WHEN THEY GOT BACK to the Kurhaus, Anna thanked Pierre and watched as he cycled off, dwindling into a blur in the icy drizzle. The man at the reception desk stopped Anna with the news that there was a message waiting for her and she was surprised to find it was from the lawyer Willem van Brug, the public defender whose job it was to represent one Tomislav Maric.
Anna had rung van Brug’s secretary before she left Sydney only to be informed, in a brusque exchange, that if she wished to see van Brug she must make a formal written request ‘in the correct manner’. The woman ended the conversation with the admonition that more notice would have been appropriate. Under the circumstances, she said, there was no guarantee that the lawyer would be able to fit Anna into his busy schedule, besides which he was away on another case in Amsterdam and might be there for some time.
Anna had sent off the required email with no optimism, assuming that her request would be a low priority. Hence her bewilderment when she read the message announcing that not only was van Brug back in town but that he was available to see her immediately. She called his office to confirm and thought again about Dutch efficiency.
Anna waited only a few minutes for the number 1 tram, which would take her back to the city centre. It was empty until a group of business types bustled aboard after a few stops, each carrying the same conference briefcases. She saw in their faces the defeated expressions of people whose expectations of a seaside working holiday had been cruelly dashed by Scheveningen’s harsh winter.
The tram whispered around a corner into the long, straight stretch of Scheveningseweg. Near the city centre, she climbed reluctantly from the warm capsule onto the frozen streets of the old town, and when she paused to get her bearings coldness seeped through the soles of her boots, numbing her toes. After a brief search, she managed to locate the office of Brinker–van Brug Advocaten in an unfashionable back street. It was on the ground floor of a building that was one in a long row of dishevelled nineteenth-century terraces. Nothing Anna had seen near the centre of the city was truly dilapidated, but she realised that Willem van Brug was clearly not at the prosperous end of his profession.
Inside she found a strait-laced, middle-aged woman waiting behind a desk.
‘Anna Rosen to see Mr van Brug.’
‘Goedemorgen mevrouw Rosen, I am Hildegard. If you will please wait here. Meneer van Brug will not be long. Would you like coffee, perhaps?’
Anna accepted the offer gratefully, a little surprised at the gracious welcome from a woman who had previously tried to fob her off. She hung up her coat and scarf, and took a seat in the waiting room. Soon she was savouring richly brewed coffee poured from an elegant pot into a china cup.
It wasn’t long before a very tall, dapper man came bustling though the door and hung up the long coat he had draped over his arm. The man exchanged a few words with Hildegard before turning to Anna, bent at the waist.
‘Ms Rosen?’
‘Anna.’
‘I am Willem van Brug. Good morning to you.’
The lawyer produced the words in an odd staccato, standing stiffly with his hand stuck out in front of him. In the moment it took Anna to put the cup back down on its saucer, van Brug bobbed upright. He reminded her of one of those toy birds that dip their beaks in a cup of water. When Anna got to her feet, he returned to the dip mode.
‘Good morning to you,’ she said, grasping the proffered hand briefly so that he could spring back to his prodigious height.
‘I see Hilde has made you coffee so, please, if you will join me in my office.’
Van Brug moved swiftly to open his door and Anna noticed that, despite his impeccable appearance, the lawyer was still wearing bicycle clips on his trousers. She gathered her cup and saucer and stepped inside, taking the chair opposite his desk. Hildegard entered discreetly with more coffee and biscuits, and whispered something to van Brug, causing him to disappear under the desk. Moments later he bobbed back up, holding the offending bicycle clips in two fingers. Hildegard plucked them from him as if they were something just fished out of a sewer.
‘Dunk u,’ he muttered.
Anna saw a hint of affection in the woman’s eyes as Hildegard withdrew, quietly pulling the door shut behind her. While the lawyer took a moment to sip his coffee, she noticed he was younger than she had first thought, with clear blue eyes and the smooth face of a man in his early thirties. Unearned years had been added by his manner of dress: a three-piece houndstooth suit tailored to fit his angular, narrow frame. His rose-coloured tie was matched by a silk handkerchief, neatly arranged in his top pocket. He put his cup down and smiled at her.
‘Thank you for coming so promptly.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I thought I might have difficulty locating you.’
‘Oh,’ said Anna with a frown. ‘Sorry, but I’m confused now. I was told you were away on another case, so I was waiting to hear if you could find some time to talk to me.’
‘Ah …’ Van Brug gazed at her with lawyerly caution. ‘Hilde did not mention that. Are you not here to collect your document?’
‘Document? I’m here to talk to you about Tomislav Maric.’
Van Brug held up his large hands in a calming gesture. ‘I see. I see,’ he said. Then he picked up a biscuit and dipped it absentmindedly into his coffee, sucking on it for a moment.
‘Mr van Brug …’
‘Call me Willem.’
‘Willem,’ Anna corrected herself. ‘Some days ago, back in Australia, I found out through The Registry that you are representing Tomislav Maric, so I made an appointment to see you at the earliest opportunity. To be quite clear: I am a writer and I’m here working on a book about his case.’
Van Brug took a moment to think about this new information, then waggled a long index finger in the air before reaching down into a low desk drawer.
‘Then I have some interesting news for you,’ he said, producing a large manila envelope. ‘Early this morning I went to Scheveningen prison to see Tomislav Maric and he did instruct me to pass this on to you, Anna Rosen. No one else was to read it.’
He held out the envelope two-handed, as if fulfilling some sacred duty. She sat looking at it.
‘I’m lost for words,’ she said.
‘I imagine that is something of a problem for a writer. Now, Ms Rosen, I have more to tell you and I must say that this development was also surprising for me. Maric, we may say, has been a difficult man to represent. Very difficult. I can’t remember a defendant who has been less interested in his own defence. Until now he has refused to say anything much to me at all. Except for rudimentary communications, he has been completely uncooperative. Of course, I am still being paid for my work on his behalf, but I am not at all comfortable with the arrangement. I have offered to stand aside, but even this he has refused. I was—what is the phrase?—at the end of my wits. Then, this morning, everything was different. This document he has asked me to pass to you without reading it and I have done that reluctantly. Honestly, I do not even know if I am acting against the law, but I do it only to establish some trust with him. If nothing changes, he will go to trial facing the most serious of charges with no effective legal defence and, no matter what he has done or not done, I think that is wrong.’
After his long speech, the lawyer paused and took up his coffee cup again, watching Anna with undisguised curiosity. She looked at the envelope, suppressing a strong desire to rip it open immediately.
‘I will do what I can to help,’ she replied.
‘So, Ms Rosen,’ van Brug said as he stared into her eyes. ‘Why does he wish to see you?’
Anna gave a small involuntary jerk. ‘He does?’
‘It will not be easy to arrange, but I am very curious still as to why he wants to see you.’
‘I knew him in Australia when we were both young. We were at university together. I sent him a message when I learned he was in prison here. But I haven’t seen him for more than thirty years and until just now I had no idea that he would agree to see me.’
Van Brug nodded. ‘I am very interested to hear that. This is a most curious story. Curious indeed. So, Mr Maric once lived in Australia. That, I did not know. I have tried to ask many times about his past and he has refused to tell me anything. Does that mean he may still be an Australian citizen?’
Anna suddenly regretted being incautious. The existence of the mysterious manila envelope had been so distracting that her tongue had run ahead of her thoughts.
‘Mr van Brug … Willem,’ she began cautiously. ‘Are you bound by some duty—client legal privilege, we would call it in Australia—to keep your communications with Mr Maric confidential?’
‘I am, most certainly. You can speak to me freely. I am only interested in representing him to the best of my ability.’
‘Thank you,’ said Anna. ‘I think the best thing would be for me to read whatever is in this envelope, to find out what Mr Maric has said and then we can sit down and talk.’
‘Well, it happens that I have to go to meet with one of my colleagues for a short time. I am happy for you to remain here to look at whatever it is Herr Maric has sent you. I will be back in less than an hour and then perhaps we can talk. Is that acceptable?’
‘All right,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s kind of you.’
‘My pleasure,’ van Brug replied, manoeuvring his ungainly figure out of the office. ‘I will close the door so you can have some privacy.’
Once he’d left, Anna stared again at the envelope for a moment, and then quickly tore it open. She pulled out the bundle of pages within and began to read.
So, you found me, for better or worse. I never thought I would see or hear from you again. I imagined it from time to time, how it would be, what I would say to you, but what good was that? I’ve been dead for so long that I came to believe the world was better off without Marin Katich. There were many reasons why he should no longer exist so I just let him go. I won’t go into all of that now, but please believe me when I say that his resurrection will be painful and it will be dangerous. I have to tell you that I am not the man you once knew, certainly not the young man in the photograph you sent me. I have it in front of me now and I barely recognise him. He is no longer me. I’m no longer him. I’ve seen too many bad things. I’ve done too many bad things, the kind of things that burn in your soul like a knife whose tip is searching for your heart.
It’s strange, you know, I’ve just read back these few lines and you could be fooled into believing that a completely rational person had written them, as if all the turmoil in my head can be put down in words that make sense of it all, but that’s not true. I’m like that fellow who’s trying to untwist the last strands of the man inside him. Gerard Manley Hopkins, right? I’ve been groping in the darkness for such a long time, Anna, but maybe it’s possible that writing this down will help—and this photo, this damned impossible photo, feels like a tiny crack of light. While it does, I’ll keep writing.
First the photo. That it could even exist seemed incomprehensible, almost supernatural, but then I remembered that our ‘friends’ had us under surveillance at that time. The fact is we were never free of them from the time we met. Of course by the time the photo was taken, they were under orders from the stuttering spider. Moriarty. That poisonous creature in his funnel web of secrets, he was behind everything. He was the one who stole my life away. So much of this was hidden from you, but I know from your book (thank you for leaving me out of it) that you worked out for yourself that Moriarty had a long connection to my father, going way back to when ASIO and the Croatian Brotherhood were bonded in what they believed was an existential fight against communism. Anyway, that connection between Ivo and Moriarty was at the heart of everything that happened, the events that tore us apart.
Of course it’s more complicated than that. I had my own role to play, my own responsibility in all of this, and if it is possible for us to meet face to face I will make my confession to you. I still feel terrible guilt about leaving you without a word, but by then I was caught in Moriarty’s trap. I don’t know what you’ve already put together, but there was so much I could never tell you, for my own peace of mind as much as anything, since this is one of the many scores I have to settle with the world. Above all, I owe you the truth.
Looking back, it’s almost beyond belief that the same spider burst in on us three decades ago just as I had begun to tell you the full story. I’ve puzzled on that over the years. How the hell did Moriarty know that I was there in that room? There can only be one explanation. He must have had you under surveillance.
It was thirty-three years ago. That’s hard to believe, isn’t it? But I remember it all so well. You were staying in that hotel—The Wellington, The Wello. For all that I’ve suppressed or locked away, I never forgotten a thing about that night, not a single detail. It was pitch darkness when I climbed up the drainpipe, a cold, rusty Jacob’s ladder up to the roof. I crept across it and climbed over a wall into your balcony. I could see you sleeping inside, your face pale on the pillow, lit by the electric clock. I felt like an intruder, some kind of stalker. I knew I had no right to be there. I was a dark creature from another dimension, from a world you would never know, and would reject if you did. I honestly believed you would hate me if you knew what I had become and I was sure you would try to stop me doing what I had to do—what I thought I had to do—to avenge my brother. See, I knew for sure they had murdered him and who could let that go?
I almost turned and ran at that point, but instead I stood there and did the breathing exercises they taught me when I was a kid, the same ones I used to calm myself when I was bent over a rifle. Then I went in to you. I swear I wasn’t expecting or imagining what happened between us. My only idea was to explain everything, one act of contrition. It seemed like the only chance to do that. It would have been a last act of decency the night before I killed Bijedic. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fully explain to you what really happened the next day … I could have easily killed the bastard, but I didn’t. You were always sceptical of things that made the world seem less rational, so you probably won’t believe me when I say that, from beyond the grave, my brother played a role in staying my hand. I swear to you Petar was with me that morning.
Not that leaving that evil bastard Bijedic alive did me any good. I was a marked man from then on. I brought the world down on my own head and that was the end of my life in Australia; I was done, broken. Every security agency was after me—and not just in Australia. All this was my own fault. I’m not asking for and I don’t deserve anyone’s sympathy, least of all yours. I was lost in the wind and I knew I could never see you again.
I believed that was true until today. Now I’m sure this is the one chance to settle my debt to you. So, if you really are bent on coming here, I’ll do my best to help you. You’ll still need to convince the prison authorities to let you in, and I don’t like your chances. I know how resourceful you are, so maybe you’ll pull off a miracle, but I should warn you that even if you do somehow manage it you won’t like what you find, not about me and not about this place.
I can’t begin to describe what it’s like in here. No matter how much they try to disinfect the stench of the men it never goes away. This is the place where the ‘civilised’ world locks away its monsters, although they’re careful not to call us that. Even the very worst are presumed innocent, and the UN, bound by its farcical liberalism, confines its alleged monsters in this fortified, heavily surveilled motel, furnished by Ikea. It’s purgatory with pottery classes and yoga and Dutch healthcare and apples from New Zealand. Since everyone in here is on trial, all life is governed by the rule of law; or, put another way, this perverse little world is ruled by lawyers and, lawyers being lawyers, the prison authority—The Registry—adheres strictly to a set of regulations to protect the rule of their law. You must think that I’m babbling. The truth is I’m totally out of practice at communicating complex ideas. It’s like trying to run with atrophied muscles.
I’m going to the trouble of explaining this to you because if they know you’re a journalist, The Registry will throw every obstacle in your way. Those allowed in from the outside world to see inmates include prison guards, doctors, a psychiatrist, family members (all dead, in my case) and, of course, lawyers. No journalist from anywhere in the world has been allowed to meet a single one of the war criminals under indictment. That is the wall in front of you. Not the one built to keep the monsters in but a wall of regulations built to keep people like you out. God forbid the public should hear directly from the alleged monsters before their cases are decided. That would sully the purity of their law.
I want to help you find a way to break down that wall. I think it’s possible to do it, but you will have to think like a lawyer and find a loophole in the regulations. I know of one such loophole: Rule 64. You should ask Willem van Brug to explain it. I have told him this may be the only way to get you in. You will know by now that van Brug is incredibly frustrated because I have told him so little. He knows virtually nothing about me. He certainly has no idea who I really am and so I’ll leave it to you to decide what to tell him. For what it’s worth, he seems reasonably intelligent, and I think he is a good man.
Finally, I will give you one argument to make the case that allowing you to meet me will not interfere with the administration of justice, which is their biggest concern, but could actually facilitate it. I have to admit that my argument is the same one used by every man in here, bar the insane. In my case, it just happens to be true.
I don’t claim to be a good man, I don’t claim to have a clear conscience, but I did not do the things they’re accusing me of. I am not guilty of the crimes they have indicted me for.