Flash Fiction: A Little Amsterdam Crime Story

The Holland Times proudly presents its third Flash Fiction series, A Little Amsterdam Crime Story.  Each month a new writer will pick up their pen and contribute a chapter to our ongoing tale. This month, read the finalisation of this thriller in Joep Derksen’s chapter 10: Justice.

It is so simple for any voodoo enthusiast. Make a small puppet, say the right words and you have full control over any living creature on this planet. Harry had gotten too close to finding out the truth; too close for comfort. He was a lone ranger in a filthy police pool of drugs, prostitutes and voodoo. He had to be paralysed, so that he could not speak another word to any person; living or dead.

Harry was the only one that could be trusted. That’s why Sonia’s spirit showed herself to him when he was driving his car. And that is also the reason why it was only Harry who got mixed up in the time loop, experiencing the same death discovery twice in a row.

For Linda Janssen-Duvalier, it was unfortunate that she had prematurely left the second level priestess training 20 years earlier. No one leaves that training without permission, or they will be punished severely. Her teacher at the time searched all over the world for many years and finally found what he was looking for: the lost statue of the God Ushu.

Convincing police officers to help “the other side” is really not difficult at all. If they won’t succumb to a large sum of cash, they can be convinced by threatening to harm their loved ones. And whoever continues to resist, will be found dead in an Amsterdam canal on any given night. Remco was really not a bad person or a bad cop, for that matter. But he had one weak spot; his nine year old handicapped daughter Sue. He knew that he could not protect her all the time and he gave in to pressure to find out any information on the lost statue of the god Ushu inside the metal box in the evidence room.

And initially luck was at his side. It was what led Harry to call him and ask him for a favour, telling him about the word “Magnesia.” He contacted Linda, had the best sex in years and found out what the secret of the black box was. He made one mistake, however; he forgot to put a silencer on his pistol, so the neighbours called the police and within minutes he was arrested. But for former Voodoo priest and current gang-boss and drugs dealer Michael Marley, that was no concern to him. The first night of imprisonment was enough for Michael to find out the truth about the secret box and how to use it. He visited Remco in his dreams and heard all the information he needed to know.

The following steps to be undertaken were almost too easy. With so many “dirty” cops being all too pleased to help, obtaining the lost statue was nothing more than a piece of cake. The moment Michael held the statue in his own hands, he laughed hysterically: “Finally, the ultimate power is mine! Now I can erase all my competitors in the drug trade. I will rule the drug world and any cop who gets in the way, will meet his end as well.”

He paused for a moment, reconsidering, and decided otherwise. “Ruling the drug world? I have much more capabilities than that. I will rule the world!” And so he took steps to become the first ever ruler of the world. “His statue of the god Ushu turned people against each other and their governments. Heads of states such as Libya, Egypt and Tunisia fell, leaving these countries in turmoil. Various groups of freedom fighters fought with gangs of terrorists, but the outcome was always certain: the group that pledged allegiance to Marley was the ultimate winner. Because the statute decided who could live and who would die. And dead people can’t fight.

In less than 20 years, all governments and politicians worldwide had fallen prey to Marley. They preferred to have the illusion of being powerful rather than going for the alternative; an honest, but humble life in the shadows of the population.

And this outcome was the result of a story that started in Amsterdam in 2011. If only time could be turned or if Harry would have found out the truth earlier on. But he failed and with that, he was the one man who put the entire world into misery.

(Published in The Holland Times, December 2013).