The Public Prosecutor

by Jef Geeraerts

  Brecht gendarmes Verhaert and Ramael went about matters in a completely different way. Discretion was not their strong point and they hadn’t so much as a notion of professional secrecy. Verhaert got drunk in a café on Brecht’s market square after a provincial football match and spilled every detail, including names and places. It was the main point of conversation in the local shops the day after. The plot quickly evolved as the gossip machine invented and introduced new details. Within twenty-four hours “the tart with the horses… you know the one… hung herself from a beam in the garage because some rich bastard from Antwerp dumped her…” In some quarters, the “rich bastard” was a furniture manufacturer, in others a bigwig in the judiciary. Housewives cycling past the farmhouse on the Oude Baan stopped to peer through the windows. The empty buildings confirmed their theory that a terrible drama had taken place. Some versions were closer to the truth: D’Hoog, the vet from Brecht, regularly checked up on her horses and everybody knew he was a bit of a ladies’ man who wasn’t averse to settling his bills in bed. He had disappeared without a trace, and nobody believed the colleague who replaced him when he said that the man had been planning a trip to Africa for a long time. “Tell us another one…” was the usual reaction.

  CID sergeant Vermeersch picked up on some of the gossip, but simply shrugged his shoulders. During a phone call with his friend Verhaert he said in his best Antwerp dialect: “Charley boy, what do women get up to when they’ve nothing gossip about? Ha, no idea? They look for something else to do!” At that point both men roared with laughter.

  Soliman was stabled at the Black Stallion, a classy riding club in Schilde. He had a spacious box, received biologically balanced feed and fresh straw every evening, but he missed the calm of his old surroundings, Yamma his mother and the paddock where he was free to run and where every smell was familiar to him. The to-ing and fro-ing of stable boys and perfumed ladies who couldn’t resist rubbing his nose made him nervous. And to top it all, he hadn’t been introduced to any of the other horses! Two days after they brought him to the club in that bloody trailer, his boss had visited in the company of an unfamiliar woman, who did nice things and whispered strange words in his ear in a language his boss had never used. His boss had saddled him and they had done some dressage training in the manège, which smelled of unfamiliar sand and where a bunch of jabbering girls had taken lessons on horses that had flattened their ears when he got too close. His boss had lead him outside at that point to let him run loose in an open pen. He was able to fool around for a while before his boss dismounted to give the strange woman a ride. She had a much firmer hand than his boss and her movements were fairly abrupt, but she kept talking to him and when she had finally worked him into a gallop, he had reared up with vigour - just to free his mouth - and broken into a sprint with her, slinging his head from side to side and turning sharply, but he had not been able to shake her off. At that point, his boss did something he had never done before: clap hard with his hands. She then urged him into a comfortable trot, a gait he utterly detested, and her movements became gentler. The boss took over at the end and the woman clapped her hands as he had done.

  For the first time since his ordination in 1974, in the cathedral of Toledo, where his grand-uncle had once been archbishop, Joaquín Pla y Daniel gave in to regression, something psychiatrists consider to be a natural defence mechanism against one of the most dangerous neuroses in existence, namely fixation. The focal point of his fixation had appeared thirty years earlier when he was studying philosophy at the University of Navarra, an Opus Dei institution in Pamplona: El Padre himself, the blessed Josemaría Escrivá. During a visit to the university, the extremely gifted student Pla y Daniel was introduced to Escrivá and given permission to kneel and receive his blessing, something he considered a great honour. From that moment onwards, something changed for ever in Pla y Daniel. His experience was like that of Saint Paul, who, according to Acts of the Apostles, was struck to the ground by a bolt of lightning. Pla y Daniel’s youth had been marked by endless frustration at his heartless mother, which lead to his hatred of all women, and he became obsessed, with baroque Spanish fanaticism, with the figure of El Padre, pledging privately to live according to the letter of his writings and teachings. The second fixation, which appeared five years later, was a logical consequence of the first: he was appointed as mentor in the formation of a group of students who were in the preparatory phase of training to become numeraries, the highest grade of membership. His uncompromising character occasionally took him too far, and after the suicide of one of the candidates he was advised to soften his approach. His reaction was to do a nine-day retreat, fast completely, drink only water, wear the cilice throughout and endure the excruciating thigh cramps it caused, and subject himself to the discipline three times a day while reciting the Salve Regina at the top of his voice. After the retreat he continued his Spartan approach to formation unmitigated, as if nothing had happened. When one of the candidate numeraries flew at his throat in a bout of sudden rage, he was invited to an audience with El Padre himself, who admonished him paternally, transferred him to Rome and promoted him to procurator of the Institution, third in line to the top. His career had taken a considerably positive turn. Every door in the Vatican was now open to him, even that of John Paul II.

  The regression that he was presently indulging took shape in his approach to the Belgian “girl” who was on retreat in the House. He had decided arbitrarily to “guide” her though the process, taking the Trident as his point of departure: penance; complete subjection to the mentor; strict and unremitting devotion. He intended to persevere until the goal of the Trident had been achieved: render the subject infantile, depersonalized and culpable (the condition of an innocent child bursting with feelings of guilt). Years of experience in Spain had taught him that the human spirit could be destabilized with relative ease using isolation, repetition and exhaustion. He chose the food she would eat, for example, limiting her to dry bread with a glass of Roman tap water, which tasted of chlorine. The isolation process consisted of a prohibition against conversation with others and the requirement to perform a series of duties, including the submission of a two-hourly written report to the mentor of the entire group, a Basque by the name of Pedro Ruiz Arcaute, who hailed from the same region as blessed Josemaría and was equal to Pla y Daniel in zealous piety. Lectures were given every day that paid little attention to the end of the Cold War and warned against three dangers: crypto-Marxism and Freemasonry, which destroy religion; sexuality, which turns humans into animals; and subjectivism, which leads to tolerance. According to the amalgama method, the said three dangers were always referred to in a single breath, as if they were one and the same.

  Every day, lengthy talks and meditations were given on one’s duty to be an instrument in the hands of God, according to the magisterium of the Catholic Church, which would ultimately be taken over by Opus Dei with world domination as the final goal.

  If there was anything wrong in the written reports, the “girls” were collectively humiliated with one of El Padre’s sayings: Don’t fly like a barnyard hen when you can soar like an eagle. Amandine had dared to say that she did not understand the connection. She was ridiculed: a woman did not have to understand, she had to function within the role pattern ascribed to her. She needed time to discuss the matter with God in prayer, was her retort. Ruiz snapped that it was inappropriate to make reference to God in public. When she replied with tears in her eyes that she wanted to dedicate her life to Him alone, she was advised with a snigger to dedicate herself to the “Apostolate of Not-Giving”, leaving her even more confused than ever.

  At a certain moment, her room was cleared of furniture and the showers were closed. Ruiz dismissed her concerns and gave her orders to write a commentary on the subject “Detachment from whatever is not of God”: objects, persons, the self, one’s own ideas, health, time, leisure, study, work, family, money, self-satisfaction…

  Her concern about being unable t
o talk to her eldest son in Leuven (she had made several attempts but the line was dead) was met with an admonition to avoid the people she loved, because feelings of attachment were inclined to encourage time-wasting. In addition to this, it was forbidden to examine the origins of one’s own uneasiness in this regard. An infamous Jesuit humiliation, employed on occasion by Paul Hersch, was similarly part of Ruiz’s drill: the use of “spiritual eleemosynae”, an Opus Dei expression for public humiliation by the other group members, who exposed one’s shortcomings in a feigned effort to encourage a change of ways. Amandine was accused of being pretentious. She was devastated, but managed to contain herself with difficulty. She lost several nights’ sleep over the remark, and even the silent recitation of the Salve Regina lying on the hard floor (according to the regulations, the night silence prohibited praying out loud) did not help.

  At the end of three days, the lack of food had left her in a permanent state of weakness. She had also been required to hand in her credit card to cover “costs”. She had left her passport in her room at the Casa Belgica on Via Omero, but someone from Opus Dei had collected it together with her luggage. Each evening, two bank transfer slips were left next to her bread and water, one for the daily “generosity” collection and one for the purchase of flowers. She refused one of her obligations without drawing attention to the fact: kissing the floor when she got up in the morning. She had been unable to overcome her obsessive hatred of dirty floors.

  When the retreat finally came to an end at three in the afternoon on 31 May, Amandine felt as if she had just begun to recover from a bad flu, physically and mentally exhausted. To round off her visit, and much to her surprise, she was invited to have dinner with Pla y Daniel in one of the opulent salons of the House, the very place in which El Padre used to entertain select company in the past, what he called “the apostolate of the table”.

  The table was adorned with antique linen, Sèvres porcelain on gilded plates, cutlery, crystal glasses and candles in a golden candelabra. She was well enough informed about Opus Dei to know that it was solid gold.

  The courses were served by female Opus Dei candidates in simple attire, who brought each plate and nodded without a saying a word. The magnificent sideboards and leather-clad walls lacked any form of religious symbolism. A glass display cabinet, containing at least a hundred porcelain, bronze, wood, terracotta, papier-mâché and metal donkeys, decorated one of the corners. El Padre insisted it was his favourite animal, and liked to tell his guests that he was “the humble donkey of Christ”.

  The many courses were accompanied by the most exquisite wines, at which Amandine guardedly sipped. She politely refused a serving of risotto with white truffles. Pla y Daniel ate and drank to his heart’s content, summoned the waitresses with a table bell, dismissed them with a wave of the hand and launched into a series of Vatican jokes about the Pope and the curial cardinals. Puffing at a quality Havana cigar over coffee, he finally returned to the point; his expression turned cold and vacant, and he issued strict orders for 2 June, when she was to attend a meeting with a “notary of our choosing” in the company of a Belgian numerary. Pla y Daniel rounded the evening off by handing her an envelope containing a bill for the retreat, her credit card, her passport and her airline tickets.

  Paul Hersch’s approach to Didier Savelkoul differed considerably to the treatment the young man’s mother had received in Rome. Hersch was beside himself with rage at having walked into Hervé van Reyn’s trap and fallen for his intimidation technique. He was now being obliged to do something he detested - complete an assignment for which he was not trained, an assignment that would backfire on him if it were to fail. The stench of double standards was enough to make even Machiavelli proud, but he didn’t give a damn.

  He was tense and restless, like an imprisoned rat searching for an escape route. His paranoid mind saw only one solution: someone else had to pay the price. And was there anyone more appropriate for the job than Didier Savelkoul, the incarnation of moral masochism? He decided to give him his “preferential treatment”, which he used on occasion to break rebellious candidates: he ignored him completely. When they crossed each other’s path somewhere in the building, he would turn his head and enjoy the thought of Savelkoul’s wincing face, like a terrified child looking up from a deep well. He usually invited him to visit his office once a day to discuss matters of concern and hear him out on his fellow students. He was well aware that these meetings were important to Savelkoul, providing him an opportunity to recharge the batteries of his identity. But Hersch’s house line had been blocked for three days in a row. His office, where he spent up to fourteen hours a day studying new “psychological formation techniques”, and where he was now taking his meals, remained unaired.

  He would sit for hours ruminating and fretting, like a sitting giant with the brachycephalic head of a Saxon farmer, brooding on the best way to satisfy his lust for revenge.

  He finally made his move at midnight on 29 May. With the softest of voices, he appointed Savelkoul superintendant in charge of buildings, knowing full well that his assistant hated practical matters of this kind.

  His behaviour during the weekly jog was equally bizarre: he encouraged the stragglers to keep up with vulgar and foul language. All this had to do with an increasing self-hatred brought on by his inability to square up to van Reyn. The stuck-up petty aristocrat with his toffee-nosed lingo would probably have been obliged to accept his response. His usual psychological defence mechanisms had failed him one after the other. For the first time in his life he had taken sleeping pills for three nights in a row.

  Baron Hervé van Reyn was in the best of form. He had spoken with notary Vroman and prospects were excellent. They had examined the notarial deed of purchase together and formulated a proposal to be presented to Amandine de Vreux. The properties were not to be donated to Opus Dei, for the simple reason that the Institute would thus be faced with a bill from the Belgian state for up to eighty per cent of the value of the gift (68,800,000 Belgian francs) in registration fees. Rather, Amandine de Vreux was to sell the properties to an anonymous company by the name of Rumpus, one of Opus Dei’s numerous fiscal and legal fronts. Van Reyn was to hand her the sale price in cash (in an attaché case), and she was to sign for receipt in the presence of the notary. Once they had left the scene of purchase Amandine was to return the attaché case to van Reyn. The money itself came from Atlantis, a non-profit organization used by Belgium’s Opus Dei to launder its undeclared income. A reduced registration fee of 12.5 per cent (8,600,000 Belgian francs) was considered a reasonable price to pay.

  A notarial donation had thus been transformed by fraudulent means into an act of sale, with the sole purpose of avoiding payment of eighty per cent registration fee to the Belgian state. Baroness Amandine de Vreux was not informed that her heirs (her two sons), both partially disinherited by this fraudulent procedure, would have to face much more serious difficulties after her death. The Belgian tax authorities would then present them with a substantial bill (art. 108 of the Belgian fiscal code on inheritance rights) for the enormous revenue acquired from the property sale (of which their mother had not received a single cent). Opus Dei was completely indifferent to the fact that both Savelkoul sons would be considerably disadvantaged by their actions (Geoffroy wasn’t even a member). Pla y Daniel, who had studied law in Spain, spoke with Hervé van Reyn on the telephone about the question. Wasn’t Opus Dei acting in total contradiction to the principles of Belgian civil law? Monseigneur van Reyn had replied with a snigger that the boys would be ill-advised to challenge Opus Dei on the matter without the help of a very good lawyer. He was simply too euphoric to worry about it. Everything appeared to have gone according to plan. Developments in that unsavoury affair with the whore also appeared to be moving in the right direction. Strangely enough, it had become a point of honour for van Reyn that the two sons be granted an aristocratic title. After all, Belgium’s Opus Dei would then be a baron richer. Before contacting the royal
court, however, he had to wait for the result of Paul Hersch’s operation, which was set to begin on 2 June. It was all very strange. The only person to remain completely free of guilt up to that point was the man himself, the guilty party. Van Reyn had sworn to bring him to his knees. He considered the five million francs stashed away in the Swiss bank account a mere bagatelle, which Opus Dei fully deserved.

  On Monday 31 May, the date of the second fortnightly meeting of Antwerp’s Rotary Club, Albert appeared an hour later than was his custom. The Rotarians were settling down to their main course and the atmosphere was the same as always, a little like a London gentlemen’s club: the executive members wore ribbons of honour round their necks to signify their function, and the entire company was dressed as one would expect of such a gathering. The conversation was animated and the wine abundant. Albert’s chair, between Walter de Ceuleneer and Georges Weyler, was empty. He took his place, emptied a glass of water in one gulp and asked for a refill.