Kill Me if You Can - James Patterson [55]
“Somebody’s not going to get laid tonight,” one of them called to me.
“Hey, buddy,” the second one yelled. “You’re supposed to get them drunk, not put them in a coma.”
I played along. “She’s a blind date,” I said. “She wasn’t blind when I met her, but she is now.”
That cracked them up, too.
“Where’d you meet her?” the third one asked.
“At an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting,” I said.
They whooped more laughter, and I kept walking. Marta and I were the entertainment of the moment, and people stopped what they were doing to stare at us. Not everybody said something, but those who did had a wisecrack. Nobody suspected she was dead.
Marta and I turned onto a dark side street that was lined with parked cars on both sides.
“Oh, look, honey, here’s our car,” I said, grabbing the door handle on a silver Vauxhall Corsa. It was locked.
I moved on to a second car. Locked. Same with the third.
The fourth one was a faded red Volkswagen van. I was able to open the door—after I smashed the side window with Marta’s gun.
I laid her flat on the backseat and retrieved my sunglasses. She stared vacantly at the roof of the van, her right eye a whole lot more vacant than the left.
“Thank you for a memorable evening, Marta,” I said, “but I’m afraid this is our last date.”
I shut the car door and headed back to my hotel to sleep off my buzz. I needed my wits about me tomorrow.
I had diamonds to sell.
Chapter 66
I CHECKED OUT of the Bodburg Hotel at 6 a.m. and relocated to a quiet little bed-and-breakfast on Geldersekade in the heart of Amsterdam’s Chinatown. I had about eight hours to get ready for my face to face with Diederik de Smet.
But first I had to change my face.
Too many people were looking for Matthew Bannon.
The homeless-man disguise I used when I was stalking Zelvas was simple enough to do on my own, but this time I needed a total transformation that would stand up to close scrutiny.
I’ve used the services of a dozen different makeup artists around the world, and one of the best was right here in Amsterdam—a Cuban expatriate named Domingo Famosa.
Domingo had worked for Dirección de Inteligencia, the main intelligence agency of the Castro government. His job was to create special-effects makeup, sometimes for the DI agents, and sometimes for the face and body doubles who stepped in for Fidel when the assassination threat level on El Jefe was high.
I took a cab to Domingo’s studio on Waalsteeg.
He was in his late sixties and had a severe speech impediment that was reputed to have been caused by having his tongue seared with a red-hot poker. It’s not clear whether the punishment was at the hands of the enemy or his own people, but whoever did it made their point. In the six hours I spent in the makeup chair, Domingo never uttered a word.
He gelled my hair flat, glued on a bald cap, and covered my face with wet plaster bandages. Once it hardened into a mask he removed it from me, added Plasticine, and sculpted fifty years of lines and wrinkles into the face.
He made a second mold and filled it with hot gelatin, creating a flexible prosthetic that he applied to my face with surgical glue.
For the next hour he artfully applied makeup, giving me the uneven skin tone and the telltale age spots of an eighty-year-old man.
Finally, he added contact lenses to create old-man rings around my irises and topped off the look with a gray wig.
I looked in the mirror. Young Matthew Bannon was gone. I was staring at my grandfather.
“That’s frightening,” I said.
He nodded, then led me to a walk-in closet and pulled out a three-piece charcoal-gray suit.
“Prosperous, but conservative,” I said. “I’ll take it.”
He finished off my wardrobe with a white shirt, a conservative blue-and-gray-striped tie, and black-leather wingtips.
I got dressed and stood in front of a full-length mirror, adjusting my posture by dropping my shoulders and bending my head and upper back forward.
Domingo was behind me. I turned around. “I want to thank you,