2003
ON JANUARY 24, 2003, I WAS IN COURT AND ABOUT TO GO INTO A HEARING. I had a friend with me who had been eager to attend a court session. I remember exactly where I was standing when I got the call: right in front of the Van Oven Hall.
I answered the phone and heard a hysterical scream. I heard my sister’s voice. She didn’t say anything, she just screamed.
“What is it! What is going on? What is happening?” I asked. An unknown male voice took over the call.
He said, “Sonja is here.”
“Who are you?” I asked. “Where is my sister, what did you do to her?” I was under the impression that this strange man on the phone had abducted my sister. “Let me speak to my sister,” I shouted.
“As,” said Sonja, and she started screaming again. She scared me.
“What is it, Son? Tell me what’s wrong!”
“Cor is dead! Cor is dead!” she yelled.
The male voice took over the call again and said that Cor had been shot. He’d been standing outside a Chinese restaurant with his friend Robert ter Haak when two men drove up on a motorcycle and fired at Cor with a machine gun.
“No, no, no! Sonja, where are you?” I shouted.
“I will go to him,” said the unknown male voice.
I asked my friend to drive me to Sonja’s house. I was totally beside myself and incapable of driving.
Sonja called me in the car. “They were wrong, As!” I heard hope in her voice.
Robert, the man who had been standing next to Cor, had been killed, but Cor was alive and had been taken to the hospital, the police had told her.
He was still alive!
I wanted to go to the hospital, too, but I didn’t know which one, and I couldn’t reach Sonja to ask her. Eventually I had my friend drop me off at her house in Amstelveen. Soon after, two policemen came and searched the house.
I called my mother to come to Sonja’s house, because I didn’t want to leave the two officers alone there and I needed a car to go to the hospital. My mother came to Sonja’s house, and Gerard picked me up to go with me.
Meanwhile, I kept trying to reach Sonja to find out how Cor was. The male voice picked up again and said coarsely, “Here’s your sister. She has to tell you something.”
From the way he said it, I knew something was wrong. Sonja came on and said nothing. I just heard her crying softly but uncontrollably.
“Son, are you there?” I asked.
“Yes,” she sighed.
“Is it bad?” I asked, afraid of her answer.
“Yes, As.” Sonja sounded as if she had no strength left to speak.
“Is he—?” I couldn’t say the word, afraid she would confirm it. There was silence.
“Son,” I asked again.
“Yes, he is—”
He’s dead, I repeated to myself. He can’t be, he can’t be dead. He had survived two attempts. Twice he had defeated the end death brings, and I was sure that he could do it again.
We arrived at the hospital. As fast as I could, I climbed the steps to the entrance and ran to the ward where they were keeping him. I was talking to him, afraid I might be too late and his soul wouldn’t hear me. “Cor, you can’t go yet. It’s impossible; you must stay with us. Don’t leave.”
At the end of the hallway I saw Sonja. I ran toward her and threw myself at her.
“Son, say it’s not true. Tell me he’s still alive.”
She shook her head. “He’s dead, As.”
A doctor came to see us. Talking to him, we saw Francis come in. She had also driven to the hospital thinking that Cor was badly wounded but still alive. At the hospital entrance, a friend of Cor’s had been waiting for her, and she knew enough.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” she said, and the friend nodded.
“How is this possible?” she asked the doctor. “You told me he was still alive.”
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said, “there has been a miscommunication. The man who was standing next to him is fighting for his life, but your father passed away.”
It was a mistake that took away any hope of ever seeing her father again.
“Can we see him?” asked Francis.
“No,” the doctor said, “he’s not here. He is still in Amstelveen.”
“In Amstelveen?” Sonja said. “Then we’ll go there. Will you pick up Richie from school before a stranger tells him what has happened to his dad?” Sonja asked Gerard and me.
“Of course,” I answered. “Should I tell him, or would you rather do that yourself?”
“Please do it for me, As. I can’t handle that right now.”
“I will, we’ll go there now.”
Richie was surprised to see us, but apparently had no idea what had happened. Without saying anything about it, we headed to Gerard’s house, where my mother was waiting. Richie was joyfully talking about what he had been doing at school.
My head was spinning. How should I do this? How should I tell him his father had just died?
“We’re going to see Grandma,” I said.
Richie loved her, and I was happy she would be there when he heard the news.
My mother was already upstairs in the bedroom, and Richie ran toward her: “Grandma!”
I followed him.
“Hello, darlings,” my mom said.
She looked at Richie and started crying.
“What is it, Grandma?” he asked, and took her hand. “Are you in pain?”
“No, love,” she said, “I’m not in pain.”
I started crying, too, and I saw Richie was confused. He felt something bad was going on. I had to tell him. I gathered all my courage and said, “Come sit with me. I have to tell you something, sweetheart.”
“Is Mom dead?” he asked fearfully, as if he suddenly realized why we were crying.
“No, darling, not your mom. Daddy is dead,” I heard myself saying.
After I uttered the words, a heart-wrenching, dark growl escaped his little body. He started shouting. “Mama,” he cried out. “I want to see Mama, where is Mama?”
“Mama will be here soon, honey. Granny and I are with you now. You can hold me tight.”
Richie put his little arms around me and cried until he was so worn out that he felt weak in my arms.
“Here, Mom, please take him. So I can ask Son what else I can do.” Sonja and Francis had driven to the place where Cor had been shot. Sonja wanted to be with him, hold him right there on the sidewalk, but she wasn’t allowed to. They were doing forensic research, and she was not to disturb the crime scene. Cor had become a crime scene. He was there on the cold ground, unreachable to everybody who loved him.
It was useless hanging around there any longer. Francis came to us, to stay with her uncle and aunt, her grandmother, and Richie. Sonja drove to her own house, and I followed her.
We sat there, overcome with grief. The doorbell rang. It was Wim.
I opened the door and sat back down on the sofa with Sonja. We cried. Wim sat down between us, put his arms around us, and cried with us.
After a while he got up and left. After all we had been through together, it didn’t feel right.
We still hadn’t seen Cor, and Francis did everything she could to get in to see him. The police were being difficult, but as young and as sad as she was, she managed to pressure them enough that we were allowed to see him that night.
Sonja, Francis, and I went there. We left Richie at home. Sonja didn’t want him to go.
We arrived at the hospital and had to use a back entrance. A couple of cops were waiting for us.
Before we went in to see Cor, they warned us that we might be shocked, that he did not look like himself, that he had been brutalized.
Sonja and I went in first, to see if it was safe for Francis to see her father like that.
There he was, in a white gown on a table. Two burning candles stood at both ends of the table. I looked at Cor’s face and his hands.
They had literally shot him to pieces.
Sonja ran toward Cor, screaming. “No, no, no!” She took his head in her hands and kissed his lips. “Wake up, Cor, please, wake up!” she cried and shook his head, as if trying to rouse him.
It was best Francis didn’t see him like this, but against our advice, she’d followed us into the room.
“I have to see him,” she said, “or I won’t believe that he is dead.”
“Go on, then,” I said.
Francis walked toward him hesitantly, took his battered hand and put it to her face. “Daddy, Daddy!” she cried. “No, Daddy, you can’t be dead!”
Through her tears she kissed his broken fingers.
I put my hand on his arm and tried to look for a sign of life in his face. “Look at me, Cor,” I whispered, hoping he’d open his eyes. “Look at me,” I said louder, but nothing happened.
Cor didn’t open his eyes. He never would again.
After a while, we were asked to leave the room. We had to leave him again. One by one, we kissed him goodbye.
“See you tomorrow, love,” Sonja said.
Francis and I looked at each other. Sonja still could not believe he was gone.
We drove home.
It was later in the evening when the doorbell rang, startling me.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Me.”
It was Wim.
“Son, come outside for a bit,” he called over my head to Sonja. Sonja, still in shock, followed him like a zombie.
After half an hour, she was back.
“What did he want?” I asked when Sonja came back. She gestured me to follow her to the bathroom, like we used to do when we talked about Wim. She switched on the dryer to drown out our conversation. The police had searched the whole house today and we didn’t know if they had installed bugs.
“He asked for the shares of Achterdam. Do you think what I think?”
“I think so,” I answered.
The shares of Achterdam: the person who owned them was the owner of a couple of whorehouses in the city of Alkmaar’s red-light district. It had been a joint project by Cor, Wim, and Robbie following the investment of the Heineken ransom in Amsterdam’s red-light district. After they went their separate ways in 1996, Cor got the Achterdam shares.
“Box, I need the shares for those whorehouses,” he had said to Sonja, and Sonja could now only think that he was behind Cor’s death.
She told him she didn’t have the shares. He’d gone ballistic, had ordered her to go find them, gotten into his car angrily, and driven away.
The next day he was back. He took Sonja outside again and “comforted” her. Cor had been a filthy dog anyway, she would mourn him for just three months and then her grief would be over. Cor was a serious alcoholic and for the kids his death was a blessing. Had she found his shares yet? Oh, and didn’t Cor have gold? She should hand that over to him now.
She couldn’t refuse, but Sonja, determined that Wim should not profit from Cor’s death, improvised: Cor had sold all his gold. She had one bar left, and she wanted to keep that for the children, if he was okay with that.
Wim was beside himself. “One bar left?!”
With Cor out of the way, Wim thought Sonja would be easy prey, but she stood firm.
Days later, Wim called and told me to come see him.
“Listen, As, I need Sonja. You have to get her and take her to the Amsterdam Forest Park. She will have to give her house in Spain to Stanley Hillis, because the hit men have to be paid. So go get her now. I’ll see you in the forest in one hour.”
I was stunned. Had I heard him correctly? The gunmen had to be paid? Was he talking to me about Cor’s hit men? Sonja had to pay for the murder of her husband, the father of her children, by donating her house to his posse? The house Cor had named after his daughter, Villa Francis?
I hurried to Sonja’s and told her what he had told me. She turned white as a sheet.
“You see he is behind all this, As?”
“Yes.”
“What now?”
“You have to come with me to Forest Park. He’ll be waiting for us.”
“No!”
We were scared of what might happen to us there in the forest. We parked the car and walked toward him.
“Hey, Son.” He told Sonja what he’d told me. “You have to give your house in Spain to Stanley Hillis because the hit men have to be paid.”
Sonja had told him twice before that she had nothing to give him, but Wim wasn’t having it. He grew impatient. And we had seen firsthand how fast his impatience could turn to violence.