Bite

by Nick Louth

  (Erica’s Diary 1992)

  Max was in a holding cell at police headquarters at Marnixstraat. Paced out heel to toe it was six and a half shoe lengths by nine. There were double doors: outer one wood, inner one steel. The windows were double too, an outer frosted layer, just enough to let through the pale light of early morning, and an inch thick inner layer of clear plate glass. Between the two was the unblinking eye of the observation camera, a permanent light, and a digital clock with a green display. The thin mattress and pillow were covered in aquamarine plastic, to match the shiny tiles on the wall. This was designer incarceration, modern and humane, with a floor spotless enough to eat your meals from. The warders called themselves carers, and told him the mattress was fire and piss proof. Then they had taken away his shoelaces, belt and St. Christopher chain in case he should harm himself.

  Max sat staring in timeless regret, until the ache in his shoulders made him realise his fists were balled tight. A few deep breaths helped ease the tension. He thought again about Lisbeth’s message, the delightful tickle as she scrawled on his left palm, and the promise she extracted from him not to read it for an hour. What she had written was a phone number and some advice: ‘A man whose hand sweats is not ready to face him and thus will not.’

  The phone number had not been erased. Max had passed that test, he was ready. But it was an old, buried, dangerous Max Carver that was ready. The part of himself that he disliked and feared and had thought gone for good after his killing of Samuel Ng, after his discharge from the Coast Guards. When he had his back to the wall, it had come back. And every part of him had to live with the consequences.

  The endless slow-motion replay of the night in Purple Haze came back again: Lisbeth trying to interpose herself; her face where Janus’s neck should have been; the two parallel gashes opening from the lower part of her left cheek, across one hitherto-perfect cheek bone and up, one each side of her left eye; her shocked stare, the pouring blood, the screams.

  After that Max remembered only lying on the floor where Janus knocked him, and those giant fists pounding him in retribution. Janus, trying to do his job of protecting Lisbeth. Failing again.

  The next few hours had been a blur. Arrival of the cops, the visit to the hospital under guard, the pretty blonde doctor with the delicate suturing technique, the pain as she bandaged his ribs and finally the dentist, shaking his head at the bombed graveyard his mouth had become. The whole time he was thinking about Lisbeth, in some hospital room, everyone afraid to show her a mirror.

  Keys jangled in the lock and the cell door swung open. Max recognised the big warder who had locked him up last night. With him was a smaller guy. Lean and stubbly, in ripped, paint-stained jeans, Ajax football shirt, and a sneer.

  ‘Get up, Carver.’ The scruffy guy’s arms were all tensed tendon and flexing tattoo.

  Max stood. ‘You a cop? I thought you were coming to share my cell.’

  Scruffy stepped so close that Max could see the broken blood vessels in his pale blue eyes and taste the stale onions on his breath. ‘I wouldn’t share my last smear of shit with you,’ he whispered. ‘I took her to the hospital. I saw what you did to her. Just give me the slightest excuse and I’ll splinter every bone in your body and render you for glue.’

  ‘Nice to meet you too,’ Max said, holding out his hand. ‘Carver’s the name. And you are?’

  ‘Stokenbrand,’ he snarled. ‘Detective sergeant.’

  The uniformed cop led Max out of the cell and Stokenbrand walked close behind, stepping deliberately on Max’s heels every time they waited for a door to be unlocked. Max’s hands were handcuffed behind his back and he was taken outside to a van.

  ‘Go on Carver,’ Stokenbrand hissed. ‘It’s only fifty yards out of here, gate’s open. Why don’t you make a break for it?’ He pushed him hard against the back of the van. ‘Go on. Hunting you down to the sewers would be a lot of fun.’

  Max shrugged away as best he could.

  ‘If only Johnny were alive now to see what you did to his girl,’ Stokenbrand said as he pushed Max into the back of the van where a uniformed cop was waiting.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Johnny Gee. The boxer. Won an Olympic Gold in Seoul.’

  ‘Never followed boxing,’ Max said.

  ‘Fifteen years ago I trained with him. He was fucking amazing. Beautiful fast fists, beautiful. He would have turned you into dog meat for what you did to Lisbeth.’ Stokenbrand turned to the other cop and asked him something. The cop shrugged and stepped out of the van, closing the door behind him. Stokenbrand watched him go, through the inspection window. ‘Just you and me, Max. I got one minute to teach you about boxing, as a special favour to Lisbeth. No-one’s going to notice a few extra bruises. Well, maybe you.’

  Max braced himself for the assault, which was rapidly and professionally administered with boots as much as fists, to his kidneys, ribs and groin, careful to never draw blood. Breathing heavily, Stokenbrand hauled Max back onto the seat, knee hard between his thighs, and clipped the American’s wrists to a restraint bar with a second set of handcuffs. The detective hawked deeply until he was chewing phlegm, and squeezed Max’s nose, trying to force him to open his mouth to receive it.

  Some things Max could take. Not this, whatever the consequences. He waited for his moment, snapped his neck back, then threw it forward hard. Max felt his forehead crack cartilage, and heard the yelp as Stokenbrand fell back to the other side of the van, setting it rocking. The detective sat down hard, hands clamped over his broken nose, a single ribbon of blood running down into his mouth.

  ‘Enough’s enough, alright?’ Max said.

  Before Stokenbrand could respond the other cop returned with two colleagues, one a sergeant with a clipboard. The sergeant looked at Max, and then at Stokenbrand, who was sniffing and trying to cover his nose. The sergeant had a short, harsh conversation with Stokenbrand, punctuated with plenty of finger pointing. Then he turned to Max. ‘You okay? Anything you want to tell me about?’

  ‘No. Everything’s just fine,’ Max said. The sergeant shrugged and slammed the van door. Max was taken to the central district headquarters at Warmoesstraat, taken to a cold interview room and dumped on a metal chair at a metal table. Both were screwed to the ground. Stokenbrand ushered the other cop out, slammed the door and locked it. He released a last venomous sneer through the inspection glass, then disappeared.

  Max got up and walked around for a while. He was dog tired, but he couldn’t sleep. It seemed about two hours later when the door opened, and Stokenbrand came in with two plastic chairs and a plug of cotton wool up his nose. Behind him was a lean fortysomething woman in a zip jacket and leather trousers and a young man in a cheap-looking suit. They sat side by side opposite Max at the table while Stokenbrand stood to the side.

  The woman spoke. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Voos. This is Mr de Haan who will look after your legal rights at the expense of the Dutch state until you find your own lawyer.’

  She opened a file and began to read. ‘Maxim Carver your case is going to the prosecutor on a charge of aggravated assault.’ She read out the formalities of the caution. ‘Do you have anything to say?’

  ‘Like I told ’em last night, it was an accident.’

  Voos looked up over her fashionable thin frame spectacles. There was not a shred of sympathy in her grey eyes. ‘So the bottle accidentally broke itself against the wall, and your arm accidentally slashed it across her face?’

  ‘It was an accident she was in the way. Sure, I wanted to get the big guy, to defend myself. This guy with the orange hair was giving him a gun. I couldn’t let that happen.’

  ‘No-one else saw that, Carver,’ Stokenbrand said. ‘But then no-one else can see into your twisted lying mind, which is the only place that weapon exists.’

  ‘Did you ask Lisbeth de Laan?’

  ‘We will, when she’s in a state to talk,’ Voos said. ‘This kind of thing makes me very angry.’ She tossed a Polaroid across the desk.
It was Lisbeth, her delicate face sliced, swollen and bloody.

  ‘Nothing you say is going to make me feel any worse about it than I already feel. She was the last person I wanted to hurt,’ Max said.

  ‘Why didn’t you leave the club when the owner asked you?’

  ‘I never met the owner. Just this gorilla who hates me since I started talking to Lisbeth.’

  ‘Janus Pretzcik is the owner. We have a number of witnesses who said you were told by him to leave but refused. When he tried to guide you to the exit, you resisted and started fighting.’

  Max shook his head. ‘It wasn’t that way at all. Lisbeth will tell you.’ He started to tell his version of events, but Voos stopped him.

  ‘You say you knew Lisbeth de Laan already. But you also say you have never been to Amsterdam before this week. From where do you know her?’

  Max kept his promise to Lisbeth. ‘She came to my art show yesterday.’

  ‘She came to your art show. Yesterday.’ Voos stared at him. ‘So that’s the first time you met her. And what is your interest in her?’

  Max hesitated. ‘She asked me to go to the club with her, that’s all.’

  ‘Were you attracted to her, is that it? A beautiful girl like her must attract many men.’

  ‘It’s not exactly that,’ Max said.

  ‘Not any more,’ Stokenbrand snarled. ‘With a hundred and seventy five stitches in her face. If you couldn’t have her, then nobody could, right?’

  Max shook his head vigorously.

  ‘Do you hate women?’ This was from Voos.

  ‘What?’

  ‘First you come to Amsterdam to meet your girlfriend. Then you report her missing. Ms Stroud-Jones has not been seen since. Then you change your appearance, dye and cut your hair. Then you meet this other woman, and you attack her with a broken bottle. Should we be now looking for your girlfriend’s body?’

  ‘You suspect me?’ Out of the corner of his eye Max saw the tattoos on Stokenbrand’s forearms tighten, the fists clench. ‘It is you guys that don’t care about Erica. It was you guys that tried to convince me it wasn’t serious, that Erica had found new friends, or gone for a little trip or some other bullshit.’

  ‘That was before we knew what you are capable of.’ Voos opened a thin folder and curls of shiny densely inked paper bounced up. ‘I got this faxed to me by the American embassy in The Hague, it’s pretty interesting, this portrait of the artist as a young man.’

  Max knew what would be there. A past he had tried to escape, catching up with him once again. Bald crimes, devoid of context or emotion, stripped of the nuance of trying to do the best thing you can with only a second to think.

  Voos scanned the pages. ‘Let’s summarise Max. 1982, assault and affray…’

  ‘Hey now. These two guys were dealing coke to school kids. Does it say that? No, sure it doesn’t. They went down to gladiator school. I got probation.’

  ‘And 1984. Carrying a concealed weapon.’

  ‘You had to live in Brooklyn to know how bad it was. I’d made a few enemies.’

  ‘Seems to be a talent of yours, Carver,’ Stokenbrand sneered.

  Voos continued. ‘Then in 1994 a dishonourable discharge from the U.S. Coast Guard Service, following a court martial over a civilian death. The embassy says they can get that file tomorrow, but why don’t you tell us what happened?’

  ‘Sure. I killed a drug smuggler during a boarding. I thought he was armed, he wasn’t. The shot that killed my buddy didn’t come from him, but from one of our own guys who got jumpy. Coast Guard command needed some fresh meat to throw to the Congressional oversight committee, and I was it.’

  Voos smiled. ‘They let convicted felons join the Coast Guards?’

  Max smiled back. ‘No they don’t. It was only probation so I thought what the hell and didn’t tell them. I guess for some reason they didn’t check. Until the Samuel Ng case. That gave them all the excuse they needed to throw the book at me.’

  ‘Hasty man, bad temper, violent,’ Stokenbrand said gleefully. ‘I could read it in your face. Now I see it in black and white.’

  ‘That’s pretty rich coming from you, buddy,’ Max said, then turned to Voos. ‘What you don’t see here are the five years freezing my butt off in the international ice patrol, you don’t read about the thirty-seven peaceful boardings I did out of Seattle, or hear the testimony of the two yachtswomen I dragged out of the water off Portland, or taste the seven hundred fifty pounds of coke my crew intercepted on one raid without a drop of blood lost.’

  ‘There was a lot of blood lost last night, Max,’ Voos said.

  ‘Listen. I’m trying to find my girlfriend. Nothing more. If you guys had taken me seriously none of this would ever have happened.’

  Voos nodded and steepled her hands. ‘I can assure you that we take you very seriously now, Max.’ She had an austere attractiveness, with a hint of grey in her short dark hair. The wedding band was fat, the engagement ring sparkled with a hefty rock. There was an aura of self-containment, even smugness about her. This was a woman who knew love, but saw none of it in front of her.

  ‘Inspector Voos, why would I kill the person I am in love with?’

  ‘We hope you can tell us. And then tell us why someone in love spends the evening chasing another woman, why someone who claims to be frantic with worry about their missing girlfriend goes drinking and listening to rock music.’ Voos rested her chin in her hand, head quizzically cocked.

  ‘You’ve got this all wrong….’ Max was shaking his head emphatically. ‘There’s a witness, right, who saw Erica with a man in a bar on the night she disappeared. Has Van der Moolen interviewed her yet?’

  Voos ignored the question. ‘Let us suppose you are correct about a kidnapping. Why would anyone do this? Is she wealthy? Is her family rich?’

  ‘Comfortable, not rich, so far as I know.’

  ‘She is a scientist earning a moderate salary, in an obscure field. There is no ransom note, nothing. It just doesn’t make sense, does it Mr Carver?’

  ‘Erica was on the verge of a scientific discovery, possibly a big step towards a malaria vaccine…’

  Stokenbrand leaned towards Max. ‘Bullshit. And not even good quality bullshit. Do yourself a favour. Show us where your girlfriend’s body is.’

  Max folded his arms. ‘Maybe I should get a lawyer who does something instead of sitting there like a dummy.’

  Haan leaned forward, his schoolboy’s moustache twitching. ‘Mr Carver, I am only here to ensure your rights are protected. I’m not here to defend you.’

  ‘So does all this mean you guys are not doing anything to find Erica?’ Max looked around the room.

  ‘Apart from having you in here, you mean?’ Voos responded. ‘We have made routine inquiries, circulated her description, contacted the British consulate so that we can trace her family and so forth. Of course I have no intention of justifying or describing to you what we may or may not do.’

  ‘But you’re happy to have me. What about the other guy? Janus. Got him in a cell?’

  Voos shook her head dismissively. ‘Why would we? There is no evidence he committed a crime.’

  ‘And this is nothing, right? And this, and this.’ Max pointed in turn to his broken nose, split lip and swollen ear. ‘Not vicious and unprovoked assault or anything, just a traditional warm Dutch welcome.’

  ‘Of course we will investigate your allegations, but the witnesses’ accounts we have so far are very different from yours.’

  Max hadn’t realised how bad he looked until Henk was shown into the interview room. The art dealer recoiled at the sight of his face, and sagged on the chair as Max retold the story. Henk listened impassively, refolding and fiddling with the spare clothes and shaving kit he had brought. Finally he looked up.

  ‘Max, Max, Max. I thought I knew you, really I did. But the person sitting in front of me is a stranger.’

  News from Kinshasa is not good. Jarman has his wife’s death certificate with him.
When Georg was shown it, he shook his head in disbelief. The cause of death was given as malaria. We were appalled, and Amy voiced the opinion that it was probably just another Kinshasa misdiagnosis. We all hope so. After all, the nuns had chloroquine and mefloquine in their dispensary, but because the malaria test was negative no-one thought to use it. No-one dares say it. But Sophie probably died for nothing.

  (Erica’s Diary 1992)

  Chapter Fifteen

  Shaun Miller was a salesman for Biomedical Supplies of New Jersey, and it was his turn to man the stand at the International Parasitology Forum. Shaun regarded it as dead time. The stand had plenty of visitors, threadbare scientists and scruffy doctors looking over the microscopes and diagnostic tests his company made, but no buyers. Parasites meant low budget hospitals, no corporate buyers and penny-pinching third world governments looking for freebies.

  As he paced up and down he knew where he should have been. Las Vegas for the World AIDs Convention, or Rio for the oncology bash. That’s where the money was.

  Shaun was just cursing his regional sales head for allotting him this graveyard when a scrum of people approached and swarmed onto the stand. ‘Gentlemen, what can I…’

  ‘I am Professor Cornelis van Diemen of the Randstad Medical Centre in Amsterdam.’

  ‘Glad to meet you, Professor. I’m Shaun Miller, can I…’

  ‘We need to borrow that microscope,’ said Professor van Diemen, pointing to the most expensive item in Biomedical’s range. ‘Just for a few minutes.’

  ‘The model 2010. Sure, take a seat. It’s got multi-planar focusing, and you can see…’

  ‘Where is the light switch?’

  ‘Here. Now on this model…’

  ‘Please stand back young man. You can try selling it to me once I’ve used it.’

  Soon Saskia was standing at the edge of a press of eager scientists and officials, watching the pecking order develop as Van Diemen invited delegates to look at the slide of Erskine’s blood. The best known experts, like F. Bruce McKilliam of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, and Kathryn Delaney of Walter Reed Army Institute got their own slide to take away and examine at their leisure. Others had to take their brief turn at the lens.