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
.