Black Widow (11 page)

‘I’m going to Ruben’s funeral, as our official representative.’

‘Ah, of course,’ she said. ‘I seem to remember volunteering you for it. Should be fun.’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘Well, keep your eyes open,’ she advised. ‘You can learn a lot, at a funeral.’

‘Right, boss. And you?’

‘I have something in mind,’ Tanja responded, as she fetched her handbag from beneath her desk.

‘You’re seeing Alex?’

Tanja thought about denying it, but there didn’t seem much point. It was more of a statement than a question; he already knew the answer. ‘How did you guess?’

‘Oh, you know,’ Pieter said. ‘The grapevine. ’

Tanja glanced over at Janssen, who gave a guilty start, then returned to his paperwork. ‘I think you mean the
crepe
-vine,’ Tanja said sourly. ‘Harald wouldn’t know a grape if it crawled up his ass and turned into a vintage Merlot. It’s a fruit, you see. He doesn’t do fruit.’

‘Well, good luck, anyway.’

Tanja might have said something else, but to make a further issue out of it would have been to draw attention to her growing nervousness. She nodded instead, and hurried away, her thoughts drifting inevitably towards the Big Date. And Alex.

I’ll make a bit of an effor
t, she decided as she cajoled the Opel out of the car park.
I’ll try and look less like a police officer, maybe. That should help.

At ten o’clock that night she was still pushing her trolley through her local supermarket, almost blinded by the cosmetic choices on offer. In the end she bought a stick of lipstick, almost at random, and two additional tins of cat food.

*

The car was an Opel, like Tanja’s, but much larger. A 1989 Senator, half a million klicks on the clock. Harald needed a big car: anything smaller brought on his claustrophobia. Still he drove with the windows down, whatever the weather, and had a habit of sticking his head outside, dog-like, whenever he could.

He reached over to the passenger seat, taking a slice of bread from its packet. The steering wheel jammed between his knees, he sprinkled the bread with grains of
hagelslag
chocolate. Not an original combination by any means, but satisfying. Who said that Dutch cuisine lacked sophistication?

Something was missing, though. Ah, of course. He reached into his jacket pocket, where he kept a slice of ham. He added it to his sandwich. Now there was elegance. Carbs, choc and pig – the three essential foodstuffs in one tasty package.

It didn’t take long to get to Enge Lombardsteeg. He parked his car at the broadest part of the alley, then, sandwich still in hand, proceeded to amble the fifty or so metres to the bar.

‘Want some weed, man?’ a staff-hippy asked as Harald took his bearings within the upstairs gedoogbeleid café. Incan Gold? More like Incan Shit.

‘Nah,’ Harald answered.

‘Got some proper skunk, know what I sayin’?’

‘Nah,’ Harald said again. ‘Fuck off, eh?’

The hippy backed away, hands aloft. Harald nodded to him, and made his way towards the café’s darkest corner, where he saw evidence of a stairway.

He clumped down the stairs. He was greeted at the bottom by a man. A very large man, who looked him up and down, and not with any great sense of appreciation.

‘Can I help you?’ the doorman asked.

‘Hope so,’ Harald answered. ‘Are you Jacobus?’

‘Who?’

Harald frowned, and pointed at the door. ‘That The Den through there?’

‘Yes.’ Again the look of mild contempt. ‘But I’m not sure it’s for you.’

‘Never mind that. I’m looking for Jacobus.’

The doorman sniffed. ‘And again I say, who?’

‘There isn’t a Jacobus working here?’

Now it was the doorman’s turn to frown. His chops lurched about his face, like meat being moved around an abattoir. ‘There might have been, now that I think about it. Bit odd. Believed in God and all that. But he’s quit.’

‘You’re his replacement?’

‘Yes,’ the man affirmed. ‘But look, I’m getting a bit bored of this. Why don’t you go away?’

Harald took out his badge. ‘Don’t think so, son. Your boss in?’

‘No,’ the doorman said awkwardly, leading Harald to think that he might just be lying. Either that or he had something to hide. Men in his profession often did.

One way to find out. ‘Never mind. Step aside, will you?’

The doorman did as he was told, though it clearly bothered him. Harald nodded pleasantly, and stepped through the door, taking his phone from his pocket as he did so. It was probably nothing, but maybe Tanja should be told.

Ah, damnit, no signal. He looked disconsolately over his shoulder, towards the steps. No way. He wasn’t going to climb those any more times than was necessary. He would phone her on the way out.

So he looked around the club, his eyes wide against the darkness. He was aware that people were watching him. Two young men sitting at the bar, and an older woman, peering out from an alcove. The place was hardly busy. He checked his watch. Only just gone eight. It would doubtless pick up later.

He approached the woman. She looked up at him, clearly bemused. He didn’t suppose he looked much like a typical patron. He didn’t look much like a typical anything, really.

‘Evening,’ he said. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Janssen.’

‘Oh?’ A confused range of emotions played across her face. ‘Did Sophia put you up to this? She did, didn’t she? Ah, what a dear! Still, I have to say that she could probably have tried a
little
harder. No offence.’

‘You’ve got it wrong. I
am
a cop.’ Harald waved his badge again. ‘Mind if I have a word, then, love?’

‘Well, I guess.’

‘I’m here in connection with the death of Mikael Ruben. Have you heard about that?’

She pulled an unhappy face. ‘I might have heard the odd whisper, yes. A terrible shock.’

‘Were you here, the night it happened?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know anyone who was?’ Harald pressed.

‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’

Harald was aware of a small commotion behind him. A rather tall, blonde-haired woman was striding across the floor to meet him. She took him by the elbow, leading him away with a surprising show of strength. ‘What are you doing?’ she demanded.

‘Who are you?’ Harald countered.

‘Sophia Faruk.’

‘Ah! The owner. Well, I was here to speak to your doorman, Jacobus. Just a routine call, you know, to see if he remembered anything about the woman Mikael Ruben left with. But he seems to have vanished. Did you sack him?’

‘No,’ Sophia replied. ‘He quit.’

‘Why?’

‘You’d have to ask him that,’ she said coldly. ‘All I know is that he called to say that he wouldn’t be coming in any more.’

‘Was that before, or after, you told him that we wanted to speak to him?’

She thought about it for a moment. She was a good-looking piece, Harald supposed.

‘I don’t remember,’ she answered.

‘Never mind. You got an address for him?’

‘If I give it you,’ Sophia demanded, ‘will you leave my customers in peace?’

‘Yeah, why not.’

So Harald left with a piece of paper in hand. He read the address. Ah, fuck it. Slotervaart. Of all the places. No matter that the government was in the process of knocking the slum down, and turning it into some sort of post-whatever paradise – it was still the place where all the Turks and the Moroccans gathered, to dream up their jihads or whatever; where pale-skinned visitors tended to be greeted with suspicion, or worse. And Jacobus lived there? He must be one tough bastard.

Harald was as brave as the next man, when the justification was there. But he couldn’t for the life of him see the sense in risking his life for nothing. So Jacobus had quit – it was in the nature of doormen to quit, whenever a better opportunity presented itself. A quick trawl of Sophia’s accounts would doubtless confirm that he’d been working on a cash-in-hand basis; he wouldn’t have felt any need to work notice. And the odds on him actually knowing something useful still seemed fairly remote, at least to Harald’s mind.

And then he thought,
Tanja will be disappointed if I don’t check it out
.

He patted his gun. Still there.

He thought again about calling her, but only for a second. She would only insist on joining him, and he couldn’t allow that. The thought of something bad happening to Tanja upset him, in a way that few things did.

He steered the Senator out towards the west of the city, past the famous expanse of Vondelpark, and then the infamous stretch of De Oeverlanden, where homosexuals liked to go cruising for boys, and gangs of gay-bashing Neo-Nazis liked to hone their skills. But now he was starting to see a few immigrants, gathering together in loose pockets of hooded menace. Harald drove on by, following his nose when his sat-nav refused to co-operate.

*

Jacobus’ street seemed quiet enough, but he knew that it might erupt at any moment. The “Dutch Compton”, the Press liked to call Slotervaart.

Harald hurried from his car, and banged on the door of an end-terrace slumbox. The door opened to his touch. His hand to his gun, Harald peered inside. There was an acrid stink of urine, or some chemical like that. There was candlelight, playing on a wooden crucifix, the unfortunate Christ seeming to bleed in the sooty glow.

The next thing he saw was a pair of junkies, white kids, cooking up. One turned to him, and laughed.

Harald ignored that one. ‘I’m looking for Jacobus,’ he said to the other.

The more serious kid shook his head. ‘Jacobus is gone, man. Moved out yesterday.’

‘Did he say where he was going?’

‘No, man. He didn’t say a word. But when we see him leave with his suitcase we know we gotta take our chance. This is our place, now.’ The kid held up his free hand. He had a knife. ‘You wanna argue about it?’

Harald was aware of other shapes moving at the edge of the candlelight, just beyond his vision. They were starting to circle, he could feel it.

‘No,’ he said, backing away towards the door. ‘Not at all.’

He returned to his car. It had been surrounded by a crowd in the intervening period. The youths ran as they saw him approach, but he knew that they might just as easily have taken their own knives and gutted him.

And who would sign the alimony cheques then? Part of Harald almost regretted his escape.

He did call Tanja, finally. Even though he knew she would be thinking about Alex Hoekstra.

Chapter 8

Saturday

Mikael Ruben’s funeral was set for midday. Pieter stood at the back of the throng, glad, at least, that there was a little breeze to be had at the edge of the crowd. The sun burned the sky; it was no day to be wearing black.

The fifty or sixty mourners observed the rites with immaculate care. The women cried, whilst the men gave the impression that they might like to cry, if only it were allowed. There was nothing here to suggest that Mikael Ruben had moved in anything other than respectable circles. Even the extroverted Anita Berger had seen fit to cover up, and tone down her makeup. Save for a curious brass broach on her breast, looking like two intertwined sticks or something like that, she was quite unadorned. She’d settled into her demure aspect rather easily, Pieter noticed; it seemed to fit her quite as well as the other.

Anita stood beside her daughter. Maria kept very still, her head tilted to one side as she listened to the priest. The Rubens had been Jewish, originally, but Pieter had learned that the old faith had been abandoned during the build-up to the German invasion. So, Dutch Reformed it was. Solid, sensible, and to hell with the Catholic baubles.

Pieter wasn’t religious. He liked religious things – churches and paintings of Christs carrying Crosses, for instance – but as a general rule he felt that the world existed without design or purpose. It wasn’t a problem; he actually found it quite comforting, knowing that he had nothing to live up to save his own ambition. But if by some miracle God
did
exist, then he could hardly take issue with Man, who, after all, had been built to his precise specification. And Free Will was hardly that, if every misdemeanour carried with it the possibility of divine censure.

Pieter dragged his attention back to the moment. This tendency towards flippancy – he would have to fight it. He’d heard the other cops in the canteen, the way they turned everything into a joke. He was determined that he wouldn’t end up like that, where every heartfelt emotion was clogged with cynicism.

‘Ashes to ashes –’

Pieter bowed his head as the final prayers were said, and mouthed his
Amen
.

And then it was over. The crowd began to disperse.

‘Detective Kissin?’

Anita Berger was looking at him. He nodded. ‘Mrs Berger.’

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

‘Well, we thought someone should come.’

Anita considered his response. ‘I see.’ She placed a hand on his arm, and steered him a little way apart. ‘Have you made any progress, yet?’

‘Well, not as such.’

‘No?’ She glanced at her daughter, who was standing alone beside the grave. ‘Well that’s a shame. For Maria, I mean. I don’t think she will be able to move on until the killer is brought to justice.’

‘Well that’s quite natural.’ He cast around for something to say. ‘So how is she doing, all things considered?’

‘Oh, as you’d expect. She’s back living with me for a few days. Of course, the play has been cancelled. They couldn’t find a suitable understudy. It’s a compliment, don’t you think?’

‘I guess.’

Anita leant in a little closer. ‘I invested a good deal of my own time in the production, you know.’

‘Oh?’

‘I helped with the costuming. Costumes, accessories, wigs – you name it, and I can either source it, or make it myself!’

‘You are a seamstress, by trade?’

‘Hardly! I run a café, as it happens. But I love all that stuff, you know? Acting, the theatrical life.’

‘You must be disappointed, then, that the play has been forced to close?’

‘Well, a little.’ Anita adjusted the lie of her hat, then moved yet closer, so that she was peering directly up at him. ‘So, you will be sure to tell me if you learn anything?’