The Public Prosecutor

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  BACK TO THE COAST

  THE VAMPIRE OF ROPRAZ

  A NOT SO PERFECT CRIME

  DOG EATS DOG

  Copyright Page

  Jef Geeraerts was born in 1930 in Antwerp. He was educated in Jesuit schools and spent time as a colonial administrator and army officer in the Congo. He gained international acclaim with his Gangrene Cycle, four novels based on his experience in Africa. Geeraerts, Belgium’s best-known author after Georges Simenon, has more recently focused on crime and noir novels, of which The Public Prosecutor is the first to be published in English.

  The sex life of the camel

  is not what one might think.

  In a single moment of weakness

  he tried to make love to the Sphinx.

  But the Sphinx’s rounded rear

  is filled with the sand of the Nile,

  which explains why camels have humps

  and the Sphinx an inscrutable smile.

  EGYPTIAN PARABLE

  The primary concern of the judiciary is not to see what does not have to be seen.

  NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

  Grab one pig by the ear and all the others squeal.

  POLISH FARMING PROVERB

  1

  While the Public Prosecutor was absorbed in his daily morning ritual in front of the bathroom mirror, his sense of satisfaction at the agreeable prospect of spending the entire week at home alone was increased considerably by the realization that he didn’t look bad at all for a man of sixty-four. Five foot six, 198 pounds naked, slightly overweight according to American norms, but this was due to his “muscles of iron and steel that had been marbled irreversibly with fat over the years”. A few sporadic streaks of grey dusted the temples of his thick, pitch-black hair. His lower jaw was angular, no sign of a double chin, his complexion bronzed, his nose classic Greek, his eyebrows Saracen, and he preferred to reveal his innate contempt for humanity as a whole with a crooked smile and an appraising look.

  But there was barely a trace of contempt to be seen this Tuesday morning, 15 May 1999, a radiant spring day with expected noon temperatures around seventy-five degrees. He felt cool, like the cowboy in the Marlboro ad.

  “Basically, it’s all a question of genes,” his school friend George Weyler (Jokke) used to say. The man was now a renowned internist earning ten times the Public Prosecutor’s salary, but having to work for it like an animal. “You need more exercise, Alberto,” Jokke would consistently complain at the fortnightly meetings of the Rotary Club, playfully poking Albert Savelkoul in the belly with his forefinger. With the exception of horse-riding and hunting, he wasn’t much of a sportsman, and he enjoyed eating in the best restaurants, where he had acquired a reputation for being a good judge of wines.

  He concentrated on the purple veins that had recently appeared in the bags under his eyes. He pinched the skin between his thumb and forefinger and pulled it carefully, as if it were a piece of elastic. Guy Staas, another school friend and plastic surgeon to many a wealthy lady, had offered to give him a nip and tuck for next to nothing, but Albert thought real men would consider such a thing thoroughly shameful. He wasn’t sure why, exactly - perhaps because of his macho conviction that men on the whole are presentable enough and don’t need such surgical interventions.

  For the second time that morning, he felt that damned pressure in his bladder. Was it what he feared? He suppressed a shiver of horror and forced himself to pay no attention to it, following his personal adage that problems disappear if you ignore them. He moved closer to the mirror, stretched his lips and inspected his teeth. His gums had been shrinking, so to speak, for some time, exposing the root tissue. He considered perfect teeth to be a must for a man of his standing. He was also of the opinion that the vast majority of his countrymen had more tartar in their mouths than ivory. He had no need to worry about that for the time being. He had a sturdy set of teeth, inherited from his mother, who had her first filling when she was seventy-six.

  He cast a satisfied glance over at his dark hirsute torso, still comparable, more or less, with that of a forty-year-old athlete. The electronic scales were next, but he decided with a sigh to leave them out of his routine. He stretched and massaged his neck, which cracked, as it did every morning, when he twisted it left and right. But this morning had at least one positive feature. His wife, Baroness Marie-Amandine de Vreux d’Alembourg, had left the day before for a week visiting English gardens with her aristocratic friends. This meant he could enjoy breakfast unperturbed, an important aspect of what he called his “elementary male Lebensraum”. He was free to take his place at the table in the kitchen, barefoot, unshaven and in a kimono, something that pleased their Polish maid Maria Landowska no end. Amandine always dressed to the nines, even for breakfast, as if she’d been invited to afternoon tea at the palace. She would finish her porcelain pot of yogurt with affectation, her pinkie raised, and gaze absently past the Public Prosecutor and Maria, to whom she spoke only rarely, and then only to give her orders in broken Flemish, a language she barely understood. “One never says merci to the staff,” was one of the more haughty expressions she and her family had cherished for more than seven generations. Since the birth of their youngest son (September 1965) she had communicated with her husband by impersonal memo. On official occasions or at dinners where communication was unavoidable, they addressed one another with “ma chère” and “mon ami”, as if they were characters in a nineteenth-century French novel.

  “Bah!” Albert grunted. He slipped quickly into the grey kimono with Samurai markings on the back (“The life of the warrior is short, powerful and merciless”). It had been a gift from his girlfriend Louise - his treasure, his greatest passion - when she had followed him the previous year to Kyoto, where he was attending a specialist conference on Anglo-Saxon law. Albert had represented Belgium, thanks in part to the intervention of his father-in-law, Baron Pierre Philippe de Vreux d’Alembourg, Emeritus Professor of Constitutional Law at the Université Catholique de Louvain, former Supreme Court judge and author of legal handbooks, and in part because he was one of the few Belgian magistrates who had acquired a DJS (Doctor of Juridical Sciences) at the University of Harvard.

  “Bah!” said the Public Prosecutor for a second time when he thought of his father-in-law: ninety-four, still alive and kicking, but completely gaga. He lived alone with a maid and a butler in an elegant town house on Marie-Josélaan in Berchem. He was a descendant of the prominent de Vreux family, elevated to the aristocracy by Leopold I for their part in the establishment of the Belgian Constitution. Fortunately, he knew nothing of the less than ideal relationship between his only daughter Amandine and his former student Albert Savelkoul, which was a result of Albert’s young mistress. According to accepted custom, Amandine had cunningly concealed the affair with such skill that even their sons, Didier and Geoffroy, were unaware of it. The oldest, Didier, was a lawyer in Leuven and still single. Geoffroy had a pretty wife, two children and was counsellor to the embassy in Washington.

  As he desc
ended the stairs to the first floor, passing his collection of authentic, hand-coloured aquatints by Henry Alken, picturing straight-backed, fox-hunting gentlemen in top hats and tails on ridiculous horses, the god-awful odour of crushed silk haute couture outfits invaded his nose. True to tradition, Amandine had decided to air them a week ago, partly out of respect for the generations of old women who had once worn them, and partly because she couldn’t bring herself to throw anything out. He hated the smell with a vengeance, because it reminded him of death: ugliness and decay at its last gasp.

  He looked at his watch. Eight thirty. She would still be asleep, his scrumptious little creature, his voluptuous little serpent, with whom he was still insanely in love after seventeen years. He would call her in an hour and tell her he was free. He would use his mobile, since he suspected his wife had been eavesdropping on his land-line calls. His office phone was out of the question. His predecessor had had a tap installed at the switchboard. Only his mobile was safe. He took pleasure in the paranoia he had been forced to create. It was the only way to preserve the privacy he cherished so much.

  He stopped on the landing in front of a statuette of Our Lady of Fatima on a simple white marble console with three immaculate lilies in a vase at its side. He snorted disdainfully. “Sanctimonious hypocrite!” She insisted that Maria Landowska renew the lilies every day. It had been one of her dreams to have a Polish maid in residence, a dream that had been fulfilled with the help of one of the canons of Antwerp Cathedral. Maria, a young lady with a réputation immaculée, earned bed and board and the princely sum of sixteen thousand francs a month for a twelve-hour working day. She was a thirty-four-year-old country girl from the Kielce region of Poland, strong as an ox and Catholic without being bigoted. Albert had a soft spot for her. When Amandine was away, they would chat together in a mixture of German and Flemish. She would teach him Polish words and he would teach her popular Flemish sayings, and their conversations were burlesque on occasion. Her mother was the village fortune teller, who took her cow - Czowieka (Daisy) - for a walk every day.

  “Salve Regina,” he said with solemnity, his eyes shut and his lips pursed, imitating Amandine’s habit of greeting the virgin every time she passed the statue. The pressure in his bladder returned. He took a deep breath and opened the door to the toilet. The flow was steady and frothy, and he was relieved. It wasn’t what he had feared after all. Jokke had told him that the first symptoms were “anal contractions and lazy urine”. Before flushing the WC, he bent his knees slightly to allow gravity to take its course and watched the last drop disappear into the pot, something he had seen in a film about American soldiers at the front during World War One.

  He suddenly remembered something he had to look up urgently. “Oh, what a beautiful morning… Oh, what a beautiful day…” he crooned, marched into his office with what he called his “cavalryman’s gait”, switched on the light and immediately found what he was looking for on the bookshelf: a small black volume bound in artificial leather with the words The Teaching of Buddha embossed in gold on the spine. The bookmark was still at page 440. He started to read:THE LIFE OF YOUNG WOMEN.

  There are four types of women. Of the first type there are those who become angry for slight causes, who have changeable minds, who are greedy and jealous of others’ happiness and who have no sympathy for their needs.

  He slammed the book shut. “Marie-Amandine de Vreux d’Alembourg to a tee,” he barked and slipped it between the South African and the Spanish versions of the New Testament. The majority of his wife’s lady friends belonged to this category. Louise belonged to category three, the good companion type. Category two wasn’t much better than category one. Category four covered the beatified cunt type, the kind that bored a man to the point of weariness. Albert wasn’t even remotely interested in philosophy and related disciplines and was likewise mildly immune to art. He considered the books in question to be little more than curiosa, all three stolen from hotel rooms where a Bible can usually be found in the bedside cabinet. The Teaching of Buddha was from Singapore, where he had attended a congress for jurists. The parallel English-Chinese text had made swiping it worth the effort.

  He looked around the only room in the house that belonged to him and him alone with gratification. It was devoid of heirlooms and souvenirs from bygone days, the sight of which could depress a man in seconds. One wall was covered with solid wood bookshelves with his favourite authors: Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Ruark, Norman Mailer, V.S. Naipaul, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, Georges Simenon, Bruce Chatwin, Frederick Forsyth, Gabriel García Márquez, alongside an extended collection of biographies, which he referred to as his “lives of the saints”. His desk was an art deco dining table in beautifully grained hardwood. A shabby Afghan rug covered the floor. The only decoration was on the desk: the decapitated sandstone head of an authentic Khmer statue from Cambodia, mounted on a cast-iron base. A glass display cabinet exhibiting three double-barrelled shotguns and two hunting rifles, magnificent examples, well-oiled and gleaming, took up half of another wall. Four sets of stag antlers together with two impressive wild boar tusks graced the wall above.

  He glanced fleetingly at his cherished weapons, was reminded of the Scottish Highlands where he regularly joined friends for a spot of hunting, crossed to the window and pulled open the curtains. The room became clear and radiant and appeared to increase in size. He switched off the light and made his way downstairs, looking forward to his first cup of coffee. Maria Landowska was busy in the kitchen, setting the table for breakfast. She was large and sturdy, and there was something stealthy about the way she moved, as if danger was lurking nearby. She was wearing jeans and a green sweater, clothes that were strictly forbidden when “Madame” was at home. When she caught sight of Albert, she smiled and revealed a couple of stainless-steel teeth, a remnant of life under Communism. Her smooth skin, lacking the slightest trace of the ravages of bourgeois society, was pale and freckled and she had prominent Slavic cheekbones. Her red ponytail looked like a bunch of dried flowers.

  “Guten Morgen, Mr Albert,” she said with her boyish guttural voice, her bright-blue eyes looking him full in the face.

  “Good morning, Maria.”

  “What’s on the menu this morning?”

  “Drie Eier.”

  “OK,” Albert said in clumsy Polish. “Fried or beaten?”

  “Beaten like raindrops on the window.”

  A cunning smile appeared on her lips. She opened the thermos and set it on the table with a thud.

  “Beaten like a farmer beats his wife?” she enquired.

  They laughed conspiratorially. He sat down and poured himself a large mug of coffee, while Maria cracked three eggs into a bowl with unparalleled skill, flavoured them with pepper and salt, and started to beat them as if she were mixing two different sorts of animal feed in a bucket. Albert took his mug and drank his coffee as he preferred: first blowing then slurping. Louise always used to say “my wolfie” when he did that.

  2

  As the years had passed, Albert had grown more and more inclined to leave the course of the day to fate, which he attempted to steer with all sorts of superstitious behaviour. What would be his first deed on this sunny spring day? Something industrious or something that suited his mood? As Public Prosecutor to Antwerp’s Court of Appeal, he was fortunate enough to be able to spoil himself with the latter. He decided to let a game of patience settle the matter, three at the most. He had read somewhere that Charles de Gaulle and the Norwegian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Knut Hamsun, were similarly addicted, and had convinced himself that this innocent custom could improve the quality of a person’s life. Interesting pieces of information of this sort filled him with respect for important figures.

  “Queen of Spades, come to my aid,” he mumbled as he made his way upstairs to the second floor to shave, still barefoot and dressed in his kimono. He had enjoyed an appetizing breakfast with all the trimmings and chatted about this and that with
Maria Landowska, who had taught him his daily dose of five Polish words. He liked the language because it sounded pleasant to his ear. He was proud of the few Polish sentences he could pronounce without any trace of an accent.

  As he walked into the bathroom, he realized he was out of breath and his heart was throbbing in his skull. Two cups of Maria’s strong coffee were to blame. This kind of reasoning allowed him to file the problem away for the time being in a remote corner of his mind. He did the same with other matters of an entirely different nature, namely the treatment of delicate cases from the offices of the district prosecutors under his jurisdiction, with which he “involved himself” when he considered it necessary (especially if there was a hint of politics involved). He was aware that he was flirting with the law in such instances, but he was also aware that it was fairly common practice in Belgium. He called it “compartmental thinking”, a technique characteristic of primitive peoples that had saved him considerable amounts of time. He considered it a highly appropriate social grace.

  He switched on his state-of-the-art Braun electric shaver, a gift from Louise, the Rolls Royce of its kind, which seemed to vacuum away the last tiny hair without a sound. After shaving, he splashed his cheeks with Davidoff and inspected his teeth for a second time. He brushed them to get rid of the taste of coffee, rinsed his mouth with water, carefully examined it to see if his gums had been bleeding and scrambled down the stairs two at a time, something that still came naturally to him. He sat at his desk in his elegant leather-and-chrome chair, a gift from the Brussels firm that had furnished his chambers at the Prosecutor’s Office, where an identical specimen had likewise been delivered. He filed this similarly Belgian form of corruption under “shrewd favours that need not be reciprocated per se”. He had preserved the firm’s publicity brochure, which claimed that the leather was fault-free because it came from Scottish cattle unharmed by barbed-wire fences.