The Pilgrim Conspiracy

by Jeroen Windmeijer

  ‘Well, we are living in the age of alternative facts …’ Judith said with a wry smile.

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ Peter said. ‘But this has been going on forever. In the Netherlands, we’ve got Hans Brinker, who stuck his finger in a hole in a dyke and stayed there all day and all night, saving the entire country from the threat of flood with his bare hands. Or Jan van Speyk, the naval lieutenant who exploded his gunboat during the Belgian War of Independence rather than let it fall into rebel hands.’

  ‘“I’d rather be blown up,” he said, right?’

  ‘Yes, exactly,’ Peter confirmed. ‘That’s what he’s supposed to have said. He stuck his lit cigar in a barrel of gunpowder and blasted the boat to smithereens. He’s been venerated for centuries. There are even statues of him. But from a military standpoint, what he did was meaningless. Actually, it was completely pointless, because it didn’t shorten the war at all, not even by a single day. Then there are the heroic Batavi who bravely revolted against the Roman Empire … Whenever you even scratch the surface of these stories, you find that there’s nothing to them. National myths are quite harmless, really, and I’d put the Paul Revere story in that category. But when nations are founded on stories that turn out not to be true …’

  They walked on, checking the map occasionally to make sure they were still following the route until a passer-by told them that all they had to do was follow the line of red bricks set into the pavement that marked out the entire trail.

  When they reached the centre of town, they went into Faneuil Hall. The guidebook described it grandly as ‘the home of free speech’ and ‘the cradle of liberty’ because it had been the venue for the nation’s very first Town Hall Meeting, a public event where politicians met with their voters. It was mostly given over to souvenir shops now.

  A door on the other side of the hall brought them out onto the Marketplace, where three long buildings formed a bustling hub of cafés and restaurants.

  Even though this was the first time that they had spent so much time together, being in Judith’s company felt easy and natural. They always found plenty to talk about, and when they weren’t chatting, their moments of silence were never awkward.

  It was a glorious day, sunny but not too warm, which had brought lots of people outdoors.

  They visited the Cheers bar, an accurate reconstruction of the bar from the TV series that Peter had once watched religiously every week. Peter wanted a photo of himself here too, sitting on the bar stool that the Cheers character Norm always sat on. A queue of people waiting to do the same formed behind Judith as she took the photograph.

  It was still early, but they decided to order beers. Peter drained his glass with gusto and ordered another before Judith’s glass was even half empty.

  ‘I’ll walk with you as far as the park,’ Judith said. ‘I can take the subway back to work from there.’

  ‘All right,’ Peter said, and he took a swig of beer to hide his disappointment. He had secretly hoped that she might duck out of work for the rest of the day so she could spend more time with him, but he knew that she had a lot to do in her short time in Boston.

  They walked past the Old State House, which, according to the guide, had been an ‘emblem of liberty’ for more than three hundred years. It was a grand building with a stepped gable, and it had a white wooden tower on the roof. It so resembled a Dutch canal house that it wouldn’t have looked out of place in Leiden. The Declaration of Independence was read to the people of Massachusetts for the first time from its balcony on July 18th, 1776. John Adams, the second President of the United States of America, would later declare: ‘Then and there the child of independence was born.’

  Peter and Judith followed the route that was marked out by the red bricks, but they had stopped reading about the buildings in the tour guide. Peter read out the name of each landmark as they went by, and that was enough for them both.

  They spent some time wandering through the Granary Burying Ground where some of the heroes of the American Revolution were buried, including John Hancock, Samuel Adams and Robert Treat Paine – three of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence – James Otis, and, of course, the omnipresent Paul Revere.

  Peter took a candid photograph of Judith as she stood under a tree, leaning over to read the inscription on a gravestone. She was half hidden in the shadow cast by the branches, but sunlight shimmered through the leaves and scattered dancing flecks of golden light all over her body. Her Magen David pendant glittered even more than usual. On the photo, the pendant itself vanished behind a ray of refracted light so brilliant that it looked like the silver star had become a tiny sun.

  Many of the gravestones lacked the traditional religious imagery that would typically be found in cemeteries. The Puritans had been against the use of religious symbols like crosses, so the citizens of Boston expressed their belief in the afterlife in a more creative way. One of the most popular gravestone motifs was the Soul Effigy, a winged skull that represented the soul’s ascent to heaven after death. They saw many images of the Grim Reaper and Father Time too.

  They went down a short set of stone steps that led onto Tremont Street. They turned right, passing a group of tourists who were standing around a portly lady, dressed in a historical costume that reminded Peter of the fashions of the Dutch Golden Age. She twirled a stylish, pink linen parasol to protect herself from the sun.

  Peter stopped when they reached Park Street Church so that he could read the entry in the tour guide to Judith.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘On this site, William Lloyd Garrison gave his first major speech against slavery. So it’s an important site for abolitionists. And here on the steps, the American patriotic song “My Country ’Tis of Thee”, was sung for the first time, a capella. It has the same melody as “God Save the Queen” and served as the unofficial American national anthem in the nineteenth century. The first verse goes:

  My country, ’tis of thee,

  Sweet land of liberty,

  Of thee I sing;

  Land where my fathers died,

  Land of the pilgrims’ pride,

  From ev’ry mountainside

  Let freedom ring!

  ‘Hey!’ Judith said, ‘isn’t that last part in Martin Luther King’s ‘“I have a dream” speech too?’

  ‘Oh yes, now you mention it, it is,’ Peter said. He closed the book and put it in his shoulder bag. ‘Freedom is really the most important value to Americans, isn’t it?’

  ‘You think?’ Judith chuckled.

  ‘I know. It’s not exactly a deep insight, but I’ve been here for almost three weeks now, and I feel like I’ve been bombarded with it everywhere I’ve gone. Freedom, freedom, freedom … “We fought for our freedoms. Our freedom is under threat …” But the fact is, this country was built on the back of slave labour, on unfair trade practices, on colonialism, the same things that made the Netherlands such a wealthy nation. Life is often still a struggle for those slaves’ descendants, and the same goes for the Palestinians in Israel. The people who founded America and the Jews who went to Israel might have found freedom, but it was always at the expense of someone else’s freedom. That’s what’s so hypocritical about the whole sto—’

  ‘What?’ Judith asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I feel like I just realised something. Could this be what Coen Zoutman’s notes are about? He was telling the stories of Abraham and the other patriarchs, the journey out of Egypt … I was reminded of it when we were in the Pieterskerk, just before you came here.’

  Judith raised her eyebrows.

  ‘I can’t see what those stories might have to do with …’ she said hesitantly.

  ‘No,’ said Peter. ‘Nor can I, actually.’

  But for Peter, it was as if he had been standing in a dark room and someone had flashed the lights on and off: in that split second, he had seen the entire room as clear as day before the darkness had returned.

  He closed his eyes and tried to recall what had br
ought the feeling on, the feeling that he was on to something. It was like hearing a snatch of a vaguely familiar tune that he couldn’t quite recognise, but knew that he knew it.

  And he knew that he knew this too.

  No, he thought. It’s gone already.

  He opened his eyes again.

  They had been standing on the corner of Park Street for a while now. They were on the edge of Boston Common. In the distance, Peter could see the grand Massachusetts State House, its golden dome shining in the sun as if lit from inside by a thousand lamps.

  The park was busy. Mothers and young nannies pushed strollers and held the hands of small children as they made their way to Frog Pond, a long, shallow paddling pool with benches around it. People sat on the grass watching street performers, singers, jugglers and the ubiquitous living statues. Elderly gentlemen sat at small tables here and there playing chess.

  A group of people, mostly African Americans, some naked from the waist up, congregated on the grass. They looked like they were homeless. Some sat outside improvised tents, while others lay on blankets or in sleeping bags. They were surrounded by empty beer cans and wine bottles, and Peter thought he could smell weed, although he could hardly believe that people would smoke it so openly in America. A man walked past him, talking loudly to himself in an obvious state of confusion.

  ‘I really have to go now, honey,’ Judith said. She said goodbye with a quick hug, then walked towards the subway station. Just before she reached the entrance, she turned around and waved at him.

  In a film, this would be a dramatic scene, Peter thought. The audience would be left wondering when – or if – these two characters would ever see each other again …

  Chapter 26

  Willem Rijsbergen sat at home in his living room. A copy of a well-thumbed murder myster rested in his lap.

  In his right hand, he held a tumbler into which he had poured himself a finger of whisky. He rolled the liquid around in the glass, focusing on the subtle changes in its golden yellow colour as it caught the light.

  For years, Rijsbergen had toyed with the idea of turning his own experiences into stories after he retired. He could publish a new adventure every six months, like a Leiden version of Baantjer, the former policeman who had penned a hugely popular series of detective novels set in Amsterdam.

  Customers in bookshops would eagerly ask, ‘Is the new Rijsbergen out yet?’

  He had always kept this ambition a secret – only his wife Corinne knew about it.

  The series would be loosely based on his own life, although, because he had dealt with so few murders, he would have to invent a fictional crime for almost every book. But he could use the things he’d seen and done during his long career to add atmosphere to his stories and give them an air of authenticity.

  But this case is different, he thought. What title would I give this story? ‘Master in Death’, perhaps?

  He drained his glass and reached for the bottle of Lagavulin to pour himself another dram.

  His thoughts turned back to the investigation. They had started by establishing who was innocent, crossing name after name off the long list that they had compiled at the beginning of the investigation: the non-members who had been at the open evening, Tony Vanderhoop and his delegation, the members of the lodge, and even the loosely affiliated members of the protest groups that Sven and Stefan were connected to.

  Herman van der Lede had been in custody for six weeks now. He had appeared to misspeak when Rijsbergen and Van de Kooij had visited his wife, the only woman who had put herself forward as a candidate in the election of the new chair of Loge Ishtar.

  Just before the detectives had left, Herman had mentioned the square and compasses, information that he almost certainly could not have had if he was innocent. Herman had refused to tell them how he knew about it. Even more telling was his refusal to say another word after he’d realised that he’d already said too much.

  Herman’s wife Jenny swore up and down that her husband couldn’t have been involved in the murder. But she was also unable to explain how Herman could mention details that had not been made public, or why he’d remained tight-lipped ever since.

  The investigation had – to use the bureaucratic term – been scaled back soon after Herman van der Lede’s arrest. Most of the staff who had been working on the investigation had been reassigned to other, more urgent cases.

  ‘You know as well as I do, Rijsbergen …’ his boss had said to him. He hadn’t looked at or spoken to Van de Kooij once during the exchange. ‘… It looks like we have our man, even if he’s not saying anything. I can’t justify keeping a big team on this case.’

  Rijsbergen had wanted to make some sort of objection, more for formality’s sake than out of any real sense of conviction. He knew that his boss was right, and that the argument was already lost. Herman was a strong suspect, not just because he knew things that he shouldn’t have known, but also because he was refusing to say anything at all that might exonerate him.

  ‘You and your partner can continue to work on this. Not full time, but you can follow every lead you get for the minute. That’s if there are any because it looks like the case has already been solved.’

  The Coen Zoutman case and the Yona Falaina case that was connected to it – although it was completely unclear what motive Herman might have had for killing Falaina – were unusually complicated. For a start, there had been a large number of people present at the Masonic Hall at the time of the murder. And then there was the lack of forensic evidence at the crime scene – or rather the excess of evidence, because so many of those people had been in the temple shortly before the murder and they had all left their shoeprints, hair, skin flakes, saliva and fingerprints behind.

  Rijsbergen and his team had now spoken to everyone who, as far as the police had been able to establish, had definitely been at the open evening. However, the problem remained that they had been unable to name between ten and fifteen other people who had been there. And as time went on, it would only become even more difficult to find out who they were.

  He and Van de Kooij had wanted to see Yona Falaina’s room on the Korevaarstraat with their own eyes. When they got there, they discovered that it was almost as anonymous as a hotel room: a bed, a bedside cabinet, a desk with a chair, and a small bookcase that mostly contained books about religious and esoteric subjects. There were no photographs, no posters on the walls, no ornaments or knick-knacks, nothing that gave any clues as to who the man had been.

  A young woman with remarkably pale skin had let them in. She had introduced herself as Rachel. ‘There are five of us living here,’ she explained as she took them up a grubby staircase. ‘I’ve been here since my first year at uni.’

  The stairs led to a landing where a bare bulb provided the only light. It was crammed full of boxes, empty wine bottles, a bicycle missing its front wheel, and bags full of clothes that were spilling their contents onto the floor. Two large, yellowing posters from a travel agency hung on the wall, one of a beach with palm trees and an azure-blue sea, and the other of a waterfall in a tropical forest. It smelled stale and damp, like a cellar.

  ‘Sorry about the mess,’ she apologised.

  It only took a few minutes for them to look around Yona’s room. Afterwards, they visited Rachel in her own room, which was very different from the stairs and landing. It was bright and airy, remarkably tidy, and it smelled clean and fresh, as though she had just lightly sprayed the room with perfume.

  ‘I don’t have much to do with my housemates,’ she said. ‘It was different when I first moved in. We used to eat together all the time, but those people have all left now. Like, with Yona, I only knew his first name and that he was from Greece. We’ve only shaken hands once. That was two years ago when he moved in. He never got any post either. He could have been lying dead in his room for weeks, and nobody would have noticed.’

  ‘Oh, you’d have smelled that pretty quickly, you know,’ Van de Kooij said. He started to laugh
but stopped when Rijsbergen gave him an irritated look.

  They stood in front of the large windows that ran from the sill all the way up to the ceiling and looked out onto the gardens behind the houses. Each plot seemed even more depressing than the one next to it, and they all looked gloomy, even in the middle of the day. It was obvious that none of the residents spent any time in them – there was no garden furniture to be seen. Everything looked sodden, the tiles were green with moss, the walls and fences overgrown with ivy and weeds.

  ‘It’s not a particularly uplifting view,’ Rachel said. ‘But it’s cheap here. I’m doing a residency at the university hospital for my medical degree. Once that’s done, I’ll be leaving.’

  Rijsbergen nodded sympathetically.

  ‘Can I get you a cup of tea or something?’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, but no, thank you. We should get going.’

  Rijsbergen suddenly felt sorry for her. She had looked disappointed when he had declined her offer of tea. He felt like he’d caught a brief glimpse of her loneliness, like seeing a single glove lying on a pavement.

  He briefly considered accepting her offer, but he had so much to do that day that he decided against it.

  ‘You’re moving out?’ he asked, trying to end the conversation on a different note. ‘I imagine it’s quite hard to find something affordable in Leiden. Have you found anywhere yet?’

  ‘I’m emigrating,’ she said. ‘I’m going to Israel after my residency. I’m Jewish. My parents moved out there a few years ago. I’m trying hard to learn Hebrew, or Ivrit rather, the modern version.’

  She pointed at a pile of books on her desk. Learn Hebrew, the cover of the book on the top of the pile read, A Basic Course in Ivrit for Beginners.

  ‘That’s a big step,’ Van de Kooij said. ‘Moving to another country. You’d be leaving behind everything you have here.’

  ‘I’m not leaving that much behind, really,’ she said, and she laughed unhappily. ‘This doesn’t feel like home any more. My parents felt the same way. The final straw came when my dad was surrounded by a group of boys on the Garenmarkt, and one of them spat in his face. It was Shabbat, and he was on his way to prayers at the synagogue just around the corner from here.’