The Square of Revenge (6 page)

But if she harped on any longer about an appeal on independent radio he would have to do something about it. Hannelore Martens may have been as green as pool-table baize, but she was also obstinate and persevering. He tried in desperation to think of an excuse to have her drop the idea.

“I think it would be better to wait first for the results of the inquiry.”

He suddenly sensed the warmth of her knees beneath the table. He hadn’t realized they were sitting so close.

“Nonsense,” she laughed. “The media are gagging for juicy reports like this. And don’t forget, their cooperation often uncovers useful information. The Dutch police have solved any number of cases with the help of the media. Bruges isn’t the sticks anymore, is it?”

“I’d have to run it past my superiors first,” said Van In tensely.

“Fine, Commissioner. But I want you to keep me up to speed. Do we have a deal?” She grabbed a brown envelope that was lying on the edge of the table and scribbled something in haste.

“Here, my address and telephone number.”

Van In accepted the envelope. It was just an ordinary envelope, without a stamp or imprint. Hannelore had used the back. He glanced at the address and telephone number, which she had written in sturdy capitals. Just as he was about to slip the envelope into his inside pocket, he noticed three words scribbled on the front.

For you, bastard.

Van In ran his fingers over the envelope. Like everyone else, he had thought that Degroof or one of his associates had left it behind on Friday. He opened the flap and removed a small square of paper.

“What are you doing?” she asked in surprise. When she saw Van In staring at the piece of paper with raised eyebrows she got to her feet and stood beside him. She leaned forward and Van In peeked shyly at her out of the corner of his eye. She was wearing a flimsy lace bra. He turned his head.
Jesus H.
, he thought.

“What’s this all about? What made you open the envelope?”

“Because it says ‘for you, bastard’ on the front. It’s hard to believe that Mr. Degroof gets this kind of mail on a regular basis,” he said impatiently.

Van In looked at the square of paper from every angle. It made no sense.

“Do you think whoever was responsible for the break-in left this behind?” She had moved in even closer. Her unabashed cleavage was unavoidable. Van In thought it better to look the other way. He tried to concentrate on the twenty-five letters on the piece of paper he was holding between his thumb and his forefinger. The fact that there were twenty-five of them was all he could figure.

“Perhaps Degroof can help,” said Van In cautiously. “Jewelers sometimes work with codes and the like. It’s all Greek to me.”

“But you said just then that you could tell from the text on the envelope that it had something to do with the case.”

“No, I didn’t,” he snorted. “I said that it was hard to imagine Degroof getting mail with ‘for you, bastard’ written on it.”

“But you still think the letter is from whoever broke into the place,” she persevered obstinately.

“Could be.”

“Could be,” she repeated. “Who else could have left it, may I ask, Commissioner?”

She pulled the piece of paper from between his fingers and studied it for a few seconds.

“I presume Mr. Degroof doesn’t correspond in Latin,” she sneered.

Fucking intellectuals
, said Van In under his breath. “I don’t know too many criminals who draft their messages in Latin either, do you?” he replied with more than a hint of sarcasm. The discomfort refused to let go. The naïve self-assurance she radiated gave him goose bumps.

“Absolutely, Commissioner, spot on. Criminals don’t tend to leave messages in Latin,” she laughed, seeing the funny side.

Jesus, that too
, Van In sighted.
She’s a good loser and she’s got a sense of humor!
His thoughts returned to the fleeting knee contact. Had she done it on purpose, or was she teasing him? Maybe she sensed that he wasn’t really in his comfort zone. Van In was a realist, but a warm, tingling thrill ran through his body.

She walked around the desk, grabbed her chair, and sat down beside him. She placed the piece of paper on the table in front of them.

“‘Rotas’ means ‘wheels,’” she said pensively. The word made up the top of the square.

ROTAS

OPERA

TENET

AREPO

SATOR

Intended or not, Hannelore was very close to him yet again. She smelled of Lux toilet soap and had a couple of freckles around her nose. Was she really a Deputy public prosecutor? Van In shook his head.

“So what do
you
think ‘rotas’ means?” she responded without taking a breath.

Van In jumped. He had strayed in his thoughts to the carefree moments he had spent with Sonja.

“Sorry, my thoughts were elsewhere.” He wanted to light a cigarette, but changed his mind. For some non-smokers, one cigarette was enough to spoil a friendship and he wasn’t prepared to take the risk.

“It looks like a puzzle … a sort of cryptogram. Don’t you think, Commissioner?” Her voice changed tone like a screwed-up adolescent. In the space of a few minutes she had shifted from interfering bitch to impish schoolgirl.

“If you’re right, then we must have a bit of a weirdo on our hands, or an idealist, or a combination of both.” Van In sighed. He was suddenly grateful to De Kee. Time to put the case to bed as quickly as possible.

“Or someone who’s been watching too much American pulp TV,” she added cleverly.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Van In groaned. “Spare me!”

“What did you say?” Hannelore glared at him. Her upper lip was trembling and it looked as if she was about to burst out laughing. Van In presumed he was now blushing.

“Typical police talk,” he said, brushing it off.

“You don’t say.”

Van In understood that there was no point in trying to fool her. She would only insist.

“You’re right, ma’am. It’s high time I updated my vocabulary.”

“Rags, Commissioner, rags. That’s what I used to say when I was in the shit.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, honestly, it harks back to my student days,” she recounted eagerly. “I turned up for my first oral exam in jeans, brand-new jeans no less. Can you guess what the professor said when he saw me?”

“No,” said Van In innocently.

“‘I don’t examine rags. Come back in September for a re-sit. Run along.’ I cried my head off!”

“You’re kidding.” He was barely aware of the fact that their conversation had become just as irrelevant as the anecdote she had just told him. They were in the middle of an investigation, after all. Another
Jesus H. Christ
was on the tip of his tongue. He was grateful no one else was in the shop.

“So where did you pick up the expression?” She poked him in the ribs with her elbow.

It was hard to tell whether Leo had been eavesdropping, but in any case his timing was perfect. He wheezed a little from sitting on his heels. His sleeves were rolled up and his piggy eyes flashed back and forth between Van In and Deputy Martens.

Hannelore put on a serious face. All this was new to her and she was having a whale of a time. She had long forgotten her colleagues’ wise advice. Pulling her weight was fine for a while, but she couldn’t keep it up. It wasn’t her style. No wonder they all walked around at the courthouse with a miserable face.

“Find anything?” Van In inquired.

“No prints,” Leo declared in a resigned tone. “And the gloves aren’t much help either … recent design, available everywhere. Maybe a microscopic examination might come up with something.”

“And the aqua regis?” Hannelore turned toward Vanmaele.

“What do you mean, ma’am?”

“Can’t it be traced? If you ask me, there’s a good ten gallons of the stuff in that tank. A sizeable amount for something that’s not available in the supermarket.”

“So you think there might be a record somewhere of such a purchase? If only. Aqua regis isn’t as rare and exotic as the name suggests. It’s just a mixture of one part nitric acid and three parts hydrochloric acid. Two innocent components you can buy in any drugstore without arousing anyone’s suspicions. Jewelers use it to separate gold from other alloyed metals.”

Leo grabbed a chair and sat down opposite Hannelore and Van In. He took off his glasses and launched into his explanation. Leo had started his career as a schoolteacher. He loved teaching, but the pupils at a variety of high schools hadn’t shared his enthusiasm.

“Pure twenty-four-karat gold is soft and unworkable,” he lectured. His round rosy cheeks were riddled with rosacea. “What we know as eighteen-karat or fourteen-karat is in fact an amalgam of gold and copper, silver, nickel, or palladium. The more the copper, for example, the yellower the gold. So-called “white gold” is a combination of gold and palladium or nickel. Eighteen-karat is an alloy containing 75 percent gold.”

“Well, well,” said Hannelore, “you learn something new every day!”

Leo thanked her with a broad smile. The lovely Hannelore was apparently everyone’s favorite.

“Processing old gold, or ‘scrap’ as they call it, is a question of separating the components. And one of gold’s more agreeable features is that it’s impervious to acid. The procedure is child’s play. You make a cocktail of two concentrated acids and dump in the ‘scrap.’ That’s how jewelers recover the pure gold.”

Leo Vanmaele returned his glasses to his nose as a sign that his lecture was over. He peered at the lovebirds in front of him through his thick lenses. For Leo, the situation was crystal-clear: something was blossoming between those two. His only problem was trying to understand how a woman like Hannelore could fall for the likes of Van In. His friend was forty-one, smoked like a nineteenth-century chimney, and drank like a Hummer in overdrive.

“So Degroof has nothing to complain about,” Hannelore concluded.

“The gold can still be used.”

“Absolutely, ma’am,” said Leo with a little too much emphasis on the “ma’am.” As if he wanted to underline the difference in rank.

“But ninety percent of the retail value of an exclusive piece of jewelry is in the design and the labor costs. Whoever did this caused a great deal of damage. If they had just taken it all, the insurance would have paid Degroof back to the last cent. Now it is more complicated.”

“Revenge,” said Van In cautiously.

“Exacted by a classically schooled psycho.” Hannelore waved the square of paper in the air.

Leo didn’t understand what she was talking about and paid no attention to her remark.

“If it was an act of revenge, then whoever did it was perfectly prepared,” he said. “No amateurs involved here. Semtex was used to blow open the safe, and that’s not the kind of thing you can pick up at the local bakery. The entire process of dissolving gold in aqua regis also takes more than twenty-four hours. Whoever was responsible must have known that the shop was closed on Saturday.”

“And don’t forget the alarm system. The culprit knew the code and the procedure followed by the security firm,” said Van In.

Hannelore fished a pack of cigarettes from the ample hip pocket in her loose-fitting skirt.

“Are you a smoker, Commissioner?”

Van In could hardly believe his ears. “Yes, thanks,” he said.” Leo refused the offer with a resolute gesture of the hand.

While Van In was enjoying his first greedy puff, Hannelore said unexpectedly: “Strange that someone who knew the alarm code didn’t know the combination of the safe.”

Leo looked at Van In with the words
pretty-and-intelligent-who-would-have-thought
written all over his face.

“My compliments, ma’am. As my old school teacher used to say: a good score, my boy, is a step closer to the front of the class.”

“Why didn’t
we
think of that,” said Van In.

“Because women just happen to be sharper than men, Commissioner,” she bragged and beamed. “And not to forget the Latin puzzle, Commissioner, eh?” She slipped the paper across the table to Leo. “You studied Latin at school if I’m not mistaken, Mr. Vanmaele?” Van In didn’t understand why they kept up the pretence and didn’t just use first names. But Leo didn’t seem to be bothered by it.

“That’s correct,” he smirked, pushing up his glasses and subjecting the piece of paper to a detailed examination.

“If we’re talking about revenge,” said Hannelore, “then it seems logical to me that we should be looking for the perpetrator or perpetrators in the immediate vicinity of the Degroof family. Revenge is an extremely personal matter. It’s more commonly associated with crimes of passion than with burglaries, at least if you can call this a burglary.”

She stared at Van In in expectation.

“I’ll try to put together a profile of the culprit tomorrow,” he said. It annoyed him that he couldn’t speak freely. “The guys from missing persons might be good for ideas. But I’m personally not convinced we’re dealing with a psycho.”

“But just then you said …”

“That was just then, ma’am.”

“Okay, everyone’s entitled to a change of opinion. But what makes you think it’s not a psycho? Intuition?”

“Indeed,” Van In smiled, “male intuition in this case.”

Bulls-eye
, thought Leo. He had been listening in while trying to decipher the Latin text. The meaning of “rotas,” “opera,” and “tenet” was obvious, and he had also noticed that “arepo” and “sator” were “opera” and “rotas” in reverse. But he still couldn’t figure what it was about.

“Not easy, Van In,” he said, removing his glasses as a sign that he had given up. “It was all so long ago. I think we’re going to need to consult a philologist. And if we translate it, does that mean we’ve figured it out? Did you notice that ‘rotas’ and ‘opera’ are also written backward, both vertically and horizontally?”

“So you also think it’s a sort of puzzle?” said Van In, leaning forward and taking the paper from Leo.

“But there has to be some kind of meaning behind it. Criminals don’t just leave messages behind for no reason, do they?” She brushed her hair behind her ears with both hands.

“Except in American pulp,” said Van In, straight-faced. “Then anything’s possible.”