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  “Actually, I was more interested in the legal aspect.”

  “I haven’t told your boss you walked out on me yesterday. I told him we had a very fruitful conversation.” He winked. “So now you’re really going to take good care of me, aren’t you?”

  I swallowed my annoyance. “Yes, of course. Let’s discuss the case, then?”

  “All right, go ahead. So, how does it look?” He took out a notebook.

  “To put it bluntly: not good.” I gave a nice long pause, in the hope that it would alarm him and he’d stop acting like a clown. “The risks you’re facing are serious enough to incline me to advise you to settle.”

  He was quiet for a moment. I was pleased to see his face fall. He started tapping the cap of his gold fountain pen nervously. “What does that entail?”

  “You might have to take it down from the Internet. And pay Miss De Boer some kind of compensation.”

  “I’ve already paid her. Two thousand euro. Nothing to sneeze at, I’d say.”

  “Let’s go over the case point by point, shall we?”

  He tapped his pen again a few times. Then wrote the word SETTLE in block letters in the notebook in front of him.

  “We are facing a number of possible grounds on which a judge could convict you. The first is the production and distribution of child porn.” I saw him dutifully jot down CHILD PORN.

  “Also sexual abuse, rape, and perhaps even attempted murder.” I paused to give him time to write down those keywords, too.

  “Miss De Boer will most likely accuse you of forcing her to participate. She’ll claim that she was naive and that you twisted her arm.”

  “She was the one who came to me, actually.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  He took time to consider this. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “I’d be interested to find out. If you are unable to produce incontrovertible proof to that effect, a judge will be inclined to believe the plaintiff’s story. After all, an eighteen-year-old girl tends to evoke more sympathy than a middle-aged man with a paunch in rather-too-tight leather pants, wouldn’t you say?” I accompanied this with a friendly smile. Peter van Benschop didn’t flinch.

  “Let’s first discuss the fact that Miss De Boer was a minor at the time of her employment. Filming sexual acts with a minor is a punishable offense. It is also a crime to pay a minor for performing sexual acts. Consensual sex with persons over the age of sixteen is legal. But paying for it, which puts it into the category of prostitution, is not.”

  “Ridiculous, isn’t it?”

  “Do you think so? Do you have children, Mr. Van Benschop?”

  He shook his head. “Not as far as I know.”

  “I didn’t think so. Anyway, the one advantage you do have is that the girl didn’t look like a minor.”

  “Young woman, remember?” Peter van Benschop was sounding quite agitated. “Young woman. And she had a lot of street smarts, if you know what I mean.”

  I ignored his remark and went on drily, “Besides, the films you made weren’t intended as child porn and weren’t marketed as such.”

  “No, I don’t do child porn. Never have, either.” He smirked as if he deserved a Nobel Prize.

  “That’s good, Mr. Van Benschop.”

  Again he gave his pen a few taps.

  “Producing child porn is a crime. The fact that Miss De Boer chose not to pursue criminal charges against you is not to her advantage. It will certainly raise questions in a judge’s mind as to her motives.”

  Van Benschop was nodding enthusiastically. In the dumps one moment, cheerful the next. Just like a little kid.

  “The question is, why did she lodge a civil complaint? Why didn’t she go to the police? I think it can only mean one thing.”

  My client leaned forward in order not to miss one word.

  “She wants money. A criminal case is one brought by the public prosecutor against the accused. A civil case is where one citizen sues another citizen. As is the case here.”

  Van Benschop wrote the words CRIMINAL and CIVIL CASE.

  “Now, it is possible to have a civil case heard in criminal court. In that case, the judge’s decision will include victim compensation. However, in those cases the compensation is usually not all that great. Leading me to conclude that Miss De Boer has chosen the civil court because she wants money—a lot of it.”

  “It’s always the same story,” Peter van Benschop said wearily.

  “And you should thank your lucky stars. Because if Miss De Boer were to have you prosecuted, I’d have to wait on the judge. If the judge ruled that rape was involved, or sexual abuse, or one of the other punishable offenses I mentioned, then you could easily get four or more years in jail. And who knows what else might come out once the police start digging into your affairs.”

  “Such as?”

  “You tell me. You mentioned yesterday that you like to go to the Bahamas. May I conclude from that that you keep your money in a foreign bank account?”

  He didn’t reply.

  “That’s what I mean.”

  Peter van Benschop tapped his fountain pen one more time and underlined the word SETTLE in his notebook.

  CHAPTER 7

  RAY

  I wanted to please the doctor so I could go home. But I couldn’t get any words on paper. That night in bed I felt as if I was back in Pain de Provence, the French bakery on Princess Irene Street where I used to work. In the seventies, the baker, Pierre Henri, had followed his summer-romance girlfriend Margaret home to the Netherlands and set up his patisserie in a blue-collar neighborhood. Back in those days, the locals had never tasted a croissant, baguette, or brioche before; they wouldn’t even know how to find Provence on a map. But Pain de Provence became a big success anyway. There was an ever-growing line of patrons coming from the fancy neighborhoods on the other side of town.

  When he couldn’t manage the bakery by himself anymore, Pierre took me on as his apprentice. Margaret, now his wife, manned the store, and had such a loud voice that we could literally hear every single order. “Four plain and two chocolate croissants for the lady. Coming right up.”

  “Pff, croissants in the afternoon,” Pierre would say. “You Dutch people are crazy! In France I sell maybe a hundred fifty croissants a day. Here, five, six hundred, and sometimes even a thousand on the weekend. You people are vraiment crazy about croissants.”

  Nothing I’d learned in baking school was useful, or even correct, according to Pierre. For example, at school we’d used yeast to get the bread to rise.

  “Anyone, tout le monde, can work with yeast,” said Pierre. “Yeast is for a baker who has no personnalité. Yeast is for the factory, for the robot, for the baker who’d just as soon have become a bricklayer. C’est incroyable that already at school, they teach you to be mediocre. Incroyable!”

  Pierre used a bread starter his father had given him thirty years ago. For the first couple of years I wasn’t allowed anywhere near La Souche, as Pierre called the mother dough. It was kept in a special temperature-controlled cupboard, far away from anything that could endanger it. Pierre would take out a piece of La Souche every day to make the dough for the bread, baguettes, or croissants. After that the mother had to be replenished again so we’d never run out.

  La Souche had to be fed at set times and then brought back up to the right temperature. Pierre even talked to her. “How are you feeling today, my treasure? Are you comfortable enough?”

  To me, he said, “It’s like making wine, Ray. It’s all in the timing and the temperature. Remember: time and temperature.”

  One day he called me over. “Smell.” He held the earthenware vessel in which La Souche lived under my nose.

  I leaned forward, shut my eyes, and sniffed cautiously.

  “Do you smell how sweet she is? Fresh but not too sour? She is what I am, Ray. It’s thanks to her that our bread is so crusty on the outside and so soft inside. She gives it that fresh, sweet taste. Without her, bread is just flou
r and water. Without her, it’s nothing, mon fils.”

  He taught me how to handle La Souche, because she was an exacting, fussy piece of dough, “more trouble than a woman,” said Pierre. He taught me exactly what she liked and exactly what she didn’t like. What temperature worked best for her, at what time to feed her and how much.

  A year later I was given full responsibility for La Souche. Pierre thought I was even better than he was at measuring her food exactly, or getting the temperature just right. He’d never met anyone as precise as me.

  After five years I was able to handle the entire kitchen by myself. I started baking at three fifteen every morning. While the baguettes, the pains aux noix, the pains aux céréales, the pains au chocolat, the chapatas, the croissants, and the brioches were in the oven, I’d do the weighing. I’d get all the ingredients ready for that day, setting them out in little bowls: the flour, the chocolate, the raisins, the sunflower seeds, the cheese, the almond paste.

  Margaret and Pierre would arrive at six thirty to start setting out the freshly baked goods in the store. When it opened at seven and the people from the fancy part of town began lining up, along with a few more sophisticated locals (“They’re crazy!” Pierre would usually exclaim), Pierre and I would make the dough for the seven different kinds of bread, and we’d bake the canelés and tartelettes. The afternoon was devoted to the croissant dough. We’d keep folding the butter into the dough until there were hundreds of layers.

  “Ah, perfection,” Pierre would finally say. Absolute perfection.

  After I’d been working there for years, Pierre and Margaret sold the business and moved to France. Pain de Provence was taken over by a man in flashy glasses who kept slapping me on the back. According to Margaret, he did that because he wanted to be my friend. After all, without me the bakery wasn’t worth anything, was it? she said.

  The day before they left, Pierre called me over. He was hugging the earthenware pot with the bread starter in his arms. “This is my most precious possession, mon bébé. It was given to me by my father when I started my first boulangerie. She’s made me what I am. Since I don’t have any sons, and Margaret is past childbearing age, I now give her to you.” There were tears rolling down his cheeks.

  Salt is lethal to bread starter. I quickly took the earthenware pot from him to prevent his tears from falling into La Souche.

  “Enjoy her. Employ her. I trust you, in turn, will find someone to pass her on to when the time comes. And if you don’t, I expect you to destroy her. Will you promise me that, Ray? Tu me le promets?”

  “Oui,” I replied.

  After Pierre and Margaret left, the new owner of the bakery decided to renovate. Before, the preparation area and ovens had had their own separate space behind the store. The new owner had decided it would be fun if the clients could see me at work. So that they’d know that everything was fresh and made on the premises and didn’t come from a factory. So the wall separating the store from the kitchen was removed and replaced with a glass partition.

  Suddenly I had people watching me peeling apples for the tartelettes and looking on as I kneaded the dough with calm, deliberate movements. It made me shy. It made me lose my confidence.

  Before, every couronne I made weighed exactly 525 grams. I made sure they did. It was just one of those things; it was important to me. After the glass window went in, a couronne sometimes wound up being close to 600 grams because my hands were shaking when I weighed the ingredients. Or sometimes I let the canelés burn. I hated being stared at. Until I met Rosita. From that moment on I constantly kept an eye on the glass wall so that when she came into the store I wouldn’t miss a minute of her. Eventually I got used to the nosy glances, and then everything turned out exactly the right weight again.

  I’d never had much to do with the people in the neighborhood. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say to them. They’d sometimes say hello and then I’d say hello back. That was as far as it went. I was kept plenty busy with my daily routine. The bakery. My fish. Eating. Sleeping. Showering. Cleaning. Laundry. Ironing. Shopping. Breathing.

  The day Rosita moved in next to me, the sun was shining. It was hot that day. She drove up in a rusty old delivery van, with a kid in a faded blue child seat and a man with greasy hair pulled back in a ponytail. Rosita and the man hauled a few pieces of furniture inside. A brown sofa set. A small table and two chairs. The biggest double bed I’d ever seen.

  The man looked tired and old, even more worn and ragged than the mattress or the brown leather couch. Rosita, on the other hand, was all smiles. She wasn’t wearing much in the way of clothes. A pair of very short shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. Sweat dripped from her dark curls to form a big wet spot on her back. I didn’t think she was wearing a bra.

  I decided Rosita was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Prettier even than the girls on television, much prettier than the other women I saw in the street. The women on the street all had yellow teeth, and didn’t wear bras, either. Only their boobs weren’t as perky as Rosita’s. They always seemed to be yelling, too. At their husbands. At their kids. At the stray dogs that pooped in their front yards and were responsible for Queen Wilhelmina Street’s nasty smell, especially in the springtime, after the snow had melted.

  And why couldn’t they take care of their front yards? The neglected front yards really, really irked me. Sometimes at night, before starting my shift, I’d take a pair of hedge shears with me. I couldn’t very well tackle other people’s gardens, but at least all the hedges along Queen Wilhelmina Street were dead straight.

  It was a relief that I hardly ever saw the old man with the weird hair who came that first day. I did regularly see Rosita, however. I liked watching her from behind the dark red curtains my mother had picked out for me. As soon as I came home from work, which was always 3:05 in the afternoon, I’d settle myself in a chair at the kitchen window and look out, hoping to see her.

  When it wasn’t raining she usually came outside for a walk with her stroller. From where I sat I could watch her walk all the way down the street until she turned the corner onto Princess Beatrix Street.

  The way she walked mesmerized me—head held high, in heels that clacked loudly with every step she took. And then her hips. The way they swayed from side to side in silent rhythm. I sometimes counted along out loud: One, two, three, four. One, two, three four. She never fell out of step, not even the tiniest fraction of a second.

  Sometimes she’d stop for a chat with a neighbor. Or she’d stuff the pacifier back into the baby’s mouth. But most of the time she just walked straight down the street without stopping.

  The first time I saw her turn that corner, I jumped up and ran over to her house to read the nameplate by the door. Rosita and Anna Angeli, it said. The letters were hacked into a piece of brown slate. I must have said her name aloud at least a hundred times: Rosita, Rosita, Rosita. It sounded like the name of a savory brioche. With Gouda and herbes de Provence.

  My favorite times were when she came back from her walk. Then I could see her face, although I found the hollow between her two collarbones possibly even more attractive.

  Sometimes she’d wave at me. Then I’d dive back behind the curtain. Just the idea that I might wave back made me nervous. There was no way that I could.

  CHAPTER 8

  IRIS

  My mother still lived in the house in which I was born, quite a nice bungalow with a garden in a suburb of Amsterdam. My father had passed away ten years earlier, shortly after he’d retired. He had been looking forward to all the traveling he and my mother were going to do, the hours he was going to spend gardening, and the books he was going to read. He wasn’t even halfway through Anna Karenina when he collapsed. Heart attack. Two days later he was dead.

  My mother liked me to stay in her house when she was away on vacation. Since I’d have to stay home with Aaron for a few days anyway, and the weather happened to be good, I didn’t mind this time. All I had at home was a six-by-ten-foot roof
terrace. Not enough to keep a young child occupied. In my mother’s garden there was room for a kiddie pool, in which Aaron could splash to his heart’s content with his plastic whale collection while I tried to work under a parasol.

  The garden was great, but the house made me nuts. My mother was terribly finicky about her things. She made me throw a big quilt over the sofa when Aaron was there. “I only buy the very best quality,” she said. “As long as you take good care of it, it’ll last you forever.” Every item, therefore, had its own maintenance routine. There was a special soap for the kitchen floor, wax for the wooden dining table, cleaning product for the Swarovski collection, polish for the stainless steel stove, special conditioner for the sofa and chairs; the cleaning arsenal took up the entire hall closet. My mother had left five pages of instructions for me so that her precious things would receive the attention they deserved.

  When the weather was nice, the garden outweighed all the trouble. Besides, Aaron loved the aquarium—the ridiculously outsize aquarium that had appeared in the bungalow’s living room simply out of nowhere one day a few years ago. Aaron hadn’t been born yet. I had just finished my studies and felt the world was my oyster.

  “I didn’t know you liked fish,” I’d said to my mother.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know,” she’d answered.

  And this wasn’t even your ordinary aquarium; it was a saltwater setup with enough bells and whistles to rival the equipment in an intensive care unit. The fragile ecosystem of corals, tropical fish, and sea anemones had to be kept at a constant temperature, not to mention the need to control the salinity, the water’s pH, the weekly water change, the special vitamins that had to be administered. My mother had a man come in, naturally, to do the lion’s share of the work.

  “What’s wrong with a nice goldfish in a pretty bowl?” I’d asked.