Judas

by Astrid Holleeder

  I invited Sonja, Gerard, and my mother to the swearing-in ceremony. My mother was proud of her daughter: I seemed to prove to her that it hadn’t been her fault that her son had committed a serious crime. She had another child on the right side of the law. I guess I restored the balance between good and evil within her family, and I was happy I could make her feel that way.

  Rather naively, I also invited Cor and Wim to attend the ceremony. They’d served their time, and I didn’t want to cut them off because of their past. After the ceremony, we’d celebrate with drinks and snacks at my new office.

  The day before the swearing-in, I still hadn’t received any information on the location and time. I felt uneasy and started calling to find out what was going on.

  I was put through to a woman at the Amsterdam Prosecution Office. “You won’t be sworn in tomorrow, ma’am. The Justice Department has objected to your joining the legal profession.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “Because you were a suspect in the kidnapping of Mr. Heineken.” I was flabbergasted. I asked if they might be mistaken and were confusing me with my brother. “I am A. A. Holleeder. I think you got me mixed up with W. F. Holleeder,” I said.

  “No, ma’am, you were a suspect in this case, and the public prosecutor Mr. Teeven wants to go through the entire file before you can be sworn in. So tomorrow is off.”

  She hung up. I felt dizzy. What was this? Never in my life had I ever been so much as fined. I was the mother of two children, I worked my ass off, I got an education to advance in life, and now the Justice Department was preventing me from working as a lawyer because I was related to one of the Heineken kidnappers?

  This was the same judiciary that had barged into my bedroom twelve years ago, pointed machine guns at my head, dragged me from my bed, thrown me to the floor, put a foot on my neck, and locked me up in a prison cell. The same judiciary that had taken away my privacy, that had followed and monitored me. Was it all starting again, all because of a crime I had had nothing to do with? Was this their revenge for my not ditching Wim and Cor? Never had I imagined I could be condemned this way by the very top of this same judiciary, led by people with university educations, so-called enlightened people.

  I didn’t feel like associating with them any longer, but I’d invested all my money into setting up my office. I had made financial commitments, such as renting my office space, and I’d just found out that Jaap had another woman on the side.

  I had to move on.

  I called Bram, and he advised me to get in touch with the dean, Mr. Hamming. He turned out to be out of the office, and his substitute didn’t want to be involved in a matter concerning this specific last name. The substitute told me to wait for Mr. Hamming’s return.

  The day went by and nothing happened. I assumed I wasn’t going to be sworn in, and I was glad I had at least found out in time so I didn’t have to make a fool of myself as the only one out of twenty candidates who couldn’t take the oath.

  I’d already resigned myself to that when the phone rang. “Miss Holleeder?” a voice said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “This is Mr. Hamming. Your swearing-in will proceed.” Then he hung up.

  At the swearing-in ceremony, he shook my hand and said, “All the best!” with a rather obvious wink.

  This gave me just that bit of hope that there were people who could look past the stigma, people who judged me for who I was, not for what my brother and brother-in-law had done. But it was also clear to me that there were those at the Justice Department who’d never be prepared to do so.

  In the summer of 1996, I was at work when my babysitter called to tell me ten detectives, a prosecutor, and a supervisory judge had searched my entire home and taken Miljuschka’s collection of Disney videotapes. The babysitter was just a sixteen-year-old girl, and at that moment she was with my eleven-year-old daughter—they had forbidden her to call me.

  Two children, exposed to powerful people who forced their way in uninvited and turned the entire house upside down in their presence, and they hadn’t even had the decency to inform me so I could have come home to reassure the frightened kids. I inquired, but I was never given any explanation for this search and what investigation it was associated with.

  I found out later that they were looking for videotapes featuring a prosecutor, presumably recorded at Cor, Robbie, and Wim’s sex club, the same one Jaap ran.

  The prosecutor who came to my house, Mr. Teeven, the same person who had obstructed my swearing-in, had bought this story about the videotapes from a prostitute called Emma, in exchange for a generous amount of money as well as immunity from prosecution for a number of ram raids committed by her and her boyfriend. The tapes had supposedly been recorded by Cor and stored inside my house.

  Teeven was so keen to clear up this oversexed prosecutor’s actions that he’d bought some cock-and-bull story from the prostitute and was now hitting a wall. It all turned out to be a lie, but in the meantime, my privacy had been invaded unjustly, and my babysitter and child had been terrorized in the name of justice.

  I didn’t get so much as an apology.

  This was the third time I’d been pestered by the Justice Department.

  And it didn’t end there.

  Starting from that same year, 2005, several people told me they’d been approached by the Justice Department requesting information about me. The department was determined to expel me from the lawyers’ register, because “such a person surely shouldn’t be a lawyer.” Such a person? As a lawyer, I took on assigned cases exclusively; I never took on any case with the slightest connection to my brother. I was completely transparent.

  Who was behind this witch hunt?

  There was yet more to come. On July 3, 2007, my secretary called. “Supervisory judge P. M. is on the phone. He needs you to come over.”

  Come over? I didn’t understand. I hadn’t overlooked a witness hearing today, had I?

  “Put me through,” I said.

  “Good morning, Miss Holleeder. We are at your house,” I heard P. M. say.

  “My house?”

  “Could you please come by? We want to search your house,” he continued.

  What was going on now? Wim was locked up, so it couldn’t be about him. I settled some things at work and drove home, where about six men stood waiting outside, the supervisory judge included.

  “Could you please let us in?” he asked.

  “What is this about?”

  “You’ve been designated as a suspect in the laundering of the Heineken ransom.”

  Was this some kind of joke? The Heineken kidnapping, again! I was seventeen years old when that took place, I didn’t have any involvement in it, and yet twelve years later they refused to swear me in, and now twenty-five years later they’re on my doorstep, blaming me for laundering the ransom?

  “Are you dealing with the rest of my family as well?” I asked. Whenever they bothered one of us, they usually did the same to the others. I felt bad for my mother; she’d been through these judge-approved burglaries so often.

  “No, not with your mother or sister.”

  “So, this is about my brother again?” I asked.

  “No, your brother is not a suspect,” the supervisory judge answered.

  Now I was really confused.

  “Is there something you’d like to tell me?” P. M. asked.

  “I’m claiming my right to remain silent,” I replied. Forget it, I thought. As if I’d want to tell you anything. About what? About six men going through my underwear, touching my things, violating my privacy? No, I had nothing to say.

  All the Justice Department had ever done was get me into trouble and cause misery. Why would I let them into my personal life, a personal life they’d tried to destroy? How could I know they weren’t plotting against me? So far, they hadn’t given me a single reason to trust them. On the contrary, I trusted them as little as I trusted my brother.

  Francis and Wim

 
2013

  WIM HAD ALREADY CALLED ME EARLY IN THE MORNING, BUT I’D BEEN busy at work. When I got home that night, he was standing at my door. “Come down for a minute,” he commanded.

  What was it this time? I walked down. He stood waiting beside his scooter. He had a gloomy look on his face, and as soon as I got to him, he fired away.

  “I was with Sonja and I asked her, ‘How is Franny?’ because I already knew Franny’s baby had been born, and I wanted to see what she’d say. She says, ‘She’s had a baby girl’ and that I can drop by next week when she’s rested. Assie, that’s disrespectful, saying, ‘You can drop by next week.’ Ya know, As, there’s just no respect. Who the hell do they think they are!”

  He was mad. Mad at Sonja and at Francis, the niece he thought he had once been so close with. Now Francis was an adult, having children of her own, and Wim felt like he barely knew her.

  After Wim’s arrest, when Francis was still a baby, she would kiss his photo every day, and every week she went with her mother and grandmother to visit him in La Santé Prison in Paris. They’d leave at two thirty in the morning to get to La Santé in time to step into the visitors’ line that formed along one of the prison walls at eight. Outside. There was no shelter from rain, wind, snow, heat, or cold.

  The guards opened the gate at noon and the first in line were let inside. The gate closed at one p.m., and if you hadn’t gotten in by that time, you couldn’t visit and had to leave. Being at the front of the line was essential. Inside the gate, a medieval staircase led up to the visitors’ area: chilly, tiny spaces of hardly four square feet, with a glass pane keeping visitors and prisoners apart. Touching was not allowed.

  Sonja and Francis visited Cor; my mother, Wim. Swapping during the visit was forbidden. But sometimes when Wim and Cor’s visiting cells were next to each other and the guard wasn’t paying attention for a second, Sonja and Francis would quickly swap places with my mom and see Wim.

  Later on, when Cor and Wim were put up in a hotel pending their extradition process, their wives could stay with them and Francis came along, too. In the Netherlands she also went to visit her uncly—as she used to call Wim. From when she was ten months old until she was nine, she always came along to visit him, and after his release, she’d meet her uncle at her dad’s house.

  But as the years went on, Wim stopped coming over.

  Children are of interest to Wim as long as he can use them to make other adults vulnerable. If he wants something from an adult, he’ll be great with their kids. Once he was in, he would use the child as leverage to get his way. One moment, people would be moved by the way he was playing with the kids, and the next he threatened to kill them if Daddy or Mommy wouldn’t live up to his demands.

  We tried to keep our children as far away from him as possible, which generally worked pretty well, because personally he didn’t give a rat’s ass about them. As soon as he began taking an interest in one of them, we knew it meant trouble.

  Wim told me someone outside the family had told him Francis had given birth, and he wanted to know why we hadn’t told him and why he hadn’t been invited to come see the baby. He himself knew the answer to this question—Francis was terrified of him.

  Sonja and I never actually told Francis and Richie what Wim had done to their father. It would have been life-threatening knowledge, as Wim thinks that children who know about “it” can’t be allowed to grow up, “for they might take revenge.”

  Francis did know, though. She was nineteen when Cor died, and had witnessed countless traumatic incidents both before and after his death.

  When she was at the swimming pool with her dad and she counted the scars from the bullet wounds, marks of the first attempts on his life, he’d always tell her, “Your uncly did that. Your uncly is a Judas.”

  After the second attack, she’d heard Cor shouting that Wim was behind it.

  Immediately after her father’s death, we warned her never to trust Wim, to watch out for him, never to go with him for anything, and to keep Richie away from him. We didn’t tell her why, but she understood full well what we meant.

  For a while Wim had seen Francis as a way to Cor’s money. When that failed, he soon dropped her.

  Now all of a sudden he showed interest in her again.

  According to Wim, Francis had told one of his girlfriends that he’d “iced her dad.”

  I tried to get him to change his mind. Surely he knew we were too scared to say anything about him. That’s why I couldn’t believe Francis had actually said this.

  But he knew for sure.

  “Assie, you listen to me. You gotta talk to her. One million percent: the person who told me about it doesn’t lie.”

  “Wim, she had a few drinks that night, she got emotional.” That didn’t make any difference to him.

  “So she said it drunk. And I get to deal with the shit? I can’t have that, Assie.”

  How could Francis have been this stupid? We’ve always warned our children: Don’t drink alcohol. People who drink loosen up and don’t know what they’re saying. Don’t talk to people who know Wim; they will pass everything on. She’d been brought up on this doctrine, and now the worst had happened anyway.

  To Wim, Francis’s statements had changed her into a threat he’d have to control. If the authorities got wind of it, they might use her to testify against him.

  I was told to pass on to Francis that if she “snitched on him,” he would “snitch on her mom.” If Francis’s blabbing led to his conviction for Cor’s murder, he’d tell them Sonja had ordered him to do it and Francis would lose her mom. “Go tell her! She’d better know what she’s doing!”

  He wasn’t done yet, though, for, naturally, Sonja too was accountable for what Francis had said and she’d have to pay for it.

  “I don’t care about seeing the baby, but see, you don’t talk to me that way, I’m not a fucking retard. And you know what happens, As: I’ll get angry. And if I get angry, I can’t be nice no more, and you’ll have to pay up.”

  The mealymouthed way he threatened them made me sick to my stomach: I’ll get angry. And if I get angry, I can’t be nice.

  It all sounds so childish, as if he’s a harmless four-year-old, acting from his primary emotions. A four-year-old will get angry and doesn’t think you’re nice anymore. Wim makes himself seem small and harmless by imitating the emotional development of a preschooler. But he is far from harmless.

  He knows it, we know it, and our background knowledge of what he has done adds a deadly edge to his words, so we know what the consequences will be if we do not comply without him even having to tell us.

  The threat is followed by the extortion, which he presents as well-intentioned advice from an experienced mature man to his younger sister.

  “You know what it is, As—it’s all about goodwill. But if there’s no goodwill, she’s got nothing left, and she’ll just be a victim and she’ll have no right to anything. It’s just a matter of goodwill, and she should respect it. She doesn’t, so you get the right to nothing.”

  I must admit, he’s a magician with words. He says everything without saying a thing. You’re able to understand and interpret his words only when you know his history. What he’s saying here is that he determines whether Sonja will get anything—Cor’s estate, the proceeds from the movie based on the book The Kidnapping of Alfred Heineken, written by Peter de Vries (based on interviews with Cor).

  She can have what was her husband’s as long as Wim grants it to her. As long as she does everything he wants, the way he wants it. He is goodwill personified.

  “But see, As, they shouldn’t think they’re smart, they shouldn’t think they can offend me. I’ll take measures, they’ll end up like the others, and I’ll show them.”

  I’ll take measures. They’ll end up like the others. Words that cut through my soul like a knife. Words that pointed to his previous deeds, to the history we shared: to Cor.

  It really meant, I won’t leave them alone, I don’t care
if they’re family; to me, they’re just like the others, and just like my other victims, just like Cor, they’ll get liquidated.

  That was the message I was supposed to deliver to Francis, a message containing a confession to her dad’s murder and, at the same time, a death threat to herself and her mother. As if this didn’t have enough impact in itself, he chose to send this message to her at the most vulnerable point in a young woman’s life—the birth of her child.

  All the moves in Wim’s chess game are well planned.

  To prevent him from asking for Francis’s address and going there himself, I said, “I’ll go tell her right away, don’t worry.”

  We’d never told him where Francis lived and intended he should never know. Once he knows where you live, he’ll drop his terror at your doorstep at any moment.

  I called Francis from the car to say I’d “drop by.”

  These words were enough for her to meet me in the hallway with fearful eyes. She knew I’d drop by only if something was up. And if something was up, it was always about Wim.

  “What’s up?” she asked, face pale. Sonja, who was visiting her, came outside, too.

  “He’s being a pain about something you supposedly said about Cor.” She immediately knew what I meant, as we’d discussed it before. “I’m supposed to tell you not to mention it ever again.”

  Francis started to panic.

  “But, As, I won’t say a word, not to anyone, really. Can you tell him I’m not talking about him at all? What’s he up to now? Is he coming after me, As, after Nora?”

  She was scared to death, scared for her child. Sonja just stood there, overcome.

  “Don’t worry about it. It’ll blow over,” I told Francis as casually as I could.

  She looked me straight in the eye, and I could tell she knew I was lying. “You know it won’t, As. You don’t fool me. I know him. You know it won’t blow over.”