Absinthe

by Guido Eekhaut

  In his opinion, all politicians were suspect. He’d gotten to know a lot of them in Brussels. Most of them were disreputable and dishonest, focused on their career, their popularity. “I wanted to see her reaction. People are most vulnerable when you attack them unexpectedly.”

  “Well, you managed that all right. You got your reaction. She almost killed you with that look.”

  The coffee arrived. Eekhaut paid the girl. “She clearly has absolutely no sense of humor,” he said.

  “You haven’t seen anything yet. You got out alive. She usually eats her opponents, skin, bones, and all. Till nothing is left of them. You were lucky. You should watch one of her television debates. Pure entertainment. She’s capable of anything once she’s cornered.”

  “I don’t watch TV,” he said. He added cream and sugar to his coffee. She drank it black. Your stomach will be grateful for that, in a couple of years, he thought. Black coffee, yogurt, fruit. No wonder she was skinny.

  “What, no television?”

  “Not if I can avoid it. And I always manage to avoid it.”

  “How do you keep tabs on what happens in the world?”

  “Whatever is on TV is badly informed entertainment, at best. Spectacular news and the most provincial items. Waste of time. Whatever is really happening, I learn through other means. And even then, I’m careful about drawing conclusions.”

  “You mean the internet?”

  “Books, reputable magazines, and talking to informed people. And yes, sure, the internet. Television will very quickly become the medium of the past. People aren’t taking it seriously anymore, not even for entertainment. Full of junk, really.”

  “So you do watch.”

  “Occasionally I’m tempted to watch, to see if it’s all that bad. And then I discover time and again that it is. But let’s talk about our investigation.”

  “We haven’t gotten far yet.”

  “A body, a bullet, a missing girlfriend, no motive, no murderer, no witnesses,” Eekhaut said.

  “We have a possible motive.”

  “Do we?”

  “Van Boer’s political connections,” Dewaal said. “Left-radical, engaged, and occasionally dangerous to the conservatives.”

  “That’s rather vague. Won’t get you far. So he had a lot of friends, and he had a lot of enemies. It seems he did something much more dangerous than simply writing left-wing stuff and pointing the finger at the capitalists. This cannot be merely ideological.”

  “You’re right, I guess,” she admitted. “We’re nowhere still.”

  “Why was he working for the PDN?”

  “We don’t know. He didn’t tell me anything about working there. He was busy, as always, and now it appears he was engaged in writing propaganda exactly contrary to his political beliefs. That doesn’t make sense.”

  “He wasn’t there because he shared their beliefs. On the contrary.”

  “Apparently not, no,” Dewaal said.

  “And he wasn’t there because he needed a job and couldn’t find anything else, either. Working there ran counter to everything he believed in.”

  “He would have had difficulty finding a job anywhere, but nevertheless—”

  “He was there,” Eekhaut said, “because he was spying on them.”

  She shook her head but said nothing.

  “You don’t agree?” he asked.

  “He wasn’t working for us, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “No, I wasn’t thinking that at all.”

  “So he was working alone. Solo. That’s what you’re implying?”

  “Probably. He discovered something that made it worth sacrificing—what, a year? Working in that place for a whole year? And now he’s dead. If we find out what he was looking for and what he was probably doing there, we might find out who killed him.”

  “Maybe he found something he could use against Van Tillo,” Dewaal said. “Something he found just before he was killed. Which made killing him such an urgent matter that a contract killer was sicced on him.”

  “That’s possible. But then, why didn’t he surface with that information? He could have contacted you.”

  “If that’s what happened, Van Tillo and Vanheul are part of the cover-up. And maybe they even ordered the murder.”

  “So my question wasn’t entirely—”

  She wasn’t going to spare his feelings. “That wasn’t your call to make, Walter.”

  “If you want to play around in politics, then it was. I grabbed the wrong end of the stick, that much I’ll agree to. But I never intend to play fair when politics are concerned.”

  “And where do you stand, when politics are concerned? I need to know.”

  He looked at his hands, not because he didn’t want her to see his eyes when he answered her, but because he needed time to consider the right formulation. “I stand on the side of the little guy whose life is fucked up time and again by all those who are richer and bigger and faster, the sort of people whose only intention is to get even faster and richer. I don’t care what color that little guy’s skin is or where he or she came from or what god he or she believes in. I care only for justice and in decency. Does that suffice as an answer?”

  “I would guess that’s a good description of a police officer.”

  “It seldom is. Most police officers see crime as a personal deviation from some socially accepted norm—a norm decided by those same rich and powerful people I was talking about. They hardly ever see the broader picture, of a society run wild. What kind of police officer are you, Ms. Dewaal?”

  “I liked you this morning. For a moment, I thought, There’s a man I would want to follow down some dark and dangerous alley. There’s a man who would protect me, without considering his own safety. There’s also a man who can and will make the same assumptions as I do.”

  “I try to stay away from dark alleys.”

  “But now, in this moment, I realize you’re much more dangerous than anything that might lurk in one of those dark alleys.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes, you are. You’re an idealist. And that’s unacceptable in a police officer, because an idealist will always ask those same questions of people like Van Tillo. But, on the other hand, that may be a good thing too. I shouldn’t have been angry, just because you did what you do best: denounce the untouchables.” She sipped her coffee. “You may also have understood by now that you’re not functioning along the lines of your assignment, as it was originally intended. Russians and Keretsky and communication between neighboring countries. Don’t fret about that, as I’m sure you won’t. I need an assistant I can trust absolutely, someone who asks questions no one else dares ask.”

  “That won’t be a problem.”

  “All right,” she said. “But why do I trust you? I don’t even know you. You come here, from Belgium, spat out by your own hierarchy, and I decide to trust you at once.”

  “I have that effect on women. Almost exclusively on women.”

  “Keep that sort of talk to yourself. I want to involve you in this investigation because you’re an outsider. You know nothing of Dutch politics. That’s why you’re not bothered by people like Van Tillo. Nobody has tried to bribe you, you have no past in this country. That puts you one step ahead of my colleagues in the office. And I want everything we’re discussing here, on this terrace, to remain between us alone.”

  “You take your whole life with you, Chief Superintendent Dewaal,” Eekhaut said. “Everywhere you go. That’s what I learned. Every time a human being ends up dead in a gutter, a child gets raped, a woman’s body is dredged from a canal, each time you take your life and your experiences with you. And nothing stays behind on this terrace.”

  “That reminds me of Breukeling,” she said. “A lugubrious idea, isn’t it? He too took his life everywhere he went. And that killed him in the end.”

  “How is that investigation progressing?”

  She made a face. “Internal Affairs is occupied with scrutinizing
what was left of the bomb. I got a call just before coming here. The bomb was put together with bits and pieces that you can buy anywhere—exactly the sort of device our friends on the other side of the fence go wild for. Whenever they want to close the deal on blackmailers and smugglers and people they in general don’t like.”

  “But why Breukeling?”

  “Internal Affairs isn’t concerned about that question anymore. So they tell me. Look, Walter: Breukeling was a street cop for most of his career. Like many of his generation. When you walk the beat day in day out, it’s difficult to keep your hands clean. He probably didn’t. But he was never caught doing anything irregular. Made a lot of enemies, though, probably because he accepted money from the wrong kind of people and didn’t return the favor often enough. Internal Affairs assumes he was still doing that, collecting an extra income. And then someone wanted to put an end to that collaboration.”

  “And the memory stick? No sign of that?”

  “No.”

  She fell silent and looked at her empty cup.

  He knew their conversation wasn’t finished. Not by a long shot.

  20

  “THE NERVE OF THAT Belgian!” Hendrika Van Tillo said. Her bosom heaved out of pure frustration. “Kees! We can’t allow this to happen. We have to take measures. Who do we know in the police?”

  “This is AIVD, Hendrika,” Vanheul said stiffly. “This isn’t some local cop. These aren’t ordinary police officers. This is AIVD, and we have to be careful.”

  “AIVD, my ass! We know somebody there as well. Call the ministry. Who else is there? Anyone from the old team? Anyone we can rely on to keep these cops in check?”

  “I’ll make the call. But I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “I’ll tell you whether it’s a good idea or not. You do trust my judgment, don’t you? A Belgian, on top of that! Comes into my own office and accuses me of murder!”

  “Strictly speaking he didn’t.”

  “No? Are you out of your frigging mind? What did you think he was doing?”

  “He asked if you were responsible for the murder of Van Boer. That is, legally speaking, entirely different. He knows very well you didn’t shoot that boy yourself.”

  “How do we know he was shot?”

  “We read it in the newspapers.”

  Van Tillo thought about this.

  “Furthermore, his question isn’t that absurd, Hendrika. After all, Van Boer did work here.”

  “The chief prosecutor of Amsterdam,” Van Tillo said. “We have met professionally. I’m probably the one who got him his job in the first place. A man without any redeeming qualities, but he’ll listen to us. Call him, Kees.”

  “I will.” Vanheul knew when not to contradict his boss.

  21

  UPON THEIR RETURN, ALEXANDRA Dewaal disappeared into her office, and Eekhaut began sorting through the mountain of files and folders that had suddenly materialized on his desk. He felt obliged to do his duty and read all of it, which hadn’t happened in a long time. He began surveying the intimate relationships between extremist organizations on the European front, a subject he wasn’t at all familiar with.

  Just as he was not familiar with Russian oligarchs.

  What he found was an intricate labyrinth of the most diverse ideologies and people inspired by different religions. Most of them could be discounted as brainless extremists and the fundamentally maladapted. About ten percent of them were important in an international context and thus potentially dangerous. Some of them seemed democratic on the outside. Partij Dierbaar Nederland was one of them. But their file contained not much more than a few short biographies and a list of points of view.

  Half an hour later, Dewaal was at his desk. “A second body has been found by local police, a young Surinamese,” she said. “Possibly the same weapon. There seems to be no connection with Van Boer, except this remarkable fact: the address Van Boer gave to the PDN as his own was a fake. It was the address of this young man who now is dead.”

  “Which goes to prove again that Van Tillo is connected with these murders,” Eekhaut said. He spoke quietly, so nobody but Dewaal would hear him. He leaned back, his arm over the backrest of his chair.

  “Too weak as evidence as yet.”

  “What’s the victim’s profile?”

  “The Surinamese young man probably knew Van Boer personally, but we don’t know that. No witnesses, I assume, as earlier. And no leads. The police are canvassing the neighborhood, but first reports say nobody noticed anything. They’ll keep me informed.”

  She left him alone again. He returned to his documents, read for a couple of hours, got more confused owing to the sheer abundance of material, looked for and found some coffee that came in a plastic cup and was barely drinkable, and observed some female officers working in the common room. Nobody talked to him; nobody bothered him. At four thirty he called it a day, stored the files in a locker, and left the building.

  He slowly walked toward Utrechtsestraat. He tried to remember what he had had for lunch, remembered it consisted of a sandwich from the cafeteria, and went looking for something more substantial. For a restaurant that promised decent food at a decent price. Lebanese fast food again? No, that would become a bad habit. Today he wanted more quality for his money.

  Maybe he would have to cook in his apartment like he’d done often enough in Leuven. The apartment came supplied with the necessary kitchen utensils. But it wouldn’t be the same as eating out.

  Not tonight anyway. He still hadn’t bought any groceries. He remembered the fridge from the morning. It had been almost empty.

  Slowly, he strolled in the direction of Rembrandtplein, crossed at Muntplein, and walked into Kalverstraat, where tourists were calling it a day and retreating to their hotels. He realized he should let a few people know he’d arrived safely in Amsterdam. Esther’s parents, perhaps, whom he hadn’t seen in months. His two nephews, with whom he had even less contact. A phone call would be enough. Or he would send a postcard, why not? That’s what a common tourist would do. But his family, what was left of it, was a vague presence on his horizon. Things had been different when Esther was still alive. She’d kept the family together. Even during those last weeks, when she’d been ill. After that, he had no longer bothered.

  Finally, he arrived at the Spui, where he found a large Indonesian restaurant. It was almost deserted. He sat down at a table.

  A young man brought the menu. “English?” he inquired. Eekhaut shook his head. “Dutch,” he said. He received a Dutch menu that turned out to be complex. He remembered having dinner here in the past and knew he had to order meat and vegetables separately. And not order too much, given the large portions they served.

  The food came almost at once. A small Indonesian rijsttafel, with all the ingredients on one plate and only a side order of veggies. He needed the better part of thirty minutes to get through it all, accompanied by a beer. At the table next to him, a couple of young Americans had ordered dinner for two and couldn’t figure out who was going to eat all that food.

  Afterward, feeling satiated, he walked over the Spui again and looked at the Athenaeum bookshop and then at the American Book Center, both closed. His first day off he would spend here, but he’d have to buy a bookcase first.

  Pieter Van Boer was on his mind. He thought about the boy’s girlfriend, who was now probably on the run from a killer. Her clothes still in the apartment, her life disrupted, her future stolen from her. Maybe she’d be found in one of the canals tomorrow or next week. Maybe she wouldn’t be found at all.

  There was nothing he could do about that. He had to wait this one out, hoping she would turn herself in.

  He sat on a bench and took his phone out of his pocket. Punched the number on the business card Dewaal had given him.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” he said.

  “Oh, it’s you. No problem.”

  “I was thinking.”

  “Good initia
tive. Keep that up. We’ll go a long way if you keep on thinking. About what?”

  “We may need to have another look at Van Boer’s apartment, maybe tomorrow. We ought to be able to find the girlfriend.”

  “I had that in mind too,” she said. “That’s why you called me?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “All right. Then let’s do it tomorrow. Have a good night.”

  He couldn’t remember why he really wanted to phone her.

  22

  ONLY WHEN HE ENTERED the Absinthe did he remember. He’d wanted to ask Dewaal why his presence earlier that day had been so important. Why had she taken him along to the scene of the murder? He had entered her professional life only just recently, coming out of nowhere. She had no idea what sort of police officer he was. She’d read his file, and there was nothing favorable in it. She didn’t know whether she could trust him. Moreover, she had a dozen people in the office she could just as easily have brought along. All of them experts. Why had she picked him? And in connection with a case that had very little bearing on his function in the Bureau.

  Had she chosen him because she feared the case would be a bit too sensitive for her colleagues, as she’d suggested earlier? Did she have a private agenda? Or privileged information? Did she have professional secrets he wouldn’t even know to recognize? He had wanted to look into her head, but that was a privilege she hadn’t yet allowed. It was much too early for that.

  Or had she chosen him because he really was the one who could be trusted in that dark alley, because he was an idealist who never doubted himself?

  Whatever the case, Van Boer might have been her personal informant, and perhaps she knew very well what his project had been.

  No, that much she had denied. And he believed her. She had confided in him, and so he was sure he could believe her. She hadn’t known what Van Boer was up to. His death wasn’t her fault. He couldn’t imagine why she would want to keep the other members of her team away from the murder scene.