Will, стр. 76
Yvette opens the door. Her eyes are red and the look she gives me is far from welcoming.
‘Oh dear, what now?’ I hear myself say bravely. ‘What’s wrong?’
She wipes away tears and leads me upstairs. Her mother glances at me, but doesn’t say a word. She too has been crying. As usual her father is in his chair behind a newspaper.
‘This is bad for my ticker, people,’ I say. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Our hero’s barricaded himself in his room,’ the father says tartly without lowering his paper. ‘Ask him yourself! It’s not as if I didn’t tell him. Steer clear of that uniform. But the know-it-all wouldn’t listen. You see what bloody comes of it!’
‘Oh, Father, you’ve made your point,’ his wife whimpers.
I go up a floor and knock on the bedroom door.
‘Lode, it’s me, Will.’
No answer. I go into the room.
Lode is sitting on the bed with his back turned.
‘Downstairs everyone’s howling.’
He turns slowly to face me. His right eye has been punched shut.
‘I saw everything,’ I say.
‘What, you?’
‘I was in one of the queues.’
‘They dragged us off and beat the shit out of us.’
‘You should have stayed out of it…’
‘You going to start now too? If someone comes up to you with a story about some lunatic waving a pistol around in the festival hall, do you have a choice? We’re cops, aren’t we? Or have you forgotten?’
He opens the door of his bedside cabinet, gets out a bottle of jenever, takes a pull and passes it to me. I knock back a hefty slug and suddenly I’m in the Hulstkamp again, swaying on the spot. Stay off the jenever.
‘Sorry. I don’t have any glasses.’
I laugh. So does he.
‘We didn’t even get a chance to see who the bastard with the pistol was. If I ever find out—’
‘My old French tutor…’ I hear myself saying.
Lode looks at me, rubs his chin. ‘I should have known your pal would be there.’
‘There was another bloke with him. A lawyer. Omer Verschueren.’
Now Lode is visibly shocked.
‘What?’
He takes another swig from the bottle. ‘You know what they say about him?’
‘Who? And what?’
‘That he plays both sides. That shit will do anything if there’s money in it. Plus he knows me and my father all too well. Three years or so before the war he was our lawyer.’
‘A complete bastard…’
‘Not wrong there.’
‘Should be put down.’
‘Absolutely.’
I rummage for the bottle and take a decent glug of jenever. Everything spins. I shouldn’t have done it. Stronger than I am.
‘Lode…’
‘Don’t. Be careful what you say. Better still, don’t say anything.’
We sit in silence for a while. I light two cigarettes and pass one to Lode.
‘I saw Chaim Lizke there too.’
Lode almost lets the cigarette slip through his fingers. ‘Impossible. That’s mad. It can’t be true.’
There he stands in the semi-darkness of his hiding place, with the kitchen table between us with an open book on it. We stare at him.
‘Where did you go?’ Lode shouts.
Lizke looks at Lode, then me. His expression doesn’t change. Incomprehension.
‘You mustn’t go out, Herr Lizke. Nicht nach aus!’
A frown appears on Lizke’s face. ‘Nach Hause? No home no more.’
Suddenly there are tears in his eyes, even though he still has an accommodating smile on his face, ready to assist us with whatever variety of folly we might have in mind.
Lode and I sigh simultaneously. Lode throws his arms in the air. I keep staring at Lizke like a child trying to see through a conjuror’s tricks.
Lizke sits down without looking at us again.
Tears fall on the table.
‘Alles ist zu einem Alptraum geworden,’ he says to no one in particular.
Lode looks at me questioningly.
‘Alptraum means nightmare,’ I say quietly. ‘Everything’s turned into a nightmare.’
Lizke blows his nose on a dirty rag.
I see a shudder pass through him before he picks up his book again to carry on reading as if we’re the ghosts.
Lode and I are outside a house in Lange Leem Straat. Next to one of the doorbells is a copper plate with ‘Flor Goetschalckx Insurance’ engraved on it. The name makes me smirk. Lode presses one of the buttons above the insurance agent’s. I don’t know the young fellow who opens the door. He addresses Lode with a whispered ‘Vincent’ and I’m introduced as ‘Robert’.
There is a smell of wet dog in the hall, an old dog. We climb the creaking stairs as quietly as possible. A gramophone is playing quiet piano music behind one of the doors on the first floor. We are led into a room that looks out over the street, the furthest one from the stairs. It’s smoky. A portly, beetle-browed man in his forties is sitting at a kitchen table covered by a crocheted tablecloth. There is a teapot ready, surrounded by empty cups. The man with the questioning eyebrows nods at Lode.
‘Who have you brought with you, Vincent?’ he asks in a grating voice.
‘A colleague of mine, Professor, from the sixth division. He’s called Robert. He’s been helping me with the Jew I—’
The man admonishes Lode to silence. ‘That’s fine, my friend. We don’t need to know everything.’
I understand why they call him ‘professor’. It’s easy to picture him at the front of a lecture theatre, the benches packed with fresh young students, smiling while they dedicate themselves to soaking up his wisdom. The fellow who showed us in is clearly a student and the little ginger-headed chap picking his nose across the table from us is obviously another. One of them pours the steaming tea and we sit down.
‘Gentlemen,’ the professor pronounces, ‘the enemy is suffering setback after setback. They can forget about North Africa, they’re taking a beating in Russia, and here in our