Judas

by Astrid Holleeder

  “Okay, that’s extreme,” he says, and gets a grip, “but it’s doable. You seem to take the situation quite lightly.”

  I smile at him.

  “That’s because,” I say, “we accepted it the moment we took this step. We know this will be the end for us. He will never accept this betrayal. The three of us know that the only thing keeping him alive is the thought of revenge. He always told us that if he gets a life sentence, he’ll commit suicide. But he’ll wait until he’s butchered us all.”

  “So you know it’s going to happen, just not when?” he asks.

  “Yes, and as things are now, we still have time to take your classes. But I won’t take a year’s subscription”—I laugh—“unless you reimburse me for any unused lessons!”

  “I think that the lessons will help you, but you should know that if they really want to get you, they’ll always succeed and this training is not going to stop them.”

  “We know that. We don’t ask for a money-back guarantee. We are under no illusion that we’ll survive because of your training, but we have to have dignity to be able to fight back. Maybe we can collect evidence—maybe DNA under our fingernails—that will help the police arrest the perpetrators and find a link to Wim. We don’t want to die like lambs, and we can’t bear the idea of him escaping punishment because of a perfect alibi, as happened with Thomas van der Bijl.”

  “Still, heavy stuff,” he says, “but let’s just get started next week.”

  “Good,” I say, “let’s do it. My sister will be there, too.”

  All three of us leave the Hilton, and on my way to the car, I tell Sandra: “Well, that’s all we can do.”

  “Yes,” she says, “but maybe it’ll help.”

  Dying II

  SONJA AND I ARE WALKING ON SCHELDESTRAAT WHEN I RUN INTO Netteke at the ice cream parlor. I remember her from the Palmschool, where we had our English classes during grade school.

  She was the strongest girl in her class, and her classmates had decided that she should fight the strongest girl in our class: me.

  Poor Netteke, cheered on by her classmates, she had just enough courage to fight me. She followed me to the cigar store.

  I wasn’t aware of her mission and thought she also was going in to buy something.

  “Hi,” I said when I turned around and saw her standing there.

  “Hi,” she replied timidly, and dashed out of the store.

  “She followed you because she wanted to fight you!” my friend Hanna, who was there with me, said excitedly.

  “Oh,” I said, unimpressed.

  “Yeah, but she didn’t dare. The chicken. You know her father is in prison? I’m telling you. In England!”

  “Oh,” I replied again, not getting what one thing had to do with the other.

  Netteke was from the Jordaan. Of course people talked about her father being in prison, but that was more of an observation than a judgment. The Jordaan was the bottom of society; you were lucky if you could feed your family. It wasn’t the way you earned your money that mattered, but how much.

  Netteke was the first girl I dared take home with me. In the daytime, when my father was away, we’d eat butter cake at my mother’s table. And so Netty met the rest of my family.

  “Your brother works?” she asked the moment we were outside and saw Wim driving up in a Mercedes.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You don’t know?”

  “No,” I said. I really didn’t know.

  “My father knows your brother,” said Netteke, in a conspiratorial kind of way, and I quickly did the math. My brother drove an expensive car without me knowing if he had a job, and he and her sketchy dad knew each other.

  Netteke was trying to say my brother was a crook.

  My father once had different plans for Wim. He wanted his eldest son to be an honorable, respected citizen, and the job of a policeman fitted that description perfectly. His eldest son should join the police force.

  My father had enlisted him, and Wim had an interview the next day. That evening my father, in his own special way, went on to “instruct him” to behave decently and be polite. He went about it a bit too diligently, and Wim ended up with a black eye and a fat lip. He refused to go to the interview like that.

  Maybe Wim’s life would have turned out differently if my father had left him alone that one time and he had gone to the interview.

  But what Wim did for a living, and in what way that was criminal, I had not the faintest idea. I saw only parts of his life:

  Wim with Cor, smiling, at the dining room table my mother had spread with bread, sandwich fillings, and steak she had to get for them, after they’d come back from the gym in their expensive cars.

  A visit to the house of his Surinamese girlfriend, who was a showgirl and who showed me all her makeup and glittery underwear.

  The day he took me to the red-light district, where he bought me a milkshake with whipped cream on top at an Italian ice cream parlor and I had to wait for him to come back.

  The brown chunk of something he showed me as a little girl, which I later understood was hash, because many kids at school smoked it.

  From these fragments, I couldn’t see Wim doing anything nasty or wrong. On the other hand, my father, shouting out loud that Wim was no good, did something nasty and wrong every evening.

  “How terrible,” Netteke says at the ice cream parlor, when I tell her about Wim and how we’ve testified. “So what happens now? And how do you deal with this?” she asks.

  She doesn’t use the word “death,” but her meaning is clear. Indeed, how do you deal with it, and let me name it: an approaching death. I act unconcerned, and in the meantime, I scan the environment for possible contractors: that’s how you deal with it.

  “You try to stay alive as long as possible, that’s all.”

  The conversation is a painful reminder of what different directions our lives have gone in since those childhood days. She lives, whereas I just survive. Still, I don’t think of myself as less happy. I just enjoy other, slightly smaller things.

  “So you’ve got a nice life?” Netteke asks. “What is it you do?”

  “I really like to have my cup of coffee around here in the morning.” She looks a bit pitying. Was that my idea of a nice life? I saw her wondering.

  “After that I eat a yogurt,” I say, “at a place near here. And in the evening, Japanese food, as often as I can. I love that.”

  “You do anything else apart from eating?” she asks with pity in her voice.

  “No,” I say, “actually, that’s the only thing that makes me happy. The small things in life, you know.”

  “But why don’t you just leave?” she asks.

  “I don’t like it abroad. I don’t even like a holiday abroad. What am I going to do there?”

  She doesn’t understand. “You’re not even fifty, and you don’t find life worth living?”

  “I’m actually quite tired of everything. I don’t feel like running away anymore.”

  I also don’t want to have this conversation. It doesn’t make me happy. I will never be able to explain satisfactorily why I just have to accept my death. I can’t even fathom it myself. I don’t know why I’ve done this; I only know I felt I had to.

  I steer the conversation in a different direction. “How is your mother?”

  “Well,” she says.

  “Good,” I say. “Well, I’m off. See you soon,” I lie.

  Farewell to My Job

  I HURRIED TO GET TO WORK ON TIME FOR A WITNESS HEARING scheduled for nine a.m. at the courthouse. Always aware of the risk that the distance I have to walk to my car entails, I walk down the stairs cautiously. I’ll never know what will happen at the end of those stairs. I’m always prepared for a gunman waiting for me there. Not that I can do anything about it; I have to use those steps no matter what.

  If the gunman’s there, I’ll always be too late. It’s just a weak spot that is hard to avoid. Once you’re in the
car, you have a chance, although that also depends on the car you drive.

  I hurry to my car, which is quite a ways away because I’d had to park around the corner. No spots in front of the house.

  The more meters I have to walk to my car, the more vulnerable I am, and the higher the risk I run, especially now that I can’t see my car. If the car is on my block or in front of my door, at least I can see if I’m being waylaid. If the car is around the corner, that’s a lot more difficult. I know that a gunman would know the direction I walk to my car. Your car is a focal point, just like your house. Draw a line between those two points and you’ve got your walking direction. Turning a corner makes you more vulnerable, you don’t know who’ll be waiting for you.

  I’m in a hurry, and you can’t afford to be if you need the time to adapt to the situation.

  This particular Monday in August 2015, everything’s going wrong. Aware of the danger that may lie around the corner, I first run to the other side of the street so I can see the block my car is parked on before I walk there. My car itself is out of sight; it’s hidden behind a big bus. That’s not good, and my first thought is to wonder if this was done on purpose. Has someone deliberately blocked the view of my car? And what, or rather who, is in that bus?

  I’m halfway to my car, and I see a person who doesn’t fit in with the street. He’s just standing there. From my side, I can see that he’s looking at my car.

  I slow down and walk closer to the houses. He hasn’t seen me coming yet; at least, he doesn’t act like he has. I disappear into one of the many porches. It doesn’t feel right. I’m sure he was standing there waiting for me.

  I don’t want to wait on the porch for too long, in case he did see me and will come for me. I consider ringing the bell of one of the apartments in the porches, to pretend I don’t feel well and to ask for a doctor. The chance that a poshly dressed and unwell woman asking for help won’t be let in is not so big.

  But I’m in a hurry as well, that damned hurry. I need to get to that hearing. Maybe I’m seeing ghosts, and what kind of explanation will I give to the judge, clerk, and witness for my arriving late? Explain to them that I thought I was going to be killed? That I had to make sure not to take any risk of getting shot? How would that look? I can’t very well say that, now, can I?

  What should I do? I can’t go to my car, that’s for sure. I decide to walk back to the corner I came from. Meanwhile I call Sonja to ask where she is.

  “I’m on my way to you, to clean your house,” she says.

  “Can you come pick me up?” I ask. “Someone is standing near my car.”

  “Of course. I’m on my way.”

  “How much longer?” I ask. “I’m in a hurry; I need to get to court.”

  “Ten minutes,” she says.

  “Okay, please hurry, I may just make it in time. Drive up to the entrance of Coffee Company. There’s a lot of activity there, and I’ll just get in and you drive straight on.”

  To be safe, I call Sandra. We always warn each other when we see something suspicious.

  “San, I have this guy standing near my car. I don’t trust it. Son’s picking me up. But you be careful, too, when you walk out your door.”

  “I will,” she says.

  Sonja’s pulling up, and I get in. “It can’t go on like this.”

  I am just in time for the hearing. It turns out the witness wasn’t delivered by the police, so I can just go home. All that stress for nothing. To me, it’s the last straw.

  If I want a chance to survive, I have to live like he did, the way he survived for so long.

  “They have tried to kill me a hundred times,” he told me last year. He probably exaggerates, but I knew there were people who at least had planned on popping him.

  Thomas van der Bijl, who openly said to Teeven that he couldn’t manage to have him killed.

  A group of people, among them Kees Houtman, who tried and failed during Christmas 2005, but were still at it.

  Willem Endstra, who had tried through several different hitmen, attempts he told me about himself, when they were pending.

  That time Srdjan “Serge” Miranovic’s son came to see him in Kobe’s Restaurant with a loaded gun, an attempt at retribution for his father’s death.

  That one time someone (probably hired by the Mieremet clan) had actually tried to kill him on Westerstraat when he was with my mother. He meant to report it.

  Or that time we were in a restaurant on Van Woustraat and this guy with dead eyes reached for his pocket.

  I truly believe he has escaped death on many occasions. So often that it probably feels like a hundred times to him.

  He had survived all of them, and he was helped by his practice of having no regular patterns, no regular place to go to, no fixed address but various places where he stayed: in Huizen, in the house a doctor friend rented for him; at the Newport Hotel, where he stayed with Nicky; in Utrecht at Mandy’s and Maike’s places; in Amsterdam, in the western part with Marieke, a new young flame; and in the Jordaan, at Jill’s. And then there was Sandra’s house. And Mom’s.

  He could not be linked to one residence. He had no normal job with one fixed address. He met in public bars and restaurants where it was so crowded that no gunman would ever open fire there. He never made an appointment far in advance; he would always change or cancel plans at the last minute if the feeling wasn’t right.

  No car in front of the door, but a garage where Sandra’s son, the one he hated so much, had to take his scooter out for him when he needed it and put it back in at night. He wouldn’t do that himself; it was too dangerous. And when the scooter was in the garage, no one could see if he was there.

  So waylaying him was not an option. He only had a phone to call, not to be called. He was unreachable by anyone, and, with the battery out, not traceable.

  With me, it’s a different story. I live in my one apartment, where I always sleep and have to leave from; my car always in front of or near the house or my office. You know where I am. And most of all, my normal job, my fixed office address, where anyone can find me at any time of day.

  That aspect of my life in particular forced me to adapt to a pattern I couldn’t escape. I didn’t have to sleep at home, and using other means of transportation wasn’t a problem, either, but my job—that could kill me. I couldn’t cancel or postpone hearings at the last minute. They were planned months in advance and were fixed. These were often cases where clients were detained, and postponement meant that they would be held longer, maybe needlessly. That was in contradiction to the responsibilities of my job as a lawyer.

  I couldn’t arrange for my visits to prison at the last moment, or visit my clients without warning. It doesn’t work that way. They know when I’m coming. I prepare cases with my clients; it’s a collaboration that takes planning, so everybody knows where I am. Not only my clients, but also fellow prisoners, their families, and the prison staff. All of these people have scheduled contact with me, and it takes just one hungry person who wants to make a buck to give me away to a gunman.

  It’s impossible to be a criminal lawyer without running into people who have dealings with Wim.

  And what if Wim comes out of the ESP and goes back to the Penitentiary Institution, where he can chat with other guys? Guys he can easily use to his benefit? Guys who are often a bit mentally handicapped in some way and can be easily persuaded to do the weirdest stuff for their idol?

  Things would only get more dangerous. I love my job. But it also connects me to a world that I know gives ample opportunity to track me down and give me away. I had already had one scare at work.

  This was when it had just come out that we were testifying, and it involved a client with a certain background who could be dangerous to me. That day I was in a hearing with him, and I got a very uneasy feeling.

  To be on the safe side, I wore my bulletproof vest in the car. The time I was to arrive was known, and it would be very easy to approach me on the stairs of the courthouse. As
a lawyer I don’t have to pass through the scanner, so when I’m inside, in the toilet, I can replace my vest with a tunic. After the hearing, I replaced the tunic with a vest again, that I wore invisibly under my clothes, so that I could walk back to my car at least sort of protected. Nothing happened.

  But fear of some professional situations made it hard for me to function. If some clients wanted to come to a hearing against my advice and would not come in, that made me suspicious. Then I would think: Do you want to point me out so that after the hearing I’m an easy target?

  When I made an appointment outside my office or court, I would change the location just before, or would go there half an hour early to complicate the situation. I had to be on guard. But I grew tired of it, and it took all the pleasure out of my job. And I knew that the regular pattern imposed by my work would be the end of me. I didn’t want to give up. I wanted to keep on working, but it was irresponsible.

  That same day, the day Sonja drove me to the hearing after I saw the strange man standing at my car, I texted my partner, with whom I’d worked for almost twenty years, and told him I was quitting.

  My partner, with whom I had celebrated Christmas and New Year’s Eve for twenty years. My partner, who’d been through everything with me—Cor’s death, the prosecutions, my role as a witness—and who’s always been there for me. My partner, whom I had never once kissed on the cheek, nor had he kissed me on my cheek, because we functioned as men with each other. And we were both against unsolicited and above all unwanted physical contact. We both detested socializing, and if we really couldn’t refuse, we’d go to a party together. My partner, the only person who’s never lied to me or anybody else; you can’t even catch him telling a white lie. It’s almost corny, how trustworthy he is. My partner, whom I texted that I was unable to speak to him, because after reaching this decision, if I heard his voice, I could only cry.