The Public Prosecutor (37 page)

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Authors: Jef Geeraerts

BOOK: The Public Prosecutor
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Albert took a gulp of vodka and looked at her with a grin.
“Mr Albert, I’d do anything for you, anything, anything…”
“OK, then from now on you’re my Third Woman.”
They emptied their glasses in one go. Maria tossed her glass in an arc above her head. It shattered to pieces on the floor behind her.
“
Nitsjevoo!
” she yelled in Russian and spread her arms.
He filled his glass and gave it to her. She emptied it and gave it back.
She stood directly in front of him and said: “Feel…”
He placed the glass on the floor and slipped his hand under the stiff silk dress.
Just as he was about to slip her panties to one side, she jumped backwards and quickly undid the dress.
“
Madame
is back,” she gasped.
“Don’t be silly,” he said. “I didn’t hear a sound.”
“I heard her come in, I mean it. I’m off to my room.”
She rushed downstairs in her bra and panties, her black maid’s uniform draped over her arm.
Albert, who was too drunk to give a damn, shrugged his shoulders, grabbed the bottle and ambled down the stairs at his leisure. Third floor, second floor, first floor.
And there she stood, Baroness Marie-Amandine de Vreux d’Alembourg, in front of the etched-glass vestibule door. Rigid as a statue. She watched as a bulky, dark-haired man, with a square jaw and a classic Greek nose, barefoot, in jeans and a sports shirt, with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a glass in the other, appeared on the first-floor landing. He stood there and started to laugh, waving a piece of paper in his hand, which he tossed at her with a derisive bow.
The look she gave him was devastating, a look of contempt that was verging on the cosmic.
24
 
On Thursday 10 June, Albert arrived home a little earlier than usual, jumping up the vestibule stairs at ten to five as he contentedly hummed ‘Dark Eyes’. He couldn’t help thinking of the day Maria jumped on top of him as he walked in the door, crossing her legs behind his back and refusing to let go. Crazy, he thought. He found it strange that there was no one in the kitchen. He wasn’t sure whether Amandine was at home. As he was hanging up his raincoat, he heard Amandine talking with Maria upstairs. He crept up to his office without being heard, closed the door behind him, made his way over to his gun cabinet, took out his favourite stalking rifle and placed it carefully on his desk. It was a magnificent Mannlicher SSG.308, with a rotating magazine, a dark-brown grained and polished butt with cheek rest, made to measure by Steyr AG in Austria and fitted with a Kahles Helia 3x telescopic sight. The combination of the weapon industry’s finest products had produced the perfect rifle, accurate enough to shoot a cigarette from someone’s mouth at two hundred yards.
Albert was an excellent marksman, but two things brought him just as much pleasure as the perfect shot: talking about weapons with people who understood them and readying a weapon for the hunt.
He took a white linen cloth, an aerosol can and a box of cleaning materials from a drawer beneath the gun cabinet. I’ve been looking forward to this all day, he thought.
He sat down at his desk, quickly unbolted the chamber, sprayed some white foam into the magazine, and left the whole thing to dry. The pungent smell of Ballistol filled his nostrils, cheering him immensely. True to the hunting tradition, he maintained the rituals to the letter, convinced that the outcome of the hunt depended on following the correct sequence.
He screwed together the three-part cleaning rod, attached a felt cleaning patch, sprayed a second shot of Ballistol into the magazine, pulled the cleaning patch through the barrel, took a look inside and admired the fluted, white manganese spirals in its interior. He deftly slipped the bolt back into the slide and polished the outside of the weapon, removed the rubber caps from the telescopic sight and checked to see if the cross-wire contrasted sufficiently with the lenses. He replaced the caps, slipped the rifle into a worn leather sheath tucked away in the cupboard and leaned it upright against the wall.
He pressed his ear to the door and listened. Silence. He crept back to his office, took a Japanese lacquered box from the drawer of his desk, removed a deck of cards and stared thoughtlessly at the inane figure of Johnnie Walker.
“What shall we play for today?” he asked aloud. “Two things,” he answered. “First: whether I should call Prosecutor Keymeulen and ask him to send me the file detailing the assault and battery case in Overbroek on 7 July ASAP?; second: whether I’ll shoot a first-rate six-point stag in Scotland as a surprise for Maria Landowska?”
He shuffled the cards and identified Maria with the Queen of Hearts. He, of course, was the King of Spades.
The first game lasted less than two minutes, ending without him drawing a single ace. He was relieved. He probably wouldn’t have called the procurator anyway. The third card in a row of seven was the Queen of Hearts. “Come on, King of Spades, let’s see you!” he pleaded. The row of seven was left with an empty space. At the last minute, he drew the card and slapped it onto the empty space. He turned the card he had landed on:
Queen of Diamonds
!
“Bah!” he grunted, collecting the cards and stuffing them back into the box.
He leaned backwards and stared at the stag trophies on the wall above the wild boar tusks. He heard someone coming down the stairs. He didn’t move. The last thing he wanted to do was bump into Amandine. And if it was Maria, he would be unable to stop himself from embracing her. She had only winked when he had told her the day before that he was spending the weekend hunting in Scotland. She had said something in Polish he didn’t understand, but he had not asked for an explanation. He had also mentioned that he had an appointment the following morning with Jokke for a complete check-up. Although he felt better, the usual fucking pain had been bothering him the last couple of days. The vodka from the evening before hadn’t done much to help. They had enjoyed a quiet night together for the first time in their relationship.
He had left her asleep when he had slipped back to his bedroom at five the following morning after his alarm had gone off.
He had asked her what she had done after “
Madame
” had returned so unexpectedly. With an incredibly cool head, she had changed back into her maid’s outfit, quickly cleared away the broken vodka glass, returned the evening dress to its proper place and closed the cupboard. She had then made her way downstairs as if nothing had happened.
“I would go to war for you,” he had said, a colourful phrase he had borrowed from his grandfather for addressing people you can trust, whatever the circumstances. “My grandfather used to say: ‘You’re the best horse in the stable’,” she had replied.
She had also been quite taken aback at Madame’s uncharacteristic kindness towards her, the first time in all the years she’d worked for her. It had reassured her. They had managed to escape a major disaster in the nick of time. He hadn’t seen Amandine for the rest of the evening. She had even taken breakfast in her boudoir after the seven-thirty mass and Maria had told him she was still being conspicuously pleasant towards her.
He stood up, walked over to the gun cabinet, stretched, and removed one of the stag trophies from the wall. He gently rubbed the antler’s shiny ivory-coloured points with the tip of his index finder and then the dark-brown warts on the shaft. He could still remember every detail of beautiful Balnacoil in the Scottish Highlands and how the stag had warily emerged from a cluster of juniper bushes and proudly jaunted into a valley, shrouded in a light mist.
He returned the trophy to its hook, opened the door and checked the landing. There was a strange silence in the house, as if it had been empty for months.
His mobile suddenly started to beep. He closed the door, returned to his desk and picked up the mobile from the floor.
“Hello…”
“Albert?” Walter de Ceuleneer’s trumpeting voice was immediately recognizable.
“What’s the matter, Walter?”
“Am I free to talk?”
“Yes, no problem.”
“I just had a call from Ramiz…”
“And?”
“He’s adamant…”
“And what does that mean?”
“He wants to know if you’ve forgotten about previous services rendered… you know…”
Albert said nothing.
“He said this was the last time he’d call…”
“Is that a threat?”
“Not sure, but I didn’t like the sound of his voice.”
“Tell him I can’t do anything for his nephew. It’s impossible.”
“He also said something about finding it hard to respect those in power when they leave their friends in the lurch.”
“I just cleaned my Mannlicher,” said Albert.
“So you can do absolutely nothing for him?”
“Nothing, and that’s the end of it.”
“I’ll pass it on. He wanted to know if he could have an audience at your office.”
Albert burst into a gravelly laugh. “Tell him I’ll be at my office tomorrow morning from nine o’clock. It’s a public place, open to Belgians and Albanians. Only the Pope gives audiences.”
“You seem to think it’s a laughing matter…”
“Far from it, I’ve never been so serious in my life.”
“Can I quote you?”
“With my compliments.”
“See you tomorrow then, seven o’clock at the airport?”
“I’ll be there, dear Walter.
Weidmannsheil!
Good hunting!”
“
Weidmannsheil!
”
Albert returned his mobile to its place beneath his desk, walked to the door, opened it and stuck his head outside. He could still hear Amandine talking to Maria upstairs. Were they rummaging through old clothes together? Amandine was prone to such whims, then everyone else had to drop what they were doing. If she were to kick the bucket before him, he knew exactly what he would do. On the day of the funeral he would empty those fucking wardrobes, pile those fucking outfits in the garden, douse them with a jerrycan of petrol and whoof!
 
Ramiz Shehu took a deep breath, swelling his torso to make himself look even more than the massive three hundred pounds plus he actually weighed (his scales stopped at three hundred).
He lit a cigarette and inhaled, held the smoke in his lungs for some time then gently exhaled. His pig-eyes gave him a cold, empty, shark-like look. A large moustache dyed with henna accentuated his baldness. A scar ran all the way from his right eye to his neck. He was relaxing in a leather armchair in the unventilated living room above his shop “Sacco”, on Antwerp’s Falconplein. He shuddered with what people in the desolate mountains of Eastern Albania call
Malisor Madness
: an unshakeable determination to settle scores for a deeply wounded sense of honour, a sacred duty to be fulfilled by every man of principle, which took second place to one thing only:
gjakmarrjé
- blood feud.
He grabbed the telephone with his broad hairy talon and slowly punched in a number.
“Nazim?”
He had a deep, throaty voice. Something resembling a smile appeared on his lips.
 
When the remarkably agile Albert caught sight of a couple of stag and half a dozen hinds sauntering over the mountain ridge about two hundred yards from where he stood, his evident sense of harmony with his surroundings (heather, juniper bushes and the occasional crooked spruce) prompted a series of associations and mental leaps, which cheered him immensely. Neolithic
joie de vivre
, he thought. The creation of humankind on the sixth day was one big mistake. He held his breath and turned to his guide, John Cummings, who was lying flat on his belly beside him, binoculars pressed to his eyes. The ghillie concentrated his gaze, completely absorbed in one thing only, a privilege normally reserved exclusively for animals. Albert peered through his binoculars and observed the stags grazing undisturbed, the hinds following their example, but more skittish, looking up from time to time, stationary, nose to the wind, ears open and alert, tails wiggling. The wind was blowing towards him, ideal conditions. One of the stags had magnificent antlers and an ash-brown coat, darker than the other, which was clearly younger. Suddenly, one of the hinds leaped playfully away from the others, pretending to take flight. Then it sauntered back and propped its nose under the larger stag’s tail. The stag turned its head, stretched its neck and emitted a short barking sound.
Cummings looked up and whispered: “They’ll probably mate tomorrow…”
Albert nodded. “Is the dark one good enough?” he whispered back.
“I’m not sure,” said Cummings laconically, returning to his binoculars.
Cummings was short and thickset, with red curly hair and a heavy beard, in which only his nose and eyes were visible. His blond-haired hands grasping his binoculars were covered with scars. His clothes were dog-eared and worn, and his green wellingtons covered with patches.

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