ON FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 2012, I WAIT FOR WIM AT THE PARK AND RIDE at the Arnhem exit, a place we agreed upon before his release from prison. Apart from Stijn Franken, his lawyer who would drive him here, nobody knew about this meeting. Stijn had arranged with the district attorney’s office for Wim to leave the penitentiary a day early to  keep him from being mobbed by the press, or worse. During his time in prison and his trial, he’d gotten so much publicity—books, articles, TV shows—that he’d become a celebrity, and he needed the extra security.

I’ve been waiting here for an hour when they drive up. Wim gets out and approaches me, brimming with energy. Happy as a child.

“Hi, sweet sister of mine,” he shouts excitedly. We say goodbye to Stijn and I tell him to get in. “Is the car clean?” he asks.

“Of course it is.” I’ve done as he taught me, arranging for a car that I know has no wiretap or tracking device.

I drive him to the location I’ve arranged for him, a chalet at a holiday resort some fifty miles from Amsterdam, rented in my mother’s name.

During his second detention, which began in 2006, my brother developed a serious heart condition; he suffered from leaking heart valves. He barely survived heart failure, but as my mother used to say, a weed doesn’t perish. Frankly, I was surprised he had a heart at all.

He claimed the doctors had given him no more than two years to live. The end of his life was near, and he threw himself into the role of feeble coronary patient until the last day of his detention. He denied himself everything, with a hardened discipline: he didn’t use salt and stuck to his maximum intake of fluids, six cans of Diet Coke per day.

He should have gotten an award for his performance.

Within an hour of his release, he had ditched his diet. It was no longer relevant to his story or his privileges in prison.

  

On our way, we pass a McDonald’s. I stop to let him enjoy a hamburger.

“Oh, this is great, Assie. I’ve really missed this,” he says with a chuckle.

After we put his stuff away and he checks the location—and approves of it—we make an appointment with Peter R. de Vries, the crime reporter. Wim knows he would be hunted for comment and a first picture after being released. He wants to avoid this by giving a statement and a photo to the media now. Peter is the chosen one. This way, others will stop chasing after him and he can control the message. I wonder what he’s planning.

  

We’re supposed to meet Peter at the entrance of the forest, somewhere in  Gooi. While we wait for him, Wim wants to be briefed on what has happened over the last couple of years. In the forest we can speak freely for the first time, without a guard behind a mirror recording everything. We’re still alert to directional microphones, though, so we whisper. We discuss Wim’s current position in the criminal world, every investigation he was involved in, his women, and the need to make money.

With each minute that passes, Wim gets crankier; it doesn’t take long for his true personality to surface.

“Call Peter! Where is that son of a bitch? Who does he think he is to leave me waiting here? I gave him a scoop!” he rages.

I call Peter, who says he is on his way. He arrives within minutes, and Peter and I exchange greetings. I feel uncomfortable. Not long ago, I told Peter that I never wanted Wim to be released. Now here I am, Wim’s confidante. Peter doesn’t let on. He knows the danger I would be in if Wim knew how I really felt about him.

In his conversation with Peter, Wim focuses on his poor health. His heart will be functioning at only twenty-five percent, he says; he has a short life expectancy, and the doctors gave him two years to live five years ago. His heart will give out any day now. He shows Peter his collection of pills and tells him about his strict diet, explaining that he only eats what he cooks himself.

I have to hand it to him: it’s a smart play. He wants his enemies to underestimate him. A sick old man, not worth spending money for a judicial inquiry or a liquidation.

Wim successfully pulls the wool over Peter’s eyes—his specialty—and Peter leaves with the message that Wim wants published all over the media: he is not dangerous but terminally ill.

  

After the meeting with Peter, we go shopping in Naarden to supply the chalet. We deliberately choose an out-of-the-way town so as not to reveal his whereabouts.

His image has become iconic; he is recognized and spoken to wherever we go. He relishes the attention, and everybody seems to have forgotten why exactly he is so famous.

But I haven’t.

Heading back to the chalet, I start talking indirectly—in case of wires in the car—about the liquidation, or assassination, of Stanley Hillis. Wim turns to me and puts his finger to his lips. I stop talking. We’re driving on a back road, and he says, “Pull over here.”

I park the car in the emergency lane. “Get out,” he says.

We walk a ways down the road before he stops me at a safe distance from the car. I know because he taught me: wires in a car can pick up sound from as far away as a hundred yards.

He stands in front of me, a savage look on his face. “We killed them all, all of them.”

Then he turns around and walks back to the car.

  

Back at the chalet, we watch a couple of TV shows. He is particularly interested in De Wereld Draait Door, where Peter R. de Vries is talking about Wim’s health. Wim’s mission has succeeded: he has signaled that he is harmless.

“Now I’m free to speed things up again,” he says.

It’s late and Wim asks, “Are you sleeping over?”

“Thanks, but no,” I say. “I’m going home.”

“Nah, you’re staying, aren’t you? You’re not leaving me here all alone,” he asks in his familiar, coercive style that leaves you no choice. “You don’t enjoy being here with me, do you? “Well, too bad, because I do like it. You can’t leave.”

That first night I stay over, reluctantly. I sleep on the couch, next to the sliding glass doors. Despite all the security measures I’ve taken, I’m still afraid we have been followed and that Wim’s former criminal friends will riddle the chalet with bullets. In these peaceful, leafy surroundings, I see danger everywhere. I’m not scared of dying, but I refuse to die because of him.

  

That used to be different.

There was a time when I would have given my life for him.

After the Heineken kidnapping, when we were all treated as pariahs, I totally believed in the us-against-the-rest-of-the-world myth of family loyalty he had taught us.

But once I found out that Wim was capable of killing his own family, I knew. The outside world wasn’t our enemy. He was.

  

That night in the chalet I lie awake all night long. I am consumed by the thought that nobody knows where we were. That Wim is already asleep and unguarded, that I could get rid of all traces of DNA by torching the house.

That I have the chance to kill him now.

  

After that sleepless night, I drive home. Sonja is waiting for me.

I tell her that I almost killed our brother, but was too cowardly to do it.

“I’m glad you didn’t do it, As,” she says. “I don’t want him to get off so lightly. That punishment would not be painful enough.” Sonja wants him to spend the rest of his life in prison. That way, he would know how it felt to be betrayed, every day, the way he had betrayed her husband, his friend, Cor van Hout.

She is right, and I wish the same fate for Wim. “But that’s only possible if we stand up against him and testify,” I say.

“Right,” she agrees.

“Then you know what will happen.”

“Yes, I know,” Sonja answers. “But maybe we should take that risk.”