The Antwerp Job

Antwerp had changed since the last time he stole something there.

The station was cleaner, for one thing. All glass and polished stone now, the old grime scrubbed from the arches until the place looked less like somewhere people arrived and more like somewhere they were expected to spend money. He stood beneath the great clock and watched the second hand make a complete circuit before checking his own watch.

He was eleven minutes early.

There had been a time when eleven minutes would have felt dangerously close. He used to arrive an hour before a job, sometimes two. He would walk the streets around the building, drink coffee somewhere with a view of the entrance, watch the rhythms of delivery drivers and doormen and men who smoked cigarettes in doorways when they were supposed to be working.

Experience was supposed to make you more careful.

Mostly, it just made you late.

Outside, rain had begun to fall across the square. He turned up the collar of his coat and walked north towards the diamond district.

The stone was waiting for him three streets away.

That was what Michael had said, anyway.

A blue diamond. Four point eight carats. Recently arrived from Geneva and due to leave for London the following morning. Somewhere between those two journeys it would spend precisely one night in a private office above a jeweller’s on Hoveniersstraat.

He had stolen more valuable things.

He had certainly stolen more beautiful things.

But he’d never stolen anything from this particular man before, and at his age novelty had become increasingly difficult to find.

The café was exactly where Michael had promised. He took the table beside the window and ordered coffee he had no intention of drinking.

Across the street, a man in a grey suit emerged from the jeweller’s carrying an umbrella.

He recognised him immediately.

That was the first problem.

The second was that the man recognised him too.

For perhaps half a second neither of them moved.

Then the man smiled.

He hadn’t seen that smile in twenty-three years.

He left three euros beneath the untouched coffee, stood, and buttoned his coat.

The diamond, he decided, could wait.