Angel in the Shadows Page 9

  ‘What kind of faces?’

  ‘Faces of children, dead children.’

  ‘Did he tell you anything more about this?’

  ‘Only that he saw them.’

  ‘Not why they were dead?’

  ‘No.’

  Esther took Efrya’s hand. ‘Tell me,’ she said softly, ‘just tell me, you’ll feel a lot better.’

  Efrya opened her mouth. First, there was no sound, as if despair had paralysed her vocal cords. ‘I was worried that we would have a dead baby, that his dreams were a prophecy.’

  Radjen stared at the young widow with scepticism. Esther kept holding Efrya’s hand. She seemed not to notice either of them, as if she were in a trance.

  ‘One night I woke up … it was about a month ago. The spot beside me in bed was empty. There was a light on downstairs. He was sitting bent over in a chair. I’d never seen him cry. I often saw in his eyes that he wanted to, but he never did. Now he was sobbing like a baby. He told me that he couldn’t keep it in any longer. I was shocked, afraid it was about us. But it was the things he’d seen. A boy he’d hit with his car. But he wasn’t the only guilty party, he said.’

  ‘Did he mention who else was involved?’

  Efrya shook her head adamantly. ‘It was better that I didn’t know. For my own safety, he said.’

  ‘What was he afraid of?’

  ‘He said that one of the men involved was very powerful; he could send me back to Ghana. That it was better if I knew as little as possible.’

  ‘Shortly after that, Thomas gave us a statement,’ Radjen said. ‘He told us that he had indeed hit a child. Indicated the place, time and the name of the man who was in the car. That man, he said, had forced him to keep driving, to just leave the child he’d hit behind on the road.’

  Radjen pulled a photo of Lombard from the case file and pushed it towards Efrya. She froze.

  ‘Do you recognize him?’

  Efrya nodded. ‘He’s a minister.’

  ‘Do you know his name?’

  ‘I believe it’s Lombard.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Radjen said. ‘A few days after making his statement, Thomas came back in to see us. He wanted to change his statement. He said he’d been mistaken, that on the night of the collision he’d first taken Minister Lombard home. After that, he drove back to Amsterdam and when he hit the boy he was alone in the car. What I wonder, and perhaps you as well, is which version we should believe?’

  He looked at her, with the hope that he’d somehow forged a bond with this inconsolable woman opposite him. A bond that made her feel safe enough to tell them what she knew. He heaved a sigh when she continued.

  ‘He wouldn’t get jail time if he said he was alone in the car. That’s what they promised him …’

  ‘Who do you mean by “they”?’

  ‘I don’t know. The people involved.’

  ‘Does that include the minister?’

  ‘No, Thomas spoke to someone else. Someone who gave him advice.’

  Radjen pulled out another photo. ‘Was it this fellow?’

  Efrya nodded. ‘He came to see us twice.’

  ‘That’s Lombard’s lawyer. He’s not the one who decides about prison sentences. Ultimately it’s a judge’s decision. Thomas would’ve known that. Why did he still want to change his statement – what do you think?’

  Efrya could barely get out her words. ‘It was for Gifty,’ she stammered. ‘They would arrange for her to come to the Netherlands. That’s why he lied the second time. But he also couldn’t bear that he’d done that. It made him sick, sick in the head. He didn’t dare go to sleep, he was afraid of having the same dream. That the dead children would return. He wanted to get away, far away. He wanted to return to Axim. He said he had a plan.’

  ‘Who else knew that?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  Radjen and Esther glanced at each other. They saw that Efrya was exhausted.

  ‘One last question, Efrya. The gate to the garden. Do you use it a lot?’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s always locked.’

  ‘Good,’ Radjen said. ‘You’ve helped us enormously, Efrya. Please take care of yourself.’

  She looked at him with hollow eyes. ‘Is it my fault he’s dead?’

  ‘No,’ Radjen said, ‘you’re not responsible for his death.’

  Esther leaned towards her. ‘You did everything you could. You tried to make him happy.’

  ‘Then why did he want to die?’

  Esther looked at Radjen with a raised eyebrow. Radjen got it and nodded to indicate that she didn’t have to beat around the bush. She cleared her throat. ‘We’re not sure yet,’ she said as gently as she could, ‘but it’s possible that Thomas didn’t commit suicide.’

  All the colour drained from Efrya’s face.

  ‘There’s a possibility he was murdered,’ Esther said.

  ‘My Thomas is dead,’ whispered Efrya. ‘No matter what you find out, it won’t bring him back.’

  ‘You’re right. I’m sorry,’ Esther said.

  ‘I’d like to leave now.’

  ‘Is there someone you can stay with tonight?’

  Efrya shook her head and stood up as if she were now shouldering the weight of the world. The hand she gave Radjen in parting was even clammier now than it had been earlier that morning. Esther escorted her out of the interrogation room.

  For a time Radjen stared at the blank wall in front of him. There was a crack in it that was gradually increasing in size, just like the crack in his bedroom ceiling. He had a keen eye for cracks and fissures, and an even greater reluctance to do anything about them.

  He rose with some difficulty. As if in a daze, he walked over to the coffee machine and performed his familiar kick-smack-press ritual. With a cappuccino in hand and the file under his arm, he headed down the hall to his office with the same number of paces as always. He kicked his door shut with his heel, placed the cup – with almost mathematical precision – on the dark-brown circular stain left by all the previous coffees and sank into his chair just as he’d done for years.

  He closed his eyes, listened to his agitated breathing and the heavy whooshing of his much too rapid circulation. He envisioned himself lying in a tightly zipped tent. From afar he heard an imaginary storm approaching and he felt himself shrinking, growing smaller and smaller, until he, as insignificant as an ant, was small enough in his mind to crawl through an ingenious network of tiny corridors looking for the path that would help him to make sense of these unsolved cases. He inched through cramped spaces where it reeked of rot, moved more deeply into the caverns, where he hoped to find a trace of evidence, a hint of a clue. He crawled through the darkness until his whole body was sweating. And he felt it: that same sensation he once had as a young man lying in his tent. At that moment, as if struck by lightning, he suddenly knew what he had to do.

  He opened his eyes and saw Esther standing in the doorway.

  ‘The forensics guys are finished with the house. A female officer’s going to drive Efrya home.’

  With the same inviting gesture he’d been using for years, he pointed to the seat facing his desk. Esther spun it around and straddled the chair, planting both her heels firmly on the ground. Her brown leather jacket made a squeaky sound as she threw her long hair over her shoulder.

  ‘If Efrya Meijer is telling the truth, and why should we doubt her word,’ Radjen said, ‘then Meijer changed his first statement under duress. His reward: the half-baked promise of a family reunion.’

  ‘But even if what Efrya is saying is true, it still isn’t proof.’

  ‘Right. But it makes it plausible that Lombard was with Meijer in the car at the time of the hit-and-run.’

  Radjen looked out of the window. It was gradually getting lighter: the city coming to life.

  ‘Have you ever taken a good look at an anthill, Van Noordt?’

  ‘Can’t say I have, Chief.’

  ‘Ants can build an entire underground colony, complete w
ith transit routes connecting different parts with each other. It’s amazing how huge and complex these structures are. And’ – he turned to her – ‘they’re basically invisible. All we see are some scattered mounds. That’s what we’re dealing with here: underground structures all connected to each other, and the only thing we see are tiny heaps of dirt. From the moment of the hit-and-run to the discovery of Meijer in his shed, we’ve been dealing with matters related to each other. But we don’t have any proof. And a few hours ago we lost our key witness. We have only circumstantial evidence. Unless the NFI can confirm what we suspect. Let’s get the hell out of here. I’ll brief you in the car.’

  11

  Kuzminki was one of the poorest and perhaps the most colourful of Moscow’s working-class districts. A greater contrast with the wealthy, flashy city centre was inconceivable. Even the smog was worse here. In a hazy and deserted park, a blind old man without teeth played his accordion. Amid discarded household goods and ripped rubbish bags, he sang about the lost love of his life.

  This fine evening,

  under a starry sky

  I’m still dreaming

  one day you’ll return …

  A large concrete tower block loomed up against the dark-grey sky.

  She was supposed to be in this thirteen-storey tower. The girl Farah had described to him. The girl called Yelitsa Andreyevna who lived in an obshaga, a dormitory at Number 54 Volzhsky Boulevard, Kuzminki.

  It felt like it was at least forty degrees Celsius in the tower block’s neon-lit lobby. Behind a fold-down desk, a surly-looking woman who was well over fifty sat in the air current of a rattling fan. Her thinning grey hair had been dyed black, the wrinkles in her face plastered with foundation, her eyes heavily lined with black kohl and her thin lips painted a dark shade of red. She was the woman with the keys, the concierge, landlady, police officer and mistress of this dormitory. She was all of these things rolled into one and the look in her eyes indicated ‘immune to charm’.

  Beside her hung a gigantic wooden board with thirteen rows of small hooks: a row for each floor; a hook for each room key. Most of the hooks were bare.

  ‘I’m looking for Yelitsa Andreyevna,’ Paul said.

  The woman held out her wrinkled hand. ‘Papers.’

  Paul gave her his tourist visa, in which he’d enclosed a small stack of rouble notes. She snatched them out and compared the photo with the man standing in front of her.

  ‘American,’ she muttered. She could have used the same intonation to say the word ‘cockroach’. These kinds of ageing women seemed to suffer from the chronic and incurable ailment known as dourness.

  ‘I’m her guest lecturer.’

  ‘And I’m the first woman on the moon.’ She returned his visa and made a bored go-on-up gesture.

  ‘Top floor, room at the back.’

  Since the lift was the size of a cupboard and reeked of fast food and urine, Paul decided to give the steps in the dilapidated stairwell a try. Each floor he passed looked more dismal than the previous one. Behind each of the twenty doors were small rooms, closets really, filled with two or three bunk beds, a table, a wardrobe, chairs and a few odds and ends. Each floor, which housed between twenty and forty residents, had only a single shared shower, toilet and kitchen. Since the introduction of the national state exam, which had students flocking to the capital from the surrounding provinces, these dirt-cheap obshagas were the only affordable places for pupils who’d moved to Moscow from the surrounding provinces.

  By the time he arrived on the thirteenth floor, Paul was gasping for breath. Hearing female voices, he made his way to the kitchen, where he found three young women around a table surrounded by stacks of dirty dishes. As soon as they spotted him in the doorway, they broke off their agitated conversation.

  ‘I’m looking for Yelitsa,’ Paul said.

  ‘And you are?’

  He hesitated. ‘A journalist.’

  ‘What do you want with her?’

  It sounded defensive. He watched their serious faces.

  ‘She’s got … important information.’

  ‘She doesn’t want to talk to anyone – and certainly not to journalists.’

  ‘Maybe she will when she finds out why I’ve come to see her.’

  ‘And why is that?’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s wise to share that with you. She may have seen things during the hostage-taking … It’s probably best for you to know as little as possible.’

  One of the young women, the middle one, suddenly stood up. Her face was flushed and she slammed her fist on the table.

  ‘What’s with the secrecy? What happened to her? Since that hostage-taking she’s become a shadow of herself.’

  The other two tried to calm her down, but to no effect.

  ‘We shared a room; I was one of her best friends. But now … now I’m afraid to sleep there. She scares me.’

  ‘Has she told you anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Let me talk to her. I’ll see what I can do for her.’

  It was a promise he probably couldn’t deliver on, but the girl who’d jumped to her feet was already coming towards him.

  ‘I’ll take you to her.’

  They walked into a grimy corridor, lit by a few puny bulbs. The ceiling leaked and the exposed electrical cables looked as if they could cause a fire at any moment.

  The young woman knocked on the last door. Behind it, Paul could hear grunge rock – distorted guitars, accompanied by drums. When Kurt Cobain’s gloomy voice launched into the first verse, he recognized the unmistakable sound of Nirvana.

  His companion pushed open the door. Paul peered into the dusky room and his eyes took in the unmade bed, the battered table, the kettle, the mugs, the overflowing ashtrays, the clothes scattered across the floor.

  Then he saw her, barely five metres away from him.

  She was sitting with her knees drawn up on the sill in front of the open window. Wearing nothing but an olive-green camisole and underwear. Her face was turned away and she clutched a half-burnt cigarette between her fingers. Behind her, the contours of the other tower blocks loomed dark and grim against the dirty brown smog.

  Paul slowly walked towards her, unsure if she’d seen or heard him. She didn’t react.

  Through the small speakers, Kurt Cobain was screaming with despair.

  Paul turned down the volume. When he looked up again, she was still in the exact same position. Her cigarette ash had dropped to the floor.

  ‘Yelitsa?’

  She inhaled the cigarette smoke. Paul drew closer. He wanted her to know that he meant no harm, that he hadn’t come to demand anything, even though there were things he desperately needed to know.

  ‘My name is Paul. I’m a journalist. I’d like to know what you went through, over there in the Seven Sisters.’

  Slowly, very slowly, she turned her head towards him. Her face looked blank, drained. The timid smile she’d had on her university ID photo had seemingly been hollowed out by her experience. Her eyes were empty, pale face even paler. She blew out the smoke as if trying to make him disappear.

  ‘I’d like to hear your story,’ Paul said.

  He produced a printout of Farah’s photo.

  ‘Do you recognize this woman?’

  She seemed to stare straight through the image, inhaled deeply, stopped breathing for a moment, and then sank even further away into some black hole, a place no one could reach, where she must have found a safe space for herself.

  He took another step towards her – she smelled as if she hadn’t washed in days.

  ‘Everybody believes this woman to be a terrorist, and that she chose to say what she said. But you and I both know that isn’t true. She was forced. Just like they pressed a gun to your head and forced you to kneel down.’

  She exhaled, slowly, her gaze miles and miles away.

  ‘She saved your life, Yelitsa. By saying what they wanted her to say, she saved your life. I’d like … You could
save her life now … you can do that … You’re the only one who can do that. Tell me what they did to you.’

  Yelitsa gazed at the almost-finished cigarette between her thumb and index finger for a moment before tossing it out of the window. For a split second, it seemed to be floating weightlessly in the mist, like a firefly, before falling to the ground, thirteen floors below.

  Paul could hear noise in the corridor. One of the young women who’d been in the kitchen yelled something in Russian to her friend by the door.

  ‘Oni za ney prishli.’ ‘They’re coming for her.’

  Paul snatched a sheet of paper from the table and picked up a pen. Then he wrote down Anya’s phone number and gave it to the young woman by the door.

  ‘This is the number of a friend … She’s Russian. Maybe Yelitsa will consider talking with her if not with me.’

  Footsteps could be heard moving rapidly down the corridor, accompanied by fearful shouting from the young women in the kitchen. When Paul left the room, he saw two men approaching. They looked impeccable in their suits, their eyes pointing straight ahead. He could tell from the way they walked that they were armed.

  He knew instantly that they hadn’t come for the girl by the window. They weren’t there for Yelitsa.

  They’d come for him.

  12

  At a food cart right beside a Dutch colonial fortress with a view of the old port, Farah bought some pecel lele and sat on the steps to eat the fried catfish, rice, vegetables and chilli sauce, among businessmen in white button-down shirts, guys in sweaty T-shirts and tourists with sun-burnt faces in Bermuda shorts. Each mouthful made her stomach growl and purr with pleasure. With the chatter of people around her, the medley of languages and the sound of the gently murmuring sea, she felt good, almost like her old self again.

  When a newspaper boy walked past, Farah bought the English-language edition of the Jakarta Post off him.

  With screaming headlines and an alarming photo, an article on the front page reported on a leaking nuclear research reactor near the coast of Johor, the southern-most province of Malaysia. The plant had been hermetically sealed off from the outside world, and the Malaysia Nuclear Power Corporation had declared that there were no health risks for Indonesians on the adjacent islands of Sumatra, Borneo and Java. But the genie was out of the bottle. Rumours about acid rain causing burns, hair loss and cancers were rife. Both supporters and adversaries of the new Indonesian nuclear-energy project had seized on the incident at the Malaysian plant to put their arguments forward.