One of the last times he came to visit, about two weeks ago, that’s the way I looked at Marc Verhoeven: the way a lion would. We were both in the same space; just like the child in the moat, the journalist had found his way into the animals’ habitat. True, there was a guard standing at the door, but I’ve already told you: I’m fast, I can do it in a couple of seconds.
Right then and there, I knew. I’d known it for a long time already, of course, but now I knew for sure. I could smell it.
Like I was sniffing his underpants.
Yes, that’s what it was like, no two ways about it. I’d fished his underpants out of the laundry basket and sniffed at them — and I knew.
And now I could smell it, even without having his underpants in my hand. Later, lots of times, I asked myself how I was able to do that. And I think I know.
First of all, because of all the years of training on the outside. In my professional community, the sixth sense is more important than the other five. For survival. You have to be able to interpret a sound without actually hearing it: the window of a car parked in front of your house is rolled down, the safety on a pistol is slid back. You hit the ground before the shot is even fired. You survive.
And on the inside too, just as much. Without turning around, you know who comes into the showers right after you. Who’s moved up behind you in a flash. You slick back your hair under the hot spray from the showerhead, you keep your eyes closed and let the water splash against your eyelids — but within half a second, you turn. You yank the sharpened screwdriver out of the other person’s hand, in one move you break his wrist — and, if you’ve got enough time, all five of his fingers.
I listened to Verhoeven. For the umpteenth time, he asked me about my connections with this guy, with some other guy, about where I was when Edward G. got plugged behind the counter of his cigar store, about whether I had used different passports during my frequent trips to Thailand, Colombia, and my place on the Costa del Sol.
Yes, I listened, I nodded, and I answered, but meanwhile I breathed through my nose as much as possible. I stuck my nose out above the grassland of the savanna, nothing but my nose, the zebra foal wandering this way would never get to see my head, the cracking of its own vertebrae would be the last sound it heard in its short life, once I sank my teeth into it.
When did it start? How long has this been going on?
It surprised me to realize that I wasn’t really even all that surprised. That’s right, I could even start to understand it a little. Ex-wife of criminal serving solid time sets out to start a new life, to forget the past. And then, one day, a journalist comes to visit. A crime journalist who is planning to write a book about her husband — her ex-husband. He is not entirely unhandsome, he’s charming, patient — not hotheaded, not like him, she thinks, and she brushes the thought aside as quickly as it arises.
On his third visit, the journalist brings her flowers, on the fourth a box of chocolates. She notices, despite herself, that she has started to enjoy his visits more and more, that she spends more time in front of the mirror, pins her hair up and then lets it fall; when the doorbell rings, she moistens her lips with the tip of her tongue.
This time he has brought along a bottle of wine, the apartment is a little less well-lit than during his previous visit; on the coffee table which she’s set with a bowl of nuts and blocks of cheese with mustard, a candle is burning.
“What did you say again, when do you have that weekend leave?” he asked me the last time we sat in the visiting area, after the guard announced we had two minutes left.
“Two weeks from now.”
“And how long have you got?”
“Three days. It’s a weekend furlough, right? Like it says. Out on Friday afternoon, back again on Monday morning.”
Verhoeven took a deep breath, stood up from his chair, took his jacket off the backrest. “I’d really like to check out a few places with you,” he said, watching the guard from the corner of his eye. “I think you know which places I mean.”
“Sure.” I wondered whether he was going to say it — whether he would dare to.
He dared; he just came out and said it: “And please, don’t go anywhere near Chiara. Try not to take any unnecessary risks, you know what I mean. Leave her alone.”
I looked at him, blinked once, not because I felt the need to blink, but because I thought it would put him at ease.
A lion — but a tame lion, napping in the sun. A nice lion: oh yeah, I could be real nice, charming, purring quietly and nuzzling up to my keeper, like a lion in the zoo. Or no, better yet, in a circus: the lion tamer cracks his whip in the sand and I jump through a hoop of real fire, night after night, I eat sugar cubes from his hand and let him scratch me behind the ears. I purr and I smile, a nice tame lion, but only in the knowledge that, one day, when he sticks his head in my mouth again before a breathless crowd, I’m going to snap my jaws shut. He will know, he’ll feel it; maybe at first, when he can’t pull his head back out, he’ll think there’s been some misunderstanding. But there has been no misunderstanding. The children will be the first to start screaming, then the women, the men will gag, the barf will splatter all over the bleachers, here and there some cold-blooded type will go on filming with his smartphone so we can all watch it again later on YouTube; how I spit out the lion tamer’s half-chewed head somewhere in a corner of the cage — maybe the snack was a little stale, it’s certainly not something I’m going to swallow, it might upset my stomach.
“She’s got a restraining order,” I said. “And I’ll be wearing an ankle monitor.”
I’d checked it out already on Google Maps: as long as I stayed on Pythagorasstraat, I was safely outside the area of the court injunction, just barely. It was only about fifty yards’ difference: as soon as I turned the corner of Pythagorasstraat and entered Copernicusstraat, my ankle monitor would send out a signal and an alarm would go off somewhere.
That’s how I imagined it, at least: there’s this central tracking room with computers, the ankle-monitor tracking room, manned by no more than two people. One of them has just ordered a pizza and the other has gone outside for a smoke. I turn into Copernicusstraat, an alarm goes off in the tracking room, it takes a moment for the ankle-monitor tracker who stayed inside to figure out which of the maybe fifty or sixty roaming monitors has been activated. Twenty, thirty seconds, maybe? Not much longer than that, I figure, but in those twenty or thirty seconds I’ve already left Copernicusstraat and am heading up Archimedesweg, toward Molukkenstraat. When I pass under the steel train trestle, the tracking room loses the signal for a bit, the colleague has come back from his cigarette break in the meantime, now they’ve got video too.
“He disappeared... there,” the one says; he points at the screen.
The other guy taps a few keys on the console and now, at the top of the screen, my first and last name appear. And who knows, maybe other things too — I’ve never been in a tracking room like that, all I can do is guess.
My age. My offense. The length of the term I’m serving. Armed and dangerous, yeah, maybe it says that too. I’ve always liked that phrase, though in my case it could be misleading: it might make people think that, when I’m walking around without a gun, I’m not dangerous.