The Public Prosecutor

Jef Geeraerts was born in 1930 in Antwerp. He was educated in Jesuit schools and spent time as a colonial administrator and army officer in the Congo. He gained international acclaim with his
Gangrene Cycle
, four novels based on his experience in Africa. Geeraerts, Belgium’s best-known author after Georges Simenon, has more recently focused on crime and noir novels, of which
The Public Prosecutor
is the first to be published in English.

The sex life of the camel
is not what one might think.
In a single moment of weakness
he tried to make love to the Sphinx.
But the Sphinx’s rounded rear
is filled with the sand of the Nile,
which explains why camels have humps
and the Sphinx an inscrutable smile.

EGYPTIAN PARABLE

The primary concern of the judiciary is not to see what does not have to be seen.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

Grab one pig by the ear and all the others squeal.

POLISH FARMING PROVERB

While the Public Prosecutor was absorbed in his daily morning ritual in front of the bathroom mirror, his sense of satisfaction at the agreeable prospect of spending the entire week at home alone was increased considerably by the realization that he didn’t look bad at all for a man of sixty-four. Five foot six, 198 pounds naked, slightly overweight according to American norms, but this was due to his “muscles of iron and steel that had been marbled irreversibly with fat over the years”. A few sporadic streaks of grey dusted the temples of his thick, pitch-black hair. His lower jaw was angular, no sign of a double chin, his complexion bronzed, his nose classic Greek, his eyebrows Saracen, and he preferred to reveal his innate contempt for humanity as a whole with a crooked smile and an appraising look.

But there was barely a trace of contempt to be seen this Tuesday morning, 15 May 1999, a radiant spring day with expected noon temperatures around seventy-five degrees. He felt cool, like the cowboy in the Marlboro ad.

“Basically, it’s all a question of genes,” his school friend George Weyler (Jokke) used to say. The man was now a renowned internist earning ten times the Public Prosecutor’s salary, but having to work for it like an animal. “You need more exercise, Alberto,” Jokke would consistently complain at the fortnightly meetings of the Rotary Club, playfully poking Albert Savelkoul in the belly with his forefinger. With the exception of horse-riding and hunting, he wasn’t much of a sportsman, and he enjoyed eating in the best restaurants, where he had acquired a reputation for being a good judge of wines.

He concentrated on the purple veins that had recently appeared in the bags under his eyes. He pinched the skin between his thumb and forefinger and pulled it carefully, as if it were a piece of elastic. Guy Staas, another school friend and plastic surgeon to many a wealthy lady, had offered to give him a nip and tuck for next to nothing, but Albert thought real men would consider such a thing thoroughly shameful. He wasn’t sure why, exactly - perhaps because of his macho conviction that men on the whole are presentable enough and don’t need such surgical interventions.

For the second time that morning, he felt that damned pressure in his bladder. Was it what he feared? He suppressed a shiver of horror and forced himself to pay no attention to it, following his personal adage that problems disappear if you ignore them. He moved closer to the mirror, stretched his lips and inspected his teeth. His gums had been shrinking, so to speak, for some time, exposing the root tissue. He considered perfect teeth to be a must for a man of his standing. He was also of the opinion that the vast majority of his countrymen had more tartar in their mouths than ivory. He had no need to worry about that for the time being. He had a sturdy set of teeth, inherited from his mother, who had her first filling when she was seventy-six.

He cast a satisfied glance over at his dark hirsute torso, still comparable, more or less, with that of a forty-year-old athlete. The electronic scales were next, but he decided with a sigh to leave them out of his routine. He stretched and massaged his neck, which cracked, as it did every morning, when he twisted it left and right. But this morning had at least one positive feature. His wife, Baroness Marie-Amandine de Vreux d’Alembourg, had left the day before for a week visiting English gardens with her aristocratic friends. This meant he could enjoy breakfast unperturbed, an important aspect of what he called his “elementary male
Lebensraum
”. He was free to take his place at the table in the kitchen, barefoot, unshaven and in a kimono, something that pleased their Polish maid Maria Landowska no end. Amandine always dressed to the nines, even for breakfast, as if she’d been invited to afternoon tea at the palace. She would finish her porcelain pot of yogurt with affectation, her pinkie raised, and gaze absently past the Public Prosecutor and Maria, to whom she spoke only rarely, and then only to give her orders in broken Flemish, a language she barely understood. “One never says
merci
to the staff,” was one of the more haughty expressions she and her family had cherished for more than seven generations. Since the birth of their youngest son (September 1965) she had communicated with her husband by impersonal memo. On official occasions or at dinners where communication was unavoidable, they addressed one another with “
ma chère
” and “
mon ami
”, as if they were characters in a nineteenth-century French novel.

“Bah!” Albert grunted. He slipped quickly into the grey kimono with Samurai markings on the back (“The life of the warrior is short, powerful and merciless”). It had been a gift from his girlfriend Louise - his treasure, his greatest passion - when she had followed him the previous year to Kyoto, where he was attending a specialist conference on Anglo-Saxon law. Albert had represented Belgium, thanks in part to the intervention of his father-in-law, Baron Pierre Philippe de Vreux d’Alembourg, Emeritus Professor of Constitutional Law at the Université Catholique de Louvain, former Supreme Court judge and author of legal handbooks, and in part because he was one of the few Belgian magistrates who had acquired a DJS (Doctor of Juridical Sciences) at the University of Harvard.

“Bah!” said the Public Prosecutor for a second time when he thought of his father-in-law: ninety-four, still alive and kicking, but completely gaga. He lived alone with a maid and a butler in an elegant town house on Marie-Josélaan in Berchem. He was a descendant of the prominent de Vreux family, elevated to the aristocracy by Leopold I for their part in the establishment of the Belgian Constitution. Fortunately, he knew nothing of the less than ideal relationship between his only daughter Amandine and his former student Albert Savelkoul, which was a result of Albert’s young mistress. According to accepted custom, Amandine had cunningly concealed the affair with such skill that even their sons, Didier and Geoffroy, were unaware of it. The oldest, Didier, was a lawyer in Leuven and still single. Geoffroy had a pretty wife, two children and was counsellor to the embassy in Washington.

As he descended the stairs to the first floor, passing his collection of authentic, hand-coloured aquatints by Henry Alken, picturing straight-backed, fox-hunting gentlemen in top hats and tails on ridiculous horses, the god-awful odour of crushed silk haute couture outfits invaded his nose. True to tradition, Amandine had decided to air them a week ago, partly out of respect for the generations of old women who had once worn them, and partly because she couldn’t bring herself to throw anything out. He hated the smell with a vengeance, because it reminded him of death: ugliness and decay at its last gasp.

He looked at his watch. Eight thirty. She would still be asleep, his scrumptious little creature, his voluptuous little serpent, with whom he was still insanely in love after seventeen years. He would call her in an hour and tell her he was free. He would use his mobile, since he suspected his wife had been eavesdropping on his land-line calls. His office phone was out of the question. His predecessor had had a tap installed at the switchboard. Only his mobile was safe. He took pleasure in the paranoia he had been forced to create. It was the only way to preserve the privacy he cherished so much.

He stopped on the landing in front of a statuette of Our Lady of Fatima on a simple white marble console with three immaculate lilies in a vase at its side. He snorted disdainfully. “Sanctimonious hypocrite!” She insisted that Maria Landowska renew the lilies every day. It had been one of her dreams to have a Polish maid in residence, a dream that had been fulfilled with the help of one of the canons of Antwerp Cathedral. Maria, a young lady with a
réputation immaculée
, earned bed and board and the princely sum of sixteen thousand francs a month for a twelve-hour working day. She was a thirty-four-year-old country girl from the Kielce region of Poland, strong as an ox and Catholic without being bigoted. Albert had a soft spot for her. When Amandine was away, they would chat together in a mixture of German and Flemish. She would teach him Polish words and he would teach her popular Flemish sayings, and their conversations were burlesque on occasion. Her mother was the village fortune teller, who took her cow -
Czowieka
(Daisy) - for a walk every day.

“
Salve Regina
,” he said with solemnity, his eyes shut and his lips pursed, imitating Amandine’s habit of greeting the virgin every time she passed the statue. The pressure in his bladder returned. He took a deep breath and opened the door to the toilet. The flow was steady and frothy, and he was relieved. It wasn’t what he had feared after all. Jokke had told him that the first symptoms were “anal contractions and lazy urine”. Before flushing the WC, he bent his knees slightly to allow gravity to take its course and watched the last drop disappear into the pot, something he had seen in a film about American soldiers at the front during World War One.

He suddenly remembered something he had to look up urgently. “Oh, what a beautiful morning… Oh, what a beautiful day…” he crooned, marched into his office with what he called his “cavalryman’s gait”, switched on the light and immediately found what he was looking for on the bookshelf: a small black volume bound in artificial leather with the words
The Teaching of Buddha
embossed in gold on the spine. The bookmark was still at page 440. He started to read:

THE LIFE OF YOUNG WOMEN.
There are four types of women. Of the first type there are those who become angry for slight causes, who have changeable minds, who are greedy and jealous of others’ happiness and who have no sympathy for their needs.

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