I wanted to tell him that accusing me of repeating myself was a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black, but I was afraid that’d result in more screaming about how nobody understood him, and he couldn’t live without Martha, and he was so lonely, and he wished he was dead — or, like we’d been through two weeks before, him collapsing to the ground and weeping like a little baby.
“Come on, let’s go find something to eat,” I said, steering him by the elbow. “And a beer,” I added quickly, before he could begin to protest.
We turned into the Pieter Baststraat and passed a storefront that had the name of our little neighborhood lettered on its plateglass window.
“Devil’s Island,” Jacob growled. “If only. I wish the devil really existed, I’d pay him a little visit, right this second. Sure, fine, go ahead and laugh. But I mean it: I’d sell him my soul if he’d make Martha come back to me.” He scoped out the storefront a second time. “What is this place, anyway? Another barbershop? Do we really need more barbers? How often do people have to get their hair cut?”
At that, he bent his head mournfully, but before he could start in on how Martha always used to cut his hair for him, I told him he was overdue for a hearty dinner.
“Booze,” he said, and then, as we passed the cigar store on the corner — a prime location, right across from Café Loetje — “booze and a smoke.”
I pushed him through the door into Loetje, which has evolved over the years from a small café with billiards to a restaurant three times its original size — though sometimes you still have to wait an hour or more for a table. They were full that night, not even a couple of stools at the bar, but one of the servers recognized me and gestured it’d only be half an hour or so before we’d hit the top of the list.
A minute later, we were back on the sidewalk, each with a glass of beer, surrounded by half a dozen smokers — mostly thirtysomethings and fortysomethings — who I figured for realtors or some other well-paid professionals. Two of them were women, having a girls’ night out. Jacob gulped his brewski, alternating swallows with deep drags on a cigarette. Across the street, the Old Catholic Church loomed, swathed in darkness.
“Got a match?” came a voice from beside me.
I turned to say I don’t smoke but realized the guy was talking to Jacob, not me. He held a cigarillo between slender fingers.
“Sure,” said Jacob, reaching for his lighter. It took him three or four tries to produce a flame.
“Much obliged, friend,” said the man.
That friend seemed a little presumptuous, but Jacob smiled.
“These things taste better when lit with a wooden match,” the man said, exhaling smoke in the direction of the church. “But who carries those old-fashioned lucifers around in their pocket these days? I love the smell of them, though, that momentary blast of sulfur. Would you like to try one of mine?”
“Thanks,” said Jacob, and he lit the proffered cigarillo with the stub of his cigarette.
I hadn’t heard a polite word out of Jacob in quite some time — and spoken to a stranger, no less. I took a closer look at the man. He was not unattractive, with black hair slicked back to just below the collar of his obviously expensive jacket. All things considered, I would call him a rather elegant fellow.
“May I pose a question?” The stranger’s gaze flicked from Jacob to me to the other smokers. “Did any of you happen to know a gentleman who lived in this neighborhood, a certain Van der Meer?”
“Van der Meer,” said a smoker who had overconfidently left his jacket inside. “You mean the professor?”
“Indeed I do.”
“Don’t waste your time looking for him: he’s dead.”
The man nodded. “A heart attack, I know. Does his widow ever patronize this establishment?”
“Yolande?” said one of the women. “No, I haven’t seen her since he passed. When they used to eat here, I always looked the other way, and not just because he ordered his steak so rare the blood dripped all over his chin.”
“Gross,” said her girlfriend.
“I took a class from him once, and he was what you call a real skirt-chaser, totally annoying. I think she was one of his students — she was at least twenty years younger than him, maybe thirty.”
The man nodded again, and this time blew a perfect smoke ring that drifted lazily skyward.
“When he was out here smoking,” the woman went on, “I made sure to keep my distance. But I think he finally quit. The last few times I saw them here, he stayed inside. I’ll tell you, he seemed crankier about it every time.”
“They lived in a big house up the street, right where the Museum District begins,” said one of the men, grinding out a cigarette with his shoe. “It came on the market three days ago, and somebody bought it without even asking to see the inside. No surprise, really: this neighborhood’s red-hot.”
Two names were called, and most of the smokers took one last puff, stubbed out their cigarettes in the standing ashtray, and headed into Loetje.
The few who remained moved closer to the door and went on talking, which left Jacob and me alone with the stranger.
“I bought that house,” he said calmly. “I’ve been looking for a suitable home in the city for some time. I don’t care for hotels, I’d much rather have a place of my own.”
“Jeez,” said Jacob, and I thought I heard a note of admiration in his voice.
“You bought a house without checking out the inside?” I said. “That seems a little risky.”
“Oh, I know the place well — I paid a call there not long ago. It’s quite lovely, and there’s a marvelous art collection on the walls.”
“I assume the art doesn’t go with the property. Or are you some kind of dealer or collector?”
“Both,” he said with a smile. “Which is why I spend so much time traveling. When I finish my business here, I’ll return to my country house outside Seville. I may stop off in Paris, I have a little pied-à-terre on the Place Vendôme.”
He exhaled a plume of smoke that came straight at me and sent me into a fit of coughing.
“Please forgive my filthy habit,” he said. “I forget that others might not appreciate the bouquet of fine tobacco as much as I do. Van der Meer ultimately had a problem with it too, which is why he had to give up smoking. Of course, that wasn’t his only problem.”
“You mean his wife?” Jacob guessed.
“In a way. She was, as you heard a few moments ago, quite a bit younger than he. At first, that was precisely what attracted Van der Meer to her, but their situation changed as he got older, and for the last few years it had all become — how shall I say it? — rather disastrous.”
“What do you mean, their situation changed?” asked Jacob. “She didn’t stop being younger than him.”
“Yes, but that was the point, you see. He began to blame her for making him feel like an old man.”
“Sounds like she’s better off without him.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say better off.” The man grinned, and — unlike Jacob, who had unbuttoned his jacket — I suddenly felt a chill.
“Explain that,” I said.
The stranger flicked the stub of his cigarillo over the bike rack and into the darkness. “Well, I was sitting in a café, she happened to be sitting alone at the next table. She accidentally spilled her drink, I handed her a napkin, and — I don’t know why, but I seem to attract people with a need to get things off their chests. Or perhaps I’m attracted to them. In any case, she told me her story. The bottom line was that her husband was a sadist who was making her life hell. There was no way he would agree to a divorce, and she couldn’t possibly leave him, because she had nowhere else to go and she couldn’t support herself on her own — she was a French tutor, and not many children seem to select that language these days. How, she asked me, could she ever get free of him? Well, a nasty old man with a weak heart, the world certainly wouldn’t be any worse off without him.”