“Is the Antica easy to find?”

“Sure. It’s near the Singel Canal. It’s well known. Ask anyone. It won’t help. The police already took Anneke’s picture there a thousand times.”

“A thousand and one won’t hurt.” Gini smiled. For the first and only time, Fricke returned her smile. Then she looked at her watch.

“Look. I have to get back. My mother worries—if I’m late, she’ll call my violin teacher.”

“Just one more question, Fricke. I think you probably know what it is.”

The girl had risen; she stopped, then sighed.

“Yeah. Sure. Did Anneke mention sex, right?”

“Was she sleeping with him, Fricke? I was told she was, but I’m not sure. Something about this man puzzles me. Sex seems too obvious, too simple.”

“It puzzles me too.” Fricke met her eyes. “I mean, usually, Anneke would say straight out. If she was screwing a boy, she’d tell me. It was no big deal. She’d say, hey—we did it last night, and it was really good, or not. But with Star… she never mentioned sex. Not once. I assumed—well, I assumed that was what they did most of the time. Listened to music. Smoked a little grass. Made love. She was crazy about him, obsessed, so I couldn’t understand. So in the end, the second time she called, I asked her. I said, and so you’re having sex, right?”

“And how did she answer?”

“She didn’t answer.” Fricke’s face contracted. “She started crying. And then she hung up.”

Chapter 12

THE ANTICA COFFEE HOUSE was in an old section of Amsterdam, in a narrow street lined with bookshops and small art galleries. Inside, it consisted of one large, pleasant room lined with paneled booths; on a rack, newspapers in several different languages were available to patrons; at several tables, people were playing chess. The atmosphere, cosmopolitan and faintly bohemian, reminded Gini of the older cafés in Greenwich Village in New York, except that the air smelled strongly of marijuana, and grass was openly on sale at the bar, along with drinks and cigarettes.

Seating herself at the bar, and arming herself with a Herald Tribune from the rack, she ordered coffee and bided her time. The Tribune had run the story of Mina’s disappearance, and Cassandra’s death, as a small item on page three, rather as Gini had expected. Missing-girl stories took time to build. If the girls concerned were in their teens, editors assumed they were runaways, and there were too many runaways to make headlines. It would be days, she judged, possibly weeks, before Mina’s story became front-page tabloid news—unless her father used his position and influence to make waves, of course.

Folding the paper, she looked around the café. It was now five in the afternoon, and the Antica was in a pre-evening lull. It was less than half full, and the clientele was mixed, in terms of age, gender, and nationality. Most of the customers had the air of habitués; there were several student types, two older men playing chess, a quiet girl reading a book, a louder group of men in the far corner, arguing in German. She turned back, and kept her eye on the bar staff, wondering whom to approach.