I would have loved to spend an hour or two looking through the shelves, where Audre Lorde’s poetry rubbed challengingly up against that of Elizabeth Bishop’s, where Lillian Hellman duked it out with Diana Trilling, and Simone de Beauvoir reminisced in fat volumes and Colette in slender ones. Shelves where women at first shyly and then more and more vehemently confessed their deepest feelings. Shelves of political tracts and shelves of oddities. Shelves where I might find first editions of Tommy Price’s wonderful old travel books. However, I remembered that I’d told Rachel I’d try to call her this evening with news.
I took out a few receipts and placed them on the cluttered desk in front of the bookseller. She was a compact, solid woman in her forties, dressed in a striped shirt and khaki trousers. She had a shrewd, amused look that was not particular to her but to her countrymen and women. I had often felt the Dutch were having a quiet joke at my expense.
“Ah,” she said. “Then something has happened to Abby.”
“You knew her then?”
“Knew…yes. Oh, yes.”
“I’m sorry to tell you—she was killed in a car accident.”
“A car accident?”
“Someone in a Fiat hit her outside the Gare Midi two days ago, around five in the afternoon. They didn’t stick around.”
The solid woman looked down. I couldn’t see her expression. “And these?”
“It looks like she had recently been buying books or something from you.”
“Books? From me?”
“It says Antikvaariat Sophie at the top of these receipts, doesn’t it? And you do sell books, as anyone can see.”
“Well, I try to sell books. Sometimes I do; very often I don’t.”
I was finding this frustrating. “Look, did Abby buy things from you, things that were valuable? Things that would be worth a lot to her partner Rachel? Because everything is going to go to Abby’s brother otherwise. Rachel isn’t family; she can’t inherit Abby’s estate in Belgium.”
“Shall we start over?” the woman asked when I ran out of steam. She got up and went to the street door, locked it, and pulled down the Closed sign. “My name is Anja,” she said, coming back toward me with her hand stretched out. “And your news is nothing I like to hear.”
I saw that there were tears in her eyes.
Anja said they had been acquaintances for about a year, ever since Abby had walked into her shop one rainy day and started talking books. They both had a passion for them, especially the work of the underrecognized women modernists of the early twentieth century.
“But these couldn’t have been what Abby bought from you. She had a complete collection. She’d been building it for years.”
“You keep assuming that Abby bought from me,” said Anja. “And she did, a bit, but just to show that she appreciated what I was doing. She’d been in bookselling, so she knew its difficulties. Mostly,” Anja looked down at the papers on the desk, “I bought from her. That’s what those receipts mean.”
“But the receipts are for the equivalent of hundreds of dollars.” I looked around. “I don’t mean to be offensive, but you look like you’re barely hanging on.”
“Women’s literature doesn’t sell the way one would wish,” Anja agreed.
“Then how…”
“I was the middleman. I bought on behalf of someone else.”
“A library, a private collector?”
“Look,” said Anja. “It wasn’t quite on the up-and-up—as you say—what we were doing.”
I waited.
“You know, I didn’t have lunch today,” said Anja. “Just forgot about it. I was going to close early anyway and get a bite. Perhaps you’ll join me?” said Anja.
She locked the shop behind us and we walked to a place a block or two away. Anja had recovered from the shock of hearing about Abby, and we let the conversation slip to lighter subjects, to Anja taking up karate again after some years respite, and to my friend Eloise, whom she knew. The disloyal thought went through my head that I could see why Abby might come to Amsterdam to see Anja. She didn’t have the beauty of Rachel, but she didn’t have her dependency either. Not that Abby had ever said in so many words that Rachel was too much for her; the nearest she’d come during a recent visit was to say that both of them had had a hard time adjusting to Belgium, and that Rachel especially seemed lonely.
We ordered sandwiches. I had a coffee, Anja a small glass of Dutch gin, genever, and a beer. It had begun to rain, and the afternoon had become dark and drawn-in. The little bar itself was dark too, one of those places the Dutch call the brown cafes. We could have been in the eighteenth century, looking through the small-paned windows onto the canal, the carpeted table between us.
It wasn’t until we were settled that Anja began to speak again. “How much do you know about her aunt? The one she inherited from?”
“Almost nothing. One day Abby was living an ordinary life in London, working in a bookstore, scrabbling to make the rent, and the next she was living in Brussels in an expensive flat with no visible means of support.”
“Her aunt was named Amanda Lowe. She came over to Europe as a nurse during the last war and married one of her patients, a rich Belgian. This aunt made over her flat to Abby before she died, with the provision that Abby live there and keep it up. But she didn’t leave Abby any money. Perhaps she meant to, but died before she could manage it. The money went automatically to Abby’s brother.”
“A beautiful flat but no money to live there. Is that why Abby was selling off her books and manuscripts?”
“Yes. Although I believe she was trying to work out some agreement with her brother, and he was being difficult. I don’t know exactly. We didn’t discuss that.”
“And meanwhile Abby still had to live,” I said and, guessing, “Was there something that her aunt had that was a secret, that was valuable, that could be sold?”
“Exactly.”
“But what was it?”
There was another pause, while Anja took a bite of the sandwich in front of her.
“This aunt,” she finally said. “Amanda Lowe. Later Madame Leconte. She was an interesting woman. Before she came to Europe and all that, before she was in the war and married this Belgian man, she had led a different life. Almost been another person, so to speak.”
“Go on.” It was raining harder now, and I could see people scuttling down the street and across the bridge with umbrellas pulled down over their heads like black crows’ wings.
“She lived in Greenwich Village for a time. She had some friends, all girls. Girls she had been to college with in the 1920s. I think Amanda fancied herself something of a writer. She wrote stories and reviews in the 1930s for several journals, and she started novels that she didn’t finish. They’re about love between women. Very interesting. But unfortunately not very good.”
“Manuscripts?” I said. “Abby was selling her aunt’s manuscripts?”
“Not quite. I’m afraid they would be worth very little, though gay scholars would find them interesting. However there was also some correspondence with several of her past lovers, and that correspondence is worth a great deal, because some of it is with…” and here Anja, in a lowered voice, mentioned one of the best known writers of the twentieth century.
“But she’s not a…”
“Precisely.”
We sat in silence for a while. Anja had another beer. I had another coffee. The rain came down.
I finally asked. “Why did you ask immediately if something had happened to Abby.”
“Did I?”
“Why should you have thought that something had happened to her?”
“I don’t know. You looked so serious I guess. That’s all. I thought the worst. Most people think the worst, don’t they?”
I thought about this. “The Dutch often do, I’ve noticed.”
Anja smiled, but in something of a strained manner. “Did Rachel send you to Amsterdam to find me?”
“Yes.”
&nb
sp; Anja nodded. “I thought Abby must have mentioned something, though she said she wanted to keep it all confidential.”
I was about to say, Rachel doesn’t seem to know anything, but I held my tongue. All of a sudden I didn’t know what Rachel had known or hadn’t known. I was equally unsure about Anja. Had there been something more between Anja and Abby than it appeared? Had they been lovers?
Anja drank her beer and seemed thoughtful, “It was a sweet tale, wasn’t it? Rachel leaving her husband the doctor for Abby, leaving her beautiful home, her friends. Rachel was one of those women who haven’t a clue they’re lesbian and then suddenly, it hits them and they’re completely changed.”
I sat listening to Anja tell the story I’d heard before from Abby. How Rachel had come to London with her husband and had stopped at a crowded pub across from the British Museum. How Abby happened to be there too and offered Rachel a chair. How the next thing they knew they were wandering the streets at midnight and fireworks were going off somewhere. I was listening, thinking, and staring absently through the cafe’s windows when I imagined that I saw a familiar figure—something in the flicker of cloth beneath a raincoat, the set of the head—slip around the corner opposite us.
But why would Rachel, if it were Rachel, have followed us to this cafe? Why would she have sent me to Amsterdam and then followed me herself?
“A sweet tale,” Anja repeated. “But they had to live in the real world. It was Rachel who insisted that they move to Brussels. A beautiful flat full of antiques, no rent to pay; it must have seemed ideal compared to their one-bedroom flat in Stoke Newington. But neither of them liked Brussels, and it was Abby who had to figure out how to support Rachel.”
The figure was gone. I was sure I’d imagined it. On a dark afternoon, one raincoat looked pretty much like another. I turned my attention back to Anja, who was finishing up with, “She loved Rachel, it wasn’t that, but Abby was never a one-woman woman. It didn’t suit her. Rachel was jealous. I think Abby may have had someone in London. She was always going over to London to see her.”
“And you and Abby…?”
“Oh heavens, no.” But Anja blushed.
“Why did she tell you so much?”
For the first time, Anja looked abashed. “I suppose I’ve been talking too much. The shock and everything.”
“She must have trusted you to tell you about her aunt and Rachel and everything,” I said. But I thought, with pain now that Abby was dead, Why didn’t Abby ever tell me this?
“That’s strange,” said Anja, when we got back to the shop. “I could swear I locked the door when we left.”
For there were two customers inside, browsing around the shelves. Anja gave a quick look at her desk and cash box. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. Her face returned to its equable expression, and she spoke pleasantly in Dutch to her customers, who answered her in German.
But I remembered the figure in the raincoat outside the brown cafe, and for the first time a little shiver of doubt passed through my mind about Rachel. A hit-and-run outside the Gare Midi. Happens all the time. Who had been running and why?
When I called Rachel in Brussels, she wasn’t there, but I left a message that I needed a little more time in Amsterdam and that I would see her tomorrow. I wasn’t sure why, but the idea of spending the night in that luxurious flat with Rachel seemed less than appealing.
I went back to the Hotel Virginia. In the dining area, the breakfast tables were pushed to the wall and Joke was practicing some incredible contortions on a mat on the floor.
“Come on down, Cassandra. Let me teach you a few tricks.”
Some tricks I’m never too old for, but I didn’t think that was what Joke had in mind. Fortunately Eloise wafted in at that moment with a pot of tea and cups on a tray. She looked as benevolent and tousled as she usually did, as if she’d just awoken from a long and particularly pleasant nap, but I knew that she’d been up since five, dealing with breakfasts and check-outs, supervising the cleaning of the rooms, dealing with reservations, shopping, and welcoming new guests.
I asked Eloise if she knew Anja.
“Not well, but yes. I’ve found absolutely incredible books on her shelves and the prices are reasonable. It’s too bad the shop doesn’t do better. Recently she told me she might have to close it if things didn’t improve.”
As we had our tea, I told her, as briefly as I could, about Abby selling her aunt’s correspondence, the love letters between Amanda Lowe and the woman who’d won the Pulitzer and had often been mentioned in connection with the Nobel.
“But she’s not a…well!”
We looked at each other and shook our heads.
“I don’t understand this constant preoccupation with who is and who isn’t,” complained Joke from a position resembling a tangled phone cord. “Who the hell cares?”
“Only literary scholars, dear Joke,” said Eloise. “They love to pry open closets. More fodder for dissertations.”
For myself, I’d often found it a bittersweet pleasure to read biographies of famous men and women who had spent so much of their life’s energy keeping their love affairs with members of the same sex quiet. They were entitled to their privacy, but we who are openly gay also have, if not a right, then a great longing and need not to feel as lonely as we have sometimes.
“But who did Anja sell the papers to, I wonder?” asked Eloise. “A private collector? A university? Some special collection? And why did Abby choose Anja?”
“I imagine she thought going through Anja would be more discreet than using her contacts in London. Anja said what they were doing wasn’t on the up and up, but there’s nothing illegal about selling manuscripts.”
“And so far it’s not illegal to out famous people.”
“So it must have had something to do with the estate. Abby wasn’t supposed to sell anything in the flat perhaps, including old letters.”
“I still have academic friends,” Eloise. “I’ll see what I can find out. I wonder,” she stopped as she was getting up and looked at me. “Could there be something more to all this than a hit-and-run?”
“You’re not thinking there’s something suspicious about Abby’s death, are you?”
But Eloise was already out the door. From the floor, Joke said, “I would say that’s exactly what Eloise is thinking. And maybe you should be too.”
The next morning I took an early train to Brussels, which gave me plenty of time to consider what I’d gotten myself into. Had my friend been murdered by her lover Rachel? Why? And what was Anja’s involvement? Why had she assumed that something had happened to Abby? To whom was Anja selling the correspondence, and for how much? What had happened to that money?
I got off at the Gare Midi and had a look around. Although the streets surrounding it were a bit grimy, the station itself had been renovated inside and had plenty of passengers. Someone must have seen something. I went back outside and talked to the taxi drivers. I asked them if they’d heard about the hit-and-run the previous week.
“Oh yes,” they remembered it (“Horrible.”); that is, they’d heard about it; well, none of them had actually witnessed it. But Paul had, and he had an afternoon shift today. If I came back around two or three, I could surely talk with him.
“You’re from the insurance, aren’t you?” said one cabby wisely, and I didn’t dissuade him.
Next I went to the local police station and was shuffled around to various desks until the inspector in charge of the case turned up and led me into his office. I introduced myself this time as an American journalist, which flummoxed him slightly.
“I assure you, Madame,” he said, “that we have done everything in our power to locate the driver and the car. But it was twilight, the worst time for identifying anything, and it was raining hard and the license plate was covered with mud.” He paused. “This woman was important in America?”
“Très importante,” I said, and thought, To her friends.
When I arrived at the apartm
ent off the Avenue Louise around noon, I found Thomas, Abby’s older brother, there. In early years Abby had talked about him sarcastically; in later years not much at all. I couldn’t remember what he did for a living, only that when they’d been growing up he’d called Abby Butt-Face. And there was something about their father’s business being a problem between them. I couldn’t recall the details, only that Abby, much like I had, had left home at an early age when it came out she was a lesbian.
He didn’t look at all like Abby. He was about fifty and plump, with a bald head fringed with seaweed-black hair and sarcastic furrows on either side of his bitten-in lips.
He hardly acknowledged me as Rachel let me in, but continued circumnavigating the room with a long list that was presumably the inventory from the security box. Occasionally he would bark a question at Rachel, but mostly he ignored her, much as if she’d been the charwoman.
Rachel appeared groggy and anxious at the same time, as if whatever pills she’d taken to sleep had dulled her wits without bringing her rest. She was still in her bathrobe.
“How did it go in Amsterdam?” she asked eagerly, but in a low voice. “Did you find the bookshop? Did you find what Abby might have been buying?”
“A woman called Anja runs it. I had a drink and a chat with her. Did Abby ever mention her?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But clearly she went to Amsterdam about a half a dozen times over the past year. Didn’t you ask her what she was doing there, who she was seeing?”
“I just thought she was restless, just like I was. In Amsterdam she could talk English, feel freer than here.”
“But you didn’t go with her?”
“No. She…didn’t want me to come.”
“Just like she didn’t want you to come to London?”
“No,” Rachel whispered.
She looked pretty miserable. But I hardened my heart against her, remembering, the inspector’s words, “It was twilight; it was raining. The car had mud on its license plate.”
“Where was Abby returning from that night she was at the train station?”
Rachel jumped.
“Or was she going off somewhere?” I continued casually.
The Death of a Much Travelled Woman Page 16
