Page 54 of The Shadow Friends

“What?”

“I’m not your sherpa. Take your own suitcase.”

“Oh. Sorry.” He grabbed his carry-on, and together, they proceeded down the sidewalk like two lost senior citizens in search of a hotel, the wheels of their suitcases rattling across the bricks.

They arrived at the apartment building, and Lloyd studied the names on the buzzers, as if he could somehow match one of those names to the man in the photo. In frustration, he pushed a button at random.

No one answered.

He tried another and another. Again, no response. Maggie imagined those buzzers sounding in empty apartments where breakfast dishes were still in the sinks.

“It’s Monday morning. They’re probably at work,” she said.

Lloyd pressed another button. This time, a voice did answer. A woman.

“Ja?”

“Oh!” said Lloyd, so startled he took a moment to pull together his next words. “Spreek je Engels?” he asked.

“Who are you?” came the response in English.

“We’re from the US. May we ask you a few—”

“Not interested.” The connection went dead.

Lloyd sighed. “She never even let me finish.”

Maggie reached past him to press a different button. A man answered this time, his voice gravelly with age. “Hello, meneer. We’re from America, visiting Missus . . .” She glanced at the list of tenants for one of the names that had not answered the buzzer. “Achterkamp. She’s not answering. Can we just leave our suitcases in . . .”

The door buzzed. She pushed it open.

“So that’s how it’s done,” said Lloyd.

“I’m too tired to pick the lock.”

They left their luggage inside the entrance, moved down the hallway to the first apartment, and rang the doorbell. No one answered. They tried the next apartment and the next.

At the fourth apartment, the door finally opened, and a woman peered out at them. She had to be at least in her eighties, and judging by the volume of the TV blaring in her apartment, she was also extremely deaf.

“Good morn—um, Goedemorgen,” said Lloyd. “I’m trying to find—”

The woman started to close the door.

“Wait! Please.” He held out his phone to show the photo of the man in the gray suit. “This man. Do you know him?”

The woman squinted at the photo, clearly bewildered by the question. Then she eyed Lloyd and Maggie with suspicion. They were hardly anyone’s version of hucksters, just a benign gray-haired couple with travel-rumpled clothes, yet this woman was having none of it. She muttered something in Dutch, clearly noncomplimentary, and closed the door in their faces.

“I think we need to refine our approach,” said Maggie. “Let’s go to the hotel and look up the names on the mailboxes. Maybe we can match his face to one of those names.”

But Lloyd was already moving toward the staircase. “Let’s try upstairs,” he said.

“If you keep knocking on doors, you’re announcing to the whole neighborhood what you’re up to.”

“I just want to find Ingrid.”

“There are other ways to do it, Lloyd. Quieter ways that don’t call attention to us. If this is his usual bus stop, we could start by surveilling it from the park. Or from that coffee shop across the street. I’m too tired to think straight, and I can use the caffeine. We’ll watch who gets off the number 21 bus and—”

The building door suddenly opened, and a woman walked in. From the far end of the hall where they stood, she was little more than a silhouette, backlit by the glare of the entrance windows. The woman glanced down at the suitcases left by the door, then focused on the two visitors.