Mr. Miller

by Charles den Tex

  I nodded. There wasn’t all that much that I wanted to say. The most important things had been said and I myself didn’t even understand the rest. I stood up and extended my hand.

  ‘I’m Michael,’ I said.

  Emma looked at us. ‘I think I’ve interrupted something,’ she said. Then her eyes fell on the laptop and the photo of Kurt. ‘Oh, now I get it. You guys are looking at dirty pictures on the internet?’

  Gijs laughed. ‘Sort of,’ he said, clicking the photo away.

  ‘Hey, it’s all right with me,’ said Emma. ‘But then I want something to drink.’

  There was plenty to drink. We polished off two bottles of wine in no time, and with all the wine and Emma’s unabashed good spirits my panic disappeared. As the glasses were being filled and emptied it seemed to me that Emma was snuggling up closer to Gijs and not the other way around, but if that was the case he did nothing to prevent it.

  While Gijs was opening the third bottle she suddenly leaned forward and laid a hand on my knee.

  ‘I don’t know what’s eating you,’ she said, ‘but it’s obvious that something is.’

  With some difficulty I forced my face to assume an awkward smile. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’re right, there is, but …’

  Emma tossed back the rest of her glass, and before retreating behind the bookcase with a loud laugh she gave me a resounding slap on the shoulder. ‘No, darling, you don’t have to tell me. Tell the one who needs to hear it,’ she said. Then she turned around and kissed Gijs full on the mouth. ‘Someday I’ll get you,’ she said, and she disappeared into the dark hole behind the cabinet, laughing.

  ‘Whoa,’ said Gijs.

  In silence we stared at the empty passageway, a hole in the room, a portal to another dimension, to the reverse side of life.

  A little noise issued from Gijs’s computer, a ping, like what you hear when a new e-mail comes in. Gijs looked.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked.

  On the screen was the same blue website with the same short menu: Back, Operate, Run, Link, Log out. In the lower left-hand corner was the same text as before: User ID: pb***7?all**. And in the upper right was the same data chain: b.ng-chn-infra/nat./051703/00.23—act.

  What was different was the bar in the middle of the screen, which had a flashing red box around it. In the bar were these words:

  User please reconfirm with Mr. Miller. Log in location does

  not match current status.

  Running server check.

  Mr. Miller? I shook my head.

  ‘I found this site in Radekker’s computer,’ I said. ‘She was doing something with it, and of all the things I found of hers it’s the only one I don’t understand. So maybe it means something. I don’t know.’ I looked at the screen. ‘But who’s this Mr. Miller? Reconfirm with Mr. Miller, it says. Do you know any Miller?’

  Gijs shook his head.

  ‘And what’s that?’ I pointed to the last line. ‘Running server check. I’m drawing a blank.’

  ‘That’s easy,’ said Gijs. ‘Computers always do exactly what they say they’re doing. So if it says “running server check,” then that’s what it’s doing. Checking the server.’

  ‘Okay, but for what?’

  ‘For whatever it says,’ explained Gijs, and he pointed to the lines on the screen. ‘Identity and location. That’s what it says. It’s asking for identification, you have to supply that, and it says that the log in location doesn’t match the current status. So now it’s trying to figure out exactly where we are … I think.’

  ‘Can it do that?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  I cursed, reached past him for the mouse and broke the connection with the internet.

  22 The Sundance Kid

  Early the next morning I awoke with a start. For a minute I didn’t know where I was. The old three-person sofa I was lying on smelled familiar but unexpected. Saturday morning in Gijs’s garden house, with plenty of alcohol still coursing through my veins, looked very different from what I was used to. Standing on unsteady feet I pulled on my pants and T-shirt and walked through the backyard to the house in search of a toilet. I opened the back door as quietly as possible and slipped inside. It was early, much earlier than I thought, and I didn’t want to wake up Gijs. Upstairs I heard thumping, faint sounds of someone walking around. It was an old house. The floorboards creaked and sounded hollow. I smiled. Gijs was already up. With my hand on the handle of the bathroom door I looked down the hallway. It was daylight. The early sun was shining in, and not only through the panes in the front door. There was more. A long strip of light ran down the hallway, and suddenly I saw where it was coming from. The front door was ajar.

  This surprised me. I walked to the front of the building, opened the door further and looked outside. No one was there. I turned around, went back inside and pushed the door shut. The lock fell into place with an unexpectedly loud click. At the same time the upstairs thumping stopped.

  ‘Gijs?’ I called.

  A stifled curse came from upstairs along with an equally stifled response from someone else. For a moment it felt as if my body temperature had dropped ten degrees all at once. I shivered, trembled. One second later I began to glow, fear driving my temperature upward. From the sound of the voices it was evident that there were two men upstairs. Two men, I realized, and not one of them sounded like Gijs.

  ‘There’s a number two downstairs. GO!’ said one of them, immediately followed by the sound of someone rushing down the stairs. I looked around in a panic. The house was too small to hide in. I had to make a snap decision beyond my range of experience. Outside I didn’t stand a chance. If they came after me they’d be on me in no time. Inside my chances were even smaller, unless I could gain time. I opened the front door again, turned around, ran through the house and out the back door to the garden house. I grabbed my laptop and backpack, slid the bookcase aside a bit, slipped through the opening and pushed the cabinet back in place.

  On the other side it was pitch dark. I found myself in a kind of shed, a closet without windows. The only point of light came through a small round hole located at eye level in the back of the bookcase. I pressed my face against it and peered through the hole. I could see almost the entire room, and through the glass door I had a view of the yard and the back of the house.

  Carefully, almost hesitantly, a man came out through the back door. He looked to the left and to the right. The yard was so narrow and so scantily planted that there was hardly any place for a person to hide. Yet the man moved slowly, deliberately, until he was in the middle of the yard. There he turned around and looked up. From the gestures he was making I gathered that the second man had to be standing somewhere on a higher floor near a window. The man in the yard shook his head and quickly walked the last few metres toward the garden house.

  Breathing deeply, I tried to calm myself, but no matter how hard I concentrated I only became more agitated. My head began to swim, I grew dizzy and I had to hold onto the wall of the shed to keep from falling over. At that moment I realized what was happening to me. It was the same oppressive feeling that had seized me at Schiphol: hyperventilation. The deep breathing I was forcing on myself was exactly the wrong way to deal with it. The pressure in my body kept rising higher and higher, as if my insides were swelling up and slowly but surely pressing against my lungs. Panicking, I tried to stop the process, but my fear only made it worse. My lungs were pumping far too much oxygen into my body, and in an attempt to rectify the imbalance they were working more instead of less. The male nurse in the ambulance had told me what to do. He had given me a small bag to hold over my mouth, to reduce the amount of oxygen I was getting and increase the carbon dioxide. Entirely simple, sensible and logical, but the bag was in the hotel. I knew just where it was, on the dresser next to the TV.

  With tingling fingers I unzipped my backpack. Feeling my way in the dark I searched for the bag of liquorice I had bought earlier. Fiddling awkwardly and dizzily I pu
lled off the closing strip, shook the contents of the bag into the backpack and covered my mouth and nose with the empty bag. Behind my back I could feel the bookcase move a little as the man on the other side opened the door of the garden house. Breathing carefully, the bag still over my mouth, I looked through the peep hole once again. The man was inside. He was standing just opposite me, and I could see his face and his eyes. He was a bit shorter than I and somewhat broader, with heavy muscles that ran diagonally from his shoulders to his neck, giving his face a distorted look. His head looked like a bottle cap set on the top of his body. Deep-set, dark eyes surveyed the room. In his left ear was an earpiece. A wire ran along his cheek down to a small device in his breast pocket. A bag was hanging over his shoulder.

  He spoke quietly: ‘Unit is here.’ He listened. ‘Okay,’ he said. He bent over and disappeared from sight. I could hear him rummaging under the desk, and soon he reappeared. He picked the computer off the floor and turned it upside down on the desk. Then he took a screwdriver out of his bag and opened the back of the case with practiced hands. He carefully removed the inner workings, unscrewed a couple of components and set them aside. From his bag he took out some new components which he installed in the computer. The man worked noiselessly and rapidly. He put the computer back on the floor under the desk, connected all the cables, put the old components in his bag and scoured the room once again.

  At the last minute his attention was drawn to something in the cabinet. In three steps he was standing right in front of it and I saw his hand reach toward the peep hole. My breath stuck in my throat. I recoiled instinctively and struck a rake that was standing next to me. The slowly slipping handle made a tearing sound against the wooden wall of the shed. My hand shot out and caught the handle before it could clatter to the floor.

  The man in the other room had heard the noise. He stopped and listened. His eyes scrutinized every part of the cabinet, shelf by shelf, and I realized that within a couple of seconds he was going to find the hole in the back wall. Feverishly I set my brains in motion. I couldn’t get out; that would make so much noise that the man would come right through the bookcase if necessary to get at me. Going back was not an option at all. The only possibility I saw was to close the hole. For the man it was no more than a round black spot. Because there was no light on my side, he couldn’t see anything through it. The most he could do would be to shine a flashlight through or stick something in. The hole was just big enough for a finger or a pen or his screwdriver. And if he were thereby to discover that there was an area behind the bookcase, he would start looking for a way to get in. So closing up the hole was the best idea.

  Once again I began groping through my backpack and found the portable hard drive that held the copied files. I pulled it out of the compartment and held it against the hole with the heel of my hand to keep it from moving.

  I heard nothing and felt nothing, except for the fact that I immediately began itching in all the places I could only reach if I let go of the drive. Nervous itching. My breathing was even worse. Slowly it began to climb. I forced myself to keep my breathing as shallow as possible and to hold the air in my lungs as long as possible, longer than my nerves thought was good for me.

  I heard the man’s voice through the thin back wall of the bookcase.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, and immediately I felt something being stuck through the hole. The wood shook and in a few seconds something bumped against the drive. It didn’t tick; it barely made any noise at all. It was probably his finger.

  Keeping the drive still and in place was all I had to do, but it required all my concentration and attention. I knew the man couldn’t see me, I knew he couldn’t hear me, I knew he didn’t know that I knew … and all those things I knew didn’t help.

  My arm began to tremble. The hard drive seemed like the heaviest thing I had ever had to hold up in my life. Again the man pushed against the plastic. Once. Twice. He tapped his finger against the back wall of the cabinet. The hollow tapping sounded like claps of thunder in my ears.

  ‘Okay, no, just a minute.’ I heard his voice drift away from the cabinet. Quickly I lowered the drive and looked out. He was looking at the cabinet from a short distance. After a couple of seconds he walked over to one of the sides of the cabinet and disappeared from view. Soon he began to rock and jiggle the cabinet. He was trying to see behind it, but he was pushing from the wrong side. He was pushing it closed instead of open. If he had tried the other side, he would easily have succeeded. I heard him groaning and sighing, and with a shriek he put everything he had into it. Through all that screaming I heard a short, dry click on my side of the cabinet. The click of a lock.

  The man on the other side gave up. I heard him panting and catching his breath.

  ‘All clear,’ he said. He looked around one more time just to make sure, and left.

  I saw him walk to the house through the yard, go into the kitchen and close the door behind him. I waited a little while—not long, because I had to go back, I had to get into the house to see if Gijs was still there. To see how he was. Memories of Ina Radekker came flooding back in sharp focus. She had been a stranger to me. But I knew Gijs, and Gijs knew me. That was the difference. I held my hands against the back of the cabinet, found a vertical slat, clamped my fingers against it and pushed and pulled with all my might. Nothing happened.

  Stumbling around in the dark I searched for the outer door of the shed and opened it. Light streamed in, and I saw the simple but strong mechanism that held the cabinet in place. At the bottom was a vertical rod, screwed against the back wall of the cabinet. The rod had fallen into a bracket, which could only be opened with a key. It was an old, simple lock that they probably never used anymore, but it made the cabinet immovable.

  I searched for all the possible places where such a key could be kept. A nail on the wall was my first idea. I looked to the left and to the right of the cabinet. The shed was crammed full. There were things hanging everywhere: ropes, garden tools, sprinklers and a hose. There were step ladders, a folded-up drying rack for laundry, buckets and an enormous collection of old pots and cans, but nowhere did I find a key on a nail. I started turning the pots and cans over one by one to see if the key was under any of them. Down on my knees, I groped around in the furthest boxes.

  ‘Yes?’ came a voice from behind. I turned around. Emma was standing right behind me with a sleepy face. In her hand was a bronze sculpture, an abstract sculpture that she was holding above her head on its tapered side.

  Applied art.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘I thought you were making much too much noise for a burglar.’ She lowered the sculpture. ‘What are you doing on my side of the cabinet anyway?’

  A few minutes later we stole through the back door and into the kitchen. The house was quiet. No voices or footsteps anywhere. We ran up the narrow stairs.

  Gijs was lying on the floor next to his bed, and for a moment, perhaps a couple of seconds, Emma and I just stood there in the doorway. We held our breath and looked, hoping he would move or make a sound. Like Ina Radekker there was no blood to be seen anywhere, but like her, too, Gijs was lying motionless. We stared at him, as if radiation from our eyes could help him, could give him the energy or strength he needed to come back from wherever he was. Maybe that was true, probably not, but when thinking is the only thing you have, your thoughts become stronger than they really are. Emma was the first to see it.

  ‘He moved,’ she said. ‘I saw it!’

  She pushed me aside and knelt down next to him. Then she placed two fingers on his neck and closed her eyes. Her calm concentration seemed to last forever. I crept closer and knelt down on Gijs’s other side, overcome by the fear that that strange elongated head of his—where numbers and computations were like images and landscapes, determining how he saw the world—would fall silent forever, closing off part of that world for good. Painful thoughts. Fear lodged in my body like a virus. The panic had another source. If I hadn’t come to see Gijs a
nd hadn’t surfed to that website on his computer, none of this would have happened. There was no way around it.

  Reconfirm with Mr. Miller.

  Location does not match.

  Running server check.

  Who are you and where are you? they had asked, whoever they were, and they had figured out the answer themselves. Less than eight hours later there were strange people in the building, people who didn’t ask questions but went straight over to the offensive—without warning, without explanation, without any interest in persons or reasons. Tough and efficient.

  I stood up and looked around. A bedroom in a house on the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam. It was quite ordinary, neat, normal. These were things I was used to seeing. The fact that I was here, that I had come here yesterday—that, too, was normal. Obviously I couldn’t do that anymore. I had been saved by the simple fact that I was sleeping in the garden house and that they hadn’t seen me. So they ended up with Gijs instead.

  ‘He’s still alive!’ said Emma. Suddenly her voice took on the urgency of a doctor at work. She rolled Gijs over on his side, prized his mouth open and stuck a finger deep down his throat. It took a while before he reacted, but the automatic reflex was still working. Gijs began to retch, and soon the first bit of fluid came up. I ran to the bathroom, pulled a towel from the rack and ran back. Carefully but quickly I placed the towel under Gijs’s mouth. Emma pushed her fingers deep down his throat once again and this time he reacted violently. The contents of his stomach gushed out in waves. Emma took a corner of the towel and wiped his mouth. ‘More!’ she shouted. There were clean towels in the closet. I placed a stack of them next to her, removed the soiled one, tossed it in the bathtub and turned on the tap. For about ten minutes I ran back and forth with soiled and clean towels. I fetched and carried off and rinsed and wrung out until Gijs had nothing left to throw up. I stood in the doorway with a wet towel in my hand and watched Emma give him mouth-to-mouth.

  Between gulps of air she called out, ‘Call 1-1-2!’