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expression softens. “There is a café on the corner of Paleisstraat and Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. Southwest corner, close by to the tram stop. I forget the name of it. We have met there several times. Couches. Lamps. More like a home than these Starbucks,” she says. “She favors it.”
    “I’ll give you my number.” He pulls out a business card for John Steele, circles the mobile number in pen, and passes her the card. He compliments himself for having the cards made. Best thirty euros he’s spent.
    “I won’t,” she says.
    “You might.”
    “It’s personal for her. For Sonia. There was a niece, I believe it was. It’s a mistake to allow that into your stories. Mark knows that. Sonia should. But that’s the thing about the personal—it creeps in, and you don’t see it for what it is.”
    Knox thinks about Tommy, and his heart is heavy. “A niece.”
    “In India. Similar circumstances.”
    Knox senses her reluctance. Isn’t going to push.
Similar circumstances.
The words swim around.
    He says, “She’s going to freelance the story.”
    “It happens.”
    “And the paper?”
    “Mark won’t like it. He’ll throw a fit. But in the end, Sonia will win. Sonia always wins. She’s very, very good. A reporter like her comes around only a few times a generation. The language skills. The people skills. Aggressive to the point of dangerous. To herself. To others. She is pretty enough for television, but has not given into it fully yet. She dabbles, for her own amusement. She is still a writer first.” She drinks the coffee, her eyes searching him over the rim expectantly.
    She looks like she’s beginning to enjoy this.
    “It’s a compelling story,” he says. “Child labor. Poor working conditions. Impoverished neighborhoods. Unwanted immigrants. Why would an editor turn away from that?”
    “The neighborhoods are not impoverished, Mr. Steele. Amsterdam is a city of immigrants—but only for the past three centuries. Do your research! Mark got a story he didn’t ask for. It’s as simple as that. He’s a control freak. If he assigns the story, it has value. If it’s brought to him in a meeting and discussed, it has value. If it shows up in his in-box unassigned . . .”
    “What editor can work that way?”
    “Now you’re sounding like Sonia.”
    “You have my card.”
    She fingers it, flicking the corner. “Yes.”

G race doesn’t know if it’s her being Chinese, or the EU credentials, but no one at the health clinic attempts to stonewall her. She asks for and is given a printout of the emergency admission records for Kahil Fahiz. It goes too easily, a rarity. She commits the home address to memory, along with a mobile number. A few minutes later, she has entered them both into her phone. Without Sonia Pangarkar’s tendency toward graphic journalism she would not have known the hospital. But now all that’s left is navigating her way through a busy city, finding bridges across canals, and wending her way toward the address.
    When mapped, Amsterdam sits like the left half of a bike wheel with crepe paper woven through the spokes; the crepe paper is the canals, with Centraal Station as the wheel’s hub. Over the centuries, the city has expanded ever outward from the thirty blocks of its central historic district—devoted entirely to tourism, the canals lined with picturesque three-story Dutch timber and Tudor houses—to a postwar district of nearly identical brick and white-trim apartment complexes. These outer neighborhoods, all identical, stretch for miles in every direction.
    Grace double-checks not only the building number, but the street name. The architecture and street layout are so homogeneous as to be dizzying.
    No one answers her repeated tries on the Fahizes’ door. The first hiccup. She tries the phone number but gets voice mail in Farsi. She understands this. She imagines no matter how many times she called, it would go to voice mail. The victim of a beating, Fahiz will