Maybe it was a mistake, shooting myself in the foot like that by going to my ex’s place on the very first day of my leave — the best way you could think of for me to blow my chance of early parole in three years.
But the moment she opened the door — I didn’t even have to hold the package up to the glass peephole so she couldn’t see my face or my eyes, like I’d been planning — I knew it was no mistake.
I could tell from the way she looked at me; it was in her eyes. The same way those eyes had looked at me at that sidewalk café in Corleone in Sicily, where she’d been working as a waitress. That was twenty years ago. I was there on vacation, because of The Godfather. Because I wanted to visit the hometown of the Corleone family, the way someone else might go on a pilgrimage to Rome. She put a bottle of Peroni and a glass down on my table and looked at me. And I looked back.
“Rob,” her lips whispered now.
“Chiara,” I said.
“What’s...?” She pointed down at my shoes, at the buzz of my ankle monitor.
The only sound from the living room at first was that of a TV, but now there was another sound too: a man’s voice.
“Who’s there?” the voice asked, and the next moment the man appeared in the little hallway that connected the living room and the front door.
I had a feeling then that I can only describe in one way. This is it, I thought, this is what I live for. That’s what sets me apart from people like Marc Verhoeven, who will never do anything but watch from the sidelines. Like a soccer coach in the dugout: his best striker scores with an unstoppable bullet to the top corner, and all the coach can do is throw his hands in the air — all he can do is cheer.
Maybe some things had happened between me and Chiara. Technically speaking, maybe she was at that moment my ex-wife.
But I hadn’t given her up, not just like that, that’s not the way I am. Today I had come to take her back.
At what moment had Marc Verhoeven fallen into the moat? The moat that separates the visitors at the zoo from the lion’s habitat? Was it during his very first visit to the maximum-security unit? Or was it later, when he hit on the bad idea of “interviewing” my wife as well?
No, it was probably right now, I thought, as in one swift movement I tore the lid off the mailer and pulled out the brick. The brick that, in a flash of inspiration, I’d taken from the pile at the corner of Archimedesweg and Carolina MacGillavrylaan, where the road workers were putting in a new section of bike path.
This is who I am, I thought when I saw his face, his eyes those of a cow that’s grazing in the middle of the tracks and suddenly realizes there’s an express train hurtling toward it, his hands making a gesture of fending off something. More like a conciliatory gesture, really: Wait a minute, we can discuss this, right?
But lions don’t discuss.
They don’t wear ankle monitors, either.
This was my life, squeezed together tightly in a couple of seconds.
And a couple of seconds was all the time he had left to sniff around in my life.
Thirty seconds, tops — it almost never takes me longer than that.
Salvation
by Simon de Waal
Translated by Maria de Bruyn
Red-Light District
It’s just after midnight, a warm spring night. Waldemar, a thickset man of fifty-eight, is standing on a bridge in the heart of Amsterdam’s Red-Light District. He’s carelessly stuffed his dark wrinkled shirt into his stained pants after rolling up the shirtsleeves a couple of times. The pants’ legs are too long and the cuffs, which drag across the cobblestones when he walks, are frayed. He leans forward against the handrail of the Bosshardt Bridge, named after the Salvation Army major who, for decades, helped the neighborhood’s weak and damned souls without worrying about their pasts.
Waldemar rocks slowly back and forth, to and fro, mumbling something incomprehensible under his breath. A tourist, Hiroki Ota, wearing a wool cap with flaps that say Amsterdam, stops a few yards away. He’s hiding a small camera in the palm of his hand and waiting for the moment when Waldemar’s worn-down soles lose their grip on the asphalt and the crazy old street person plunges headfirst into the murky water. He wouldn’t be the first simpleton in Amsterdam to suffer that fate and drown, but when the man hasn’t fallen in after rocking perhaps fifteen times, Hiroki gives up and walks on, disappointed. He disappears into the knot of people pushing their way through the busy Molensteeg.
Red lights and garish neon ads are reflected in the canal’s still water. Swans float by, slowly, elegantly, and drift beneath the bridge. They come to a halt in front of the Casa Rosso nightclub, vain and almost haughty as they wait for the bread that is thrown to them every evening. Crowds of tourists take photos of the unexpected and paradoxical scene: stately white lines of impalpable beauty on expansive black water, lit up by the simultaneously alluring yet merciless red neon lights of the prostitutes’ claustrophobic windows.
Waldemar has seen it all a hundred times. Silently he straightens his back and leaves the bridge, his gaze turned deeply inward, his bearing making him unapproachable; he thinks of his daughter, whom he’s missed for so long. He looks up only when he reaches the next corner. Rowdy students, unsuspecting tourists, a boisterous group of young women celebrating a bachelorette party all pass him by. He turns a corner into a passageway that leads to the next canal. No red lights here for a change, but a large, busy snack bar where a drunk boy with close-cropped hair and a dangling lower lip fruitlessly tries to insert a coin into a slot so he can open the vending machine’s window, within which an assortment of typical Dutch treats beckon. Behind the vending machine, a sweaty bearded man appears with a tray of fried snacks; with practiced movements, he quickly fills all the empty windows with freshly prepared food. Bold gulls swoop low through the street, waiting for a moment of relative quiet in the passageway so they can snatch up any fallen morsels. The boy takes a bite of his croquette, which is still too hot. Cursing under his breath, he keels forward, gasping for relief, and the food falls out of his mouth. He staggers on angrily, waving the hot croquette in his unsteady hand.
Emerging from the passageway, Waldemar comes out onto the next canal, the Oudezijds Voorburgwal. This has quite a different, almost peaceful look, dominated by the monumental Old Church, Amsterdam’s oldest building, which dates back to the year 1280, its tower illuminated in the evenings. A beacon of hope above a square kilometer of misery, which is how the local police have characterized the Red-Light District for years. Waldemar saunters past the church. The dark-skinned prostitutes preside over their domain in the small alleys surrounding the stately building, just like every other group that has its own space in the district: the S&M ladies, the Thai and Filipino transsexuals, the Chinese, the Eastern Europeans. And all of that spiced up by dozens of busy coffee shops, by a café where the Hells Angels meet, by the headquarters of the Salvation Army. Belief and sin go hand in hand here.
Waldemar knows it all. The entrance to the small passageway at the Oudezijds Voorburgwal is dark and oppressive, only illuminated halfway down by the red neon lights over the prostitutes’ doors. Waldemar assumes his usual spot across from the passage, a place where he can look into it without calling attention to himself. The world passes him by; it’s a day just like the hundreds of others he has spent there. And here comes Aaron, a man in his fifties, sporting an extravagant dark-gray beard and a velvet suit that could belong either to an old-time town crier or a member of Rembrandt’s Night Watch. A dashing hat with a long feather rests atop his head. He carries a wooden staff with a pennant, so he can be easily spotted in the busy crowd. This way, the tourists he is guiding can follow him with no trouble. Waldemar steps back a bit to make way for the guide and his entourage.