by René Appel
Sometimes, when they start bitching at me, I picture it in my mind: I’m lying on my bed and a guard says something about dirty laundry on the floor, making it sound like he’s my mother. Then I think about it. In my mind, I slide my hand under the mattress. He doesn’t have time to get away, maybe he starts screaming, maybe he doesn’t: I’m fast. Whatever the case, it’s too late. I’m finished before his colleagues can get there.
But I don’t do that. I won’t ever do it, either. As far as that goes, we’re all the same around here. Good behavior is the key thing we have in common. We do our little hand-washes, we borrow a book from the library, we play Ping-Pong and foosball like civilized individuals, pull some weeds in the herb garden. In any case, we never fight. We’re always conscious of the cameras, twenty-four hours a day. “Wasn’t that serve out?” we ask cautiously and, cool as can be of course, lay our paddles on the table. We look at each other. Staring down is what they call that. It’s about who has the steadiest eye, the most eloquent body language. But the security cameras don’t pick up a thing. “I think you’re right, it was out.” You make a mental note to do something later, in the showers or out in the yard, in a corner where there aren’t any cameras.
The serve wasn’t out, you know that—and he knows it too.
* * *
The first time he showed up at visiting hours was six months ago. A journalist, a big name in crime circles. Marc Verhoeven. He had a plan: a biography, the story of my life.
“We share the revenues,” Verhoeven told me then. “Everybody wants to read about you. I expect it’ll sell a quarter of a million copies.”
I was up for it. I didn’t have to tell him everything, nothing that would jeopardize my getting out of here three years from now.
“But I’ll need you to tell me a couple of things, of course,” he said. “Things people don’t know. Things they want to read about.” Then Verhoeven asked if I was okay with him interviewing my wife. “Ex-wife,” he corrected himself right away. “To get a complete picture, I want to interview Chiara too. But not without your permission, of course. Not behind your back.”
I sensed something at the time, I don’t know exactly how to describe it: a dark cloud, people say sometimes, as in, “dark clouds gathered.” But what I sensed wasn’t so much dark as compact and odorless. A poisonous cloud from a chemical plant, the neighbors are warned to keep their doors and windows shut.
“She’s not my ex-wife,” I told him. “We’re only separated.”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Have it your way. I mean, if you’d rather not have me interview her, just say so.”
Later on, I couldn’t help but laugh about that Not behind your back. All you could really say was that I had been too trusting. Looking back on it, if I had known then what was going to happen, that visiting hour would have gone differently. Would have ended differently, I should probably say.
* * *
You have those animal habitats at the zoo that look a little like an open cellblock. In fact, there are no bars. Just a moat with a wall on one side that the visitors can lean on, and the habitat itself is on the other side. A lot of trouble has been taken to reconstruct the animals’ natural surroundings: a couple of boulders have been brought in, there’s some sand, one or two trees that obviously aren’t native to these parts.
At the back of the habitat is where the animals lie—let’s assume we’re talking about predators here, but it could just as easily be zebras or chimpanzees—dozing in the shade. There’s not much movement, a couple of sparrows are pecking around for leftovers between the rocks, but it’s not enough to wake the predators from their afternoon nap. They—for the sake of argument we’re still assuming that we’re talking about mammals here: lions, tigers, bears—blink their eyes occasionally, as though they’re dreaming: a nice dream, perhaps; they’re back where they came from, Yellowstone Park, the forests of Madagascar, the rolling savannas of Kenya or Tanzania.
Then, suddenly, there is tumult. Somebody—perhaps only a child, a child who has escaped its parents’ attention for a few seconds—has clambered up onto the wall and then fallen into the moat. There are screams, mostly from the parents, but then other bystanders get involved in the general panic: they shout instructions at the child, conflicting instructions, one of them shouts this, the other shouts that. Swim! Run! Don’t move! The water is shallow, it only comes up to the child’s chest. A rope! A keeper! A ladder!
Then one of the predators—now we can come out and say it: this is the lions’ habitat—one of the lions opens an eye. What’s all the noise? he wonders. Can’t a lion get a little sleep in this habitat? What’s all that splashing around in the moat?
It’s the biggest lion, the male, the kind of lion we imagine when we think of a lion: from The Lion King, a Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer lion, a lion like the ones on a pouch of Samson rolling tobacco, with a huge mane around its head. Slowly it stretches, even more slowly it rises, one leg at a time, onto all fours; easy as can be, it wanders over to the moat to look at what all the fuss is about.
One of the last times he came to visit, about two weeks ago, that’s the way I looked at Marc Verhoeven: the way a lion would. We were both in the same space; just like the child in the moat, the journalist had found his way into the animals’ habitat. True, there was a guard standing at the door, but I’ve already told you: I’m fast, I can do it in a couple of seconds.
Right then and there, I knew. I’d known it for a long time already, of course, but now I knew for sure. I could smell it.
Like I was sniffing his underpants.
Yes, that’s what it was like, no two ways about it. I’d fished his underpants out of the laundry basket and sniffed at them—and I knew.
And now I could smell it, even without having his underpants in my hand. Later, lots of times, I asked myself how I was able to do that. And I think I know.
First of all, because of all the years of training on the outside. In my professional community, the sixth sense is more important than the other five. For survival. You have to be able to interpret a sound without actually hearing it: the window of a car parked in front of your house is rolled down, the safety on a pistol is slid back. You hit the ground before the shot is even fired. You survive.
And on the inside too, just as much. Without turning around, you know who comes into the showers right after you. Who’s moved up behind you in a flash. You slick back your hair under the hot spray from the showerhead, you keep your eyes closed and let the water splash against your eyelids—but within half a second, you turn. You yank the sharpened screwdriver out of the other person’s hand, in one move you break his wrist—and, if you’ve got enough time, all five of his fingers.
I listened to Verhoeven. For the umpteenth time, he asked me about my connections with this guy, with some other guy, about where I was when Edward G. got plugged behind the counter of his cigar store, about whether I had used different passports during my frequent trips to Thailand, Colombia, and my place on the Costa del Sol.
Yes, I listened, I nodded, and I answered, but meanwhile I breathed through my nose as much as possible. I stuck my nose out above the grassland of the savanna, nothing but my nose, the zebra foal wandering this way would never get to see my head, the cracking of its own vertebrae would be the last sound it heard in its short life, once I sank my teeth into it.
When did it start? How long has this been going on?
It surprised me to realize that I wasn’t really even all that surprised. That’s right, I could even start to understand it a little. Ex-wife of criminal serving solid time sets out to start a new life, to forget the past. And then, one day, a journalist comes to visit. A crime journalist who is planning to write a book about her husband—her ex-husband. He is not entirely unhandsome, he’s charming, patient—not hotheaded, not like him, she thinks, and she brushes the thought aside as quickly as it arises.
On his third visit, the journalist brings her flowers, on the fourth a box o
f chocolates. She notices, despite herself, that she has started to enjoy his visits more and more, that she spends more time in front of the mirror, pins her hair up and then lets it fall; when the doorbell rings, she moistens her lips with the tip of her tongue.
This time he has brought along a bottle of wine, the apartment is a little less well-lit than during his previous visit; on the coffee table which she’s set with a bowl of nuts and blocks of cheese with mustard, a candle is burning.
* * *
“What did you say again, when do you have that weekend leave?” he asked me the last time we sat in the visiting area, after the guard announced we had two minutes left.
“Two weeks from now.”
“And how long have you got?”
“Three days. It’s a weekend furlough, right? Like it says. Out on Friday afternoon, back again on Monday morning.”
Verhoeven took a deep breath, stood up from his chair, took his jacket off the backrest. “I’d really like to check out a few places with you,” he said, watching the guard from the corner of his eye. “I think you know which places I mean.”
“Sure.” I wondered whether he was going to say it—whether he would dare to.
He dared; he just came out and said it: “And please, don’t go anywhere near Chiara. Try not to take any unnecessary risks, you know what I mean. Leave her alone.”
I looked at him, blinked once, not because I felt the need to blink, but because I thought it would put him at ease.
A lion—but a tame lion, napping in the sun. A nice lion: oh yeah, I could be real nice, charming, purring quietly and nuzzling up to my keeper, like a lion in the zoo. Or no, better yet, in a circus: the lion tamer cracks his whip in the sand and I jump through a hoop of real fire, night after night, I eat sugar cubes from his hand and let him scratch me behind the ears. I purr and I smile, a nice tame lion, but only in the knowledge that, one day, when he sticks his head in my mouth again before a breathless crowd, I’m going to snap my jaws shut. He will know, he’ll feel it; maybe at first, when he can’t pull his head back out, he’ll think there’s been some misunderstanding. But there has been no misunderstanding. The children will be the first to start screaming, then the women, the men will gag, the barf will splatter all over the bleachers, here and there some cold-blooded type will go on filming with his smartphone so we can all watch it again later on YouTube; how I spit out the lion tamer’s half-chewed head somewhere in a corner of the cage—maybe the snack was a little stale, it’s certainly not something I’m going to swallow, it might upset my stomach.
“She’s got a restraining order,” I said. “And I’ll be wearing an ankle monitor.”
* * *
I’d checked it out already on Google Maps: as long as I stayed on Pythagorasstraat, I was safely outside the area of the court injunction, just barely. It was only about fifty yards’ difference: as soon as I turned the corner of Pythagorasstraat and entered Copernicusstraat, my ankle monitor would send out a signal and an alarm would go off somewhere.
That’s how I imagined it, at least: there’s this central tracking room with computers, the ankle-monitor tracking room, manned by no more than two people. One of them has just ordered a pizza and the other has gone outside for a smoke. I turn into Copernicusstraat, an alarm goes off in the tracking room, it takes a moment for the ankle-monitor tracker who stayed inside to figure out which of the maybe fifty or sixty roaming monitors has been activated. Twenty, thirty seconds, maybe? Not much longer than that, I figure, but in those twenty or thirty seconds I’ve already left Copernicusstraat and am heading up Archimedesweg, toward Molukkenstraat. When I pass under the steel train trestle, the tracking room loses the signal for a bit, the colleague has come back from his cigarette break in the meantime, now they’ve got video too.
“He disappeared . . . there,” the one says; he points at the screen.
The other guy taps a few keys on the console and now, at the top of the screen, my first and last name appear. And who knows, maybe other things too—I’ve never been in a tracking room like that, all I can do is guess.
My age. My offense. The length of the term I’m serving. Armed and dangerous, yeah, maybe it says that too. I’ve always liked that phrase, though in my case it could be misleading: it might make people think that, when I’m walking around without a gun, I’m not dangerous.
The blinking dot now reappears on the far side of the trestle.
“Where’s he going?” asks the colleague who was just outside for a smoke.
Then the bell rings. “I bet that’s my pizza,” the other man says.
For a moment they stand there, wavering. Just how serious is this? It’s not the first time someone with an ankle monitor has entered forbidden territory. Nine times out of ten, they turn around and go back after a minute or so, to the area where they’re allowed to be. In the background, we hear the opening jingle for the weekend soccer recap on Studio Sport. The timing is perfect: at the very start of the first highlight, a slice of pizza can move from box to mouth.
I stop, turn around, walk back to the trestle.
“Look, he’s realized, he’s going back.” The bell rings again, more impatiently this time. “Could you answer that? It’s my pizza.”
The blinking dot disappears beneath the bridge, disappears completely.
“What do we do? Report it? Send a car out?”
“Hold on a minute. If he comes back out on the right side, it’s a false alarm. They don’t like that much.”
I wait under the bridge, I count to twenty, more or less as long as it would take me to come back out on the right side again. But above all I wait to hear if they’ve done anything yet. If I can hear a siren in the distance.
If I do, I’ll call it off. Tomorrow is another day. But if things stay quiet, I’ll wait those twenty seconds and race out from under the bridge, into the new neighborhood. I’ve already looked at it at least a hundred times on Google Street View—this neighborhood wasn’t there yet when I disappeared from public life—and I could find the door to her building in a flash, even blindfolded. I figured it out. Less than two minutes. I’m an athletic person, I’ve been training, I stopped smoking ten years ago. Within ninety seconds, I’ll be at the door. I’ll ring the bell—not hers, the neighbors’ on the floor above or below her.
Hello?
It’s your neighbor from the ground floor, they left a package with me yesterday, it’s for you.
* * *
At a household appliance store on Linnaeusstraat, I checked out a few of the carving knives in the display case. If I wanted a better look, I’d have to ask the salesgirl to unlock the case for me.
I was going to have to rely on my own strength—I could do it with my bare hands if necessary. And maybe it wouldn’t be necessary. I thought about how I would put my foot in the door, the panic in her eyes.
Just want to talk to you for a moment, I’d say. If you’re smart, you’ll keep calm and let me in.
At the stationery outlet a little farther along, I bought a cardboard mailer and a big fat marker. The mailer was one of those you have to put together yourself; I stopped in a doorway on Hogeweg and folded it together, wrote her name and address in block letters on the label.
Back in my day, there wasn’t any fountain at the corner of Hogeweg and Linnaeusparkweg. On that corner, there used to be what the people called a seamy bar. Now there’s a patio restaurant where mothers sit drinking café lattes while their children shriek and splash in the fountain.
Café latte, another one of those expressions. In my day, the year I was sentenced, they were still just calling it a coffee with hot milk.
In fact, restraining orders can be a good idea. What I’m saying, I guess, is that I’m not opposed to restraining orders in principle. They can keep you safe from certain things, they can protect you from yourself, like an ignition interlock in a car. If you can’t get the car started, then you won’t hit a tree on the first curve or cream somebody at a crosswalk.
What I hadn’t counted on was that the ankle monitor would warn not only the imaginary crew of the ankle-monitor tracking room, but that it would warn me too. Halfway down Copernicusstraat, about a block and half from the crossing with Archimedesweg, it started buzzing. Not only buzzing: it actually vibrated. It went off, like an alarm clock.
“Fucking shit!” I said, and picked up the pace. Maybe they’d told me about this, maybe they hadn’t—in any case, I couldn’t remember. The deeper I went into the area covered by the restraining order, the louder the buzzing (and the vibrating). Under the trestle, it buzzed and vibrated almost nonstop.
I picked up the pace a little more; by the time I came out from under the bridge, I was sprinting. The sidewalk went up an incline there. From Google Street View, I recognized the new glass building at the corner of Archimedesweg and Carolina MacGillavrylaan. Like I said, this neighborhood hadn’t been built yet when I went into the slammer. Back then, the only thing along the Ringvaart, across from Flevopark, were some garden plots and a research lab where they did tests with radioactive material. Kids I went to grade school with used to claim they’d seen frogs with three legs and two heads along the banks of the Ringvaart. On Saturday afternoons, we combed out the whole shoreline there sometimes, but we never found a deformed frog.
There weren’t many people out on the street, fortunately. Not a lot of passersby who might hear the buzzing of my ankle monitor. That seemed pretty unlikely to me, anyway; maybe in a closed space, a room or a shop, but not here, not outside.
I was panting by the time I got to the doorway of the brown building with its two apartment towers. I scanned the nameplates beside the doorbells, waited till I’d caught my breath, then rang the one that belonged to her downstairs neighbor, on the ninth floor.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice said through the intercom, no more than ten seconds later.
“I’m your downstairs neighbor,” I said. “They left a package for you at my place this morning.”
I held up the package in front of the camera and started counting to ten; at four, there was a loud click and the glass door swung open.
