The Public Prosecutor E-Book

Jef Geeraerts

• Herausgeber: Bitter Lemon Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

Albert Savelkoul, Public Prosecutor of Antwerp has power, money, an aristocratic wife and a high-maintenance mistress. A wonderful life-until Opus Dei takes a less than benevolent interest in it. So starts a harrowing yet humorous tale of blackmail and murder.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

 

Title Page

 

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

 

BACK TO THE COAST

THE VAMPIRE OF ROPRAZ

A NOT SO PERFECT CRIME

DOG EATS DOG

Copyright Page

Jef Geeraerts was born in 1930 in Antwerp. He was educated in Jesuit schools and spent time as a colonial administrator and army officer in the Congo. He gained international acclaim with his Gangrene Cycle, four novels based on his experience in Africa. Geeraerts, Belgium’s best-known author after Georges Simenon, has more recently focused on crime and noir novels, of which The Public Prosecutor is the first to be published in English.

The sex life of the camelis not what one might think.In a single moment of weaknesshe tried to make love to the Sphinx.But the Sphinx’s rounded rearis filled with the sand of the Nile,which explains why camels have humpsand the Sphinx an inscrutable smile.

EGYPTIAN PARABLE

The primary concern of the judiciary is not to see what does not have to be seen.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

Grab one pig by the ear and all the others squeal.

POLISH FARMING PROVERB

1

While the Public Prosecutor was absorbed in his daily morning ritual in front of the bathroom mirror, his sense of satisfaction at the agreeable prospect of spending the entire week at home alone was increased considerably by the realization that he didn’t look bad at all for a man of sixty-four. Five foot six, 198 pounds naked, slightly overweight according to American norms, but this was due to his “muscles of iron and steel that had been marbled irreversibly with fat over the years”. A few sporadic streaks of grey dusted the temples of his thick, pitch-black hair. His lower jaw was angular, no sign of a double chin, his complexion bronzed, his nose classic Greek, his eyebrows Saracen, and he preferred to reveal his innate contempt for humanity as a whole with a crooked smile and an appraising look.

But there was barely a trace of contempt to be seen this Tuesday morning, 15 May 1999, a radiant spring day with expected noon temperatures around seventy-five degrees. He felt cool, like the cowboy in the Marlboro ad.

“Basically, it’s all a question of genes,” his school friend George Weyler (Jokke) used to say. The man was now a renowned internist earning ten times the Public Prosecutor’s salary, but having to work for it like an animal. “You need more exercise, Alberto,” Jokke would consistently complain at the fortnightly meetings of the Rotary Club, playfully poking Albert Savelkoul in the belly with his forefinger. With the exception of horse-riding and hunting, he wasn’t much of a sportsman, and he enjoyed eating in the best restaurants, where he had acquired a reputation for being a good judge of wines.

He concentrated on the purple veins that had recently appeared in the bags under his eyes. He pinched the skin between his thumb and forefinger and pulled it carefully, as if it were a piece of elastic. Guy Staas, another school friend and plastic surgeon to many a wealthy lady, had offered to give him a nip and tuck for next to nothing, but Albert thought real men would consider such a thing thoroughly shameful. He wasn’t sure why, exactly - perhaps because of his macho conviction that men on the whole are presentable enough and don’t need such surgical interventions.

For the second time that morning, he felt that damned pressure in his bladder. Was it what he feared? He suppressed a shiver of horror and forced himself to pay no attention to it, following his personal adage that problems disappear if you ignore them. He moved closer to the mirror, stretched his lips and inspected his teeth. His gums had been shrinking, so to speak, for some time, exposing the root tissue. He considered perfect teeth to be a must for a man of his standing. He was also of the opinion that the vast majority of his countrymen had more tartar in their mouths than ivory. He had no need to worry about that for the time being. He had a sturdy set of teeth, inherited from his mother, who had her first filling when she was seventy-six.

He cast a satisfied glance over at his dark hirsute torso, still comparable, more or less, with that of a forty-year-old athlete. The electronic scales were next, but he decided with a sigh to leave them out of his routine. He stretched and massaged his neck, which cracked, as it did every morning, when he twisted it left and right. But this morning had at least one positive feature. His wife, Baroness Marie-Amandine de Vreux d’Alembourg, had left the day before for a week visiting English gardens with her aristocratic friends. This meant he could enjoy breakfast unperturbed, an important aspect of what he called his “elementary male Lebensraum”. He was free to take his place at the table in the kitchen, barefoot, unshaven and in a kimono, something that pleased their Polish maid Maria Landowska no end. Amandine always dressed to the nines, even for breakfast, as if she’d been invited to afternoon tea at the palace. She would finish her porcelain pot of yogurt with affectation, her pinkie raised, and gaze absently past the Public Prosecutor and Maria, to whom she spoke only rarely, and then only to give her orders in broken Flemish, a language she barely understood. “One never says merci to the staff,” was one of the more haughty expressions she and her family had cherished for more than seven generations. Since the birth of their youngest son (September 1965) she had communicated with her husband by impersonal memo. On official occasions or at dinners where communication was unavoidable, they addressed one another with “ma chère” and “mon ami”, as if they were characters in a nineteenth-century French novel.

“Bah!” Albert grunted. He slipped quickly into the grey kimono with Samurai markings on the back (“The life of the warrior is short, powerful and merciless”). It had been a gift from his girlfriend Louise - his treasure, his greatest passion - when she had followed him the previous year to Kyoto, where he was attending a specialist conference on Anglo-Saxon law. Albert had represented Belgium, thanks in part to the intervention of his father-in-law, Baron Pierre Philippe de Vreux d’Alembourg, Emeritus Professor of Constitutional Law at the Université Catholique de Louvain, former Supreme Court judge and author of legal handbooks, and in part because he was one of the few Belgian magistrates who had acquired a DJS (Doctor of Juridical Sciences) at the University of Harvard.

“Bah!” said the Public Prosecutor for a second time when he thought of his father-in-law: ninety-four, still alive and kicking, but completely gaga. He lived alone with a maid and a butler in an elegant town house on Marie-Josélaan in Berchem. He was a descendant of the prominent de Vreux family, elevated to the aristocracy by Leopold I for their part in the establishment of the Belgian Constitution. Fortunately, he knew nothing of the less than ideal relationship between his only daughter Amandine and his former student Albert Savelkoul, which was a result of Albert’s young mistress. According to accepted custom, Amandine had cunningly concealed the affair with such skill that even their sons, Didier and Geoffroy, were unaware of it. The oldest, Didier, was a lawyer in Leuven and still single. Geoffroy had a pretty wife, two children and was counsellor to the embassy in Washington.

As he descended the stairs to the first floor, passing his collection of authentic, hand-coloured aquatints by Henry Alken, picturing straight-backed, fox-hunting gentlemen in top hats and tails on ridiculous horses, the god-awful odour of crushed silk haute couture outfits invaded his nose. True to tradition, Amandine had decided to air them a week ago, partly out of respect for the generations of old women who had once worn them, and partly because she couldn’t bring herself to throw anything out. He hated the smell with a vengeance, because it reminded him of death: ugliness and decay at its last gasp.

He looked at his watch. Eight thirty. She would still be asleep, his scrumptious little creature, his voluptuous little serpent, with whom he was still insanely in love after seventeen years. He would call her in an hour and tell her he was free. He would use his mobile, since he suspected his wife had been eavesdropping on his land-line calls. His office phone was out of the question. His predecessor had had a tap installed at the switchboard. Only his mobile was safe. He took pleasure in the paranoia he had been forced to create. It was the only way to preserve the privacy he cherished so much.

He stopped on the landing in front of a statuette of Our Lady of Fatima on a simple white marble console with three immaculate lilies in a vase at its side. He snorted disdainfully. “Sanctimonious hypocrite!” She insisted that Maria Landowska renew the lilies every day. It had been one of her dreams to have a Polish maid in residence, a dream that had been fulfilled with the help of one of the canons of Antwerp Cathedral. Maria, a young lady with a réputation immaculée, earned bed and board and the princely sum of sixteen thousand francs a month for a twelve-hour working day. She was a thirty-four-year-old country girl from the Kielce region of Poland, strong as an ox and Catholic without being bigoted. Albert had a soft spot for her. When Amandine was away, they would chat together in a mixture of German and Flemish. She would teach him Polish words and he would teach her popular Flemish sayings, and their conversations were burlesque on occasion. Her mother was the village fortune teller, who took her cow - Czowieka (Daisy) - for a walk every day.

“Salve Regina,” he said with solemnity, his eyes shut and his lips pursed, imitating Amandine’s habit of greeting the virgin every time she passed the statue. The pressure in his bladder returned. He took a deep breath and opened the door to the toilet. The flow was steady and frothy, and he was relieved. It wasn’t what he had feared after all. Jokke had told him that the first symptoms were “anal contractions and lazy urine”. Before flushing the WC, he bent his knees slightly to allow gravity to take its course and watched the last drop disappear into the pot, something he had seen in a film about American soldiers at the front during World War One.

He suddenly remembered something he had to look up urgently. “Oh, what a beautiful morning… Oh, what a beautiful day…” he crooned, marched into his office with what he called his “cavalryman’s gait”, switched on the light and immediately found what he was looking for on the bookshelf: a small black volume bound in artificial leather with the words The Teaching of Buddha embossed in gold on the spine. The bookmark was still at page 440. He started to read:

THE LIFE OF YOUNG WOMEN.

There are four types of women. Of the first type there are those who become angry for slight causes, who have changeable minds, who are greedy and jealous of others’ happiness and who have no sympathy for their needs.

He slammed the book shut. “Marie-Amandine de Vreux d’Alembourg to a tee,” he barked and slipped it between the South African and the Spanish versions of the New Testament. The majority of his wife’s lady friends belonged to this category. Louise belonged to category three, the good companion type. Category two wasn’t much better than category one. Category four covered the beatified cunt type, the kind that bored a man to the point of weariness. Albert wasn’t even remotely interested in philosophy and related disciplines and was likewise mildly immune to art. He considered the books in question to be little more than curiosa, all three stolen from hotel rooms where a Bible can usually be found in the bedside cabinet. The Teaching of Buddha was from Singapore, where he had attended a congress for jurists. The parallel English-Chinese text had made swiping it worth the effort.

He looked around the only room in the house that belonged to him and him alone with gratification. It was devoid of heirlooms and souvenirs from bygone days, the sight of which could depress a man in seconds. One wall was covered with solid wood bookshelves with his favourite authors: Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Ruark, Norman Mailer, V.S. Naipaul, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, Georges Simenon, Bruce Chatwin, Frederick Forsyth, Gabriel García Márquez, alongside an extended collection of biographies, which he referred to as his “lives of the saints”. His desk was an art deco dining table in beautifully grained hardwood. A shabby Afghan rug covered the floor. The only decoration was on the desk: the decapitated sandstone head of an authentic Khmer statue from Cambodia, mounted on a cast-iron base. A glass display cabinet exhibiting three double-barrelled shotguns and two hunting rifles, magnificent examples, well-oiled and gleaming, took up half of another wall. Four sets of stag antlers together with two impressive wild boar tusks graced the wall above.

He glanced fleetingly at his cherished weapons, was reminded of the Scottish Highlands where he regularly joined friends for a spot of hunting, crossed to the window and pulled open the curtains. The room became clear and radiant and appeared to increase in size. He switched off the light and made his way downstairs, looking forward to his first cup of coffee. Maria Landowska was busy in the kitchen, setting the table for breakfast. She was large and sturdy, and there was something stealthy about the way she moved, as if danger was lurking nearby. She was wearing jeans and a green sweater, clothes that were strictly forbidden when “Madame” was at home. When she caught sight of Albert, she smiled and revealed a couple of stainless-steel teeth, a remnant of life under Communism. Her smooth skin, lacking the slightest trace of the ravages of bourgeois society, was pale and freckled and she had prominent Slavic cheekbones. Her red ponytail looked like a bunch of dried flowers.

“Guten Morgen, Mr Albert,” she said with her boyish guttural voice, her bright-blue eyes looking him full in the face.

“Good morning, Maria.”

“What’s on the menu this morning?”

“Drie Eier.”

“OK,” Albert said in clumsy Polish. “Fried or beaten?”

“Beaten like raindrops on the window.”

A cunning smile appeared on her lips. She opened the thermos and set it on the table with a thud.

“Beaten like a farmer beats his wife?” she enquired.

They laughed conspiratorially. He sat down and poured himself a large mug of coffee, while Maria cracked three eggs into a bowl with unparalleled skill, flavoured them with pepper and salt, and started to beat them as if she were mixing two different sorts of animal feed in a bucket. Albert took his mug and drank his coffee as he preferred: first blowing then slurping. Louise always used to say “my wolfie” when he did that.

2

As the years had passed, Albert had grown more and more inclined to leave the course of the day to fate, which he attempted to steer with all sorts of superstitious behaviour. What would be his first deed on this sunny spring day? Something industrious or something that suited his mood? As Public Prosecutor to Antwerp’s Court of Appeal, he was fortunate enough to be able to spoil himself with the latter. He decided to let a game of patience settle the matter, three at the most. He had read somewhere that Charles de Gaulle and the Norwegian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Knut Hamsun, were similarly addicted, and had convinced himself that this innocent custom could improve the quality of a person’s life. Interesting pieces of information of this sort filled him with respect for important figures.

“Queen of Spades, come to my aid,” he mumbled as he made his way upstairs to the second floor to shave, still barefoot and dressed in his kimono. He had enjoyed an appetizing breakfast with all the trimmings and chatted about this and that with Maria Landowska, who had taught him his daily dose of five Polish words. He liked the language because it sounded pleasant to his ear. He was proud of the few Polish sentences he could pronounce without any trace of an accent.

As he walked into the bathroom, he realized he was out of breath and his heart was throbbing in his skull. Two cups of Maria’s strong coffee were to blame. This kind of reasoning allowed him to file the problem away for the time being in a remote corner of his mind. He did the same with other matters of an entirely different nature, namely the treatment of delicate cases from the offices of the district prosecutors under his jurisdiction, with which he “involved himself” when he considered it necessary (especially if there was a hint of politics involved). He was aware that he was flirting with the law in such instances, but he was also aware that it was fairly common practice in Belgium. He called it “compartmental thinking”, a technique characteristic of primitive peoples that had saved him considerable amounts of time. He considered it a highly appropriate social grace.

He switched on his state-of-the-art Braun electric shaver, a gift from Louise, the Rolls Royce of its kind, which seemed to vacuum away the last tiny hair without a sound. After shaving, he splashed his cheeks with Davidoff and inspected his teeth for a second time. He brushed them to get rid of the taste of coffee, rinsed his mouth with water, carefully examined it to see if his gums had been bleeding and scrambled down the stairs two at a time, something that still came naturally to him. He sat at his desk in his elegant leather-and-chrome chair, a gift from the Brussels firm that had furnished his chambers at the Prosecutor’s Office, where an identical specimen had likewise been delivered. He filed this similarly Belgian form of corruption under “shrewd favours that need not be reciprocated per se”. He had preserved the firm’s publicity brochure, which claimed that the leather was fault-free because it came from Scottish cattle unharmed by barbed-wire fences.

He opened a drawer and took out a round Japanese black lacquered box adorned with a slender bird. It contained a worn-out pack of Johnnie Walker cards. He shuffled the pack and the third card he chose was the Queen of Spades. “Ha ha!” he said. “She heard my appeal.” He childishly identified two of the four queens with Louise and Amandine, the latter with the Queen of Diamonds, which he considered the least interesting. If the next card was the King of Hearts (Albert Savelkoul), his day would be made. He nervously selected three cards from the pack and flipped them over, but there was no sign of a king. At the last moment, when he had more or less given up hope, he flipped over the King of Diamonds. And the King of Hearts! “Ha ha!” he exclaimed for a second time. By the time he had placed the Queen of Spades on top of the King of Hearts he had lost interest in the game. His decision had been made: on Tuesday 25 May 1999, under the treacherous sign of Castor and Pollux, he was going to enjoy every moment without the slightest inkling of false modesty. He would show his face at the Prosecutor’s Office, peer over a few shoulders and make sure everyone had seen him.

His official car would arrive at the front door as it did every day at nine o’clock sharp. He glanced at his watch. Twenty past eight. He rolled back his chair and reached for his mobile, which was concealed behind a table leg. He quickly keyed in her number. He let it ring twelve times but no one answered. Unusual, he thought, and hung up. She must be in the stables. He produced a scrap of paper from his kimono and read aloud: “Horse: koń, judge: se̜dzia, egg: jajko, coffee: kawa, milk: mleko.”

He picked up his mobile a second time, but instead of calling her number he stared absently into space. If she didn’t pick up this time, that would be a bad sign, in spite of the Queen of Spades. He decided to wait a while. Tempting fate so early in the morning could ruin the rest of the day. He tried to reassure himself. She could only be with the horses at this hour. Was there something wrong with Yamma or Soliman? According to Albert, who had received a pony from his father fifty-seven years ago and was an experienced horseman, Louise was the only woman who knew how to treat horses properly. When they rode together through the Sint-Job-in-’t-Goor woods where she lived, he always admired her natural balance in the saddle and her perfectly coordinated instinctual reactions. He fantasized that they had once galloped across the Asian steppe together on sturdy Mongolian tarpans, centuries ago in the time of Genghis Khan, she screaming wildly, her hair unfettered, he with a bow over his shoulder. He had once told her about it while she was riding Yamma and she could barely stay in the saddle for laughing. He could be a romantic at times, and as he mused on their first encounter he became more and more convinced of it. Their relationship was the result of what he referred to as a chapter in a picaresque novel, the kind of thing that never happens to ordinary men and women. Seventeen years earlier, on Friday 5 March 1982 to be precise - he was still the public prosecutor’s first substitute in those days - he had intervened in a delicate case of adultery among Antwerp’s upper-crust, which a team of gormless criminal investigators had more or less botched up. While personal interventions in such matters were exceptional, he found himself in a privileged position at the time on account of the simple fact that the then public prosecutor was a political creation of his father-in-law, Justice de Vreux. He was free, for example, to enter the public prosecutor’s chambers unannounced, and the man even called him by his first name, something not done in those days.

The official report of the case in question revealed a glaring procedural error: the team of inspectors had burst into the house of the defendant on 7 January 1982 “to ascertain the offence of adultery”, fifteen minutes before the prescribed time of five in the morning. The lady involved had fled stark naked into the garden, where the temperature was five below zero. This savoury detail is not mentioned in the report, nor the fact that she was left out in the freezing cold for more than half an hour. She wasted little time in submitting a complaint against the inspectors, with three witnesses to confirm her side of the story. He had summoned the woman to the Prosecutor’s Office in an effort to settle the matter out of court. His boss, the former public prosecutor, was on the point of being promoted to adjunct Barrister-General to the Council of State, and preferred to avoid such cases. The lady turned out to be a particularly attractive forty-year-old woman, accompanied at the time by her then sixteen-year-old daughter, the breathtakingly beautiful Louise. He was at the height of his midlife crisis in those days, which his circle of less-than-innocent friends called “the midday demon”. He also realized that his life up to that point had been a sexual flop of grandiose proportions. A little drama could do no harm.

In the same period, prompted by Amandine’s evident lack of interest in what she called “marital duties” (they had slept in separate rooms since the birth of their son Geoffroy in 1965), he made occasional use of the services of a prostitute in the district surrounding the central train station. But on one of his evening excursions, a plain clothes CID vice squad investigator had spotted him leaving an establishment on Van Wesenbekestraat, the curtains of which were still drawn. Although he had disguised himself with a baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses, the investigator, alias “the Krul”, had clearly recognized him. He could be one hundred per cent certain that details of the incident would remain inscribed in the police database for ever and a day. He stopped visiting the area after that evening, aware that the investigator in question would probably have tipped off the CID commissioner general’s office, where details of his misdemeanour would be recorded, a fact that could prove embarrassing in certain circumstances. The Krul’s own sordid reputation made little if any difference. What the fuck was he to do to defend himself at the Prosecutor’s Office, where he was first substitute, nota bene, with a file running around full of testimony provided by “nightclub hostesses”, forced by the Krul to provide their services for free during his monthly visit to check their papers? Even the man’s reputation as a psychopath wasn’t likely to tip the balance in his favour. The Public Prosecutor could count his blessings nevertheless. The affair had not affected his career, the Krul had passed away, and Van Wesenbekestraat had been taken over by the gay community in 1990.

His romance with Louise had started at that very moment. It was love at first sight on both sides and he could still remember every last detail. The only risk involved was her age, two years under the legal limit, but he was so madly in love with her he simply ignored it. She was still attending the Dames Chrétiennes Institute on Lange Nieuwstraat, Antwerp’s most exclusive school for girls, run by the female Jesuits. The first time he saw her with her mother, she was wearing the school uniform, which excited him intensely. Their first love nest was a friend’s flat. He had borrowed the keys and insisted she wear her school uniform to every rendezvous until she graduated in 1984.

Their lovemaking was passionate but conservative. During their first seemingly endless kiss, he had slipped his hand slowly under her pleated skirt. He thought she would be satisfied with kissing and caressing at first, but the illusion he had been cherishing that Catholic schoolgirls in Antwerp knew nothing about love was quickly dismissed. Without mincing words she told him what she wanted. She had been taking the pill for two years and knew all about orgasms and the like. While he searched for her “honey pot”, she would unzip his fly and pull out his stiff cock. After she had reached her climax, he would slip her panties out of the way, slither inside, still standing upright, grab her muscular buttocks with both hands as she clung to him like an ailing bird, and when she shouted “Mate! Mate! ” he would come, howling like a wolf. They would collapse together on the bed and the kissing, touching and other foreplay would start again. The verb “to mate” had immediate success with her every time. Their lovemaking lasted the entire afternoon in the early days, but after a while the single act of penetration evolved into an episode of touching and fondling that raised them to an état de grâce so to speak, in which she would come with ease and he would pretend half the time. He called this “the white-lie method”.

Although she still had the sinuous snake-like body of her youth, the silky-smooth skin with the musky odour of faintly perfumed chamois leather, and luxuriant East-Indies hair in which he would bury his nose like a hound in search of prey, it didn’t make the slightest difference now in 1999; not even the discovery of brand-new variations on the verb “to mate” was of any help. To put it plainly, his virility had been on the decline for several years. It usually took at least a quarter of an hour before he succeeded in producing what he called a “sparrow’s orgasm”, and during their last encounter he had even had difficulty getting an erection. He tried to make up for it with expensive gifts.

“Oh well,” he mumbled, audibly inhaling and looking at his watch. Eight thirty-five. He grabbed his mobile, but something stopped him from calling her. He groaned and gazed at a silver-framed sepia photo on his desk of a young boy on a pony, looking into the lens as if he was about to burst into tears. The pony was a Shetlander with a bushy mane and distrustful expression, waiting patiently for the opportunity to kick someone, if his stance was anything to go by. His name was Pieter. When the pony was found dead in his stable on a summer morning in 1944, Albert experienced grief for the first time.

Whenever he looked at the picture, pessimistic thoughts about the irreversible swiftness of time, growing old and the carefree days of his youth that were gone for ever, would flood his mind. This time was no exception. He envied Louise, only thirty-two and a couple of years younger than his eldest son, no less. In the glory years, he had derived enormous pleasure from reading Lolita, and that thrill, nowadays taboo, had played a considerable part in the gratification of his needs, but even sexual fetishes like Lolita were now beyond him.

“Oh well,” he muttered a second time. He stared into space, his face washed out, listening to a mysterious electric motor start up somewhere deep in the foundations of the goddamned building, looked at his watch, resolutely straightened his back, concentrated on the Queen of Spades and punched in her number. She answered after a single ring.

“Hello…”

Her husky voice.

Albert forgot the world around him. He took a deep breath and asked: “How’s that Black Lotus of mine?” They always spoke to one another in the dialect of Antwerp.

“Mmm…”

“And what’s my Black Lotus wearin’?”

“Guess.”

He leaned back in his chair, enjoying the moment. “Champagne-coloured… satin… undies… thigh length… where a man can take his time, slipping his hand…”

“Well, well…”

“And why would a man do that?” he said, anticipating her response.

“You know why…”

He felt a warmth in his eyes. “Love of my life…” he whispered, his lips close to the phone. He had called her that from the beginning.

“Will I see you today?” she asked impersonally.

“First a quick visit to the office, then I’m all yours. Should I bring anything special?”

“Up to you. Shall I saddle the horses?”

“Of course. By the way, were you in the stable half an hour ago?”

“Nope, why?”

“I phoned.”

“I was in the house. Maybe the radio was too loud.”

“Maybe…”

“Cheerio. See you later…”

He gave her a kiss through the phone.

He hung up and calmly climbed the stairs to his bedroom, without deigning to look at the Virgin of Fatima. “Judge se̜dzia milk mleko coffee kawa horse koń egg jajko,” he crooned to the tune of Mozart’s ‘Que dirai-je maman?’, a melody he always had to play for his mother on the piano in the olden days.

Maria Landowska had carefully arranged his shirt, ties and suit on a valet stand in the bedroom. He inspected the flawless, made-to-measure, dark-blue alpaca suit, the striped silk shirt and selection of ties. Without hesitation, he selected a flamboyant Versace number, flagrantly defying instructions “concerning the attire of magistrates and comparable functions”, which had circulated among the personnel on his advice six months earlier.

An emblem of the Grand Cross in the Order of Leopold II decorated his left lapel. He examined it carefully to ensure it was correctly positioned in the buttonhole.

3

Albert had once thoroughly enjoyed reading the book Official and Confidential on the secret life of the legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The book contained sufficient and incontrovertible evidence that the man was a scoundrel of the first order, who hated the same vices in others that he himself possessed to a considerable degree. This did not diminish his admiration for Hoover in the slightest. He did not know why, but every time his chauffeur, provided full-time by the Prosecutor’s Office via the CID, opened the passenger door for him and said: “Good morning, Public Prosecutor, sir,” he couldn’t help thinking of Hoover. He had taken perverse pleasure in reading about the way the man had treated his chauffeur. He had apparently been fanatically demanding when it came to spatters on his blacked-out Cadillac, the precise size of the folded travelling blankets on the rear seat and even the shape of the ice cubes for the Jack Daniels he regularly enjoyed with his bosom friend Clyde Tolson, in spite of the FBI’s strict prohibitions against homosexuality and drinking alcohol on duty.

“Good morning, Public Prosecutor,” said the chauffeur as he held open the rear passenger door of the brand-new, black Opel Omega. The Peugeot had been passed on to a district prosecutor two months earlier. Amandine preferred the Peugeot, and he knew why: Peugeot was the model preferred by Antwerp’s French-speaking elite, or what passed for French, a custom dating back to the War, when Dufour’s - the best yachts money could buy - still attended to its clients in the language.

“Good morning,” he answered in a neutral tone, briefly looking him up and down. J. Edgar Hoover only spoke to his chauffeur to tell him off or accuse him of things of which he was entirely innocent.

“The Kaai,” said Albert when the chauffeur had taken his place behind the wheel.

The distance from his house, a desirable residence on Amerikalei, given to his wife by her father Justice de Vreux on the tenth anniversary of their wedding, to the Court of Appeal on the Waalse Kaai was a little less than a mile. Albert considered it the height of luxury, which probably explains why he enjoyed it so much. “Completely absurd,” said Jokke Weyler one morning, having gone along for the ride. “Luxury is always absurd, Jokke,” he had replied. “But the classes are God’s creation, are they not?” One of their more affected expressions.

Antwerp’s Court of Appeal on the Waalse Kaai was located next to a tarmac surface littered with garbage bags, which was supposed to pass for a car park. The building itself had seven stories and was a prime example of the ugliness that characterized third-rate Seventies postmodernism. The first floor had hexagonal windows that looked like the wide-open gullets of North Sea cod. Faulty drainage had left the frames discoloured and stained. The building was about twenty-five years old, but wear and tear was visible wherever you looked. Inferior building material and poor maintenance were to blame, an excellent example of what had become known as “Belgian laxity”. Albert avoided the Court’s public entrance at all times. At the rear of the building, near the Cockerill Kaai, there was an inconspicuous rusty metal door, which was always locked. Only he and the janitor had a key. The door opened into a gloomy corridor with coarse concrete walls leading to a elevator, which stopped only at his offices on the seventh floor. He considered himself a public figure and was not shy of the media, but starting the day in mystery was an exclusive privilege he reserved for himself. He deemed the hard-working diligence of the office staff on his arrival to be evidence that the Antwerp Public Prosecutor’s Office was running like clockwork. But he was unaware of the fact that the moment he pushed the button in the elevator, a red light flickered on the seventh floor, announcing to an attentive clerk that “Cardinal Richelieu” was on his way. The remainder of the staff were thus forewarned. He had acquired the nickname on account of the Roman elegance with which he wore his red toga and genuine ermine cape. At the Court of First Instance, they used to call him “line of least resistance”, which he put down with a fake smile to his talent for “appropriate delegation”. He preferred to limit the latter, aware that his subordinates might imagine they had achieved something while they were only entertaining themselves.

He opened the elevator door, looked left and right into the empty corridor, frowned at the absence of activity and made his way pensively past a row of portraits, former public prosecutors, posing self-importantly like Renaissance prelates with white lace ruffles and ermine collars, draped with medals of honour. This illustrious gallery would include his own portrait in three years time, he thought. His soundproof, studded-leather office door was open. He headed directly towards his impressive Italian desk, with matching designer cabinets in solid rosewood. The interior had devoured a significant portion of the 1996 budget entry for “fixtures and fittings”. He sat down in his chair, the leather of which had an unfamiliar odour, vaguely reminiscent of some exotic aromatic plant. He cast a contemptuous glance at the bundle of exposed cables running at floor level along the wall. The computers acquired by the Court of Appeal in 1995 were yet to communicate with one another. Links to the other prosecutors’ offices and courts of the land were still impossible, in spite of police reforms. The keyboards were little more than glorified typewriters.

“Hmm…”

He looked up. His secretary was standing in the doorway with a file under her arm. She was close to fifty, a resigned expression on her face, small, pale and chubby, with short grey hair. She was wearing a dark-blue skirt, a beige blouse with a turnover collar and a string of artificial pearls. She was unmarried, took care of her mother, and was completely dedicated to her job as secretary. Albert, to whom she exhibited the devotion of a nineteenth-century maid, saw her as part of a dying race.

“Good morning, sir.”

“Good morning, Miss Verdonck.” He used his subdued baritone voice. He never addressed subordinates by their first name and even used official titles for his colleagues, a habit inherited from his father-in-law, who abhorred the barbaric manners introduced by the Americans.

“Anything out of the ordinary?” he enquired in his best “Queen’s Dutch”, the tone slightly elevated.

“Nothing in particular, Public Prosecutor, sir.”

“Good,” he replied, his chin tucked into his chest.

She deposited the file on his desk and waited.

“That will be all, Miss Verdonck,” he said without looking up. She disappeared.

Albert opened the file and rubbed his eyes with extreme caution. Although he was long-sighted by heredity, he only wore glasses when he was reading a book, an activity he confined for the most part to his home life. According to psychiatrists, the obstinate refusal to wear glasses was a sign of narcissism, but after reading a fascinating article on the matter he had become convinced that narcissism was a characteristic of highly gifted individuals and was something to be sought after. In his opinion, there was only one vulgar variant, which he referred to as “secondary narcissism”. He was particularly proud of the expression, which was not to be found in the manuals because he had invented it himself, during the Glyndebourne Festival, no less. He hated classical music and only attended concerts when there was no alternative. People determined to identify themselves with one or another famous conductor, soloist or opera singer particularly irritated him. Amandine, on the other hand, was wild about the sophistication of such musical events. Every year she insisted he join her for an entire week at the Glyndebourne Festival, which had an international reputation for being among the most exclusive, and where she had friends among the English aristocracy (Lord and Lady Egremont, Edith and Noël Beiresford-Peirse and the Earl of Carnarvon) with whom she could gossip to her heart’s content in her poor English. One evening, after an opera during which he had fallen asleep, the public had applauded, shouted and stamped their feet for little short of fifteen uninterrupted minutes. The episode had angered him so much that he was unable to say a single word at the post-opera dinner. For the first time in his life, he noted something “non-juridical” on a piece of paper in his hotel room that night: secondary narcissism: hysterical projection of personal deficiency; read inanity.

He fished his Mont Blanc Meisterstück 149, nicknamed “the cigar”, from his inside pocket, removed the cap and started to sign the letters in purple ink without reading them. He finished off his carefully placed signature with three elliptic full stops, designed to lead his addressee astray in one way or another: Catholics wondered which lodge he belonged to, and although the so-called “free-thinkers” knew better, they still had their doubts. The truth, however, was simple. Public Prosecutor Savelkoul did not belong to the Christian People’s Party nor was he attached to the Lodge, something quite unique in the politicized Belgian legal establishment.

Having dealt with the day’s correspondence, he returned his fountain pen to its place, groaned and inspected the series of photographs hanging side by side on the wall. He felt a little melancholic, as he always did when he looked at the photographs on the wall. He was much younger in most of them: with King Boudewijn, Queen Beatrix, UN Secretary-General Waldheim, twenty years of Belgian Prime Ministers, President Mitterrand, and, topping them all, President Bush, who shook his hand by sheer accident during a flying visit to the University of Harvard, where Albert had “audited classes” in 1989.

4

Albert left the Court of Appeal at ten thirty via the back door. He strode across the car park towards the Vlaamse Kaai, his expression introverted, as if he were deep in thought. He was aware that a selection of people were watching him from the windows above, following his every move with laser precision, and this prompted him to walk with dignity, much slower than his usual brisk pace - evidence, he believed, of his excellent physical condition. He turned into Pourbusstraat, a cheerless place lined with derelict buildings and warehouses, reminiscent of New York’s Lower East Side. He walked through an open door and found himself in an ugly brick-paved courtyard with lock-up garages right and left. He produced a bunch of keys, unlocked a grimy plastic roll-down shutter numbered 14, pulled it up, opened the boot of a large black BMW, removed his jacket, folded it inside out, placed it in the boot and slipped into a brown leather sports coat lying beside it. He loosened his tie and tossed it on top of the jacket, closed the boot, got into the car, started the engine and reversed out of the lock-up.

 

At that same moment, twelve hundred miles away in Rome, a short, thickset, sixty-year-old woman was leaving the Academia Belgica on Via Omero, a grubby bunker-like edifice from the Mussolini era. A silk Hermès scarf was knotted around the strap of her black, crocodile-leather handbag. She had a peroxide blond, razor-cut hairdo with a lock hanging over her forehead in imitation of Queen Paola. There was a hint of disdain in her expression, a feature common among upper-class ladies. She made her way with measured steps to the awaiting taxi, stopped at the rear passenger door and tapped the window, but the chauffeur did not budge. She stepped awkwardly into the taxi, closed the door, fished a visiting card from her handbag, put on her glasses, which were hanging around her neck on a chain, and said in Italian with a French accent: “Viale Bruno Buozzi settantatrè.”

The thin unshaven chauffeur with Arab looks and a black anorak started the engine and accelerated abruptly. The woman glanced at the meter, which correctly read three thousand lire, and glowered involuntarily. Instead of following the shortest route via Villa Giulia, the chauffeur drove at reckless speed through the “gay park” towards Piazza del Popolo. The woman looked at her watch, opened her handbag, produced two ten-thousand lire notes and held them at the ready. The chauffeur positioned himself at the front of the left lane at the crossroads with the Via Flaminia, and the second the lights changed to green, he cut in front of the line of cars waiting to drive straight ahead and turned right into the steeply climbing Viale Bruno Buozzi.