“I did what you asked, Master,” said Jonathan.
As proof that he had fulfilled his task, he handed Venex a key. In exchange, he received a triple dose of heroin.
“I’m very satisfied, Jonathan. Go now and become one with the world on the other side. There you will see Trui and Jasper again, and you will be happy together.”
Venex accompanied Jonathan to the front door. He had reasoned like a general in the heat of battle. Defeating the enemy was a question of tactics, a pliable strategy that accounted for the circumstances in which the struggle was being waged. He no longer needed to be concerned about Trui or Jasper or Jonathan, and Coleyn would keep his mouth shut as long as his supply was assured. The only remaining obstacle was Van In, and the commissioner had a pleasant surprise in store.
“You made the right decision,” said Venex when Jonathan said good-bye.
“Thank you, Father.” Jonathan lowered his eyes. He felt like the Nazarene on the cross. It is accomplished.
8
The Bible says the seventh day belongs to God. For once, Van In had not begged to differ and had devoted the rest of the weekend to the lesser known Morpheus, the god of dreams. After a stormy reconciliation, he and Hannelore had retired to bed around eight the previous evening and had slept like innocent children for sixteen uninterrupted hours. They were still in bed. It was three degrees below zero outside and a tree branch lashed the windows in the wind and roused Van In from his slumber. He sat up, took a look outside, then turned and huddled up against Hannelore’s back. The warmth she radiated mingled with the memory of his last dream and he dozed off again.
The central heating in Saint Jacob’s Church on Moer Street waged a one-sided battle with the ice-cold east wind that howled mercilessly through the door every time another latecomer entered the building. In the old days, pastors would complain about that sort of thing, but now that so few people attended church, they counted themselves lucky to have a congregation of sorts. The number of weekend masses had been reduced to a mere two, but even then, less than a couple of hundred diehards made the effort. Not what you would call busy for a parish with five thousand parishioners.
The eleven thirty mass usually attracted the biggest crowd. People tended to prefer the later hour.
“Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”
Numb with cold, the assembled faithful responded in haste: “Thanks be to God.”
The organist pounded the keys and drove the parishioners outside with a mangled version of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
The dry cracks that followed one another in quick succession sounded like the rattle of machine-gun fire. Hannelore opened her eyes in a daze, leaned over to the window, and peered through the curtain. There it was again. … Ratatatat, ratatatatat. She pushed Van In onto his back and sat upright.
“Did you hear that?”
Van In’s open mouth produced a snore that sounded like an angry growl. Hannelore glanced at her watch. Was it really twelve fifteen?
A short five minutes later, the first sirens rent the Sunday silence. They seemed to be coming from every point of the compass and increasing ominously in volume. Hannelore shook Van In to wake him. When she didn’t immediately succeed, she threw off the comforter and jumped to her feet.
“Jesus,” she said. “Something terrible must have happened.” She scurried downstairs, leaving the bedroom door wide open. Van In groped around without opening his eyes and tried to pull the comforter over his head. When that failed, he rolled over on his side once again and fumbled fruitlessly for the warm body that was no longer there.
“Pieter! Get down here, for Christ’s sake.”
Now he too could hear the sirens. It sounded as if the entire Bruges police fleet had landed in front of his door. He scrambled to his feet, pulled on his pajama bottoms and slippers, and joined Hannelore at the front door. They watched the emergency services flashing past the intersection of the Vette Vispoort and Moer Street.
“I’m going to take a look.” Van In made a move to go outside.
Hannelore held him back.
“In your pajamas?”
At the side door of Saint Jacob’s, all hell had broken loose. A dozen police officers were doing their best to calm the hysteria and keep the road open for ambulances as they waited for reinforcements. By the time Van In arrived on the scene, the provincial disaster management plan had already been set in motion. A Medical Emergency Team doctor was assessing the wounded and handing out color-coded wristbands. Up to four additional doctors were on their way, hardly enough given the extent of the calamity. According to initial estimates, there were eight dead and seventeen wounded, three of them seriously. Van In grabbed the first officer he could get his hands on and asked what was going on.
“All I know is some crazy guy let loose with a machine gun in the church.” The young officer had a lump in his throat and was having trouble holding his tears in check. “I don’t get it …”
“Have they arrested anyone?”
“You’ll have to ask Fier, Commissioner. He was first to arrive.”
Van In wormed his way through the tangle of caregivers offering first aid to the wounded. A child had taken a direct hit to the chest, and one of the caregivers was trying in desperation to stop the bleeding. The entire situation was so surreal, Van In still wasn’t completely sure what had happened. The blood and the mutilated victims made Moer Street look like Sarajevo after a mortar attack.
Inspector Ronald Fier was doing his level best to bring some order to the chaos. He had called in for assistance from the federal police and the Red Cross. A truck was on its way with crush barriers to close off the street, and the governor and mayor had been informed about the bloodbath. Everything was running according to plan, and no one could accuse him of screwing up, but he was still happy to see Van In emerge from the crowd. Clearing the area was going to be difficult, and he needed all the help he could get. They had simulated disasters in training, but nothing could have prepared them for this. People ran back and forth, shouting, trying to offer help, unaware that they were actually in the way.
“Did anyone see the gunman?” Van In shouted.
Fier stared at the commissioner in surprise. In all the commotion he hadn’t thought about the killer.
Van In didn’t push the matter. “Give me your walkie-talkie, Fier.”
The order wasn’t intended to be as blunt as it sounded. Fier didn’t mind. He was more than content that someone was taking charge.
“Close off the street and start rounding up eyewitnesses inside the church. It’s warmer in there.”
“I’ll do my best, Commissioner.”
Fier scurried off. A choir of sirens in the distance announced the arrival of reinforcements. Van In glanced at his watch. It was twelve thirty, and Hannelore had jumped out of bed at twelve fifteen? The killer couldn’t have gotten far, not even in a car. He pressed the speak button on the walkie-talkie and asked for the duty officer.
The incident room was a hive of activity, with people milling around and the telephones ringing incessantly. The officer on duty, a corpulent deputy commissioner, was out of breath from all the toing and froing. Why on a Sunday, he thought, and why on my watch?
“Rocher here,” he said, ignoring the usual walkie-talkie etiquette on account of the emergency situation.
Van In said, “I want every police corps and federal brigade within a range of twenty miles placed on standby. We need as many officers on the streets as humanly possible. Try to close off the main roads and have them check every vehicle.”
The duty officer took a deep breath. His blood pressure was edging higher and higher. What’s he thinking? That I’ve got six arms? He wanted to say he was on his own, but Van In didn’t give him the chance. He broke the connection.
Hannelore was hard at work. She had wrapped herself up aga
inst the cold and was interviewing the first eyewitnesses who had assembled at the back of the church.
“He was driving a gray Toyota, ma’am,” said an elderly man who had witnessed the massacre at close quarters. He was bleeding from a wound on his forehead, which he dabbed incessantly with a cotton handkerchief. He was a war veteran and had been in worse predicaments.
“With all due respect”—a piercing female voice forced its way uninvited into the conversation—“but if you ask me it was a Ford Fiesta.”
The neatly dressed war veteran grunted. “It was gray, I’m sure of that.”
Hannelore turned and concentrated on the new witness. “Are you sure, ma’am?”
The elderly lady with peroxide blond hair nodded conclusively as she caressed her fur coat—a genuine mink that she had received as a gift from her husband after years of whining. Fortunately it had been spared in the catastrophe. A bloodstain would have been unthinkable.
“Of course I’m sure. There’s nothing wrong with my eyes. Eh, Eduard?” She cast a knowing glance in the direction of the man who had paid for the coat. Eduard had been branch manager of a major bank and had spent most of his private life playing second fiddle to his spouse, but in the circumstances he felt obliged to disagree with her observation.
“I thought it was a Renault, honey.”
The glare with which the lady treated her husband seemed just as deadly as the hail of bullets that had initiated the bloodbath. Hannelore knew from experience that people behaved strangely in extreme circumstances—but with eight corpses on the sidewalk outside, the conversation was getting a little bizarre.
Van In had harvested a healthier crop of witnesses. A young churchgoer remembered the first three numbers on the car’s license plate because they happened to be his initials. Van In scribbled the initials PVA in his notepad.
“And the make?”
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m afraid I can’t help you there. When the man started shooting, I hit the floor.”
Van In understood.
“The car was definitely gray,” said the young man when Van In asked if there was anything else he could remember.
Van In immediately sent out a description of the car and made his way to the church. Moer Street looked like something out of Dante’s Inferno. The armada of ambulances grew larger by the minute. Doctors and nurses spread out their wares: catheters, sterile compresses, syringes, ripped packaging. Swirling lights enveloped the neighborhood in a nervous blue. Van In spotted a Renault Espace parked between the ambulances and recognized the logo of the local TV station. A cameraman was checking the reserve batteries that hung from a belt around his waist, clearly aware that batteries were more precious than gold at that moment. If his camera were to lose power, his producer would have him charged with criminal negligence. And rightly so. Something like this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and soon his pictures would be transmitted all over the world. The public loved its daily portion of sensation, and he was going to provide it today.
Van In pushed open the church door. There wasn’t a trace of the devotional silence that normally filled such buildings. The nave looked as if a hurricane had just passed through. The high-backed wicker chairs typical of most Flemish churches had been thrown all over the place. People huddled together weeping, trying to console one another. Those with minor injuries waited in the aisles on stretchers and filled the church with their groans. Inspector Fier had set up an improvised crisis center in the choir area and was desperately trying to coordinate operations on a borrowed mobile phone. Van In left him to it and joined Hannelore, who was in the middle of a heated discussion with public prosecutor Beekman.
“Prosecutor Beekman,” said Van In, shaking the man’s hand, which felt clammy in spite of the cold. Beekman had been through the wars in his career, but the despair on his face was almost tangible.
“I’m happy you’re here, Pieter.”
Van In nodded. The compliment pleased him. He leaned forward and kissed Hannelore on the forehead. “Make sure you don’t catch cold,” he said.
“I told her the same,” said Beekman.
Van In realized only then that the prosecutor’s leather jacket was draped over Hannelore’s shoulders. Beekman was a modern magistrate, but deep inside he was a romantic who would have preferred to have lived at a time when savoir-vivre was more important than the inflated politenesses his function obliged him to maintain. In the company of Hannelore and Van In, he felt free to act like a normal human being.
“We have a description of the car,” said Van In. “It’s not much, but we have to start somewhere.”
Beekman nodded. He would have to speak to the press later, and he was glad to have something to tell them. “I want you to lead the investigation, Pieter. You’ve got carte blanche, and I’ll make sure you get everything you need to do your work.”
Van In didn’t argue. The fact that he was in the middle of another case was beside the point at the moment.
“I’m going to need all the help I can get, Prosecutor Beekman. And if you can throw in a miracle …” he added with a forced smile.
“We’re in the right place, Pieter. Look around you,” he said. “Saints and sinners everywhere.”
The mayor of Bruges waited patiently while a hastily procured journalist readied himself for an interview for the commercial station. The journalist happened to be in town for a tourist program he was presenting, a fortunate accident that gave him an advantage of at least three hours over the public broadcaster. The staff at VTM—the Brussels-based commercial broadcaster—were working at fever pitch to prepare an extra news transmission and were almost ready to go on air.
“I’ve just been informed that eight people are confirmed dead. Three others have been taken to Saint Jan’s Hospital in critical condition,” said the mayor, looking straight into the camera. He had learned a lot in his four years as mayor. Without the usual scrap of paper with prewritten questions, he felt like a whale in shallow waters. Fortunately this was television, and no one expected him to say anything original. The images of the bloodbath would speak for themselves.
“I understand the disaster management plan was immediately implemented,” the journalist said. “How long did it take for the emergency services to get here?”
The mayor nodded. A standard question. “The first ambulances were on the spot within five minutes.”
“On the spot” was a phrase the mayor was to use many times in the course of the day.
“We’ve had our fair share of experience with major disasters,” the mayor continued, referring to the capsizing of the MS Herald of Free Enterprise and the series of multiple collisions that had plagued the highways of West Flanders in recent years. “Our people are exceptionally well trained, and as you can see, they’re doing an excellent job.”
The interview was beginning to sound like soccer game commentary. The journalist was obliged to end it. Self-adulation was bad for audience ratings, and he had to take that into consideration. “If I’m not mistaken, the governor of West Flanders has just arrived …” The camera swerved in the direction of a farmer stuffed into a tailored suit.
While the politicians polished their images in front of the camera, Van In and Hannelore continued interviewing eyewitnesses undaunted, assisted by Fier and his men, Guido—who had heard the news via the radio—and Prosecutor Beekman. After more than four hours, during which each witness was questioned extensively, they managed to ascertain that a masked man or woman had opened fire on the churchgoers from a stationary gray car. One specific detail was intriguing. The shooter had waited until roughly thirty people had left the church before opening fire. Descriptions of the shooter ranged from heavy-built to skinny, and estimated age from twenty to fifty. Everything was carefully written down and passed on to the appropriate people but to no avail. The gray car with license plate PVA had not been spotted thus far.
“How does a cup of coffee back at my place sound?” asked Van In.
No one protested. The sacristan, who had spent the preceding half hour looking at his watch, produced his keys and hurried to the sacristy to lock up and switch off the lights.
“Glad to see the back of us,” said Inspector Fier with a grin.
A couple of officers who had already made their way to the door laughed at the double entendre. Van In waited in the nave.
The powerful halogen lamps in the vaulted ceiling went out like a row of giant candles, engulfing the church in a cheerless half-light. Van In was reminded of something he’d heard Guido say: Light needs darkness to justify its existence. In the darkness, the church was suddenly sinister and eerie. The monumental rood screen behind the altar had been reduced to a vague silhouette, and the rounded arches on either side were filled with blackness, granting access to an uncanny world. The polished floor tiles reflected the streetlight that filtered through the massive windows of the building, transforming the floor into a dismal and desolate lake. The other side, where freedom beckoned, was unreachable. Hideous monsters lurked under its treacherous surface, waiting patiently for a foot to disturb the water, then snapping in an instant and dragging their prey into the deep. As a boy, Van In had had countless dreams about being locked up in a large building, terrified to move, an unutterable menace hiding in every corner and behind every door. Even when he woke up drenched in sweat, he was afraid to move a muscle for minutes on end.
“Hey, Pieter. Are you planning to join us?” Hannelore’s sonorous voice tugged him back to reality. She walked toward him, took him by the arm, and said: “You’re not thinking of spending the night here, are you?”
Van In shook his head, and Hannelore steered him to the door. Ridiculous as it may have sounded, he was happy to be outside again.
Moer Street was deserted. Beekman had insisted the street be closed off until the forensics team had finished their work, and they still had hours to go. They had recovered fifty-six empty shells thus far. Every bullet hole was marked with chalk and photographed, as were the positions of the victims.
The Fourth Figure Page 12
