Melancholy and nostalgia at the Krasnapolsky.

It’s the way it was back in the day when anyone looking for our Jimmy knew to check out the bar in the Krasnapolsky hotel on Dam Square, Amsterdam. They’d find him there all grey-looking and hunched up over whatever drink someone had bought him but he could never tell you who or what or why. He was a fixer, the oil that greased the cogs that turned in the hush of the Grand Café off the hotel lobby where diplomats, generals, monied folk and other ne’re-do-wells met people they weren’t supposed to meet, hiding in the depths of leather high-backed chairs positioned behind giant indoor palms, and early each morning the political, military and economic secrets of the western world were bought and sold there over breakfast after a night that started in the basement bar but ended in one of the luxury suites in duplicitous though fairly comely company. Jimmy didn’t care for military secrets but he seemed to know everyone’s personal secrets and indiscretions, hence some of the furtive, reluctant meetings at the Krasnapolsky. The happenchance that put me in possession of the above information was a mixture of family connections, unemployment and an affair of the heart. Jimmy was the son of a family friend. I went to school with him when we were both teenage wild colonial boys in Africa. My girlfriend (though I’m not sure that she knew that’s how I saw her) was a dancer in the hotel night club, and I had nowhere else to be having just been fired from my job in an aluminium smelt oven in Barendrecht outside Rotterdam. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this dated information, but the memory of Jimmy and those days at the Krasnapolsky came to me as I got lost among the pages of Amor Towles’ ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’. Nothing to do with Towles’ excellent tale, just an atmosphere thing. It’s a day for melancholy and nostalgia and whiskey after all, a day like all the other days.