I turned around and walked away, ignoring all the shouts—as if I were just an innocent bystander. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Excuse me, pardon me …’ After reaching the end of the counter I went around the corner. With trembling legs and pumping lungs I slipped in with a group of passersby and walked with them back to the main hall. At the first entrance to the train platforms I shot down the escalator and boarded a waiting train. I didn’t know where it was going, but anything was better than this. Unable to move, I waited for the doors to close.
Tucked into a far corner I pulled out the paper bag and held the opening over my nose and mouth. Then I breathed in and out, very slowly, until the tingling and the pressure in my body disappeared.
Only when the train began moving did I notice I had something else in my hand: a piece of Breger’s jacket, a breast pocket that I had torn off in its entirety, complete with contents. There was a piece of hard plastic inside, some kind of card. I took it out slowly and looked at it.
Risk Containment Group
H. Breger
Operations manager
111.37vbr-599/00spm.002
Less than ten minutes later I got out at the deserted Hoofddorp station. Middle of the night. Last train. My lips were incredibly dry.
26 Gijs forever
Nighttime in Hoofddorp is total. No one ever goes there and no one ever wants to leave. They’ve all left already. The business district looks abandoned and silent between the railroad tracks and the highway. The station is made of concrete, glass, steel and modern tiles. Cheerful colours. Bare fluorescent lights keep the cheerfulness from getting out of hand. Another man got out of the train with me. He was wearing a dark suit and pulling a suitcase on wheels. The wheels clicked on the cracks between the tiles. It was the only sound to be heard. The man knew where he was going. He walked up the stairs resolutely and disappeared. I could hear the little wheels clicking into the distance. A car door slammed.
The hall of the train station was empty. The ticket counter was closed. Anyone who wanted to travel now had to rely on the ticket machines. Outside the emptiness was much vaster. There wasn’t a single car in the parking lot, not a taxi to be seen at the taxi stand. The last one had probably just left.
For a minute I didn’t know what to do. I was tired, my body was worn out, all my limbs were begging for a bath and a bed. And my head kept right on racing. When I stopped moving, my thoughts became even more agitated. So I hoisted my backpack onto my back and started walking. I followed the meandering new asphalt past dark buildings and beneath streetlights that were shining for no one but the security services, perhaps, and the night watchmen. And for the real estate agents, trying to sell off empty office space with signs printed in desperately enormous type. Instinctively I began to count. In one street alone I counted twenty-five thousand square metres of empty offices. I had come to a ghost town.
I walked and walked. The end of the street was further than I had expected. Fifteen minutes later I reached Crown Plaza Hotel. I trudged across the parking lot and finally found myself in front of a glistening check-in desk in a silent lobby. A man in a hotel uniform gave me a friendly look. It was one-fifteen. Even the muzak had been turned off.
‘Good evening,’ he said, and that sounded terrific.
I undressed and looked at myself in the mirror. There were a few scratches and black-and-blue spots here and there, but otherwise it wasn’t so bad. It felt worse than it looked. I unpacked my backpack. Then I laid out all the papers on the small desk in a corner of the room, with my laptop beside them. With excessive deliberation I checked to make sure I still had everything. It wasn’t much, but somewhere in the midst of those few things lay the answer I was looking for. Not now though.
With two painkillers and the contents of a mini bottle of whisky inside me I lowered myself into a hot bath. Slowly. I kept filling the bath with hot water so I could enjoy that strange state of semi-weightlessness as long as possible. Much later, deep in the night, I crept into bed.
The next day I was awakened by a single thought in my head: the laptop. If Breger had been able to find me so quickly, he must have had something that would enable him to find me. A device or a signal or something else. It couldn’t have been my cell phone, because my old one had been turned off ever since I bought the new one. The only other device I had was the computer, which had been issued to me by the office and which I was now lugging around with me everywhere I went. If Breger had been receiving signals from me, they must have come from the laptop. There was no other way.
But how?
Gijs’s address had been found in a snap as soon as he logged onto a certain website. I had never been there with my own computer so I assumed they couldn’t find mine. Why would they want to anyway? They couldn’t very well keep track of every computer.
Unless it was the other way around: that computers from the company had an automatic tracking system. HC&P had their own worldwide computer network by which a great deal of the company information was exchanged. It was quite possible that only employees had passwords for accessing the system, but perhaps the computers themselves had tracking codes as well. That would give HC&P a second line of security. And if that was true, then my computer would automatically report in every time I went on the company network. I had done that from the hotel at Schiphol. I had used Ina Radekker’s password, but if my computer had its own code then all they had to do was to respond to that, which they had done with amazing speed.
I looked at the machine—lid closed, quiet and idle—with new interest. It was possible. I knew it was possible. Modern computers could do the strangest things without your being aware of it. But it didn’t make any sense, because with my password I could log onto the company network from any computer. I could do it from a client’s computer and even from an internet cafe if necessary. And if you could do that, what was the point of having computers that signed themselves in and out?
Yet I had been found by means of my computer and by connecting with the internet. I was sure of it. I cursed. Without the internet I was nowhere, and with the internet I couldn’t stay anywhere. That meant I had to travel from one public internet facility to another until I discovered how they were tracing me.
I packed my things, checked out and took a taxi back to Hoofddorp station.
From the silent first class compartment I called Gijs. He sounded animated, almost cheerful. The whole thing had cost him one day and one night, and to tell the truth he hadn’t slept so well in a long time.
‘I ought to do that every weekend,’ he said. ‘They take everything away from you in the hospital, except the TV.’
He was very light-hearted about it. Too light-hearted, but that was his way. He was above all earthly cares, even if the earthly cares had tried to wrestle him down. Especially then. He did tell me that Emma and I had found him just in time. Emma had done the most important thing: empty his stomach as quickly as possible so they could treat him further in the hospital.
‘Don’t ask me how,’ he said, ‘because I was barely conscious myself. Emma knows everything.’
‘Emma isn’t speaking to me anymore, I’m afraid.’
Gijs laughed. ‘Yeah, that’ll happen,’ he said. ‘You just shouldn’t have walked out.’
‘I had no choice,’ I said.
‘I know.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You don’t know the half of it. And it’s only getting worse.’
‘Oh, you think so?’ Gijs remained laconic. ‘Who ended up in the hospital anyway, you or me?’
‘You,’ I said.
‘Exactly. But you know what I don’t understand? Everything that was on my computer is gone. The programs are still there (and not all of them, by the way), but all my work, all my documents, my e-mail login—all the rest is gone. And what’s there isn’t mine.’
‘Before they left, one of those guys took out your hard drive and put in a new one.’ I told him what I had seen from behind the bookcase.
‘But why?’ Gijs
asked. ‘I noticed it right away. As soon as I turned the thing on I could tell something wasn’t right.’
‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘But maybe they didn’t intend for you ever to turn your computer on again.’
Gijs was quiet for a moment. ‘And if I was gone, no one else would notice. They probably wouldn’t even realize that it wasn’t my disk.’
‘Something like that,’ I said.
‘So I had to be eliminated because there was something on my computer,’ said Gijs. ‘Just breaking in and erasing the files wasn’t good enough. No, I had to be erased myself.’
‘Just like Radekker,’ I said.
‘That’s what it looks like,’ said Gijs. He thought for a moment. ‘Where are you now?’
‘I can’t tell you,’ I said. ‘You’ll hear from me. Open an e-mail address that you’ll only use from internet cafes.’
‘[email protected],’ he said. ‘What do you think of that?’
27 Reassuring bias
I really didn’t know why I decided to go to my parents. Instinct, probably. Something that follows its own logic, whether it’s logical or not. Family ties exert a force, even if there’s hardly anything left to pull. It’s a kind of nerve that keeps sending impulses long after the contact has been broken. Every now and then you have to give in to it to satisfy the impulse.
Addiction works the same way.
My parents’ house is located in a residential area, at the end of a road that twists through the neighbourhood in an unpredictable way. No first-time visitors can ever find it. There’s no longer any difference between the street and the sidewalk. In fact, there’s no sidewalk at all. The fronts of the houses look like backs, and the whole thing is executed in that tasteless seventies building style. The house is almost as old as I am. We’re just three years apart, but we have nothing in common.
This is where I grew up, in a suburb of Dordrecht. For sixteen long years I was able to see how the growing trees and bushes added not a hint of character to the neighbourhood. The aging greenery was more a disguise for the streets than a part of them. The best solution would probably have been to issue a ban on pruning and gardeners and to wait until the plants had overrun the entire area.
I stood at the end of the street for a moment and applied some chapstick to my lips. Calmly. I rolled my lips against each other to spread out the grease. My parents’ house was not visible from where I was standing, but I could see a large section of the street. There weren’t many cars, and the police car that had been posted there was so conspicuous that I didn’t even have to look for it. Anyone who sits in a parked car in this neighbourhood doesn’t belong here.
I walked past the street to the gateway that opens out between two houses a little further on, at a place where you wouldn’t immediately expect it. The system behind the houses is just as whimsical as the design of the neighbourhood, with all its twisting streets.
I slipped in through the gate, walked across the yard to the back door and went inside. In a single step I was there, unannounced, among the tea and cookies.
‘Michael?’ said my mother.
‘I said I would come, didn’t I?’
‘But it’s not Sunday. You were going to come on Sunday, and on Sunday we were sitting here waiting, and …’
‘We?’ It was an unconscious question, a question that issued unannounced from my growing sense of distrust. My mother knew that the police were keeping the house under surveillance. My mother knew about everything that happened in the neighbourhood.
‘Well, yes—we, here, the way we’re always here, and you might have given a little thought to our situation. It hasn’t been easy for us either.’
It was the three of them: my father in his chair and my mother in the doorway to the kitchen. Peter, my youngest brother, was slouched in a corner of the sofa, MP3 earbuds in his ears, TV remote in his hand. Fox Kids cartoons without sound for his eyes and house in his ears. He raised his right hand, palm turned toward me.
‘Yo, Michael, cool.’
I rubbed the palm of my right hand against his. Soft contact, skin on skin.
‘Pete,’ I said.
My father heaved himself out of his chair and positioned his big body right in front of me. He slapped me on the shoulder and burst out laughing.
‘I don’t know what they think of you,’ he said, ‘but it seems to me those guys don’t think at all.’ It was his way of letting me know that he was behind me. Unconditionally. Brief and with reassuring bias. Exactly what you expect from your family. I was all right by him, but he wanted to know everything, such as who the murdered woman actually was.
‘Girlfriend of yours?’ he asked.
‘No, somebody in the financial department. I had never seen her before.’
‘You see!’ My father turned to my mother and repeated what I had said. He had complete trust in me. My mother didn’t. She thought I should obey the rules. If I was innocent, nothing could happen to me. That’s what she thought. She sighed.
‘I know that,’ she said. ‘A foreigner, no doubt?’
‘Why would she be a foreigner?’ I asked.
‘Because she was there in the middle of the night. What was she doing there if she wasn’t on the cleaning staff? They hire the strangest people. That’s just a fact.’
‘Radekker, Mom. Her name was Radekker. Okay?’
‘Oh, a Jewish girl?’ she asked, switching prejudices effortlessly.
‘How should I know? And I was there in the middle of the night, too, remember!’
‘Yes, but you had to work.’
‘How come you know so much about it?’
Without even wanting to I had ended up in the quarrel I had wanted to avoid. My father used his prejudices to protect his family. My mother used hers to attack the rest of the world. It was insane. Peter looked at me from the sofa, eyebrows raised. He had withdrawn from these confrontations for good. The MP3 player was a wall he had raised around his thoughts. Thundering music hung around him like an electronic shield. Even my mother’s steely opinions ricocheted off it.
My father walked over and stood between us, trying to put a stop to the absurd conversation.
‘He says he had never seen her before.’
‘Until she was lying there,’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ said my father. ‘And where was she lying?’
‘In the corridor, in front of the elevator.’ I nodded, picked up a cookie from the dish on the table and stuck it in my mouth. Sugar helped deal with the estrangement.
‘But then other people must have seen her, too?’ my father asked.
I shook my head, realizing how little they knew. They thought it was all about Ina Radekker, and it was, but in the meantime my world had been turned upside down, on its head, inside out, and I had ended up on the outside. The outside of my own life. Compared to them I was in another dimension. I saw things that didn’t exist for them at all, and as I answered their questions I knew that everything I said needed ten times more explanation.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No one else was there.’
‘Oh. Okay. But why not? There are hundreds of people working there, right?’
‘Yes, but not in the middle of the night.’
They didn’t know anything, and the more I tried to find an opening the harder it became. ‘Mom,’ I said, ‘I’ve ended up in a situation. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not what you’ve heard about it. Just believe me.’
‘So you should go to the police,’ she said. If the police were looking for me, then I had to cooperate. That’s the way she saw it. She couldn’t believe that the police wouldn’t believe me.
I shook my head. ‘I can’t go to the police, Mom. Really. All the evidence points to me. If I were to walk into a police station they’d put me under arrest and toss me in a cell and that would be it. I wouldn’t stand a chance. Forget it.’
I went to the kitchen and took a beer out of the fridge. With the bottle at my lips I walked back into the living room
.
‘Kurt not here?’ I asked.
My father shook his head. ‘Kurt has way too much to do in Amsterdam,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask me what.’
That was more than my mother could bear. She opened her mouth and started screaming. a high-pitched, shrieking sound that cut through the room. Then she stamped her foot and punched the air with her fists.
‘HER NAME ISN’T KURT!’ she shouted.
‘Who cares what her name is?’ said my father. ‘She’s still Kurt, right? Or have I got that wrong?’
Peter pulled the earbuds out of his ears and stared at the noiseless TV screen, where animal figures in clothing were chasing each other.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Kurt is just a hot babe.’
The room was draped in silence. Peter had said the worst that could be said, the very words that my father, my mother and I had wanted to avoid. Forever. That’s why the silence was so total. My mother was the first to recover herself.
‘You shouldn’t say those kinds of things!’ she hissed.
‘Yes, I should,’ said Peter. ‘You shouldn’t make such a big deal out of it. Listen.’ He stood up and walked over to us. ‘I’ll say it again: Kurt is a hot babe, okay? And any guy who doesn’t think so has his cock screwed on backwards.’
‘Her name is Kirsten,’ said my mother. ‘Kirsten. She won’t know she’s been accepted until we call her by the name she prefers.’
‘Oh, give me a break! You call her Kirsten but she’s still a guy with a problem. Come on! You’ve got to accept her body. If Kurt were to walk in here in a midriff top, I’d think: wow, cool. My sister! Then the name would come automatically.’
‘Maybe for you,’ I said. ‘But it’s different for me. Kurt and I used to share a bed.’
Mr. Miller Page 13