“ABBY’S DEAD?”
Around me the conversation stopped. My friend Eloise had handed me the phone in the middle of a dinner to welcome our mutual friend Joke, the Human Pretzel, back to Holland. Joke had just returned from a year in Beijing studying advanced acrobatics.
“Abby can’t be dead.”
Rachel, Abby’s lover, had tracked me down in Amsterdam, where I was taking a break from the English winter. Not that it’s any warmer in Amsterdam but the Dutch seem to know how to get through the cold wet season in a cozier fashion. Now she was telling me the gruesome details and asking me to come help her sort out papers.
“Yes, of course I’ll come to Brussels. Tomorrow.”
“Your friend Abby from London?” asked Eloise. It was Eloise’s dinner table and Eloise’s flat in the hotel she managed near the Vondel Park. Long ago she’d been a Women’s Studies professor in the States, but she’d come to Amsterdam to write her novel and had never gone home.
“Yes. She’s been living in Brussels for a few years. Was living.”
“How’d it happen?” asked Joke. She looked very small across the table; I’d forgotten how small she was, more like a twelve-year-old boy than a thirty-year-old woman, though her white-blonde crewcut and French-striped shirt also helped with the effect.
“She was leaving the Gare Midi in Brussels when someone in a hurry drove his car into her. Hit and run. They haven’t found him.”
It could have happened to anyone. It could have happened to me. I was always dashing across streets without looking properly around me. When Abby and I had been young and in love, we had never paid the slightest attention to traffic. We’d believed ourselves invincible.
“I never look out for where I’m going,” said Joke, shaken.
“Me either,” said Eloise. She was a slow-moving, dreamy person, the sort you fear might harm herself unintentionally with a sharp object or be mugged in broad daylight.
“Now you, Eloise, I’d worry about,” I said, turning back to dessert. “Joke, on the other hand—she’d probably just do a double back flip over the hood of the car.”
People in shock often make such flippant remarks. And my friends laughed. Still, none of us could quite finish our apple cake.
Lesbians live in Belgium of course, because lesbians live everywhere. They live alone and they live with friends, and they live with their partners of six years, as Abby had lived with Rachel. It’s not illegal to be a lesbian in Belgium, but that’s because legally you don’t exist. You exist as a taxpayer, and as a worker and consumer participating in the Belgian economy; but as for deciding who should get your money after you’re dead, you don’t really have a choice. In the eyes of the law you’re single, unattached except through blood. Only family members can inherit. And lesbians are never, can never be, family to each other.
“If I had any idea that the will we made wasn’t valid in Belgium,” Rachel said, “I never would have moved here. We paid a British solicitor to draw it up for us with power-of-attorney, everything. It’s useless.”
“But surely you could challenge the Belgian law. You’re American citizens, you’re just in Belgium for…” I hesitated. I had no clear idea why they were in Brussels. I knew that Abby had inherited some money from an aunt of hers about a year ago, and that, without talking much about it, she’d begun to live a very different lifestyle.
“And how would I pay the lawyer?” Rachel said bitterly. “Our money was in a joint account, and that account is now closed. Closed to me anyway. Wide open for Abby’s legal heir.”
We were in their apartment off the Avenue Louise, a luxurious flat that I’d never been to before. When I first knew Abby in the seventies, she was just another young American in London, squatting in abandoned houses, working for free at the women’s bookstore. Her passion even then had been for collecting books and manuscripts, the odd bit of correspondence. She had eventually gotten a job in one of the antiquarian book shops near the British Museum where she specialized in firsts by twentieth-century women authors. Our affair was brief; our friendship had lasted years. We used to get together for cappuccinos on Coptic Street, a tradition that continued after she moved to Belgium last year, because she came back frequently to London. So I’d never seen this Brussels flat before and was suitably impressed.
“Take a good look,” said Rachel as she showed me around. “I won’t be living here much longer. Abby’s brother will be here to take possession tomorrow and unfortunately the security box at the bank, which I’m now barred from opening, has a complete inventory.”
“But Rachel, surely he’ll let you keep living here. Surely he’ll…”
I trailed off when I saw the expression on her face. “Abby’s family hated the fact that she was a lesbian; that’s why she came to London in the first place. Even though her parents are dead, her brother still has the same feelings, plus he was furious that their aunt left her this place. Now’s his chance to get it back. Do you think he’s going to let me have anything?”
When Abby first got together with Rachel, all her friends had been surprised. Little scruffy, streetwise Abby with her New York accent, five-foot-two, a mop of unruly brown hair that hid her eyes but not her pugnacious chin. Ratty sweaters, jeans from the boy’s department, boots whose rhinestones were mostly gone. How had Abby gone and fallen in love with a Long Island housewife with a shiny black pageboy and a closetful of clothes? Looking now at Rachel, face wrinkled and sagging, eyes red from tears and lack of sleep, black hair shot with white and pulled back into a careless ponytail, I realized she was well over fifty. Rachel had left her husband of twenty-five years for Abby. She’d never had a job outside the home. Her ex-husband wouldn’t provide for her, and she had no marketable skills. She’d followed Abby first to London and then to Brussels, and lost contact with whatever community she’d had in Long Island. Now, in addition to losing Abby, she was about to lose her home, her income, and her financial future.
“Not that I especially want to live in Brussels,” Rachel said, leading the way to an elaborately carved wooden secretary. “If I knew where to go and what to do, I’d be out of here in a flash.”
She stood looking at two framed photos of Abby on the desk. One was of Abby at eight or nine, with missing teeth in a wide grin; the other was of Abby from a few years ago, still tough and impish.
“I didn’t ask you to come Brussels just to hold my hand, Cassandra,” she said finally. “I thought you might be able to help me figure out what some of these papers might refer to. You knew Abby for a long time; you might have some idea what she was up to in London and Amsterdam.”
I looked at the pieces of paper on the desk. Bills of sale, mostly, with the price in pounds or guilders. But what the objects purchased were was somewhat unclear. Not many of the receipts had names at the top. Only a small handful, in fact. A few were printed with the name of a London bookshop on Coptic Street, the one where Abby had once worked, and the others were stamped Antikvaariat Sophie, Keizersgracht, Amsterdam. An antikvaariat is a second-hand bookstore.
“They must be receipts for books that Abby bought,” I said.
“I thought that at first myself,” said Rachel, “but then I wondered, Where are these books? Abby had been getting rid of her collection over the last six months. She certainly wasn’t buying new books.”
I looked at the receipts again and calculated the rate of the pound and the guilder. Some were for modest amounts, a few were sizable, and two of the Dutch ones were astronomical. Whatever Abby had bought at the Antikvaariat Sophie, it had cost her many hundreds of dollars.
“I asked myself, Was it drugs?” Rachel said. “But Abby seems the last person to have gotten into drugs.”
“Nor do drug dealers usually give receipts.”
Rachel dug farther into one of the drawers and came up with an envelope of cash. “I found this too. It’s enough to live on for perhaps three months.” She held it out to me. “But I want you to use some of it, Cassandra, to help me.”
“How?”
“You know Amsterdam, you have friends there”—she sounded wistful—“Could you go to this used bookstore, and find out what Abby was buying? Maybe it’s valuable. I can’t go myself—I’ve got to be here when Abby’s brother arrives tomorrow.”
I opened the envelope. There was more than three months of groceries in there, but then, I’m more frugal than Abby and Rachel had obviously been. “And if it turns out that Abby had something of value that isn’t in the inventory, that she didn’t even tell you about…?”
“It wouldn’t be illegal to withhold that from her brother,” Rachel said, and then she laughed grimly. “Listen to me. I’m worried about doing something illegal. After what the Belgian state has done to me.”
Brussels is a city on a grand scale. Boulevards and parks, an enormous palace, a beautifully restored central square, nineteenth-century shopping arcades of glass and wrought iron. In spite of all this grandeur, it used to have a kind of blackened shabbiness that I once found appealing. Now, except in pockets, like around the Gare Midi, for instance, all that sad grit and glamour was giving way to the gleam of corporate headquarters and European Community buildings.
Amsterdam may have as much big business as Brussels, but you don’t feel it so strongly. The scale is small, the streets and buildings human-sized. You can walk it easily, and it never seems overwhelming. It had begun to rain on my trip back to Amsterdam that afternoon, a thick marine downpour. But it let up as the train pulled into the Central Station, and I decided to head for one of the inner canals, the Keizersgracht, on foot.
The Antikvaariat Sophie was a shop I’d noticed and forgotten on my strolls around the canals. Some of the other bookstores, just as small, had more lively and inviting shopfronts, often with painted wooden signs and bikes out front, often clustered together, in neighborly fashion. The Antikvaariat Sophie had a more solitary look to it, squeezed as it was between tall, narrow residences. It was that solitude more than any shabbiness, any dustiness that gave the bookstore its closed in, secret look.
Not secret perhaps. Private. I remembered Abby, with a force I didn’t usually see in her, saying at our last meeting: “Americans don’t believe in privacy. If you don’t respond to the most prying question, they believe you’re holding out on them.”
At the time I’d agreed. Long years abroad had given me a great reluctance to discuss my personal affairs with acquaintances, much less on television. But I never made a big deal of it; when effusive Americans demanded to know whom I was seeing and what my plans were, I simply lied. Now I wondered what Abby might have meant when she’d talked about privacy. Who was asking her questions? What secrets had she kept, even from Rachel?
A tiny bell jingled when I opened the door to the Antikvaariat Sophie, and a woman looked up, neither friendly nor unfriendly, from behind a desk piled with papers and books. There were piles of books everywhere, on tables, alongside the shelves, in boxes. Most of them were books by women, everything from battered old copies of Sisterhood is Powerful to The Life of Hildegard von Bingen. It was a narrow room, with a cozy look. A few framed black-and-white photographs on the wall—I recognized Vita Sackville-West—and a well-worn armchair with a table next to it.
I would have loved to spend an hour or two looking through the shelves, where Audre Lorde’s poetry rubbed challengingly up against that of Elizabeth Bishop’s, where Lillian Hellman duked it out with Diana Trilling, and Simone de Beauvoir reminisced in fat volumes and Colette in slender ones. Shelves where women at first shyly and then more and more vehemently confessed their deepest feelings. Shelves of political tracts and shelves of oddities. Shelves where I might find first editions of Tommy Price’s wonderful old travel books. However, I remembered that I’d told Rachel I’d try to call her this evening with news.
I took out a few receipts and placed them on the cluttered desk in front of the bookseller. She was a compact, solid woman in her forties, dressed in a striped shirt and khaki trousers. She had a shrewd, amused look that was not particular to her but to her countrymen and women. I had often felt the Dutch were having a quiet joke at my expense.
“Ah,” she said. “Then something has happened to Abby.”
“You knew her then?”
“Knew…yes. Oh, yes.”
“I’m sorry to tell you—she was killed in a car accident.”
“A car accident?”
“Someone in a Fiat hit her outside the Gare Midi two days ago, around five in the afternoon. They didn’t stick around.”
The solid woman looked down. I couldn’t see her expression. “And these?”
“It looks like she had recently been buying books or something from you.”
“Books? From me?”
“It says Antikvaariat Sophie at the top of these receipts, doesn’t it? And you do sell books, as anyone can see.”
“Well, I try to sell books. Sometimes I do; very often I don’t.”
I was finding this frustrating. “Look, did Abby buy things from you, things that were valuable? Things that would be worth a lot to her partner Rachel? Because everything is going to go to Abby’s brother otherwise. Rachel isn’t family; she can’t inherit Abby’s estate in Belgium.”
“Shall we start over?” the woman asked when I ran out of steam. She got up and went to the street door, locked it, and pulled down the Closed sign. “My name is Anja,” she said, coming back toward me with her hand stretched out. “And your news is nothing I like to hear.”
I saw that there were tears in her eyes.
Anja said they had been acquaintances for about a year, ever since Abby had walked into her shop one rainy day and started talking books. They both had a passion for them, especially the work of the underrecognized women modernists of the early twentieth century.
“But these couldn’t have been what Abby bought from you. She had a complete collection. She’d been building it for years.”
“You keep assuming that Abby bought from me,” said Anja. “And she did, a bit, but just to show that she appreciated what I was doing. She’d been in bookselling, so she knew its difficulties. Mostly,” Anja looked down at the papers on the desk, “I bought from her. That’s what those receipts mean.”
“But the receipts are for the equivalent of hundreds of dollars.” I looked around. “I don’t mean to be offensive, but you look like you’re barely hanging on.”
“Women’s literature doesn’t sell the way one would wish,” Anja agreed.
“Then how…”
“I was the middleman. I bought on behalf of someone else.”
“A library, a private collector?”
“Look,” said Anja. “It wasn’t quite on the up-and-up—as you say—what we were doing.”
I waited.
“You know, I didn’t have lunch today,” said Anja. “Just forgot about it. I was going to close early anyway and get a bite. Perhaps you’ll join me?” said Anja.
She locked the shop behind us and we walked to a place a block or two away. Anja had recovered from the shock of hearing about Abby, and we let the conversation slip to lighter subjects, to Anja taking up karate again after some years respite, and to my friend Eloise, whom she knew. The disloyal thought went through my head that I could see why Abby might come to Amsterdam to see Anja. She didn’t have the beauty of Rachel, but she didn’t have her dependency either. Not that Abby had ever said in so many words that Rachel was too much for her; the nearest she’d come during a recent visit was to say that both of them had had a hard time adjusting to Belgium, and that Rachel especially seemed lonely.
We ordered sandwiches. I had a coffee, Anja a small glass of Dutch gin, genever, and a beer. It had begun to rain, and the afternoon had become dark and drawn-in. The little bar itself was dark too, one of those places the Dutch call the brown cafes. We could have been in the eighteenth century, looking through the small-paned windows onto the canal, the carpeted table between us.
It wasn’t until we were settled that Anja began to speak again. “How much do you know about her aunt? The one she inherited from?”
“Almost nothing. One day Abby was living an ordinary life in London, working in a bookstore, scrabbling to make the rent, and the next she was living in Brussels in an expensive flat with no visible means of support.”
“Her aunt was named Amanda Lowe. She came over to Europe as a nurse during the last war and married one of her patients, a rich Belgian. This aunt made over her flat to Abby before she died, with the provision that Abby live there and keep it up. But she didn’t leave Abby any money. Perhaps she meant to, but died before she could manage it. The money went automatically to Abby’s brother.”
“A beautiful flat but no money to live there. Is that why Abby was selling off her books and manuscripts?”
“Yes. Although I believe she was trying to work out some agreement with her brother, and he was being difficult. I don’t know exactly. We didn’t discuss that.”
“And meanwhile Abby still had to live,” I said and, guessing, “Was there something that her aunt had that was a secret, that was valuable, that could be sold?”
“Exactly.”
“But what was it?”
There was another pause, while Anja took a bite of the sandwich in front of her.
“This aunt,” she finally said. “Amanda Lowe. Later Madame Leconte. She was an interesting woman. Before she came to Europe and all that, before she was in the war and married this Belgian man, she had led a different life. Almost been another person, so to speak.”
“Go on.” It was raining harder now, and I could see people scuttling down the street and across the bridge with umbrellas pulled down over their heads like black crows’ wings.
“She lived in Greenwich Village for a time. She had some friends, all girls. Girls she had been to college with in the 1920s. I think Amanda fancied herself something of a writer. She wrote stories and reviews in the 1930s for several journals, and she started novels that she didn’t finish. They’re about love between women. Very interesting. But unfortunately not very good.”
“Manuscripts?” I said. “Abby was selling her aunt’s manuscripts?”
“Not quite. I’m afraid they would be worth very little, though gay scholars would find them interesting. However there was also some correspondence with several of her past lovers, and that correspondence is worth a great deal, because some of it is with…” and here Anja, in a lowered voice, mentioned one of the best known writers of the twentieth century.
“But she’s not a…”
“Precisely.”
We sat in silence for a while. Anja had another beer. I had another coffee. The rain came down.
I finally asked. “Why did you ask immediately if something had happened to Abby.”
“Did I?”
“Why should you have thought that something had happened to her?”
“I don’t know. You looked so serious I guess. That’s all. I thought the worst. Most people think the worst, don’t they?”
I thought about this. “The Dutch often do, I’ve noticed.”
Anja smiled, but in something of a strained manner. “Did Rachel send you to Amsterdam to find me?”
“Yes.”
Anja nodded. “I thought Abby must have mentioned something, though she said she wanted to keep it all confidential.”
I was about to say, Rachel doesn’t seem to know anything, but I held my tongue. All of a sudden I didn’t know what Rachel had known or hadn’t known. I was equally unsure about Anja. Had there been something more between Anja and Abby than it appeared? Had they been lovers?
Anja drank her beer and seemed thoughtful, “It was a sweet tale, wasn’t it? Rachel leaving her husband the doctor for Abby, leaving her beautiful home, her friends. Rachel was one of those women who haven’t a clue they’re lesbian and then suddenly, it hits them and they’re completely changed.”
I sat listening to Anja tell the story I’d heard before from Abby. How Rachel had come to London with her husband and had stopped at a crowded pub across from the British Museum. How Abby happened to be there too and offered Rachel a chair. How the next thing they knew they were wandering the streets at midnight and fireworks were going off somewhere. I was listening, thinking, and staring absently through the cafe’s windows when I imagined that I saw a familiar figure—something in the flicker of cloth beneath a raincoat, the set of the head—slip around the corner opposite us.
But why would Rachel, if it were Rachel, have followed us to this cafe? Why would she have sent me to Amsterdam and then followed me herself?
“A sweet tale,” Anja repeated. “But they had to live in the real world. It was Rachel who insisted that they move to Brussels. A beautiful flat full of antiques, no rent to pay; it must have seemed ideal compared to their one-bedroom flat in Stoke Newington. But neither of them liked Brussels, and it was Abby who had to figure out how to support Rachel.”
The figure was gone. I was sure I’d imagined it. On a dark afternoon, one raincoat looked pretty much like another. I turned my attention back to Anja, who was finishing up with, “She loved Rachel, it wasn’t that, but Abby was never a one-woman woman. It didn’t suit her. Rachel was jealous. I think Abby may have had someone in London. She was always going over to London to see her.”
“And you and Abby…?”
“Oh heavens, no.” But Anja blushed.
“Why did she tell you so much?”
For the first time, Anja looked abashed. “I suppose I’ve been talking too much. The shock and everything.”
“She must have trusted you to tell you about her aunt and Rachel and everything,” I said. But I thought, with pain now that Abby was dead, Why didn’t Abby ever tell me this?
“That’s strange,” said Anja, when we got back to the shop. “I could swear I locked the door when we left.”
For there were two customers inside, browsing around the shelves. Anja gave a quick look at her desk and cash box. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. Her face returned to its equable expression, and she spoke pleasantly in Dutch to her customers, who answered her in German.
But I remembered the figure in the raincoat outside the brown cafe, and for the first time a little shiver of doubt passed through my mind about Rachel. A hit-and-run outside the Gare Midi. Happens all the time. Who had been running and why?
When I called Rachel in Brussels, she wasn’t there, but I left a message that I needed a little more time in Amsterdam and that I would see her tomorrow. I wasn’t sure why, but the idea of spending the night in that luxurious flat with Rachel seemed less than appealing.
I went back to the Hotel Virginia. In the dining area, the breakfast tables were pushed to the wall and Joke was practicing some incredible contortions on a mat on the floor.
“Come on down, Cassandra. Let me teach you a few tricks.”
Some tricks I’m never too old for, but I didn’t think that was what Joke had in mind. Fortunately Eloise wafted in at that moment with a pot of tea and cups on a tray. She looked as benevolent and tousled as she usually did, as if she’d just awoken from a long and particularly pleasant nap, but I knew that she’d been up since five, dealing with breakfasts and check-outs, supervising the cleaning of the rooms, dealing with reservations, shopping, and welcoming new guests.
I asked Eloise if she knew Anja.
“Not well, but yes. I’ve found absolutely incredible books on her shelves and the prices are reasonable. It’s too bad the shop doesn’t do better. Recently she told me she might have to close it if things didn’t improve.”
As we had our tea, I told her, as briefly as I could, about Abby selling her aunt’s correspondence, the love letters between Amanda Lowe and the woman who’d won the Pulitzer and had often been mentioned in connection with the Nobel.
“But she’s not a…well!”
We looked at each other and shook our heads.
“I don’t understand this constant preoccupation with who is and who isn’t,” complained Joke from a position resembling a tangled phone cord. “Who the hell cares?”
“Only literary scholars, dear Joke,” said Eloise. “They love to pry open closets. More fodder for dissertations.”
For myself, I’d often found it a bittersweet pleasure to read biographies of famous men and women who had spent so much of their life’s energy keeping their love affairs with members of the same sex quiet. They were entitled to their privacy, but we who are openly gay also have, if not a right, then a great longing and need not to feel as lonely as we have sometimes.
“But who did Anja sell the papers to, I wonder?” asked Eloise. “A private collector? A university? Some special collection? And why did Abby choose Anja?”
“I imagine she thought going through Anja would be more discreet than using her contacts in London. Anja said what they were doing wasn’t on the up and up, but there’s nothing illegal about selling manuscripts.”
“And so far it’s not illegal to out famous people.”
“So it must have had something to do with the estate. Abby wasn’t supposed to sell anything in the flat perhaps, including old letters.”
“I still have academic friends,” Eloise. “I’ll see what I can find out. I wonder,” she stopped as she was getting up and looked at me. “Could there be something more to all this than a hit-and-run?”
“You’re not thinking there’s something suspicious about Abby’s death, are you?”
But Eloise was already out the door. From the floor, Joke said, “I would say that’s exactly what Eloise is thinking. And maybe you should be too.”
The next morning I took an early train to Brussels, which gave me plenty of time to consider what I’d gotten myself into. Had my friend been murdered by her lover Rachel? Why? And what was Anja’s involvement? Why had she assumed that something had happened to Abby? To whom was Anja selling the correspondence, and for how much? What had happened to that money?
I got off at the Gare Midi and had a look around. Although the streets surrounding it were a bit grimy, the station itself had been renovated inside and had plenty of passengers. Someone must have seen something. I went back outside and talked to the taxi drivers. I asked them if they’d heard about the hit-and-run the previous week.
“Oh yes,” they remembered it (“Horrible.”); that is, they’d heard about it; well, none of them had actually witnessed it. But Paul had, and he had an afternoon shift today. If I came back around two or three, I could surely talk with him.
“You’re from the insurance, aren’t you?” said one cabby wisely, and I didn’t dissuade him.
Next I went to the local police station and was shuffled around to various desks until the inspector in charge of the case turned up and led me into his office. I introduced myself this time as an American journalist, which flummoxed him slightly.
“I assure you, Madame,” he said, “that we have done everything in our power to locate the driver and the car. But it was twilight, the worst time for identifying anything, and it was raining hard and the license plate was covered with mud.” He paused. “This woman was important in America?”
“Très importante,” I said, and thought, To her friends.
When I arrived at the apartment off the Avenue Louise around noon, I found Thomas, Abby’s older brother, there. In early years Abby had talked about him sarcastically; in later years not much at all. I couldn’t remember what he did for a living, only that when they’d been growing up he’d called Abby Butt-Face. And there was something about their father’s business being a problem between them. I couldn’t recall the details, only that Abby, much like I had, had left home at an early age when it came out she was a lesbian.
He didn’t look at all like Abby. He was about fifty and plump, with a bald head fringed with seaweed-black hair and sarcastic furrows on either side of his bitten-in lips.
He hardly acknowledged me as Rachel let me in, but continued circumnavigating the room with a long list that was presumably the inventory from the security box. Occasionally he would bark a question at Rachel, but mostly he ignored her, much as if she’d been the charwoman.
Rachel appeared groggy and anxious at the same time, as if whatever pills she’d taken to sleep had dulled her wits without bringing her rest. She was still in her bathrobe.
“How did it go in Amsterdam?” she asked eagerly, but in a low voice. “Did you find the bookshop? Did you find what Abby might have been buying?”
“A woman called Anja runs it. I had a drink and a chat with her. Did Abby ever mention her?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But clearly she went to Amsterdam about a half a dozen times over the past year. Didn’t you ask her what she was doing there, who she was seeing?”
“I just thought she was restless, just like I was. In Amsterdam she could talk English, feel freer than here.”
“But you didn’t go with her?”
“No. She…didn’t want me to come.”
“Just like she didn’t want you to come to London?”
“No,” Rachel whispered.
She looked pretty miserable. But I hardened my heart against her, remembering, the inspector’s words, “It was twilight; it was raining. The car had mud on its license plate.”
“Where was Abby returning from that night she was at the train station?”
Rachel jumped.
“Or was she going off somewhere?” I continued casually.
“She was…going to Amsterdam.”
“In the evening?”
But Rachel had composed herself. “Why shouldn’t she go in the evening? Anyway, you know as well as I do that she kept her life…”
“Private?”
“Secret,” said Rachel. “I didn’t ask. She didn’t offer information.”
Except to Anja, I thought. Abby seemed to have told Anja everything. Rachel and I had been whispering in a corner of the apartment, and both of us started when Thomas said, “Is this the Louis 16th chair?”
Rachel nodded to him and muttered, “He doesn’t have a clue, the greedy philistine.”
I said casually, “So did Abby’s aunt specify that not only could the flat not be sold, but none of the articles in it? Is that why Abby resorted to selling the correspondence? It probably wasn’t listed on any inventory.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Did Abby know you couldn’t inherit? Obviously you didn’t.”
“Cassandra, I asked you to go to Amsterdam and meet with someone at this Antikvaariat Sophie. And you come back giving me the third degree.”
“And that’s another thing. Why did you make me go to Amsterdam when you were going there yourself? Did you just want her out of the bookstore so you could get in and look for something?”
Rachel was silent. I took out the envelope still filled with money and handed it back to her. “This is nothing I want to be involved in.”
Thomas was wandering near the bookshelves. “Those aren’t your aunt’s books,” Rachel told him sharply, coming over to him. “They were your sister’s.”
“Everything of my sister’s is mine now,” he reminded her.
“Well, there’s nothing valuable on those shelves.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
We watched him scan the titles, pull down a few of the more expensively-bound books, and look at them. He obviously had no idea that a book in worn paper covers, but signed by Virginia Woolf, was many times more valuable than a leather-bound reprint of a Jane Austen novel. I could see myself that Abby’s collection was sadly diminished.
Rachel walked back across the room to where I stood near the door. “Insufferable man,” she muttered.
“When exactly did he arrive?”
“This morning.”
“There’s no chance he could have come a few days ago?”
“Why would he have…” Rachel stopped and looked at me. “You don’t think…” A stain of red came surging up from her chest and into her face. “Abby was murdered?”
I wasn’t sure how far I wanted to go in this direction with Thomas still in the room, even though we were both whispering. “It’s possible.”
“Then you think her brother…or even I…or this woman Anja? But why?”
“Love and money, the two usual motives.”
“You think I might have run over the woman I loved and left her lying in the street?”
“If you were jealous enough. Or desperate enough about money.”
“Okay, that’s enough. Get out. I thought you were a friend; I thought you would help. But now I see you’re out to punish me for some reason. You can leave.”
“I didn’t say it was you,” I tried to explain, but she had opened the door and practically pushed me out. “You admit you were jealous of Anja,” I said, as the door closed firmly behind me.
I could have gone to the police station with my suspicions, but I hesitated. I didn’t have enough facts, and Rachel’s expression of total horror showed she really was surprised to find herself accused. I needed to know more. As I made my way back to the train station, I remembered an evening the three of us had spent in London a few years before. We’d dined well and drunk moderately and laughed enormously, and I’d gone away not so much envious as satisfied: Abby was happy with Rachel.
Things could change. Anja said that Abby wasn’t a one-woman woman, which to me was a fairly clear indication that they’d been involved. I wondered who the lover in London was. I tried to see it from Abby’s perspective, as I sat on a bus travelling through a gray mist that made it seem much later than early afternoon. She had moved to Brussels because of the flat, and in order to satisfy Rachel’s desire for a better standard of living than they’d had in London. But neither of them was happy there. They didn’t have friends; they didn’t have community. Abby began to wander. Rachel was lonely. There were arguments. Each blamed the other. Rachel suspected affairs, and probably she was right.
But then why didn’t Abby leave her? Why did she sell off her book collection and try to sell her aunt’s letters, if not to continue to stay in Brussels and support Abby?
I tried hard to recall our last conversation. It had been about a month ago, in bleakest January. Abby had been casual, as usual. “Hi, I’m in town. Meet me for a cappuccino at the usual spot, all right?”
As I had walked up Coptic Street, I saw her just emerging from the bookstore where she used to work. I caught up with her there. To my surprise, she’d seemed a little embarrassed. “Just visiting Peter,” she hastened to say, as if that wasn’t exactly what I would have assumed.
She had seemed very glad to see me, and we’d spent an hour catching up. She wanted to know all about my recent travels, and I amused her with stories of Luisa Montiflores and her boundless ego. Abby and I had rarely talked about anything very important to us except in a slantwise, jocular fashion, but this time, she’d seemed especially anxious to keep the conversation off herself. When I asked how Brussels was, she shrugged. “It’s gloomy in winter, but then every place is. We’re doing a lot of reading.” And then she’d changed the subject. I’d tried to drag it back—“How long do you plan to be there?”—and that was when she’d made her remark about privacy and secrets. It wasn’t really any of my business, she let me know.
I got off at the station and asked for the cabby Paul, but he had just taken off with a fare. I went into the Gare Midi and found a bank of phones. First I called London.
“Peter? This is Cassandra Reilly. You may not remember me, but I was a friend of Abby’s.” I told him, as gently as I could, that she had been killed.
“But I just saw her recently,” he said. “Just last month. I can’t believe it. Not Abby.”
“She worked for you for donkey’s years, it seems.”
“And I’ve missed her badly since she left for Brussels. Couldn’t understand why she wanted to go there and once there, since she was so unhappy, why she didn’t return.”
“She told you she was unhappy?”
“Oh well, you know Abby. She never told anyone the total truth, only the version that suited her at the moment. But of course that’s what made her such a good book buyer. If someone brought in a load of books, imagining they were valuable—and of course sometimes they would be valuable—Abby would never let on. She knew such a vast amount, but then she would, wouldn’t she? Raised in the trade.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well of course you knew,” Peter sounded surprised. “Her father had Lowe’s Antiquarian Bookstore, that excellent shop on the West Side in Manhattan. People still remember it—the marvelous selection, the old wooden shelves up to the ceiling, the books in the glass cabinets, beautiful books. Abby grew up in the shop. But when her father died suddenly, her brother was the one to take it over. I don’t know the reason why. I suppose because he was the boy and she was still too young.”
I was remembering a very early conversation with Abby. “The business went to my brother, even though he didn’t love it. He was just greedy and thought it would make him rich. But he doesn’t know anything.” But I had not remembered that it was a bookstore. Perhaps she hadn’t told me.
“You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to,” I said. “But is there any possibility that she was selling you titles from her collection?”
“I’m afraid so, yes,” he said. “I hated to see her do it, but she said she couldn’t really manage otherwise. She said she hoped that something was going to come through soon though.”
I thanked him, hung up, and called Anja.
“I’ve been thinking about our conversation,” I told her. “And it’s occurred to me to ask which university you were selling the letters to.”
“I’m afraid I can’t really tell you that.”
“But Abby is dead now. Whatever agreement you made with her can’t be valid. Is the sale still in progress? Did you receive the money? How much was it and what happened to it?”
“It’s not that I don’t want to tell you, Cassandra,” she said a little nervously. “But I’d prefer to wait a little. Things are still in progress with the university, and I’d rather not queer the negotiations, so to speak. Besides, it’s a little unclear to me at the moment what right you have exactly to ask all these questions. If you’re working with Rachel, I must say that I have some reservations.”
She had put it very diplomatically, but I understood that she was not going to tell me much more. Perhaps she was regretting that she’d revealed me so much already.
“You suspect Rachel?” I finally said.
“Just ask her what she took from my desk yesterday. See what she says,” said Anja and rang off.
As I walked past the ticket office, I had the strong urge just to get on the first train back to London. I could sleep on the ferry from Ostend. I was sick of this whole business and not sure why I was getting more deeply involved. But I kept walking and when I got back to the taxi stand, Paul was there.
Fifteen minutes later I was back on a bus going in the direction of the Avenue Louise. I hadn’t found out much from the cabby, but I’d found out a few things. Paul was from the former Yugoslavia and didn’t speak much French. He hadn’t given me the clear answer that I wished.
“A gray Fiat, very hard to see,” he said. “New one, not old. Very much mud on the license plate.”
“But how could the mud stay stuck?” I asked. “It was raining.”
“Brown mud,” he said.
“You’re sure it was a gray Fiat?” I was not sure if Rachel and Abby owned a car, but I supposed Rachel could have rented one. “Did you see the license plate? Was it from Brussels?”
“Too much mud,” he said.
Thomas was gone when I buzzed Rachel from downstairs. She let me in, and seemed subdued. “I didn’t expect to see you again.”
Somehow she had pulled herself together, had combed her hair and put on a sweater and pants. She had been crying.
She gestured me to a chair and went to make tea. Now that I was getting more familiar with the apartment, I could see that it was not as posh as I’d first imagined. There were definitely antiques, but the wallpaper was spotted and old, the carpets stained. It had a kind of musty smell, too, which probably came from the velvet, slightly moth-eaten drapes.
“I called Peter at Abby’s old bookshop,” I said when Rachel came back. “He told me that Abby was selling off her collection.”
“I could have told you that. We were desperately poor. Abby’s books were the only thing of value.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t think it was important. The books were sold; the money was used up. What I was trying to find out was how Abby had used the money, whether she had bought anything valuable that wouldn’t be in the inventory.”
“She didn’t buy anything. She sold something to this woman at the Antikvaariat Sophie.”
Rachel nodded. “You mentioned some correspondence. As if I knew about it. I didn’t, actually.”
I explained what it was.
Rachel thought for a moment and then said, “I guess I’m not surprised that Abby didn’t tell me about the letters. She probably knew that I wouldn’t approve of making money off a youthful love affair. I believe that people should come out when they’re ready. Which means that some people are never going to come out, if they can help it.”
She went on, “Look, I know that Abby always liked to put it about that she bowled me over and that I left my husband for her. And that’s partly true. He gave me an ultimatum and I had to accept it. He’d accommodated himself to my other women lovers, but Abby was more threatening.”
“Other lovers?”
“My husband knew I’d experimented, as he called it. In fact, I’d been sleeping with women a long time before I met Abby. But it’s true that Abby meant enough to me to leave the life I’d had. It wasn’t easy. I didn’t have a work permit in London, so I was reduced to doing under-the-table freelance editing, while I waited to get legal status there.”
“You were an editor?”
“I’d done editing in New York, yes.”
I bit my lip. I had gotten the impression early on that Rachel had had no skills, that Abby had had to support her.
“Then her aunt died. Abby raved about the apartment, said that Brussels was a fascinating city, that it would be a great base to explore Europe from. You know how impetuous and persuasive she could be. I was reluctant. After all, I was finally starting to feel at home in London after five years. But I said yes. It was only when I got here that Abby told me that we had to live in the flat and not sell anything in it. She was trying to work something out with her brother. Meanwhile, we sat here driving each other slowly crazy.”
She had used that phrase about Thomas before. “What exactly was she trying to work out?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly,” Rachel stumbled. “I understood that he got some money from the estate. I don’t know how much. But perhaps she was hoping to work out an agreement with him about some of the valuables here. Perhaps that she could give them to him in exchange for cash. Or that she could sell them and he would take half. I don’t know.”
“Do you have his address here?”
“Just the hotel name.”
“I’d like to ask him some questions.”
Rachel shuddered. “It was so creepy, him crawling around looking at everything. He told me that I’d have to be out of here by the end of the week. I hardly know where I’m going to go. Probably back to London. I don’t really know anyone here.”
“It must have been lonely,” I said.
“Abby and I handled it differently. I started learning French, and reading a lot and visiting the museums and the churches. It was really harder for Abby. She hated to think she’d made a mistake in all this. She didn’t want to talk about it. But every once in a while she would just get on the train and leave. I figured out what she was doing with her books at some point, that that was why she was going to London. But then she started going to Amsterdam all the time. That I couldn’t quite understand.”
“But you thought she was having an affair?”
“Was she? With this woman Anja?”
“I don’t know, honestly.”
“But you think so.”
“Yes, perhaps.”
“I think so too.”
“Is that why you followed me to Amsterdam yesterday?”
“I still don’t know how you know that,” said Rachel, slowly. “But yes, I did. After you left, I suddenly felt quite wild and had to do something. I took your same train, and followed you to the shop. I saw you talking with Anja. I saw you both leave for the cafe.”
“You broke in then. What were you looking for?”
“Some letter, some sign.”
“Anja said you took something off her desk.”
“I did. It was a note from Abby to Anja.”
“Can I see it?”
She went over to the secretary and fetched it. It was short, typed letter.
Dear Anja,
“No, I don’t want to talk on the phone. I’d rather see you. The usual place, on Tuesday evening.”
“The usual place—was that in Amsterdam or here?”
“Tuesday was the day Abby was killed,” said Rachel slowly. “On her way to the train station.”
It was late afternoon when I arrived back in Amsterdam, a day much like the day before, only darker and wetter. I called Eloise from the Central Station.
Eloise had talked with friends in the States. It was true. A buzz had gone around for years that this particular famous woman novelist, who had reached her seventies denying every innuendo, had had lesbian relationships in her youth. But there had never been any proof, and certainly nothing written. There still wasn’t.
“Maybe this woman killed Abby,” Eloise said.
“It’s not that much of a stigma.”
“Well, maybe to her it is.”
“I think I need to talk to Anja again.”
“The shop will be closed now. Do you want her address? I went to a party once at her house. It’s right near the shop, also on Keizersgracht.”
I thanked her and hung up, and made my way by tram and foot to the shop, just to check. The CLOSED sign hung in the window. I walked back across the canal to a cafe and sagged into a chair inside. I was suddenly aware of just how exhausted I was from my back-and-forth trip to Brussels in one day. I hadn’t eaten lunch. Hadn’t really found out much either. I’d tried calling Thomas at the hotel, but there was no answer. I asked when he had checked in and they told me just the night before. I asked, as casually as I could, if he was out in his gray Fiat and was told, politely but firmly, that Monsieur had no car. I don’t know if I really suspected him. Other than an apartment-full of moldering antiques, what could be in it for him? Still I wanted to talk with him. I could imagine Abby selling first her books, and then the correspondence, to get money. I could imagine her dealing with Anja. I could imagine Anja dealing with a collector or university. I could even believe, though it was difficult, that Rachel knew nothing about this. But I could not imagine why Abby had had to die.
Perhaps I was just making up a big story about the whole thing. Perhaps it was my way of not facing the fact that Abby had been careless, had not been looking, and had died for no reason at all in a hit-and-run accident.
Accidents happen all the time. I ordered a sandwich, and while I waited, I stared out the steamy window at the passing cars. In central Amsterdam there weren’t many cars, but they still drove as if they were larger and more important than anything around. It was twilight; it was raining, exactly the same conditions that had existed a few days before at the Gare Midi. I could barely see anything; would not, in fact, have seen the car stop and park in front of the Antikvaariat Sophie if the person who got out had not been wearing complete white. In the gloom she shone.
I threw some guilders on the table and dashed out the door. The white figure had gone inside the store, but no light was turned on. It couldn’t be Anja, for she had told me that she walked everywhere. “It’s such a problem having a car in the city.”
There was no movement in the shop. Could it be Rachel? I crept along the bridge. It was a gray Fiat, the same make of car that had killed Abby. Should I knock on the shop door? Should I write down the license plate? Call the police? Tell them what?
But as I moved up the street toward the shop, I saw something that made me duck quickly into a doorway. It was Anja, getting into the driver’s seat of the Fiat. She was wearing a white karate costume, with a brown or black belt. She had something in her hand, a bag. I pressed myself in the doorway as she drove past, and tried to see whether there were streaks of mud on the license plate, but it was too dark. She was going in the opposite direction of the address Eloise had given me for her flat. Probably to her karate class.
I called Eloise back to ask what to do, but she had gone out. Joke answered instead.
“Do you still have your motorscooter?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Can you be at this address on the Keizersgracht in ten minutes?”
“Sure. But why?”
“Because we have about an hour, maybe a little more, to break into someone’s house.”
It was nothing, Joke assured me, to scramble up a back wall and get inside Anja’s flat. “If it had been the front, that would have been harder. But here there are drainpipes and balconies. I’ll manage.”
We had forced our way through a broken door into the back yard of the tall house. My heart was beating and my mind was racing the clock. I didn’t want neighbors to call the police before we’d found any evidence, and I certainly didn’t want Anja to come back while we were still there.
“Go back to the front door,” Joke told me. “And wait for me to open up. Don’t watch me climb,” she warned. “You’ll probably feel faint.”
I did watch her for a moment, just enough to feel faint, and then went round to the front. In less than five minutes, though it seemed like hours, she let me in, and raced back up the two tall flights of stairs to Anja’s flat. I followed more slowly, huffing a little.
That’s why Joke found the letters first. Not the ones we’d expected. But two little stacks on top of a cluttered desk, as if someone had recently been looking at them.
The first pile Joke handed me were dated in order, starting from about two months before. They were typed, using the same typewriter and paper as the letter Rachel had removed from Anja’s desk.
Dear Anja,
Here is a sample letter as agreed. Please let me know what the university says. You know how awkward I feel about selling my aunt’s correspondence, but I don’t see any other way out at the moment. We are so broke.
Abby
Dear Anja,
I’m pleased that the university wants to take the collection, but it doesn’t seem as if the price they’re offering is really fair. After all the letters do shed a really important light on one of the major writers of our time. Can you try again, either with them or someone else?
Abby
Dear Anja,
Thanks for managing to push the price up! It’s still not quite what I could wish, but it’s quite decent and we’re in desperate straits. Any chance of an advance from you on this?
Abby
Dear Anja,
Thanks so much for the cash. This should tide us over until the beginning of the month. I don’t want to send the letters, so I’ll be coming to Amsterdam this weekend to deliver them to you. See you then.
Abby
Dear Anja,
Thanks for the second installment. Much appreciated. I’ll look forward to the last—and biggest—installment soon!
Abby
Dear Anja,
I had the most extraordinary note today, from the letter-writer herself. It was addressed to my aunt and begged her please not to go along with this extortion. What does this mean?
We need to talk!
Abby
There was nothing in these notes to indicate that Anja and Abby were lovers. There was, unfortunately, something to indicate that Anja had not been selling the letters to a university collection at all. A suspicion that was confirmed by two letters with U.S. stamps.
These were typed, with a very black, decisive ribbon, and the tone was firm, but the signature at the end looked old and ill, not bold at all.
Dear Miss de Joost,
You are correct. The copy of the letter you sent from me to Amanda Lowe is indeed legitimate—it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. It was the product of an unwise passion between two college girls and as such, should be relegated to the trash bin. However, as I think it is unlikely you—or the party you say you are acting for (can she really still be alive after all these years? I know I am, but I feel it is much too old)—would be willing to throw it away, I am prepared to pay for this letter and any others you may have.
Dear Miss de Joost,
I really cannot abide greed. What seemed to be a simple transaction, a simple and quick erasure of the past, has now turned nasty. I cannot pay the price you name. And I do not like the hint that if I do not come up with the full, exorbitant amount, you will “take your business elsewhere,” as you so delicately put it. Take it elsewhere and go to hell. I would rather be outed, than made a damn fool of.
I rustled throughout the other papers on the desk. “Is that all, just the two letters from her? Maybe Anja never sold the collection at all. But how strange. She went right to her.”
“Maybe she thought she could get more money from her.”
“But clearly Abby had no idea of what was going on. She thought Anja was going to—had, in fact—sold the letters to some university.”
“Until the writer sent Abby a note telling her about what one might perhaps call blackmailing.”
“So Abby had received just a couple of cash advances from Anja. Those were the receipts. But Anja had the letters. She could get whatever price she wanted, either from the writer herself or from other universities.”
“Abby must have been on her way to Amsterdam to confront Anja, when…”
“But the letters between Amanda Lowe and the writer must be somewhere around here then,” said Joke, rustling around in the drawers of the desk.
“What are you doing in my flat?” said a voice from the doorway. She was in her white karate uniform and the belt around her solid waist was black. “What are you doing in my desk?”
I tried to take the defensive. “There’s a lot that you haven’t told me, Anja.” I held up the letter from Abby and the writer. Behind me I could sense Joke moving away in the direction of the window. It was fine for the Human Pretzel to think about clambering down three stories, but I knew that my only way out was the door.
“It’s not what you probably think,” she said. “I’m not a blackmailer. Abby wanted more money, and so I tried to raise the price. The next thing I know the writer is yelling about extortion.”
“But why did you write to her in the first place, not a university special collections or a library?” I was covering for Joke, hoping she could get to the window and out while I distracted Anja. It was clear to me now that she not only had the means—the gray Fiat she had never mentioned—but the motive. She had deceived Abby; Abby had found out; she had decided to kill Abby.
Anja came closer to us and the desk. “I know it looks awful. But you must believe me that I didn’t expect things to turn out the way they did. I didn’t expect Abby to be killed. I was going to explain it all to her on Tuesday when we met.”
“So she was coming to Amsterdam to meet you?”
“Yes. But I got so worked up by the whole thing that I decided to drive there and see if I could catch her at the train station…”
“You caught her all right,” I couldn’t help saying angrily. Joke chose that moment to jump out the window.
“Where’s she going?” cried Anja, rushing toward me. “She’ll be hurt.”
“She can take care of herself,” I said. “As for where she’s going—to the police I imagine.”
“The police! But I didn’t do anything to Abby. She was already dead when I got to the Gare Midi.” Instead of coming back into the room, Anja began to climb out the window herself. I didn’t know what to do. Out of the corner of my eye, I suddenly saw a bundle of old letters, tied with a faded ribbon, that had fallen off the side of the desk.
“All right,” I said, in as calm a voice I could manage. “Let’s just say I believe you. Would you come back in and explain? If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to fear from the police.”
Slowly she returned to where I was standing, and said, “But that’s the trouble, when you do one thing wrong, it makes it look as if you’re capable of anything.”
I perched on the desk chair and motioned for Anja to sit down, where she wouldn’t have a view of the fallen packet of letters.
“It started when Abby found the letters in a box in the apartment,” Anja said. “I remember how excited she was when she came to me to tell me who they were from. ‘They’re worth a fortune to scholars,’ she said. And then Abby asked me if I’d help her sell them.”
“Why? Why didn’t she do it herself?”
“Because of her brother. That’s when I heard the whole story about the inheritance and how Abby wasn’t supposed to sell anything from the apartment. She was afraid, if her brother knew she’d sold them, he’d either want all or part of the money, or else he would try to use that to get her out of the apartment.”
Anja sighed. “I told her I really hadn’t done anything like that before and wasn’t sure I felt comfortable. But she said she’d tell me who to contact.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Anja shook her head. “I read the letters, and they seemed so…personal. And I knew the writer was still alive. It seemed a really awful thing to do to her. Not to say she’s a lesbian of course, but to do it behind her back. So I thought, Well, why not give her the opportunity to buy the letters herself? I truly wasn’t thinking of it as blackmail. I just wrote her and sent her a copy of one of the letters and said I had all of them. I only asked whether it was legitimate. I did not name a price at first until I checked with Abby; she told me what to ask. That’s when the writer got so angry and accused me of blackmail, and then she wrote a letter to the old address she had for Amanda Lowe and begged her not to go along with this. That’s the letter Abby got.”
We could hear feet coming up the stairs. Heavy feet. Probably police feet. All of a sudden I was no longer sure that Anja had killed Abby. I thought it was a shame in fact, that the last thing Joke heard before she dove out the window was that Anja had driven her Fiat to the Gare Midi.
There was a powerful knock on the door, and I rose to let them in. I wanted to tell them, “I don’t really think she did it,” but caution stopped my protest as they handcuffed her to take away for questioning.
The next morning found me again on a very early train to Brussels, this time with the letters in my bag. I read them, one by one, all the way through the Low Countries, and then I read them again. They were beautiful and true, the words of a twenty-year-old in love with a woman for the first time. Why and when had she become ashamed of that part of her life? Who had made her feel ashamed?
In my case it was my mother; in Abby’s case her father. We had both been around the same age—sixteen. We’d both laughed about it afterward, years after we had left home and weren’t speaking to our relatives. We had been two tough girls, Abby and I, talking about first loves with a knowing look. Never talking about the shame, the anger, and the hurt of it.
When I arrived in Brussels, it was still only nine. I should be getting a discount from the railway for all the trips I’d taken. I took a cab to the Avenue Louise and woke up Rachel. I knew that Thomas was coming at eleven to make another inspection of the apartment, and I wanted Rachel to delay him as long as possible. Then I went to the post office, where I made a few phone calls to New York. Within an hour, I knew more than I needed. I headed for his hotel.
He wasn’t a neat man, the chambermaid told me. She gestured in disgust at clothes dropped anywhere, at the crumbs from his breakfast croissant all over the sheets, and at the papers and letters flung around on the dressing table. I had pressed a franc note into her hands and told her I was his secretary, here to pick up some papers for his meeting today that he’d forgotten. We commiserated over his messiness; then I started searching. After only a few minutes, I found what I was looking for. It corroborated what a bookseller friend in New York had found out for me, that Lowe’s Antiquarian Bookshop, while still alive, was in grave trouble.
Here on the desk was a letter from Abby to her brother, offering to trade the apartment in Brussels, with its many fabulous and valuable antiques, for ownership of Lowe’s.
“I know that it’s not an equal exchange,” she’d written. “Our aunt’s things are worth far more than the store, especially since you’ve run it into the ground, but I still have a sentimental attachment to it. I’d be willing to trade fair and square. As for inventory, I have my own collection, and my connections, and I have a deal coming up that I expect to bring in quite a bit.”
Oh Abby, Abby, I thought. Why did you brag to him? Why did you tell him the apartment had valuable antiques? Why did you hint at a deal?
I had not cried for Abby when I heard the news of her death, or when I was at the apartment with Rachel or when I stood outside the Gare Midi and looked at the spot where it had happened. But sitting in Thomas’s hotel room, on a bed still scattered with croissant flakes, I cried as I read Abby’s letter. I cried because that was how I had remembered her and loved her: as a dreamer, a liar, a deal-maker, a sentimental girl with a tough and impish face.
I suppose my story should turn now to how I managed to get the police in Brussels to investigate the possibility that Thomas had indeed killed his sister. How they discovered that he had come into Brussels on Tuesday morning, and had rented a gray Fiat. How they found traces of Abby’s blood on the fender of the car, and his fingerprints all over the place. But I find that the subject saddens me. I’m glad he was caught and punished, of course, but his imprisonment will never bring back Abby to me.
As for the rest of us—Anja, quite chastened after a night in jail, went back quietly to doing what she did best, selling books. I sometimes stop there when I pass through Amsterdam, and I come away with books I never meant to buy on subjects that are suddenly fascinating.
After Thomas’s conviction, Rachel could have fought to keep the flat, for there were no other relatives. Instead, the Belgian state took it. Rachel said she didn’t care; she was just relieved to be out of there. She came with me to Amsterdam for a visit instead, and in the way of many people who come to Amsterdam, she simply stayed. Abby was her true love, but she will probably go happily into old age running the Hotel Virginia with Eloise.
As for the famous letters themselves, Eloise took it upon herself to return them to the woman who wrote them so long ago. “Once,” Eloise said, “I would have seen this as an opportunity to make my name. I would have edited the letters and published them without her permission. Not any more. I guess I’ve completely lost my ambition.”
But some time later a letter came in the mail from the famous writer.
Dear Eloise,
Yes, I have burnt them, as you feared I might. I had become brave during the extortion attempt, and then I lost that bravery, as I have lost it before. Perhaps other letters will be found (I was prolific then). It’s hard to keep secrets in this life, much less beyond. Though of course by then I will not care. I did read the letters—once—before I burned them. Amanda was a dear friend of mine once. It all came back to me. It wasn’t love, not in that way, but it was love no less. Save or burn this letter as you will.
The other day, back in London, I walked down Coptic Street, on a light, cool, spring evening. Birds sang—where do those birds live, who live on Coptic Street? There was the smell of lilac wafting on a breeze—where could those lilac bushes grow, in the midst of the city? For a minute or two, I was many years younger, going to meet my lover Abby. I could almost see her running toward me from the other direction, heedless of traffic, running quick and joyous without looking at anything but me.