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Authors: Jef Geeraerts

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BOOK: The Public Prosecutor
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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.
BOOK: The Public Prosecutor
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