“As you are retiring,” whispers Starr, who is accompanying him at the ceremony, “so will I. You don’t think I’m coming back to this crappy school in September if you’re not here to lecture.”
“OK, but then stay with me for the vacation.”
“That’s what I was planning. A lifelong vacation without end. Happy birthday, Old Vic!”
Afterwards they toast Victor with sparkling wine, a blanquette de Limoux that Starr refuses to drink, and his colleagues come up one by one to say goodbye. The same way you greet the family after a funeral.
The director: “We’ll miss you, Victor. You’re irreplaceable.”
The professor of theatre studies: “I hope you’ll come and see us now and then. If your girlfriend gives her permission!”
The sports teacher: “So what are your plans, old man? Or should I ask Miss Mortenson?”
The elocution teachers: “Life begins at sixty. But I don’t need to tell you that, it seems.”
The janitor: “You should write a book, Mr Cox, now that you’ve got the time.”
The professor of photography: “I think Victor had more time before he retired.”
Rudy Poels, who also used to teach film history: “It seems that men who stand in the limelight come across as sexy to women. Is that the case, Miss Mortenson?”
“Some men don’t need to,” snaps Starr.
“Come on Rudy,” Cox replies. “That’s an old cliché that has nothing to do with me. Let’s take this opportunity to smoke the peace pipe.”
“I don’t smoke,” says Poels bitterly.
The professor of English literature intervenes. “The minute you feel you have given a faultless performance is the time to get out.”
“Charlton Heston,” says Starr. She cannot take the hypocritical compliments and veiled allusions any longer and tugs at Victor’s sleeve. “Come on, we’re off. I need some fresh air.”
Sunday, 2nd July 2000
Once again there is a woman in the house, which smells of love and coffee. She is sleeping in the room next door, her knees pulled up, and is sucking her thumb like Carroll Baker in Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll.
Last night she cooked for me. And she brought two bottles of Dom Pérignon from her father’s cellar and a lemon tart with sixty candles.
“I didn’t buy you a birthday present,” she said. “The present is me.”
I found it comforting that she was with me, because no one from my distant family had thought of my birthday. After dinner she stretched out on the sofa and began to flick through a book about Hitchcock. I suggested that we watch one of his films.
“Not on your birthday,” she said. “Let’s play a game.”
I opened the second bottle and asked what she had in mind.
“A strip quiz.”
I filled the glasses.
“We choose a subject and ask each other a question in turn. If you don’t know the answer you take off a piece of clothing. Like strip poker, but with questions. When I lived in New York it was all the rage with the students. Everyone played.”
“You too?” I asked, and could hear her call my name in the cellars of Brooklyn, naked and powerless like the prey of panting oiled demigods.
“Of course.”
“With my advanced years I think I’m a little too old for that kind of game.”
I had not undressed in front of a woman for years. Even when, in a fit of absolute despair after the death of Shelley, I had brought one of the boozers home from the Candy Bar.
“Nonsense. Anyway, you’ll win.”
“Who says?”
“Let’s smoke a joint. It will help you relax.”
She lit a self-rolled cigarette and handed it over to me excitedly.
“Breathe in deep.”
I drew on the cigarette. The smoke burnt my lungs.
“Have you thought of a subject?” I asked, coughing with streaming eyes.
“Hitchcock’s appearances in his own films. For example North by Northwest.”
“Then my answer is: just after the opening titles he runs up to catch the bus but the doors shut in his face. And I keep my clothes on.”
“That was an easy one. You can also give the answer and then the other player has to guess the title. OK?”
I handed over the cigarette and thought for a while.
“To Catch a Thief.”
“At the back of a bus Cary Grant looks at Hitchcock who’s sitting next to him. My turn now. A small crowd is listening to a political speech when a drowned person is fished out of the Thames. Hitchcock, wearing a bowler hat, is standing among the curious onlookers who are trying to get a glimpse of the body.”
“Frenzy. Now for a harder one. Hitchcock is winding a clock in a musician’s flat.”
Starr drew on the joint and frowned as she sucked the smoke into her lungs.
“No idea,” she said and pulled off her sweater. She was wearing a white lace bra under which her dark nipples were visible. Her skin was pale white, with a beauty spot here and there. I took a drink of champagne, spilling some.
“Rear Window.”
“How stupid of me. Strangers on a Train.”
“When Guy Haines, played by Farley Granger, steps off the train he passes Hitchcock who is trying to get on with a double bass.”
“See, you are winning!” she laughs. “And what’s more my glass is empty.”
I refilled her glass. She was flushed with excitement and her eyes were sparkling.
“Your turn,” she said.
“Rope. Not easy.”
In reply Starr fell back on the sofa, pulled off her new boots and socks and unbuttoned her jeans.
“In the background, against the façade of a building in the right of the picture, the famous drawing of Hitch’s profile is flickering as a neon sign.”
“I think I had better get used to being undressed! Another drag?”
I was feeling pleasantly light-headed and took the glowing butt.
“Wait… You got the double bass… Oh yes… which film is he carrying a cello in?”
“In The Paradine Case. He leaves the station next to Gregory Peck with a cello under his arm. Do you really want to carry on playing?”
“Of course. It’s just starting to get interesting!”
“I know. At the start of the film he comes out of a pet shop with two little dogs.”
“Marnie?”
“The Birds. Sorry.”
“Here we go!”
She bounced up and wriggled out of her tight-fitting jeans. She spread her arms out and started to spin round the room on her toes. Her thong disappeared between her round, firm buttocks. Just like the advertisements in the bus shelters. I could not keep my eyes off her. She was even more beautiful than in my wildest dreams. There I stood with all my clothes on, embarrassed but trembling with desire after this perfect seduction, like Glenn Ford peeping at Gilda over half a century ago. Two more difficult questions and she would be standing there stark naked.
She stopped dancing and leant dizzily against the bookcase.
“My turn. The film,” she said breathlessly, “where he appears twice.”
This time I didn’t know the answer.
“Under Capricorn. The first time at the governor’s reception, the second time on the terrace of his palace. You lost!”
I couldn’t wait any longer. As I undid my shoe laces, I quickly asked the following question.
“In the newspaper that William Bendix is reading, he appears in an advertisement for the slimming tonic Reduco.”
She undid her bra and let it slide slowly off her breasts.
“Come on Starr, you know the answer,” I said, as I pushed off my shoes. “William Bendix only made one film with Hitchcock.”
“I really don’t know,” she said defiantly, and flung her bra into a corner of the room.
I could hardly concentrate. My mouth was dry. Gasping for breath I stammered: “Lifeboat.”
She refilled her glass, dipped he
r finger in the champagne, caressed her erect nipples and sighed: “I’m out of inspiration. You ask the next question.”
“His profile appears as a silhouette behind a glass door at the Registrar of Births and Deaths and he makes an obscene gesture. Like this.”
I stuck out my middle finger. She stuck it deep in her mouth – the mouth of Linda Lovelace – then pushed me on to the sofa. She came and stood before me.
“You must pull off my panties. It’s the rules.”
“First the answer.”
She shook her head, smiling.
“Family Plot,” I heard myself saying from afar, as I slipped her tiny panties down her legs. She had shaved her pubic hair. Full of emotion, I gazed at the gentle curve of her belly and lower down at the swollen apricot between her slightly parted legs. How had I deserved this divine spectacle? I who, married to loneliness, had my life behind me, who survived my fears and doubts from one day to the next as an exile somewhere on the frontier of banality and mediocrity, with nothing more to offer, for whom tomorrow had become a meaningless concept, for whom women had never been more than unapproachable apparitions, fleeting shadows on a taut linen cloth? There I sat, stoned and grey-haired in my drink-sodden body, dumbfounded and paralysed, and all I had to do was stretch out my hand to touch this flawless, shameless child of flesh and blood with my trembling fingers. God is a woman, I thought, and she looks like Clara Bow.
“You can take a bite,” she said, softly stroking her groin. “No one else.”
Then she walked over to the bedroom, turned round in the doorway and said:
“OK, Mr Cox, I’m ready for my close-up now.”
I switched off all the lights and put on the soundtrack of 9½ Weeks. I undressed in the dark and slipped into bed beside her.
“Admit you were cheating just now,” I whispered.
“What did you think?” she replied and disappeared under the sheets.
To describe with the right words what happened last night in the room next door, you would have to be a writer. And I am not. The only thing I can say is that I wept for joy like a child under a Christmas tree.
14
Marion Mees
In the last week of August the Film Museum organized a retrospective entitled Possessed by the Devil devoted to expressionism, a spellbinding tour d’horizon of twenty years of German cinema. Starr and Victor attended several open-air screenings in the courtyard of the former Royal Palace. Tonight Georg Pabst’s Die Büchse der Pandora, better known as Lulu, was on the programme. When they left the building, a lot of people turned round to look at Starr in amusement.
“You see how I look like Louise Brooks?”
“Especially tonight.”
“In that scene where Lulu is gazing at herself in the mirror in the wedding dress as Dr Schön comes in to shoot her, I saw myself standing there.”
“Well, Cox, are you with this young lady?”
Cox turns. Poels is standing behind him, extending a clammy hand to Starr.
“I can’t see anything wrong with that,” Cox replies coldly, preparing to move on.
“I was quite touched,” continues the projectionist, unperturbed, “when I saw the two of you sitting there like lovebirds.”
Poels turns his dull eyes on Starr, and stares at her penetratingly from behind his thick glasses.
“I’m an ex-colleague of your boyfriend. We have met before. At Victor’s farewell at the Institute.”
“I don’t remember you,” says Starr, omitting to shake his hand.
“Your girlfriend suffers from loss of memory. Not drink problems again, I hope?”
“Leave us alone, Poels. And don’t be so pathetic.”
“Me? Pathetic? You’re the poor fool around here, Victor.” Poels turns away and disappears into the crowd.
“What an awful guy,” says Starr, shivering. “Bastards like that make my skin crawl.”
“Just forget him, Starr. He’s just frustrated because I became a professor while he’s still a projectionist.”
There’s a brief pause. Then Cox says: “Are you hungry?”
“Whenever I see myself on screen.”
“Feel like mussels? I know a restaurant where they serve mussels all year round. They must come from China.”
It was a warm evening and Antwerp resembled Rome. They walked beneath an indigo-blue sky across the Meir to the Groenplaats, where they took a taxi to Docklands.
They sat down at a table at the back of the room. Starr lit a cigarette and looked at the collection of framed photos of partying guests to her left on the wall. She pointed at a black-and-white group portrait of Ma Mussel and her friends, posing next to the jukebox in sparkling paper hats, with their glasses raised.
“They don’t look very happy,” remarked Starr. “Just a collection of castaways. Especially that one in the black dress. Do you know her?”
Victor nodded, and Starr understood.
“Shelley?”
“No, Dixie.”
“Well, darlings, looks like you enjoyed that,” says Ma Mussel, clearing away the empty plates.
“They were delicious,” says Cox. “Shall we have another bottle of Riesling?”
“My treat,” says Starr.
As he watches the imposing behind of Ma Mussel disappear into the kitchen with the dirty plates and bowls of empty shells, he glances at the mirror behind the bar and catches the eye of The Sponge, who has stepped into the restaurant in the company of an extravagantly made-up blonde. The inspector walks over to his table and claps him on the shoulder.
“Mr Cox! Long time no see!”
“Some time last century.”
“Who would have expected it? And at the scene of the crime, too.”
Luyckx looks enquiringly at Starr, who is touching up her lipstick in the reflection of her knife blade.
“Let me introduce you,” says Cox. “Starr Mortenson, one of my ex-students. Chief Superintendent Luyckx.”
“And my name’s Katia,” says the blonde next to Luyckx, tugging down her extremely short strawberry-pink dress.
The restaurant is crammed full and there is not a table to be had.
“Come and join us,” says Starr, moving her chair over.
Luyckx hugs Ma Mussel and orders a bottle of champagne.
“We’ve already eaten,” he says, “I can’t look at another mussel.” He winks at his girlfriend. “Well, Professor, I have the impression that young people are having a positive influence on you. You look ten years younger since we last met.”
“I’m doing my best to enjoy my retirement.”
“And I’m looking after him,” laughs Starr.
“I wouldn’t doubt it for a moment.”
“We went out tonight to see one of Pabst’s films.”
“There’s no business like show business.”
“I put on The Seven Virgins of Draculanus for Fons. It’s still giving him a hard-on.”
“Katia’s from Poland,” says Luyckx, as if that explains everything.
Ma Mussel brings the champagne and white wine and asks: “Will you really not eat anything, Spongey?”
Luyckx shakes his head and pours out the champagne.
“Superintendent Luyckx led the investigation into the death of Shelley,” Cox says to Starr.
“I gathered that.”
Luyckx raises his glass. “To your new-found youth!”
The opening bars of Beethoven’s Ninth sound from his inside pocket and he apologizes.
“Hello? Yes… What?… Wait a minute, I can’t hear you, it’s too noisy here… Hang on a second.”
The music coming from the jukebox – Lee Dorsey’s ‘Ya Ya Twist’ – is so loud that he is forced to go outside to continue the conversation.
“That’s better. Yes… The motel on the old motorway? I know, yes… Right now? At Ma Mussel’s… Yes… I reckon half an hour… See you there.”
Luyckx reappears in the restaurant and slaps a five-hundred-franc note on the table.
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“Got a problem, Fons?” asks Katia.
“Just routine. You carry on without me.”
“I wouldn’t like to have your job,” says Cox.
“You don’t. Shall I drop you home?”
“No,” replies Katia. “The weather’s fine. I’ll walk and maybe pull a few tricks.”
The Babylon Motel was built in 1958 in the amusement park of the same name on the Antwerp – Brussels highway, and initially enjoyed enormous success. The promoters had managed to buy up for a song what was left of the monumental sets of D.W. Griffiths’s 1916 film Intolerance and had it shipped over from Hollywood. If you set off from Antwerp for the capital it was impossible to miss the gigantic elephants, Persian columns, winged bulls and Egyptian deities that stood by the road a little beyond Londerzeel. Tourists visiting the World Fair who did not want to spend a fortune on a hotel room in Brussels could spend the night there for a reasonable price. Despite that, after four years the business went bankrupt. It remained closed until the mid-Eighties. The abandoned estate was then purchased by a company from Maastricht and patched up. The new clientele consisted mainly of people from the Netherlands passing through the region, who could eat their own sandwiches in the dining room and park their caravans and mobile homes for a night among the ruins in the overgrown gardens. But for the last few years it had more or less been kept going almost exclusively by lorry drivers from Eastern Europe and strange travelling salesmen.
Nowadays there is little left of the amazing decor. And the motel is just a rusting carcass of glass and iron next to a long line of tumbledown bungalows. The blue neon sign over the entrance gate is broken except for the first four letters. In the distance Luyckx can see the word ‘Baby’ flickering in the night. He slows down, turns off to the right and drives carefully over sagging slabs of concrete to the poorly lit reception area where Lannoy and Sax are waiting for him.
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