“To see you,” repeated Freddy, laughing. “But of course . . . And how long have you known her?”
The American seemed to be genuinely searching for a response to this question, but dates and days of the week, like many other things, had never been his strong point.
“You know where she lives?”
“No.”
“And can you tell me what this Natacha whom you don’t know much about was doing at your apartment, lying down with her eyes closed?”
“She was sleeping,” said the American, before releasing a nervous little laugh that led the inspector to suspect he was less stupid than he’d first seemed.
“And since when do you take photos of sleeping girls, huh?” Freddy cried, pounding his fist on the table. “It’s not already perverted enough to shoot them from behind on the street? You need more, more, more?”
The American went pale as photo paper that had been exposed to the sun.
“And who’s to tell me you didn’t drug her and rape her, then kill her and take her photo, like hunters do with the heads of their prey? Eh? Who?”
The American curled up on his chair, took his head in his hands, and started to breathe like a horse at the entrance to a slaughterhouse.
“Listen to me, American: I’m not your enemy and I’d like to believe whatever you tell me, but as long as you say nothing and we don’t find her alive, I can’t let you leave here . . . You understand what I’m saying?”
The American spread his hands and made a strange movement of his head that perplexed the inspector.
Freddy asked a security guard to make sure the American didn’t leave the room, then went back to his office. A few moments later, the ringing telephone interrupted his thoughts.
“I found some stuff on the girl, asking people in the neighborhood,” said Abdel. “Some of them recognized her face, and one woman had even seen her go into the building on 156 rue de Flandre. So I went there myself—there was no name on the doorbell, but I knocked on the super’s window and he let me in. I showed him the photo, and the guy confirmed it was one of the two students on the third floor . . . I headed up . . . there was no one there, but since it was an old door, I went ahead and pried it open without causing too much damage . . .”
“Bravo, respect for the procedure,” said Freddy. “And then?”
“I looked around a bit, and it seemed just like any other student’s apartment, with two rooms, single beds, and two desks covered with textbooks . . . Anyway, in the smaller room there was a photo of the girl, the same girl in our photo, and I told myself that it must be her room . . . You see, chief?”
“Yes, I see, Abdel . . . And then?”
“Here’s where it gets interesting! Listen . . . I dug around the room for a while and pretty soon I stumbled on this big cardboard box in her wardrobe, like a shoe box, full of money, mainly fifty-euro bills and also some hundreds . . .”
“What? But . . . how much was in there?”
“I didn’t count, chief, but I’d say there has to be at least five thousand.”
“Five thousand!”
“Yeah . . . and that’s not all. On the desk, there was a planner marked with just the names of men—around three or four per week.”
“Well, who’d have thought? The sly little thing . . .”
“And I haven’t told you the strangest part, chief! At the bottom of the box, there was an envelope full of photos showing girls from behind.”
“Girls from behind?”
“Yes, chief, girls from behind!”
“But what’s she doing with those photos at her apartment?”
“No idea . . . Either she’s the one who took them, or they’re the American’s.”
Freddy got lost in his thoughts for a few seconds, before bringing his attention back to the conversation.
“Well, and after all that, do you have any idea where she might be?”
“Hold on, chief, I haven’t finished. Just when I was about to leave, a girl came into the apartment. I surprised her and she was pretty scared. I introduced myself, and she told me that she lived there. I showed her the photo and I explained that we’re looking for this person. She said the girl’s name was Justine, that she was, in fact, her roommate, and she’d gone to Paris for a few days to visit her family . . .”
“Justine?”
“Yes, Justine, chief! Her real name! Natacha must be the name she gives to men . . .”
“Okay, I’m starting to understand . . . And then?”
“I showed her the box with the money and asked if she knew anything about it. The roommate immediately started crying, then she told me she didn’t really know what her friend was up to, but that, yes, there were often men who came over, and the money might come from that, but she didn’t know anything about it and had nothing to do with any of it.”
“And what did you do then?”
“I told her not to contact Justine under any circumstances, otherwise she’d have to deal with us. I suggest we let her take her time coming back from France, and we arrest her right when she gets off the train. According to the roommate, Justine gets in tomorrow on the 7:45.”
“Nicely done, Abdel! Prostitution, abuse of a handicapped person . . . Ah, yes, she’s going to have quite a lot to explain to us, this pretty little Frenchy.”
Freddy hung up before standing and taking a few steps toward the window, then looked down at the street. How many cases had he solved in his career? He no longer remembered exactly, but in nearly forty years in the profession, this was among the most efficiently handled ones, solved in less time than it took to type up the lousy police report.
The inspector’s watch, a gift from his wife on their twentieth anniversary, read 4:55 when he headed back to the room where the American was still under surveillance. Freddy opened the door and gazed paternally down at the little man, who was busy counting the square tiles on the wall.
“I have some good news for you and some bad news. Which would you like to hear first?”
“I don’t know,” said the American, as if he’d been asked to choose between a vanilla or chocolate ice cream cone.
“In that case, let’s start with the good news,” said Freddy. “All suspicion of murder and kidnapping has been lifted. As soon as you’ve signed your deposition, you can go home and continue with your little life in peace.”
“Really?” said the American, as if he’d heard that the dog he’d lost as a child had just been found.
“The bad news is, well, I’m afraid that your new girlfriend might be a whore. And between us—and I tell you this from my years of experience, without wanting to hurt you—I’d be shocked if that wasn’t the case.”
“A whore?”
“Yes, a whore,” said Freddy.
“Really,” said the American, as if he’d just been told there’d been a mistake, and the dog that had been found wasn’t his after all.
PART III
Room to Maneuver
In the Shadow of the Tower
BY ÉMILIE DE BÉCO
Reyers
She had grown up in the shadow of the tower. Literally. At the upper end of rue Colonel Bourg, with all the appearance of a dormitory town for miners, the two major Belgian broadcasting organizations sat at the foot of the colossal structure: Vlaamse Radio-en Televisieomroep on one side, Télévision Radio Belge Francophone on the other. A concrete nail seventy meters tall, its head thirty-four meters in diameter, the tower, now timed to light up red like a whorehouse after dark, was once just as austere as the programs it transmitted.
Schaerbeek was often described by those who loved it as the municipality that best represented the multifarious spirit of Brussels. Here, the broad avenues lined with old bourgeois houses, their window boxes filled with flowers, stood side by side with slums where the religious radicalism of the poor spread like weeds. When you mentioned that you lived in Schaerbeek, you had to say on which side.
To the west, a rotting tenement; to the east, a
mansion. Here, gobs of spit on the sidewalk; there, picturesque cobblestones.
As for Lydie’s neighborhood, it was just plain ugly, much like most of the 1990s in Belgium, a time when the streets and the culture were brimming with corduroy, tassel loafers, athletic socks, and, of course, tinted glasses, which would soon become a rallying sign for the biggest local stars: pedophiles.
On August 15, 1996, the nation witnessed the liberation—practically in real time—of Sabine Dardenne (twelve, close-cropped hair, terrorized) and Laetitia Delhez (fourteen, shoulder-length hair, in tears) from a makeshift dungeon in a house in Marcinelle.
This was how Belgium came to know its public enemy number one: the predator Marc Dutroux, forty years old, mustached, greasy-haired, sporting his famous glasses.
First came fear, followed soon by anger. Then revenge. On Dutroux, certainly, but on all the others too: the perverted schoolteachers, the abusive vicars, the “borderline” camp counselors and lecherous sports coaches; and on all those not-quite-normal men, about whom one had always known, always felt, or suspected; that look of his, the way he spoke . . .
The people wanted to take over for the police, as well as for the judge and jury, to correct the authorities’ mistakes by whatever means necessary, acting only as citizens whose hands are not tied by any professional code of ethics can.
Soon the press joined the wolf pack, publishing daily photos of presumed sex offenders along with details as to their whereabouts, doing its part to help the burgeoning executioners to carry out their work.
* * *
It was in this context that one day—it was a Wednesday afternoon—the five o’clock news team from the TRBF walked down three flights of stairs, across a hallway, and past the guardroom, tangling equipment cables in the revolving door, and made their way on foot—a rare occurrence—until they arrived at no. 33, rue Colonel Bourg. A yellow house, its roughcast walls flaking, its windows smudged with the wet noseprints of a dog. It was Lydie who opened the door. She hadn’t looked through the peephole; she was expecting a visit from her best friend Véronique, whose parents allowed her to run about the neighborhood in spite of recent events and her being only six years old. It must be said that these people were living more or less in poverty.
Lydie would long remember the affable smile on the face of this very tall, very handsome man, wearing a tie with a Provençal pattern, a microphone in hand, all set to record, this man who had stroked her head and asked her if her papa was at home.
He was. Unemployed ever since the automobile factory had closed, he spent his days watching cartoons. With his daughter if she was at home, otherwise alone.
He dragged himself off the couch, his T-shirt covered in crumbs, his pants smudged with stains, his hair matted and sweaty, his face sallow with boredom and the alcohol that was eating away at his liver. This was how he appeared to all of Belgium on the five o’clock news: as a presumed sex offender, just one name on a list sent anonymously to the media; the only one to have the honor of a visit from the TRBF, simply because he lived nearby. Jean-Marc Peereman slammed the door as soon as the reason for the visit was announced. The journalist, Claverie, went on to comment on this reaction—a revealing one, to his mind—for a solid minute and a half.
At the end of Claverie’s report, he reminded his viewers that the case in question had yet to be officially filed, but it was too late: Peereman looked the part and, in the public mind, immediately became a child rapist, a monster to be abhorred, who deserved to have his house stoned and shit left on his doorstep.
Jean-Marc Peereman was quickly, but perhaps too ambivalently, redeemed to the public. The actual criminal’s name, as it turned out, was a near-homonym—Peeremans, with an s. A nineteen-second correction on the next morning’s news, rattled off between soccer scores and a report on protesting dairy farmers. Never look back, always ahead, was the “law of the airwaves” that had been declared by the newsroom’s editor-in-chief. With an air of seriousness, Claverie briefly presented the photo of Lydie’s father, offering his apologies on behalf of the news staff. Then: “Moving on, the mad cow disease crisis: should we or shouldn’t we buy meat at the supermarket?” For the viewers, however, there was no smoke without a fire, and they planned to hang the bastard. Out of distraction or laziness, the newspapers and radio broadcasters failed to relay the correction, leaving the public to believe that a case was still open. The harassment continued, reaching its height on the day when Peereman found his door vandalized with bold spray-painted letters announcing to the neighborhood: Get fucked here.
Six months later, Jean-Marc Peereman committed suicide. Hanged himself in the stairwell, leaving no note, one cold, gray morning.
Eighteen years later
Lydie had struggled to complete her studies. She’d repeated a year twice, taking seven to earn her degree in journalism from the Université libre de Bruxelles. That had given her plenty of time to explore the hereditary dimension of alcoholism: her fellow students nicknamed her Sterfput, “the drain.” But perhaps for reasons other than her thirst for booze.
As her teaching assistant often gushed, Lydie was truly “made for television.” She spoke well, she wrote well, she had “everything going for her,” but never managed to remember the ownership structures and cross-interests of the Belgian and international media. This subject matter was not concrete enough, in her view. But Lydie was a hard worker. Watching her grow exhausted from studying into the small hours night after night, her instructors had tried to dissuade her from pursuing this path—With journalism, you either have it in your blood or you don’t, they said. You have the gift, the knack, the thing, or you don’t.
Lydie had always politely deflected their attempts to push her toward publicity or public relations. She would be a journalist or nothing at all. It was her guiding force, her calling.
She had found her path in life very early, as a little girl, and ever since the first grade she’d written the word journalist next to the phrase, What I want to be when I grow up, on the worksheets the students had to fill in each year.
But once she’d earned her diploma, she hadn’t sent out a single résumé. She had waited. Patiently. A month went by, then two, three. It would eventually be time for the recruitment test given by the TRBF, an open exam the public broadcasting organization was obliged to hold at regular intervals.
In the meantime, she studied. She read the papers, listened to the radio, watched TV. She watched him. Daniel Claverie, still very handsome, his teeth so white, so personable, so kind. He no longer dirtied his hands with on-the-ground reporting; he hosted the evening news on the main public channel. The viewers adored him. He always came out on top in the yearly rankings of anchors preferred by Francophone Belgians. Among his qualities, according to the viewers: “his seriousness,” “his empathy,” “his calm strength,” “his credibility.”
Claverie was a gentleman who always took the time to give autographs to those who recognized him in the line at Delhaize; he ran a 20k race to help raise money for cancer research, he donated blood and plasma, and he was publicly outraged over the deafening silence surrounding the plight of Somalian children facing famine once again. An all-around good guy, this Claverie.
Lydie had already spoken to him once, during a job visit organized by her university. He was the only person who had deigned to answer her questions when they checked out the editing room, explaining, among other things, what “that button, there” did. Lydie couldn’t help but recognize that Daniel was a charming man, a model of the perfect son-in-law or older brother.
She couldn’t wait to meet him again.
* * *
Five hundred hopefuls sat in the lecture hall at the Université libre de Bruxelles, filling in multiple-choice questions, one Sunday morning in December. At last, the recruitment exam for the TRBF. The test of general culture covered the last two centuries of Belgian history; it was wiser to leave an answer blank than to guess incorrectly. She had crammed. Knew the Red Devils and
the Mad Killers of Brabant like the back of her hand, knew the ratio of Flemish speakers to Francophones in Brussels, could cite the federal state debt to the nearest euro, and remembered the exact name of the law regulating the private security service sector in Belgium.
Lydie was the last to exit the room. Nothing could be left to chance, and nothing was. She received her score a week later: 66 out of 100, an honorable performance. The ticket, in any case, to the second phase of recruitment: the jury.
Twelve journalists licensed by the organization bombarded her with questions, assuming a professional track record she obviously didn’t have, fresh out of school as she was.
“You run into King Albert II in the elevator, what do you do?”
“How far along is the RER project in Walloon Brabant?”
“Give me five ideas for news stories that come to mind when I say the word slagheap . . .”
She had tried her best to respond articulately, like a trained chimpanzee, though she was certain that these questions had nothing to do with the reality of the field—she held back the fire ready to flare from her nostrils.
Only the amiable Daniel Claverie had shown a hint of kindness. She had immediately felt, upon walking into the room, that she would be able to make an ally of him. In a smooth voice, he asked her, “Deep down, why do you wish to pursue this difficult profession, mademoiselle?”
Lydie didn’t have to think for very long. “You might find me a bit sentimental, but I truly believe that only honest, thorough, impartial, high-quality reporting is capable of preventing—even repairing—injustice, in the broadest sense of the word.”
Two or three hotshot reporters snickered, but her response had hit home with most of the jurors—she was accepted, congratulations.
* * *
The 7 and 25 tram lines stop just beneath the TRBF headquarters, at Diamant, one of the least-scintillating public transport stations in all of Brussels. Its walls are a dirty white and grayish yellow, its platforms lined with trash cans constantly overflowing with old chewing gum and apple cores. A perfect incubator for cynicism. Waiting ten minutes for the tram there is already depressing; to be stuck for an hour is close to torture.
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