Book 3—Red Roses
*** The book is now being written. Available February 2004.
A blazing sun, the air shivering. Hitler weather, as people used to say during the war. It seemed as if everyone in the city was on holiday. The streets were hot and humid but inside the courthouse it was damp and cold, as if fear had seeped into its thick dark walls. In the largest of thirteen interrogation rooms on the second floor, Peeters opened the windows and uncapped a Diet Coke. He hadn’t shaved in days and his hair was tangled and greasy. He was dressed in old worn sandals and a stained undercover anorak, a Browning 9 mm Para with a firm grip tucked into his shoulder holster. Deridder was furiously typing an official report outlining similarities in the m.o. or modus operandi of the Russian mafia and Albanian hit men. Tony Bambino busied himself with a pipe cleaner and a rag polishing his dismantled service revolver. Sofie Simoens—in tight jeans and snakeskin cowboy boots—bit in a slice of pizza from a thin square box. Sweating profusely, Peeters slurped his Diet Coke. For the police detectives from the murder squad, it was business as usual, a day like any other day.
‘There is no such thing as a criminal,’ Tony Bambino said.
‘You believe that?’
‘Two old friends quarrel in a café. One hits the other on the head with a beer bottle. Kills his friend. Is he a criminal?’
‘Could you murder someone?’ Sofie Simoens asked.
‘I hope not, but who knows?’
Dressed in his familiar corduroy trousers and a green Lacoste polo, the Chief Constable entered the interrogation room. A telephone started ringing. Sofie Simoens threw the crumpled pizza box in the dustbin and Peeters picked up the telephone. On the four tables that were expertly puzzled together in the middle of the room, Deridder put some yellowed files in order. Thin files he placed on top of thicker ones. Each file was held together with a rubber band.
Suddenly the sky darkened and it began raining heavily.
Tony Bambino immediately shut the windows.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, did someone fart in here?’ Peeters asked and ran around sniffing like mad.
As always at the beginning of rainfall after a long hot summer, the stink of the municipal sewers contaminated the inner city and polluted the air that hung in the narrow streets like a dirty old rag.
‘Could you murder someone, Chief?’ Sofie Simoens asked.
The Chief Constable shrugged his shoulders. ‘Everyone can, I guess,’ he said. ‘The question is not could I but would I. Why do something like that? You know I hate lawyers and detest the courts, they’re a man’s worst nightmare—and murder, as you well know, is the ultimate nightmare.’ He smiled and rapped his knuckles on the tabletop. ‘Attention, please. We’ve got that Russian mafia don behind bars. Finally. He’s in a downstairs holding cell. Peeters, Bambino, Sofie and Deridder: the man is yours. You can squeeze him like a lemon, if you want, although in my opinion you’ll get far better results if you interrogate him en chansonette, the way Maigret does.’
‘How does that go, Chief?’
‘Who is Maigret?’ Deridder asked.
‘Don’t you know?’
‘No.’
‘You never read a Maigret novel?’
‘No.’
‘A chansonette is a little lullaby, isn’t it?’ Sofie Simoens asked.
‘I didn’t know that,’ Peeters said.
My French isn’t so good, he thought.
‘Shall I show you?’
‘Please do, Chief.’
‘The suspect is brought in. You smile at him, gently, and say: “I can’t think why you’re here. Must be some mistake. I mean, you of all people can’t be guilty of anything, can you? There’s nothing against you in our files, nothing at all. Can you imagine why you’ve been brought here?” The suspect will try to be helpful. “Perhaps it has something to do with that brawl in the Café de Paris last night...,” he might stammer. “The Café de Paris? Was there anything serious last night?” you ask him. “You didn’t have anything to do with that, did you?” That’s how he’ll be lulled to sleep by the chansonette, like a baby. You yawn a little, as if you’re bored, and say: “Anyway, this brawl has nothing to with you. But what were you doing…?” and then, you grab his balls. If you can keep this little game up for an hour or two, the suspect will shit his pants like he’s never shitted them before and confess to whatever you want. That’s what we call an interrogation en chansonette and it was Inspector Maigret of the Paris police judiciare who taught me how to sing our little lullaby.’
There was a knock on the door and the prisoner was brought in.
Using some thin copper wire as a noose, one of the police detectives hanged himself at the house of his girlfriend. The Russian mafia boss had his brains blown out in the High Street. A contract killing, apparently. In a ‘drugs supermarket’ where heroin, cocaine, liquid ecstasy and other mind-popping substances were sold over the counter, ‘drug tourists’ were shot at random, killing five. There was a rapist on the loose too, prying about for blonde girls, young, innocent and pure as a virgin. For the police detectives, this meant working around the clock. The courthouse was in a state of alarm. Politicians spoke out. On top of all that, the Chief Constable had problems of his own: his libido was failing him and his doctor put him on a diet of Viagra and testosterone injections.
The Chief Constable got out of the wrong side of the bed and staggered to the bathroom. Wednesday, 7.30 A.M. The sky had a sultry, sandy colour. In the oval mirror, he looked at his wrinkled face and shivers ran down his spine. Not only did he look like a Woody Allen double, he also felt like Woody Allen. Old and tired, worn out, ready to be dumped.
‘A difficult day ahead, sweetie?’ Marie-Thérèse asked gently.
‘No more than any other working day,’ the Chief Constable replied, somewhat grumpy. ‘Albanian hit men for starters, a rapist and a gang of Russian mafioski as a main course and two stabbings for desert.’
‘Enjoy your meal, sweetie!’
‘If you really want to know what people are like, darling, you should come to the courthouse for a day or so. I’ll show you around cells and interrogation rooms. Introduce you to some of my customers. As the saying goes, if you want the smell of shit, you have to sit on top of it.’
‘I’ve been told, sweetie, that the art of turning negative thoughts into positive ideas is the secret of a happy life.’
‘Art, art. What are you saying? Life is not a painting, life is a Pussy capital P,’ the Chief Constable said.
Marie-Thérèse shook her head. ‘No, sweetie, you’re wrong,’ she said. ‘You’ve always told me that I’ve got a Pussy capital P. Does that mean that my pussy is art, too?’
The Chief Constable snorted with laughter. ‘That pussy of yours, darling, is the most beautiful work of art I’ve ever seen.’
‘As beautiful as the Mona Lisa?’
‘More beautiful.’
‘As beautiful of the Venus of Milo?’
‘Infinitely more beautiful.’
‘That’s what I longed to hear!’
The Chief Constable poured himself his morning coffee, black, no sugar, no milk. Same as Maigret, he thought, and smiled. Although he was on medication, he still had to watch his cholesterol.
The telephone rang.
Marie-Thérèse looked up at the wall clock in the kitchen and said: ‘Eight A.M. That’s the time of day when problems start.’
The Chief Constable put the phone down and sighed.
‘Something wrong, sweetie?’
‘A corpse on my empty stomach,’ he said.
Meanwhile in Los Angeles …
Friday, bad luck day. In Santa Monica Harbor, Max boarded a fishing boat that broke the waves like a surfboard. The shadow of blue fish shot past the hull and cast an aubergine bruise on the water. An old skipper prepared the fishing lines. He used a rusty fisherman’s knife to cut up small mackerel, medium mullet, flying fish and good-sized squid as bait. The knife was sticky with blood and puss and scales and cut both ways. The skipper was running around barefoot, dressed in shorts stained with fish blood. The shorts were tied around his middle with a piece of rope. He had a rugged face and wavy white hair. He looked very much like Spencer Tracey.
There was a boil in the water and a school of dolphin went into the air wildly. Warm winds blew across the ocean and the more they distanced themselves from the shore, the more the salt of the sea drove out the sweet smell of frangipani and oleander. From the crackling radio on board, the voice of Willie Nelson boomed over the ocean, in a duet with Julio Iglesias.
Max worked himself into the only fighting chair and buckled the shoulder harness. A glass fibre rod was resting in its socket, waiting for the fish to take the bait.
Spencer Tracey shut down the engine.
The boat was dead on the water.
To all the girls I’ve loved before
Who travelled in and out my door
A green sea turtle scudded under the hull of the boat.
‘Be patient. Fish will come out,’ the skipper said. ‘Small ones first and then the big ones. The real heavyweights. If they don’t come out now, they’ll never come out.’
I dedicate this song
To all the girls I’ve loved before.
Small ones, big ones, that wasn’t what Max was thinking about. He was thinking about that other Willie Nelson song, the one he had listened to at a few minutes to midnight in his cell in La Modelo, while Oskar jerked off and Rafa clipped his toenails and Antonio lit a crack cigarette and behind the iron bars of their prison window the sky turned scarlet with a gloss of sulphur.
Never again would he be able to exorcise the dull pain of prison life.
Never again. Tears welled in his eyes.
‘Feeesh! Feeesh!’ Spencer Tracey yelled.
Behind the boat, a long dark brown shadow winged up and a big spear longer than your arm burst out of the water followed by two black eyes and a giant head and a sharp dorsal fin and the head smashed at the bait and missed it and came up again as fast as the shadow of a plane moving over water. Suddenly there was a ratchet and the rod bent double and the line screamed out and ran off the reel, vibrating furiously, rushing through the depth of water.
‘Oh my God, we’ve got him! A heavyweight!’
The skipper throttled back the engine and the rod bent like a bow and the line started z-z-zigging out. Max was lifting and reeling, lifting and reeling, as regularly as a machine, lifting and reeling, lifting and reeling, and the line jerked down in the water.
The fish leaped clear and long, silver in the sun, and spashed back in the water again, throwing a column of spray like a shell hitting the sand. Max noticed that his sides were banded with lavender stripes. The fish came out again and the spray roared and he jumped wildly twice more, hanging high and stiff in the air before falling with a bang.
‘He’s committing suicide!’ Spencer Tracey grinned.
Slowly the big fish was coming in. The broad spear shot out of the water again followed by the giant head with its eyes that looked like soup bowls. The rod bent double, to breaking point almost, the reel screeched out and the big fish came again, BOOO—OOOM, and again, BOOO—OOOM, in a long straight jump, shining silver in the sun, his fins out wide like purple wings. The line was s-s-singing out and s-s-slicing the water and the spool started to whiz-z-zzz and the big fish jumped fifty-three times before going down down down and heading off fast toward the shore, twisting and turning … and then something slipped … the line snapped with the sound of a whiplash and lashed across the surface of the water like a thin silver snake …
The line went slack.
Son-of-a-bitch, Max thought.
You goddam son-of-a-bitch.
His muscles ached, his legs were shaking.
‘Shit. That was him. That was Cassius Clay. He beat us, fair and square,’ Spencer Tracey said.
‘Shit is Scheisse in German,’ Max replied.
The heavyweight skipped away, as graciously as a ballet dancer, farther and farther away, jumping up and down, up and down, until he leapfrogged over the horizon and disappeared forever. The skipper farted. He blew his nose in his hands and wiped his fingers on the railing. Que Sera Sera. Max curled his upper lip in a vicious smile. He grabbed the fisherman’s knife and angrily threw it in the darts board on the cabin door, like an expert in the circus. Dead on target. What will be, Will be.
‘I knew you would come,’ the Chief Constable said. A final confrontation took place between the serial killer and the Chief Constable at Musso and Frank’s Grill, the Hollywood landmark restaurant. Klik-klak, klik-klak. ‘How is Laura?’ Max asked. ‘Laura is dead,’ the Chief Constable said. ‘Dead? How come, dead?’ ‘An accident,’ the Chief Constable said and he lowered his head.
NOTE 1:
Though in the past the author wrote several non-fiction books in English, he started writing crime fiction in Dutch, his native language. He is now, however, actively rewriting his three crime fiction titles to date—Black Snow, Dead Corpse and Red Roses, to be published September 2004—in English, in order for prospective buyers/publishers to be provided not with a translation but with original crime fiction in English.
NOTE 2:
Black Snow, Dead Corpse and Red Roses is a continuous and ongoing story told in three books, in the manner of The Lord of the Rings or The Matrix, which tell a continuous and ongoing story in three films. It goes without saying that each of the three titles stands on its own and is written to be read independently from the one before or after.
COMING SOON:
Murder at Midnight (available 2004)
Deadlier than Death (available 2005)
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