The Public Prosecutor (21 page)

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Authors: Jef Geeraerts

BOOK: The Public Prosecutor
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Van Reyn hesitated. He sensed that something serious was going on, but there were few things he found worse than losing face, a unmitigated betrayal of the family motto
Droit et en avant
.
“Fine, I’m listening,” he said with evident reluctance.
“The bottom line is this…” the director continued, choosing his words with caution, “the documents you received from us within the framework of your assignment have been rendered unusable.”
“In what way?” van Reyn interrupted in a high-pitched tone.
“Look,
monsieur
, let me tell you what the consequences would be for you should you decide to use them against my advice…”
“Mm…”
“We know, in the meantime, that the police investigators have informed the target of the incident in which a dog and a horse were shot.”
“Thanks to the unbelievable gaffe of one of your, er… detectives.”
“These things happen,
monsieur
,” the director replied with little enthusiasm.
“So you’re siding with that… that… I’ve no idea how to refer to such individuals.”
“They were both fired on the spot.”
“And so far we haven’t made an inch of progress.”
“May I continue?”
“Please do.”
“Well, the fact that the target is the Public Prosecutor of Antwerp places him in a privileged position to dig up everything there is to be dug up about the case, if you get my drift.”
“No, I don’t… er… get your drift.”
“We cannot use the photos under any circumstances.”
“And why not?”
“Because blackmail on the basis of those photos might elicit a completely different reaction than we might have expected. The man is aware of certain information, which, should he wish to dig deeper, might point in our direction. Then we’ll be left holding the baby and the authorities will turn their attention to us. There is one positive point, however: the police
are not aware
that photos were taken.”
“Good, I see, but there’s something else: has the relationship between… er… the target and that woman been seriously damaged by the incident?”
“The house is currently empty,” the director replied in haste, a detail he had picked up from the Antwerp CID, which he shared against his better judgement, but it was the only way to calm his client down.
“The crucial element from
our
perspective is that the relationship with the woman in question remains broken…”
“I see…”
“What do you suggest we do to make sure he never meets the woman again?”
“The easiest thing would be to check his telephone calls.”
“Tap them, you mean?”
“No, that would be impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible.”
“Believe me, Perálta. If it were possible, we would not hesitate to do it for you. Let me suggest the following: we use an electronic device to track outgoing and incoming calls, and check the corresponding addresses. Experience has taught us that interesting information will not be long in emerging.”
“Agreed, but let me make another suggestion.”
“Feel free.”
“We’re not prepared to pay for the botched operation.”
“If you promise to return the photos to my office, then we have a deal.”
“I presume you are insured against staff
blunders
.”
“Er… Quite,” was the director’s cowed response.
“Then I’ll have the photos returned as quickly as possible.”
“Work will only recommence when we have them in our custody.”
“
La confiance règne
.”
“Indeed.”
Baron Hervé van Reyn did not pursue the irony of the situation. Copies of the photographs had already been made and given to Paul Hersch. The originals were in his safe.
“Then I consider the matter closed,” he said in a superior tone.
“
Au revoir
, Perálta.”
“
Au revoir
.” He was about to hang up, but continued in the nick of time: “Should I simply deposit the photos in your mail box?”
“We have a secure delivery box, similar to the one used by the banks.”
“You’ll have the photos this afternoon.”
Hervé van Reyn returned the receiver to its cradle, placed both elbows on the desk in front of him, covered his eyes with his hands and held his breath for as long as he could. He used a breathing technique taught him by his friend Navarro Valls to organize his thoughts. He applied the technique when he was confused or when taken unawares by the occasional platonic temptation. When it slowly dawned on him that he still had an important trump card to play, namely the information on the Swiss bank account, he stretched his neck to the point that it hurt and remained in that position until he had counted to a hundred. He then stood up, stretched out his arms and started into an emotional recitation of the
Salve Regina
, Opus Dei’s preferred prayer, which every numerary was expected to say at the end of every day:
Salve, Regina, Mater misericordiae,
vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve.
Ad te clamamus, exsules filii Evae.
Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes
in hac lacrimarum valle.
Eia, ergo, advocata nostra, illos tuos
misericordes oculos ad nos converte;
et Iesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui,
nobis post hoc exilium ostende.
O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria.
 
The prayer had the desired effect. It gave him energy and a renewed awareness that he was a member of the elite guard in the army of Christ, sanctifying every second of his life by fulfilling the obligations of his state, such that his existence had become one long prayer.
He meditated further on Saying 3 of El Padre (“Let your outward conduct reflect the peace and order of your soul”), sat down and called the student house in Leuven. Without beating about the bush, he ordered Paul Hersch to postpone “the action - you know what I mean” until 1 June, after the month of Mary.
“And the photos are not to be used,” he concluded.
“A very smart decision, if you ask me,” Hersch responded cryptically.
After hanging up, Baron Hervé van Reyn walked over to the safe in the corner of his office, set the four-dial lock to the correct combination, opened it and removed a manila envelope. He asked himself if Mr Marlowe was naive enough to believe he would receive every existing copy of the photographs.
15
 
The period between Friday 28 May and Tuesday 1 June was dominated by two issues: the weather, which continued to be warm and dry with a gentle easterly wind, resulting from an anticyclone over Russia, and the apparent if temporary cessation of activities of those who, maliciously or unawares, had been spinning a web around Albert.
There was one exception: Albert’s incoming and outgoing telephone calls continued to be registered by Marlowe & Co.’s Electronic Number Interceptor. Baron Hervé van Reyn called the detective bureau every evening at the stroke of six and took note of the numbers. When it appeared that Albert had not called Louise Dubois in Sint-Job-in-’t-Goor for two days in a row, van Reyn was tempted to give in to something he normally distrusted immensely: wishful thinking. He called the number himself on occasion, but there was never any answer. In order to be completely sure, he commissioned Marlowe & Co. to conduct an on-the-spot investigation. On Sunday 30 May at two o’clock in the morning, a team broke into the farmhouse using a counterfeit set of keys. In the meantime, Louise had asked her mother, with whom she was now living, to have the place emptied. This detail provided Baron Hervé van Reyn with sufficient certainty that her relationship with Albert Savelkoul had at least been compromised. He decided to wait a few more days before asking for a meeting with His Majesty’s personal secretary. He had heard from Pla y Daniel that Amandine de Vreux was expected back in Belgium on 1 June. The day after, she was to be invited to appear at the office of Jozef Vromen, a lawyer in Ekeren, to arrange an important matter. Hervé van Reyn was also planning to be present.
 
Johan D’Hoog, Louise’s vet friend, was the first protagonist to disappear suddenly from the scene. His UNESCO contract in Botswana was to begin on 1 July, but after a passionate farewell encounter with Louise in a rendezvous hotel opposite Antwerp’s Museum of Fine Arts (just over half a mile from Amerikalei), he took a Sabena flight to Johannesburg on Saturday 29 May. Major de Vreker had told Albert that an international warrant for his arrest had been issued, but this was a lie. He passed through Zaventem airport unimpeded, and three hours after arriving in Johannesburg he joined a flight to Gaborone. From there he took a two-engine Cessna to Maun, where his friend David Robinson, registered guide with Okavango Wilderness Safaris, was awaiting his arrival. Robinson had taken off the entire month of June to go camping with D’Hoog in the Okavango Delta, one of the few places in Africa where the fauna still lived as it had done a thousand years ago. D’Hoog and Robinson had a particular bond. They had studied animal behaviour together in 1992 and 1993 at the University of Birmingham.
Louise was expected to fly out to Gaborone at the end of July, to stay with D’Hoog in the bungalow that UNESCO had placed at his disposal. Her first express letter, addressed to Mr J. D’Hoog, Private Bag 14, Maun, Botswana, arrived on 31 May in the box of what passed for the town’s post office, a lopsided building with clay walls and a corrugated iron roof supported by pillars so riddled with termites they started to buzz when you knocked the door. The letter declared how insanely she loved him and how much she looked forward to the day they could
mate
for the first time under the sizzling African sun.
Louise lodged with her mother, who lived on her own in an enormous villa after divorcing her husband and bagging a tidy settlement. The villa was located in the leafy Maria-ter-Heide district near one of the Belgian army’s artillery training grounds, where it had been as still as the grave for more than two years due to expenditure cuts at the Ministry of Defence. She spent her time smoking, walking Igor, watching TV and chatting to her mother if she wasn’t in Brussels shopping or drinking coffee with one of her women’s club - the exclusive “Montgomery” - girlfriends at some or other patisserie.
Conversations with her mother were conducted in a strange mixture of French and Antwerp dialect. They referred to Albert as “
le vieux schnook
”, as a mark of their boundless disdain for all the stingy men in the world. Louise had told her the whole story, one hundred per cent faithful to reality for once, and she made no effort to hide the fact that she had a new lover. Her mother’s only objection was to Botswana, where, like all of Africa, it was dirty, overrun with stinking Negroes and dangerous on account of the animal life. She advised her daughter to take Prozac, which she herself had done for years.
“There isn’t a problem Prozac can’t deal with,” she claimed.
 
Major de Vreker thought long and hard before deciding on his tactics. He wavered between two priorities: his steadfast loyalty to the gendarmerie and his enviable relationship with Albert. The Flemish proverb “
het hemd is nader dan de broek
” - roughly equivalent to the English “charity begins at home” - finally won the toss. He hedged his bets in the first instance by putting together a carefully prepared report on the matter addressed to Colonel Spitaels, chief of the Operations Directorate at the General Staff in Brussels, and marked
Confidential
. The gendarmerie were still reeling from the voluntary resignation of corps commandant Lieutenant-General de Ridder in April 1998. The disgrace was ultimately the government’s fault, which had apparently forgotten the gendarmerie’s excellent record of service in the Dutroux affair for purely political reasons, namely the survival of the Deheane government at whatever cost until the crucial elections of 1999, the outcome of which de Vreker expected to be in line with the Belgian norm. The Old Political Culture (which he referred to as “that obstinate creature”) had counted yet again on the manipulative capacity of disinformation in combination with the “common sense” of the average voter, who tended for the most part to make the most of it. Electoral upheaval was unlikely. In the days prior to the summer holidays, the population was more interested in practical, everyday issues, which mass marches, green protests and leftist agitation were unable to solve. The opposition conducted a short-sighted, reactionary election campaign and the gains of the Flemish National Front were considered a necessary evil (the extreme right was growing throughout Europe after all). The prime minister in question, nicknamed the cart horse, the plumber, the Texan bull and the viceroy of Absurdistan, was about to take leave of Belgian politics and be granted a well-deserved and well-paid job in one of the European institutions. The end of a chapter in Belgian history.

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