Mr. Miller

by Charles den Tex

  In the upper right-hand corner of the screen was a chain of data:

  b.ng-chn-infra/nat./051703/00.23—act.

  In the lower left-hand corner was this:

  User-id: pb***7?all**

  At the upper left was a small menu:

  Operate

  Run

  Link

  Back

  Using the mouse, I clicked to the last option on the menu, Back, and immediately the image flashed to a new screen. All the data disappeared. Now in the middle of the blue field were three lines:

  User ID

  Location

  Log in

  Following User ID and Location were spaces that had to be filled in. I cursed. By clicking Back I had shot out of the program and wouldn’t be able to get back in without a login name. I typed pb***7?all** after User ID and Amsterdam after Location, and clicked on Log in. Without success. Entrance denied. Logical: the program automatically replaced a number of characters with asterisks or question marks, to prevent anyone else from seeing what the User ID was. I had accidentally picked up a web address from Ina Radekker’s computer by which I could bypass the system’s security in one go, as if I could get into a building through an open back window without anyone asking me for a pass.

  I stared at the screen and at the words displayed on the deep, dark blue. After a couple of minutes I noticed the web address, 11121774.938/utilities/55618.222. The address no longer had anything to do with HC&P and was totally different from the address on the screen by which I had entered the site. I didn’t get it.

  Somewhere there had to be something, something that Radekker had done or failed to do and for which she was finally murdered. That was the only explanation. In view of her work, it probably had something to do with money, money belonging to clients or to the firm. All the transactions took place electronically, so anyone with the right codes could move a great deal of money from one account to another.

  But what else? It was a possibility, but I didn’t believe it. It wasn’t logical, and even murders have to be logical. Perhaps even more logical than other things, or the motive wouldn’t be good enough. That was certainly true in this case; Ina Radekker’s death was no love story that had gone dramatically wrong. Not in front of the elevator doors on the third floor of the HC&P office building.

  But what was it then? Even if she had made off with a couple of million, was that any reason to rub somebody out? Apart from the fact that you just didn’t do that kind of thing, it didn’t get you anywhere since you’d never get the money back. That was what didn’t make any sense. Unless it was something else, of course. Unless Ms. Radekker had discovered that someone else was absconding with the company funds. Then there would be reason to step in. The larger the amount, the stronger the reason.

  But there was still another question. What was this Huib Breger doing there? Why was he able to move through the building at will without being noticed? I spend one night hanging around in the canteen and the next day the computer spits out a nice little report about it. But he and a couple of his pals do away with a debt analyst and there isn’t a trace of it to be found. The fact that someone is murdered, okay, not the done thing, but there was a level of organization at work here that was all out of proportion with what Radekker could have discovered. There were at least three men involved and it was the night before she was supposed to go on vacation, so it had been carefully premeditated. Not only did the men have access to the registration system, but they also knew about her personal plans. All that just to conceal financial fraud?

  I could just imagine how much money was at stake.

  The computer made a discreet little noise to indicate that my time was up. Within two minutes the computer would be disconnected from the internet, unless I bought more time. I took one last look time at the blue screen with the few words written on it. That didn’t make any sense either. If Radekker had tracked down a case of fraud via her computer, I should have found something containing financial information: bookkeeping records or administration, at least something that showed that money was being moved around.

  I hadn’t found that kind of site or document anywhere, and this one had nothing to do with finances either. The purpose of this website was still completely unclear to me, but it certainly wasn’t intended for managing money. Even I could see that.

  I logged out and packed my things. Returning to the RAI by tram, I walked the couple of hundred metres from the terminus to the hotel. Once I reached my room I was overcome by fatigue. From the moment I sat down on the edge of the bed there was no stopping it. My whole body had a screaming need for sleep. Literally. I could actually hear my muscles. I called reception and asked if they would wake me at twelve-thirty that night. Then I showered, undressed and crawled into bed. It was a quarter after eight. With a little luck I could get in four hours of sleep. I can’t remember what I was thinking at that moment, but it couldn’t have been much.

  At exactly twelve-thirty the phone rang. Half asleep, I dragged myself out of bed, heaved myself into my clothes and left. It was quiet in the hotel lobby and outside in the parking lot. Nights on the outskirts of Amsterdam are peaceful, even on weekends.

  It was different in the centre of town, especially in the neighbourhood where Gijs lived. Friday nights there were full of activity. I squeezed the car into a spot between a streetlight and a bridge railing. The spot was so tight that I could hardly get out of the car.

  Gijs came from a well-to-do family, so Gijs lived on a canal, the Keizersgracht. He owned a building on the strip between Utrechtsestraat and the Amstel. It wasn’t big, but it was a whole building, three-and-a-half metres wide and fifteen metres deep. Four storeys high with narrow, steep stairs that he navigated by screwing his tall body into a ball. The rooms were narrow and smaller than you would expect in a canalside house. The stairwell in the middle of the building divided it into a front and a back with a narrow landing in between. The house had once belonged to some old aunt who died childless at the age of eighty-eight. It had been inherited by Gijs’s parents and through them by Gijs, since the family never sold any of its real estate. Some buildings in the centre of town had been family property for more than two hundred years, from the end of the eighteenth century to modern times.

  We walked in single file through the narrow corridor to the kitchen at the back of the building, and then out the back door and into the yard, just as narrow as the house and more than twenty metres deep. At the very end of the yard was a garden house, a little one-room structure, frugally furnished with a large desk and a couple of chairs, an old sofa pushed up against the wall, a little old table in the corner with an electric kettle and an automatic coffee maker on it, a small refrigerator and a minuscule sink. This was Gijs’s lair. It was his favourite spot, cut off from Amsterdam and in contact with the rest of the world by means of the powerful computer under his desk.

  Gijs said nothing. He dove under his work table and soon reappeared with a bottle of wine. He poured a glass for each of us and sat back, a glass under his nose, and only then did he want to know what in God’s name was going on.

  ‘Good question,’ I said.

  ‘This isn’t the Michael I know,’ he replied.

  ‘Not the Michael I know either.’

  He fell silent once again. So did I. We sipped our wine.

  ‘Because you’re always … well, so normal …’ He looked at me. ‘That may be a shitty thing to say, but I mean just the opposite. All those difficult so-called geniuses in the office have skin you can practically see through and you need an operating manual just to talk to them, they’re that sensitive. All you have to do is look at them and they develop a complex. But not you. You’re just … normal …’

  We both fell silent.

  ‘But not now,’ he said. ‘What were you doing in the canteen? Nobody does that.’

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get in the next day.’

  ‘Into the canteen?’

&nb
sp; ‘No, into the building, of course. And that thought alone made me panic.’

  Gijs nodded. ‘Okay, I’m with you,’ he said. ‘Partly. Because even if they fire you, …’

  I knew what he was going to say and I knew he had no idea how ridiculous it sounded.

  ‘Then what?’ I said.

  ‘Well, it’s not the end of the world, is it?’

  ‘Maybe not for you,’ I said, ‘but if I end up on the street it would only be a matter of months before I started scraping bottom. We don’t all have fat unlimited bank accounts that we can draw on.’ I was snarling, more sharply than I intended. ‘My family doesn’t have a nice collection of buildings. If I were to call my parents, I might get ten euros out of them, maybe a hundred, but that’s all they’ve got. Okay?’

  Gijs swallowed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He felt self-conscious and waved his arms awkwardly.

  ‘And right now I’m feeling a little sensitive, too, okay? Especially when my family is involved.’

  Suddenly Gijs stood up and pulled me out of my chair so I was standing right in front of him. Without saying a word he threw his arms around me, pulled me close and slapped me on the back in a way that he was clearly unaccustomed to. It was as sincere as it was clumsy.

  ‘Stupid of me,’ he said.

  Before I knew it the tears were streaming down my face. I lost all the self-control I had so fiercely struggled to maintain. In the middle of the night, in a garden house in Amsterdam, in Gijs’s arms, I stood there bawling. And thinking about that made me cry even harder. There was no stopping it. Sniffling, I freed myself from his hug and wiped my eyes and cheeks with my sleeve. Gijs and I had known each other for about three years, no more than that, but from the first moment we understood each other as if we hadn’t known anybody else. With Gijs every conversation was worthwhile, even if wasn’t about anything at all. Especially then. That’s the difference: not in the content of the conversation but in the way you relate to each other. I didn’t know how that worked. Maybe it was a smell or a certain kind of electron cloud around the body, like an aura or whatever, but the basis of the contact was immediate. Not physical. Gijs and I didn’t feel the need to climb all over each other, which is why his hug was so awkward. The contact between us was elemental, a kind of bedrock affinity, as if we both had the same bar code. Peep. Peep. Done. No need to take it any further.

  That’s what Gijs and I had. I dried my eyes and laughed.

  ‘And what Van Waayen is saying about you, I don’t believe that either,’ Gijs said.

  I grinned. ‘I don’t even know what Van Waayen is saying about me,’ I said, ‘and as far as I’m concerned I don’t need to know.’

  Gijs shook his head. ‘Right,’ he said.

  Silence again. From this spot in the backyard you could still hear the sounds of Amsterdam, but they seemed far away.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I do know, though,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t alone in the building. There were others, and one of the men is called Breger.’

  ‘Breger?’ Gijs repeated the name and his fingers flew to the keyboard of his computer. He did what I had already done, and with the same result. The name ‘Breger’ did not appear in the HC&P personnel listings.

  ‘And who is this Breger?’ he asked.

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘That’s question number one, two and three.’

  ‘What do you know?’ Gijs asked.

  ‘Not enough.’

  Gijs shook his head. ‘That’s not what I meant,’ he said. ‘Come on, you’re a consultant, aren’t you?’ He pulled me out of my chair and pushed me through the room. ‘Get going, walk, move. As long as you stand still, nothing’s going to happen.’ He pushed me again and again, each time a couple of steps further. As soon as I stopped he was back. ‘Let’s hear it, where were you? What were you doing? What do you know?’ With that combination of questions and movement Gijs forced me to shake off my despondency. You know more than you think you do, that’s his basic premise. First look, then think. But it doesn’t happen by itself.

  With a faltering voice I told him what I knew, from the night in the canteen to the fight in Radekker’s apartment. I didn’t leave anything out, didn’t skip a single detail, and the more I told him the less I understood, and the more the details began to predominate. As I talked, I pulled my laptop out of the backpack and turned the thing on.

  ‘What did you use?’ asked Gijs.

  ‘A dumbbell,’ I said. ‘About two kilos.’

  ‘In the middle of his forehead?’

  I nodded. ‘More or less, yes.’

  ‘And is he still alive?’

  ‘When I went to leave, he was still moving, so …’

  I shoved the laptop toward him. There was a list on the screen. ‘These are web addresses,’ I said. ‘And it all has to do with one of them. But I have to access the site on your computer. My computer can’t handle it.’

  Gijs pulled up a chair and sat behind my laptop while I went to work on his computer. While the site was uploading, I could hear Gijs click through the e-mail and look at the sites. The laptop was zooming.

  Click. Click.

  ‘WOW!’ said Gijs. He leaned back in his chair and poured himself another glass of wine. ‘It all comes down to this,’ he said. ‘There are beautiful women and there are very beautiful women. We all know that.’ He rubbed his crotch unconsciously with his hand. ‘And then you’ve got these kinds of women. Jesus, you’ve got some incredible babes on your computer, you know that?’

  ‘Me?’

  He changed the settings on the screen to get a sharper image. Suddenly he turned the computer so I could see the screen.

  ‘Is this that Ina?’ he asked.

  On the screen was a photo of the woman who had thrown my life into disarray, the woman I knew better than any other but who had totally alienated me from myself. Because of her I no longer knew back from front, literally. Everything I thought I knew was gone. I thought things I shouldn’t have thought but were impossible not to think. I tried to swallow, but my throat dried up from one minute to the next. My heart pounded, my breathing became so shallow that it seemed like it was stuck in my gullet. I had to force the words past it in order to speak.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s Kurt.’

  21 Please reconfirm

  For Gijs, Kurt was just a strange name for a woman. No more than that.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Kurt. But otherwise Kurt is drop-dead gorgeous. I don’t know how you know her or what she’s doing in your computer, but Kurt is all right.’

  ‘Kurt is my brother,’ I said.

  Gijs said nothing. His eyes darted from the screen to me and back again. Back and forth. He laughed. ‘With a brother like that you don’t need any sisters,’ he said, laughing again awkwardly. ‘What do you mean, your brother?’

  ‘Kurt was my brother,’ I said, ‘until I went to pick him up at Schiphol last Monday and suddenly he turned out to be my sister.’

  Gijs jumped to his feet. ‘And you didn’t know this?

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He was gone for five years. For five years we hadn’t seen each other, no photos, nothing. Then all of a sudden there he was standing in front of me …’

  ‘No, get out of here!’

  ‘Think what you want, but …’

  ‘It totally blew you away.’

  ‘Yes, that too,’ I said, ‘but what happened was …’

  ‘You think you know somebody and they turn out to be a stranger, an unknown quantity, a creature from outer space. Jesus, man, so what do you say then?’

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said, ‘no …’

  ‘Because that’s what it’s all about, right?’ There was no stopping Gijs. ‘He had himself altered. Because that’s what we’re talking about. And when somebody has himself altered you just can’t wrap your head around it. At least I can’t.’

  I stared silently into the distance. Gijs had said a lot, but not what I was thinking.

  ‘Or do you mean you can wrap
your head around it?’ he asked. ‘That you completely understand it, or something like that. If you do, just say so.’

  I shook my head again.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But that’s not it.’

  ‘Oh, no? What is it, then?’

  ‘Look at the screen,’ I said.

  Gijs turned the computer back towards himself and looked. Stared.

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘A stunner, totally hot,’ he said, without any hesitation.

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘That’s what I think. Except for me that means something very different.’

  It took a couple of seconds before what I said really sank in. Then he looked at me with wide-open eyes.

  ‘Oh, fuck!’ he said. ‘Boy, are you ever confused.’

  We both looked at the photo of Kurt, beaming on the little monitor. Eyes that knew me as no one else knew me. Kurt, with whom I had done everything for twenty years, learned everything, been everywhere. At least half of me had come into being along with Kurt. My memory was filled with connections to him that had come unglued in a flash. The longer I looked at the photo, the less I recognized myself. That was the real shock.

  Suddenly the bookcase behind him began to move. At first I thought it was an excess of fatigue and alcohol, that I was hallucinating, but after the first deceptive little movement the entire cabinet slid noiselessly aside. Out of the darkness came the voice of a woman.

  ‘I saw the lights were still on,’ she said, and she came in. ‘And I thought, surely the guy next door has an extra glass for a lonely …’ Then she saw me and recovered herself. ‘Oh, hello,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you were …’ She stuck her hand out. ‘Hi, I’m Emma. I live here in the back, and Gijs and I have a …’ She gestured behind her to the shifted bookcase, suddenly noticed our shocked faces and thought she had been the cause. ‘… Okay, this is not going well,’ she said. ‘Sorry, I …’ She was about to walk away but Gijs stopped her.

  ‘No, wait,’ he said, and he looked at me. ‘I think we could use a little diversion. Don’t you?’