No Time for Tears
by Stan Lauryssens
Manteau/Standaard Uitgeverij, August 2006 (The Netherlands)
Fiction | Mystery & Detective
Material: Dutch edition available
In memory of Ed McBain
In this gripping and hard-boiled police procedural, three dead bodies in one day is too much, even for the Antwerp murder squad. The Inspector is having a rough time, he has blood on his hands and no one comes to his rescue.
As always in his crime fiction, Stan Lauryssens expertly explores the criminal mind. The saddest and baddest things one can imagine—disgusting and criminally insane—happen simultaneously and yet there always is Hope with a capital H:
[...] Three shots, three bullets, hard and dry like the crack of a whip, one next to the other right between the fifth and sixth rib, smack in the middle of his heart. His chest splintered, blood spattered all over and an agonizing pain buzzed all through his body.
[...] The telephone rang. "Hello? Hello?" A heavy breather. "Wrong number." The Inspector shrugged. He put the phone down.
[...] They were waiting for him under the broken streetlamp. Green swimming caps over their eyes, with dark holes for their nose and mouth. Green is the colour of Islam. Their pointed ears were sticking out of the holes. WHÀMMM! The first blow came as a total surprise, in his stomach. There was no pain. The Inspector buckled and fell on his knees, he retched and threw up. ”Fuckkking assshole!” the man said in a strange voice. His accent tasted like couscous.
[…] That was it. Ibrahim, Chalid and Abdelhafid befind bars. Muhamed and Abdulla behind bars. Moh behind bars. The black widow behind bars. Eighteen year olds in black leather jackets and soldiers of Allah and professional Muslims and the jihad men and moellah’s and innocent bystanders behind bars. Everyone and everybody behind bars. Time comes to a standstill in a prison cell, and always at night. Ibrahim and Chalid and Abdelhafid and Muhamed and Moh and Abdullah kicked out their shoes and spit in their hands and washed their nose and forehead with their own saliva, in a cleansing ritual repeated five times a day. They turned, facing Mecca…
“As good as the best Sjöwall and Wahlöö.”--PagiA
All six titles—Black Snow, Dead Corpses, Red Roses, Deader than Dead, More than Naked and the new No Time for Tears sold more than 110.000 copies up to now. Stan Lauryssens was awarded the much-coveted Hercule Poirot Award 2002 for his first crime novel, BLACK SNOW, that sold 45.000 copies in six months in as many editions.
Stan Lauryssens was in prison himself, in three countries, and was extradited through Interpol. He´s got a story to tell. A good, gripping story. How does it feel to be handcuffed to the inside of a police van? Ask Stan! He spent nights in stinking police cells with psycho-killers, drugs dealers, child molesters and bank robbers and was himself interrogated for hundreds of hours. No wonder he knows about police procedural.
No Time for Tears
Opening scene, a fragment:
The day began like any other day. A knife sliced his back and his kidneys popped out of his body, like coconuts, and fell on the floor. Blood. Bloodbloodblood. Blood everywhere. So much blood, it made him sick to the bone. Blood and pain. Everything was pain. Terrible pain. He shot up, wide awake and dripping wet. It wasn’t a dream, it was a nightmare. He couldn’t breeze. His teeth rattled. He rubbed his eyes and shook his head. The nightmare was gone. He sat there, with a dull head and stoned as a crab, staring at his reflection in the mirror behind the half empty bottles on his drawing room cabinet. He had an idea. A man can only be called a prick when he’s got a prick. If it was a good idea, he didn’t know, but it was an idea, and it was his alone. He slurped a thimble of pure, undiluted morphine that smelled like bitter almonds and tasted like aspirin. Everything was ready. His old scouts knife. Clingfilm, aseptic gauze, cotton wool and clean underpants. Sandwiches. An apple. A small container of yoghurt. His diary, his ball-point pens, the press cuttings and the envelopes. Right in the middle of the table: his semi-automatic Bushmaster next a handful of dum-dum bullets, his fake stage moustache and a wig. He grabbed the knife and wielded it in the air, roaring with laughter—not because of the pain, he didn’t feel the pain—until his mouth twisted, and with a strange look in his eyes, he slashed the glans off his penis and a superb, never seen before orgasm of blood splashed and splattered to all sides, his sperm cells illuminating the night sky like the most festive fireworks.
‘AAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGHHHH!’
‘W… w…what are you doing?’ his mirror image stuttered.
Heavy drops of rain licked the windows.
Shit wheather, typically Belgian.
End fragment:
High above the dance floor, all around the swimming pool, stroboscopic lights and disco balls slowly turned round and highlighted the party atmosphere, though it was only four o’clock in the afternoon. On the sounds of Jimmy Durante and his All-Stars Big Band, guests were dancing cheek to cheek. Five saxophones, five trombones, six trumpets, one double-bass, a piano, a guitar and drums. A real swing band, the Inspector thought. Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, that kind of music. Jimmy Durante had red hair and a square jaw. As is the case with all trumpet players, a flock of slimy spittle, white as milk, was dripping from his lips. He wiped his mouth and casually fingered the keys of his horn.
‘Test, test, intro number seven,’ the band leader said.
The pianist started strumming softly.
The female singer lowered her microphone and closed her eyes.
‘Ready?’ the band leader asked.
His real name, as a matter of fact, was Joseph Devolder, but in the glitter world of showbizz, Jimmy Durante sounded like the real thing.
‘One two three,’ he said and snapped his fingers and blew a few lazy keys.
The drummer was no Gene Krupa. Still, he was good. No genius, but good. Softly caressing his drum brake, boombedeboom-boom-boom, juggling his drum sticks, boombedeboom-boom-boom, he worked magic. The saxophones and the trombones stood up, pointed their instrument in the air, sat down, stood up, trumpets to the left, trombones in the middle and saxophones to the right. Then they sat down again. Routine, basically. With both hands, the singer grabbed the microphone. She lowered her fake eyelashes. With her blonde hair piled on top of her head, she looked like a Barbie doll in an expensive ballroom gown. When she bowed her head and opened her mouth, the band sang Chattanooga Choo Choo, the 1941 Glenn Miller evergreen, all swing, bubbling with life. Remember the famous oe-aa-oe-aa in close harmony? The drummer who wasn’t Gene Krupa rounded off the vocal dream-come-true with a sharp rattle of his hardest drum sticks.
Applause all over.
‘Ta-de-da-ta-POW!’ the band leader joked.
Deridder didn’t care for jazz. He
didn’t like the nasal sound of trombones and saxophones. He prefered hard rock and heavy metal. Kiss, AC/DC and Metallica were more to his liking. He grabbed a salmon sandwich from a nearby tray and kneaded the soft bread to small dough balls he could plug in his ears, as if they were earplugs. To be honest, Sofie Simoens wasn’t fond of jazz either. She fancied Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Deep Purple.
A helicopter sweeped the clouds. Police sharpshooters everywhere, in the park, behind trees and in the bushes, their MP5 semi-automatic in position. The submachine guns had night sights. Each policeman wore a fire-proof balaclava, tight-fitting bullet-proof helmet, an armored Nomex flak jacket—the word POLICE stenciled on their back, in stark white capitals—with bullet-proof plating to protect vital organs, pouches containing CS gas canisters and flash explosion sticks, fire-proof gloves, leggings and socks and Adidas GSG9 combat boots. Nothing could happen, they were the safety net to protect distinguished guests at the party, and the safety net was in place. A grey van came to halt in front of the barriers. Two words on its side, in calligraphy: Catering L’Ostendaise. The driver was dressed as a kitchen help. He dutifully showed his documents to the Robocops. The barriers opened and the van sped through the vast parkland, along the fish pond and fake rock formations, past the solarium with sauna, relax pool and massage parlor.
‘Number thirteen. Tu-doe-tu-doe-tu-doe. G-clef,’ Jimmy Durante said.
He blew his horn. The
singer blinked her eyelashes. The band played How High the Moon in up-tempo, followed by Till the End of Time, Perry Como, Doris Day—It’s Magic— Frank Sinatra of course and even Take That.
‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ the van driver hissed.
His name was Jamal. He was a Muslim extremist. No wonder a war chest was expertly hidden under the silver saucers and porcelain dishes piled high with lobster on toast, salmon and oyster canapés and caviar on eggs: revolvers, pistols, ordinary guns, some kalasjnikovs, a Mannlicher Carcano exactly like the one that killed Kennedy and dozens of cardboard boxes that contained handfuls of light .222, .223 and .270 ammunition as well as the deadly .338 Winchester Magnum shells that under normal circumstances are only used to hunt wild deer on the African plains.
‘BOEM BOEM bang their balls!’ Abdellah shouted.
‘Fuck offfff! HAHAHA!’ Selima laughed.
‘There’s only one God…’
‘… and that God is Allah!’
‘Allahu’akhbar!’
‘La illallah adillah Mohammed rasul illahah!’
‘Allah is greatest! Allah is greatest! Allah is greatest!’
BELLS WILL RING
TING-A-LING-A-LING
TING-A-LING-A-LING
THAT’S AMORE…
Dean Martin.
Jamal and Abdellah and Selima clenched their fists. ‘Power, salaam!’ They opened their clenched
fists and spread their fingers and made the victory sign. V for Vampire, V for Vermin, V for Vagina, V for everlasting Victory. They weren’t listening to the music. This has to be fun, they thought, this is WAR, and if we die, we’ll be martyrs and our reward in heaven will be rich and sensual: seventy-two virgins and everlasting happiness. Unfortunately, Abdellah wasn’t the bravest terrorist. His body was shaking. He swayed his head, sweat splashing in all directions. Selima jumped out of the back of the old Catering L’Ostendaise van and fell over and rolled into a rain ditch and unzipped her brand-new double-action China made Makarov pistol and aimed at the singer in her beautiful ballroom gown and pulled the trigger and—BAMMM! A single shot, bone-dry, crackling like a whip. With a deafening noise, the Makarov exploded in her hand and within a nanosecond, the bullet drilled a neat round hole in the singer’s cheek and left her face in a misty cloud of blood and smashed her shattered teeth into the blind wall behind her at a speed of 300 metres per second. BAMMM! and BAMMM! and BAMMM! BAMMM! BAMMM! Another round of bullets and suddenly there was nothing anymore that could be done.
The Inspector burried his head in his hands.
Police sirens started wailing, ÍÍÍÍ-ÁÁÁÁ, ÍÍÍÍ-ÁÁÁÁ, like braying donkeys, and for once, the braying of donkeys sounded like music in the ears of the Robocops.
‘Il-Hamdu-Allah,’ Selima whispered.
Fog fell over the park.
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