Black snow
A man in black scurried past ravaged houses. His leather shoes made a rasping sound on the wet cobblestones. Klik-klak, klik-klak. It had been raining heavily. Belgian weather, as they say. In the cosy comfort of her studio, a female artist was copying a Rubens masterpiece in minute detail. From an all-night pub nearby, the jukebox belched the desperate voice of Doris Day singing Que Sera Sera. What will be, Will be. The man in black rang the bell.
‘Who are you?’ she asked.
He didn’t give her an answer.
‘I don’t know you.’
No answer.
‘It’s late.’
He nodded.
‘What do you want from me?’
He smiled. He had a beautiful mouth.
‘Come back tomorrow,’ she said. ‘It’s too late.’
‘It is never too late to die,’ he said softly and gave her his best smile.
She buried her face in her hands and jerked her shoulders and shook her body and tried to give a horrifying cry for help but her mouth burst open and crackled and flaked like a smile on an old painting, she started rattling and gasping for breath and while his invisible hands choked her to death, something snapped in the back of her neck, with the dull sound of broken plywood.
Was this the beginning?
Or was it the end?
Or was it the beginning of the end?
A team of five police detectives led by an elderly Chief Constable—he holds up the fictional Commissaire Maigret [Simenon] as his prime example—started untangling the riddle of the strangled artist. They worked from the nineteenth-century courthouse, a damp and sinister building at the edge of the inner city. The city is Antwerp, world capital of international diamond trading. On the second floor of the courthouse, thirteen doors opened up to as many interrogation rooms. Police detectives on duty used these rooms simultaneously as their office. In the middle of the largest room, four battered desks from the furniture department were cobbled together and formed a single workbench. The bench held three Olivetti typewriters, three telephones, a fax machine, a new PC hardly anyone in the office knew how to use and two overgrown ashtrays. Why had the murderer cut off her nipples and what had he done to her vagina? Why was the body slit almost in half and draped over a canvas depicting a masterful copy of Venus and Adonis that is the star attraction in the Metropolitan Museum? Only a few days after the brutal killing, the mutilated body of a drag queen, hands and feet missing, was fished out of the polluted waters of a bleak Antwerp dock, his wig still glued to his balding head. The closer the police came to the truth, the more they distanced themselves from the killer.
It was cold and pitch dark in her studio. The Chief Constable went looking for a light switch. The painting of Venus and Adonis after Rubens still stood there on its wooden easel, unfinished. It was the perfect copy. Adonis turned his head away from Venus and looked disapprovingly at a patch of blank canvas smeared with puss and blood. The blood had dried a brownish purple.
‘I don’t think for a moment the killer tried to deceive us,’ Deridder said. He was the youngest of the police detectives, a vainglorious man who boasted that he looked like a Brad Pitt double. ‘On the contrary, he’s giving us some clues. The nipples, the slashed vagina, the missing labia.’
‘A cry for help,’ the Chief Constable replied. ‘He wants to get caught.’
‘He—or she.’
‘She? Forget it, Sven.’ The Chief Constable shook his head. ‘A man did this. Women kill differently. Graciously and with elegance, I’d say. There’s only one female serial killer I know off, a prostitute in Florida who shot seven truck drivers seven times in the back. No knives, no axes, just a simple .22 and a handful of bullets. You know any example of a woman killer that behaved like a wild animal? Only men slaughter and skin their victims. Only male killers behave like pigs.’
‘Mutilated bodies, decapitation, blood all over, bowels on the floor. It’s so disgusting. I’m getting fed up with the world of crime.’
‘There’s no turning back now. Mark my word, we’re dealing with a serial killer. For the next couple of weeks, we’ll have to wade through rivers of shit. That’s what life is like for a police detective. Rivers of shit.’
The two men paced the studio.
‘In Argentina, real women dance the tango with their labia,’ Deridder said.
The Chief Constable sighed. ‘There’s an awful lot I’m willing to believe, Sven, but certainly not that Rosy was furiously dancing a tango when her murderer rang the bell. Besides, you need two to tango and Argentina is too far away from Antwerp.’
A fierce wind rattled the window panes.
‘Are you an Elvis fan?’ the Chief Constable suddenly asked.
‘You mean—Elvis Presley?’
‘Any other Elvis you know off?’
‘Elvis Costello.’
‘I didn’t mean it as a joke, Sven.’
Deridder pouted. ‘Some time ago, while cleaning out the attic, I came across some old LP’s. They were my father’s, I guess. Love Me Tender was among them.’
Softly the Chief Constable hummed the song.
Love Me Tender
Love Me Sweet
Never Let Me Go.
He’s lost his marbles, Deridder thought.
Got out of bed on the wrong side.
‘At the end, Elvis was a walking pharmacy,’ the Chief Constable said broodingly. ‘He was really hooked. Took eleven prescription drugs three times a day, including three shots of Demerol. Eleven times three makes thirty-three. You know what Demerol is, Sven? It’s poison. A killer, pure and simple.’
‘We’re looking for clues to a brutal murder, Chief, and you have Elvis on your mind.’
‘Because there’s no way we’ll find the clues we’re looking for.’
‘Why not?’
‘What did the fingerprints department come up with?’
‘Nothing. Negative.’
‘See what I mean? We’re wasting valuable time, Sven. The girl has not been killed because she had a nice pussy and although you’re a very young man still, you know as well as I do that if it’s not for the pussy, it must be for the money, and if it’s not for the money, we may as well forget about it and go home. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that Rosy simply had some really bad luck. Wrong place, wrong time.’ He sighed and looked at his watch. ‘Enough for today, Sven. Let’s have a drink at the Café d’Anvers. If they allow me in, a poor old bugger like myself. You do know who works the lavatories in Café d’Anvers, don’t you?’
‘I don’t, Chief, no.’
‘None other than our very own Miss Belgium!’
‘A real Miss Belgium?’
‘1992. Prettiest girl in the country back then is now up to her elbows in shit and piss. How about that? It shouldn’t surprise you, Sven. Life is a cruel business. By the way, there is a link between the overdosing of Elvis Presley and the killing of Rosy De Moor: both were forty-two years of age when they died.’
‘What happened to her nipples, Chief?’
‘Whose nipples? Miss Belgium, you mean?’
Deridder laughed and shook his head.
‘Must have eaten them,’ the Chief Constable said.
‘And her labia?’
‘In the old Rome, roasted pigs vagina was considered an emperor’s delicacy, on a par with fine olives and the best wines. Nothing surprises me anymore, young man. Life is full of shit.’
‘Well, when you’re hungry, everything is tasty.’
‘Remember Hannibal Lecter? Stuffed himself with raw liver. Human liver. Another serial killer—I forgot his name—cooked the genitals of his male victims in a pressure-cooker and turned them into a spicy spaghetti sauce that he served his old mother. Life may be shit but murder is filth, Sven. Only in films and on TV has murder been elevated to the art of killing.’
They left the artist’s studio. From the wharf nearby rose the nauseating smell of dead mud. In this city, it was common knowledge that some docks were peopled by giant eel as thick as a wrist that fed on dog carrion and the discarded bodies of stillborn children. The whole world looked bleak, save the fronts of the old warehouses of a bygone era. They were knee-deep in damp drizzle. As soon as winter was over, perhaps it would be spring forever. High up in the night sky, through the drifting clouds, the Chief Constable searched for the Great Bear, but however much he did his best, he couldn’t distinguish his favourite constellation in the razzle-dazzle of stars and clouds and rain faintly illuminated by the dimmest of moonshine.
In Café d’Anvers, the police detectives were the only customers.
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