Until I Find You (95 page)

“You drove him to the docks, in Rotterdam?” Jack asked her. “They both went along with it, right till the end?”

Femke looked out the window at the slowly passing traffic on the Singel. “Your little face on the ship’s deck was the only smiling face I saw, Jack. Your mother had to hold you up, so you could see over the rail. You were waving to that giant whore. The way your dad dropped to the ground, I thought he’d had a heart attack. I thought I’d be taking a
body
back to Amsterdam—in all likelihood, in the backseat of my Mercedes. The big prostitute picked him up and carried him to my car; she carried him as easily as she used to carry
you
! Mind you, I still thought your dad was dead. I didn’t want William in the front seat, but that’s where the huge whore put him. I could see then that he was alive, but barely. ‘What have I done? How could I? What
am
I, Femke?’ your father asked me. ‘You’re a flaming
Christian,
William. You forgive too much,’ I told him. But the deal was done, and your dad was the only man on earth who would stick to his side of a bargain like that. From the look of you, Jack, your mom stuck to her side of the bargain, too—sort of.”

At that moment, Jack hated them both—his mother
and
his father. In his mom’s case, the reasons were pretty obvious. In his dad’s case, Jack suddenly saw him as a
quitter.
William Burns had given up on his son! Jack was furious. Femke, a retired lawyer but a good one, could see the fury on Jack’s face.

“Oh, get over it. Don’t be a
baby
!” she told him. “What’s a grown man in good health doing wallowing around in the past? Just move on, Jack. Get married, try being a good husband—and be a good father to your children. With any luck, you’ll see how hard it is. Stop
judging
them—I mean William
and
your mother!”

From the way her two grown sons fussed over her, Jack could tell that they adored her. Femke once more looked out the window; there was something final about the way she turned her face in profile to Jack, as if their meeting were over and she had nothing more to say. Nico Oudejans had asked her to see Jack, and she probably had a fair amount of respect for Nico—more than she had for Jack. She’d done her duty, her face in profile said; Femke wasn’t freely going to offer Jack more information.

“If I could just ask you if you know what happened to him—starting with where he went,” Jack said to her. “I assume he didn’t stay in Am-sterdam.”

“Of course William didn’t
stay,
” she said. “Not when he could imagine
you
on every street corner—not when your mother’s image was
engraved
in the lewd posture of every prostitute, in every gaudy window and dirty doorway in the district!”

Jack didn’t say anything. By their imploring glances and gestures, Femke’s sons were urging him to be patient. If he just waited the old woman out, Jack would get what he’d come for—or so Femke’s sons seemed to be saying.

“Hamburg,” Femke said. “What organist doesn’t want to play in one of those
German
churches—maybe even somewhere Bach himself once played? It was inevitable that William would go to Germany, but there was something special about Hamburg. I can’t remember now. He said he wanted to get his hands on a Herbert Hoffmann—a famous organ, probably.”

Jack took some small pleasure in correcting her; she was that kind of woman. “A famous
tattooist,
not an organ,” he told Femke.

“I never saw your dad’s tattoos, thank God,” Femke said dismissively. “I just liked to listen to him play.”

Jack thanked Femke and her sons for taking the time to see him. He took a passing look at the prostitutes in their windows and doorways on the Bergstraat and the Korsjespoortsteeg before he walked back to the Grand, this time avoiding the red-light district. Jack was glad he had the videocassette of Wild Bill Vanvleck’s homicide series to look at, because he didn’t feel like leaving the hotel.

There was more than one episode from the television series on the videocassette. Jack’s favorite one was about a former member of the homicide team, an older man who goes back to police school at fifty-three. His name is Christiaan Winter, and he’s just been divorced. He’s estranged from his only child—a daughter in university—and he’s taking a training course for policemen on new methods of dealing with domestic violence. The police used to be too lenient with the perpetrators; now they arrested them.

Of course the dialogue was all in Dutch; Jack had to guess what they were saying. But it was a character-driven story—Jack knew Christiaan Winter from an earlier episode, when the policeman’s marriage was deteriorating. In the episode about domestic violence, Winter becomes obsessed with how much of it children see. The statistics all point to the fact that children of wife-beaters end up beating
their
wives, and children who are beaten become child-beaters.

The social message wasn’t new to Jack, but Vanvleck had connected it to the cop’s personal life. While Winter never beat his wife, the verbal abuse—Winter’s
and
his wife’s—no doubt damaged the daughter. One of the first cases of domestic violence that Christiaan Winter becomes involved in ends in a homicide—his old business. In the end, he is reunited with his former team.

Vanvleck’s homicide series was more in the vein of understated realism than anything on American television; there was less visible violence, and the sexual content was more frank. Nor did happy endings find their unlikely way into any of the episodes—Christiaan Winter is not reunited with his family. The best he can manage is a civil conversation with his daughter in a coffeehouse, where he is introduced to her new boyfriend. We can tell that the veteran policeman doesn’t care for the boyfriend, but he keeps his thoughts to himself. In the last shot, after his daughter gives him a kiss on the cheek, Winter realizes that the boyfriend has left some money on the table for the coffee.

This was
noir warm,
which was Wild Bill at his best—at least this is what Jack said to Nico Oudejans when Nico called and asked Jack his opinion of Vanvleck’s series. Nico liked the series, too. Nico didn’t ask Jack how the meeting with Femke had gone. Nico knew Femke; as a good cop, he knew every detail of Daughter Alice’s story, too. Jack told Nico about Herbert Hoffmann being a tattoo artist, not an organ. Naturally, Nico asked if Jack was going to Hamburg.

He wasn’t. Jack knew actors may be more highly skilled at lying than other people, but they are no more adept at lying to themselves—and even actors should know better than to lie to cops.

“What more do I need to know?” Jack asked Nico, who didn’t answer him. The policeman just kept looking at Jack’s eyes—then at his hands, then at his eyes again. Jack began to speak more rapidly; to Nico, Jack’s thoughts were more run-on than consecutive, but the cop didn’t question him.

Jack said that he hoped, for his father’s sake, that William had another family. Jack wouldn’t invade his father’s privacy; after all, William hadn’t invaded Jack’s. Besides, Jack knew that Herbert Hoffmann had retired. Alice had revered Hoffmann, but Jack would leave Herbert Hoffmann in peace, too. So what if Hoffmann had almost surely met William Burns?

“Now that you’re getting close, maybe you’re afraid to find him, Jack,” Nico said.

It was Jack’s turn not to say anything; he just tried to look unafraid.

“Maybe you’re afraid that you’ll cause your father pain, or that he won’t want to see you,” the policeman said.

“Don’t you mean that I’ll cause him
more
pain?” Jack asked.

“Now that you’re getting close, maybe you don’t want to get any closer—that’s all I’m saying, Jack.”

“Maybe,” Jack said. He didn’t feel like much of an actor anymore. Jack Burns was a boy who’d never known his father, a boy whose father had been kept from him; maybe what Jack was really afraid of was losing his missing father as an
excuse.
That’s what Claudia would have told him, but Nico said nothing more.

If William had wanted a Herbert Hoffmann, Jack thought he knew which kind. He imagined it was one of Hoffmann’s sailing ships—often seen sailing out of port, or in the open sea on a long voyage. Sometimes there was a dark lighthouse and the ship was headed for rocks. Herbert Hoffmann’s Sailor’s Grave was among his most famous; there were his Last Port and his Letzte Reise or Last Trip, too. In most cases, Hoffmann’s ships were sailing into danger or unknown adventures; the feeling the tattoos gave you was one of farewell, although Herbert Hoffmann had done his share of homeward-bound tattoos as well.

A Homeward Bound would not have been his father’s choice, Jack was thinking. On the ship that had carried Jack away from his dad, Jack sensed there would have been more of a Sailor’s Grave or a farewell feeling—at least from William’s point of view. A ship leaving harbor conveys an uncertain future.

Or else William Burns had stuck to music on his skin. Jack could imagine that, too.

There was a nonstop flight from Los Angeles to Amsterdam—a little more than ten hours in the air. Richard Gladstein was going to be tired. He would leave L.A. at 4:10 in the afternoon and land in Amsterdam at 11:40 in the morning, the next day. Jack assumed that Richard would want to take a nap before they met Vanvleck for dinner that evening.

For two days, Jack didn’t leave his hotel room except to go to the gym on the Rokin. He lived on room service; he wrote pages and pages to Michele Maher. He came up with nothing he would send to her, but the stationery at the Grand was both more plentiful and more attractive than that at the Hotel Torni.

Jack did manage to come up with a clever way of asking Michele Maher the full-body tattoo question—that is, dermatologically speaking.

Dear Michele,

As a dermatologist, can you think of any reason why a person with a full-body tattoo might feel cold?

Please return the stamped, self-addressed postcard—checking the appropriate box.

Yours,
Jack

On a postcard of the Oudezijds Voorburgwal canal, he gave Michele the following options.

o
                  No.

o
                  Yes. Let’s talk about it!

Love,
Michele

Of course he didn’t send that letter or the postcard. For one thing, he didn’t have a U.S. stamp for the return delivery; for another, the “
Love, Michele
” was taking a lot for granted after fifteen years.

His second day alone, Jack almost went to see Els again in her apartment on the Sint Jacobsstraat. He didn’t want to sleep with a prostitute in her seventies—he just liked Els.

Mainly Jack would lie awake at night—imagining his little face on the ship’s deck, where his mother had lifted him above the rail. Jack was just smiling, and waving to beat the band, while the damage was being done around him—especially to his dad.

In Hamburg, maybe William had met someone; that might have helped him to forget Jack, if he’d
ever
managed to forget his son. After all, he’d had a correspondence with Miss Wurtz when Jack was attending St. Hilda’s. It wasn’t as if William had stopped thinking about Jack, cold.

When Richard arrived, he went straight to bed and Jack went back to the gym. Jack was eating more carbs and had changed his weightlifting routine; he’d managed to put on a few pounds, but Jack was still no Jimmy Stronach. (Not that there was anything he could have done to acquire Jimmy’s
penis.
)

In the gym on the Rokin, possibly in a failing effort to drown out the awful music in the weight room, Jack tried singing that ditty his mother had sung only when she was drunk or stoned—the one that seemed to resurrect her Scottish accent.

Oh, I’ll never be a kittie

or a cookie

or a tail.

The one place worse than

Dock Place

is the Port o’ Leith jail.

No, I’ll never be a kittie,

of one true thing I’m sure—

I won’t end up on Dock Place

and I’ll never be a hure.

How funny that it had once been Alice’s mantra to never be a whore.

Jack thought of their nightly prayer, which—when he was a child—they usually said together. He remembered one night in Amsterdam when she fell asleep before he did, and he said the prayer by himself. Jack had spoken a little louder than usual, because he had to pray for the two of them. “The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended. Thank You for it.” (Of course that had probably happened more than
once.
)

Jack took a footbridge across the canal on his way back to the Grand. He stood on the bridge and watched a sightseeing boat drift by. In the stern, a small boy sat looking up at the footbridge—his face pressed to the glass. Jack waved, but the boy didn’t wave back.

It was already dark when Jack walked with Richard Gladstein to the Herengracht, to a restaurant called Zuid Zeeland, where they were meeting William Vanvleck. Jack was in no mood for the meeting. He kept thinking about the
other
William—the one he would have loved but was afraid to meet.

V

Dr. García

31

Therapy

F
ive years later—as if striking the match that would set fire to Jack’s life in Los Angeles, strip his character bare, and ultimately lead him to seek his father—a young woman (younger than he realized at the time) sat not quite fully clothed on Jack’s living-room couch in that forlorn dump he still lived in on Entrada Drive. She was thumbing through his address book, which she’d picked up off his desk, and reading aloud the women’s names. In an insinuating tone of voice, she would first say the name and then guess what relationship Jack might have had, or still had, with the woman.

This juvenile behavior should have alerted him to the fact that she was clearly younger than she’d told him she was—not that Jack shouldn’t have guessed her real age for other reasons. But he
did
have difficulties with math.