing shortage; a few decades later, the city council passed measures
against them, but the existing waterborne dwellings were grand-fathered in,
tolerated as long as an annual fee was tendered.
Janson kept a sharp eye out, scrutinizing each in turn. The nearest resembled a
long, brown-shingled bungalow, with a small turbine vent atop a roof of red
corrugated steel. Another resembled a tall, floating greenhouse; inside, the
long glass panels were lined with curtains, affording the residents some
privacy. Nearby was a houseboat with an intricate trellislike fence around a
flat-topped enclosure. A pair of lanterns sprouted out from what looked like
stone bird feeders. Boxes of geraniums spoke of a house-proud squatter.
Finally, he saw the familiar blue-painted cabin with an abandoned look.
The flowerpots were mainly empty; the windows were small and sooty. On the deck
next to the cabin was a bench of age-silvered wood. The boards of the low, wide
deck were warped and irregular. It was anchored just next to a small quayside
parking lot, and as Janson approached, he felt his pulse quicken. Many years had
passed since he had last been there. Had it changed hands? He detected the
distinctive resinous scent of cannabis, and he knew it had not. He stepped on
board and then walked through the door of the cabin; as he expected, it was
unlocked.
In one corner of the sun-dappled space, a man with long, dirty-gray hair was
crouched over a large square of vellum. He had pastels in both hands, which
veered toward the paper in alternation. A smoldering marijuana cigarette lay
next to a red pastille.
“Freeze, motherfucker,” Janson said softly.
Barry Cooper turned around slowly, giggling at some private joke. When he
identified his visitor, he sobered up a little: “Hey, we’re cool, right? You and
me, we’re cool, right?” There was a fatuous half smile on his face, but the
question was tinged with anxiety.
“Yeah, Barry, we’re cool.”
His relief was visible. He held his arms open wide, his palms speckled with
pigment. “Show me some love, baby. Show me some love. How long has it been?
Jeepers.”
Cooper’s speech had long retained an odd mixture of idioms—part stoner, part
Leave It to Beaver—and the fact that the American had lived abroad for nearly a
quarter century served as a linguistic fixative.
“Too long,” Janson said, “or maybe not long enough. What do you think?” The
history they shared was complex; neither man fully understood the other, but
both understood enough for a working relationship.
“I can make you some coffee,” Cooper said.
“Coffee would be fine.” Janson sat down on a lumpy brown sofa and looked around.
Little had changed. Cooper had aged, but exactly as one would have expected him
to. A tangle of graying brown hair had surrendered almost fully to gray.
Crow’s-feet crowded his eyes, and the lines between the corners of his mouth and
his nose were incised now with a fine line; there were vertical creases between
his eyebrows, and horizontal creases on his forehead. But it was Barry Cooper,
the same old Barry Cooper, a little scary and somewhat crazy, but mostly neither
of those things. In his youth, the ratios had been different. In the early
seventies, he had drifted from college radicalism to the real thing, a harder,
more callous reality, and, by incremental steps, ended up a member of the
Weather Underground. Smash the system! It was a greeting in those days, a simple
salutation. Hanging around the college town of Madison, Wisconsin, he’d fallen
in with others who were smarter and more persuasive than he was and who took his
inchoate disquiet with the misdeeds of Authority to a crystalline extreme. Small
pranks, designed to nettle law enforcement, led to more extreme acts.
One day, in New York, he found himself in a Greenwich Village town house when a
bomb one of the members was concocting went off prematurely. He had been taking
a shower and, singed and sooty but largely unharmed, walked around in a daze for
a while before he was arrested. When he was out on bail, the police determined
that his fingerprints matched those found at the scene of another bombing, this
one of a university laboratory in Evanston. It had happened at night, and there
were no casualties, but that was a matter of luck as much as anything; a night
watchman could easily have been in the area. The charges were increased to
attempted murder and federal conspiracy, and Cooper’s bail was revoked. By that
point, however, he had fled the country, making his way first to Canada and then
to Western Europe.
And in Europe, another chapter of his curious career began. The exaggerated
reports about him circulated by American law enforcement were swallowed whole by
the radical groups of Europe’s revolutionary left—the circle associated with
Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, known formally as the Rote Armee Fraktion,
informally as the Baader-Meinhof Gang; the tight-knit organization that called
itself the Movement 2 June; and, in Italy, the Red Brigade. Intoxicated by the
romance of urban insurrection, these militants regarded the shaggy-haired
American as a latter-day Jesse James, a free rider for the revolution. They
welcomed him into their circles and disputatious factions, asking him for advice
about tactics and techniques. Barry Cooper was pleased by the adulation, but his
visits were also a strain. He knew a great deal about varieties of
marijuana—about how Maui sinsemilla differed from Acapulco red, say—but had
little interest in, or knowledge of, the practical affairs of revolution. Far
from the criminal mastermind of the Interpol advisories, he had been a slacker,
along for the ride—for the drugs and the sex. He had been too dazed to
comprehend the ferocity of his new comrades—too dazed to comprehend that what he
regarded as student pranks, the equivalent of stink bombs in the bathroom, they
regarded as prelude to violent upheaval and the forcible overthrow of the
existing order. When he was among the revolutionaries, he kept this to himself,
hiding behind gnomic responses. His reticence and pointed lack of interest in
their own activities rattled them-surely this showed that the American terrorist
did not trust them or take them seriously as a revolutionary vanguard. They
responded by revealing to him their most ambitious plans, trying to impress him
by disclosing the extent of their human and material assets: the safe house in
East Berlin the front organization in Munich that provided them with financial
support, the officer in the Bundesrepublik national guard who kept his radical
lover supplied with quantities of military-grade ordnance.
As time passed, Barry Cooper grew uncomfortable, and not simply with the
masquerade: he had no stomach for the acts of violence they vividly described.
One day, in the aftermath of a subway bombing in Stuttgart arranged by the
Revolutionary Cells, he saw a list of victims in a newspaper. Pretending to be a
newspaper reporter himself, he visited the mother of one of the passersbys who
were slain. The experience—coming face-to-face with the human reality of the
glorious revolutionary violence—left him shaken and repulsed.
Janson paid him a visit not long afterward. In the attempt to gain entree to the
shadowy world of these terrorist organizations, he searched for people whose
fealty to civilization might not have completely eroded—people who were not yet
dead to so-called bourgeois morality. Barry Cooper’s association with those
organizations always struck him as odd; he knew his file well, and what he saw
was someone who was essentially a joker, a cutup, a clown, rather than a killer.
A get-along go-along guy who had found himself getting along and going along
with some very bad company.
Cooper was already living in Amsterdam, in the very same houseboat, making a
living selling colorful sketches of the old town to tourists—kitsch, but sincere
kitsch. He had the affect of someone who had smoked too much pot for too long a