Brussels Noir

by Michel Dufranne

Cursing in Flemish the whole way in the car. Traffic jam in the city center. I crawl toward the boulevard Emile Jacqmain and the Hilton at the place Rogier. Oh well, the painting I was working on when that bastard Meijers called has every chance of becoming a failure anyway. Les mangeurs des enfants is eating me.

  In the Hilton bar I only have to follow the din to find Eliath Meijers. With great cunning, he wears the disguise of a potbellied sugar daddy. In reality, he nearly chokes on his own venom. Meijers is the CEO of an import/export firm and has Lebanese—a Lebanese pretending to be a Jew—and Belgian citizenship, is registered in Liechtenstein but lives in the well-to-do village of Drogenbos near Brussels. He is married to a Dutch Valkyrie by the name of Birgit Waarsenbergs.

  Underneath the mask of the jolly uncle who’s fond of tasteless jokes, Meijers is the uncrowned king of the murky trade in very expensive and very fake paintings.

  “Sit down, Drees.” Blinking innocently at me, he taps the stool next to his well-filled ass.

  I sit down close to him and put my right arm around his shoulder, pushing my thigh against his. “Come on, Meijers, don’t be shy, give me a tongue dance.”

  Grinning, he leans over so I can kiss his Azzaro-sprinkled cheek. He would like to cuddle me, I’m sure, but we’re not alone. Off to the side, one of his bodyguards is staring through his glass of tea at us. His face is consumed by the solipsism of Allah’s righteousness.

  Meijers glances at me, his eyes flickering mischief. “You’ve become fat.”

  “What, you don’t have a mirror at home, Meijers?”

  He has watched too many classic mob movies, ingested too much Hollywood. He wants to be treated like a capo and I’m treating him like he’s Dostoevsky’s Idiot.

  “A drink? Some food? They have delicious—”

  “No, I don’t want a drink or some food. Let me guess why you wanted to see me: you’ve decided you have way too much money and you want to bestow it on me as redemption for your many bloody sins.”

  He chuckles, but not too enthusiastically. There is something on his mind.

  “If you want me to falsify a Mondrian for one of those über-rich, stiff-upper-lip bitches who can’t see the difference between a toddler’s drawing and an algebra exercise, then the answer is no.”

  Meijers pretends he’s laughing so hard that he’s nearly suffocating in his next gulp of coffee. He simply loves my charade and so he acts as if I’m his idol.

  “You’re still boxing, garçon? Oh, you’ve got those heavy, strong arms. Let me pinch them, come on, they can’t be real.”

  “No English boxing, Meijers. Nippon kempo and Thai box.”

  “Could you beat a regular, sound boxer with all that fancy Eastern stuff, Drees? Can you prove it to old Meijers? I’ll arrange something. No-holds-barred.”

  “That sounds to me like an old-fashioned street fight, Meijers. Good enough for me. But I’ll bring my own assistant. Yours would drug my drink so that you could win the bets you’d surely organize.”

  Roaring laughter. Eyes toward the ceiling, exposing his throat.

  We look each other in the eye. We’re akin. We’re not friends.

  “Serge has threatened me.” Meijers always changes the subject like that. And never, ever, even during the most delicate conversations, does he lower his voice. “He said he would show me the color of my intestines with his assegai, something like that, very poetic, that boy. Such a beautiful kid, totally different from you, Drees, you hairy ape . . . Serge is a . . . a reed, a gleaming black stallion, a—”

  “Let me guess: Serge threatened you because you paid him a lot less than what you’d promised for the false Greuze.”

  Meijers leans toward me. Tiny beads of sweat on those bulldog cheeks. I don’t like the man but he’s never stood in my way. He loves money. I love money.

  “You know him well, Drees. You think he’s up to it? You should’ve seen him foaming at the corners of his mouth. A creature of the wild from top to bottom.”

  Before my mind’s eye, with razor-sharp precision, I picture Serge in the Parc de Forest, his assegai pointed toward my balls.

  No, Serge isn’t up to it. I chuckle.

  “Why the laughing?”

  “He slaughtered his own father, Eliath.”

  His small eyes blink into mine.

  “Serge is as mad as an armadillo with tropical fever rattling in his skull.” I’m on a roll now, puffing steam. Oh hell, this is exhilarating. “I would be very careful if I were you. And afraid.”

  “Did he really kill his own father?”

  “He told me the story, every detail of it.”

  “And you believe him?”

  “Fucking A.”

  Eliath sighs, slurps the last drops of his coffee. He groans like a small child plagued by a nightmare.

  “He has a pretty wife, Drees. And what I heard is that you—”

  “Gossip. People project their dreams onto me, Eliath. Why? Because I am the Artist with a capital fucking A. I rob their souls and transcend—”

  “Yeah, yeah. But Serge . . .”

  “Oh, he’ll get you sooner or later. The things he’ll do with your puny circumcised dick, sweet Lord, I don’t even want to think about . . .”

  “Drees, you foul-mouthed barbarian, I’m so fond of your blabber.” Meijers smiles. His eyes reflect the light, nothing else.

  “How’s your daughter doing?” If he can change subjects abruptly, so can I.

  Gitte, Meijer’s daughter, is a bouncy, black-haired teenager with Lolita eyes. She leads Meijers by the ring in his nose. Nasty rumors suggest that Gitte can’t be his—the beauty and the beast, etc. Whatever. If you want to change the subject, just mention her name and he goes off like a firecracker.

  “She’s the light of my life, Drees. She’s so artistique. Of course she must grow. She adores your paintings and she thinks you’re real macho. But tell me more about Serge.”

  Ooh la la, so quickly with his feet on the ground again: Serge is for sure weighing heavy on his mind. Let’s rev it up here . . .

  Half an hour later I say goodbye. As a bonus, on top of the bloodcurdling stories I invented about Serge, I lick Meijers, grunting like a Labrador, over his mustache while bear-hugging him. His upper lip tastes of sour sweat and pomade.

  The whole trip back to my house, although stuck for a long time in a traffic jam again, I’m grinning like a lunatic.

  * * *

  Three weeks later, someone—I don’t recall his name, which is strange, it must have been a mutual friend and I don’t do ether—told me that Serge’s body had been found in a crack in a rock in the vicinity of the village of Beez, close to Namur, in the Ardennes. Suicide by hanging was the verdict.

  Jeanine looked gorgeous at Serge’s funeral, graced by the attendance of nearly the whole Tutsi clan of Brussels. A journalist and art critic, whose blood I could drink, told me a few days ago that rumor has it that a doctor sedated Jeanine so she could attend the funeral. According to him—frog’s eyes and a Schiller collar—the drug made Jeanine look even more torpid and defenseless than usual, and thus even more sexy. He also wanted to communicate that Serge had squandered his huge talent—but I cut him short: “Serge Butoyara was a much better painter than I could ever be.” I saw in his face that I had sold him a headline for his next article.

  Eliath Meijers didn’t attend the funeral but he did send an enormous garland, flashy as a parrot. The monstrous thing had to be carried by three men.

  Listen carefully: I am 100 percent sure that it was suicide. Meijers had nothing to do with it.

  Serge was that unstable type you find everywhere: unable to give his life shape and meaning.

  If we painters can’t give shape and meaning to mankind’s measly existence, who can?

  Moreover, not everything I told Meijers was a lie.

  Serge really killed his father.

  He confessed it to me.

  A story like a nightmare, really.

  * * *

  “We
were cruising through the jungle, Drees, my father and I. He was a freckled Flemish redhead. Imagine that. I never knew how he survived Rwanda’s mighty sun. Freckles . . . in our sunbathing mountains.

  “He used to beat my mother and me. We lived in Save, at his mission post in the mountains. Yeah, sure, Rwanda is the African equivalent of Switzerland and all that crap . . .

  “I never knew what he was thinking or what kind of mood he was in. He hardly spoke to me, except when he hit me. On those occasions, he grunted the same expression over and over again, a Flemish curse I suppose. Oh, almost forgot: each morning he would snarl the day’s chores at me. So much for conversation between father and son.

  “I used to look at his reddish fringe of beard that kept rising and falling like a small ferocious animal when he was cursing at my mother and me.

  “We rode into the valley of Save, had to stock up on supplies. My father drove the Land Rover hard, as usual. I don’t remember much about the accident. At the moment of the crash, I was staring at the sky going misty behind the ridges and fantasizing about the mythical Rwandese hero Ryangombe, who my mother used to tell me stories about. That very morning she’d related the tale of how Ryangombe threw himself on the horns of a giant bull to save other people. I was wondering why Ryangombe had done such an utterly foolish thing. He had to know that he would be punctured, the moron. The tip of the Nubaru Mountain suddenly tilted. Something seemed to puncture me and I heard a thrilling cry, like that from a bird of prey, precisely the same cry that Ryangombe had uttered when he died.

  “When I regained consciousness, the Land Rover was lying on its side next to me. My father’s upper body stuck out of the window. My back hurt, but I seemed okay. I stumbled toward my father. Blood trickled down into his red beard, pooled upon his closely shaven skull. His eyes, however, were open.

  “Open the door, boy, help me. So soft, his voice. I had never heard it before, that kind of tone. It scared me. As if a ghost in his head was talking to me after he had left his body.

  “Now he looked at me. What he saw made him turn his eyes away.

  “What I saw made me turn my eyes away.

  “I sat down beside him and I watched the mist engulfing the faraway ridges, like bleached cotton on black river pebbles. The village of Save was close enough to go there by foot and ask for help. My father didn’t mention the car door anymore. He remained silent. When I stole a glance at him, he was staring at a pebble on the ground.

  “I stayed sitting there until dusk. I must have been there for about nine hours, but I didn’t feel hungry or thirsty. When three farmers found us, there was no breath left in my father’s breast.

  “The farmers couldn’t drive. I told them I could. Between the four of us we managed to get the car upright.

  “We drove back to Save. I was immensely proud behind the steering wheel with the three farmers crowded together in the front seat and the body of my father bouncing up and down in the back. Faster and faster we went. It was the ride of my life. When we arrived, the farmers, myself, and my father’s body were covered with gray dust.

  “The farmers said I was crazy. I had driven so fast I could hear the wind whistling in my hair.

  “And I told them that from now on, my name was Serge Butoyara, my mother’s name.”

  * * *

  You dream of me while I’m crouching on your chest like the simian you said I was, Drees.

  Shed my leading role in your nightmare. Wake up and move that bleached old man’s body.

  Don’t lie snoring contently in your bed with your mouth wide open.

  Your closed eyes don’t fool me.

  You’re awake and still you can feel me, can’t you?

  You have killed me just as I killed my father.

  Get up.

  Don’t you hear the telephone ringing?

  You’ve had many calls over these last few days.

  Breathing calls.

  Your phone is ringing in the middle of the night.

  Any moment now, you’ll open your eyes, you’ll bolt upright, grab the phone.

  You’ll hear the breathing.

  Maybe Meijers has decided that you’ve become a liability.

  That you know too much about Serge and him.

  Maybe a woman whose heart and soul you wounded is planning revenge on you.

  There . . . there you go, Drees . . .

  Only the sound of breathing and the thumping of your heart.

  II

  You want to understand my artistic vision of life?

  Okay, take a peek at my last painting. Took me months, an Eiffel Tower of Campari bottles—yes, I drink Campari, dickhead—and buckets of sweat.

  After that canvas, I haven’t had a single brush in my hand.

  And I finished it a year ago, go figure.

  I’m sure Serge managed to implant the horrid image in this fine piece of art in my brain. From now on you’ll be a lousy painter.

  Revenge from the grave.

  I exhibited the painting in the Memorias gallery in de Wolstraat. It was a group exhibition, so I thought I could risk it.

  “Has the Renowned Artist Drees de Grijse Gone Mad?” was one of the headlines of a critique in a “quality newspaper.”

  For sure drunk and stoned and deep in Alzheimer’s, that slimeball.

  My artistic thesis for this painting is as follows: life is one of those giant eels crawling in a muddy seabed with a maw bigger than its tail.

  So I went ahead and painted one of these fuckers. What’s the big deal? Pic-fucking-asso would’ve gotten away with it.

  Okay, my background—nothing but mud and slime—is a bit monotonous on the canvas.

  But the eel . . . man! The eel’s head looks more like a suction cleaner, actually. Sucks everything into the shit deep under the muddy water.

  When life wiggles its tail, you hope something out of the ordinary will happen: you fall in love, you betray your best friend, you fuck his wife, you endure painter’s block.

  You do those things and the result is a shitload of problems. Your best friend ends up dead, followed by night-calls—pant pant, wheeze wheeze—mystery, suspicion, fear.

  And a thumping heart.

  And then—nothing.

  No more calls. No more mystery. People do normal things again. The woman named Jeanine, a dangerous sphinx in my opinion, moved to Amsterdam to become the lover of the proprietor of a goddamn weed shop.

  As if that woman isn’t already high enough from herself.

  So you forget what happened. So easy to settle again, squander your days, waiting for your earthly demise—in the meantime wining, dining, fornicating.

  But not painting. The famous Drees de Grijse has retired, hey-ho.

  Only, just when I—by pure luck—had sold my exceedingly mauvais eel painting to one of those blasé MEPs wasting the European taxpayer’s money—he considers my eel avant-garde!—precisely then, life immediately grabs my throat again.

  Brussels may be an unkempt and filthy city with way too much traffic coursing through it, and with an architecture that has no spirit to offer except greed and contempt, but the pearl-gray light of a September evening can turn some of its corners into a cozy fantasy.

  I’m sitting on the terrace of Marché aux puces on place Jeu de Balle with a half-empty bottle of Campari, celebrating the sale of my horror painting, simultaneously wrestling, however, with a linguistic problem. There was a time when puces meant hookers, wasn’t there? Or does it only mean flies? The Campari and the candy colors of some of the nineteenth-century houses surrounding the plaza, bordered with sycamores, don’t do much to enlighten me. Hookers—definitely.

  “Drees! Drees de Grijse! Of all people . . . Coincidence doesn’t exist.”

  I look up.

  What a coincidence.

  Gitte Meijers. Little Gitte. Daughter of Eliath Meijers and Birgit Waarsenbergs. The light of Eliath’s eyes. And he had such tiny piglet peepers, the scumbag.

  Gitte Meijers. Her eyebrow
s so wide, her upper eyelids painted black, her face geisha-white, her lips dark as sea anemones, stars on her cheeks, mandalas on her arms.

  She’s—what—eighteen, nineteen now? In spite of her extravagant makeup, she has that dark look of her father. How long ago kaput, that hog Meijers? Two, three years? Time flies and all that jazz. Some devilish cancer. Pancreas? In any case, it went lightning-fast. Great reception after the funeral. Lots of expensive booze. Blond Birgit looked extremely fuckable in her black outfit. I told her so and she agreed.

  Her daughter wears a bodysuit with fucking beach sandals, the outfit a maze of white and gray circles. She moves en vogue, yeah.

  “Do you like my color palette, Drees?” She points to her face.

  “Bellissima.”

  “Going to a dance party.” She comes closer, almost leans over my shoulder. “Did you know that I have reproductions of all your paintings in my room?”

  “Kneel before them every evening and say your prayers; they’ll bring you luck.”

  She laughs. She’s young, she doesn’t sense that I’m tense.

  Gitte. Gitte Meijers.

  “Want to come along? I was waiting for my friend, but he’s more than an hour late.” A shrug of her slender shoulders. “These days he’s more obsessed with dealing than with me.” Her face brightens. “There will be a top-class deejay at the rave.”

  With some decorum, I grope in my leather jacket and put on my dark glasses. She giggles. Years ago, I wrote a threatening letter to her father, stating that I knew he was a murderer. I didn’t send it. Instead I buried the letter in the small village of Beez, close to Namur, in the Ardennes. In a certain crack in a rock. There, I asked Serge’s spiteful spirit to take revenge on Meijers, sooner or later. I was apeshit drunk, so I forgot my vow; however, nature in the form of Meijers’s cancerous pancreas did the rest.

  Much obliged, nature.

  Hours later. Gitte isn’t going to no party. She sits on the terrace with me, listening breathlessly to my ramblings about one of my forefathers who was of Spanish descent, and a nobleman to boot. Sadly enough, that capitano couldn’t resist raping girls. “Querida, querida!” he howled during his vile acts, whereupon, his beastly lust quenched, he strangled those poor lasses.