17
Deborah Kerr
“You could at least have met me at the station,” says Starr, bursting into the room and chucking her travelling bag on to the bed. “I had to come all the way from Ostend by tram.”
Cox explains that he is not allowed to leave the hotel because they found the half-charred body of a strangled whore in a dustbin in the car park behind the hotel that morning.
“You don’t say.”
“A high-class tart who picked up her clients in chic hotels along the coast.”
“And what’s that got to do with you?”
“Nothing.”
“I hope you’ve got a solid alibi. I can’t cover you this time.”
“I ate in the room while I watched Too Much, Too Soon in which Dorothy Malone plays an alcoholic. But she reminded me too much of Dixie and I turned it off.”
“That’s the first time you’ve called her Dixie.”
“Because the image of Shelley is fading away while I can see Dixie’s more and more clearly. Perhaps because Shelley personifies life while Dixie means death.”
“And what did you do next?”
“Then I fell asleep in your perfume and dreamt you were lying next to me.”
“You call that an alibi?”
“Whatever it is, it’s the truth.”
Starr goes out to the balcony and turns her back to him. Cox gazes at her silhouette, framed against the pink sky. He walks over to her, puts his arms around her and kisses her on the neck.
“I’ve missed you so much,” he whispers.
Starr turns round, looks at him with penetrating eyes and sticks her tongue out. Cox kisses her again, long and greedily on her young mouth.
“It’s even better when you help,” he sighs.
“Bacall to Bogie in To Have and Have Not.”
Cox calls down to room service and orders smoked salmon and prawn sandwiches and his traditional bottle of Chablis.
“Tell me about the Deborah Kerr retrospective in Stockholm. Was it worth the trouble?”
“Oh, Grandpa Mortenson has been secretly in love with her, I think, since he discovered her in 1950 in King Solomon’s Mines.”
“Did you know that’s the first film I saw as a child in the cinema? I was so excited that I peed in my pants and screamed the place down.”
“It comes across as rather old-fashioned nowadays.”
“Like me.”
“Exactly, Old Vic.”
“But you sounded quite enthusiastic on the phone.”
“That was because Grandpa was standing next to me and I was hearing your voice. But I don’t find Miss Kerr a particularly exciting actress. A bit of a cold fish.”
“She does come over as rather detached. Until she surrendered to wild and unrestrained passion like in the beach scene in From Here to Eternity.”
“When she’s making out with Burt Lancaster in the surf? Yes, that’s something else. Shall we go swimming too? Look at the sunset! In a quarter of an hour it will be dark and the tide is right out. We can repeat the scene without anyone seeing…”
There was a knock on the door. An ancient waiter clearly suffering from Parkinson’s disease shakily placed a laden tray on the coffee table and left the room like a twisting crab.
“And then we’ll have dinner in bed. Shivering, with blue lips and knees, and sand between the toes, and salt on our skin, just like when we were kids, right?”
“I can’t go out. The police are on duty. But if you want to, go ahead. I’ll watch you from the balcony.”
“I do really feel like it.”
Starr goes into the bathroom, pulls on an oversized white bathrobe, and reappears with a bundle of towels under her arm, like an excited child that has never seen the sea.
“I’ll be right back. Don’t forget to watch!”
Cox gets his binoculars out of his bag, pours a glass of Chablis and takes his place on the balcony like a captain on the bridge of his ship. He watches her dance over the promenade and down the bluestone steps leading to the beach. The last time he had felt his heart beating so hard was when Harriet Andersson in Ingmar Bergman’s Monika unbuttoned her cashmere jumper to reveal her Swedish shoulders.
Koksijde is famous for its sunsets, but he cannot remember as dramatic a sky as this since he presented Shelley with Karen Morley’s earrings on the Hollywood hills in the previous century. He turns his binoculars on Starr, who is running to the sea through golden puddles on the abandoned beach. It’s as if she can feel him spying, because at precisely that point she turns, flings her bathrobe and towels on to the ridged damp sand and waves broadly, with both arms like a windmill. She is so close and yet infinitely far, and the thought that this naked, carefree, young woman, bathing her perfect form in the dying rays of the sun, belongs to him and to none other, and that soon, between the scented sheets, he will be licking the salt from between her legs while the hotel falls asleep and the moon is reflected in the dark sea, fills him with an overwhelming feeling of undeserved happiness.
At the very moment that she ventures carefully into the foam of the waves, the sun is snuffed out on the horizon and it begins to grow dark. He can still see her indistinctly as she hops with her elongated body through the first billows and then dives into a large wave. And then her head comes up, and then a beckoning arm. And then nothing. It’s too dark now to follow her any longer with the binoculars.
Cox leaves the balcony, lights the candles on the sideboard, slips the soundtrack of Manhattan into the CD-PLAYER, goes into the bedroom, stares at the old man in the mirror, and desperately sprays some aftershave over his hollow cheeks, wondering yet again whether this is all a dream and whether Starr really exists. But her panties and bra are unmistakably there, lying next to the toilet on the tiled floor.
When Starr still has not returned after quarter of an hour, Cox starts to feel uneasy. From the balcony all he can see is blackness. He can hear the terrific roar of the sea in the distance and, in the room that awaits her, softly, Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’.
I’ll just wait another five minutes, he thinks, and then… Then what? He cannot leave the hotel. And it doesn’t seem quite the right moment to tell the police downstairs that another woman has disappeared. He goes and stands on the balcony and calls her name into the night. The policeman pacing to and fro in the light of a streetlamp on the promenade looks up surprised.
“Anything wrong, Professor?” he calls.
“No,” replies Cox. “I thought I saw a falling star. A falling star! A star!”
He goes back into the room and closes the balcony door and the curtains, as if to hide his confusion from the outside world. He breaks out into a sweat. He pours himself another glass of wine, sits down on the edge of the bed and tries to concentrate. It is now twenty minutes since Starr disappeared. Why in God’s name did he let her go? Just so that he could spy on her through his binoculars, like the eye of a camera, and possess her all himself. That’s all. Because nothing gives him more pleasure than to look at her. “Don’t forget to watch,” were in fact her last words before leaving the room. She had provoked him and now he was to blame. No one goes swimming like that so late in October. Because no one can take more than ten minutes in that ice-cold water. But had he ever been able to refuse her anything? Perhaps Cox was worrying unnecessarily and she was long back, sitting frozen at Nick’s bar with a mug of mulled wine. Starr is so unpredictable. That’s part of her irresistible charm. There’s no point in waiting for her up here any longer and he decides to go and look discreetly to see whether she is hanging around downstairs in the lobby or the bar.
18
Stanislas Larsky
Cox comes out of the lift, turns right and walks without looking up past a row of palm trees in copper pots to the Bogart Bar. The four card players from yesterday evening are sitting over a rubber of bridge at the same table in absolute silence, while Nick is buried in the crossword in Het Laatste Nieuws behind his empty bar. No sign of Starr: not in the
bar, nor in the lobby where a couple of hotel guests are chatting in a desolate, wintry atmosphere as if nothing unusual had occurred in the last twenty-four hours. When he goes up to reception, Monsieur François puts down his book on bacterial infections in sea-water aquariums and asks what he can do for the professor. Cox asks whether the pretty young woman who left the hotel half an hour or so ago in a bathrobe has returned.
“I haven’t seen anyone in a bathrobe, Professor.”
“That’s impossible,” protests Cox, “I saw her myself from my balcony crossing the promenade and walking down the beach to the sea.”
“I’m sorry, Professor. I was probably reading. But I would certainly have noticed a guest in a bathing costume in October.”
Cox walks in confusion to the entrance. He must go out, down to the beach, with or without permission. He really doesn’t care any more.
At that moment Lejeune and Fontyn appear in the hall.
“Mr Cox, I have good news for you.” The superintendent takes him by the arm. “Shall we go to the bar? We’d be more comfortable there, I think.”
Cox follows as if he is in a film but doesn’t understand the screenplay.
“Two cold triple brews! And what will you have, Professor?” asks Lejeune.
“The usual,” mumbles Cox.
“So one dry Martini and two Trappists, then,” repeats Nick, disappearing behind the bar.
Cox looks at the clock hanging on the wall between two tempestuous seascapes. Starr has now been gone for more than forty minutes.
“You seem particularly nervous, Mr Cox.”
“Nervous, me? No. Why?”
“Your hands are shaking.”
“I’ve been confined to the hotel since yesterday.”
“I owe you an apology and a drink. I was going to have you called in, but then I thought it would be more correct to come along myself. You have indeed not left the hotel, just as I asked, and we appreciate that. By the way, you have nothing more to fear. We have arrested the murderer of Deborah Marchal.”
“And what’s more, the victim wore a different perfume,” says Fontyn. “Opium, by Yves Saint Laurent.”
“And who murdered her?”
“Larsky, Stanislas Larsky, the tramp who claimed to have found her body.”
“Stan?” asks Nick in astonishment, as he puts three glasses and a bowl of peanuts on the counter. “He was always a friendly chap. Last week, with the approval of the management, I gave him half a bottle of champagne that we were going to throw away.”
“A friendly chap, but not with such a friendly past. Both the Hungarian and Austrian police have been after him and there was an international warrant out for his arrest.”
“He was always perfectly pleasant to me,” says Nick. “I felt sorry for him. He might have lived among the rubbish bins, but he was always well turned out.”
“Yes, a real predator. Two gruesome murders of streetwalkers in Budapest, and three in Vienna. And now Deborah Marchal.”
“And who knows how many other victims. This fellow has been sighted all over the country since 1995. Charleroi, Mechelen, Puurvelde, Antwerp…”
Cox empties his glass with a grimace and glances anxiously at the clock.
“They called him the Butcher of the Carpathians,” adds Fontyn with a certain note of respect in his voice, “because as a rule he used a cleaver on his victims.”
“And has he confessed?”
“We’re working on it.”
19
Federico Fellini
The moon is cardboard – a pale, pimply, pockmarked disc hanging by a slender thread over the surface of the sea as in the films of Méliès. Cox carefully descends the worn steps of bluestone leading to the beach and takes off his shoes and socks to walk across the loose sand. He feels dizzy after the seven dry Martinis he has drunk on an empty stomach in the Bogart Bar. Not having to pay for anything at the Astoria, Lejeune was having the glasses constantly refilled. It had been difficult to leave the superintendent without awakening suspicion. He had finally used the lame excuse that he always enjoyed a stroll along the beach alone at night.
Lurching past a row of white-painted bathing carriages with large wooden wheels, he suddenly finds himself face to face with two little boys staring at him suspiciously in the moonlight. The smaller is about five years old, the bigger barely a year older. They are both holding on tightly to a shovel. The bigger one is wearing a short, white bathrobe, the younger has a similar one in dark blue with a white pattern and cuffs. They both look alike: the same jet-black hair combed forwards, the same dark eyes, the same furrowed brows. Too drunk to wonder what the children are up to so late at night all alone on the beach, Cox asks whether they have seen a lady coming out of the water in a bathing costume an hour and a half ago. The children shake their heads.
Starr is an excellent swimmer. Moreover, she grew up in Sweden and is used to larking around in ice-cold water. So an accident can be ruled out, and Cox wonders whether she really did come to see him in Koksijde. But when he shuts his eyes he can see her standing on the balcony, coming out of the bathroom, running over the beach, waving at him from the waves, he can hear her warm voice, feel her tongue and smell her perfume. He cannot report her disappearance because just now in the bar he lied to Lejeune out of fear. They would suspect the worst for the umpteenth time, just as when he knocked on Luyckx’s door on Monday, 8th June 1998 to tell him that Shelley had not come home. He opens his eyes again.
The two little boys have not budged an inch. Just like a photo from the Twenties. Apart from them he cannot see another soul on the beach. So they would have had to see her go by.
“A pretty lady with long legs and big black eyes and towels under her arm.”
The older boy shakes his head again, without lifting his penetrating gaze from Cox.
“How long have you been here?” asks Cox.
“Don’t know,” says the older one.
“What’s your name?” he asks the little one.
“Riccardo.”
“Is that your big brother?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing on the beach so late?”
“We’re playing.”
“And what are you playing?”
“We’re playing at being two little clowns who live in a sandcastle…”
“… And who save a rhino.”
“And where are your parents?”
“In the Fulgor.”
The name sounds familiar but Cox cannot place it.
“And where is the Fulgor?”
“In Kos… Ko… Koksijde.”
“Did Mummy and Daddy ask you to wait here for them?”
“Yes.”
“And are they coming to fetch you soon?”
“After the film,” says the older child.
Suddenly, Cox realizes that he can no longer hear the waves breaking. In deathly silence he looks in the direction the roaring has been coming from. But the sea has disappeared, replaced by an endless, rippling plastic sail sparkling in the cold rays of a spotlight. He breaks out in a cold sweat.
“The sea in Amarcord,” he mumbles.
He feels the eyes of the older little boy boring into him.
“And what’s your name?” asks Cox hoarsely, although he already knows the answer.
“Federico.”
The beach starts to spin, along with the blank façades on the promenade, the fake sea, the horizon, Cinecittà’s plaster star-filled sky and the Méliès moon. Cox feels the world toppling over. He tries to turn and flee, but falls over flat on the fine sand, which fills his nostrils and mouth. The sand of the beach in Rimini. All his life he has dreamt of meeting Fellini, il maestro, the magus, the greatest director of all time. But not young Federico with his angry little mouth who is waiting with his little brother Riccardo for their parents Ida and Urbano until the show at the Cinema Fulgor is over!
He picks himself up and stumbles back to the bluestone steps. He staggers across the pro
menade and runs panting on his bare feet into the hotel.
“My goodness, Professor!” exclaims Monsieur François. “What’s happened to you?”
“Nothing… I fell down the bloody steps. You can’t see a thing out there.”
“But it’s a full moon. And what’s happened to your shoes? Where are your shoes?”
“I’ll go and get them tomorrow. Is the bar still open?”
“It should be. I haven’t seen the card players come out yet.”
“My goodness, Pro—”
“I know, Nick, I know. And I also know where my shoes are.”
“No offence. Will it be the usual, Professor?”
“Actually I’ll have a San Pellegrino and two aspirins.”
“That should perk you up.”
“You’re not going to believe me, but I’ve just seen two children five years old or so playing all alone in the sand.”
“Oh yes, Richard and Freddie. They’re the children of the projectionist at the Meteor, the cinema just up the promenade. Their father works in the evening so they insist on going to the beach in the evening too. Our nightwatchman keeps an eye on them.”
“What’s the cinema called again?”
“The Meteor.”
So why had little Federico been talking about the Fulgor then? The Fulgor was the cinema in Rimini where as a boy Fellini had devoured the films of Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd and the Marx brothers every afternoon. Or had Cox just misheard? And why did they claim not to have seen Starr? And in that case who was the young woman he had seen disappearing into the waves?
He suddenly feels bushed. He swallows his pills and empties his glass.
“I’m going to bed.”
“It’s been a long day, Professor.”
What immediately strikes Cox as he enters the room is that Starr’s travelling bag has disappeared from the bed. The clothes that she dropped on the bathroom floor have gone too. And the bathrobe is hanging neatly on the hook next to the mirror again. She probably came to pick up her things while he was downstairs in the bar with Lejeune and Fontyn, gnawing away at his fears. She must have been cross that he hadn’t waited for her, and decided to leave the hotel behind his back by the service entrance to catch the last train back to Antwerp. She was already out of sorts because he hadn’t met her at the station. Starr was capable of anything.
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