Page 103 of Nobody's Fool

“Harm?”

“Apropos name, no? He is a citizen of the Netherlands. He was thirty-six years old at the time of his arrest. This was a year after you left. He has a fairly extensive record, all minor things. Petty robberies. It’s what I told you before. Even if we caught him back then, what crime had he really committed—stealing under a thousand dollars from you and, what, pretending someone was dead?”

“And this arrest?”

“Assault.” Osorio squints and reads. “Seems our friend Harm got into a fight in a room at the El Puerto Hotel.”

“Did he stand trial?”

He shakes his head. “All charges dropped.” He keeps reading. “Oh, this is interesting.”

“What?”

“According to the record, the man he attacked was an American named Frank Ache. Bergkamp claimed self-defense, saying that Ache first attacked his girlfriend, a woman named—” He looks up at me. “Anna Marigold.”

Boom.

He continues to read. I am not patient.

“What?” I ask.

“Give me a second.”

I take out my phone and google Anna Marigold. Nothing significant. I hit the image search. A bunch of textile patterns of marigold flowers designed by a woman named Anna Spiro pop up. I try putting the name in quotes—“Anna Marigold”—but still get nothing. Then again had I really expected to get anything worthwhile? No. I try “Harm Bergkamp,” but the results are all in Dutch. I click through a few, but they all seem to be about someone with the name who died in 1876.

Finally, Osorio lets loose a deep breath, sits back, and rubs his face. “Okay, so here’s the deal.”

I put my phone down and lean toward him.

“It’s like what happened to you. Anna met Ache at the Discoteca Palmeras. She faked a drug overdose. Not death. But like, really out of it. The problem was, from what I can gather here, Bergkamp got held up and didn’t get there in time. So Ache kept shaking her and shaking her. Anna tried to keep her eyes closed and pretended to be out of it. But how long can you pull that off? So he figures out she’s faking it and she’d already stolen his money and hidden it. So Ache loses it and starts beating her.”

The broken nose, I think. The shattered cheekbone. Could this be how she got them?

“Harm Bergkamp arrives, sees her in trouble. He jumps on Frank Ache to stop him. That’s the assault. It turns super ugly. Hotel security intercedes. Bergkamp and Ache both get arrested. Anna Marigold has to go to the hospital.”

He stops and reads some more.

“And?” I say.

“And that’s it. Charges dropped. My guess is, neither side wanted to pursue it.”

“How badly was Anna hurt?”

“Doesn’t say. It just says that she was hospitalized in Málaga.”

“Can we get records?”

“From that long ago? Doubt it. And what are you going to learn? There won’t be pictures.”

“So,” I say, “how do we get Harm Bergkamp’s current whereabouts?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

With the help of Polly and the Pink Panthers, I find Harm three days later in, of all places, Nashville, Tennessee.

Or should I say Buzz? Or Buzzy?

Harm Bergkamp now goes by the name—get this—Buzzy Berg. He works on low-budget horror films, using local breweries and abandoned buildings as locations. His movies are universally terrible and three steps below what we used to call “straight-to-video.” I tried to watch one calledBed, Bloodbath and Beyond, but I’m not good with gore and that’s pretty much all the films offer.

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