The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (22 page)

“You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to,” I said. “But is there any possibility that she was selling you titles from her collection?”

“I’m afraid so, yes,” he said. “I hated to see her do it, but she said she couldn’t really manage otherwise. She said she hoped that something was going to come through soon though.”

I thanked him, hung up, and called Anja.

“I’ve been thinking about our conversation,” I told her. “And it’s occurred to me to ask which university you were selling the letters to.”

“I’m afraid I can’t really tell you that.”

“But Abby is dead now. Whatever agreement you made with her can’t be valid. Is the sale still in progress? Did you receive the money? How much was it and what happened to it?”

“It’s not that I don’t want to tell you, Cassandra,” she said a little nervously. “But I’d prefer to wait a little. Things
are
still in progress with the university, and I’d rather not queer the negotiations, so to speak. Besides, it’s a little unclear to me at the moment what right you have exactly to ask all these questions. If you’re working with Rachel, I must say that I have some reservations.”

She had put it very diplomatically, but I understood that she was not going to tell me much more. Perhaps she was regretting that she’d revealed me so much already.

“You suspect Rachel?” I finally said.

“Just ask her what she took from my desk yesterday. See what she says,” said Anja and rang off.

As I walked past the ticket office, I had the strong urge just to get on the first train back to London. I could sleep on the ferry from Ostend. I was sick of this whole business and not sure why I was getting more deeply involved. But I kept walking and when I got back to the taxi stand, Paul was there.

Fifteen minutes later I was back on a bus going in the direction of the Avenue Louise. I hadn’t found out much from the cabby, but I’d found out a few things. Paul was from the former Yugoslavia and didn’t speak much French. He hadn’t given me the clear answer that I wished.

“A gray Fiat, very hard to see,” he said. “New one, not old. Very much mud on the license plate.”

“But how could the mud stay stuck?” I asked. “It was raining.”

“Brown mud,” he said.

“You’re sure it was a gray Fiat?” I was not sure if Rachel and Abby owned a car, but I supposed Rachel could have rented one. “Did you see the license plate? Was it from Brussels?”

“Too much mud,” he said.

Thomas was gone when I buzzed Rachel from downstairs. She let me in, and seemed subdued. “I didn’t expect to see you again.”

Somehow she had pulled herself together, had combed her hair and put on a sweater and pants. She had been crying.

She gestured me to a chair and went to make tea. Now that I was getting more familiar with the apartment, I could see that it was not as posh as I’d first imagined. There were definitely antiques, but the wallpaper was spotted and old, the carpets stained. It had a kind of musty smell, too, which probably came from the velvet, slightly moth-eaten drapes.

“I called Peter at Abby’s old bookshop,” I said when Rachel came back. “He told me that Abby was selling off her collection.”

“I could have told you that. We were desperately poor. Abby’s books were the only thing of value.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t think it was important. The books were sold; the money was used up. What I was trying to find out was how Abby had used the money, whether she had bought anything valuable that wouldn’t be in the inventory.”

“She didn’t buy anything. She sold something to this woman at the Antikvaariat Sophie.”

Rachel nodded. “You mentioned some correspondence. As if I knew about it. I didn’t, actually.”

I explained what it was.

Rachel thought for a moment and then said, “I guess I’m not surprised that Abby didn’t tell me about the letters. She probably knew that I wouldn’t approve of making money off a youthful love affair. I believe that people should come out when they’re ready. Which means that some people are never going to come out, if they can help it.”

She went on, “Look, I know that Abby always liked to put it about that she bowled me over and that I left my husband for her. And that’s partly true. He gave me an ultimatum and I had to accept it. He’d accommodated himself to my other women lovers, but Abby was more threatening.”

“Other lovers?”

“My husband knew I’d experimented, as he called it. In fact, I’d been sleeping with women a long time before I met Abby. But it’s true that Abby meant enough to me to leave the life I’d had. It wasn’t easy. I didn’t have a work permit in London, so I was reduced to doing under-the-table freelance editing, while I waited to get legal status there.”

“You were an editor?”

“I’d done editing in New York, yes.”

I bit my lip. I had gotten the impression early on that Rachel had had no skills, that Abby had had to support her.

“Then her aunt died. Abby raved about the apartment, said that Brussels was a fascinating city, that it would be a great base to explore Europe from. You know how impetuous and persuasive she could be. I was reluctant. After all, I was finally starting to feel at home in London after five years. But I said yes. It was only when I got here that Abby told me that we had to live in the flat and not sell anything in it. She was trying to work something out with her brother. Meanwhile, we sat here driving each other slowly crazy.”

She had used that phrase about Thomas before. “What exactly was she trying to work out?”

“Well, I don’t know exactly,” Rachel stumbled. “I understood that he got some money from the estate. I don’t know how much. But perhaps she was hoping to work out an agreement with him about some of the valuables here. Perhaps that she could give them to him in exchange for cash. Or that she could sell them and he would take half. I don’t know.”

“Do you have his address here?”

“Just the hotel name.”

“I’d like to ask him some questions.”

Rachel shuddered. “It was so creepy, him crawling around looking at everything. He told me that I’d have to be out of here by the end of the week. I hardly know where I’m going to go. Probably back to London. I don’t really know anyone here.”

“It must have been lonely,” I said.

“Abby and I handled it differently. I started learning French, and reading a lot and visiting the museums and the churches. It was really harder for Abby. She hated to think she’d made a mistake in all this. She didn’t want to talk about it. But every once in a while she would just get on the train and leave. I figured out what she was doing with her books at some point, that that was why she was going to London. But then she started going to Amsterdam all the time. That I couldn’t quite understand.”

“But you thought she was having an affair?”

“Was she? With this woman Anja?”

“I don’t know, honestly.”

“But you think so.”

“Yes, perhaps.”

“I think so too.”

“Is that why you followed me to Amsterdam yesterday?”

“I still don’t know how you know that,” said Rachel, slowly. “But yes, I did. After you left, I suddenly felt quite wild and had to do something. I took your same train, and followed you to the shop. I saw you talking with Anja. I saw you both leave for the cafe.”

“You broke in then. What were you looking for?”

“Some letter, some sign.”

“Anja said you took something off her desk.”

“I did. It was a note from Abby to Anja.”

“Can I see it?”

She went over to the secretary and fetched it. It was short, typed letter.

Dear Anja,

“No, I don’t want to talk on the phone. I’d rather see you. The usual place, on Tuesday evening.”

“The usual place—was that in Amsterdam or here?”

“Tuesday was the day Abby was killed,” said Rachel slowly. “On her way to the train station.”

It was late afternoon when I arrived back in Amsterdam, a day much like the day before, only darker and wetter. I called Eloise from the Central Station.

Eloise had talked with friends in the States. It was true. A buzz had gone around for years that this particular famous woman novelist, who had reached her seventies denying every innuendo, had had lesbian relationships in her youth. But there had never been any proof, and certainly nothing written. There still wasn’t.

“Maybe this woman killed Abby,” Eloise said.

“It’s not
that
much of a stigma.”

“Well, maybe to her it is.”

“I think I need to talk to Anja again.”

“The shop will be closed now. Do you want her address? I went to a party once at her house. It’s right near the shop, also on Keizersgracht.”

I thanked her and hung up, and made my way by tram and foot to the shop, just to check. The CLOSED sign hung in the window. I walked back across the canal to a cafe and sagged into a chair inside. I was suddenly aware of just how exhausted I was from my back-and-forth trip to Brussels in one day. I hadn’t eaten lunch. Hadn’t really found out much either. I’d tried calling Thomas at the hotel, but there was no answer. I asked when he had checked in and they told me just the night before. I asked, as casually as I could, if he was out in his gray Fiat and was told, politely but firmly, that Monsieur had no car. I don’t know if I really suspected him. Other than an apartment-full of moldering antiques, what could be in it for him? Still I wanted to talk with him. I could imagine Abby selling first her books, and then the correspondence, to get money. I could imagine her dealing with Anja. I could imagine Anja dealing with a collector or university. I could even believe, though it was difficult, that Rachel knew nothing about this. But I could not imagine why Abby had had to die.

Perhaps I was just making up a big story about the whole thing. Perhaps it was my way of not facing the fact that Abby had been careless, had not been looking, and had died for no reason at all in a hit-and-run accident.

Accidents happen all the time. I ordered a sandwich, and while I waited, I stared out the steamy window at the passing cars. In central Amsterdam there weren’t many cars, but they still drove as if they were larger and more important than anything around. It was twilight; it was raining, exactly the same conditions that had existed a few days before at the Gare Midi. I could barely see anything; would not, in fact, have seen the car stop and park in front of the Antikvaariat Sophie if the person who got out had not been wearing complete white. In the gloom she shone.

I threw some guilders on the table and dashed out the door. The white figure had gone inside the store, but no light was turned on. It couldn’t be Anja, for she had told me that she walked everywhere. “It’s such a problem having a car in the city.”

There was no movement in the shop. Could it be Rachel? I crept along the bridge. It was a gray Fiat, the same make of car that had killed Abby. Should I knock on the shop door? Should I write down the license plate? Call the police? Tell them what?

But as I moved up the street toward the shop, I saw something that made me duck quickly into a doorway. It was Anja, getting into the driver’s seat of the Fiat. She was wearing a white karate costume, with a brown or black belt. She had something in her hand, a bag. I pressed myself in the doorway as she drove past, and tried to see whether there were streaks of mud on the license plate, but it was too dark. She was going in the opposite direction of the address Eloise had given me for her flat. Probably to her karate class.

I called Eloise back to ask what to do, but she had gone out. Joke answered instead.

“Do you still have your motorscooter?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Can you be at this address on the Keizersgracht in ten minutes?”

“Sure. But why?”

“Because we have about an hour, maybe a little more, to break into someone’s house.”

It was nothing, Joke assured me, to scramble up a back wall and get inside Anja’s flat. “If it had been the front, that would have been harder. But here there are drainpipes and balconies. I’ll manage.”

We had forced our way through a broken door into the back yard of the tall house. My heart was beating and my mind was racing the clock. I didn’t want neighbors to call the police before we’d found any evidence, and I certainly didn’t want Anja to come back while we were still there.

“Go back to the front door,” Joke told me. “And wait for me to open up. Don’t watch me climb,” she warned. “You’ll probably feel faint.”

I did watch her for a moment, just enough to feel faint, and then went round to the front. In less than five minutes, though it seemed like hours, she let me in, and raced back up the two tall flights of stairs to Anja’s flat. I followed more slowly, huffing a little.

That’s why Joke found the letters first. Not the ones we’d expected. But two little stacks on top of a cluttered desk, as if someone had recently been looking at them.

The first pile Joke handed me were dated in order, starting from about two months before. They were typed, using the same typewriter and paper as the letter Rachel had removed from Anja’s desk.

Dear Anja,

Here is a sample letter as agreed. Please let me know what the university says. You know how awkward I feel about selling my aunt’s correspondence, but I don’t see any other way out at the moment. We are so broke.

Abby

Dear Anja,

I’m pleased that the university wants to take the collection, but it doesn’t seem as if the price they’re offering is really fair. After all the letters do shed a really important light on one of the major writers of our time. Can you try again, either with them or someone else?

Abby

Dear Anja,

Thanks for managing to push the price up! It’s still not quite what I could wish, but it’s quite decent and we’re in desperate straits. Any chance of an advance from you on this?

Abby

Dear Anja,

Thanks so much for the cash. This should tide us over until the beginning of the month. I don’t want to send the letters, so I’ll be coming to Amsterdam this weekend to deliver them to you. See you then.

Abby

Dear Anja,

Thanks for the second installment. Much appreciated. I’ll look forward to the last—and biggest—installment soon!

Abby

Dear Anja,

I had the most extraordinary note today, from the letter-writer herself. It was addressed to my aunt and begged her please not to go along with this extortion. What does this mean?

We need to talk!

Abby