On the Nassau Bridge he stops and stares at the motionless water, at the tar-smeared jetties along the gangway where Shelley’s corpse drifted among dead rats, empty plastic bottles and rotting vegetation. He can see her again, like in a silent film, lying under a palm tree at the Chateau Marmont swimming pool, unscathed, laughing, at the threshold of life. What a lonely, inevitable decline.
When he walks down the Verversrui past Katia, who is still sitting in her display window like an icon, she waves at him like an old friend. He stops and turns back. She laughs, baring her Polish teeth, and beckons him in. He finds it hard to explain, but the mischievous idea of screwing the sweetheart of Clint Eastwood’s declining years excites him. Less than five minutes later she is lowering herself on to him like a bawdy angel with her ivory legs spread and asking in broken Flemish what she can do to make him happy.
27
Leo Lejeune
One week later Luyckx and Lejeune are strolling along the whitewashed pier at Ostend after an excellent lunch. They are old acquaintances and have been working together regularly since 1990. That has led to a couple of great successes, including the arrest of the paedophile priest of Missegem in 1991 and the dismantling of the drug-trafficking ring led by Dr Vozen of Zeebrugge in the same year. Since then they have been sharing both their appreciation of the fresh sole meunière at the Belgica – the old restaurant on the promenade where Lejeune used to go and eat as a child with his parents on Sundays – and their dislike of endless, useless official gatherings. In any case, the weather is too fine to be stuck in an office. In the little bay to the left of the pier a couple of brave swimmers are even defying the ice-cold waves. To the right of the promenade the masts of the fishing boats are dancing in the port. In the distance the Dover ferry is approaching the coast of Belgium.
The day after their conversation at Ma Mussel’s, Luyckx had picked up a photo of Starr from Cox. He seemed completely relaxed and obviously had no idea with whom the old professor had spent part of the previous night. Relieved, Cox gave him the portrait that stood next to the photo of Shelley on his desk. Luyckx had a good copy made that he faxed to his colleague in Ostend with the question whether he had ever heard anything about the unexplained disappearance of a certain Miss Mortenson.
Lejeune put five detectives on the case. Four people recognized her from the photo. From what they said, it appeared that she had spent the three days before her disappearance in Ostend, not Sweden, as Cox surmised. She had stayed for three nights at the Grand Hôtel des Thermes. Alone. The last witness to see her, in the late afternoon of 14th October, was the first mate on the Seastar II ferry. She had attended the on-board reception that the shipping company gave each year for family of the victims of the Princesse Astrid, the ferry that sank off Fort Mardyck in 1949 after striking a mine.
“We checked the passenger list of the Princesse Astrid from the twenty-first of June 1949,” says Lejeune, “and there really was a Gustav Mortenson on board.”
“That still doesn’t explain why she was lying to old Cox,” says Luyckx.
“I fear it wasn’t the first time. If she really looks like she does in that photo, I think it would be quite normal if she had more than one lover.”
“They were completely in love with each other…”
“That’s what he says. I’ve met him three times. That fellow isn’t normal. You should have seen him last week – a complete wreck, a zombie. He claimed to have seen a monster on the breakwater in front of the Astoria at Koksijde. Don’t ask me what he was up to out there at midnight.”
“He was commemorating the death of his wife, he told me.”
“On a breakwater? Come on, Fons, pull the other one. You know the old rule: nine times out of ten a murderer returns to the scene of the crime.”
“I thought he wasn’t able to leave the hotel after Marchal’s murder.”
“That’s right. But I only had two men who had to be everywhere at the same time. But fine. He showed me the belt from her bathrobe that he’d found on the beach. You only find something like that if you’re looking for it.”
“He told me about that too. But according to him it was just a coincidence and she’s still alive.”
“Two months ago, a fishing boat pulled up a skull in its nets. The skull of a young woman with a perfect jawbone. It doesn’t prove a thing, but apart from Starr only a couple of Alzheimer’s patients have gone missing in that period.”
“Get me a cast of the jaw.”
“Will do. What bothers me most is that he was in the area when Marchal was murdered and that Larsky, who’s confessed to every other murder, continues to deny that one.”
“Personally I don’t think he could hurt a fly. He’s running around in a parallel universe, a phantom world which he’s totally absorbed in. He knows everything about the cinema but it seems as if he’s never been touched by real life.”
“The barman at the Astoria did confirm that. Nick told me that he has an enormous collection of film props.”
“You see? What reason would he have to bump off all these women, anyway?”
“Films can sometimes have a malevolent influence on certain individuals. Last week I arrested a gang of hooligans who had rented A Clockwork Orange and that same evening they raped the wife of a handicapped councillor right in front of him.”
“There’s no business like show business.”
28
Sandy White
Monday, 17th June 2002
It matters little to me if someone reads this one day. Since it is the truth. I realize that these disclosures will be painful for some people, that my candour will shock those hypocrites who keep their silence behind closed doors.
For one week now I have been seeing Katia every day. It is not without some shame that I may state that I am in thrall to her. Perhaps because between us there is no talk of love. Katia and I are conducting a transaction. I pay her for services rendered, just as one pays a nurse. What I experience with her I have never known before. Neither with Shelley, nor with Starr. On each of my visits she takes me a little further on the journey. A belated, unexpected voyage of initiation. Our relationship is abstract and at my age I cannot imagine a more perfect one. For me she is and she will remain a mysterious being, of whom I know only the skin, the scent, the taste and her first name, and with whom I barely exchange a word. Because words are redundant next to her saliva, her sap. She is a woman without a past, without a story, without wishes. A soft, warm cocoon that refuses nothing, makes no plans, does not want to know anything and makes my wildest dreams come true. When I am with her only one thing counts: pleasure – immediate, raw, vertiginous pleasure. She is my opium, my last, enervating romance, and I am her regular customer. Luyckx has no idea of this. She says he never asks questions, but it is better that way. That way I feel a little like her lover.
It is half past ten in the morning and the red-light district is waking up in its soiled sheets. Behind Katia’s window, the pale green curtains are still drawn, but Cox knows that she is waiting for him. She has put on the coffee and is sitting in her wicker chair opposite the bed. The chair with the rounded backrest, like the tail of a peacock in display. The chair on which Sylvia Kristel exposed herself in Emmanuelle and conquered the world. She is naked under her unbuttoned broad imitation fur. Her lips are painted bright red. A thick layer of make-up keeps her eyes open. Cox falls on his knees like a votary before a heathen Virgin. She says: “From today you may kiss me.”
Whores don’t kiss, except their lovers and their pimps. Cox feels this is a kind of promotion. Henceforth he is no longer an ordinary customer, even though he continues to pay. The money that he deposits in the glass hand on the bedside table is part of their desperate but unavoidable ritual.
After having sex, Katia and Cox share a cigarette, while he gazes in the mirror above the bed at their languid bodies like at the remains of a feast. Outside, people are crashing into each other, war is raging, and the city is making ready for the co
ming dog days of summer. He zooms in on her weathered features. Her lipstick has been worn away by the kisses, as if she has eaten strawberries and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. In a flash he recognizes the face of an actress whose name he cannot recall but whom he can place clearly in a film noir, perhaps a film by Fritz Lang that he recorded years ago off the television. He remembers Luyckx’s story about the lipstick on Sandy Misotten’s body and goes and sits on the edge of the bed. Katia puts her arms around him and nestles her head against his shoulder. She is sweating and her fragrant skin is sticking to his. He can feel her nipples like little rubber buttons in his back.
Outside the sun has dissipated the lingering morning mists. The city looks peaceful. Cox is struck forcefully by how all these nameless individuals have continued their little lives indifferently, apparently unaffected by anything in the outside world. Antwerp is the capital of false romanticism, of carefree stupidity. This is where the dramas erupt at night. Petty dramas that smell of stale beer and poorly digested nostalgia.
On the Grote Markt he decides to have breakfast on the terrace of the Café Noord and watch the incomprehensible theatre of the world. Then he sets off for the Nationalestraat where he keeps his archives and collection of video tapes. It’s an old warehouse that he rents for a pittance from the OCMW, a kind of municipal Citizens Advice Bureau, and that you reach through a passageway and hidden courtyard. He moved his collection of curiosities here when Shelley remarked at one point that she had no room to breathe at home and that what’s more she had no intention of dusting all this junk every week. This secret place was his ultimate refuge. Apart from him, no one else had ever set foot inside. Not even Starr. She had vanished from his life too soon for that.
In his will the entire collection was bequeathed to the Antwerp Film Museum. After all, his collection really deserved to be housed in a museum.
In the middle of the packed room stood the pièce de résistance: a twenty-seven-foot high elephant squatting on its haunches while rearing up to the glass dome with its trunk erect. Originally designed by Walter L. Hall for the Babylon segment of D.W. Griffith’s cinema epic Intolerance, the elephants flanked Igmur Bel, the mightiest city gate of Babylon at the time of Belshazzar in 539 BC. This megalomaniac set was not broken up after the film had been shot, and served as a shelter for the numerous homeless people wandering around the studios and hills of Hollywood after the great depression of 1929. When Cox heard in 1985 that the Babylon Motel in Londerzeel might be demolished, he bought up the pieces of one of the elephants that had been shipped there for the 1958 World’s Fair, and had it transported to his storehouse at his own expense. There he restored it with the help of a Moroccan plasterer. The giant beast was hollow, and big enough for him to set up a table and chair inside its belly. Whenever he studied there alone, isolated from the mediocrity and insidious dangers of the outside world, Cox felt that he was truly sitting at the heart of cinema. Years ago, when he was desperately seeking Shelley, he had described this to Mrs Kountché. She had not really understood what he meant but it had just made her even more inquisitive than she already was.
The rest of the collection was less striking but no less precious for that. A couple of hundred original posters, of which one for Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen’s Der Golem from the year 1914 was the showpiece. Some fifty props, carefully wrapped in tissue paper, that he kept in cardboard boxes. Apart from the zebra-skin coat of ZaSu Pitts, which was displayed on a tailor’s dummy from the Thirties; an old 35mm film projector that he had snapped up when the Berchem Palace cinema had closed down; over one hundred reels of film, mostly fragments of forgotten pictures, apart from Phil Karlson’s Kansas City Confidential, which was complete; countless film props, wigs, shoes, fake jewels, trinkets, weapons and masks filling the steel wall-racks, folders full of press clippings, film magazines and a complete set of Ciné Revue, photos of sets, signed portraits of film stars, directors’ manuscripts, original scripts and screenplays and two pages of the storyboard for Ivan the Terrible illustrated by Eisenstein himself.
Cox opens the glass door of the bookcase where he keeps his videotapes. They are mainly films he has recorded off the television or old classics that he has bought. The tapes are arranged alphabetically by director. Between Lamorisse, Albert and Langdon, Harry he finds what he is looking for: You Only Live Once from the year 1937, The Woman in the Window from 1944, Scarlet Street from 1945, Clash by Night from 1952, Moonfleet from 1955 and While the City Sleeps from 1956. The last of these was broadcast on Flemish television in 1978 with the title Het vijfde slachtoffer (The Fifth Victim). Perhaps it was once again only coincidence, but Sandy Misotten had been the fifth victim in the series of unsolved murders. Furthermore, he reads on the cover that Lang’s film was premiered on 16th May 1956, and, if he remembers correctly, Sandy was murdered on 16th May.
Cox slides the cassette into the video player to check whether his theory is right. He vaguely recalls the plot, but when he reads in the opening titles that the character of Judith Felton is played by the B-movie actress Sandy White he fears that the manner in which she meets her end will not differ greatly from the way in which Sandy Misotten was murdered.
Cox needs to watch only a few scenes to remember the entire story.
Youthful Walter Kyne Jr, played by Vincent Price, inherits one of New York’s leading daily newspapers. So, a press magnate, just like Baron Misotten de Landshove. He promises the job of editor-in-chief to whichever of his employees succeeds in having the serial killer arrested who is terrorising the populace. The psychopath, dubbed the lipstick murderer, because he smears the bodies of his victims with red lipstick, has already killed four women when the film begins. His fifth and final victim is called Judith Felton. Before leaving her apartment, he leaves a message as usual on the walls in large, scarlet block letters: CATCH ME OR THERE WILL BE ANOTHER MURDER.
Cox goes into the elephant, sits down and starts to think. It is now clear that all the murdered women were the victims of one and the same crazed cinema-lover. It is as if the murderer is addressing him directly, as if he has hidden among the film props to spy on him, as if he is challenging him to test his knowledge of the cinema in some kind of morbid game. Cox knows less about the murders of Louise Vlerickx and Virginia Steiner, but Luyckx can help him there. Then he will be able to make the link with the films that inspired the two remaining murders. But first he must bring the superintendent up to date with his recent discoveries before the man strikes again, as his message on the window of Baron de Landshove’s glasshouse gives cause to fear.
29
Henri C.
As he walks home in the pale afternoon sunshine, Cox thinks back to the murder of Louise Vlerickx seven years ago. She had studied for a few months in the department of theatre studies at the Institute but was expelled for misconduct. He never taught her himself and cannot really remember her clearly.
She was found dead in the garage of Jos Donders, a notary and vintage automobile collector in Puurvelde, behind the wheel of one of his cars, on 16th December 1995. How and why she had ended up precisely in his garage was never clarified. But Cox knows that the solution to the mystery is concealed in that question. Perhaps Luyckx is in possession of new details that could put him on the trail, because Cox does not know of a single film in which a young actress is killed or commits suicide in that way.
Outside his door, Mrs Kountché is chatting with the postman.
“Anything for me?” asks Cox.
The postman hands him a bundle of letters he was about to put in his mailbox.
“C’est l’amour qui passe – Love is passing by,” sighs his neighbour, quoting the title of the Belgian film.
“L’amour, l’amour… At my age it’s only bills that pass by,” replies Cox. “Guess where I’ve just been.”
“The elephant!”
“Exactly. And next time I’ll bring you along too.”
“You’ve been promising that for years.”
C
ox glances absent-mindedly at the post. As expected, it’s just the telephone bill, the half-yearly motor insurance, some bank statements, advertising for the sweetbread festival at the local supermarket – and one normal letter in an oblong white envelope without a logo that he opens at once.
The text has been typed by computer in Times New Roman, his favourite font. He sits down at his desk and starts to read.
Friday, 14th June 2002
Dear Professor Cox,
I know that you have been in regular contact with Superintendent Luyckx of the Antwerp Criminal Investigation Department since the death of your wife on Saturday, 8th June 1998. I also know that you were questioned by The Sponge and his equally stupid Ostend colleague Lejeune in connection with my other magnificently staged executions. I also know – and this will probably interest you – exactly what happened to your girlfriend Starr. But that you will only learn when our paths finally cross.
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