“THIS IS A BAD idea,” Rowland said, clattering down the bare stairs behind her. “Lindsay, I’m warning you. I told you I wasn’t house trained. There won’t be any food.”
“Of course there will,” she replied over her shoulder. “Through here? Every kitchen has food in it, Rowland, even yours.”
It had not escaped Lindsay’s notice that her proposal to cook had caused Rowland deep unease. In the gospel according to Max, of course, Rowland’s one-monthers and three-monthers always insisted on ministering to him.
“Listen, Rowland,” she said firmly, removing from the back of the kitchen door a frilly apron Rowland would certainly never have purchased. “Let’s get one thing clear. This is work. We’re colleagues. With luck we might end up friends. I do not have designs on you. I’m not moving in on you. I hate people who do that. I’ve had innumerable lovers who tried to do just that to me—and they’re all ex-lovers now.”
“Really?” Rowland said, recovering his poise, leaning back against the door and raising an eyebrow. “Innumerable, eh?”
“You don’t need chapter and verse.” Lindsay began opening cupboards. “I’m just telling you, the techniques are roughly the same. In my case they start telling me what wine to buy. Then they criticize my clothes. Then they tell me how to bring up my son. Then they complain about the hours I work. At which point”—she glanced back at him with a smile—“I usually let Louise loose on them.”
“If they’re that easily detached, they probably weren’t worth bothering with in the first place,” Rowland remarked.
Lindsay, mildly thrilled by this statement, ignored it, and made a great show of going through cabinets in search of food. The exchange seemed to have been useful, she thought; Rowland now appeared much more relaxed, in a good humor, even quietly amused. He found a bottle of wine and uncorked it. He set two places at the table.
“So, Sylvie wasn’t serious, then?” Lindsay managed to interject. Rowland looked genuinely astonished, then a little embittered.
“Serious? I thought you’d heard the gossip. I never get seriously involved. Didn’t your informants make that clear?”
Lindsay decided it was safer to say no more. She concentrated her attention on Rowland’s kitchen, which, though primitive, had charm. The refrigerator might be antique, and the gas stove looked prewar, but the room had a beautiful York stone floor, and a splendid built-in breakfront—at present, unfortunately, still painted its original Victorian brown.
Blue, Lindsay thought; that wonderful flat, washed-out Swedish blue; or perhaps an off cream. Then you could put lots of blue and white plates on it, and a huge jug of wildflowers. You could have a rash mat on the floor… really, all the room needed was repainting, and things…
“So tell me. I’m going to cross-examine you now,” Rowland said, sitting down at the pine table—it was nice, that pine table—and running his hands through his astonishing hair. “First, why has no one else made this connection before? Those two dresses are identical. Your piece appeared in Vogue, after all.”
“Timing, mainly,” Lindsay answered, staring at Rowland’s small store of edibles and wondering how on earth you could make a meal from these ingredients. “My article didn’t appear until spring 1979, three years after the Cazarès St. Petersburg collection. It ran in an English magazine, and that particular 1976 Cazarès dress was featured only in an American publication. Unless you put the two photographs side by side, you’d never make the connection. At most, you’d note a resemblance and pass on.”
Inside the cabinet there were two shelves. On the bottom one were the items Rowland had evidently purchased: five cans of tomato soup, several cans of tuna fish, an unopened package of instant five-minute rice, some breakfast cereal, marmalade, and jam. On the upper shelf were articles evidently purchased by Sylvie and perhaps by her predecessors—some of it looked dusty, sad, as if neglected for months, or even years. There was a large bottle of very expensive virgin olive oil, a jar of sun-dried tomatoes, a can of pâté de foie gras, some raspberry vinegar, some green peppercorns, and a little pot of musty Provençal mixed herbs.
“You don’t have any eggs, do you, Rowland? Sorry, what did you just say?”
“Letitia,” he said, fetching eggs, then sitting down again, apparently now happy to let Lindsay get on with it, as she much preferred. “All right, so no one else spotted the similarity, but she must have. She bought couture. Surely she must have noticed that the hot new Paris designer had produced a dress identical to the one made for her ten years before?”
“No. Because she gave up all that after her first husband died. She stopped going to the collections. She stopped buying couture. She would have heard of Cazarès by the time I interviewed her, obviously. But she wouldn’t have seen the Harper’s Bazaar picture of that actual dress. I keep telling you, Rowland. It’s an American publication. If she’d known, she’d certainly have told me. I’m certain she had no idea… Rowland, don’t watch me when I cook. It puts me off.”
“Sorry. I wasn’t really watching you. I was thinking. Staring into space. Are you going to scramble those eggs? I like scrambled eggs.”
“Yes, I am,” said Lindsay, breaking eggs into a bowl. “It’s going to be a hodgepodge. A Tom sort of meal. And it’s going to be damn difficult scrambling eggs in this thing. They’ll stick. The bottom of the pan’s all wobbly. Don’t watch.”
Obligingly, Rowland averted his eyes.
“The dates fit,” he went on in a thoughtful way, “the ages fit. Lazare’s—what? Almost fifty? And Cazarès never reveals her age, but she must be in her forties, even if she looks younger. If she was sixteen or seventeen in 1966, that would make her around forty-five or forty-six now. Possible?”
“Yes. Insofar as you can tell from one glimpse on a runway twice a year. When she’s heavily made up, and darts away again as quickly as possible.”
“It would explain a good deal,” Rowland went on. “The accent Lazare has, for a start; a New Orleans French accent is very strange. Presumably Cazarès managed to eradicate hers—but then, she was better educated than her brother. More important, it explains the pathological secrecy, of course. The deliberate laying of false trails. Can you imagine it, Lindsay, if it’s true? All those years pretending they were not related, desperately hiding that one central truth from the world?”
“No, I can’t,” Lindsay said. “But I know it would be horrible—corroding. And they weren’t just disguising the fact that they were related. They were lovers as well as brother and sister. If the rumors can be believed, they’re lovers still.”
She broke off from stirring eggs to turn the bread toasting under the grill.
Rowland made no comment.
“That child haunts me,” she continued, her face troubled. “I could see he haunted Letitia as well. What do you think became of him? Did he die, get put in some home? I think perhaps he did die. Perhaps he was handicapped in some way.”
“The child of a brother and sister? I know.”
“Think, Rowland, if he’d lived, he’d be in his twenties now. Grown up. Older than Tom. And they could never acknowledge him, never even see him. I think that would be so desperately hard… What is it, Rowland?”
“Nothing.” He had turned to look at her, suddenly intent; then he shook his head. “All of this is speculation anyway. It’s not even easy to check it out. There’s no surname. It’s too vague.”
“If you did have a surname”—Lindsay was now spooning eggs onto toast—“would you be able to run checks then?”
“Oh, you could run some even without a name. You could start with the Grants, with that convent and its school. With a name, you’d certainly get a lot farther. You could then trace the births of Marie-Thérèse and her brother. You should be able to trace the birth of her child—and discover whether or not he died. It’s conceivable you could trace them to France, through immigration records. That might provide an early address. That might give you a lead on how or where Lazare first made his money, even when they changed their names. But it would take a long time, it might lead nowhere, and besides, I told you, Lindsay. This is background and it has to stay background.”
Lindsay said nothing. It had occurred to her that there might be a quick way of discovering that surname, and an ingenious way too, but she did not intend to mention it to Rowland, in case she was wrong.
They sat down to eat their meal. It was a kind of picnic, Lindsay thought. They had toast and scrambled eggs, then toast and pâté. Then Rowland, who was still hungry—it seemed unfair that a man could imbibe so many calories and remain whiplash lean—ate cornflakes for dessert. He made coffee—and at some point during this odd meal, which began companionably enough, Lindsay could sense that just as he had done earlier, he was retreating into some private world of his own.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last, catching her eye. “I’m getting locked back into this Lazare story. That happens to me. I’m not good at switching off. And there’s one detail that’s bothering me.”
“About the story I told you?”
“Indirectly, perhaps. It’s more than that though.”
“You can’t tell me why you’re interested in Lazare?”
“Lindsay, no. I’m sorry. When it’s over, I’ll explain.”
“But Gini knows? She’s going to work on it with you?”
“That’s certainly the plan.”
“So it does relate to what happened at Max’s? And it does relate in some way to Amsterdam?”
“Lindsay, don’t ask.” He rose. “Look, it’s past ten now. I ought to call Gini—I said I would. She was going to see Susan Landis this evening, and some of Cassandra and Mina’s friends. It’s getting late. Would you mind if I just called her briefly? I won’t be five minutes.”
He was fifteen. He returned, looking thoughtful and distracted.
“So, any progress?”
“No, unfortunately. Gini saw a group of girls from that Cheltenham school. One claimed Cassandra had mentioned Star a few times. But that’s all. None of them was much help. There have been no sightings of Mina—if there had been, Gini or Max or the newsroom would have called. We’re running the story of Cassandra’s death and Mina’s disappearance tomorrow. With photographs of both of them. That might bring something in. Meantime, Gini’s going off to Amsterdam in the morning, and you’re off to Paris.”
He stopped speaking abruptly. Then: “Let me get your coat—and I’ll just quickly find those books I promised Tom.”
Five minutes later Lindsay was in her car, a book on Bergman, another on Fellini, and a tome on the French nouvelle vague on the passenger seat beside her. It was a long, slow, cold drive home, with many misturnings and doubling-backs. She had been thanked with warmth and courtesy. She still felt dismissed and dispatched.
What had the evening achieved? She had cooked perfect scrambled eggs in an impossible saucepan. She had provided Rowland with information that might be fascinating but was of little practical use. He didn’t even trust her enough to explain the exact nature of the story he was working on. The story he and Gini were working on.
“I hate the world,” she told Tom, who was still up and watching a late movie.
A small bump on the sofa, which in the dim light Lindsay had mistaken for cushions, uncurled itself and sat up. It proved to be Tom’s quiet, sweet-faced, and somewhat formidable girlfriend. Her name was Katya. Tom put his arm around her.
“Never mind,” he said in a kind way, eyes still fixed on the screen. “The world doesn’t hate you. Nor do I.”
“Nor me,” said Katya. “Hi.”
Lindsay felt cheered. She went to bed, tossed the fat airport novel on the floor, kicked it under the wardrobe, and read Updike for two hours. At one in the morning she got out of bed, retrieved the fat novel, and turned to the end. The hero was a veritable Lazarus, it seemed. He came back to abundant life on page 502, seduced the heroine again on page 503, quarreled with her magnificently on page 510, and after an eight-page sexual marathon, led her altarward on the penultimate page.
Like Rowland, Lindsay was a traditionalist when it came to stories: she had a weakness for triumphal love. Comforted by this rousing ending, she returned to bed and slept well.
Rowland, meanwhile, lay in his bed on the top floor of his Huguenot house with its view of Hawksmoor’s spire. Across the street, as he had first observed shortly after Lindsay’s departure, a white Mercedes convertible was parked. He had no inclination to check whether it remained there, but lay on his back, wakeful, watching the time go past.
He thought back through the story Lindsay had recounted. He thought of her, and of Gini, then Cassandra, who was dead, and Mina, who was still missing, and finally of a young man with dark hair, a young man in his twenties, a young man of undisclosed nationality, Mitchell’s candy man, Star.
At three he fell into a light sleep; he dreamed of a shadowy Esther, and a shadowy New Orleans. Although he retained a clear sense of direction, he was dazed. They walked together along Decatur, up Dumaine, along Bourbon to Canal. Esther was trying to tell him something, but he could not hear the words.
He awoke with a start and lay there, fighting the restlessness such dreams always caused. Hours inched by; he felt the peculiar turmoil of exhaustion and sleeplessness; he felt under siege from the demands of the present and the past.
At five, abandoning the possibility of sleep, he rose, went downstairs to his cold kitchen, and made coffee. Sitting there at the table, he finally submitted, and let the past back into his mind. It was not such a very long history: he had met Esther, a DEA operative, within a month of his taking that assignment in Washington, D.C. Until then, he had spent most of his free time on the fringes of Georgetown, in the company of fellow English journalists. It was a close-knit, gossipy, expatriate community, inward-looking, dependent on American contacts for work yet treating Americans, Rowland found, with a curious, faintly derisive patronage; this patronage, he noted—and it angered him—modulated in private, and after drinks, into scorn. The clannishness, the clubbiness, was already beginning to pall, and Rowland was already finding that he was gravitating more and more to the company of American journalists, when a friend at the Post introduced him to Esther.
On the occasion he first met her, in a fashionable downtown restaurant, she drew his eye for several reasons: she was unusually tall; she was beautiful; she was formally and exquisitely dressed—and she was the only black woman in the room. Rowland, the outsider, the displaced person, the man who never felt English, or Irish, who had never had the sensation he belonged, shook her hand. She gave him a long, cool, quantifying look: Rowland felt an immediate, and astonishing sense of recognition, the signaling of like to like; it was followed by a rare exhilaration, then some ruthlessness on his part. The friend who had introduced them was ditched, unceremoniously, within the hour. Moving on with her somewhere, anywhere, the place was immaterial, they ended up at three in the morning at a street near his house. Esther was a Smith graduate; she had a law degree from Harvard; her great-great-grandmother had been a slave. These facts mattered very much, and not at all.
“Come home with me,” Rowland said.
She gave him one long, still, grave, considering look.
“I just might do that,” she replied.
A week later they rented an apartment together near Dupont Circle. A month after that, Rowland proposed; Esther, more cautious than he, refused.
“Very well,” Rowland said. “I shall repeat the suggestion a year from now. In the meantime, I’ll just make myself indispensable.”
“You’re indispensable now,” she replied dryly. “As I suspect you know.”
A year passed; during that year Rowland’s newspaper decided to send him to France. Rowland rejected this assignment, and subsequently resigned. To his surprise, he found it was an easy decision: Esther’s work tied her to Washington; his did not, but he found that he had plenty of freelance work there from both British and American papers. His English friends doubted the wisdom of this move, and Max—visiting from London—castigated him for it. Their demurrals made Rowland impatient; he did not doubt his own abilities; he knew he could alter the course of his career; he intended, and needed, to be with Esther: the choice was effortless, and no sacrifice was involved.
“Marry me,” Rowland said to her—and being meticulous about such things, he reiterated his proposal exactly one year later, to the hour.
“I just might do that,” Esther replied.
A date was arranged; the week before, they were due to visit her brother again, in New Orleans. Her brother, host to them on several previous occasions, had promised to be Rowland’s best man. At the last minute Rowland was forced to cancel that visit to cover an urgent story. He was writing up his copy, was near to completing it, when Esther announced she was just going out to the grocery store.
He had glanced around quickly from his desk; Esther had smiled, waved a hand at him, and told him to hurry up and finish writing. Now, sitting in his kitchen, his coffee cold and undrunk, Rowland looked at that tiny, frozen frame: the last time he had seen her alive. Had he not changed the date of their visit, she would still have been alive; they would have been married, might have had—would surely have had—children. My fault, he thought as he always thought at this point. My fault, and I didn’t even say good-bye.
The boy who killed her, a crack addict just sixteen years old, stopped her on the way back from the store. Two blocks from their house. He demanded her purse—and, according to the witnesses, Esther at once gave it to him. For no known or comprehensible reason, the boy shot her anyway. He raised his gun and fired into her neck at point-blank range. Esther fell; she bled to death on the sidewalk. Mindful perhaps of AIDS statistics, the little clutch of bystanders who gathered around her did nothing; no one administered first aid.
That fact, which had made him so bitterly angry at the time, still made him so now, six years later. It would, almost certainly, have made little difference—or so Rowland was subsequently informed. Still, it remained for him an act of iniquity: even if those witnesses could not have saved her, surely one of them at least could have held her, cradled her, talked to her as she died?
He found the manner of her death unbearable, and sometimes he believed that his own inability to abandon mourning was connected not simply to her death, but to the way in which she died. It was as if he had to compensate for that act of omission and for his own act of omission in not saying good-bye. The futility of this task, of which he was aware, did not deter him. Max had told him once, sharply, to stop doing penance. Rowland, hearing the accuracy of the remark, turned away in silence. He felt penance had been imposed upon him: choice was not involved.
Now he never spoke of Esther to anyone, under any circumstances. He preserved his grief with this privacy, and when—with the passing of time—he sensed that this grief was less intense, it made him ashamed.
Grief, he was beginning to discover, could not be activated at will, no, not even predawn, alone in a cold house, in an empty room. Esther was beginning to slip away from him. He could still recapture the sound of her voice, and sometimes the exact quality of her gaze, but her image was more shadowy than before. He could sense her, escaping his grasp, edging away from him into that netherworld the dead occupy, while more vivid figures, living figures, moved to the fore.
Was this release, or betrayal? Could you betray the dead? Once he would have answered that last question in the affirmative; now he was unsure.
He waited another hour, and then—at seven—called Gini, who was still in the country with Charlotte, but preparing to catch an early flight to Amsterdam. There she was going to see Anneke’s parents, who might or might not have information about Star.
“Ask if he could be American,” Rowland said. “Ask if he could have American connections.”
“Why? Rowland, I’m not hopeful they’ll know anything anyway.”
“Never mind. Just ask.”
When he had hung up, he felt angry with himself. He was doing what he most despised, breaking every rule in his own book. He was seeing connections where none existed—but then, that was not surprising, he told himself. For several reasons, among them lack of sleep, his judgment was impaired.
“Is there any chance this Star could be American?” Gini asked. “Or could have American connections? Did your daughter Anneke ever mention making American friends?”
Across the room from her, Erica van der Leyden shook her head. “No. Apart from the note Anneke left, she never mentioned this man. I don’t recall her having any American friends. We lead a quiet life. Anneke was at school all day. When she came home, she had homework to do. If she was out, it was always with friends I knew. My husband and I never allowed her to wander around Amsterdam on her own, going to cafés, that sort of thing. Anneke had a strict upbringing. My husband and I are old-fashioned.”
“Of course,” Gini said politely, wondering whether there was any point in continuing. She had been here, in this lovely, tranquil, exquisitely furnished room for nearly an hour. To enter it was like stepping into one of the Dutch interior paintings she had always loved. A Delft-tiled wood-burning stove stood in the corner; tall windows overlooked one of the loveliest canals in Amsterdam. Erica van der Leyden was as civilized and as understated in appearance as the room; she spoke perfect English; she was about thirty-six, dressed in conservative clothes, low-heeled shoes, a well-cut skirt, a sweater, and pearls.
Only her hands revealed the grief she experienced and the tension she felt. She could not keep them still. Every time she had to speak her dead daughter’s name, her hands clenched. Gini pitied her deeply. She could see that Erica van der Leyden was a woman fighting desperately to stay calm, a woman hanging on by the slenderest of threads.
There was only one discordant element in this room, and that was the teenage girl now slouched in a chair to Gini’s right. She had been introduced as Fricke, Anneke’s elder sister, and was about sixteen. She was not prepossessing, and Gini suspected she both knew that, and chose to emphasize it. She was overweight, with heavy eyeglasses, and long, fair, greasy hair. She was wearing jeans and a turtleneck sweater, and she, too—to judge from the few sullen remarks she had so far made—spoke excellent English.
Her mother had already made two attempts to persuade her to leave the room. Neither had been successful, for all that strict upbringing. Rising to her feet now, Erica van der Leyden made a third.
“Fricke, I’m sure you must have some studying to do.”
“I’ve already done it.”
“Then if you would leave us alone, please, for just a short while. You can see—this isn’t easy for Miss Hunter or for me.” She hesitated, then said something more sharply, in Dutch. Fricke gave her another sullen stare and did not move.
“Why shouldn’t I stay? I’m Anneke’s sister. I don’t suppose it occurs to anyone I might have something useful to say.”
The rudeness, and the fact that she spoke in English so Gini could not mistake the rudeness, seemed to please her. Erica van der Leyden flushed, and Gini quickly intervened.
“No, please. Don’t ask Fricke to leave on my account. It’s true. She might well remember something—something that seems unimportant perhaps.”
Fricke made a small grimace that might have implied satisfaction, or scorn. Her mother gave a resigned gesture of the hands and returned to her chair. She gave Gini a bewildered, helpless look. Gini could feel this interview slipping away from her. She leaned forward.
“Perhaps, Mrs. van der Leyden, if you could describe Anneke to me. I know it must be painful, but under the circumstances…”
“Of course.” Her hands twisted in her lap. “Another young girl is dead. A third is missing. My heart goes out to their parents. I wish I could assist, but—”
“If you could just tell me the kind of things Anneke liked, that might help. Did she like to go to the movies, or dance? Did she like music?”
“Well, she liked music, I suppose—modern music, as most girls of her age do. She was interested in clothes. She used to buy fashion magazines, didn’t she, Fricke? We had some arguments, as mothers and daughters do, about hair, and makeup and clothes—but nothing serious. Anneke was a very sweet girl, not as clever as Fricke, of course, but imaginative. Gregarious. She had lots of friends. She had pen pals too, all over the world. She loved receiving letters and cards. And then she was quite good at languages. She liked to travel. We had all been to Italy, and Spain, and to Switzerland to ski. She made a school trip to Paris last year, and another, the year before, to London, which was a great excitement. She took ballet classes. She was good at dancing, very graceful…”
It was the very ordinariness of what she was describing that undermined her: Gini saw the realization come into her face—that the girl she was describing might be any young girl from a reasonably privileged and educated background. Her own inability to convey her daughter’s uniqueness—that was what made her suddenly choke on her words. Tears rose to her eyes. With a gesture of apology she rose and turned away.
Gini expected Fricke to go to her mother then, and attempt to comfort her, but the girl did not move. She continued to sprawl, exactly as before, watching with an air of surly condescension. Gini stood.
“Mrs. van der Leyden,” she said. “This is distressing you. I’m sorry. Perhaps it would be better if I left now?”
“No. Please. You’ve come a long way. I said I would see you. Perhaps—there’s a photograph of Anneke I would like to show you. I’ll get it. If you would excuse me one moment…”
She left the room. In the heavy silence that followed, Gini returned to her chair. She picked up the note Anneke’s mother had produced earlier, the note that Anneke had left behind. It was dated the second of April, the previous year. On an attached sheet of paper, for Gini’s benefit, was a neatly inscribed translation. It read:
Dear Mother and Father,
Yesterday I met a new friend, called Star. He is a wonderful man, and very kind. I’m going with him to England for just a few days. I’ll be back Friday. I’ll call from England. Don’t worry.
Lots of love,
Anneke
Nine months later she was dead. Her parents never saw her alive again. It was the stuff of every parent’s nightmares, and the note’s insouciance, its naïveté, chilled Gini to the bone.
“She actually believes all that, you know.”
Fricke spoke so suddenly that Gini started.
“I’m sorry?”
“My mother.” Fricke rose. “She actually believes all that rubbish she said now. Pen pals. Ballet lessons.” She gave Gini a measuring look. “I suppose you believed it too.”
“Not necessarily.” Gini returned that look coldly. “Your mother was trying to help me. She may be mistaken in what she said.”
“Oh, yeah? She’s mistaken all right. My father too. They didn’t understand Anneke. They didn’t know her at all.”
“Look, do you have something to tell me?”
“I might have.”
“Then why don’t you get on with it and stop wasting my time?”
The girl flushed, then gave a shrug and turned away. Gini waited. Her instinct was not to prompt and not to plead—and it seemed to be correct, for it was Fricke who was the first to give way.
“I can’t talk to you here.” She hesitated. “You know the Leidseplein? It’s a big square, near the Vondel Park.”
“I know it. I’ve been to Amsterdam before.”
“There’s a café there, on the north corner. It’s called the Rembrandt. I’ll meet you there in half an hour. I have a violin lesson then. I’ll skip it. She’ll never know…”
“Fricke—”
The girl was already moving toward the door. She gave Gini one last, sneering glance.
“If you’re there, fine. If you’re not—who cares… You reporters are all crap anyway. When Anneke first disappeared, they were all on the doorstep, they phoned all the time. Now that she’s dead—what happens? Nothing. They’ve all gone on to the next fucking tragedy.”
She brought out the two expletives with some care. Gini did not react to them or to her comments, and this seemed to disappoint her. She left the room.
Gini remained only a short while longer with Mrs. van der Leyden. Yes, she learned, Anneke had kept a diary and address book, but she had taken them to England, and they had never been found; the police had already been through all her other personal papers, which had provided no information, and which were now packed away. No, there had never been any hint of serious unhappiness or disturbance on Anneke’s part. She was a contented, well-adjusted girl with nice friends from good families.
This portrait did not convince Gini, and she knew it did not truly convince Anneke’s mother either; that was why she stressed its accuracy so desperately and at such length. She continued to speak in this way as she led Gini down the stairs and across the hall. There, her hand on the front door, she abruptly stopped. “Sometimes she would have these little moods, of course,” she went on, pleading in her eyes. “As all teenagers do, as Fricke does. It’s nothing. It passes. It’s part of growing up. She knew how much we loved her. She loved her family in return.”
Gini could hear the agonized unspoken questions, and read them in her eyes. They were the same questions Mina’s parents had not dared to voice to her the previous night: What didn’t we see, how did we fail her, where did we go wrong?
“Please. Take the photograph. Keep it. It’s yours.”
Erica van der Leyden pressed the picture of Anneke into Gini’s hands. Her face crumpled, became lax with grief.
“I loved her,” she said with sudden passion. “I loved her so much. If you don’t have children, you can’t understand. I love my husband, of course—we’ve been married many years, and I would never tell him this… But the way I love him, it’s nothing, nothing compared to the way I love my daughters. Is that terrible? I don’t care. It’s true. If I had to sacrifice him for them, I wouldn’t hesitate, not for one second. Him, myself, this house, everything we possess—it’s all meaningless, I’d abandon it all tomorrow, I’d kill to bring her back—”
“Please,” Gini began.
“—that’s what it means to be a mother. No man on earth can ever feel like that. Such desperate desperate love. Oh, dear merciful God…”
She was shuddering from head to foot. She covered her face with her hands, then suddenly gripped Gini hard, forcing her to look up at her face.
“Tell me Anneke knew that. If I could just believe she knew that…”
“I’m absolutely certain she knew it,” Gini said quietly. “Mrs. van der Leyden, I’m sure she knew…”
It was an inadequate reply, but it seemed to console Anneke’s mother—temporarily, at least.
“Perhaps you’re right,” she said. “I pray to God you’re right.”
Leaving the house, Gini walked away fast, and stood by the canal, holding tight against the railings of the bridge. She was trembling with the force of Erica van der Leyden’s emotion. It had passed from Anneke’s mother into her; she felt as if it were in her lungs and heart and blood. It was fearsome, and she feared it most because it had not simply been transferred from Anneke’s mother to herself—something within her had risen up to meet it, to recognize it. I have been claimed, Gini thought, beginning to pace the bridge, breathing in great gusts of the cold air; and because she knew that this had always lain in wait for her, that it was her female birthright, this moment was one she never forgot.
She crossed to the far side of the canal and looked back. Anneke’s mother was drawing the blinds against the gathering dusk. Gini knew she had crossed a divide. For a moment she felt physically weak, weighted down by a disabling passion and concern. The next instant she experienced its very opposite, a heady strength so powerful, so affirmative, she felt light with joy.
She had been ready for this initiation into womanhood, she thought. She had been preparing for it since arriving in Sarajevo, but how curious, how unlikely, that this revelation should be effected in a strange city, in the bourgeois hall of a bourgeois house, by a woman she had never previously met.
This was how it felt to be a mother; this was the nature of that condition; she could feel its vulnerability and its power flow in her veins. She felt a sudden and overwhelming flood of gratitude to the woman who, having lost a child, had given her this gift.
Was the conduit grief, or love? Both, she thought, and, turning, quickening her pace, made her way toward the Leidseplein, and its cafés and its lights.
In the summer months the Rembrandt café would have been filled, no doubt, with students, backpackers, the international army of the young. Now, in January, its interior was almost deserted. Those few customers there were all foreign and elderly, perhaps retired couples taking low-price mid-winter breaks.
Gini chose a prominent table by the windows and ordered coffee. She waited, calming herself, forcing her mind back to her work, though she knew from this moment on, she worked with new purpose and a deeper determination, and that her work would be informed by the emotion she had seen in Erica van der Leyden’s face. Two young girls had died; Mina Landis would not make a third, she would not let that happen—and as she let that thought settle in her mind, she felt it was not some empty assertion or boast: she was armed now, and injury to another daughter, another child, was something she could actually prevent.
She needed assistance, however; she needed some new lead. Unless Fricke proved helpful, she could see that this visit, even if far from a wasted journey for her, was one that would produce little hard information. She needed a signpost; someone had to show her which road to take next.
She had already seen the police inspector who had handled Anneke’s case; he also had spoken perfect English, and been eager to assist. But nine months of inquiries, it seemed, had thrown up virtually nothing.
“Your police have the advantage over us,” he said. “They have a description at least. To tell you the truth, I’m surprised Star actually exists. I’d decided Anneke van der Leyden invented the name. It wouldn’t have surprised me. With girls her age, nothing does.”
A dead end, Gini thought. The previous day, at Max’s, before Rowland left with Lindsay for London, she had tried to persuade him once more to let her talk to his DEA contact here. She had been expecting a refusal, and a flat refusal was precisely what she got.
“Then just give me a place name, Rowland,” she had said, walking out to the drive with him. “A café. A bar. Somewhere this Dutch chemist goes, where his American partner hangs out.”
“No. I will not. I’ve already explained. I get information on condition I do nothing to prejudice a DEA investigation that’s been in place for months.”
“I’m not going to prejudice it, for God’s sake. What do you think I’m going to do, Rowland? March up to these guys, order a crate of White Doves, flash my press card, and demand Star’s real name or else?”
“The answer’s no. It has to be no. I gave my word, my professional assurance.”
“Oh, very well. It seems to me that finding Mina is rather more urgent than some DEA shadow play that’s been going on for months. Still, you’re the boss.”
He was not amused by that. He gave her one long, cold, green look.
“Shall I just make something crystal clear? You step out of line on this, Gini, you embarrass my source, and I’ll take you off this story. You won’t work for me again—ever. Understood?”
“Understood,” Gini had replied with an irritable shrug. She had been about to turn away, go back into the house, but something in Rowland’s manner made her pause. He seemed to be waiting for some further response. Gini hesitated; she knew her manner had been graceless; she still did not find it easy to accept instructions from men—she had worked with too many men in the past whose editorial dictates she despised, and Rowland McGuire’s tone, that cold, flat statement of terms, had made her hackles rise at once.
He was still waiting: standing in the driveway, his hands thrust into the pockets of his overcoat, the wind lifting his dark hair away from his forehead, his green eyes—he had the clearest green eyes she had ever seen—still resting on her face. She could feel his disapproval—and he seemed to regret that, as if he had expected better of her. This was not just intransigency, male obstinacy, she realized, feeling guilty. Rowland was waiting for her to admit that his seniority to her was not the issue; he was waiting to see if she had the honesty to admit that he was right.
“I’m sorry,” she said, turning to him with a gesture of apology. “Really. I do understand the priorities here. I give you my word, Rowland. I won’t do anything to prejudice your source.”
“It could be dangerous if you did,” he said, and something in his tone confused Gini.
“Dangerous? You mean to me?”
“No. Of course not. At least I hope not. To my source, obviously.”
“You mean—if his cover was blown? Rowland, I’d never do that.”
“I did explain. The DEA didn’t put an operative into Amsterdam just to report on the activities of a small-time Dutch chemist, however lethal or successful his product. Amsterdam is a major conduit for heroin and cocaine. At a conservative estimate, five billion dollars’ worth of those drugs passed through that city in the last twelve months. With those sums of money involved, the stakes are extremely high. So are the risks for any operative on the ground. I imagine I don’t need to explain that.”
Gini flushed. “No. Of course not. You’re right to rein me in. I’m sorry I spoke as I did. I realize—I’m rushing it, going too fast. I do that. I get obsessional. It’s been remarked on before. I’m nearly cured…”
He had looked at her then with slightly more warmth. He began to walk away toward Lindsay’s car, then turned back.
“Just as a matter of interest—who remarked on your impetuosity? Was it Max?”
“No. My father—for years. And Pascal’s certainly touched on it more than once.”
She knew he picked up the wryness of her tone, but he made no further comment. He gave her one last odd, assessing look, then climbed into Lindsay’s car for the drive back to London.
An unusual man, Gini thought now; an interesting man—and a man who was every bit as capable of impetuosity as she was. Lindsay had described him, on the trip down, as arrogant. Gini wondered if she had since revised that view—with which she herself would not have agreed. In the short time she had known Rowland McGuire, she had already clashed with him twice. She did not like to recall that moment when he had rounded on her in Max’s kitchen and accused her of lack of charity. He was the only person present on that occasion who had had the courage to say what they all thought, and she admired that. Not arrogant, she thought, but uncompromising—and though she might not admit it to him, she owed Rowland a debt for that angry remark. It had shocked and shamed her out of the slough of despair and aimlessness and misery in which she had been drowning for months; but she was grateful for it. Rowland McGuire had put her back on course. Thanks to him, she had rediscovered how it felt to be herself.
She must call him, she thought, as well as Pascal, when she returned to her hotel. Meanwhile—she looked at her watch—it was nearly four, and Fricke was late.
She opened her bag and took out the picture of Anneke. It was a studio portrait, her mother had said, taken to celebrate her fourteenth birthday. Her last birthday; within a year of this picture’s being taken, Anneke was dead.
A pretty, elfin-faced girl stared back at her. She had short flaxen hair, like her mother, cut in a neat bob. She was wearing an old-fashioned dress, which made her look younger than her years. Like Mina, she could have been taken for a twelve-year-old. She was thin, flat-chested, and her smile looked forced, as if cameras made her self-conscious.
“She hated that picture,” a voice said.
Gini looked up to see Fricke by her side, clutching a violin case. She made a grimace, then sat down, poured herself some coffee, and immediately—with a defiant glance at Gini—lit a cigarette.
“It doesn’t even look like her. They dolled her up.” She gave Gini another of her slow, measuring looks. “So. This girl who’s missing now—Mina, right? You have a picture of her?”
“Not with me. No.”
“Does she have dark hair by any chance? Black hair?”
“No. She has red hair. Why?”
“Because he likes dark hair. Anneke told me. She dyed her hair black to please Star. You didn’t know that?”
“No.”
“Well, she did. He cut it off, cropped it, so it was really really short, like yours. Then she dyed it black for him. She liked it. It looked cool, she said.”
“I see.” Gini returned the measuring look. “So, is this what you wanted to tell me? That you and Anneke were in touch after she left? And your parents don’t know this?”
“No one knows.” She gave Gini a mutinous glance, then pushed back her hair. “Tell them if you like. I don’t give a shit.”
“I don’t want to run telling tales.” Gini paused, trying to assess her. “But why tell me?”
“You came all the way from England.” She blew out a cloud of smoke, then shrugged. “Maybe I was touched by that. Maybe I thought you had a brain in your head, better than most of those creeps who tried to interview my mother. I was watching. I thought you were pretty smart. On the other hand… Maybe I just felt like it. Anneke’s dead now. Why not?”
“And that makes a difference? Had you promised her you’d say nothing?”
“Yeah. She called twice when my parents were out. The first time was about three days after she left. The second was about two weeks after that. She made me swear I wouldn’t tell—and there was nothing to tell anyway. None of it was heavy—she just wanted to chat. She didn’t tell me where she was. She said she’d be coming back… And I believed her. I thought she really was okay, the way she said—”
She began to cry suddenly, as suddenly as her mother had. Tears dripped down her nose and misted her glasses. She took them off and began to rub them furiously with a paper napkin. Gini watched her quietly: without her glasses, without that expression of sneering defiance on her face, Fricke looked young, vulnerable—and afraid, Gini thought.
“Is that the problem, Fricke?” she said gently when the girl’s fit of sobbing had stopped. “Have you been feeling guilty about this?”
It was the wrong approach. “Who said I felt guilty?” Fricke snapped. “Why should I? I told you—she didn’t say one fucking thing that would have helped anyone find her. Get off my back…”
“Fine,” Gini said, and decided to try another tack, since sympathy evidently made the girl feel angry and cornered. “Then let’s stick to some facts. Let’s start with you—who taught you your slang, Fricke? Were they American or British, because someone did.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Everyone Dutch speaks good English. I’ve been learning it since I was six.”
“Come on, Fricke. You didn’t learn four-letter words in a classroom. You use them in a very idiomatic way. You scarcely pause to think.”
“So? It’s a crime, is it, to have English friends, American friends?” She gave Gini another scornful look. “All year Amsterdam’s full of foreigners, people my age. Sure I talk to them. I meet them all around the place…”
“Where all around the place?”
“Just all around. In cafés. Art galleries. Here in the Leidseplein.”
“Oh, come on, Fricke. Let’s stop fencing around. You covered for Anneke, didn’t you? All the time your mother was explaining how careful she was, how she always knew where Anneke was, I was trying to figure out how Anneke got around the restrictions. It didn’t take a great leap of imagination. You did it together, didn’t you? Gave each other alibis? Backed each other up?”
“So what? Everyone does. So we skipped jail once or twice…”
“Sure. And your sister ended up dead. Who introduced her to Star, Fricke? Was it you? One of your American or English friends?”
“No, it fucking wasn’t. I never met him. I never saw him in my life…” Her voice rose. “You’re getting this all wrong. You’re just like my parents. You think Anneke was my sweet little kid sister. Listen, she went on the pill when she was twelve. It was Anneke the boys all chased, it was Anneke who was screwing around, not me. And last January she got thrown over by this boy she really liked. It really cut her up. My mother thinks she was so happy—well, she wasn’t. She used to cry, she’d come to my room every night, and we’d talk, and she’d cry some more… That’s why she went to Star, because he understood.”
“What?” Gini said. She had known that if she kept the pressure up, Fricke would eventually make a slip. She had just done so, and she still hadn’t realized. She was staring at Gini blankly.
“She went to Star, that’s what you just said. Not—went off with him, to him.”
“I made a mistake.”
“No. I don’t think so, Fricke. Your English is too good. I know why you phrased it that way. Anneke already knew Star, didn’t she? She didn’t meet him the day before she left, the way she wrote in that note. She’d planned to leave.” Gini sighed. “Oh, come on, Fricke, you’re sixteen, you’re intelligent. Why do you think I’m pressuring you like this? Your sister’s dead. Another girl in England is dead. Mina is with Star right now, and she’s at risk. I want Star found, and I want him stopped. You want that too—surely you do? So why the hell can’t you trust me and give me your help?”
There was a long silence. Gini was not sure, even then, if she had made the right approach. Outright appeals, antagonism, sympathy—nothing she said seemed to reach this girl. She was still looking at Gini with a mutinous hostility, as if Gini were irrevocably on the other side of some impassable wall between the young and the adult.
Gini could sense the impasse. Feeling suddenly tired and dispirited, she signaled to the waiter to bring more coffee. There was an irony here, beneath the surface of this difficult conversation. Gini wondered if Fricke would believe her if she tried to explain how close she herself felt to Anneke, to Mina. She thought of herself, a few weeks short of her sixteenth birthday, cutting school, taking a plane to Beirut to join her father, the last futile attempt she had made to make her father notice her, take some interest in her life.
“I want to be a journalist too, Daddy,” she had said. “I thought—if I came here. Watched you. I could learn. And I wanted to see you, of course.”
He hadn’t even replied. He’d just sat there in his hotel room, sipping his bourbon. When she mentioned journalism, there was an immediate flicker of derision in his eyes; he laughed suddenly—a snort of laughter. Gini had never forgiven that.
Her father had been her god: since she scarcely knew him, rarely saw him, it had been easy to imagine him as such. In Beirut, day by day, watching him sit sweating in the bar of the Hotel Ledoyen, doing next to no work, rehearsing his endless anecdotes about Vietnam, his Pulitzer, to a crowd of sycophants, she had discovered how misplaced her idolatry had been. She turned back to Fricke, to her cold, hostile stare. The girl was already on her third cigarette.
“I can understand some of this, Fricke,” she began. “I can remember how it feels to be your age, Anneke’s age. I can remember—oh, the confusion, the pain, the clash of loyalties. I can remember all that.”
“Oh, yeah?” The girl gave a small smile. Her certainty that Gini could not, that the experiences of her sister and herself were unique, unprecedented, infuriated Gini. Then she remembered: that blind teenage arrogance, that conviction that no one, ever, could have experienced emotions so complex and intense, she too had felt that.
She gave another sigh and looked away. She thought of the day on which she had first met Pascal, of his introduction in the Ledoyen bar, of her father continuing to hold court, her own embarrassment—it was midmorning, and her father was at the three-bourbon stage already, the anecdotes getting too protracted, too boastful—and then her gradual realization that this tall, silent young Frenchman, standing on the edge of a group of men twenty strong, was watching her father in silence, with an expression of undisguised contempt.
He had left the bar shortly afterward; she had followed him, furious, intent on challenging him. The challenge had escalated into confrontation, almost a fight. The conflict in Beirut was still localized then. Pascal Lamartine had caught hold of her arm and dragged her out into the white heat of the street.
“Take a look at your father’s unimportant little war, then,” he had said, his face tight with anger. “You won’t find it in a hotel bar any more than he will. It’s just down this street.”
There had been another car bomb. Lamartine had his cameras out at once. She stood amid the wreckage, tilting walls, rubble, screams, and lamentation: a child’s feet protruded from the masonry right in front of her. It was the first time she had ever seen, and smelled, death and grief.
She froze, then tried to help. There was a man, and they were trying to lift him onto an improvised stretcher, a length of corrugated metal. An Arab woman spat at her, and she stumbled back. She had blood on her hands and blood on her face. Then, out of the confusion of people and noise and movement, Lamartine had come back. She could see shock, contrition, anxiety on his extraordinary face. She felt his arms lock around her, and then he was drawing her away, around a corner, down a street. They stopped in a hot, narrow street near the harbor. He had a room there over a bar. He drew her into the shade of a doorway, began to speak in an agitated way, then stopped.
She had looked at his face, his fierce, intelligent face, his gray eyes. She watched his gaze become steady, then intent. She knew then, as he knew, what had to happen next. Less than fifteen minutes after leaving the scene of the bomb, she was in his room, in his arms, making love for the first time, with a man she had only just met, scarcely spoken to, but felt she had known all her life.
Could she tell Fricke this, or some of this? Would it make any difference if she did? Could she say, trust me, Fricke, I know how it feels to be wildly in love for the first time in your life. I know how it feels to toss caution aside and gamble everything on one glorious risk. It can work out, Fricke—it did, eventually, years later, in my case. I still love the man concerned; we met again. I am with him now—those fifteen-year-old instincts of mine may have been unwise, but in my case they were correct.
She leaned forward, some of those sentences on her lips; then she drew back. No. In the first place, Fricke would not believe her; in the second, it would be irresponsible. Such instincts had been deadly in Anneke’s case.
The silence had continued for some five minutes now. Fricke was frowning into space, fiddling with her cigarette. Her thoughts, Gini realized, had been following a completely different track. She now turned back, pushed aside her lank hair, and gave Gini a cautious look.
“What you told my mother this afternoon—” She hesitated. “That was true? It was definitely Star who got Anneke onto drugs?”
“Yes, it was. I interviewed someone in England, a man who sees Star pretty often. He met your sister twice with Star. She was on heroin by then, and Star was supplying it. He used to help her give herself a fix.”
“You didn’t say that to my mother.”
“No.” Gini sighed. “And you can understand why, I think.”
“I guess so.”
Gini looked away. She could hear Mitchell’s voice. According to him, Star was charging twenty pounds for Anneke when Mitchell first met her. Some months later, when he next saw her, the price had dropped by half, so it took twice as many men to buy the same fix. Star had said he was teaching Anneke the laws of supply and demand, that this was economics, a graduate course. “Get this straight,” Mitchell had said with an air of self-righteousness. “She gave me a dose the first time, and by the second—no way. She was filthy. She had lice. She was a junkie—okay? She had those dead eyes junkies get, like all they can think about is smack, get me smack. She was a zombie… And Star thought that was pretty amusing. That’s what he gets off on. A power trip.”
None of this could be said, of course, or even intimated. Gini turned back to Fricke; they looked at each other. Perhaps something in her face communicated—afterward Gini was still unsure—but where persuasion had failed, silence was effective: Fricke suddenly began to talk.
“She met him in France,” she said. “On that school trip my mother mentioned. February last year, about two months before she ran away with him. They ran into each other in Paris—I don’t know where, in some art gallery, or a museum café maybe. But he must have been a quick worker, because those school trips are really tightly supervised, curfews, teachers crawling all over the place. He couldn’t have had more than fifteen, twenty minutes before the next patrol. That was enough. He gave her an address. Anneke was writing to him after that. She told me—she’d met this really wild guy, she’d written to him, and he was writing back.”
“She was writing to France?”
“I don’t know. Anneke said he moved around a lot. She got secretive after she met him. She’d just throw out these little hints. She never told me what they were planning, that she was going to run off with him. I would have done something then if I’d known. I’m not a fool. I would have gone to my father—”
She hesitated once more, eyeing Gini. Then, as if she had come to a sudden decision, she reached down into her shoulder bag and drew out a book.
“Here.” She slid it across the table. “It’s Anneke’s address book. The first time she called me—that’s why she called. Because she was worried about this book.”
Gini stared at the girl, who had blushed crimson. Carefully, she opened the book; it was a small loose-leaf binder crammed with names, numbers, and addresses.
“Where was this, Fricke?”
“In this special hiding place she had. Under a loose floorboard in her closet. She kept her diary there. Her supply of birth control pills. Grass sometimes. She’d taken Star’s letters and the diary, but she’d forgotten this. You were going to ask, weren’t you? It was going to be your next question, I could tell.”
“Yes. It was.”
“Take it. You keep it. Show it to the police. I don’t care anymore. I hid it for her, because she was afraid they’d find it—she knew they’d search her room. And then, when she still didn’t come back—I went through it. I’ve been through it a thousand times.”
“His address must be in here? That’s why she was so worried, why she called, why she asked you to hide it?”
“Yes.” Fricke drew in an unsteady breath. She lit another cigarette. “Except it isn’t in there—or I can’t find it. There’s no entry for Star. There’s a thousand names and addresses in there. All her pen pals, France, Germany, Italy, England, Belgium, America, Africa… she’d been into that since she was nine. She got seven, eight letters at least every week. You find him, if you can—but I’m telling you, it’s impossible. It’s like looking for one pebble on a beach.”
Gini reopened the notebook. It was a typical teenage girl’s book, untidy, covered with doodles and scribblings, and crossings-out. It was partly typed and partly handwritten; it was a mess.
“Fricke—I’m very grateful. But I can’t read Dutch.”
“You don’t need to. He wasn’t Dutch, he wasn’t based in the Netherlands. You can read the foreign addresses—look, that one there, that’s in France, and there’s one in San Francisco. You might find something. You’re a journalist. I thought…”
Fricke, so hostile a short while before, was now looking at her with pleading, as if Gini and her putative skills were her last hope. Gini, who was not optimistic, did not want to disappoint her or raise those hopes.
“I’ll try, Fricke. I promise you that. I’ll go through this tonight. If necessary, the police here can look at it.” She added, “You do realize, don’t you, Fricke—for your sake as well as theirs, you’re going to have to tell your parents this?”
“I know.” Fricke lowered her eyes and fiddled with the cigarette. “You think they’ll be angry?”
“No. I don’t. I think they’ll understand. They love you very much, Fricke.”
“I know they do. Oh, shit…”
She began crying again. Gini waited quietly until this new fit of tears ceased. She took out the props of her trade, her tape recorder, her notebook, and as she had hoped, they seemed to give Fricke new confidence.
“You want to interview me? You really think I can help? I told you—Anneke said very little.”
“That doesn’t necessarily matter. If you can remember what she said, Fricke—the little details, the ones that seemed unimportant, irrelevant at the time. Those are the ones that often help the most.”
“I’ve got a good memory. Pretty good, anyway.”
For ten minutes after that Gini took her carefully through the sequence of events: the first meeting in Paris, the correspondence. Star’s arrival in Amsterdam, their departure, the two subsequent telephone calls Anneke had made, the long silence that came after them, the months of waiting, and then the news of her death. As Fricke spoke, Gini could feel some memory, some echo of this, inching its way forward from the back of her mind: school trips—it was connected to that; someone, somewhere, recently had mentioned something similar, but Gini could not recall who or when.
“So you think Star came to Amsterdam to get her, Fricke, is that right?”
“Yes. I’m sure he wasn’t here before that. She told me he was coming. She said she was going to see him—she was so excited. And that was the day before she left.”
“He must have had a very powerful influence over her to make her do something so risky.”
“He had. It was like—like he summoned her, came to claim her. He told her he’d been looking for her all his life, and the second he saw her, he knew she was the one. Like it was destiny, or fate.”
“And she believed that—why? Because she was fourteen and it made her feel—special, singled out?”
“I guess so. She said—when she phoned—she said he was powerful. She kept talking about that. He read the tarot cards for her. He said he could show her who she was.”
“I see.” Gini lowered her eyes to her notebook. Again she had the sensation that Anneke was so close to herself. That intoxicating sense of self-discovery, she could remember that so well. With Pascal, in Beirut, and now. She always felt that when she was with him, she knew who she was. But if Anneke’s story was, in some respects, a mirror image of her own, its outcome had been very different. Anneke had been unlucky, undiscerning, and certainly foolish—though Gini would never condemn her for that. She had fallen in love with a man who was dangerous, even evil: from the moment Mitchell had started his story, she had never doubted that.
“Go on, Fricke,” she said, looking up. “All this helps me, and it may help Mina too. You must have asked Anneke a lot of questions. You were talking on the telephone—what? Ten minutes each time, more? Think, Fricke.”
“She said he asked about us a lot. He’d get her to describe our parents, me. He wanted to know about—oh, ordinary things. Family things. What we did at Christmas, where we went on vacation, how my parents first met.”
“Did he talk to her about his own family, where he came from?”
“No, never. Anneke said he hated women who asked questions, she’d learned that. And every time she asked, he got angry, really angry. So she thought maybe he’d had something horrible happen when he was a child. Like maybe he’d been abused, or fostered out, or put in a home, something like that. But that was just guesswork. He never said one word about his parents, where he grew up.”
“And the anger—she used that word?”
“Yes. The first time she called. She said he was really hard to handle, because one minute he’d be really quiet and sweet, and the next, for no reason, he’d go completely crazy. Freak out. Start screaming at her.”
“Rapid mood swings?”
“I know.” Fricke met her eyes. “Afterward, when she didn’t call again, I got afraid. I thought maybe he was on something. But Anneke said he was clean. She said she could handle the moods, she was the only one who could. He told her she had the soothing gift—that’s what he called it. He’d make her lie down next to him and stroke his forehead some special way. She was proud of that.”
Gini made no comment. She was listening to the alarm bells in her head. On something, or more than that? Out of the shadows around Star she could see a word emerging—sociopath.
“Anything else, Fricke? How did they spend their time? They traveled around, but Anneke wouldn’t say where.” She flicked back through her notes. “They listened to music, smoked a little grass… what else?”
There was one other activity that was an obvious addition to that list, and Gini knew she was going to have to ask about it eventually. She waited. Fricke was frowning, trying to think.
“He had this thing about being clean,” she said at last, surprising Gini. “That’s it. Because Anneke was laughing about it. She said when he spent time with the travelers he’d let himself go, but the second they left them, he was a fanatic for washing. He’d take baths, three, four times a day. Shower, go to bed, get up in the middle of the night and shower again. She said that. What else? He read. He read a lot. She mentioned that.”
“Did she say what kind of books?”
“Yes. She said he liked war books. Books about weaponry.”
“Weaponry?” Something cold moved along Gini’s spine. “Fricke—you’re sure? Tarot cards and books on weapons? That doesn’t seem to fit.”
“That’s what she said. She was boasting, telling me how clever he was. Like he had this fantastic memory. He had this book with hundreds of pictures of guns, different kinds of guns, some catalogue thing, and they used to play this game. She’d test him. She’d cover up the name and the details so he could see just the picture, and then he’d identify them. Every single one. And not just that, he knew their—what would you call it?”
“Technical specifications?”
“Yeah—that. Their size, the kind of ammunition they used, how many rounds they could fire in what time. He knew all that. No mistakes. He was word perfect, every time.”
More alarm bells, much louder now. Gini bent over her notebook, anxious lest Fricke read the reaction in her face.
“But he didn’t actually have a gun, Anneke never said that? He just liked looking at pictures of them, right?”
“Oh, no. He didn’t have a gun. It wasn’t serious. Just like a party trick.”
“Fine. Fricke, this is very helpful. It gives me a profile. A shape. And I know Anneke met him in Paris—that’s a strong lead. I have this address book. I’m just wondering… When Anneke was due to meet him here, when he came to Amsterdam for her—she didn’t mention where she was meeting him?”
“No.”
“Suppose she’d been selecting the meeting place, where might she have chosen?”
Fricke deliberated for a few minutes. “The Antica,” she said finally. “It’s a coffee house. They sell grass there. It’s licensed. Anneke used to go there with the boy who broke up with her. It’s cool—it’s got a good atmosphere. She might suggest that. Or she might just suggest they meet on some street.”
“Is the Antica easy to find?”
“Sure. It’s near the Singel Canal. It’s well known. Ask anyone. It won’t help. The police already took Anneke’s picture there a thousand times.”
“A thousand and one won’t hurt.” Gini smiled. For the first and only time, Fricke returned her smile. Then she looked at her watch.
“Look. I have to get back. My mother worries—if I’m late, she’ll call my violin teacher.”
“Just one more question, Fricke. I think you probably know what it is.”
The girl had risen; she stopped, then sighed.
“Yeah. Sure. Did Anneke mention sex, right?”
“Was she sleeping with him, Fricke? I was told she was, but I’m not sure. Something about this man puzzles me. Sex seems too obvious, too simple.”
“It puzzles me too.” Fricke met her eyes. “I mean, usually, Anneke would say straight out. If she was screwing a boy, she’d tell me. It was no big deal. She’d say, hey—we did it last night, and it was really good, or not. But with Star… she never mentioned sex. Not once. I assumed—well, I assumed that was what they did most of the time. Listened to music. Smoked a little grass. Made love. She was crazy about him, obsessed, so I couldn’t understand. So in the end, the second time she called, I asked her. I said, and so you’re having sex, right?”
“And how did she answer?”
“She didn’t answer.” Fricke’s face contracted. “She started crying. And then she hung up.”