When I turned, the guy was even closer.
My head bobbing, I couldn’t focus on his face; but beneath the goggles, he seemed to be grinning, crazily.
I turned forward again. The neighborhood was coming to an end. Too soon, the street would gutter out into a commercial block catering to tourists. I saw a big, corny windmill above a tacky restaurant.
There was one last bridge over a last canal before we got there. My mind racing as fast as the bike, I thought that Alec Guinness had replaced Charles Laughton in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Laughton was too fat to be bought as a prisoner of war.
The whiz of wheels was now right behind my head.
I flared around, unable to resist seeing our pursuer. He had the same strange gritted-teeth look, only more extreme, the effort of the chase taking its toll. But he wasn’t too tired to do something new.
He reached out to grab our bike.
His fingers clawed at the rat-trap above our back rear tire. He fell away. Then he tried again. Katie and I managed to pedal fast enough to keep him ever reaching, never taking hold. But how long could we keep on doing it?
“Don’t stop!” I yelled, more at myself than her.
“Don’t worry!” Katie responded.
Once more, the guy flung out his hand. This time, his fingers tapped the steel of the rat-trap. Either he was getting better or we were getting worse.
The final bridge was just a few feet away. I thought I could even hear tinny, piped-in music from the windmill restaurant.
I turned around again and saw him. I noticed another detail on what was left bare of his face. There were shaving cuts on his chin and cheeks. I took a second to consider it. That was a mistake.
He got hold of the back of the bike.
Brutally now, as he rode, he began waving our bike back and forth on the cobblestone road. I felt myself veering, nearly tipping over. Katie kept more of a steady hand, but even she had to hold on tight. The bridge was steps away, and water, of course, was underneath it.
“Hey!” I yelled to him, absurdly.
He gave us a particularly hard yank to the right. My upper half tilted over as if directly pushed. It took all my strength to lean left, sit back firmly on the seat, while pedaling with all my might.
Now we were on the bridge. Beyond it was the street of shops and eats, home of help or even worse hurt. I saw the spokes of the windmill start to move, ever so slowly.
Then I realized it wasn’t moving. I was.
The guy had given the tandem a final, galvanizing pull to the side. The back tire skidded once, definitively, and my hands lost their grip. I sailed from my seat.
For a second, I saw only Amsterdam sky. Then, on my way down, I saw a little boat, a skip I think they call it, docked in the canal. A cat sat on its protective tarp. It calmly watched me hit the water.
IT WAS ONLY DEEP ENOUGH TO DROWN ME.
I headed to the bottom, dark water filling my nose and mouth. I smelled unwashed feet and, strangely, almonds. I thought that Katharine Hepburn had fallen into a Venetian canal in David Lean’s Summertime, and the result was a lifelong eye infection.
In the eighties, an elderly Lean was announced to direct a film of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo starring Dennis Quaid. He died before it happened; on deck was Arthur Penn, who’d been hired as an insurance hedge. But the film was scuttled, anyway. A few years earlier, Penn had been replaced on Altered States by Ken Russell.
Underwater, these thoughts swam around my brain like the little fish darting around my head. Or were they just pieces of dirt? I couldn’t tell, and opening my eyes only caused stinging. I squeezed them shut again. Then I tried to rise.
I felt a ten-ton weight on my head.
It took me a second to realize that it was a hand, pressing upon my skull. Sitting on the bottom now, I reached up and, with ten fingers, grabbed ahold of what felt like a male forearm. When frantic jerking of the arm solved nothing, I sank my nails into its skin.
It took a surprisingly long time for the arm’s pressure to subside. When, at last, it succumbed, it wasn’t to my stabbing; I faintly heard a woman’s voice.
“That’s enough!” it said.
Then the hand pushed me over, in a last aggressive act.
I fell in slow motion, my chest scorched from lack of air. Just before hitting the filthy canal floor, I managed to right myself in time to survive. I shot to the surface and emerged, spitting and moaning, like an angry whale.
Standing there—it really was shallow—I looked around at the streets and bridges. I saw no one, not the bicyclist, not Katie. I didn’t think about a motive or the identity of the perpetrator. I was too stunned.
Then, a second later, I was too confused.
Feet away, Katie and the spandex man were standing, leaning on their bikes, outside the windmill restaurant. They were talking, casually. Wiping dirty water from my eyes, I saw that the guy had removed his hat and goggles.
It was Johnny Cooper, newly shaven. Katie was kissing him.
The two of them turned. They saw me standing there, helplessly, in the canal. Then they both waved at me, and smiled.
—
“What do you mean, it was The Postman Always Rings Twice?” I shouted.
“We were doing a scene from it,” Katie explained. “Unfortunately, neither one of us owns a car. So we did the best we could. Graus is busy working.”
The three of us were having lunch in the tacky tourist trap, appropriately named The Wooden Shoes. My soaked and stinky appearance caused little gawking from other tables; the Dutch are, of course, discreet.
