Charles den Tex

Mr. Miller

Translated from the Dutch by Nancy Forest-Flier

World Editions

breda 2015

Published in Great Britain in 2015 by World Editions Ltd., London

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Dutch Foundation for Literature

Copyright © Charles den Tex, 2005

English translation copyright © Nancy Forest-Flier and World Editions, 2015

Cover design Multitude

Image credit © Millennium/Hollandse Hoogte

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published as De macht van meneer Miller in the Netherlands in 2005 by De Geus bv, PO Box 1878, 4801 bw Breda

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

isbn 978-94-6238-012-7

nur 302

No part of this publication may be reproduced and/or published by means of printing, photocopying or by any means, without the permission of World Editions bv, Breda, the Netherlands. Phone: +31 (0)76 523 3533. Internet: www.worldeditions.org.

1 Bellilog 06.13.04

Kurt today. Tears in my eyes every five minutes. Didn’t know I was so sentimental. Maybe it just means more than I’m aware of. Or want to admit. And with no more than half a day free. Even then it’s a squeeze, since I have no idea how I’m going to make up for all those hours. Life on the margins. That’s all I’ve got. Everything counts. Fuck it. Jess in S.F. at least until the end of the week, probably longer. So no sex, except in my head. Living for the future, the eternal now. Now, now, now, so much now. Anyway. Three and a half hours, three if all goes well. Going back in time.

Wish me luck.

2 Hyperventilation

The end of my life landed at Schiphol four weeks ago. Since then nothing has been the same. On a Monday morning, eight-eighteen, it came in on a Boeing 747 flying non-stop from Atlanta, and I even went to meet it. From the minute the plane landed—seven minutes early, in fact—I was lost. Robbed of very bit of control I thought I had—if I had ever had it in the first place, of course. But as long as nobody tests you, you can think what you want.

At the gate there was that sense of expectation of people doing something for someone else that they’d never do otherwise: being part of a crowd staring through a glass wall at an area they cannot enter, where there’s always less to see than what they had expected. Yet there I was, standing on tiptoe, struggling to see someone I wanted to recognize. Preferably a face with a probing gaze, with the same expectation, searching for emotional release. Arms and hands waving, men and women jumping up and down, children running all over the place, straining eyes that are sending signals past every obstacle to the other, THE other, the one they’ve come to meet.

I was waiting with my parents for Kurt, my younger brother, who had left five and a half years before and hadn’t been back since. He was twenty-two at the time. He had gotten stuck in some course of study that changed its name every year, and meanwhile I had charged ahead on my way to a job that would cut me off from my past forever. Kurt and I are just over two years apart and we’re not in any way alike. He’s blond and I’m dark, but that may be the least of our differences. Our tastes always ran in opposite directions: flavours, colours—it didn’t matter. If I wanted sports, he wanted music. And vice versa. If I felt like a burger, he campaigned for pizza. There was always a certain something, though, and we were always together, inseparable. Because with Kurt I knew who I was. He was my brother, I was his brother. It was as easy as breathing, as spontaneous as walking. Except he had signed up for an exchange programme in theoretical mathematics, a field he ended up in because it came easy to him. What he himself wanted was never entirely clear. He went to America, and five years later he still hadn’t come back. After a couple of months he stopped answering his e-mails. The phone number I had for him was cut off overnight. I just didn’t get it. There were things that drove my parents crazy, things they wouldn’t talk about. Screaming behind closed doors, breathing so shallow that the air hardly had a chance to get down their throats and built up behind their eyes.

But they said nothing.

By the time Kurt left, we had both been out of the house for some time. I had gone from the outskirts of Dordrecht to study in Rotterdam and ended up in Amsterdam. The fact that I could move from the Bible Belt to the heart of international commerce just like that, without a passport or vaccinations, strengthened my trust in the things I had been unaware of in the austere religious world of my parents: the business community and the enormous amounts of money, drink and expensive clothing that go with it. Men and women competing at every conceivable level: status, position, relationships, power and property. Nothing is certain, except for the fact that you have to fight for it. Before the end of my fourth year I had a job in Amsterdam as a communications consultant with a large consultancy, HC&P. The economy had an insatiable hunger for young, recently graduated individuals with a high hormone level and a higher than average IQ. More than four hundred consultants and staff worked at HC&P in a gleaming glass tower in Amsterdam’s southern quarter. It’s the Dutch branch of a firm of consultants that operates worldwide. So there I was, on the ninth floor, with a hot desk, a complete array of modern equipment, a leased car and more money in my bank account each month than I had ever seen in my life.

I can talk to anybody, anytime, under any circumstance. That’s what I do. I live by talking, e-mailing, phoning and meeting. Sixteen hours a day. I train other people so they always know what to say: how to be more relaxed on camera, better in meetings, more effective in consultations. That’s my job. To a certain extent I’ve learned it, but mainly it’s a natural gift. My clients are directors, chairmen and politicians. I saw the Minister of Justice every week, sometimes more than that, to teach him how to introduce tough policy with as little public resistance as possible.

I did that—for years—and during those years Kurt disappeared. Little by little he receded from my memory, where all the things we had done became happier but also less prominent.

Until that Thursday morning, as I stood with my nose pressed against the glass wall and projected images from the past onto the hesitating crowd of people shuffling around the conveyor belt in search of suitcases and bags. There I waited, lips dry and breathing too fast. Without thinking I pulled a chapstick out of my pocket and spread it around my mouth. Force of habit. Nowhere did I see anyone who looked the least bit like Kurt.

My parents, who were standing next to me, were just as surprised as I was when our gaze was finally reciprocated. A waving arm, first hesitant, then full of conviction. My parents waved back. I did not. For some reason I couldn’t even raise my arms. My limbs felt as if they had been screwed onto my body. My lungs were bolted onto my back, full of air that was far too heavy. My heart was pumping panic through my veins. Kurt waved, at me, and looked at me with eyes that seemed to suck me through the glass.

Soon the sliding doors of Gate 3 opened. Kurt dropped the bags on the floor and ran up to me—arms around my neck, pulling me close without uttering a word, pure physical contact—and finally said, ‘Jesus, I missed you!’

That was the moment when I lost myself. Right there in the arrivals hall, Kurt in my arms. I knew what I was seeing, but I didn’t see what I knew. Something fell apart somewhere and slowly I felt my knees go slack. The arrivals hall at Schiphol grew darker and darker, and it wasn’t until later, much later, that I was aware of an unknown man tugging and pulling at me.

‘He’s come around,’ the man shouted. I saw my parents in the midst of the crowd. And Kurt. And right after that everything went black. The next thing I saw was a man in a greenish yellow outfit in the back of an ambulance. He slapped me on the back, listened to my chest, shone a light in my eyes and moved his right forefinger slowly from left to right and up and down.

‘Hyperventilation,’ he said, and gave me a small bag to breathe into if it should happen again.

What did he know.

3 Bellilog 06.14.04

I’m not here. Okay?

4 Exclamation points in the void

Yesterday my flow of words was brought to an abrupt halt. After getting out of the ambulance, filling in forms, answering questions and being given a clean bill of health, I found myself standing alone in front of the terminal at Schiphol. Without parents, without Kurt. Between the attacks of hysteria I had made it clear to my father that they were not to wait for me. Best not to wait. In my hand I was holding the little bag and the instructions, ‘what to do in the event of another attack.’ I had nothing more to say. No matter how hard I tried, I could find no answer to the questions that kept coming at me, bigger and bigger and increasingly aggressive.

Except for drink. That’s what I wanted. Lots of alcohol, and with no one else around. Especially no one I knew, no consultants or clients. Leeches. I went to the closest bar and asked for a double vodka on ice. After a third glass I didn’t want to see anyone anymore, not even the bartender. His professional cheerfulness had the opposite effect on me. Half drunk and half unhinged, I went back home. I couldn’t go back to the office in that state, and I certainly couldn’t meet with any clients. Nor did I want to. But with all that alcohol in me I didn’t even have to think about it.

I closed the door to my apartment and started in. A little while later, as I was smashing the empty bottle to bits against the wall, I felt a total blockage of uncontrollable thoughts and disordered emotions raging in my head. The three hours I had taken off to pick up Kurt had turned into five. The first appointment came and went as I poured myself another drink and was unable to suppress a sense of victory. The phone rang, my cell. The office, I saw in the display. Otherwise I ignored it. Alcohol had taken control of all my systems. My schedule disappeared as the hours passed. Meetings dissolved into thin air. The weekly session with the Ministry of Justice. The preparations for the European Summit on Security and Integration would have to take place without my input. Ethnic tension and religious claims were leading to increasingly sharp differences of opinion throughout most of Europe. The EU had to come up with a joint policy, but sensitivities were so acute that progress seemed impossible. For HC&P it was the biggest assignment ever. The firm was working on the conference from ten different countries. So was I. The counselling I was providing the minister was an essential part of the entire project.

But not now.

The endless peeping of my cell phone was only the beginning of a frenzied barrage of phone calls between the office and clients who were waiting in vain in various conference rooms. They didn’t disturb me in the least. Nothing but irritating noises from another world, signals that were trying and failing to make any kind of connection.

Trembling from the drink, I picked up the phone and turned it off. Put it back on the table. It was silent now, a solitary object. A thing among things. I wanted to grab the bottle, which was just out of reach, but I lost my balance. Nothing unusual, except I could no longer remember how to stop myself from falling. My arms and legs still had some of their reflexes, such as swaying and groping for things, but the vodka gave me no control.

I went down with one enormous crash. Flat on my back. Nicely done, I thought, until my head hit the wooden floor with far too much force. Stabs of pain fought their way through the drink and helped me carry on, since the pain now convinced me that what I needed was more to drink. Lots more.

In the middle of the night the electricity went out. Everything. All at once. From one minute to the next the apartment was plunged into darkness. With half of me hanging onto the couch, I tried to figure out what was going on, but I didn’t get much further than the circuit breaker. Why that had suddenly stopped working was beyond me. Stumbling and tottering, I made my way to the front hall, propping myself up against a doorpost or a wall with every step. At the halfway point I had to stop. My head was spinning. My limbs were slack and unreliable. I leaned against the wall, panting. The contents of my stomach became more and more agitated. Eyes closed. Breathing deeply. Slowly. Until calmness returned and I was able to continue walking. Four or five steps to go. No more.

The fuse box was located in a corner of the closet, right next to the front door of the apartment. Feeling my way, I searched in the dark for the shelf above the fuse box. That’s where I kept my passport. Always in the same place. Right by the door. With my coats. Handy. Next to it were a couple of reserve fuses and a flashlight. Groping uncontrollably, I found the flashlight and flicked it on. Then I stared at the fuse box—for minutes, it seemed, because I hardly was able to grasp what I saw. And what I saw were buttons. It took a long time before I realized that all the switches were fine, and even longer before I came to the conclusion that the electricity in the apartment hadn’t gone out after all. I sank backward into the coats.

That’s where I woke up. My eyes opened and came to rest on familiar forms that I didn’t immediately recognize. The light in the apartment was on again, and it took awhile to recall what had happened earlier on. How much earlier on was no longer clear to me. My head was rebelling against the alcohol but my tongue and my throat wanted more. My body was in need of hydration. Physical demands slowly began to suppress all thought, although the images remained. Undiminished. Kurt with outstretched arms. Warm body pressed against me. Eyes that saw everything. Even now. Even here. This is what I was thinking, so I still did have thoughts after all.

Nausea suddenly overcame me. It spread from my stomach, and before I could reach the bathroom the contents of my insides had been squeezed outward. The potent smell of vomit rebounded through my entrails, and soon I was hanging powerless over the edge of the toilet bowl. Reflex heaving continued until there was nothing left to heave. Then the thirst intensified. In a burst of virtual sobriety I went to the kitchen and found everything I needed: two microwave hamburgers, a can of Coke and a bottle of rum. As the microwave did its work, I gulped down the Coke and uncorked the bottle. The rum had no trouble finding its way into my system and mixed readily with the alcohol in my blood. I was left to the mercy of a union of liquid compounds that only wanted the best for me. The fat and salt in the hamburgers provided no protection whatsoever, but what they did for my convictions more than made up for it. Junk food is the modern world’s only real contribution to cooking. A hundred percent processed, treated, modified and flavour-enhanced, with a best-before date issued by a multinational. That’s all I needed.

The floor was never far away. Crawling, glugging. Halfway through the rum there was little reason to get back on my feet. I leaned against the couch, bottle and cigarettes in hand. Daylight came far too early, with its ruthless optimism. A painful cheerfulness that I had absolutely no need for. More than ever, I missed someone to belong to. I missed Jessica.

The rest of the rum brought silence, unconscious silence. Time suddenly accelerated. An hour passed in the blink of an eye. The sun disappeared from the window. The rum became triple sec. The TV was on, broadcasting word games I didn’t understand. Laughing faces, surprise, incredibly lively colours and people asserting things with utter conviction. Images flashed past, as if the TV set was full to bursting and everything flowed out as soon as you made an opening for it. Men with beards and women with headscarves looking at the smouldering remains of a building, their eyes filled with injured piety. And hate. That was something I recognized immediately. Hate that didn’t yet have the room it needed, that was being kept for future use, imperishable, stored in the genes. The voice of the news presenter suddenly sounded strained, with less space between the syllables.

… fire broke out last night at the nearby Islamic school. The fire started at several points and spread very rapidly. The walls of the school were covered with racist slogans and offensive texts. After the earlier disturbances, the situation appeared to be under control, but the peace was illusory. Local Muslims are speaking of an attack, and …

I zapped away to MTV. Thundering music. Sound off. Swimming through the room on the last drops of triple sec. The orange flavour began to grate on me. I washed the sticky sweetness away with white wine, which I had more than enough of. I was past the alcohol, past drunkenness. I had landed in a transcendental state where I saw and heard everything but registered nothing. I stared at my computer screen for minutes at a time without any questions occurring to me, without the will to do anything. I was sitting there to work on my blog, that much I knew. Somewhere in the far recesses of my mind a habit was thrashing around that was stronger than any drink I could consume. I had to write in my blog, even if it was just a couple of words, because without my blog I was no longer in touch with the world. So with limp fingers I began punching at the keyboard. For a moment it surprised me that the computer was running. I couldn’t remember having turned it on. An unwarranted conviction settled in my head, even though I knew I could no longer be sure of anything.

The e-mail icon flashed. Incoming message. I read the mail from Jessica. Sent an answer. Ignored all the frantic messages from the office. Exclamation points in the void. Christ, was I sick.

5 Bellilog 06.15.04

Intense mad-cow feeling, spongy synapses with signals disappearing and reappearing in entirely different form, subdued, distorted. Aggressive.

Mail from: Jess

Subject: sf

work hard play hard, 24-7, in shape in gear. very cock-centered place, this. regenerated protozoa with egos. maybe something to it. far from finished. everything ok on the amstel? miss-u.

jess

Mail to: Jess

Subject: Re: sf

youre not cheating on me, are you? more than I could handle. floundering here. lots of xxx and everything else ive forgotten. belli

6 Man is the information he carries

I had been receiving some fat bonuses in recent years. For every follow-up assignment I managed to bring in I was given a percentage of the returns, even more if the assignment was brand new. Sometimes this amounted to tens of thousands of euros. And suddenly now my future was uncertain.

No one had heard from me for two whole days. No colleagues, no clients, no one from management. Understandable for me, perhaps, but lethal for my job situation. It was a form of corporate suicide. HC&P gave its employees very little leeway, and I had gone way over the line. I was in the elevator, waiting for the doors to close. Clean underwear, clean shirt, white, no tie, dark blue suit with a narrow stripe, and enough gel in my hair to keep it in a state of high-spirited surprise. It wasn’t real, but it worked. I was still up to my eyeballs in alcohol. I looked neatly pressed, but inside chaos reigned, more than I could suppress. I needed all the help I could get, and until I got it I was shutting everything out, beginning with my family. Talking to them was out of the question, especially with Kurt. Not because Kurt didn’t say anything but because I couldn’t trust my own words. Everything I wanted to say meant something different than what I actually said, so I kept my mouth shut. Much better that way.

That strategy probably wouldn’t work at the office, since HC&P saw information as the firm’s primary concern. Not the people, not the equipment, not the building or the clients, but the information. People were no more than the information stored within them and made accessible by them.

Man is the information he carries.

That sentence is engraved on a polished, dark granite pillar in the reception area of each of the company’s seven hundred twenty-three branches. It’s a small, stylish object, not garish or gaudy. On the contrary, if you didn’t know it was there you’d have to look for it, and that’s part of its attraction. It’s the company slogan, but perhaps more than that, it’s the basic principle behind its dealings in the world. Job applicants have to fill out long questionnaires and go through endless interviews.

‘If we don’t know what you know, then we’ll never know what we can do for each other.’ That’s how the leadership thinks at HC&P and that’s how the company works. Openness, and the sharing of knowledge and information: that’s the basis of collaboration. The company knows everything about me. It knows who I am, where I come from, where I live, my bank account number, what my favourite music is, what my strengths and weaknesses are, how high my IQ is (applicants with IQs under 140 are rejected out of hand), where my family lives, what illnesses I’ve had and when I last visited the dentist.

IQ is important. Partner IQ is 180 and higher. Partners are the men with the ability to see through extremely complex situations and facts and to formulate new possibilities. Jessica is the first woman in the company to think and work at that level. What she lacks in experience she makes up for in untamed killer instinct. She’s faster and more accurate than the best of them. She can be totally concentrated and still remain accessible to others, as if her brain had two separate functions, just like breathing and seeing. Jessica is an IQ tempest in her own body, and there’s nothing HC&P would rather do than make use of her fearsome capacities. All within the rules of the firm, of course.

The sliding door of the elevator was stopped by a strong, tanned hand. Dries van Waayen stepped into the gleaming, polished compartment.

‘Me, too,’ he said. Partner-director, fifty-six, his watch cost more than everything I was wearing put together. His expression was solemn but happy. Everything he did was important, and therefore serious. He enjoyed his work so much that he simply radiated satisfaction. Always, under all circumstances.

‘Bellicher,’ he said. He had the ability to sound friendly in the chilliest way. ‘Is it just the two of us?’

‘Looks that way.’

As the door slid closed for the second time, Van Waayen placed a hand on my shoulder and gazed at me with a look that revealed nothing but the shameless pleasure he took in being himself.

‘That’s good,’ he said, ‘because we have to get together some time and talk about the future, don’t you agree?’ He pushed the button for the fifth floor with his forefinger. For a moment it looked as if the only effect of the elevator’s upward movement was his eyebrows, which rose to unprecedented heights. The smile disappeared from his face. ‘Because you understand, of course, that your future looks quite different than it did a couple of months ago.’ He did not expect an answer. The bad economy, the plummeting stock market, the encroaching silence with regard to mergers and takeovers, the collapse of telecommunications and the draining of the IT sector, along with my recent two-day hiatus—all this was reason enough to discuss my future at the firm.

I nodded, pursed my lips a bit and attempted a vague smile. It made little difference.

‘My office,’ said Van Waayen. ‘Around lunchtime, I thought. That work out for you?’ This was not a question. Make sure it works out.

‘About twelve-thirty,’ I said. We both knew what this was going to be about.

Van Waayen nodded. ‘Fine,’ he said.

The elevator came to a halt with a sigh. The gentle electronic imitation of a gong and a blinking number indicated that we had arrived at the fifth floor.

‘This is me,’ Van Waayen said. ‘Last in, first out. Goes for me, too. You see?’ He laughed and vanished down the corridor. His corridor. Distinctions are made to be drawn. And just as the elevator began moving again it hit me: I was going to be fired. Even the last dregs of alcohol were no solace. In point of fact I was already out. Virtual, maybe, but what were a couple of hours in the big scheme of things?

The elevator shot upward, pressing my throat down into my heart. When I swallowed, it squeezed the rhythm out of my chest and my body stiffened into a dry cramp. This was more than I could take on. I couldn’t get fired. It was impossible. My body seemed to resist the very idea. Being fired meant I’d be cut off from everything I had: the technology, the profession, the systems. Cut off from the assignments that had brought me to the heart of every major development. Mega-assignments that I could easily work on twenty hours a day, driven by the commitment to find solutions where often no solution had been found before. Where the solution didn’t even exist until I found it. Until we found it. Racing through the country for every client, every assignment a different team. Connected. With everything. If I no longer had that, then all that was left was the content. And content is for losers. The prospect alone took my breath away.

Panting discreetly, shallow panting, not too fast, I got out of the elevator on the ninth floor. My lips were so dry I was afraid they’d crack. Briefcase in one hand and chapstick in the other, I rushed to my hot desk. Gazing out over Amsterdam I spread the balm over the tiny, sharp flakes of skin and the stinging fissures in my lips. It relieved the taut dryness around my mouth, but no matter how I looked at it, the morning only grew shorter. Twelve-thirty was arriving as it had never arrived before. Inevitably. Twenty-five more minutes. Twenty. Fifteen.

I can’t let this happen, I thought, no matter what.

‘I’ve had more dissatisfied clients on the phone in two days than in the past fifteen years …,’ Van Waayen said. He looked at me in silence.

I didn’t respond.

‘… your clients,’ he went on. ‘Erik Strila from Justice has never called so many times before. If you leave a minister high and dry without letting him hear from you, you’re doing something wrong. And I’m putting this very mildly. I’ve had to spend two days tying myself up in the most awkward knots to make sure it didn’t get any worse. But don’t worry, all the clients have been reassured and they’re all sticking around. Which is more than I can say for you.’

My own problem was only third on the list, if that. The client came first and the firm came second. Rightfully so, perhaps, but Van Waayen exaggerated. The power of the client is that he can walk away and go elsewhere. That may be true, but in real life clients aren’t so quick to walk away. That wasn’t a factor here, either, but his having to come up with excuses for me was galling for him. Worse than I could have thought.

‘That’s not what I hired you for,’ he said. ‘Seriously. Yesterday I had to send Peter to The Hague at a moment’s notice. Preparations for the EU summit are continuing, whether you show up or not. I also discussed it with the other partners, and we can’t act as if nothing happened, you understand?’ He wasn’t laughing. The interests of a satisfied client were more important than ever. ‘The EU summit is our biggest assignment. Coordinating European security and integration policy puts us squarely in the middle of all the relevant ministries. Justice is crucial. And what do you do? Apparently this kind of responsibility is not in reliable hands in your case. So if I don’t step in now we’ll have no end of trouble, and what will we have to show for it?’

It was a conversation with lots of logical conclusions drawn from indisputable developments, but it wasn’t about having a conversation. It didn’t even look like a conversation. It was an offer of three months’ salary and a promise to spend the next six months helping me find a new job. In concrete terms: a good eighteen thousand euros, five interviews with an outplacement advisor and not the slightest prospect of work, since dismissed consultants are an almost unemployable group. Especially communications consultants. I’d be turning in my car, my cell phone, my laptop and my clients, knowing only too well that the combination of mortgage and flexible credit line would be ruthlessly pulled out from under me within four months.

I did not respond to the offer. I had already decided that. Subconsciously. Instinctively. I pursed my lips, shook my head slightly and raised my eyebrows.

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’ But I didn’t go along with it, for the simple reason that I didn’t agree with it.

‘Take your time,’ Van Waayen said. There was an obligatory sort of reasonableness in his voice. ‘Then we’ll talk further. I always have time on Friday.’

‘Today is Wednesday,’ I said.

‘Whatever. You get what I mean. You don’t have to leave before lunch. That’s not how we treat each other here. But one way or another we have a conclusion to draw. You know that as well as I do.’

Twenty minutes later I was back in the corridor. I hadn’t agreed to anything, hadn’t admitted anything, and I hadn’t eaten any of Van Waayen’s sandwiches. All there was in my stomach was a corrosive pool of coffee and acid. Nothing was left of what I had once been so sure of. The immense HC&P building, which last week had still been the foundation of a rock-solid future, was now anything but. One decision would put me on the other side of glitter and security. If I let go now, I’d never get back in. That much was certain. So I didn’t go anywhere. In fact, I stayed.

After lunch I called my contacts and rescheduled all my appointments. With plenty of apologies and placation I managed to charm my old clients one more time. Why I don’t know, but there was nothing to it. I called Erik Strila, who seemed surprised to hear from me. Word of my departure had apparently gotten around. He listened to my excuses but skirted around them, as if he had heard other ones already. Better ones. And he had.

‘Erik,’ I said, ‘how often have we seen each other and talked over the past year?’

‘Too often to mention.’

‘And all those times I always showed up. I was always perfectly prepared. True or not?’

‘True, yes.’ He agreed, but it sounded like a forgotten memory. A consultant is as good as his last achievement.

I said it to make sure it got said. I wasn’t gone yet. Erik Strila was the client with whom I had the best working relationship. He was my contact at Justice. I had embarrassed him in front of his minister and he wasn’t going to forgive me easily.

‘We’ll talk sometime,’ he said. He even avoided saying goodbye.

All by itself, and almost imperceptibly, my subconscious came to a decision. My head was making assessments that I wasn’t even aware of. What I knew, what I had done, what I had heard—everything lined up in neat rows, vertical and horizontal, compared, tallied up, subtracted, weighed and turned over one last time before being approved or rejected. While I was making my phone calls and talking it struck me: somewhere behind my eyeballs, along the finely branched nerve cells in my head, among the hundreds of millions of contacts there was one that stuck out.

Clear as glass.

Hard as war.

7 Bellilog 06.16.04

I am a communications consultant and I wouldn’t want to be anything else. I can’t even imagine being anything else. Being a consultant is a state of mind. In the meantime this is how things are stacked up: VW is a partner and I’m a junior—not any more, actually, but that has yet to be confirmed, so until then I am—and partners never have to be right because a junior is always wrong. Life may not be fair, but that’s no big deal. That’s power. And because HC&P is a respectable company, a junior will always make sure that a partner never has to exercise his power. Because you just don’t do that. Having power is chic, but exercising power is vulgar. And vulgar is a no-no. A vulgar consultant is an oxymoron. A vulgar consultant does not exist. He cancels himself out.

That’s how things stand, and the only chance I have is to pass something on to the partner that will make him more important than he already is. Not in my eyes, because I don’t even count, but in the eyes of his colleagues, the other partners, the chums. That’s where the points are tallied up.

Take your time and keep on walking, the door shuts by itself.

Mail from: Jess

Subject: Re: Re: sf

cheating? floundering? excuse me? what’s this about? hot and thinking of you. does that help? love u

8 The remains of able-bodied comrades

At the end of the afternoon I put my things in my briefcase, stuck my cell phone in my pocket, zipped my laptop into its bag, took the elevator to the third floor and locked myself in the canteen.

No one was there. All the tables were cleared, the floors swept. A salutary peace reigned. I walked coolly to the back as if I knew what I was doing and put my stuff in the farthest corner, the one closest to the kitchen. I pushed the swinging door open and looked inside. No one there, either.

Excellent.

I turned the latches on the entrance doors to lock them from the inside. They were swinging doors without keyholes. Nothing could have been simpler. No one had ever considered the possibility of a person wanting to ensconce himself in the canteen. Why would they?

Now I was sure that tomorrow I’d be able to get into the building, if only because I had never left. It was thinking and acting at the very lowest level, but there had been instances of a person’s building pass failing to work the day after a candid evaluation talk. The person never got any further than the downstairs reception area. There was always a reason for immediate refusal of entrance. The most common was confidential company information about the client. Information was sacred and everyone accepted the need to protect it. Exaggerated? Perhaps, but in the consultancy world everything is exaggerated. People said goodbye from a distance, never in each other’s company. That only muddied the waters. It was as simple as that, and I was not about to end up on the street in such a childish way.

With every move I made I became calmer, more convinced that I was right. I made coffee, turned off the light and withdrew into the corner I had made for myself. Laptop on a small table, cell phone off. I didn’t want anyone to call me. That would be too bizarre. I clicked through the documents in my computer and stared, sometimes for minutes at a time, at the memos and reports I had written for clients. A lot of the most recent work was for the Ministry of Justice. Media training for the minister, communicating the security policy. That was my work. What made it fascinating was the scale of the assignment, knowing that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of people would be affected by the results. Amplifying small suggestions until they became noticeable changes. That’s what I was staring at, and the waiting came naturally.

All around me the building grew quieter and bigger. Fewer telephones rang, fewer people walked through the corridors, the elevators went up and down only now and then. There were always a couple of midnight oil burners. HC&P had deadlines and interests that sometimes kept consultants at their desks until deep into the night. Even that was normal. I knew I wouldn’t be really alone in the building until two or three o’clock in the morning, and even then I couldn’t be sure. Because of the extreme working hours the alarm system was almost never in operating mode. It was there, all right, but no one ever turned it on because someone was always busy somewhere in the building. There was a night watchman downstairs armed with a battery of video cameras who kept an eye on the most important places. The canteen was not one of them.

I got hungry. In the kitchen I found well-stocked supply closets. I could hold out for a week here if necessary. There was plenty of bread and sandwich makings in the refrigerators, and salads of every shape and size. With a plate full of everything and a can of Coke to quench my unremitting thirst, I turned the light back out. I ate by late daylight, drank another can of Coke and waited for the rest of the evening. And the night.

I woke up on the floor. The Coke had done its work and was ready to move on. I stood up, my limbs stiff, stretched and looked around. It was dark. The only illumination was the small exit light above the door, a little white man running against a green background. It was ten past two.

Cautiously I unlocked the doors. The latches slid slowly back, and in a few seconds I pushed the door open a crack. The bathrooms were on the other side of the hall in one of the corridors on the left. Maybe fifteen metres from the canteen, no more than that. I stood with my hand on the door and listened.

All was silent, and here, too, it was dark except for the emergency exit. I heard no one and saw no one. The need to go became more intense. Quickly I slipped into the hall and shot across to the other side. Covering the floor with great strides, I rushed around the corner when suddenly my feet got caught up in something, first the right and then the left, and I fell headlong, flat on my face. Shocked and surprised, I looked around, almost laughing at my own stupidity for not seeing whatever was lying there, a bag or a … what was it? I crept closer on my hands and knees, and my hand pushed against something that felt suspiciously like an arm. I pinched it. No reaction. Coming even closer I suddenly found myself looking into the blank, staring face of a woman.

She didn’t respond. She was lying there on the floor in the middle of the night. I had no business being there, but she far less than I—certainly not like this. I pushed her shoulder again very gently.

‘Hey,’ I said.

Nothing happened.

‘Hey!’ I said again with a bit more conviction, and I pushed harder. She rolled over from her side to her back, and her eyes kept looking at me with a bewildered and reproachful gaze. She didn’t see anything. She didn’t even blink.

I withdrew my hand warily and leaned back on my haunches, my eyes fixed on the woman. On the body of a woman. A woman I didn’t know was lying here dead in the corridor. I stood up, dizziness spinning through my head and tugging at my stomach. It lasted no more than twenty seconds in all, maybe a bit longer. The shock of the past few days, the excessive amount of alcohol I had polished off, the confrontation with Van Waayen, and my dismissal. And now this.

Who was this woman? And why was she lying here? Did she just collapse on her way home after a night of work, her bag over her shoulder? Even before she could reach the elevator? Or did she sprain her ankle, topple over and hit her head against the wall? One of her shoes had come loose and lay a little further down the corridor. It was possible. Except there was no sign of it anywhere. She was lying straight across the corridor, her head at least a metre from the wall. So how did it happen? If it wasn’t just some kind of crazy accident, or cardiac arrest, what was it then? Had she been murdered? And if so, by whom? There was no one here. I held my breath and listened, trying to distinguish different sounds, but all I could hear was the building. Indeterminate ticks and clicks, a gentle hum and murmur of the climate control and the other systems tucked away behind the ceiling and walls, mechanical sounds produced without human intervention. Quite normal under any other circumstances, but not now.

How long had she been lying here? When was the last time I had heard sounds in the corridor? Before I fell asleep. Way before. It had grown quiet after about ten o’clock, at least on this floor.

I looked at the woman again. I walked around her, dropped to my knees, picked up her bag and zipped it open. Bending forward awkwardly in the semi-darkness, I tried to see what was inside. It was a big bag with long, rigid handles that kept getting in the way. I saw a wallet, a pack of cigarettes, a lighter and all sorts of other little things. I rummaged through the contents, took out a set of house keys and was about to continue searching when I noticed a waving light approaching from one of the side corridors. The beam swerved back and forth from left to right, and almost immediately I heard the sounds of subdued whispers. Two, maybe three different voices. My breath caught in my throat, and in a flash I realized that being here was not a good idea. Not at all. These men were not from security. They were walking through a dark office building with flashlights. People who belonged here would simply turn on the lights and speak at normal volume. Suddenly I laid my hand on something, a flat plastic card. I pulled it out. It was her company pass, and in a split second I read her last name. Radekker. That was it. That’s all I had time for. The men had almost reached the corner of the corridor. I put the other things back in the bag and was about to lay it down, but my hair had gotten tangled in one of the strange raised handles. With a single fierce tug I pulled the bag loose and could just barely suppress a scream. In four quick paces I was out of the corridor. I let the door of the canteen close gently behind me. Panting, and with a pounding heart, I leaned against the wall behind the door. I felt the place where I had pulled the hair out of my head and waited, listening to thumping and lugging sounds, to remarks that I could only half understand at best.

‘… doing this? Do we take the elevator?’

‘No, idiot!’

Laughter. More thumping.

‘Yeah, the other side!’

‘… get the stuff?’

Mumbling.

‘What do you think?’

‘What I think is what I’m asking. Otherwise I’d ask something else.’

There was a sound of dragging, sighing and groaning.

‘Jesus, bitch is heavy.’

A dull smack.

‘Hey, watch what you’re doing!’

My head was a jumble of thoughts. I knew too little, and what I did know did not appeal to me. It was threatening. Overlooking the city from an office tower of glass, steel, stone and concrete, I was literally too far removed from everything. In a neighbourhood without houses and without shops, where people in suits travelled to make plans, attend meetings, write reports and do other abstract things, all high above the ground, the only manual work had to do with operating computers and telephones, keyboards and buttons. Everything else was verbalization. A communication consultant has no idea what manual work is. I was not the right person to run into dead people. Not on the street, not in the train and certainly not in this office building. Yet I did want to know what had happened in the hall, what those men were doing there. And I had to call security. Two things at the same time.

Call first.

Preferably as soon as possible. The only way I could do anything was by contacting someone else. I ran into the kitchen, found a wall phone next to the swinging doors and snatched the receiver from the hook. The number! I looked on the inside of the receiver and on the phone itself, but there was no list of internal numbers. Security had its own number that everyone was supposed to know in case of emergency. Except there never were any emergencies, so I had no idea.

Nine?

I pressed the key and listened. Nothing happened.

One?

Again nothing.

Zero?

Outside line.

I slammed down the receiver with a curse and ran back to the canteen entrance. Then I warily pushed one of the doors open a crack and looked out. And listened.

Silence.

No sound. No movement. Hesitantly I left the canteen. The corridor was empty. The woman was gone, her bag was gone, the shoe was gone and the men were gone. There was nothing to indicate anything to anyone. Still uncertain, I walked further down the corridor, toward the elevators. The doors were shut and the little lights next to the buttons were dark. The elevators had stopped running and were standing still somewhere, anywhere. I began racking my brains. The office was built in the shape of a wedge, with a central column and two curved wings. The elevator shafts were in the middle section and the emergency exits were at the far ends of both wings. Both exits were about equally far from where I was standing, except the men had come from the left wing. So logically, it seemed to me, they would follow the same route back.

Every choice counted, and no choice meant doing nothing. I ran into the corridor, not at full speed but at a strange, slow-motion pace. Inhibited by caution. By fear. I wanted to hurry, but at the same time I didn’t want to make any noise. As a result I succeeded in neither. I didn’t hurry and I made more noise than I had to. At the last turn in the corridor I stopped, leaned against the wall and peered cautiously around the corner. No one. The emergency exit sign was shining forlornly between the dividing walls. Now I ran to the doors at the end of the corridor and pushed one open. Behind the door was a bare concrete stairwell, where every sound reverberated and boomed as if it were being produced by a cheap amplifier. I didn’t hear a thing. Not a single sound. With great caution I stepped into the open space and tried to look over the railing and into the stairwell, but it was too far away. If I were to let go of the door, it would close and lock behind me and I wouldn’t be able to get back in. All my things were still in the canteen so I had to go back, no matter what happened. I kicked off one of my shoes, placed it at an angle in the door frame, and let the door close on it. The powerful door-closer squeezed the soft leather all out of shape, and with faint, unexpected pain I stood there watching the compression of three hundred euros worth of footwear.

Taking two steps at a time, I stormed down the stairs to the exit on the ground floor three floors below, and soon I was standing in the parking garage beneath the building. I had jammed my second shoe into the heavy steel door leading to the garage, and it was even flatter than the first. No one was there. In that whole immense, bare, concrete parking level there were only three cars, and one of them was mine. Outside in the street I heard the sound of a passing motorcycle. A siren wailed in the far distance. Just for a moment. Then silence. There was nothing to see, nothing to detect.

Slowly I walked back upstairs to the canteen. I had seen something, but I had absolutely no proof that anything had taken place. None. If I were to call security, the man would want to know what I was doing in the building at the very least. And in the canteen at that. My place of work was six floors higher, so what was I doing there? What was I doing here? Calling the police would produce the same results, the only difference being that the police probably wouldn’t even show up. No body, no people, nothing. All I had were my own thoughts, my ideas, and my trust in them was minimal. I was thinking things that paralyzed me, things that kept me from seeing who I was, or who I thought I was. As if you had always loved chocolate and suddenly, from one minute to the next, the smell alone made you sick, made you break out in hives. As if you had become allergic to the one thing you loved the most. Like that, only worse.

It was all because of Kurt, that was clear. Kurt had turned me inside out. My whole body had risen up in protest against my mind. A war was being fought inside me on the molecular level, and on that battlefield my self-confidence was the first casualty.

In one of the refrigerators in the kitchen I found a bottle of wine, and before I knew it I had polished off more than half. I was totally oblivious to the flavour. The alcohol found the remains of its able-bodied comrades with convincing ease.

Maybe half an hour had passed since I had first left the canteen to go to the bathroom, and I still hadn’t been there. High time. I took off my jacket and hung it over the back of the chair, putting my hands in the pockets to take out my cigarettes. Pack, lighter—and there was something else in the right-hand jacket pocket. The woman’s keys. And her pass. I looked at the pass and read the name: I. Radekker. Reading her name brought back the image of her dead body. Alone, dumped in the corridor, lifeless on the indestructible office carpeting.

I put the keys in my pocket, walked to the bathroom and retreated into one of the cubicles.

Goose bumps on my arms.

9 Bellilog 06.17.04

Adrenalin dreams, fingers on the computer keys, tools for making symbols, contact with the contact points, no one to reach, signals to myself … slept very badly.

10 First look, then think

Daylight came. Finally. I had been waiting almost three hours. Awake, restless, uncertain as I was, it took much longer for the time to pass than I was used to. I made coffee, and in the kitchen I listened to the little radio that was always there. Music. Talk shows. News. Reports that flitted by: emigrating farmers, protesting health care workers, financial setbacks. I heard it, but the details had no impact on me. Except for that one item.

… at the mosque yesterday, Dutch youths came to blows with youths of foreign origin after the windows of the mosque had been smashed in. The police managed to separate the two groups. Seven people were wounded and taken to the hospital. Things remained tense until long after midnight …

The reports you don’t want to hear always sound the loudest. Every day provided new reasons for harsher decisions to be made at the upcoming European summit. I was haunted by images of escalating conflict, thoughts I had no room for. My own situation had priority.

The first employees began arriving at six-thirty, the consultants well before the office staff and before the clients could start calling. Often the early morning was the only part of the day you could work in peace without being disturbed by the phone, by ad hoc discussions, by colleagues popping in or by meetings that got out of hand. I packed my things and waited in the corridor until someone below got into the elevator going up. Only when the elevator began moving did I press the button, so no one below would notice that I was still in the building.

The elevator stopped and almost noiselessly the doors opened. Two men were inside, young consultants who, like me, had to find their hours where others left them. Frans Stutman and Thomas Ridden. Showered and shaved, they both looked at me, their eyes still heavy with sleep.

Frans was the first to speak. ‘Hey, Michael, another all-nighter?’

‘Can you see it?’

‘And smell it,’ said Thomas.

‘Thanks a lot.’

‘De nada.’ Frans opened his briefcase, took out a designer bottle, aimed the atomizer at my jacket and pressed down. A cloud of fresh male scent descended on me. Thomas waved his hand back and forth and coughed.

‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘What kind of garbage is that?’ He grabbed the bottle from Frans’s hands. ‘Three litres for ten euros? Or did Shell make this? Aerosol unleaded? I can’t release this product any more. Public health comes first.’

The door opened on the eighth floor. Thomas sprinted out with Frans right behind him, into the corridor, out of sight. With them went the fun of the job, the passionate desire to have an opinion about everything, to add an insight or throw in your two cents. One floor higher I got out, walked into the right wing of the building and headed for the large work area where the hot desks were. A consultant’s place is with his client and not at the office behind a desk. Desk work is a waste of time, which is why an advanced form of musical chairs had been introduced. We had ten work stations for fifteen people. Ten desks that belonged to everyone, and therefore to no one. There was nothing on the desks: no plants, no photos, no postcards. Nothing. Ten virginal working surfaces that gave the impression of an unused office. Everyone had his or her own cart, a kind of glorified shopping trolley made of fashionable brushed aluminum and high-quality plastic with a place for files and folders and a small lockable compartment at the bottom. It was as if you had arrived at the ward for terminal patients and you were allowed to keep a few personal things next to your bed. Not too many, because before too long all your junk would have to be cleared away anyway.

At the door I grabbed my cart, walked with it to the farthest work station, next to the window and plugged in my laptop. While the computer was starting up I took out my cell phone. It was still off. I had been unreachable since the previous afternoon. The HC&P office had almost no land lines. Even the secretaries walked through the building with cells. Everyone was always available. Everywhere. Unless you turned your phone off, but that was only permitted during conferences with clients or higher-ups. The first was company policy, the second was an unspoken rule.

As soon as the phone found the network it began peeping and the voicemail symbol appeared in the display. I called, and the computerized voice from the phone company told me I had seven messages. Three were from Dries van Waayen—personal, no less.

‘Bellicher,’ the manicured voice said. ‘On second thought, maybe we ought to work on reaching a point of clarity for both parties. Let’s do it soon. I understand you’re on the road, meeting with a client, and that’s great, but once you start something it’s a good idea to grab the bull by the horns. That’s what we advise our clients and it’s what we do ourselves. Call me,’ he said.

End of message.

In the next one he elaborated his idea. ‘Now we have to be careful that we don’t turn our attention to the wrong things, that we don’t lose sight of the difference between effectiveness and efficiency. Focus is the goal. That’s important. That’s what it’s all about. I know it and you know it. So I think it would be good if we could come back to this as soon as possible. Call me. I’m available.’

End of message.

The third voicemail was less nuanced. The cultivated smooth edge of his voice was gone. I wasn’t with a client at all, and now he knew it, too. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to know what IN GOD’S NAME you’re up to! Whatever possessed you to make such a stupid decision, especially now? Not only is it at odds with the interest of the client, but it also jeopardizes the good name of HC&P. I expect to see you tomorrow morning at ten-fifteen in my office.’

A play in three acts. Announcement of the idea, confrontation with the principle and the immediate execution. All my own fault. Of course. Management doesn’t make mistakes, and certainly not the management of an international consultancy.

That’s why he was so eager to get rid of me. As soon as possible, before my behaviour could have any negative consequences. On that point he was merciless. You could make mistakes in your analysis, you could miss things in your research, you could forget to ask the right question. All signs of stupidity, of course, but it was permitted. People make mistakes. It happens. The seniors and partners made sure you knew what you had done wrong. All fine—in moderation, of course. But leaving a client in the lurch—a client—that was not done. That was cardinal sin number one. Even illness was hardly an excuse. As long as you could walk, sit and be present, you dragged yourself to the appointment. You might not utter a word all afternoon, but even that was better than not showing up. The only acceptable reason for cancelling an appointment with a client was to make room for an appointment with a more important client. A wholesale office supply company, for example, could be pushed aside for a ministry, but even then it would have to be absolutely unavoidable. But standing the client up, just like that, without offering any reasons and without even calling, was unthinkable. And that is exactly what I had done. For Dries van Waayen I had become intolerable.

I listened to the rest of the messages, and the only one that actually got through to me was the last one. It was Kurt, chatting alone in the digital storeroom.

‘Hey, Michael, it’s me, you’re not there … or you are and you don’t want anybody on the line … and that means me, too, whatever, and that’s fine, I mean, that you’re not talking to me, I can just imagine … so just for a minute, not long, of course, because … I really want you to talk to me again, because … Jesus, how can I say this … it’s me, I mean, you know that, right?’

There was silence. The only noise was the faint hum of the connection, running for a couple of seconds. I sat behind the desk, staring out the window in a trance, the cell phone pressed to my ear. The message—ended, disconnected and stored quite some time ago—would be saved for another twenty-four hours. No longer.

I had arrived in a foreign land, in hostile territory. I didn’t want to be there. And to tell the truth, I wasn’t really there yet. All my suits were still hanging in the closet, shirts at a hundred-and-fifty euros apiece, silk ties. My consultant’s pitch was still in my computer, which I always had with me.

If I had to report to Dries van Waayen at ten-fifteen, I wanted to know what to ask, not only about myself but mainly about Ms. Radekker. I’d find out soon enough when I was going to be fired. I knew exactly how that would go. HC&P let it be known in no uncertain terms that loyalty was the highest good. You were never to abandon each other, to let each other down, but if you did you’d be out the door before the end of the day. I had absolutely no faith in the loyalty of the firm. Apparently it was my time to go, and this was how I’d make my contribution to maintaining the profits. Fine.

But with Radekker things were not fine. She was dead and her body had disappeared. Something had happened within the walls of this office building that no one knew anything about except me. If I didn’t do something fast, I wouldn’t be able to do anything at all. Once I was outside the firm it would be impossible to make contact with anyone, so someone from management had to be informed. Dries van Waayen was the first. After all, he was responsible for personnel. If I was going to tell Van Waayen, I’d have to know who Radekker was, what department she worked in and whether she had been reported missing. Those kinds of things. Simple things.

All the names, telephone numbers and workstations of the firm’s employees were available through the HC&P network. Within two minutes I knew that only one Radekker worked for the firm: Ina Radekker, debt analyst in the Finance & Control department with an assigned workstation, room 3-026. She had her own phone extension, but I had little use for that now. I clicked through the phone book, looking up Radekker in Amsterdam. Two hits. H.K. Radekker on Van Breestraat. Didn’t seem like the right one to me. Wrong initials and much too upmarket. My lips were so dry they hurt. From the air conditioning or from something else, maybe the radiation from all the cell phones. I pulled on the loose bits of skin with my teeth until one tore off. Without chapstick I had no life. I looked at the second name: I. Radekker, Admiraal de Ruyterweg. That sounded more like a debt analyst in her early thirties. I wrote down the address and phone number and called. Instinctively I held my breath. What if someone answered, what was I supposed to say? I could hardly just blurt out what I thought: that someone had been killed here last night and I thought it was Ms. Radekker, and was she missing perhaps, or … After twenty rings I hung up. No one was home. Logical. Or not logical, that was possible, too. Everything was possible.

One by one the others came in. New smells jostling with each other. Coffee, eau de toilette, leather and wax from polished shoes and chic briefcases. Snatches of conversations could be heard left and right, sometimes faltering, then pierced with an unexpectedly loud laugh. Beginning of the day, an ordinary day, Thursday, not even the end of the week. Outside a watery morning in June, inside enough collective ambition in one room to supply the Netherlands with its own aeronautics industry.

‘Here, you look like you could use this.’

From the corner of my left eye I saw a steaming cup of coffee appear on the desk.

Gijs dragged a chair from another desk and sat down across from me. He was holding an old plastic bag, from the Albert Heijn supermarket. Gijs was not one for luxury briefcases. A waste of money. Especially if you could pick up a perfectly good bag every week for ten cents when you did your grocery shopping. Gijs was my age, a little more than ten centimetres taller—one metre ninety-three—economist by training, mathematician by nature. Set him down in front of a complex calculation and he’d simply see the answer, as if the numbers and symbols were exactly the same as the colours and lines in a painting. It was like me looking at a photo and saying, ‘Oh, right, a car,’ except he’d look at a complicated math problem and say, ‘Oh, right, twenty-one.’

Where it came from he himself didn’t know. ‘Can’t you see that?’ he’d ask. ‘It’s right there. You can see that it’s there, can’t you? How can you not see it?’ He saw sums as compositions, tables as visual constructions. For him, annual reports and balance sheets were the simplest of cartoons. During his college years he once failed an exam because although he knew the answer he couldn’t explain how he had arrived at it. In fact he didn’t arrive at answers; they were there already.

But not for me. I saw the world in terms of relationships, of positions and interests. If someone said something to me, I saw his words like a river flowing across a landscape. From his tone and pronunciation I could hear the relative importance of what he was saying and see where the dikes were strong and where they were in danger of giving way. I could sense exactly what a person ought to say, when and to whom, in order to preserve the unity of his words while remaining within the banks. Gijs couldn’t see that. When Gijs listened to someone, all he heard was what had been said.

‘If someone says twelve, then what he means is twelve, right? Or am I being stupid?’

Sort of like that. And we were both colour blind, he a bit more than I, but we both thought there were an awful lot of metallic green cars riding around.

‘Report done?’ he asked.

I shook my head.

‘Not done?’

I shook my head again.

‘Worked all night and still not done? Bad planning, Bellicher.’

I nodded.

‘Can I do something? Help? I have an hour.’

The hot coffee spread slowly through my body and produced a relaxation I hadn’t felt in hours. Gijs’s phlegmatic attitude did the rest. Suddenly I realized that I was taking myself for a ride, and doing it big time. I was hiding behind the events of the previous night and acting as if my future in the firm didn’t matter anymore. My own problems were nothing in comparison with a murder. At least that’s what I thought. But if I was brutally honest with myself, things were exactly the opposite.

HC&P was an unusual collection of people, full and partial geniuses with audacious talents and bizarre gifts. People like Gijs van Olde Nieland, who saw the world as a pallet of numbers, values and codes, who looked at everything other people regarded as abstract and saw it as concrete—and found that perfectly normal. There were many more like him in the company, attracted by the work, by the sometimes absurdly convoluted problems that were dumped on the consultant’s desk with increasing frequency, because this was the perfect place for people who could see straight through the most complex questions. It was a self-sustaining process. That explained the incontestable position of the big international consultancies, and with just over a hundred thousand consultants in more than seven hundred branches in a hundred and twenty-four countries, HC&P was among the biggest. Consultants from the firm exercised influence over the policies of governments and the business community throughout the world. As modern consigliari they had the ear of the rich and powerful. Behind the scenes they guided the decisions of governments and companies, decisions that affected the lives of hundreds of millions, billions of people wherever they happened to live: in Amsterdam, London, New York or Paris, but also in villages like Rijpwetering, Lurcy la Ville, Pleasant Hill or Wexford. With their far-flung network, consultants were not only aware of developments wherever they were taking place, but in some cases they set that policy themselves.

In the Netherlands I was part of that network. I belonged there, with people like Gijs and Thomas and Jan, and with Jessica, who saw everything as an expression of strategy and tottered on the brink of perversion. You could see that by the way she moved her body, sometimes with barely controlled little jolts, almost undetectable, because she managed to gain control over herself at the very last second. At inconvenient moments she would come and stand so close to me that I could hardly speak. Every movement could be a form of assault. She would do those kinds of things and then look as if she were in a meeting, talking about the strategic difference between a brand and a product.

Jessica and I did not live together, but that didn’t really mean anything. She had an apartment on Gerrit van der Veenstraat. I lived on Deurloostraat, a hundred square metres on the top floor. The two addresses suggested more of a difference than there really was, because without her I wasn’t the man I wanted to be. Gijs was the first person I had met at HC&P, but it was through Jessica that I came to love the firm. I belonged with these people.

And I belonged with Sandra and with Marja, who could see the religious background and upbringing of everyone she had ever met as if it were wrapped around them like an aura. She could reduce the most complicated conflicts to manageable proportions within three minutes. ‘One Protestant among four Catholics,’ was her observation after having been merely introduced to the five members of a completely gridlocked board of managing directors. ‘The Protestant always loses, of course, except you know Protestants, they never give in.’

I belonged there, with all the other goofballs who couldn’t tell a grey car from a green one but who could study a collapsing public service, learn about the strategy, the economics, the sociology and the communications and tell them all apart, list the priorities and explain it all to boot.

First look, then think. That was rule number one. Otherwise you wouldn’t know what you were talking about. All around me I could see the people I belonged with. If I couldn’t belong with them anymore, I couldn’t belong anywhere.

Dries van Waayen wasn’t finished with me yet.