The eye of God?
Yes.
The Catholic Church?
The Archdiocese of Poznań, yes.
Émile Brunfaut moaned.
What’s wrong? Philippe said.
My spleen, Brunfaut said.
The fact that the cover-up of the murder in Hotel Atlas didn’t just go back to a Belgian public prosecutor, but involved N.A.T.O. somehow, meant the case really was “too big” for Émile Brunfaut. Let’s forget it, he had said to Philippe. I can’t forget it, Philippe had said, but I won’t do any more.
We’re going to leave it alone now, Émile said.
Yes, we’re going to leave it alone! When are you getting out of hospital? Next Sunday at three we’re playing against Bruges.
We’ve got to be there.
We will be there!
In the weeks that followed, Émile Brunfaut focused on his health. This meant that whenever he smoked he did it with a bad conscience, and only rarely drank his Duvel followed by glass after glass of his beloved rosé. He did, however, axe the Mort Subite altogether, and he cut off all visible fat from whatever he was eating and pushed it to the side of his plate. He eyed his frites suspiciously before “just having a taste” and eating only two-thirds of the portion, and the moules were practically all protein. He did walk more than before, although after three weeks he went back to his old habits, interpreting the feeling of liberation and the pleasure he experienced as clear symptoms of his recovery. He reported for work again and was given back his police badge, his computer and a mountain of bureaucratic work. There were more reports than dead bodies and that was fine by Inspector Brunfaut, who was calmly cheerful about it. Maigret popped into his office and engaged in some abstruse small talk to see if Brunfaut really had forgotten the murder in Hotel Atlas. But how can you see if someone has forgotten something without reminding them of it? The inspector was so amused by Maigret’s naivety that he saw it as definitive proof that he was back to his old self. No, he wasn’t going to go near the case anymore.
Except he couldn’t entirely leave it alone.
N.A.T.O., though – that was too much for him to handle. And in any case he wouldn’t have known how to embark on an investigation like this, no matter how circumspectly. He did, however, have the name of the victim, his three names in fact, for three different passports had been found in the hotel room. As soon as he had been assigned the case, Brunfaut had jotted these names down in his notebook. And that hadn’t vanished – you couldn’t delete a notebook. Also on his mind was the question of what the Catholic Church or one of its dioceses might have to do with the case. He got no further with the names; none of the three was on a police database nor even on a civilian register anywhere in Europe. Which could only mean that all three passports were forged. For Brunfaut and the means at his disposal, this represented a dead end. And what about the involvement of the Arch-diocese of Poznań? In the notes he made he kept writing VAT as an abbreviation for Vatican, because he couldn’t imagine a Catholic bishopric cooperating with intelligence services without the Vatican’s knowledge. He could only speculate. So he hadn’t lied when he emphasised to Philippe and, more importantly, Maigret that he was leaving the case alone. After all, he was merely staring at empty boxes like a complex Sudoku puzzle he couldn’t solve.
He was all the more surprised, therefore, when out of the blue Philippe told him to come to the cemetery to discuss the matter. He must have been tacitly fishing around the case too and now had something on the end of his line.
When Brunfaut eventually got to the Mur des Fusillés he looked around for the bench where Philippe and “his friend” were supposed to be waiting. But there was no bench. Not in front of this huge monument “AUX VICTIMES INNOCENTES DE LA FURIE TEUTONNE”. Behind it, perhaps, on the other side? Or to the side? Or had Philippe meant another bench? He saw the field with the endless white crosses. Not that he’d never seen a military cemetery before, but for the first time he was shocked that he . . . that he found it beautiful. He stood there, took some deep breaths and found this large, hedge-lined square with its identical white crosses beautiful. After all the grave mounds, grave slabs, gravestones, crypts, mausoleums, chapels with which the dead or their descendants sought to outdo everyone else, after all the statues of weeping putti, weeping angels, weeping mothers, in granite, in marble, in bronze and in stainless steel, after all the sprawling, creeping, climbing plants, after all the restlessness in the field of eternal rest, here it was peaceful at least. Sheer optical peace. He found it beautiful in a radically aesthetic sense, as if this part of the cemetery were an installation, the project of an artist working with the stylistic idiom of peace, liberated from any meaning. Each time he took a step to the left or a step to the right new views emerged, new lines, diagonals, alignments. How clever, he thought: alignments. Changing alignments, but the perspective was always pointing in the same direction, to eternity. Eternity was everywhere, as was – ultimately – the liberation from sense and meaning. In order to honour these destinies every distinct destiny was extinguished; in commemoration of the sacrifices made they had sacrificed the idea that each individual life was unique and irrecoverable. There was only form, symmetry, harmony. Integration into an aesthetic picture. In death there was no resistance at all. Brunfaut was horrified because he, the sweating, panting, stinking creature, found this beautiful. Not good. Beautiful.
But where was Philippe? Standing next to the memorial, Brunfaut looked about him. All of a sudden he saw a pig break through a hedge and begin to root amongst the white crosses. The pig! It kept sticking its snout into the ground, boring down, scraping with its hooves. It backed into a cross, making it crooked, the pig kept digging and rooting, and the cross slowly began to tip over. Inspector Brunfaut, who throughout the course of his professional career had never encountered armed men, but had trained for such a scenario in simulation exercises, felt an unfamiliar fear and helplessness in the presence of this animal. He didn’t know what to do. His rational side told him to approach the pig as if to apprehend it. How ridiculous! His instinct was to run away. A policeman run away from a pig? Whatever Brunfaut actually did at that moment – later he was unable to remember – whether he took one or two steps forwards, or retreated a couple of steps, or both, an indecisive back-and-forth, the pig raised its head, made a terrible sound and scurried away, an animalistic force, in a dead straight line diagonally across the field of harmonious symmetry. With a groan, Brunfaut realised that he was on his backside. He was sitting on the path, one hand clutching his damp handkerchief, the other digging into the gravel. His palms were grazed and he could feel a stabbing from his coccyx up to his back. And the wind blew across the graves.
Back in the hotel Professor Erhart took a shower, then put on a fresh shirt and a light suit of blue linen. He looked in the mirror: European blue. He smiled to himself. Pure coincidence! He decided against a tie.
Then he took the folder with his speech from his briefcase. The buckle straps were cracked and he made a mental note to rub in some dubbin when he got home. Beside the bed was a chair, essentially just a seat, not padded, covered with red Nappa leather. Erhart sat down and put his feet on the bed.
It was uncomfortable and claustrophobic. With difficulty he heaved himself out of this half egg and sat on the bed. He wanted to go through his speech one more time before leaving for the meeting. He had written it in English, and although his English was excellent after visiting professorships many years earlier at the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago, he’d had it checked over by an English professor friend of his.
Are you really going to give this speech?
Yes.
What I’d give to be there!
Erhart quietly recited his speech at the speed he intended to deliver it, and timed it on his smartphone. Seventeen minutes. Two minutes too long. But what did that matter; his life was at stake. That was melodramatic. He wondered what was wrong with him. He felt as if he had fallen out of ti
me. He sat on the bed, the pages of his lecture on his lap, and stared at the gloomy brown wallpaperof the hotel room. Why were they now coming into his head, these foreign words, words foreign to him. With a pang of emotion he recalled words his mother had explained to him when he’d read them in a book and hadn’t understood: improvident, behove, apothecary, asunder, game . . .
Mama, it says here: The poachers slipped into the forest under cover of darkness in search of some game. I don’t understand.
You know what poachers are! People who hunt illegally.
Yes, I know that, but: in search of some game. Does that mean they were going to play something at night in the forest?
No, game are the wild animals that are hunted and eaten.
He had sat there for a long time, astonished and unsettled that killing could be some kind of game.
Professor Erhart pulled himself together and set off for the meeting.
Nine
La fin, un prolongement du présent –
nous-mêmes une condition préalable du passé.
THE PIG WAS captured by one of the Sheraton Brussels Hotel’s security cameras on place Charles Rogier, a short sequence showing the pig entering the frame slowly, its head raised, as if it were out for a pleasant stroll and breathing in the early summer air, one passer-by leaps to the side, others stop in amazement, some take out their mobile phones to film the pig and then it is already out of the picture. This video was uploaded to YouTube with the title “Aankomst van een afgevaardigde op de conferentie van de dieren” by a user calling themselves Zinneke. There was an enquiry at the Sheraton to discover which of the security personnel, who had access to the saved footage from the security cameras, this Zinneke was. The hotel manager was concerned about the damage to the hotel’s reputation if a video of a pig running free outside the Sheraton went viral. But there was no damage; on the contrary. The film was shared on Facebook and before long had been viewed 30,000 times. Metro was now able to publish a photograph of the pig, after which more images were leaked to the paper from the Carrefour security cameras in chaussée de Louvain, the post office in avenue de la Brabançonne and the Austrian embassy in rue Kortenberg. All the images were so blurred or shaky that Professor Kurt van der Koot, who had now secured a regular column in Metro, was unable to say with absolute certainty if it was the same pig or a different one. A horde of pigs, he thought, would make people feel uneasy, whereas they’d be touched by the thought of a lone pig wandering through Brussels – it would stir in them an almost childish fondness for animals, it was the stuff of legend. And so, only five days after the publication of the first video on YouTube, he launched a campaign in Metro: “Brussels has a pig! What should we call it?” Suggestions to be sent to the editor within the next three weeks. Professor van der Koot bridged the intervening time with his series “The pig as a universal metaphor”. In daily articles he wrote about the range of things the pig had been made to act as symbol for: good and evil, fortune and disaster, sentimental love, contempt and deep-seated hatred, eroticism and wickedness. It was the only animal which as a metaphor covered the entire breadth of human emotions and philosophies, from the pig in clover to the filthy pig, from being “piggy in the middle” to “a greedy piglet”. He even ventured into the political realm and discussed the concepts of the “Jewish pig” and “Nazi swine”, before moving on to the pig as forbidden meat in some religions and the much-loved Babe, Peppa Pig and the Three Little Pigs. His series became a huge success, not least thanks to its illustrations: photographs of cute little pigs, facsimiles of old caricatures depicting emperors, generals and presidents as pigs, reproductions of paintings showing the pig in art (an illustration by Tomi Ungerer showing a mother sow reading her piglets a fairy tale: “Once upon a time there was a butcher . . .”), figurines and trinkets, from piggy banks to pig cooks, from the hunted to the hunter, and photographs of everyday objects: van der Koot himself had learned to his astonishment that there was barely an item of everyday use that had not at some point assumed the form of a pig: beer tankards, salt cellars, slippers, caps, even toasters . . .
The editorial team appointed a jury of prominent figures who were to compile a longlist from the submissions, and then a shortlist from which they would select the winning name. On the jury were: the folk singer Barthold Gabalier; the actress Sandra Vallée; the professional footballer and champion goalie from the Jupiler Pro League, Jaap Mulder; the widow of the former mayor of Brussels, Daniela Collier; the cartoonist Roger Lafarge, who had been under police protection ever since his Muhammad caricatures; the writer and Brussels chronicler, Geert van Istendael; the two-star chef Kim King, maître de cuisine in “Le Cochon d’Or”; and the artist Wim Delvoye, known for tattooing his pictures on pigs. Chairman and spokesman of the jury was, of course, none other than university professor Kurt van der Koot.
Romolo Strozzi was virtually unflappable. Things that might take other people by surprise elicited from him no more than a wry smile. What could possibly astound the man to whom nothing was unfamiliar? Personally he’d had a rich and varied life, and what he hadn’t encountered himself had been passed down to him by his family and forefathers as a treasure trove of experience. Besides, he was extremely well read. And in the field he cultivated professionally he knew every grain, every stone and every weed. He’d had to smirk discreetly when that Fenia Xenopoulou had quoted the president’s favourite book out of the blue, trying hard to be casual, but there was no doubt it was a deliberate tactic. It showed that she had prepared with a considerable degree of neurotic energy. But it had failed to take him off-guard. He knew people would try everything possible, but her attack had missed its target. Did she really think that he would go and tell the president: By the way, this Madame Xenopoulou’s favourite novel is the same as yours, Monsieur le Président? Did she really believe that this would give her an advantage?
He sat down at a table outside Café Franklin on the corner of rue Franklin and rue Archimède, on the shaded Archimède side. It was a hot day and he fancied a cigarette while he waited for Attila Hidekuti, chief of protocol of the president of the European Council. He needed an informal chat about Madame Xenopoulou and her soi-disant Jubilee Project.
All of a sudden there was a huge pig standing before him. A person in a grotesque full-body, pink-polyester pig costume, holding a stick to which a placard was affixed. The pig leaned the placard against the wall of the café, sat at the neighbouring table and removed his head – that’s to say, his pig’s head – to reveal a red face dripping with sweat, wet blond hair sticking to his scalp. The man was roughly Strozzi’s age. He wiped his face several times with his pink polyester sleeve and said to the waitress, who had just appeared with Strozzi’s coffee, A beer, please!
Are you shocked? I don’t blame you, he said, turning to Strozzi. Please don’t scoff, I’ve been unemployed for months. It’s difficult at my age. In the end I stood outside the stock market on boulevard Anspach with a sign that said: “I’ll take any work!” Then I got this job. Carrying a placard around. Wandering the streets of the European Quarter in a pig costume. Advertising, he said, wiping his face again.
Strozzi turned to read the sign:
Van Kampen’s the Butcher
Finest meat!
Best sausages!
Telephone to order
(Please note our new number . . .)
Lots of people laugh. Some ask, how can you do it? Why is it so hard to imagine what people will do for money these days? Do you think it’s any fun, wearing this costume in this heat?
Strozzi took out his wallet, the waitress brought the man’s beer, smiled and asked him, Anything with that? Corn on the cob, perhaps?
Strozzi put a five-euro note on the table and left. On the other side of the street he texted Attila: Not in Franklin! I’m in Kitty O’Shea’s, blvd Charlemagne.
He stood in his socks and underpants on the small balcony, carefully brushing his suit. On these warm, dry days the gravel paths in the cemetery were
very dusty; each step between the rows of the dead threw up dust that crept up his trouser legs and got caught in the fibres of his jacket. David de Vriend treated his clothes with great care. When he had returned to life, after the liberation, he had set great store by good suits tailored from top-quality material. Although he had never enjoyed a large income as a teacher, eventually he earned enough to order bespoke suits rather than buying them off the peg. He brushed and thought of bread. Why was he thinking of bread? He brushed carefully and patiently, he was happy with the clothes brush he’d bought forty years earlier at “Walter Witte”, the shop for “Everyday Goods” on boulevard Anspach. Monsieur Witte himself had recommended this brush, Top quality, Monsieur de Vriend, this brush will outlive you, the very best clothes brush, German horsehair, inserted by hand into the oak head. De Vriend faltered briefly: German . . . what? Horsehair? before suddenly realising that he cared more about the quality of everyday goods than the ghosts of the past. He bought this German brush which would outlive him, which was innocent, as were perhaps the hands that had crafted it. As he brushed his suit the telephone rang in his bedroom. He heard the sound but didn’t register it was for him. The ringtone was unfamiliar and he wasn’t expecting a call. Time and again it is said that nobody who survived a concentration or extermination camp could ever throw away a piece of bread. He had read it again just now in the paper. The daughter of Gustave Jakubowicz had mentioned it in an interview for De Morgen, after the death of her father, the famous human rights lawyer: As children we were often made to eat hard bread. We wouldn’t get a fresh loaf until the old one was finished, our father couldn’t throw bread away, he just couldn’t. De Vriend brushed. Gustave, oh Gustave! The telephone rang again. Gustave had loved top-quality suits and fresh baguette in restaurant bread baskets. No more threadbare clothes, good, thick fabrics! Nothing off the peg, certainly nothing striped, and no cap, nothing covering the head! Anybody who’d been in a camp knew what no cap meant. It meant death. And so afterwards it meant life. Freedom. The very best fabrics and an uncovered head. De Vriend brushed expertly, he stood on the balcony in his underpants, one leg of his suit trousers pulled over his left arm, rhythmically brushing the material, immersed in this movement like a violin player. Somewhere a telephone started ringing again. He had four men’s suits. For the winter, two of thick tweed, one Harris in herringbone and a slightly softer salt-and-pepper Donegal suit. For the transitional periods of the year he had a midnight-blue pure new wool suit and a lighter, but nonetheless pleasantly warm charcoal one of mohair. He didn’t have a summer suit. He had frozen too much in his life and for him summer was another transitional period too. He didn’t mind a hot day and the grey mohair he was now brushing was so wonderfully light. How long had he had it? Many years, it must be many years now.
The Capital Page 25
