Bonita Avenue (23 page)

“Outside. Beat you up.” Joni Sigerius, interpreter, twenty-five years old, unmarried.

“You just said you can spot a scumbag a mile off,” Sigerius said. “I can too, whether it’s Rotterdam or Shanghai. Always could. Africans, Russians, Asians, doesn’t matter—I could always tell. But how? Even if a guy is stark naked, I can still see it on him. You?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen riffraff naked.”

Sigerius grinned. “I have. For nearly a year, every day.”

“Siem.” Tineke. She seldom called him by his first name. Sigerius clapped the air with his right hand as though it were someone’s back. “Don’t interfere,” he said.

Joni got up from the table. “I think I need to pee. I can’t take this.”

Retrospectively, in light of the scene’s disastrous ending, he would identify this moment as the turning point. He recalled clearly that Sigerius paid no attention, he completely ignored his elder daughter. Instead he picked up his napkin, slid off its copper-colored ring, and then slammed it onto the table between him and Aaron. His mouth had an imperative look, his eyes were dark and
fanatical. “Imagine this Pitte naked,” he said. “Would you see it then?”

He answered that he thought so, it seemed to him something innate. “Yeah. In his look. They have a look that’s stupid and aggressive at the same time. No … smart and stupid. Is that possible?”

“A person’s look is a matter of breeding,” Sigerius said. “Right, Aaron? We’ve come that far a century after Lombroso. It’s all about the nature-nurture ratio. You can nudge a born criminal in the right direction.”

Joni was back surprisingly soon; it was hard to believe she’d actually been to the toilet. It seemed more likely that she had been eavesdropping from behind one of the ferns. “But
you
can’t,” she said as she glided past Aaron’s back on the way to her chair.

Huh? Had he heard that right? This was a frontal assault, although he wasn’t sure whose front was hit or what with, or why. But such a rebuke. Why now? Was he missing something? Yet more astonishing than Joni’s sneer was Sigerius’s reaction, namely
none
. His concentrated face rippled ever so slightly, a barely noticeable twitch. He set down his knife and fork, silver with heavy handgrips, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hairy hand.

“Aaron, I want you to tell Joni as precisely as possible what happened. Don’t skip a single detail. I want you to tell us how you taught that punk a lesson.”

No. Of course Aaron Bever had not taught Manus Pitte a lesson. He had never seen this Manus Pitte guy, never smelled him—he’d almost forgotten this himself. And
if
Pitte
had
parked his Escort on the side of the road in order to sock Aaron Bever in the kisser, then Aaron Bever would not have hesitated for a second
before tearing out of there—beat it, burn rubber, before that pleb, that roughneck, that lout, even came anywhere near his minivan. Get out and start swinging? He wouldn’t stand a chance, just like his brother didn’t stand a chance. If Pitte had dragged Sebastian through the revolving door, then he’d have knocked out all his teeth and flattened him like a tube of toothpaste in no time. Back at the trailer park, Pitte would have stuffed him with horsehair and old newspapers, propping him up in the back of the trailer between the karaoke set and Grandpa’s stuffed sheepdog.

“Luckily it didn’t come to that,” he said. “He dragged me as far as the revolving door; I went to grab the doorframe, but suddenly he let go. We both fell over backward. Pitte had seen something that gave him a real shock. And when I saw it, I got a shock too. But Pitte was more shocked, Pitte nearly shat himself. Out of the revolving door came a man, probably for the outpatient clinic, or maybe he came to have himself euthanized. It was a terrible sight. Pitte and I, sprawled on the floor tugging at each other, look at him at the same time, we see him at the same time. Together we see a monster. The Elephant Man. They weren’t burn wounds, it was something else, an alien landscape, the dark side of the moon; a single eye looked at us from that mass of flesh, the other one was overgrown with some gross protuberance, an orgy of pulpy flesh, a riot of warts and boils …”

Joni spat a piece of beef onto her plate. Cud. “Aaron, give me a
break
.”

“You give
me
a break.” Sigerius. “Go on.”

Aaron took a gulp of wine. “Well, OK, our hero scrambles up and starts shuffling backward into the hospital. Funnily enough, he picks up his tray and goes into the foyer without paying for the sausage rolls, looking back a couple of times.”

“And you?”

“Followed him, naturally.”

Aaron’s description of his pursuit, stairs up, stairs down, elevator in, elevator out, released an avalanche of pleasure. With his cell phone to his ear (that bit about the cell phone was a sudden brainwave, no one at the table was alert enough to realize cell phones didn’t exist back then, in reality his brother had asked the hospital personnel to call the police), he trailed his suspect: a manhunt! “Pitte abandoned his tray in front of the elevator.” Sigerius’s face went purple and his head fell back in hilarity when Aaron told him he helped himself to the sausage rolls.

“And what, you bite into his sausage roll?”—the final words dissolving into a guffaw that bellowed forth from deep within Sigerius’s throat, like an eruption of magma. But the women at the table did not laugh with him. Joni’s irate face swung from Aaron to her wet-eyed father, and Janis dragged a cooled-off potato croquette through the gravy with her fork.

“Jesus Christ,” Tineke muttered. She got up and went into the kitchen with the empty Wedgwood platter. They could hear her give the deep-frier basket a hardhanded shake. Sigerius shoved back his chair, still har-harring, both hands on his belly, which filled his polo shirt like a strong nor’wester.

“Dad,” said Joni. “Just cut it out.” Her neck was covered with red splotches, all the way into the graceful V-neck of her blouse. But Sigerius appeared not to hear, he just kept on braying, and Aaron noticed that his sensation of triumph was beginning to evaporate. There was something going on here that he had no part in.

Tineke returned to the sunroom with the platter of sizzling potato croquettes and looked at her husband. Her puffy face, framed by ash-blond curls, seemed expressionless, as fat people’s faces often do. Maybe that is why the bang of the platter on the table came as such a shock. “Siem—
stop it
.”

Silence.

Sigerius looked at her, silently and sadly. His face was instantly transformed into an abandoned warehouse.

“Tell them the truth then, damn it, instead of that juvenile giggling.”

“What truth?”

“Come on. Don’t play the fool. Go on and tell them, if you know so much about it.”

“Guys,” Janis hushed.

Her mother did not hear her. “If you’re a real man, Siem Sigerius, then you’ll tell them who called last Saturday. Which piece of scum.”

“Tien, spare me this. Spare us this. What does Saturday have to do with this? For God’s sake.”

“Plenty. Everything. And you damn well know it. Tell them. Or I will.”

Sigerius did not move a muscle. Although on his rector’s skull, under that cropped, slightly graying hair, one little one did. An unseen, uneasy muscle. “You’re ruining everyone’s evening,” he said, “and you damn well know
that
.”

“Then
I’ll
tell them.” She looked across the table at Joni and Janis. “Sweethearts,” she said, “don’t be alarmed. Wilbert called. Our very own scumbag rang up. Saturday night, especially for you two. Wilbert Sigerius. Wondering if you survived the explosion.”

He was cold. He was so caught up with himself—with his own mendacity, with Sigerius’s response, with his revenge on Joni and her beaus—that he didn’t understand what had just happened. He couldn’t make rhyme or reason of it. Apparently he was not the focus of his own act, but had hammed his way through a one-man
show while the main performance was taking place not onstage but in the stalls. There were so many things he didn’t get: he didn’t get why no one was relieved at Sigerius’s spectacular mood boost, he didn’t get why Tineke started in on that telephone call while her husband was dead set against it, he didn’t get the antipathy between Joni and Sigerius. And worst of all: how could he not have realized it was not about Manus Pitte at all, but in fact about Wilbert Sigerius?

He of all people, who thought he knew something about the IJmuiden Basher and the family over which he cast his ragged shadow. Ever since that evening long ago in the canteen of the campus gym, when Sigerius acquainted him with the résumé of the family’s very own lowlife, it had become a research project. It fascinated him. He had started with Joni, using all the tact he could muster up, and barraged her with questions: what did
she
know about Wilbert, aside from the shreds of information she’d already given him? Not much, apparently. Even less than her father had already confided in him. Yes, he was doing time, that much she knew, but no details. She clearly didn’t like talking about it; in fact, no one else in that family did either, they’d sooner bite off their tongue than mention that goddamn jailbird. Figuring he understood that, he undertook to find things out for himself. One morning he cycled to the public library and delved into the newspaper archives for court reports of Wilbert’s case. The conviction was handed down in 1993, Sigerius had said so, at the Haarlem courthouse. That was all he had to go on. But he had time. Since the Enschede library did not save past copies of the
Haarlemse Dagblad
he installed himself at the oval reading table across from the coffee automats and perused, without success, every copy of the Amsterdam
Parool
from 1993, after which he had them bring up a stack of
Telegraafs
from the depot, and what do you know: just as he was about to lose hope, his eye fell upon a dry little item.
Further in the section he found an extensive article, its blocks of text in boldface, containing details that would occupy his thoughts for the rest of the day.

Wilbert S. appeared before the court on November 16, 1993, for beating to death one Barry Harselaar, fifty-two, process manager at the Hoogovens steelworks, in a blind rage with a four-kilo sledgehammer. Thanks to prior mediation by North Holland Probation Services, Aaron read, the “revolving-door criminal S.” worked the morning shift as an odd-job man in the factory complex of hot rolling mill 2. Things went well for a few weeks, until his foreman—Harselaar—noticed that Wilbert S., who had done time earlier for sexual intimidation, had been making unwelcome advances to a forty-one-year-old canteen employee. After the woman had complained to Harselaar about “boob-grabbing,” he decided to teach the newbie a “sympathetic” lesson. According to two eyewitnesses, Harselaar was leaning against a sledgehammer next to an empty iron barrel, about a meter high, when he called Wilbert S. over. “Listen, pal, my pack of shag’s lying at the bottom. You should be able to reach it with those sticky fingers of yours.” When Wilbert S. leaned into the barrel, his waist folded over the iron rim, Harselaar picked up the sledgehammer and gave the side of the barrel a massive wallop. That’ll teach him and his filthy paws. What Harselaar did not know is that Wilbert S. had already taken lessons: Aggression Management Training, offered by the National Parole Board for easily inflamed individuals. “Have a short fuse,” Aaron read the blurb on the Parole Board’s website, “but not sure where it comes from? Aggression maintenance begins by finding the causes. Self-control ultimately leads to inner calm.”

“S.” clambered out of the barrel, his ears ringing, and screamed as he set upon his foreman, taking him by the throat. According to bystanders, after a short skirmish he grabbed the sledgehammer,
promptly raised it above his head and brought it down with a splitting smack between Harselaar’s neck and left shoulder. The foreman collapsed. Intervention was impossible: one of the two witnesses, twenty-one-year-old Ronald de H., attempted to intercede, which earned him a broken pelvis from a well-placed backswing. What they saw happen under their very noses in the next thirty seconds must have been traumatic. Wilbert S. beat Barry Harselaar with the hammer, shouting “fucking prick” at least fifteen times, until the man had been turned into a mangled, bleeding bale of flesh and bone. The autopsy determined that Harselaar’s body suffered no fewer than twenty-six broken bones. The only thing that was still intact was his organ donor card.

Having spent his aggression, Wilbert S. flung the sledgehammer against a wall and fled through the 600-meter-long rolling mill, out an emergency exit and into the steelworks complex. An hour and a half later he was arrested in a storage depot behind one of the coke plants.

Because S. was a recidivist (twice earlier convicted of assault and battery), because it was not a matter of self-defense or undue provocation by the victim, and considering the brutality of the crime, the Haarlem District Attorney demanded ten years’ imprisonment plus mandatory psychiatric treatment. Although the judge shared the DA’s revulsion at “S.’s uncontrolled rage,” his verdict was eight years in prison minus four months’ prior detention on remand. Mandatory psychiatric treatment was out of the question, because S., according to the psychiatrists at the Pieter Baan clinic, was entirely
compos mentis
.

The evening after his visit to the library, Joni joined him for dinner at his house on the Vluchtestraat, and when he shared his findings with her during the washing-up she began to cry. It was the first time he had seen her in tears, and while he felt an innate
tenderness he still found it difficult to understand her reaction. He asked questions, the wrong questions.

“Are you crying because of the foreman he murdered?”

“No, I didn’t know him.”

“Are you crying because you’re ashamed?”

“No, of course not. Why would I be ashamed?”

“Because of the gruesome details, for instance.”

“No!” she blubbered, “yeah, that
too
, I’m crying about everything, you know? And it wasn’t murder, it was manslaughter. I’m just sad for the guy himself, for his bad luck. In spite of everything I really feel sorry for him. Is that so crazy?”