I threw away the Staandard and went in search of the Gazet. It was late afternoon, and the first newsstand I came to, on the corner of Maria-Theresialei, was the one kept by the old fellow with the goitre – good God, suddenly I see him, plain as day, in his fin-gerless gloves and the woollen cap with the earflaps that he always wore – who made a great fuss of retrieving for me from under a pile of grubby magazines what he claimed was the very last copy of the late edition, grumbling under his breath. I took the paper from him and skulked off like a rat with a stolen tidbit. Rounding the corner, I stopped and scanned the pages, once, twice, a third time. There was no mention of Axel. I was surprised not to be surprised.
I went next to the Gazet offices, to try to speak to Hendriks. I do not know what I expected of him: I had not seen or heard from him for eighteen months or more. I was kept waiting in the front office for a long time. The familiar smells, of newsprint, ink, paper dust, provoked in me an inward sob of nostalgia, distant relation, it might be, to the grief for my dead friend I supposed I was too shocked to have begun to feel yet. The girl behind the counter who took in classified advertisements pretended not to know me; we used to flirt with each other, in the old days. I turned over the already dry and brittle pages of the previous week's editions, filed in their big wooden clasps. Newsboys ran in and out, whistling. A mad old woman came in from the street and shouted something and went out again. Wind-driven scuds of wet snow were flopping against the windows. I was remembering the walking holiday Axel and I had taken together in the Ardennes before the war, and the little inn we had stumbled on one rainy night, where we sat drinking plum brandy by the light of a log fire and he told me of his plans to write a study of Coleridge's aesthetics; how enthusiastic he was, his eyes shining in the firelight; how young he looked; how young he was, and I, too. He did not live to write that book, and when, years later, I tried to write it instead – to write it for him, as it were – I could not do it either.
Hendriks would not come down, and sent one of his deputies to fob me off. I remembered the fellow's face from those late nights at the Stoof, but could not recall his name. I saw that he remembered me, too; he had the decency not to meet my eye. He was fat, like his boss, and out of breath from the stairs, and leaned against the counter, exaggeratedly gasping, with a hand pressed flat against his chest. When I demanded to know if he knew the circumstances of Axel's death he only shrugged. Everything was confused, he said, no one was certain of what had happened. I pressed him, but he only shook his head, and said again what he had said already. His petulant, brusque tone told me that the Gazet had no intention of being associated with this death, one among so many, after all. The girl behind the counter gazed away, tapping a pencil against her teeth, pretending not to be listening. I left, and walked dully through the streets. The snow had stopped, but a big-bellied, mauvish sky hung low over the city, promising a heavy fall later. On a street by the train station an armoured car was stopped, with a trio of teenage soldiers in outsized greatcoats sitting side by side on the front of it, dangling their legs over the edge, like three school truants paddling in a pond. And further along, by the Stads-park, three dead girls in belted, lumpy overcoats with ragged bullet holes across the front, gruesome counterparts somehow to those idling boy soldiers, were tied to the railings with placards hung about their necks on which was daubed a message I did not care to read; I thought of the dead crows, their blue-black plumage rubied with dried blood, that my grandfather long ago would string up on the fences in his cornfields to discourage their ravening fellows.
I never did discover the true circumstances of Axel's death. I thought of asking his family, and went more than once and stood under the trees in the square looking up at the windows of the Vander apartment, but each time my nerve failed me. Then they moved away, or so it seemed, for on the last occasion when I skulked under their windows there was no sign of life within, no lamp burning or vase of flowers on display, only a broken roller blind, hanging down crookedly. I made enquiries of people whom Axel and I had both known, but either they would not speak to me, or claimed not to know any more about what had befallen him than I did. Extravagant rumours began to fly about. Some were too ludicrous to listen to, for example that he had committed suicide when a love affair went wrong – imagine Axel hanging himself, and over a woman! Others were slightly more plausible, but I could not believe them, either. It was said for instance that he was not dead at all, but had been rounded up by mistake with a band of communists and interned at Breendonck, from where his father was seeking to buy his release. A journalist of my acquaintance, of my former acquaintance, whom I encountered in the street late one wet night, drunk and wild-eyed, his face running with rain or tears, it was hard to tell which, grasped me by the lapels and assured me in an urgent, sobbing whisper that Axel had been caught up in a dispute among the factions surrounding the military authorities, that the affair had ended in bloodshed, and that he had been shot and his body flung into an unmarked grave. At the time all sorts of stories like that were in the air, about all sorts of people. Most amazing of all the explanations I heard of Axel's disappearance, however, was the heroic farrago, recounted to me one ice-hung morning in a café on the Groenplaats, in tones of tragic wonderment, by one of his former girlfriends, that he had been betrayed, arrested, tortured, and summarily executed for the leading part he had played in the organisation of an underground Resistance cell. She looked so sorrowful and solemn, saucer-eyed Monique, and the pink-tinged air outside was so still, so coldly lovely, that I could only nod and say nothing, trying not to laugh. Many years later, however, in Arcady, one night at a gruesome academic dinner I found myself seated opposite a withered old fellow with ash on his waistcoat and soup on his tie, a visiting savant from old Europe, of Walloon origin, who on hearing my name became greatly excited and hailed me warmly as a former colleague in arms. Holding him off with what I knew must be a horrible, temporising grin, I studied that time-ruined visage – collapsed cheek and lolling Bourbon lip, moist rheumy eye, the pallid skull smooth and domed like the cap of a giant toadstool – and tried urgently to discern in it the features of one I might once have known or at least have met in Axel's company long ago. No blank-eyed bust stirred in the shadowed gallery of my memory. And what did he think, the old fool, if he really had known Axel and now believed that I was he – that forty years had added a foot or so to his height and turned his film star's profile into that of a superannuated carthorse? The more discouragingly diffident I became the more emotional he waxed, lapsing from laughable English into execrable, macaronic French, reaching infirmly across the table and trying to clasp my crabwise retreating hand, exclaiming the while about les beaux jours d'antan aux Pays-bas when, shoulder to shoulder with our amis ardents, we wrought havoc upon the military housekeeping of the invading sale Boche. He would have worried me more had he not been such a caricature; nevertheless, I extricated myself as quickly as I could from his humid attentions and left the building and walked across the campus in the balmy dark, under the eucalyptus trees draped with the strenuously abradant music of crickets, wondering if I should invite the old warrior to come for a hike with me up into the hills next day and kill him. However, when I arrived at Sprague Hall next morning to hear him speak, a notice on the door informed me that due to unforeseen circumstances Professor de Becker's lecture had been cancelled. It turned out that over a shaky breakfast in the college dining room the hung-over Professor had got into an altercation – on the validity of Durkheim's concept of the conscience collective, as I recall – with one of the faculty's many young Turks, and became so heated that he suffered an infarction and fell dead with his face on the table among the coffee cups and the bowls of muesli. I have always had the devil's luck.