Free The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam by Chris Ewan Page A

way.”
    “And finally the monkeys.”
    “About which you don’t have a monkeys.”
    “Ba-da-boom.”
    “That was one of the thin man’s best lines.”
    “From their successful Blackpool season?”
    “No doubt.” She sighed. “So what are you going to do?”
    “Sorry?”
    “What’s the next step to solving all this?”
    “Who said anything about solving anything?”
    “Nobody did. I just thought you might want to look into what
happened. Honour among thieves and all that.”
    “Right. The thing is, I need to look out for myself here, Vie.
And it strikes me the absolute best thing I can do right now is
keep my name out of this mess. So I’m going to finish my book and
then I’m going to work out where I’m off to next and that’s
it.”
    “You are thinking of moving on then?”
    “Once the book is done, yes.”
    “Well, have you considered London? We could have a conversation
in person for once.”
    “And remove my air of mystery? Let you put a face to my
name?”
    “Charlie,” Victoria said, as if I was a touch slow, “I’ve seen
your jacket photo a hundred times, remember?”
    “Oh yes,” I told her. “I forgot.”

∨ The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam ∧
11
    A fter I was through
talking to Victoria, I played around with some more plot ideas for
a while but I didn’t come up with anything new to solve the
briefcase problem, at least nothing sensible. The truth was I was
forcing things, trying to complete a book that wasn’t ready to be
finished just yet. Somewhere, deep in my subconscious, my mind was
toying with the puzzle I’d set it and in time, though I had no idea
when, the brilliant solution would surely come racing through the
channels in my mind, like a kid running to show his parents the
jigsaw he’s just completed. Until then, though, I would just have
to wait.
    So I dropped my pencil and booted up my laptop and connected to
the Internet and gave into my curiosity. Once I was online, I
called up Wikipedia and typed in the words ‘Three Wise Monkeys’. I
clicked on ‘search’ and soon found the content I was after.
The three wise monkeys are a pictorial maxim.
Together they embody the proverbial principle ‘to see no evil, hear
no evil and to speak no evil.’ The three monkeys are:
Mizaru, covering his eyes, who sees no evil;
Kikazaru, covering his ears, who hears no evil; and
Iwazaru, covering his mouth, who speaks no evil.
    The source that popularised this pictorial maxim is a
17 th century carving over a door of the famous
Toshogu shrine in Nikko, Japan. The maxim, however, probably
originally came to Japan with a Tendai-Buddhist legend possibly
from India via China in the 8 th century (Yamato
Period). Though the teaching most probably had nothing to do with
the monkeys, the concept of the three monkeys originated from a
word play on the fact that zaru in Japanese, which denotes the
negative form of a verb, sounds like saru, monkey.
    The idea behind the proverb was part of the teaching of god
Vadjra, that if we do not hear, see or talk evil, we ourselves
shall be spared all evil. This is similarly reflected in the
English proverb ‘Talk of the devil – and the devil appears’.
    All of which, to paraphrase, seemed to be saying that the
message the monkeys had been intended to convey was that you should
stay out of things as much as possible. And who could argue with
that? Not me, for one. So I powered down my laptop and I put on my
coat and then I left my apartment with the intention of taking a
stroll around the neighbourhood before finding a local brown bar
where I could drink a few beers, get something to eat and maybe
strike up a conversation or two.
    It was a fine plan, a great one even, but it fell apart the
moment I opened the front door of my building to find Inspector
Burggrave at the bottom of my steps. A uniformed colleague was
stood beside him and a marked police car was parked just
behind.
    “Mr. Howard, you are under arrest,” he told me.
    “But