Return to Hiroshima
Page 33
* * *
Shoganai, Xavier Douterloigne thinks as he sits beneath the cherry blossoms. That’s the way it is. Between the branches, the spring sun pitches shards of light that land on his closed eyelids. He has the feeling that he understands nothing about life, and that it’s OK. Not good, just OK. He opens his eyes and starts to dig, carefully at first and then with trembling fingers. He doesn’t take long before he feels something hard. Moments later, he’s holding the tin box he buried with his sister Anna in both hands. The promise wasn’t fulfilled as it should have been, Xavier thinks. More than ten years had passed and things hadn’t turned out as they had expected. The trembling in his hands gets worse as he opens the box. The paper on which Anna wrote her poems has turned dark green from the damp and the Porsche 956K Hockenheim has patches of rust here and there, but the locks of hair are in perfect condition, as are their father’s pen and their mother’s medal.
Xavier holds his breath. It’s impossible, but his eyes aren’t deceiving him. There’s a dark red petal at the bottom of the box.
He’s certain the petal wasn’t there when they buried the box. And even if he’s mistaken, it’s still impossible: cherry blossom petals only keep their intense colour for a couple of days.
While his brains grumble in protest, Xavier Douterloigne thinks back to what Anna said in the cemetery in Flanders Fields.
He holds the petal to his nose. Its smell stuns him... like an arrow to the heart.
125
Tokyo – St. Luke Hospital – Tsukiji –
neurology department – professor Arima
and chief commissioner Takamatsu – April 11th 1995
“Professor Arima, I’m chief commissioner Takamatsu of the Hiroshima prefecture. I need you to...”
“Can’t it wait? We’re under incredible pressure treating the two-hundred plus patients that were brought in after the sarin attack.”
“It’s an important matter.”
“Is it that urgent, Mr Takamatsu?”
“It’s about Mr Takeda. He’s in ward three, if I’m properly informed.”
“Mr Takeda. A moment… Yes, you’re correct chief commissioner. But get to the point, please.”
“Takeda was one of my inspectors in Hiroshima. He was suffering from depression and killed his wife just before he fled to Tokyo.”
“Is that so? Serious business indeed. You’ve come to arrest him, I presume?”
“I have subordinates to do that kind of thing, professor Arima. I’m more interested in his condition...”
“Doesn’t ward three ring a bell, Takamatsu?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“That’s where we keep people ‘alive’ who were in such bad shape when they were brought in we had to use a defibrillator on them. The majority are in a vegetative state, literally. The sarin completely poisoned their nervous system. If Mr Takeda ever emerges from the coma he’s in, he’ll have the intellectual age of a four-year-old infant. Large parts of his brain have been damaged. He won’t be able to use his limbs anymore, but we still have to wait and see how serious that paralysis will be.”
“Will he be able to speak, doctor?”
“He’ll be able to make noises, but carry on a conversation or make a statement... forget it, commissioner. The man is a complete wreck and will stay that way until the day he dies. If I wasn’t a doctor and hadn’t sworn the Hippocratic Oath, I would advise euthanasia. It would be more humane than keeping him alive. But isn’t that the way we are here in Japan? Duty prevails over everything. Will you excuse me?”
“Of course, doctor, with pleasure.”
Bob Van Laerhoven published more than 30 novels in Holland and Belgium. He explored trouble-spots across the globe from 1990 to 2003: Somalia, Liberia, Sudan, Gaza, Iran, Iraq, Myanmar, Mozambique, Lebanon, Burundi, Kosovo…During the Bosnian war, in 1995, he sneaked into the besieged town of Tuzla when the refugees arrived from the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica. This resulted in the book Sebrenica.Testimony to a Mass Murder.
De wraak van Baudelaire won him the Hercule Poirot Prize for best suspense novel of the year in Flanders in 2007. The French translation La Vengeance de Baudelaire was published in 2013, followed by Baudelaire’s Revenge in the US, and Месть Бодлера in Russia. Baudelaire’s Revenge won the USA Best Book Award 2014 in the category “mystery/suspense.” Laerhoven’s short story collection Dangerous Obsessions (2015) was “best short story collection of the year” in The San Diego Book Review and is translated in Italian, Brazilian, Spanish, and Swedish. Heart Fever, his second collection, came out in the US in January 2018. He contributed to Brussels Noir in Akashic’s famous Noir-series. Brussels Noir was translated in French and in Polish.
Word-of-mouth is essential for any author to succeed.
If you enjoyed Return to Hiroshima, please consider
leaving a review on Amazon.
Even a couple of lines would make a difference
and would be extremely appreciated.
Crime Wave Press is a Hong Kong based fiction imprint that endeavors to publish the best new crime novels from around the globe.
Founded in 2012 by acclaimed publisher
Hans Kemp of Visionary World and
seasoned writer Tom Vater, Crime Wave Press publishes a
range of crime fiction – from whodunits to Noir and Hardboiled,
from historical mysteries to espionage thrillers,
from literary crime to pulp fiction,
from highly commercial page turners to
marginal texts exploring the world’s dark underbelly.
Crime Wave Press promotes strong voices, exceptional talent and
unique points of view in the crime fiction genre.
Visit our website: www.crimewavepress.com
Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/CrimeWavePress
If you like to be among the first to hear about new
Crime Wave Press releases
and special Crime Wave Press promotions sign up for
our mailing list on our website.
We promise to never share your email with anyone.
The Crime Wave Press Team