THREE WEEKS LATER
‘Come in, Henk,’ the justice minister said.
I was back in Willem van der Steen’s office in The Hague. It was just down the road from Internal Investigations, my new place of work; I was commuting there from Amsterdam.
‘You remember Wim?’ he asked.
Wim Rijnsburger, my former AIVD handler, was sitting at the circular glass table, next to the minister.
‘I do,’ I said. Rijnsburger watched me, rheumy-eyed and silent.
‘OK,’ van der Steen said. ‘Let’s get down to it: we’ve looked at your report. You’ve got balls, Henk. Not even a month into your new role, and you want to indict the police force’s most senior Internal Liaison member?’
‘Or take a step towards it,’ I qualified.
There were limits to how much senior-level support I could expect this soon into my new job, but I at least had their full attention.
Van der Steen said, ‘Everything you’re describing here relates back to Rem Lottman – and he’s gone.’
‘Indeed,’ I accepted.
‘So you’re recommending going after Joost instead, eh?’
‘I wouldn’t put it quite that way.’
Joost had agitated to lead the investigation into Lottman and his disappearance. However, he’d been denied by the cabinet – in particular by the energy minister, Muriel Crutzen, I’d later learned.
Had van der Steen also been involved in the thwarting of Joost? This was becoming complicated.
‘It’s going to be a question of evidence,’ van der Steen was saying. ‘Let’s dive deeper. You’re claiming that there was a scheme to reward the foreign diplomats of countries providing oil and gas to Holland on favourable terms.’
‘Yes.’ Surely he’d been told this by the energy minister?
‘And that those rewards were distributed out of Amsterdam – facilitated by the police force. Diamonds, valuable paintings, escorts, even underage ones… Joost being implicated.’
‘Right. It happened on his watch.’ Joost had been the Amsterdam police commissioner at the time.
‘Our watch,’ the minister corrected me.
Rijnsburger was scrutinising me all the while. I hadn’t expected the AIVD veteran to be in this meeting, and couldn’t help feeling unnerved by his presence. A file on Joost in Internal Investigations, which I’d only just consulted, revealed that Joost himself had started his career in the AIVD. It made sense – it explained how he’d come to run an informant network for the Amsterdam police, which I’d first stumbled across after discovering a body in Amsterdam harbour…
Now another question was starting to surface: did Joost and Rijnsburger know one another? Were they old allies, rivals… or some combination of the two, according to circumstance?
‘So, let me get this straight,’ van der Steen was saying. ‘You contend that Joost failed to support an investigation into a Ukrainian woman savagely attacked at the Royal Hotel in Amsterdam, because – you hypothesise – she was an escort provided to an Emirates sheikh as part of this favours-for-energy scheme. You then go on to speculate that Joost arranged for the burglary of a Verspronck painting from a Norwegian diplomat’s house in Amsterdam, after the Norwegian government reneged on an energy-related agreement. A local gangster, Frank Hals – now deceased, I note – arranged for the burglary of the painting, only it went wrong, and the Norwegian diplomat died in the process…’
‘It’s a lot to take in,’ I said, wondering how and when the minister had become aware of Hals’s death.
‘Indeed,’ the minister continued. ‘And the painting was later discovered as a rolled-up canvas in a Schiphol storage locker, and misappropriated by Joost – you say.’
Something else was striking about pulling the files on Joost: being able to pull them. I wasn’t allowed to pull my own file, nor others who’d worked for me. That would have constituted a conflict of interest. Checks and balances. And yet, in my new role, my former boss’s file was freely available to me. Was I secretly being aided and abetted in going after Joost? Van der Steen knew of the grudge between us…
‘Finally, you speculate that Joost may have become involved in a website catering to paedophiles. You cite the testimony of an unnamed London police detective – who you say must remain anonymous – who alleges that Joost frequented a website called’ – he looked down – ‘Night Market.’
I remained silent.
He sat back. ‘That’s quite a charge sheet.’
‘They’re not charges. They form the basis of probable cause, warranting the allocation of resources towards an investigation.’
‘Hmm.’ He reached for the conference phone and pressed a button.
‘Sir,’ his assistant’s voice crackled.
‘Get Marc up here, would you?’
‘Marc Vissering?’
‘The same.’
*
Marc Vissering was a public prosecutor who’d risen rapidly to the top of his profession – and he was also Liesbeth’s husband. Tall, light-eyed and youthful-looking, his clean-cut demeanour belied a killer instinct when it came to bringing cases before judges.
He arrived in the minister’s office and we nodded our hellos to one another.
‘Ah,’ van der Steen said, acknowledging his arrival, ‘we’re talking about the Ukrainian woman at the Royal.’
So Marc knew all about the matter – from the minister, or his wife? Both, probably – Liesbeth had worked on the case when I’d been her team leader. At that time, Marc had also been working closely with Joost, in a prosecutorial capacity.
Were Marc and Joost in contact? It was all too much to keep track of…
‘You’ve had a chance to look into it?’ the minister asked him.
Marc nodded. ‘Yes, I think I’ve got a reasonable sense of the dynamics here. The odds don’t look good.’
‘Go on,’ van der Steen said.
‘The victim at the Royal Hotel never came forward,’ Marc summarised. ‘She was never interviewed –’
‘At Joost’s direction,’ I interjected. Joost had directed Liesbeth away from the case after she had tracked down the Ukrainian escort in question.
Van der Steen raised a palm in my direction, silencing me.
‘There were no witnesses,’ Marc said, continuing his assessment.
I opened my mouth to say that a maid – a fellow Ukrainian – had found the woman beaten into unconsciousness. But I stopped myself. Strictly speaking, Marc was right. There were no known witnesses to the alleged assault itself. While there is no jury to persuade here in Holland, the judges take their impartiality seriously, of course.
‘If no victim steps forward,’ Marc was saying, ‘and there’s no witness to the incident…’
It was uncannily like a remark that Liesbeth had made at the time.
If a tree falls in the forest…
‘Given those circumstances, I don’t believe that the then police commissioner could legally be considered to have acted negligently in deciding not to pursue an investigation,’ he concluded.
Van der Steen nodded, accepting Marc’s assessment.
I sat back, thinking about the chessboard here: who really held power over whom? Clearly the minister was the king. But as on the chessboard, his scope of movement was limited – by public scrutiny and the media, among other things. It would take relatively little to topple him, in certain circumstances.
Marc was heavily circumscribed as well, by the laws of evidence and legal procedure. Meanwhile, the police were the pawns – foot soldiers – as ever, and my elevation to Internal Investigations made me at best a middle-ranking piece, based on my extra access to files and information.
No, the piece on the board with real freedom of movement was Joost. Senior-most member of Internal Liasion. Somehow he’d managed to carve out a role that defied definition, even.
Van der Steen was addressing me. ‘What else have you got, Henk?’
Was it wise to show my full hand with Marc still in the room? I decided that I had little left to lose now.
‘The painting,’ I said. ‘That Verspronck, the Girl Dressed in Blue study – its misappropriation.’ It was the most tangible element of all. ‘Where did it go? Let’s have Joost answer that.’
Van der Steen drummed his fingers lightly on the table.
Marc looked down.
It was Rijnsburger who coughed and said, ‘In fact, I can answer for him.’
‘Oh?’
‘He donated it.’
‘Donated?’ I repeated, starting to sense a miscalculation on my part. ‘To who?’
‘It was taken from its original owners by the Germans during the Second World War,’ Rijnsburger said. My stomach lurched like it had a lead weight inside; I recalled a remark by a custody sergeant at the diplomat’s house where it had been stolen: There’s a question about the provenance, whether it changed hands during the war…
‘But how could he donate it?’ I blurted. ‘There are other people to consider – the Norwegians for one, and also the art insurers in London…’
‘They were all consulted.’ Rijnsburger put a single document down on the glass table. It looked like some kind of bill of receipt; it felt like the river card thrown down in a poker game – which I’d just lost.
‘He donated the painting to the Nationaal Monument in Kamp Vught,’ the AIVD veteran concluded.
I was speechless. My mouth opened and closed again like an expiring fish’s. Rijnsburger was referring to the former concentration camp in southern Holland run by the SS. The original owners of the painting must have been sent there. It had been a transit camp for Auschwitz.
‘And Joost had authority to do that?’ I asked weakly, trying somehow to salvage the situation.
Van der Steen indicated that Marc could leave. The young prosecutor did so, avoiding eye contact.
The minster said, ‘Whatever procedures were bypassed, no one could fault Joost for trying to return that painting to the people it was originally taken from – who didn’t want any press about the matter, by the way.’
He glanced down at the report again. ‘What else do we have?’ He paused. ‘Of course, we could have looked more closely at that gangster Frank Hals, and his involvement in the whole episode… only, he’s no longer around.’
Rijnsburger’s watery eyes were fixed on me.
The minister closed my report, dismissing me. ‘Must try harder, Henk.’