The Public Prosecutor (32 page)

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Authors: Jef Geeraerts

BOOK: The Public Prosecutor
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After roughly half an hour, he got to his feet and started to throw pebbles at a tree fifteen yards or so from where he stood. He had done the same for hours on end as a boy, and under normal circumstances he considered it a transparent form of childhood nostalgia. When he turned out to be just as good as he used to be-adisappointment since he was already sick to the teeth of it - he took out his mobile and called Hervé van Reyn. The female numerary who answered the phone at weekends on Avenue de la Floride informed him that the Regional Vicar was absent.
“
Merci
,” Hersch grunted.
He called chateau “Beukenloo” in ’s-Gravenwezel and van Reyn finally answered. “
Allô, oui
,” he said with a high-pitched voice.
Hersch was determined to stick to his guns. “I’ll keep it short, Hervé. I just wanted to say that I’m willing to do that you-know-what business, but only under one condition: someone drives me there and back. Not in my own car and not in an Avis hire drive.”
“
Ooh la la!
” was all van Reyn could manage in response.
“Clear?” Hersch retorted, irritated by the stupid reaction.
“And do I get to know the time and place?” van Reyn asked.
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Monday morning at three a.m. in a village called Overbroek east of Antwerp. In front of the church…” (He wanted to say “the local priest is also involved”, but swallowed his words.)
“How long have you had this information?” van Reyn enquired.
“Not long!”
“Hm… and will he have the money?”
“That’s the idea.”
“I’ll call you back.”
“Why?”
“To tell you who will be picking you up.”
“Aha! That’s good to hear.”
“OK. I’ll call you back later.”
“Fine by me.”
“Where are you, by the way? The connection’s fading in and out.”
“A forest in the heart of the Ardennes,” said Hersch in an explosion of gravelly laughter.
“Are you pissing me around?”
“Not at all. If you want I can let you hear the birdsong.”
“
Bon
,” van Reyn concluded. “I’ll call you.”
“That’s the third time.”
The connection went dead. Hersch closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. He sat still for a couple of minutes and tried once again to empty his mind. But something unexpected happened, something he feared, especially when he was alone with nature’s intimacy: he got an erection. He jumped to his feet and raced up the hill towards his car. He reached Ternell out of breath and sweating like a horse. Strings of ejaculatory prayers buzzed incessantly through his head. The combination of running and praying had done the trick: the temptation of the flesh had released him.
He parked his car in Eupen not far from Sankt-Nikolaus-Pfarrkirche and stopped at a butcher’s shop, where he purchased a couple of
Eupener Würste
. He ordered a glass of Funckbier at a café, whipped out his pocket knife, and started to cut one of the sausages into slices, which he popped unashamedly into his mouth without paying the least attention to the café owner, who watched him with suspicion from behind the bar.
The telephone call from Paul Hersch had interrupted something van Reyn had done every weekend for years, something he considered a Duty to the Future of the Country (its youth), an “apostolate of friendship”, which Saying 973 interpreted in part as “discreet indiscretion… whispered in the ear… with which you open up unexpected horizons”. Baron van Reyn gave his own personal twist to the Saying, treating the “apostolate of friendship” as a sort of upper-class scouting activity.
On the grounds of his ancestral castle, which was set in five hundred acres of forestry and pasture, leased out to local farmers, he had had a log cabin constructed in which twelve carefully selected boys between the ages of twelve and seventeen (the twelve apostles) were permitted to camp at weekends and during the holidays. He selected the boys himself according to four criteria: they had to come from conservative Catholic families, be excellent students, fit and healthy, and free from physical impairment. In other words, perfect candidates for Opus Dei’s future “fishermen” in Leuven. Three of the twelve had an aristocratic background and spoke better French than Flemish, and two were what might be called “pretty boys”. Hervé van Reyn, who wandered around in a scout’s uniform with khaki shorts and an authentic Royal Canadian Mounted Police hat, sublimated this fact by silently comparing them with the apostle John, the beloved of Jesus. Their uniform tie was light blue (for Mary) and they wore a wooden cross on the left pocket of their khaki safari shirt. The weekend camp started according to custom at two o’clock on Saturday afternoon with a game of football and a natural-history quiz. The latter was organized by Gustje the gamekeeper, who confronted the boys with unusual aspects of the forest’s animal life: the shooting, trapping, skinning and butchering of birds and mammals. “Mister Hervé” considered it essential for the boys to learn such things. It prepared them for the future - there was little doubt that a knowledge of hunting in all its dimensions would be of benefit later in life and further their careers - and at the same time, should Armageddon arrive, such prehistoric techniques, as he called them, would help them survive.
Around six in the evening, the apostles took a cold shower, dressed in suit and tie, and attended mass celebrated by van Reyn in the chapel. They were then served a lavish evening meal with one glass of wine per person. After dinner a debate was organized in the salon on some question of contemporary politics, philosophy or a spiritual topic. At ten o’clock they would make their way to the log cabin, where they slept on the floor in lightweight sleeping bags. Van Reyn also slept in the cabin, but he had the habit of arranging a confidential conversation in “discreet indiscretion” with each of the boys in turn before he retired, gently holding their hand in his. He called this an “exercise in divine love” and credited himself for never allowing any further form of “corporality”. Heroic deeds of self-control were unnecessary, of course, since he had never suffered a moment’s trouble from his libido in his entire life. Rumour had it that he was gay but unaware of the fact, which for some explained his somewhat effeminate appearance and high-pitched voice. But Baron van Reyn was an exception in every respect, including sexuality. He differed completely from his noble forefathers, who had often taken the family motto - “
Droit et en avant
” (“upright and forward”) - quite literally by siring a respectable number of descendants with the servant girls and the daughters of the local farmers. He was also the first priest in the family since his great uncle, a canon of the cathedral, drowned under suspicious circumstances in the castle lake in 1902. Rumours abounded in those days that he had been “messing around with young boys”, but there was no hard evidence to confirm them.
The weekends of sport and intellectual activity Hervé van Reyn enjoyed with his twelve apostles were considerably more upright and deserving than the work he did as Regional Vicar of Opus Dei for Belgium, a position that often called for unrelenting rigidity and, of course, Sacred Brazenness. None of this bothered him in the least, however, since he could always find a Saying in
The Way
to justify his behaviour. He liked to use the Jesuit expression
pia fraus
or white lie. His whole existence was a tissue of preciously formulated white lies, even during the whispered conversations with that day’s
préferé
, who, he would inform repeatedly, belonged to the elite of his people, in training for the rigid doctrine of Opus Dei, which considered Catholic non-members as ordinary foot soldiers and sinners as vessels of stinking garbage. The only corporality that bothered him during these indiscreet discreet conversations was a build-up of saliva in his mouth, which forced him to swallow every five seconds and transformed his Flemish gutturals into a throaty Arabic rattle.
 
At half past twelve that same Saturday, Albert and Maria were sitting in the kitchen drinking vodka and cokes. She was wearing her usual black dress. “Madame” had called a taxi half an hour earlier and had driven off without saying a word.
“Madame’s gone to visit her father with Master Didier,” said Albert.
She smiled.
“I thought as much,” she said, taking his hand and running the tip of her finger over his knuckles.
He ran his fingers through her loosely brushed hair, a pleasure he enjoyed intensely.
“And how is my old man getting along?” she asked.
Albert pointed tellingly at his forehead.
“Too old, if you ask me,” she said and nipped at her vodka and coke. “Like my
babka
Maria…”
“Really?”
“What’s your star sign?”
“Star sign?”
“What month were you born?”
“October… tenth.”
“I’d never have guessed. Libra.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“A good sign for a woman.”
“And you?”
“Twelfth of April. A good month for men.”
“What do you call it?”
“Aries. An animal with horns this size,” he said, illustrating with his hands.
She sipped her drink and said nothing.
“Why does Madame always take a taxi or the official car?” she blurted.
“Because she never learned to drive and now it’s too late.”
“Huh?”
“Can you drive?”
“I took lessons in the Polish army.”
Albert laughed in disbelief. “You never told me.”
“You never asked.”
“How long were you in the army?”
“Three years. I can also drive trucks and tanks, and I’m pretty handy with a Kalashnikov.”
Albert was bent double with laughter.
He kissed the tip of her nose, and she grabbed his hair with both hands and kissed him firmly on the lips.
She stood beside him. He caressed the back of her thighs, but when his hand ventured upwards she sat down and took his hand in hers.
“Not now. It’s not a good time…”
“
Pozadku
…”
“Midsummer is on a Monday,” she said out of the blue.
“True,” he said, slightly taken aback.
“On Midsummer’s day I want to cook you a Polish meal. And burn lots of candles.”
“I can’t wait, Maria. How do you say ‘candle’ in Polish?”
“
Świeczka
.”
Albert nodded. It sounded pretty.
“Where can we celebrate Midsummer?” she persisted.
“I know a good place.”
“
Pozadku
…” She smiled.
They sipped their drinks every now and then and enjoyed the moments of silence.
 
“So what is it like to be a lawyer in Amsterdam?” Baron Pierre Philippe de Vreux asked his grandson Didier, who had been invited to lunch with his mother every first Saturday of the month for as long as he could remember. Opus Dei always gave permission. According to custom, French was spoken at table.
The question caught Didier unawares and he returned his desert spoon to its place. He had barely managed to taste the vanilla custard.
“Didier is a lawyer in
Leuven
, Papa,” Baroness Amandine patiently corrected her father, gently caressing his small emaciated hand, like the hand of a corpse. He was in a wheelchair.
They were taking lunch in the dining room of the family’s town house on Marie-Josélaan in Berchem, which looked more like a museum for Delft porcelain. The characteristic white and blue vases, jugs, pots and decorative platters filled every corner, and even the lunch was eaten from Delftware plates. Coffee had just been served.
One of the walls was graced with an almost life-size statue of the Sacred Heart with a red lamp burning in front of it, making the place appear like a chapel. Two portraits decorated the opposite wall, one of them depicting Baron Pierre-Philippe in his red ermine-collared robes, with an excess of decorations pinned to his chest. The fragile old man in the wheelchair, with the ridiculous napkin tied like a baby’s bib around his neck, had little in common with the proud Supreme Court justice in the painting beyond his white combed-back hair and his austere gaze.
His hand quivered and he was barely able to control the spoon, but he refused help from whatever quarter. The other portrait depicted Baroness Louise-Marie de Vreux, née de Wasseige, a generously proportioned lady with a double chin and a tiny mouth, wearing a diamond tiara and a silk evening dress. A four-stringed pearl necklace adorned her ample bosom.
“My dear Didier, a lawyer should never forget article sixty-nine of the Belgian constitution,” said Baron de Vreux, his index finger wagging admonishingly. “The King ratifies the laws of the land and promulgates them.”
“Yes,
bon-papa
,” Didier replied. He glanced furtively at his red fingertips and ate another spoonful of custard. He was wearing a greenish sports jacket and a tartan tie. He had bags under his eyes, which accentuated the paleness of his skin.

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