‘Yes?’
I went in and saw Edgar Hasselbaink lying on the grey cord sofa that was as big as my living room. He wore a lemon-yellow, close-fitting linen suit, bright blue sneakers, and his curly hair, which was about twenty centimetres long, stood out wildly in all directions. Under the suit jacket his chest was bare, and his dark, muscular, obviously very fit torso was on view. At first sight he looked like a mixture of a crazy professor, hipster and model for summer fashions.
I imagined Valerie de Chavannes beside him in her thin red dress, and wondered what they were playing at. Saint-Tropez in autumnal Frankfurt? Or did they dress up in the evening just to look sexy for each other? And then did they watch the news together? And eat supper afterwards?
‘Good evening, Herr Hasselbaink.’
‘Good evening. He turned his head to me, but otherwise stayed comfortably outstretched. He pressed the remote control in his right hand and muted the voice of the news presenter on the TV.’
I glanced briefly through the door into the hall. ’Where’s your daughter?
‘My daughter?’ He slowly sat up. ‘Probably up in her room. Why?’ He spoke with a slight Dutch accent.
‘My name is Kayankaya, and I am a private detective.’ I was watching his face closely. ‘We don’t know each other, but perhaps you have seen me before, or at any rate heard of me.’
Nothing gave away what he was thinking; he just looked irritated. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘May I have a private word with you somewhere we can’t be disturbed?’
He kept his eyes on me, looking thoughtful and increasingly anxious.
‘Yes, of course.’ He got up from the sofa and automatically did up one button of his jacket. A bare chest didn’t suit the situation. ‘In my studio.’
He walked past me and out into the hall. He was a good head taller than me, an impressive figure.
The studio was in the basement, and there were only two small skylights to let in natural light. Edgar Hasselbaink pressed the light switch, and four white, bright neon tubes came on.
‘I always thought that light was all-important for painting,’ I said.
‘Well, don’t I have light in here?’
‘I meant natural light.’
‘It depends what you’re doing. I don’t paint trees in the sunset, if you see what I mean.’
‘I think so.’ I looked at the picture standing on an easel in the middle of the room. It was probably what he was working on at present. A sleeping girl against a blue background, presumably Marieke.
Hasselbaink followed my glance. ‘My daughter. There’s no more beautiful sight in the world than your own child sleeping peacefully.’
‘Hmm-hmm.’
‘Do you have children?’
I shook my head. ‘On the other hand, I can imagine few things in the world worse than seeing your own child unable to sleep for fear, don’t you agree?’
Hasselbaink had propped himself on a table in the corner and started rolling a cigarette. ‘Yes, I do.’ He rolled up the paper. ‘And now? What do you want?’
‘Your wife mentioned that you studied medicine in Amsterdam before you began your career as an artist.’
He stopped rolling the cigarette and looked up. ‘Yes, for two years. Because my parents insisted on it. Why?’
‘It must take a certain knowledge of human anatomy to be able to stick a shashlik skewer into a man’s chest so that it passes between the ribs and into the heart. The study of medicine is one way of acquiring such knowledge.’
Hasselbaink looked at me, his mouth slightly open, the almost-finished cigarette between his fingers. He looked very calm, thoughtful rather than surprised. Finally he lowered his eyes, licked the paper and finished rolling the cigarette. With a grave, concentrated expression, eyes on the floor, he searched the pockets of his suit for a lighter. He finally found one in the outside pocket of his jacket, lit the cigarette and thoughtfully blew the smoke in a thin curl towards the ceiling.
‘Of course I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he said in a relaxed tone, almost as if he were amusing himself a little, at my expense, ‘but do by all means go on.’
‘I picture it like this …’ I put my hands in my trouser pockets and began strolling round the studio. I kept stopping in front of the picture of the sleeping Marieke. It did indeed give off an aura of deep peace.
‘You were in The Hague and, as usual when you are travelling or staying somewhere abroad, you rang home every evening to say good night, “I love you”, and so on. After your wife told you several evenings running that Marieke wasn’t there at the minute, was with a friend, at a Greenpeace meeting or whatever, after a while you began wondering what it was all about. And I imagine that the concern your wife couldn’t quite keep out of her voice reinforced your fears. At some point you decided to go to Frankfurt in secret and see what was going on.’
‘Why wouldn’t I trust my wife?’ he suddenly asked. ‘Why would I travel in secret?’ His tone of voice was entirely neutral, as if his interest in the whole thing was of a purely theoretical nature.
‘Your wife was my client. In case you haven’t worked it all out yet, I was the one who brought your daughter home. And at least — I don’t want to offend you or your family: your wife would certainly arouse many reactions in people, but I doubt whether unconditional trust is among them.’
His upper lips twisted slightly into a smile that I found hard to interpret. Was it angry? Bitter? Amused? Or after at least sixteen years of living with her, simply tired?
‘I assume there’s a night train from The Hague or Amsterdam to Frankfurt, or else you came by car?’
He did not reply, just smoked and looked at me.
‘Well, so once you were here you slipped into the house, probably while I was sitting with your wife in the living room. I don’t know how all the rooms and back entrances connect up, but you must have had some way of listening to what we were saying. And then you heard Abakay’s name and address, and you set out to save your daughter.’
I stopped in front of him. He looked at me inquiringly.
‘May I roll myself a cigarette too?’
‘Be my guest.’ He offered me the pouch of tobacco.
I sat down on a chair covered with dried splotches of paint and helped myself to a suitable amount of tobacco.
‘And I assume you rang Abakay’s doorbell, but no one opened the door. Then you sat waiting in the café beside the door to the apartment building. And you ordered the dish of the day, not because you were hungry, but because by then it had occurred to you that if you were visiting someone like Abakay it would be as well to have a weapon with you.’
I licked the cigarette paper, rolled up the cigarette, and tore off the tobacco fibres hanging out of the ends.
‘The waiter remembers you.’
I thought briefly of the young white man with frizzy hair who couldn’t imagine a black man with racist feelings strong enough to make him attack his Turkish neighbour. Okay, yes, there was a skewer missing at lunchtime, but I can’t imagine it was your racist neighbour who nicked it. And who hadn’t dared to mention a black man’s skin colour. Probably because he was afraid of bowing to racist clichés. Better not mention skin colour at all. Maybe it was the unconscious anger of many good, tolerant white people: Why the hell are we always being made to beat about the bush like this? Why can’t you all be white like everyone else, and then there’d be no problem with the damn description?
‘A light?’ asked Hasselbaink, offering me his lighter.
‘Thanks, not yet.’ I was holding the cigarette between thumb and forefinger as I used to when I still smoked, and examined it for a moment in silence. ‘And then you rang Abakay’s bell again, and this time someone opened the door. But it was the wrong man standing in the doorway. A large, fat, bare-chested drunk, and maybe Marieke was even shouting for help in the background.’