Feelings of Fear Page 5

  “I’m sorry, Jack,” she said, “but you didn’t call my name.”

  She tore open the plastic bag with her fingernails to reveal his bright blue, sweaty face, his eyes still wide open and his tongue lolling out.

  “You should have called out, ‘Jeff!’”

  Friend in Need

  I had known Jan Boedewerf for over three months before I realized that his friend Hoete (of whom he spoke conversationally almost every day) was imaginary. To say that I was bewildered would be an understatement.

  “Hoete and I went to see the Zandvliet Lock on Saturday,” Jan enthused, on Monday morning. “Well, I persuaded him to go. He’s not very interested in docks and locks. Afterwards we went to the Djawa Timur restaurant on the Klein Markt. He likes Indonesian food but he wouldn’t eat anything. He spat out his rice! I don’t know why he gets so angry.”

  On Tuesday, he said, “Hoete was still in a temper. Sometimes I think he wants to kill me.”

  “Really? Kill you?”

  “Well, metaphorically speaking.”

  At first, there had been nothing to distinguish Jan Boedewerf from every other accountant at the Bank van België, of whom there were thirty-five. He arrived at work at Schelde Straat at eight a.m., parking his brown Volkswagen Passat in a numbered slot in the staff parking-lot. He wore a brown suit and a brown necktie and tan-colored shoes and carried a briefcase. He was always whistling between his teeth. He hung his coat up on a hanger marked with his name. He sat all morning in front of his computer, and at twelve p.m. he went out for lunch at Les Routiers on Cockerillkaai. Mussels, maybe a breaded veal cutlet, a glass of red wine. At one thirty p.m. he came back and worked until four thirty and then he went home.

  He had short sandy hair and dandruff and brown-rimmed glasses and a round pale-freckled face. His weekend hobby was to visit the docks. He knew everything about the docks and the locks. The Kattendijk maritime dock had been built in 1860 and had a surface area of 139,000 square meters. The Boudewijn Lock was 360 meters long and had a high tide depth of 15.23 meters.

  He was unmarried, and had never been married, as far as I could tell. Well – didn’t altogether surprise me.

  I don’t usually have anything to do with accountants of any nationality, especially drones like Jan Boedewerf. To tell you the truth, I’m not much of a businessman, either. I’m an automobile man, not a money man. But Bill Kruse had been ill and we were desperately short-handed: so Randy Friedman sent me over to Antwerp a year ago to set up a new division of Fancy Cars Inc – “The Car You’ve Always Dreamed Of At A Price You Couldn’t Imagine.” We started nineteen years ago in a disused grain repository in Mobile, Alabama, bringing in specialist autmobiles, by which I mean Lamborghinis and Ferraris and suchlike. We went through a pretty sticky beginning, mainly due to the oil crisis, but after six or seven years and $137,000 in extra finance from Randy’s grandpa we managed to climb gradually into profit. Then we wanted to expand into Europe, sending Porsches and light-bodied BMWs to America, and bringing Pontiac Firebirds and Chevrolet Corvettes into Belgium.

  So that was where the Bank van België came in. Jan Boedewerf and I were supposed to work out a realistic finance package which would enable us to order eleven Maseratis and six Lamborghinis as well as two Bentley Azuras and a Rolls-Royce Silver Something.

  To put it mildly, it was an uphill battle, in spite of the fact that Antwerp was one of the flattest places on earth. Jan was practical, straight-laced and completely literal-minded. We had to go through pages and pages of European Union directives and more small print than a Gideon Bible; and I knew that his bosses wouldn’t tolerate anything less.

  “Emissions?” Jan would say, picking up a sheet of paper and peering at me through those glass-brick lenses. “What about emissions? We have to have percentage guarantees.”

  “You’re a banker, not a mechanic,” I told him. “What do you care?”

  “You can’t sell a car if it smells,” he retorted, which was just about the only faintly amusing thing I ever heard him say.

  One morning in the second week of January it was so foggy that we could see nothing outside of our twelfth-story window but gray freezing fog, penetrated only by the black knobbly spires of Our Lady’s Cathedral and Saint James’s Church where Rubens was buried. I was tapping out a row of figures when Jan said, “Why don’t you come to lunch today and meet my friend Hoete?”

  “I don’t think so, Jan. I want to finish up these forecasts first. We’re running way over time.”

  “You’re so eager to go back to Alabama?”

  “Do you blame me, for Christ’s sake? At least it’s warm in Alabama.”

  “Still, we have almost completed everything, haven’t we? And you will enjoy Hoete’s company, I’m sure.”

  I sat back in my swivel chair and looked at him. “After everything you’ve said about him?”

  Jan shrugged and made a silly face. Against my better judgement, I switched off my computer. We had almost pulled together a mutually agreeable finance package, and at our last meeting I got the impression that Bank van België were pretty much decided. They were going to go with us, I could sense it. All we needed was $2.75 million and Fancy Cars Inc was on its way to global domination. Today, Antwerp. Tomorrow … who knew? Aston Martins to Azerbajan? De Tomasos to Delhi?

  “OK,” I said. “Let’s go meet this grouchy pal of yours.”

  We walked across the gray cobbles of Schelde Stratt in a fine wet drizzle and hailed a taxi to take us to the old part of Antwerp, to a restaurant called ’t Spreeuwke in the Oude Koornmarkt. I was wearing gloves but it was so cold that I had to clap my hands together. That was the trouble with Antwerp: it lay so low that you hardly knew where the land ended and the Schelde River began. And there was always the feeling that ghosts were around, hurrying through the fog. Rubens, and the Rockox, and the Plantin-Moretus family.

  ’T Spreeuwke was warm and wood-paneled and almost all of the tables were crowded. The maitre-d’ produced two enormous menus and led us through the restaurant to the very back, to a circular table beneath a circular window – a table set for three. The place was full of laughter and the pungent aroma of mussels. Jan said, “What will you have? A glass of beer?”

  “OK. Sounds good to me.”

  He ordered in Flemish, and the waiter brought three glasses of pils, which he set out on the table in front of us.

  “Jack,” said Jan, raising his glass. “Allow me to introduce you to my friend Martin Hoete.”

  I lifted my glass, too, but I wasn’t at all sure what he meant. “Cheers,” I said, and clinked glasses with him.

  Jan clinked his glass with the glass that had been laid at the empty place. “Cheers,” he said. Then he waited – and when I did nothing, he nodded his head toward the glass and said, “You’re not going to—?”

  “What?” I asked him. I was totally baffled.

  “You’re not going to say cheers to Hoete?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “No, no. It’s my fault. I haven’t introduced you. Martin – this is Jack Scott. Jack, this is Martin Hoete.”

  I stared at the empty bentwood chair. It really was very empty. Then I looked back at Jan. I was beginning to think that this was a practical joke, but Jan’s expression was so deadly serious that my confidence began to waver. I had been the victim of practical jokes before, but there was always a give-away, always a smirk. Jan was pale-blue-eyed and totally unsmiling and there wasn’t even a twitch of insincerity on his face.

  “How do you do, Martin?” I found myself saying.

  Jan suddenly beamed. “Martin says he’s very well. Very well indeed. He has a strep throat so you’ll have to forgive him. He’s bought a new flat in Berchem and he’s very happy with it. Well – if it wasn’t for that woman.”

  “What woman?”

  “His ex-wife, of course. Maria.”

  “What’s the problem with Maria?”

  “She keeps demanding more money. You know what ex-wives a
re like. Unfortunately Hoete has just lost his job with Best & Osterrieth.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Yes – well, it has driven him almost to despair, hasn’t it, Hoete? Sometimes he feels like cutting his throat. Sometimes he feels like cutting Maria’s throat. What a slut she is. She went off with that Quinten Venkeler, from Atlas Shipping.”

  “I see.”

  I have to admit that I was close to making my excuses and leaving; but the maitre-d’ arrived at that moment to take our order. Both Jan and I asked for mussels, as a starter. Hoete, apparently, wanted chicken soup.

  “For his throat,” Jan explained. “Would you care for some wine?”

  We were presented with two huge steaming bowls of mussels, a heap of fresh-cut bread, and a bottle of cold Sancerre. The waiter set a plate of thin chicken broth in Martin Hoete’s place; but even when I looked up and raised a querying eyebrow, he simply nodded to me, and said, “Bon appetit, monsieur.”

  “Hoete has been very hard done by,” said Jan, with mussel-juice dripping from his chin. “He came here to work – didn’t you, Martin? – thinking that his wife was going to be faithful to him. But as soon as his back was turned … well, she was flirting with every man she set eyes on. And of course, that Quinten Venkeler … he’s always been a ladies’ man. She fucked him on the very first night she met him, at an office party, on the forwarding manager’s desk, no less. You can imagine why Hoete feels so angry.”

  I tried to look both sympathetic and reasonable. “Sure … but I don’t think that violence is the answer, do you?”

  The light from the circular window was amber. The discarded mussel-shells were the color of slate. When he spoke, Jan’s mouth was a crimson gash in a face as pale as potatoes. I felt for a moment as if I had intruded into a sixteenth-century Flemish painting.

  “What other answer is there? A woman takes a man’s life away from him. What else can he do but take his revenge?”

  I had finished my mussels and looked at the plate of chicken broth. “Hoete doesn’t seem to be hungry,” I remarked.

  “Well, why don’t you help yourself?” Jan suggested. He glanced toward the maitre-d’. “They always get upset in here if they think that you don’t like the food.”

  I slid the chicken broth across the table toward me and picked up a large silver spoon. I managed to drink almost half, and finished up by dunking my bread in it.

  “Women have had it their own way for far too long,” said Jan. “What do they think we are? We work every hour that God sends us, and then they spit in our faces.”

  “Have you ever had a serious relationship with a woman?” I asked him.

  His plate of mussel shells were taken away and half a roast chicken was placed in front of him. He proceeded to tear off the leg and the wing, sucking his fingers to get rid of the grease. “I loved a woman just once. Really loved her, I mean. I think it happens only once in everybody’s lifetime. Just like Maria and Hoete.”

  I was given a veal cutlet in dark brown breadcrumbs and thin fried potatoes. A large bowl of waterzooi was set in Hoete’s place. Either the waiters and the maitre-d’ were used to Jan’s imaginary lunch companion, and humored him – if he was prepared to pay for it, what did it matter? – or else there really was somebody there, and I couldn’t see them.

  Over coffee, Jan took out a small pale cigar and offered me one. We both sat and smoked for a while in silence. Then Jan said, “Hoete wants to ask you a favor.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “Well, he wants to visit Maria this evening … have a chat with her. Try to make her see sense about this money thing.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  “You’re impartial, that’s the point. Kind of a referee. If you could go along to make sure that nobody loses their temper. I know he’d appreciate it.”

  I looked again at the empty chair. “I don’t really think so.”

  But Jan leaned across the table and took hold of my arm. He was so close that I could see his gold molars, right at the back. “There are times when you doubt your eyes, aren’t there? There are times when you think that you might be going mad.”

  I shook my head. “Hoete doesn’t exist, Jan. You’re making him up. I don’t know why. But what I do know is that I’m not going to go along with him tonight to see his ex-wife, because if I do, I’ll be going on my own.”

  Jan stared at me for a long, long moment and then released my arm. “He doesn’t exist? What do you mean, he doesn’t exist? If he doesn’t exist, then who ate his waterzooi?”

  He pointed to the bowl in front of Hoete’s empty chair. There was nothing in it but two or three chicken bones and a slice of carrot. I turned around, and even though the light was against me, and the restaurant was already clouded with cigarette-smoke, I saw a thin dark man in a snapbrim hat making his way toward the entrance.

  “There was nobody here,” I told Jan.

  He gave me an odd, puckered smile. “Nobody is often the most dangerous person there is. If I were you, I would go to Maria’s apartment tonight, just to make sure that he doesn’t get up to any mischief.”

  With that, he pushed a black-and-white photograph across the table. A striking girl with high cheekbones and dark hair and a mouth that looked as if she just had finished kissing.

  “This is her? This is Maria?”

  Jan nodded. “She’s something, isn’t she?”

  I turned the photograph over. On the back was scrawled 6 Ster Straat, De Keyserlei, 2100. I took it and read it but I still wasn’t happy.

  “So where do you fit into all of this?” I asked him.

  “Haven’t you guessed?” he said, still smiling.

  I didn’t go back to the bank that afternoon. I called to say I was down with the grippe, and then I went back to my room at the Novotel on Luithagensteenweg. I emptied two miniature Johnnie Walkers into one glass and sat on the bed watching Asterix cartoons with the sound turned down, trying to get my mind straight.

  I kept thinking of Maria’s face and the more I thought about it the more it haunted me. She wasn’t anything to do with me; so why was I so worried? Martin Hoete didn’t exist, so she wasn’t in any danger. But what if Jan believed that he was Martin Hoete? What if Jan were schizophrenic and “Martin Hoete” was his vengeful alter ego. Maybe that was why Jan had taken me to lunch and asked me to make sure that Maria wasn’t alone at nine o’clock tonight. Maybe the good side of his personality was making plans to protect Maria from the bad side of his personality.

  I tipped back the last of the Scotch. It was a quarter to nine, and it was dark and foggy outside, with the mournful hooting of steamers being towed up the Schelde to the docks. I went downstairs in the elevator and in the mirror I thought I looked pale and stressed. I guess I must have been working too hard lately. Too many late nights at the bank. Too much computer-time. I didn’t have any real friends in Antwerp, only business friends, and most of my sightseeing I had done alone – standing in the gloom of Ruben’s house or walking around the gloomy precincts of the zoo, while Polar bears paced relentlessly up and down.

  In the hotel pharmacy I bought a copy of Time magazine and (as a second thought) an old-fashioned straight razor. Martin Hoete didn’t exist but Jan was real enough, and if there was trouble between him and Maria it was just as well to go prepared. Not that I would ever use a razor on anybody, but it was something to wave around in case things turned ugly.

  Then I took a taxi to De Keyserlei – the broad avenue that led to Antwerp Station – and asked to be dropped off at the end of Ster Straat.

  Ster Straat was narrow and cobbled and lined with lime trees, a street of heavy gray apartment buildings that had somehow survived the war. Number 6 had a wide archway, with black metal gates, and a courtyard with a mosaic floor. I tried the gates and they swung open with a low, weary groan. I hesitated for a moment and then I stepped inside. There was a sharp smell of disinfectant and that ever-present pungency of Belgian drains. I
walked across the mosaic with my footsteps echoing against the archway. A moped suddenly buzzed down the street behind me and startled me.

  My heart was beating hard and I didn’t really know why. Jan was eccentric, but he didn’t frighten me. Hoete disturbed me, with all his threats of cutting throats, but then Hoete wasn’t real, was he?

  I reached the black-painted door that led up to the apartments. Beside it was a row of bell-push buttons marked in neat italic handwriting: T & V Hovenier. D van Cauwelaert. M Paulus. That “M” must have stood for Maria, because it was the only one. Apartment number 5.

  I was tempted to push the bell and introduce myself, but then it suddenly occurred to me how ridiculous it would appear if I said that I was here to protect her from somebody who didn’t exist. Instead, I decided to wait outside for a while, to see if anybody did show up.

  The night grew damper and colder. I was beginning to think that I must be seriously mad to be pacing up and down this courtyard like one of the Polar bears in the zoo. Eleven o’clock passed, and then I heard the chimes ring out eleven fifteen and I thought that enough was enough. I would go back to my hotel and have a hot, deep bath and finish off the rest of the whiskey from my minibar.

  I was about to leave when the gates groaned open, and a thin man in a dark coat came into the courtyard, clanging the gates shut behind him. He crossed to the door, taking out a bunch of keys as he did so.

  “Bonsoir” he said, as he opened up the door.

  “Bonsoir” I replied. He didn’t look like Hoete – at least, he didn’t look like the Hoete that I had imagined, when Jan had described him to me. A sharp nose, metal-rimmed glasses that glittered in the darkness. He went inside, but before he could shut the door I called out, “S’il vous plaît, monsieur! J’ai oublié mon clef!”

  He held the door open for me and I followed him into the vestibule. There was a small table with a vase of dried flowers on it, and a reproduction of Rubens’ Toilet of Venus – a big fleshy Venus with her back turned, watching me knowingly in a mirror held up by Cupid. The man opened the sliding door to a tiny elevator and we both crowded into it, shoulder to shoulder.