In the Vondelpark, Vivi was trying to keep her pulse rate down. She headed for the Blue Tea House. The white van wasn’t there anymore. Was it hiding in the trees? She desperately needed some caffeine to calm her. She got one of those great Amsterdam cappuccinos, hefty, foamy, sat with the pigeons and papers outside on the patio. It was grey and damp and chilly and she liked it that way. More like black and white photos of dire times gone by. Oddly contemporaneous, black and white, sepia, daguerreotypes reaching across eras.
Twelve years ago, in this same November week, she was sitting at this same patio table, on November 3, 2004, reading the horrific news of the assassination in Amsterdam the day before of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.
Van Gogh had been murdered by a man who had s
