The Public Prosecutor (30 page)
Read The Public Prosecutor Online
Authors: Jef Geeraerts
In line with tradition, lunch was taken in Chez Duparc, a restaurant still considered by many Belgians to be among the best in Western Europe, probably because the menu, which had remained unchanged for years, was determined by certain prescriptions of classical nineteenth-century gastronomy and, with equal probability, because the place was so expensive only an elite few could afford to set foot inside.
By the time dessert arrived (crêpes suzette with ice cream and a sauce of Pernod and pepper, one of the house’s secret and more daring combinations) together with a glass of Château d’Yquem 1964, the eight invitees at table were in a particularly jovial mood (the minister of justice’s private secretary, a French-speaking aristocrat who had attended the last half-hour of the meeting, had joined the college for lunch). The problems raised during the meeting had been set aside (it was the weekend after all), and should similar teething trouble be encountered in the future, a typically Belgian compromise was sure to be reached after joint consultation, with a view to the maintenance of existing power structures, which the upcoming elections - the following week - were likely to leave untouched, thanks to an atrociously expensive disinformation campaign organized by the ruling party and the population’s short memory. Only those with half a brain remained convinced that the elections would lead to an unashamed and unsubtle restoration of the
ancien régime
.
ancien régime
.
The bill (46,768 francs, including service and VAT) was paid by Albert with a special credit card he reserved for the purpose.
The Opel Omega slowed to a halt in the weekend rush hour as it entered the Leopold II tunnel, only to find that the tunnel’s ventilators were out of order yet again and the exhaust fumes were percolating into the car. Albert started to agonize over the only real problem on his mind: his appointment with the unknown man on Monday 7 June in front of the church in Overbroek, the man who was intent on blackmailing him for five million francs. He had made the appointment when the man phoned him at ten o’clock sharp that morning. He had detected a degree of enthusiasm in his voice. Something new, he thought. He had toyed with the idea of installing a tracking device for incoming calls, but he feared it might raise suspicions among his own staff and was not convinced such gadgets would work with a mobile phone.
He called Walter de Ceuleneer, who was on his way to his villa in Knokke in the back of his Rolls Royce. He was also stuck in traffic between Drongen and Nevele due to an accident.
Albert informed him of the day, place and time of the appointment. “We’ll take care of it,” he replied. “If there’s a hitch I’ll be in touch. By the way, will Louise be joining us in Scotland?”
“I think so,” Albert replied.
“The horsies are ready and waiting!”
“I’ll have a word with her,” said Albert and he hung up.
“Bloody traffic’s a pain in the arse,” he said to his chauffeur.
“It’s the same every Friday, Public Prosecutor.”
“I suppose so,” Albert answered, bereft of inspiration.
The pain in his lower belly had stopped and he had been able to urinate normally, but he had other worries. How long before Amandine smells a rat, he fretted. The very idea of a weekend in her clawing presence, with Maria hovering in the background radiant with desire for him, made him question his
savoir-vivre
, the
virtù
of the Renaissance man, a much cherished narcissism in which he had believed unconditionally until that moment.
savoir-vivre
, the
virtù
of the Renaissance man, a much cherished narcissism in which he had believed unconditionally until that moment.
21
After a couple of days of “Belgian weather”, the first weekend in June 1999 turned out to be warm and sunny, with temperatures reaching into the eighties. A stiff east wind blustered along the coast. Surprisingly enough, the ever optimistic nit-pickers at the meteorological office hadn’t declared it a “catering industry weekend”, as they were often inclined to do, which meant that the exodus of apartment dwellers - with surrogate outdoor lives - to the traditional coastal resorts got off to a slow start. But it wasn’t long before the motorway police were obliged to introduce traffic controls, although their efforts were not enough to prevent a pile-up between Nevele and Aalter, which created a twenty-five-mile tailback. As a result, many day trippers only reached the coast in the early afternoon, with the cheerful task of finding a parking space waiting to greet them on arrival.
The Belgian, Italian and Swiss protagonists involved in the affair surrounding Public Prosecutor Savelkoul were, for the most part, unaware of one another’s existence. As such, their behaviour during this unexpectedly pleasant weekend was what one might be inclined to call normal, that is, they continued to be convinced that what they were doing or planning to do was in complete harmony with Christian ethics.
As was his custom in the summer, Walter de Ceuleneer spent every weekend in his “cottage by the sea”, as he liked to call it, in leafy Knokke-het Zoute. It was in fact a pretentious replica of a Victorian country house with an ivy-covered façade, rejoicing in the equally pretentious name “Manderley”. His wife’s continued absence, trying to lose a pound or two at her favourite Californian fat farm, allowed him to invite a lady friend for the weekend. Mouche was a forty-something divorcee who lived close to his home in Brasschaat. He referred to her as “my regular”. While he played golf in the company of the cheats and swindlers surrounding the local mayor, she relaxed in the sun by the pool drinking gin and tonics, to which she had developed a remarkable immunity over the years. She was blond, slender and, thanks to a couple of costly facelifts in Davos, Switzerland, more or less wrinkle-free. She lived for her body, and enjoyed flaunting it in the company of “our Walter”, whose excessive generosity towards her could not be said of every man. His slightly ridiculous obsession with parading her in public - in spite of his age and excess weight - was the result of certain symptoms of the penopause, for which he tried to compensate with an exaggerated passion for her husky bedroom voice and regular use of the American wonder drug Viagra.
“I can still manage a second round,” he would bluff in male company, “and with live ammunition!”
His wife was aware of his relationship with Mouche, but she preferred to make the most of a less-than-ideal situation, primarily because of her determination to protect her status as well-to-do married woman whatever the cost, and turning a blind eye was a tried and tested face-saving technique.
That Saturday evening, de Ceuleneer was planning to take Mouche to a restaurant in Sluis specializing in mussels. After dinner they would have a drink at home - she in her negligee, he in his bathrobe - until the moment arrived when he would trumpet: “Time for me to give you a good seeing to!”
Notary Vromen had maintained the same Friday evening ritual for more than fifty years: mass at St Lambert’s followed by a glass of port with the parish priest - Karel Jacobs-aformer classmate at the junior seminary in Hoogstraten. They would talk about the good old days when they were children, an innocent form of regression they both enjoyed immensely. At seven o’clock sharp, the notary said goodnight and made his way to his “castle” a couple of hundred yards along the street, taking his time on account of his stroke. Elza, the seventy-year-old maid, would serve him buttermilk porridge with brown sugar in a gloomy dining room full of nineteenth-century furniture illuminated by a single forty-watt bulb. She would place his medication in a plastic pot next to the plate and leave the room without saying a word. She refused to wear a hearing aid, in spite of her chronic deafness, and her bad back made it difficult to get out of bed in the morning, but she continued in service nonetheless. She saw herself as one of the Vromen family heirlooms, an important part of her psychological identity that would be irretrievably lost if she were to be dismissed for reasons of old age or sickness. Notary Vromen seldom spoke to her, partly because he was taciturn by nature and partly because she rarely understood a word he said. She had carte blanche when it came to the housekeeping, although he checked every bill and invoice to the last franc, and left them unpaid for at least a month (cash in a used envelope). She also had the key to the wine cellar, where hundreds of bottles from the Twenties and Thirties awaited consumption, something the notary was unlikely to achieve in his lifetime.
He emptied his plate, dribbling right and left on both the tablecloth and his napkin, and then turned with suspicion to the plastic pot and his medication: Zestril for high blood pressure, Hydergine to prevent narrowing of the cerebral arteries, and Rytmonorm for cardiac arrhythmia. He finally gulped down the lot with a glass of tap water.
He drew the faded velvet curtains around nine o’clock, transforming the dining room into a dimly lit cave in which he felt completely at home and safe from the wicked world outside, a characteristic symptom of geriatric paranoia. He then collapsed into an armchair, the springs of which had long given up the ghost, closed his eyes and withdrew into the womb of the past, his face resembling a death mask. He tried to recall fragments of scenes from his unhappy youth, in which his dominant mother was intent on seeing him elevated to the priesthood one day. Her plans came to nothing when he was expelled from the seminary for reasons that were not made public. He decided to study for his notary examinations instead. Brooding on his failed vocation was the only form of self-torment he had left, a poor surrogate for his weekly visits to the friendly prostitute with the beery laugh in Antwerp’s red-light district. She would tickle his neck with her toes while he ground his teeth and tried to jerk his penis into an erection. Failure was inevitable.
After half an hour of melancholic musing, he would grope his way up the unlit stairs to his bedroom and put on his musty flannel pyjamas. He would hoist himself into the same elevated bed in which his mother had died, roll over onto his back and set about praying a series of ten Ave Marias, out loud and in Latin, for the forgiveness of his own sins and the sins of the world. He rarely got beyond the fifth. He would drift into sleep, snoring gently, his exhalations sounding on occasion like a death rattle. The room slowly filled with an unpleasant odour, as if someone had sprinkled vinegar on the bed.
Joaquín Pla y Daniel was in the habit of reserving one weekend per month for an “excursion”, as he liked to call it, and he allowed little if anything to disturb this routine. This was due in part to his obsessive behaviour (the only way to survive in an organization such as Opus Dei), but it also allowed him to vent some of the stress his obsessive behaviour tended to create in staggering proportions. In reality, he only had himself to blame. His fanatical implementation of Opus Dei’s strict discipline - he was after all one of its senior members - resulted in an unusual form of schizophrenia. To the outside world he was the personification of the elite Basque numerary, and he did not intend to fall short in this regard. But at the same time, he was a highly intelligent man and he realized that the rules of the organization had narrowed his mind and left him with such tunnel vision that he had come to consider every form of openness to the world as sinful. His all-consuming curiosity clearly did not square with his role as the Opus Dei functionary he had become.
To facilitate the mental openness he needed to fulfil his administrative duties, and for this reason only, he permitted himself one single weekend per month of “recreation”, a word he had borrowed from the Jesuits, with whom he had a love-hate relationship. He considered their intellectual flexibility objectionable, but he knew well enough that without Ignatius of Loyola there would never have been a Josemaría Escrivá. He also had to admit that it was the Jesuitical casuistry of men such as the infamous Doctor Eximinus, Francisco de Suárez, that allowed him to rationalize his monthly escapades.
No one in the Opus Dei headquarters on Viale Bruno Buozzi had the slightest idea where he spent his notorious weekends, and none dared allude to them in public. The truth, in fact, was unremarkable. Pla had secretly rented an apartment in a seventeenth-century palazzo on Via delle Botteghe Oscure, close to Isola Tiberina, an upmarket quarter that was built to house the city’s pharmacists and was now populated by diplomats and senior Civil Servants. Much to his delight, the district was more or less abandoned at weekends. He called the flat his “captain’s castle”, taking inspiration from the English author, whose name he had forgotten, who had secretly furnished a room as a ship’s cabin, and used it to lie low for a couple of days every month.
Pla’s weekend was riddled with rituals, each with a hint of infantile paranoia, all of which made him think he was in some sort of spy film. This satisfied him enormously because it differed completely from the universal, divine paranoia that gave foundation to the miracle of providence embodied in blessed Josemaría Escrivá, a providence he was convinced would one day govern the Catholic Church. The miracle filled him with intense pride and at the same time with a perverse delight in the fate of all the damned outside Opus Dei, a typically Basque characteristic that had twice the vigour in Pla because it had been passed on to him literally at his mother’s breast. His hatred for women had its origins half a century earlier when he refused the breast for no apparent reason as an infant and was forced to take a beating from his mother for his trouble. For this reason, his veneration for El Padre was greater than his veneration of the Most Holy Virgin, whom he invoked 150 times a day with Escrivá’s glassy stare peering over his shoulder.
The first ritual for the month of June 1999 was the celebration of Holy Mass for the female numeraries resident in the house. He distributed Communion - always received on the tongue - with abrupt indifference. He then took a cold shower, selected an unobtrusive beige linen civilian suit, a brown shirt and a black tie, got dressed and skipped breakfast. At quarter to eight, he slipped out of the building via a rarely used exit that gave out into the park behind the house. The high stone wall concealed a moss-covered door, for which he had a key.
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