Angel in the Shadows Read online

  Farah weighed up her chances. So far, her false Russian passport had taken her past two checkpoints at international airports. But she hadn’t forgotten the two officials she’d had to eliminate in the Moscow-to-Kiev train. She couldn’t take any risks here. She needed an alternative.

  That’s when she spotted movement by the glass doors. Initially, the sharp backlight stopped her from being able to see exactly what was going on, but, judging by the shrill sounds of gleeful voices echoing through the lobby, she figured it might be a large group of children entering the museum.

  One of the guards reached for his walkie-talkie and called for immediate assistance. The other walked towards the children, who’d now noticed the wooden angels above their heads and were jumping up excitedly while raising their arms in the air to try to grab hold of them.

  Of the five veiled women accompanying the group, one headed straight for Farah.

  As soon as Farah recognized her, she felt just as happy as the children, who were growing giddier by the minute.

  ‘I couldn’t just let you go,’ Aninda said, and handed her a silk headscarf. ‘Put it on. We’re all wearing one.’

  ‘My rucksack is in a locker,’ Farah said as she wrapped the scarf around her head. ‘My passport –’

  ‘Give me the key,’ Aninda said. ‘Quick.’ She beckoned to Rino, who came running over. She issued a few brief orders. ‘This key fits that little door. Go over, open it and bring back the rucksack. And please be quick.’

  After he finished barking into his walkie-talkie, the guard tried to persuade the women to take the children back outside as quickly as possible. Then some twenty Chinese tourists emerged from another gallery to see what the noise was all about. They squeezed past the children and the guards to get to the lockers, where Rino had just opened the door. He pulled the rucksack out and ran to Farah with a delighted expression on his face.

  She took his hand and, on Aninda’s sign, the other children all crowded around her as they made their way to the exit.

  Against the backlight of the low-hanging sun, all the people on Taman Fatahillah resembled faceless shadows from a big wayang show. Cheers could be heard, rallying cries. Before long, Farah saw what was going on. The people on the square parted for a large group of young protesters with white bandannas around their heads, demonstrating against Gundono’s nuclear-energy plans. The military police closed in on them from various directions.

  The children, who’d been so gleeful only moments earlier, now looked disappointedly at the cart with the fairground wheel, which was hurriedly whisked away by its owner.

  ‘We’ll come back soon and then you’ll all get to have a spin,’ Aninda shouted. ‘We’re going home now.’

  She turned around to Farah.

  ‘And you’re coming with us.’

  13

  It was already well into the evening when Radjen drove through the IJ Tunnel to Amsterdam-Noord. He reflected on the unexpected demand Paul Chapelle had thrown at him that afternoon in return for cooperation on the international developments surrounding AtlasNet.

  His mind wandered back to the injured boy. Once Sekandar had recovered enough, he’d be brought to Chapelle’s farm to continue his rehabilitation there. As far as security was concerned, his idea had a large number of obstacles that would need to be worked out, but a quieter, more rural environment might help the boy recover faster, and it could very well improve the communication with him. Chapelle and his mother both spoke Dari. So far, the boy had told Farah only his name. Now, he’d spoken his first words in a long time to Paul. There was a good chance that he’d follow up with the rest of his story. An important step in getting an official statement from him.

  He’d just parked his car in front of the middle of three old VOC warehouses when his phone rang.

  It was Ellen Mulder with the results of the toxicology tests. She confirmed what he and Esther had already suspected before the autopsy.

  ‘Meijer was drugged. He had traces of alfentanil in his blood. It’s often used for short surgical procedures. It takes effect within a minute.’

  ‘How long does it last?’

  ‘Fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Thank you, Ellen. I hope you have a good evening.’

  ‘You too Radjen, bye.’

  He had his apprehensions about the night ahead as he entered the refurbished warehouse’s main hall, located all the bells and tried to find Esther van Noordt’s nameplate.

  Her voice sounded as strained as he felt. A buzzer alerted him to the fact that the barred gate had clicked opened. He walked into an area where hundreds of years ago, coffee, tea, tobacco and cocoa from the Dutch colonies were stored. Now the three warehouses had been put to a variety of uses, including a business and innovation centre, a café, and exhibition and studio spaces for artists – all part of a project called Nieuw Amsterdam. It was an initiative of Kars Moonen, a rugged fellow who liked to refer to himself as an artistic entrepreneur. Kars had spent years in Australia living and painting with the Aborigines. Then he retreated to somewhere in the northern Canadian woods and lived like a hermit while sculpting angels from tree trunks. When he returned to the Netherlands, he purchased three abandoned warehouses from the city of Amsterdam, which didn’t have a clue what to do with such a run-down industrial area. At the time, he paid next to nothing for the buildings.

  Kars brought together a small army of young artists, which at first glance resembled some kind of creative anarchistic society, and he also had apartments built in the old complex.

  In the central shared space, an array of colourful characters were mounting an exhibition about Afghanistan. Radjen gazed at a panoramic image of a city that could have been Paris in the 1980s. But the immense white mosque dome and the Venetian balconies with Byzantine arched windows looked out of place. He walked over and read the caption: KABUL 1976.

  On the gallery of the first floor, where the apartments were located, Esther was waiting for him in the doorway. She was wearing light, wide-legged joggers and a T-shirt with thin horizontal black-and-white stripes. She looked like a cross between a seaman and an inmate.

  ‘My hangman,’ she said to welcome him. He saw that she was nervous. Perhaps just as nervous as he was.

  She walked him into a large room, where a grainy blue evening light seeped through the arched windows. ‘Pretty special place to live,’ Radjen said, ill at ease.

  ‘Hard to imagine that it would all have been demolished,’ she said.

  As they spoke, menacing clouds massed on the horizon above Amsterdam’s old city centre.

  ‘A few hundred years ago people visited this part of town on Sunday for their amusement,’ Esther said. ‘They came here to see executed prisoners rotting on the gallows. You won’t leave me hanging that long, right?’

  Radjen didn’t respond. By now all his attention was focused on the rope construction that she’d secured around a high wooden beam.

  ‘I gave a lot of thought to whether they used some kind of harness to hoist Meijer into position,’ she said. ‘But the problem is that you’d have to put both legs through it. That would have been pretty hard if, as I surmise, Meijer was out cold. You’d also have to remove the harness afterwards. That would take a long time and leave traces on the clothing. So it didn’t seem like a practicable option.’

  She showed him a wide nylon strap with a locking mechanism on the back on to which a 10.5-mm-thick Wall Master Unicore climbing rope could be hooked. That rope ran through a self-locking pulley device she’d attached to the ridge beam. She’d passed the rope through and pulled it tight.

  ‘Okay, we can get started,’ she said, with an uncertain look on her face, ‘but I need to smoke a joint first. Any objections?’

  ‘I’ll have a hit too,’ Radjen said.

  ‘It’s pretty strong stuff,’ she said, as she walked into the kitchen and pulled a small plastic bag out of a biscuit tin. ‘Home-grown.’

  ‘Shall I nab you on possession of an illegal substance and
then hang you?’

  ‘You might as well make yourself my partner in crime,’ she said. ‘Ninjas share everything anyway.’

  She sat down on a wide sofa, pulled out a pack of Rizla papers, rolled a joint, lit it, inhaled and passed it to Radjen. He held it up in front of him and eyed it the way you do things you distrust.

  Esther spread out her arms along the back of the sofa and sunk into the cushions as she stretched her legs. ‘It’s good stuff, trust me.’

  Radjen inhaled deeply and held the smoke in for a bit. Then he exhaled. He felt slightly euphoric.

  ‘It’s been ages,’ he said, as he returned the joint.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘I’d just become a detective. We backpacked around Europe for two weeks.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Me and my girlfriend.’

  ‘Did she look like Ellen Mulder?’

  ‘No, she was … different … we ended up at Lake Trasimeno.’

  It was out before he knew it. He didn’t know why he’d told her. His voice faltered. Suddenly he saw the empty tent before his eyes, after he’d unzipped it. He was soaked because he’d been swimming. He felt the bewilderment of the past embrace him. It had been so long ago, but the sensation was still just as strong as then.

  Esther didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘They say that Trasimeno, the son of the Etruscan King Tyrreno, drowned there,’ she said, exhaling a long stream of smoke, ‘and that the ghost of his beloved nymph is still searching for him. When the wind blows and you listen closely, you can supposedly hear her crying as she calls his name. “Trasimeno, Trasimeno …” ’

  With a high-pitched voice she imitated a restless spirit.

  ‘Did you hear her, Radjen?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I asked if you heard her crying?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The ghost of Trasimeno’s beloved.’

  ‘No … No.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes, sure.’

  ‘You suddenly seem so … distant.’

  ‘It must be the weed.’

  ‘Hmm …’

  She took her time inhaling and kept the smoke in her lungs. Then she exhaled with a cough.

  ‘Was she your childhood sweetheart, the girl who travelled with you?’

  He wanted to tell her everything, but it had been so long since he’d talked about it. ‘No. Well … yes … actually. She was …’

  ‘She was what? C’mon, spit it out! I mean, was she just one of many, or was she the love of your love?’

  ‘The latter, yes …’

  ‘Well, that’s beautiful, right? Did you marry her?’

  ‘No. She … I ended up marrying someone else.’

  ‘And what happened to your great love?’

  He shook his head and gestured that he wanted the joint.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, after sitting up straight and offering him another toke. ‘I shouldn’t be so nosy.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Radjen said. ‘But what you said about marriage … when we were at Meijer’s place, why …?’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘I’m curious what you have against marriage?’

  ‘You need a man, right?’

  ‘There are men in abundance.’

  ‘It’s about the type of guy.’

  ‘What type?’

  ‘Jesus … well, he has to be at least as tall as I am.’

  ‘Is that the key criterion, height?’

  ‘I don’t like short men.’

  ‘Okay, tall. Age?’

  ‘Irrelevant.’

  ‘Tall, ageless. Profession?’

  ‘Typically male question. Maybe he protects the world from all evil,’ she said, grinning. ‘But without the giant S on his chest and he doesn’t fly around in a red cape or the like.’ She grabbed the joint out of his hand, took a drag, then giggled and asked, ‘Are you actually happy, Radjen?’

  The question hit him hard. He acted as if nothing were wrong and heard himself giving her a relaxed answer.

  ‘Seems like everyone is talking about this nowadays: being happy.’

  ‘Life’s too short. A bit of happiness goes a long way, right?’

  She took a last toke, and then looked at him the same way she had that afternoon when they had stood outside Ellen Mulder’s office. She seemed so vulnerable, no longer the indomitable detective who flipped around chairs, tossed her hair over her shoulder, sailed the high seas and crushed out a cigarette with the heel of her boot. Everything seemed crystal clear to Radjen at this moment: the colour of her eyes, the smell of her skin and the tone of her voice, which sounded deeper than usual.

  ‘I’ll walk you through it,’ she said. ‘You drag me back towards the pulley device, you fasten the strap around my hips and hoist me up. Once I’m hanging high enough, you secure the rope.’

  She didn’t wait for his answer. She removed her trainers, then her socks and went and stood in place.

  ‘C’mon, get up and catch me.’

  Radjen went and stood right behind her. He felt a bit dizzy. He caught a whiff of her scent: apples and the sea. She let herself fall backwards. He extended his hands and caught her under her armpits. She tried to remain as limp as possible. He bent through his knees to support her weight and dragged her backwards.

  ‘I trust you,’ she whispered in his ear, letting him drag her five metres or so across the floor to the stool.

  He sat her on the stool, and, with one arm on her hips, tried to place the nylon strap around her with the other hand. She was still pretending to be as limp as possible. He wanted her to trust him; hoped that she’d keep feeling safe with him. He tightened the nylon hip strap, which was attached to the rope now holding her in place.

  ‘Everything okay?’

  She nodded, but the expression on her pale face indicated otherwise.

  ‘Shall we stop?’

  She shook her head no.

  He grabbed the rope and unfastened it. The first short tug he gave it made the beam creak. The nylon strap tightened around her hips.

  With the next tug, her feet left the ground. Her body began to lean forward, so she was hanging at a slight diagonal in the air. But when he pulled the rope again, the resistance exerted by her body weight made her hang more vertically.

  After a last firm tug her head was just a few centimetres under the beam. With some difficulty he secured the rope. Only once he’d looked up again did he see that she was making jerking movements in the air.

  He quickly lowered her to the ground.

  She threw her arms around him and wept silently.

  He did his best to console her.

  Part Four

  * * *

  PRAYER

  1

  For anybody about to be hanged, the sound of a trapdoor opening must be terrifying. It’s then that death, disguised as gravity, begins to tug at their feet.

  Once Esther was hanging at the highest point on the beam in her apartment, she felt as if somewhere inside her a trapdoor had opened and an unforeseen fear tried to drag her into a bottomless pit.

  Radjen saw it in her eyes.

  Within seconds he’d lowered the device she was strapped into and freed her from the belt tightly fastened around her hips. In his arms, she soon regained her composure.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, determined to control her tears.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I lost it there for a minute.’

  ‘Nothing to be ashamed of.’

  She looked past his shoulder at the rope hanging from the beam, which was still swaying slightly in the air.

  ‘In any case, we proved it’s possible.’

  ‘To ourselves, then,’ Radjen said. ‘To the outside world, we haven’t proven a thing.’

  ‘In fact, it’s probably better if nobody hears anything about this,’ she said with a slight smile.

  ‘My ninja lips are sealed,’ Radjen said.

  She wiped the mascara streaks
from her face and said, ‘I could do with some time alone.’

  He drove in the direction of the IJ, listening to the soothing cadence of the windscreen wipers. He’d lost track of the time. On the other side of the river he saw the lights of the old city, the coming and going around Centraal Station, and the brightly lit modern flats of KNSM and Java islands resembling a giant Mondrian mosaic.

  Passing the village of Schellingwoude, he then crossed a wide bridge and drove on to Panamalaan, into the night-time heart of Amsterdam, along the illuminated canals, until he reached Westermarkt, where during the day there was always a queue of visitors hundreds of metres long waiting to get into the Anne Frank House. Further down, he saw men stumbling out of cafés with women on their arms and zigzagging away on their bikes, back to apartments where they’d fall into unfamiliar beds and barely sleep.

  Esther’s scent was still with him. His shirt was slightly damp with her tears. He kept driving until he’d left the city centre, reached Hobbemakade, and the East Indies Monument appeared in front of him.

  Then he knew what he had to do.

  He stopped in front of Efrya and Thomas Meijer’s house and peered inside. It looked dark and deserted.

  As he pulled out a skeleton key, he knew he was breaking just about every existing police rule. Yet that didn’t stop him.

  His mind wandered back to his childhood. Every evening before he went to bed, his grandmother would tell him a different story about a clever dwarf deer named Kantjil, but she would always leave it to Radjen to make up an ending. ‘You got your gift for fantasy from me,’ she’d say, grinning. And every evening, once she’d said good night and left his room, in the light cast by an oil lamp, Radjen would re-enact the entire story as a shadow play on the whitewashed wall of his bedroom.

  Only when he became a detective did he realize what a unique skill he’d developed. Unlike others, he could reconstruct loose fragments into a cohesive whole. This skill went much further than just putting together the pieces of a puzzle, which is what most of his colleagues did. He had the ability to re-create events in his mind’s eye: his very own shadow play. After he’d gathered enough information about a wrongdoing, he could place himself in the middle of a crime scene and, as a spectator, imagine the course of events in front of his eyes. Of course, not everything he saw was equally clear, but he often discovered those last details he needed to solve the case.