Judas

by Astrid Holleeder

  “I’d like to know what precisely you can share with us,” she said.

  Out of suspicion, I hadn’t let on much about that in my earlier interviews, and I’d only spoken cryptically about what I knew about the liquidations. “Enough,” I said.

  “Such as?” she asked.

  Without mentioning his name, I said, “Who he has iced.” Fear crept up on me while I spoke the words. “If it gets out that I’m talking to you, it’ll be my death sentence. Before I tell you anything, I need to know what you’ll do with the information and who’ll be involved.”

  “Don’t worry, your talking to us will be kept between the three of us for now, and you really can trust us,” Betty said, trying to reassure me.

  “With all due respect, I don’t trust him, and I don’t trust you, either. I can only trust my sister and myself. It’s my experience that everyone can be bought, and those who won’t be bought will yield out of fear for their well-being or that of their loved ones. Paying a visit to someone’s kids’ school is easy to do—he’s done it. That’s why I need to know what will happen with my information before I tell you anything.”

  “That’s why I’m here, to explain it to you,” Betty said.

  The bottom line was that I’d have to tell them what I knew first. They’d put it down in a written statement, and based on this statement, it would be decided if it qualified as “highly confidential.” If it did, my statements would be used in a prosecution against Wim only with my explicit consent. Should I back down at any point, the statements would never be revealed. But even if I did go through with it, the Justice Department wouldn’t automatically use them. That depended on whether the State’s duty of care allowed the use of my statements. Put differently: When the Justice Department deemed it too dangerous for me, they could still decide not to use my statements.

  I didn’t like what I heard. I’d have to unfold my entire life for them to put down in writing and only then decide if it was of any use to them?

  To me, sharing the information verbally with the Justice Department was dangerous enough, but the existence of written statements made it even riskier. What if Wim got his hands on them? Besides that, I would never know if giving my statements had made any difference, whether they’d actually use my information against him.

  In the scenario they laid out for me, I’d be left with no control over my personal safety whatsoever. Why was it so important to write down what I said? Telling your story within a confined room still enables you to deny it ever took place, to deny what people may claim. It’s a completely different thing to have your story written down and taken away, out of the reach of your power and influence.

  Who would be reading it?

  I could already picture one of these women walking into the prosecution office, waving my statements above her head and saying, “Guys, look what I’ve got here! It’s a statement from Holleeder’s sister. You won’t believe how fucked up this family is! These gals are washing their dirty laundry in public. You really should read this!” I imagined the whole department having a ball with these statements and the rat meanwhile managing to make a quick copy and taking it with him as fun reading material for my darling brother.

  “Yeah, right,” I said, “I’d rather bite my tongue off and bleed to death than put a statement in writing.”

  I’d have preferred to use my brother’s method: whispering all the damning information into their ears, leaving no evidence of having spoken with them. Betty wouldn’t have it, though; a written statement was mandatory or they wouldn’t be able to do anything.

  “Suppose you’ve got my statement on paper, though,” I said, “you won’t even know if you’ll use it. Why not hear me out now? As a prosecutor, can’t you decide right now how a statement could help you?”

  “No,” she said, “it has to be done in peace and quiet. We need to consider if these statements support other evidence and if all together it will be sufficient for prosecution, conviction, and possibly a sentencing.”

  This sounded reasonable enough, but their strategy didn’t alleviate my anxiety.

  “Where will you be keeping this statement?” I asked.

  “Inside a safe,” Betty said.

  “Inside a safe…” I echoed.

  A safe didn’t impress me at all. A safe offers zero protection if you don’t know who has access to the key. And that’s something I can never be sure of.

  “Who is able to access this safe?”

  “Just me and my superior.”

  “Okay,” I said, “your superior will have a key as well. But I don’t know your boss. And I have no way of knowing what he’ll do with this key, so that doesn’t reassure me. For example, as a CIU officer, could you be shoved aside by a case officer, or, for all I know, by an undersecretary or a minister dropping by to raid your safe? How will I know your superiors don’t have their own keys without your knowledge? That they’ll take a peek and leak it so I don’t have a way out? I want to trust you, but I can’t tell what others will do. Suppose you conclude it lacks relevance, or I decide to refrain after all? Then what?”

  “We’ll sign an agreement in advance, confirming this statement may be used exclusively with your consent,” Betty said, “and without your consent, it will be destroyed immediately.”

  “Destroyed how?”

  “Through the shredder,” she said.

  “What about the audio recordings?”

  “Destroyed too.”

  “How does that work? Can I be there to see it’s actually done? I’d want to see it with my own eyes.”

  “No, you’ve got to take our word for it.” Another minus point for her.

  “But how many people would get to know my identity? How many will be involved without my knowledge?”

  The thought of losing control scared me to death. The more people know, the bigger the chance of leaking.

  “For the time being, it will just be the three of us,” Betty said. “We’ll get other people involved only later in the procedure.”

  I didn’t have the faintest idea about all the formalities my testimony would involve, or all the departments it would have to pass through. I wouldn’t have dreamed this many conditions would apply. I painted pictures for Betty of all kinds of situations that might occur, which she tried to counter as best she could.

  Eventually she just looked at me a bit pityingly, as if she were thinking, How sad to have to go through life that suspicious. “You’re going to have to put a tiny bit of trust in us to handle your case responsibly,” she said.

  Trust? Reality will prove your trustworthiness, I thought. You’ll only stop being trustworthy if things end badly. By then it will be too late for me.

  It was a tough conversation for both parties.

  After what she’d told me, I was still too unsettled, and I left.

  “How did it go?” Sonja, who’d been waiting for me at home, asked. “Was it a rat?”

  “No, she wasn’t a rat. She’s onto him,” I said.

  “Now what?” Sonja asked.

  “I don’t know if this will work for us.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s all about phases. First they want to talk, then they want a written statement. After that, they’ll decide if it will be useful to them and if they want to continue with us.”

  “Oh, I won’t do that. Not when he’s still walking around free. It’s way too dangerous, As.”

  “They say we can trust them.”

  “Like hell we can. And what about his rats? I won’t do it. I’m not writing anything down. It’s just too risky. Do you trust ’em?”

  “I don’t trust anyone, but I think these three women are okay. I don’t think they’ll screw us on purpose. I’m just worried about the top. That scares me more. What if he’s got his rat in there? Then these three have no authority, they’ll just have to do as the boss tells them. I really don’t know yet. But if I go through with it, I won’t do it by myself, Box. So what are you going to do?”
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  She was quiet for a minute, then spoke.

  “It’s tough, but I can’t say if it’s the right thing to do. Right now, we’re all still alive. It’s not much of a life, but at least we are alive. If we testify, we probably won’t be, and is it fair to do that to our children? How are these kids supposed to make it without us? Who’ll protect them from him? That’s what’s bugging me. I really don’t understand why he hasn’t been shot yet. Everyone around him drops like flies except him. And he’s got so many enemies.”

  “Then you’re just sitting around waiting for someone else to do something. That’s easy, leaving it to others. So far it hasn’t gotten us anywhere. We’re dependent on fate. I’d like to take my fate into my own hands, and I don’t care what happens.”

  I was so fed up. All those decades, we had to be silent about everything we knew. All those years, he’d burdened us with his horrible information, stuff he had done. All those years, he used everything we held dear to put pressure on us. He destroyed the things we loved. Used us to serve his own best interests while undermining ours in every possible way.

  We’d become his security system, his place to safeguard his secrets. He owned us. He had crowned himself king of the family, and we were his subjects. He had us living in constant fear of saying something wrong, continuously threatened against talking to the police.

  I couldn’t keep on living under this regime. It was eating away at me. I needed to break free.

  I knew for certain that if I told what I knew, it would be clear instantly that my statements should be highly confidential. I had to gamble, had to believe that they wouldn’t be shared with others or Wim himself—at least not by the three women.

  “I’m going to take the first step,” I said finally. “I’ll testify. I am certain it will be deemed a highly confidential statement and after that we’ll see. If something happens to us in the meantime, the Justice Department will at least have something to go on. I’ll take the risk.”

  “Fine, if you do it, I’ll do it too. I’ll take the plunge with you. It’s about justice for my husband, and for my children’s lives.”

  Even after I was fully committed to my mission, I still wavered sometimes.

  “We’re the same, Assie,” Wim would tell me at least once a week. And it was true. Of the four children my mother had, the middle two, Sonja and Gerard, and the oldest and youngest, Wim and me, were very much alike in character and behavior.

  Our characters prevented us from being victimized. As small and powerless as we were, we wanted to take our fate into our own hands by trying to defuse my father’s unpredictable behavior.

  As a child, I’d developed a tic of repeating my every movement. Opening and closing the door twice, putting my shoes on twice, touching the doorknob twice. It kept me quite busy. I’d figured out that by touching everything twice, I could control my father’s willful behavior, so he wouldn’t beat us.

  One night—I was seven and Wim was fourteen—I saw him shutting the fridge twice.

  “You’re doing it too,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You do everything twice too.”

  He looked at me, understanding, and in that moment I felt a strong connection.

  Had I been a boy, I might have turned out just like him. Maybe it was being a girl that prevented me from compensating with violence and bravado. Maybe I had used my intellect instead, safeguarding me from a similar path in life.

  Who am I to condemn him for the coincidence of being born male? Should I, of all people, be the one to do this to him, while we might well be “the same,” as he claims?

  “So you’d be the same as him just because you both repeat some stuff?” Sonja asked, dryly. “Nonsense, As. How can you even think that way? You’re nothing like him. Would you shut up about it? He’s an evil person, and you’re not!”

  “No, but if I’d been in his shoes, I might have acted the same way. I might have murdered someone close to me if they were threatening my life.”

  “But he did it himself—he’s only got himself to blame for these situations! Because he’s been selling everyone out his entire life, he ends up in situations that make him decide to get rid of people. But he doesn’t have to! He chooses it consciously. You’d never act that way. So stop saying you are just like him. That’s what he wants you to believe, so he can manipulate you. And it’s working. He’s making you believe you are an exception to the rule, but you’re not.”

  Sonja was right, and I knew it. I am no exception to him; he sees me only in terms of how he can use me. But he sure knows how to make you believe it, that you’re the life ring just barely keeping him afloat in his ocean of misery. Maybe I wanted to be just that, on the lookout for that moment of connection from long ago, even though I know that Wim is long gone, even though I know what he’s turned into.

  Once again, I’d made the mistake of hoping he harbored real emotions. I’d let myself be disarmed by his feigned affection in the middle of my battle against him. I really couldn’t afford this. I had to keep my guard up and couldn’t be tempted into a situation that would prevent me from seeing the attack coming.

  Meetings with Betty

  LEADING UP TO MY NEXT MEETING WITH BETTY, I WAS CONSUMED​ BY thoughts of what I should tell her. I cried a lot, slept poorly, and got edgier by the hour. I drove everyone around me crazy, but besides Sonja, no one knew what was wrong with me. Nobody could know what I intended to do, because what they didn’t know, they couldn’t pass on.

  Then the day finally arrived. Michelle texted, “Hi, 4:30 p.m., second elevator. See you later.”

  At four fifteen I was on my way to the agreed location when I got another text: “Betty just got sick and can’t make it. We’re here, though—is that all right with you? She’ll try to be back later this week.”

  I was suspicious right away. First they had me come all the way over, and not even fifteen minutes before our meeting, the CIU officer cancels? I’d prepared mentally for this interview, and now she wasn’t going to be there. Was she really sick? Or was she thinking I would share my statement with Michelle and Manon so easily? I’d explicitly said I only wanted to speak with her, only with an officer.

  Michelle was waiting for me.

  “Am I being played here?” I asked, perhaps a bit too aggressively.

  She was taken aback but recovered quickly. “Of course not, Betty just got sick.”

  She sounded so sincere that I felt ashamed. This moment was so heavy for me, it was messing with my common sense. I had to relax. “Betty hoped she could be here until the very last minute—this meeting is important to her as well. But she couldn’t hold anything down and simply couldn’t come. We’re not playing you, honestly.” Michelle spoke calmly, and I could tell by her tone that she was telling the truth.

  “Okay,” I said, feeling reassured. “Sorry about my behavior, but I’ve been feeling really apprehensive about this.”

  “I understand,” Michelle said. “Would you like to set up the next meeting anyway?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Back already?” Sonja asked. “That was fast.”

  “She wasn’t there, she’s sick,” I said.

  “Ah well, shit happens.”

  She didn’t suffer from paranoia. Then again, she hadn’t gone through the hell of interviewing yet. She hadn’t had to rake everything up again.

  “I think I’m starting to lose it,” I said.

  “Then you have to stop it, As. If you can’t deal with it, you should get out.”

  “No, I’ll be fine. It’s just so heavy. Recalling everything, going through these emotions again.” I started crying.

  Sonja hugged me. “Cut it out, Astrid, you’re making me cry too,” she said through her tears. “Listen, regardless of whether we go through with it, Cor is proud of us.”

  A week later, I had another meeting with Betty.

  She started by saying, “Sorry about canceling last week, but I was really sick.”

&n
bsp; “I know,” I said. I couldn’t say “I don’t mind,” as it had been pretty clear to the other two that I most certainly had. I still felt a bit ashamed about it. The past week I’d tried to get more sleep, and I had been able to get used to all the horrible memories. It made me slightly more pleasant to be around.

  Betty got started. “What can you tell us?”

  Oh, no. I’d resolved not to cry, and I was tearing up at the very first question. The hurt was so intense that even after ten years I couldn’t speak about it without shedding tears.

  “He did Cor,” I said, and automatically made Wim’s customary gun gesture.

  “Did” can mean anything, but the gesture makes the meaning absolutely clear.

  “He had Cor murdered, his own brother-in-law,” I said. I’d said it. After a decade of silence, I’d finally said it aloud!

  I was startled by how good it felt to utter those words at last.

  I no longer felt torn, and, most important, I no longer felt like I was betraying Cor. Suddenly I found myself talking about the other liquidations Wim was responsible for. I was engulfed by an enormous sense of peace. At last, I could do what I wanted, what I considered just and righteous, what matched my norms and values. At last I could tell the truth about him. I no longer had to lie for him.

  What a marvelous feeling.

  Whether I was ready to make this statement to the whole world, him included, was a different question, though. I would only do it if Sonja did.

  The fear of leaks and retribution remained. But now that I’d made the very first statement, it was irreversible. As of now, I knew my life was in the hands of these people. If they betrayed me, or were careless enough to let someone else do it, I was dead.

  To take the edge off this idea, I told myself I might just as well walk under a bus tomorrow and not take life and death so seriously from now on. Besides, it felt so good to actually be able to tell the truth that I took the anxiety in stride.