Angel in the Shadows

by Walter Lucius

  The leading opponent, Baladin Hatta, was quoted as saying, ‘The incident with the Malaysian nuclear reactor confirms once more that our part of the world is not suited to nuclear energy. Far too few Indonesians possess the necessary qualities and work experience to operate a nuclear reactor. Corruption among the authorities is such that there are bound to be mistakes. The nuclear-energy programme proposed by our government is potentially lethal to all Indonesian citizens.’

  Finance Minister Gundono clearly disagreed with this view. ‘Indonesia has no other choice. By 2025, our power consumption will have tripled. We must have the courage to be forward thinking. Nuclear energy is our future.’

  Farah folded up the Jakarta Post, put it in her rucksack and then descended the fortress steps.

  In an internet café on Jalan Kalibaru Barat, she ordered a Coke and thirty minutes of time; then, on the sluggish Toshiba, she googled ‘Baladin Hatta’.

  The greasy screen displayed a handsome man in his forties dressed in a dark-red polo shirt. He had a determined look in his eyes and a masculine smile; in a word, he came across as charming and confidence-inspiring. Each image depicted Hatta in his comfort zone, be it as a politician in Parliament, a sportsman among sportsmen, an ordinary person among ordinary people. Many faces, many different guises, but always that determined yet charismatic look, a man anyone would buy a car from. Baladin was especially popular among Jakarta’s multitude of poor and young people. He was the founder of the Waringin Foundation, a legal-aid organization that provided assistance to members of vulnerable urban communities, but specialized in helping children from the street. Through care programmes, education and sheltered accommodation, Hatta sought to make them fully fledged members of society. He was an idealist after her own heart, this Hatta. In the process, he’d also become the face of the growing anti-nuclear-energy protests in Indonesia. Needless to say, his ideas and activities didn’t go down well with the current government, which had labelled him a Communist, an opportunist and an agitator. All good things come in threes.

  Having googled the address, she flagged down a bajaj, one of the motorized tricycles that crisscrossed the city in their thousands, to take her to his party’s headquarters in South Jakarta for two thousand rupiah. Shouting street vendors brandished their wares, mopeds buzzed around the place like cruel wasps, lorries spewed exhaust fumes, and countless cars slalomed through it all. It was the everyday chaos of a city of millions.

  The party office was located in a large old building. Small groups of people walked in and out as if there were some kind of non-stop performance going on inside. On either side of the street, traffic police were standing beside their gleaming motorbikes, busily conferring with one another. She entered the hot and crowded lobby of the building and wormed her way through to a woman behind a desk that said PRESS.

  ‘Journalist?’

  ‘No … uhm, yes,’ she said. That brief hesitation was enough. The woman made a bored gesture, as if she were swatting away flies. That same moment there was a commotion outside. Hearing the shrill noise of traffic whistles in the street, Farah followed the people who hurried out, and in the distance she saw three black SUVs approaching almost without a sound. Bodyguards got out, kept bystanders at bay and opened doors. From one of the cars emerged Hatta, again in his comfort zone and looking even better than he did online, smiling in a relaxed way and shaking hands on his way into the building as if everybody were his best friend. Among the press photographers, Farah spotted a camera team close by. She might be wearing her brown lenses, and her hair was short and dyed, but her face remained the same – she could well be recognized. She ducked behind a shoulder and allowed herself to be swallowed by the crowd while the group made its way into the lobby, in pursuit of Hatta.

  She cursed herself for her eternal, uncontrollable impulsiveness.

  Hold out a carrot and I’ll chase it.

  What on earth did she think she could accomplish here, at the party headquarters of a politician she knew only by name, just because he’d produced a few nice quotes that suggested he might be on her side? What was she thinking? Hello, Mr Hatta, would you like me to give you some more background information on that scoundrel Lavrov? Yeah, sure, let’s hear it, Ms Journalist, high on the list of internationally wanted terrorists.

  Disoriented, she looked around. If the city were a body with a network of nerves and blood vessels, she was now standing beside one of its main arteries. This is where the blood of a metropolis bursting at the seams circulated in the form of a stinking stream of motorized traffic tearing right past her.

  That’s when she felt an arm grab her, and a voice say, ‘Kamu sudah mau mati?’ ‘Have you got a death wish?’

  Startled, she turned around. It was one of the traffic officers. Shaven-headed, macho smile, his eyes invisible behind mirrored shades. She looked at him, unsure what he was after.

  ‘Crossing here equals suicide. And you’re too pretty for that.’

  In a reflex, she flashed him a smile and apologized. ‘Maaf, maaf.’ ‘Sorry, sorry’. He let go of her arm. From a distance, his colleagues were watching with big grins on their faces. She muttered ‘Terima kasih’ – ‘Thank you’ – and was about to move on. She was clearly too confused for her own good; she needed to get away from any kind of uniform as quickly as possible.

  ‘Hey!’

  His voice again. More forceful this time. Her breath caught in her throat. She turned around and forced a smile as she instinctively reached for her rucksack to open it. She’d have to show the passport with the false name and the false date of birth. He’d leaf through it and stare even longer at the photo and the personal details than the officials in the Moscow-to-Kiev train had done.

  Then he’d fix her with the look of someone who wouldn’t have the wool pulled over his eyes. He’d bundle her off to his colleagues, with her hands restrained, and they’d put her in the back seat of one of their cars and take her to the police station – for questioning, for maltreatment, or something worse.

  ‘Please be careful. I don’t want to lose you yet.’

  She could hear the good-natured chuckling of his colleagues. With a smile and a wave in their direction, she hurried on her way.

  Her heart was pounding in her throat.

  13

  Radjen had the nasty habit of throwing plastic bottles and food wrappers behind the driver’s seat, leaving toothpicks in the ashtray and shoving crushed coffee cups into the side pockets of the car doors. It had been an eternity since he’d cleaned out the Corolla. In a half-hearted attempt to get rid of the musty smell, he opened the window and then sat up as straight as possible. When he was standing, he could suck in his belly, but behind the wheel it blatantly bulged over his belt. He quickly pulled on his jacket to cover himself, but the damage had been done. From the corner of his eye he saw that Esther had already noticed.

  As he looked up at the cobalt-blue morning sky dotted with airplanes and clouds, he realized Esther had been right. The NFI had taken their sweet time in examining Lombard’s computer. He wasn’t prepared to cut them any more slack. Earlier, he’d seen a key witness hanging in a noose and, with this, they’d lost a vital part in the case against Lombard. Those computer files were now the only evidence. He wanted confirmation, as quickly as possible, that those files hadn’t ended up on the minister’s computer by accident, but had been downloaded intentionally by Lombard himself. Most likely sent to him by a circle of anonymous fellow users. Maybe they would even manage to find other paedophiles who were accessing the images. Child pornography enthusiasts often comprised a tight-knit, secretive group, a closed network.

  At Esther’s urgent request, he stopped at a petrol station, where she scored some hamburgers and large coffees. They parked the Corolla where the lorries stood, clicked open their burger cartons and took a few big bites. A hundred metres in front of them three lanes of traffic had come to a standstill.

  ‘Roadside tourists,’ he muttered between bites. ‘We’ve becom
e bloody roadside tourists having a picnic.’

  He turned towards her. She just nodded; she was too busy satisfying her hunger. He looked at the traffic again. Why was there always that compulsive need to fill the silences?

  ‘In the past, when motorways were first built, people came with tents and spent the entire day on the side of the road gawking at the traffic.’

  Esther didn’t respond; just stared ahead. She seemed annoyed, or withdrawn. He took a sip and sighed, but was determined to keep his mouth shut.

  His mind was racing.

  A boy run down, a minister under suspicion, two charred corpses in a burnt-out car, the abused body of a female doctor riddled with bullets, the attempted abduction of the injured boy, the broken body of one of his detectives, who’d plunged a hundred and fifty metres, only to impale himself on the spiked beams of a glass entrance canopy.

  And, as the icing on the cake: the recent hanging of a key witness.

  He saw himself as a child again, on the large rug in his parents’ living room, with all the different colours, shapes and sizes of Lego scattered around him. He would look at it until he knew exactly what kind of a construction he was going to make. Now, fifty years later, it was a habit of his to look at every aspect of an investigation under his wing in exactly the same way.

  Each case was, in fact, a whole bunch of building blocks you had to analyse one by one, to figure out how the whole structure fitted together. The larger the puzzle, the stronger the incentive to look at the matter from different perspectives, zoom in on details, establish some distance and fill in the small gaps, discover new approaches, to finally construct a scenario in which all the isolated facts connected to each other. Sooner or later the chronology of events did become clear. Then cause and effect, perpetrator and motive, all emerged.

  That’s how he worked, and he’d always trusted this approach. His method served as confirmation, time and time again, that what he did mattered, that he had control over the world around him. And, above all: a grip on himself, on his own life.

  But he’d lost hold of this observational role. The Lego blocks threatened to bury him.

  ‘What I don’t understand, Chief …’

  Her voice startled him. Esther was staring straight ahead, as if she’d seen something in the distance that took her train of thought in a new direction.

  ‘Two years ago they won the election, the Liberal Democrats, and that had everything to do with Lombard. He’s not all that young any more – how old … mid fifties?’

  ‘Fifty-eight.’

  ‘My God, he got dealt a good set of genes: he looks young but at the same time trustworthy, with that touch of grey at his temples. I mean, when he speaks, I believe what he says.’

  We’re contemporaries, Lombard and I, Radjen thought. Same generation. Different lives.

  Esther rubbed salt into the wound. ‘I mean, the man is a walking success story. Makes a big impression on TV. Lots of female voters. Still has the look of an ideal son-in-law, despite his age. And he’s doing it with little boys?’ She shook her head and took a last bite. ‘Hard to believe. I don’t get it.’

  ‘You’re not the only one,’ Radjen sighed. ‘We think we know the man, but we only see how he’s presented by the media. We believe what they feed us, not what really happens, who people really are.’

  He thought about the YouTube clip he’d seen of the ‘terrorist’ Farah Hafez. She was a totally different woman from the one he’d seen during the Pencak Silat Gala, a woman driven by passion, the woman who’d brought Thomas Meijer in as a key witness.

  ‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘Lombard the jovial politician with the ash-blond curls, always dressed to kill, trustworthy. He could be the neighbour you invite to a barbecue or who helps you wash your car on a Saturday morning. It’s hard to believe that a man like this is capable of offences against children. But I’ve seen the pictures stored in his computer and they tell a different story.’

  He looked at her. Her face silhouetted against the morning sky. ‘You’re not telling me you think he’s innocent?’

  She licked her fingers and looked at Radjen. He unexpectedly felt the same intimacy he had last night on the landing of Efrya and Thomas Meijer’s house when he was removing the white overall. He could see she felt at home in his presence, as if they’d been friends for years. She removed a cigarette from her packet.

  ‘Innocent until proven guilty.’

  ‘Why did you become a detective in the first place?’ he asked.

  She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘No idea.’

  ‘You wanted to make the world a better place?’

  ‘No. Did you?’ She offered him a cigarette. ‘Do we still have time?’

  ‘You smoke one for me.’

  She took his coffee cup and the fast-food boxes, crawled out of the Corolla, dumped all of it in a rubbish bin and leaned forward out of the wind to light her cigarette. He watched her from the Corolla the entire time. And he realized that watching her did him a lot of good: it created a pleasant state of turbulence within him.

  When she returned and he started the engine, it crossed his mind to drive day and night, to the shores of Lake Trasimeno, to light that missed cigarette tomorrow morning with her, just in time to watch the sun rise from behind the mountains.

  The heavily guarded rectangular building of the Netherlands Forensic Institute was close to the motorway, on the edge of a modern suburb. Lustreless black steel strips partly encased the glass structure like a protective shield. A bunker of steel and glass overlooking a sprawling residential neighbourhood, a tangle of motorways and a lush golf course, deserted at this hour.

  Radjen reported to reception. Less than a minute later they were heading upstairs on one of the wide escalators, accompanied by a somewhat portly man with three archive folders tucked under his arm.

  ‘Tom Dalsven,’ the man had introduced himself. ‘I understand it’s urgent.’

  ‘True, new developments in the case.’

  Radjen estimated that he was in his late fifties. He had no natural charisma, no energy, not even a measure of vitality. A man who exuded some authority only because of his size, thick glasses and a plump, sweaty handshake.

  They silently took the lift to the third floor, where Dalsven led them through a high, cube-shaped corridor with all the warmth of an ice rink and, still silent, held the door open for them. They entered a predominantly white space. There was a large work table with round steel legs, a screen and state-of-the-art hardware for copying data.

  ‘We’ve searched the internet history to establish a digital timeline so we could see what the owner did on his computer. In this way, we hoped to determine whether the suspect was looking for something specific or accidentally came across the images while he was browsing.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Before I show you what we found, I should tell you that, in addition to looking for files, we also checked which ones, if any, were shared with others. Files with the characteristics of child pornography are usually downloaded in a network. Surprisingly, we didn’t find a network. We found the following photos and it’s of course up to a judge to determine whether being in possession of these is a punishable offence. I’m not in a position to say.’

  Dalsven tapped something on the keyboard, and the screen revealed a stream of data, numbers and symbols.

  And then the first photo appeared.

  Radjen estimated that the girl suggestively eyeing the lens couldn’t have been older than twelve. Her shoulder-length blonde hair was partly covered with a thick layer of soapy foam, as if she were wearing a white woollen cap. Other than that she was naked, in a pose somewhere between standing up and sitting down. Perhaps she was getting out of her bubble bath at that very moment. It was a gaze he wouldn’t quickly forget. A child’s gaze, but also the look of a woman-in-the-making who knew she was being watched, and who shamelessly let herself be seen, because she had nothing to hide. Not because she wasn’t aware of how at
tractive she was but precisely because she was intensely aware of it. Radjen couldn’t explain it any other way. This image was about more than the naked innocence of a child. She was letting herself be watched, and she didn’t care about it, which made what he was seeing so confusing. She was aware of her body, that much was clear. The suds on her shoulders that had dripped from her hair, the foamy bubbles on her arms, the reflections on her glistening breasts and belly. He could see all of her body to her thighs, and then he realized it. She exhibited the same audacity as those women who pose for calendars you always see in garages. Calendars not meant for jotting down birthdays or appointments.

  ‘This is not one of the photos I saw before.’

  ‘There are more.’

  The next picture was of the same girl. This time leaning against a tree, her knickers and shorts pulled down around her knees. Her upper body was bare, her back to him. She stood against the tree as if trying to push it over, her body tensed all the way down to her stretched toes, but her pinched buttocks, bent head and the stream between her legs flowing to the ground told a different story. Radjen saw that she was demonstratively urinating against the tree. A few metres away two of her friends were laughing in embarrassment.

  ‘No,’ he hoarsely said. ‘Not that one either.’

  The third image was the most bewildering. The same blonde girl, in sensual black and white, hanging backwards on a dark-coloured rope she had tautly clasped between her legs. Her head was tilted seductively; her blonde hair hanging in strands. Her face reflected a languid ecstasy, mouth half open, her hands gripping the rope on which she appeared to be swinging back and forth. Radjen was aware that he was observing her as he would a grown woman, with the same lust. For several moments he stared at her bare belly, the navel, and sensed in himself the shameless need to reach for that belly with his hand, to stroke her there and whisper gentle words to make her feel safe, saying she would never fall, because he’d be there to catch her.