“I can understand some of this, Fricke,” she began. “I can remember how it feels to be your age, Anneke’s age. I can remember—oh, the confusion, the pain, the clash of loyalties. I can remember all that.”
“Oh, yeah?” The girl gave a small smile. Her certainty that Gini could not, that the experiences of her sister and herself were unique, unprecedented, infuriated Gini. Then she remembered: that blind teenage arrogance, that conviction that no one, ever, could have experienced emotions so complex and intense, she too had felt that.
She gave another sigh and looked away. She thought of the day on which she had first met Pascal, of his introduction in the Ledoyen bar, of her father continuing to hold court, her own embarrassment—it was midmorning, and her father was at the three-bourbon stage already, the anecdotes getting too protracted, too boastful—and then her gradual realization that this tall, silent young Frenchman, standing on the edge of a group of men twenty strong, was watching her father in silence, with an expression of undisguised contempt.
He had left the bar shortly afterward; she had followed him, furious, intent on challenging him. The challenge had escalated into confrontation, almost a fight. The conflict in Beirut was still localized then. Pascal Lamartine had caught hold of her arm and dragged her out into the white heat of the street.
“Take a look at your father’s unimportant little war, then,” he had said, his face tight with anger. “You won’t find it in a hotel bar any more than he will. It’s just down this street.”
There had been another car bomb. Lamartine had his cameras out at once. She stood amid the wreckage, tilting walls, rubble, screams, and lamentation: a child’s feet protruded from the masonry right in front of her. It was the first time she had ever seen, and smelled, death and grief.
She froze, then tried to help. There was a man, and they were trying to lift him onto an improvised stretcher, a length of corrugated metal. An Arab woman spat at her, and she stumbled back. She had blood on her hands and blood on her face. Then, out of the confusion of people and noise and movement, Lamartine had come back. She could see shock, contrition, anxiety on his extraordinary face. She felt his arms lock around her, and then he was drawing her away, around a corner, down a street. They stopped in a hot, narrow street near the harbor. He had a room there over a bar. He drew her into the shade of a doorway, began to speak in an agitated way, then stopped.
She had looked at his face, his fierce, intelligent face, his gray eyes. She watched his gaze become steady, then intent. She knew then, as he knew, what had to happen next. Less than fifteen minutes after leaving the scene of the bomb, she was in his room, in his arms, making love for the first time, with a man she had only just met, scarcely spoken to, but felt she had known all her life.
Could she tell Fricke this, or some of this? Would it make any difference if she did? Could she say, trust me, Fricke, I know how it feels to be wildly in love for the first time in your life. I know how it feels to toss caution aside and gamble everything on one glorious risk. It can work out, Fricke—it did, eventually, years later, in my case. I still love the man concerned; we met again. I am with him now—those fifteen-year-old instincts of mine may have been unwise, but in my case they were correct.
She leaned forward, some of those sentences on her lips; then she drew back. No. In the first place, Fricke would not believe her; in the second, it would be irresponsible. Such instincts had been deadly in Anneke’s case.
The silence had continued for some five minutes now. Fricke was frowning into space, fiddling with her cigarette. Her thoughts, Gini realized, had been following a completely different track. She now turned back, pushed aside her lank hair, and gave Gini a cautious look.
“What you told my mother this afternoon—” She hesitated. “That was true? It was definitely Star who got Anneke onto drugs?”
“Yes, it was. I interviewed someone in England, a man who sees Star pretty often. He met your sister twice with Star. She was on heroin by then, and Star was supplying it. He used to help her give herself a fix.”
“You didn’t say that to my mother.”
“No.” Gini sighed. “And you can understand why, I think.”
“I guess so.”
Gini looked away. She could hear Mitchell’s voice. According to him, Star was charging twenty pounds for Anneke when Mitchell first met her. Some months later, when he next saw her, the price had dropped by half, so it took twice as many men to buy the same fix. Star had said he was teaching Anneke the laws of supply and demand, that this was economics, a graduate course. “Get this straight,” Mitchell had said with an air of self-righteousness. “She gave me a dose the first time, and by the second—no way. She was filthy. She had lice. She was a junkie—okay? She had those dead eyes junkies get, like all they can think about is smack, get me smack. She was a zombie… And Star thought that was pretty amusing. That’s what he gets off on. A power trip.”
None of this could be said, of course, or even intimated. Gini turned back to Fricke; they looked at each other. Perhaps something in her face communicated—afterward Gini was still unsure—but where persuasion had failed, silence was effective: Fricke suddenly began to talk.
“She met him in France,” she said. “On that school trip my mother mentioned. February last year, about two months before she ran away with him. They ran into each other in Paris—I don’t know where, in some art gallery, or a museum café maybe. But he must have been a quick worker, because those school trips are really tightly supervised, curfews, teachers crawling all over the place. He couldn’t have had more than fifteen, twenty minutes before the next patrol. That was enough. He gave her an address. Anneke was writing to him after that. She told me—she’d met this really wild guy, she’d written to him, and he was writing back.”
“She was writing to France?”
“I don’t know. Anneke said he moved around a lot. She got secretive after she met him. She’d just throw out these little hints. She never told me what they were planning, that she was going to run off with him. I would have done something then if I’d known. I’m not a fool. I would have gone to my father—”
She hesitated once more, eyeing Gini. Then, as if she had come to a sudden decision, she reached down into her shoulder bag and drew out a book.
“Here.” She slid it across the table. “It’s Anneke’s address book. The first time she called me—that’s why she called. Because she was worried about this book.”
Gini stared at the girl, who had blushed crimson. Carefully, she opened the book; it was a small loose-leaf binder crammed with names, numbers, and addresses.
“Where was this, Fricke?”
“In this special hiding place she had. Under a loose floorboard in her closet. She kept her diary there. Her supply of birth control pills. Grass sometimes. She’d taken Star’s letters and the diary, but she’d forgotten this. You were going to ask, weren’t you? It was going to be your next question, I could tell.”
“Yes. It was.”
“Take it. You keep it. Show it to the police. I don’t care anymore. I hid it for her, because she was afraid they’d find it—she knew they’d search her room. And then, when she still didn’t come back—I went through it. I’ve been through it a thousand times.”
“His address must be in here? That’s why she was so worried, why she called, why she asked you to hide it?”
“Yes.” Fricke drew in an unsteady breath. She lit another cigarette. “Except it isn’t in there—or I can’t find it. There’s no entry for Star. There’s a thousand names and addresses in there. All her pen pals, France, Germany, Italy, England, Belgium, America, Africa… she’d been into that since she was nine. She got seven, eight letters at least every week. You find him, if you can—but I’m telling you, it’s impossible. It’s like looking for one pebble on a beach.”
Gini reopened the notebook. It was a typical teenage girl’s book, untidy, covered with doodles and scribblings, and crossings-out. It was partly typed and par
tly handwritten; it was a mess.
“Fricke—I’m very grateful. But I can’t read Dutch.”
“You don’t need to. He wasn’t Dutch, he wasn’t based in the Netherlands. You can read the foreign addresses—look, that one there, that’s in France, and there’s one in San Francisco. You might find something. You’re a journalist. I thought…”
Fricke, so hostile a short while before, was now looking at her with pleading, as if Gini and her putative skills were her last hope. Gini, who was not optimistic, did not want to disappoint her or raise those hopes.
“I’ll try, Fricke. I promise you that. I’ll go through this tonight. If necessary, the police here can look at it.” She added, “You do realize, don’t you, Fricke—for your sake as well as theirs, you’re going to have to tell your parents this?”
“I know.” Fricke lowered her eyes and fiddled with the cigarette. “You think they’ll be angry?”
“No. I don’t. I think they’ll understand. They love you very much, Fricke.”
“I know they do. Oh, shit…”
She began crying again. Gini waited quietly until this new fit of tears ceased. She took out the props of her trade, her tape recorder, her notebook, and as she had hoped, they seemed to give Fricke new confidence.
“You want to interview me? You really think I can help? I told you—Anneke said very little.”
“That doesn’t necessarily matter. If you can remember what she said, Fricke—the little details, the ones that seemed unimportant, irrelevant at the time. Those are the ones that often help the most.”
“I’ve got a good memory. Pretty good, anyway.”
For ten minutes after that Gini took her carefully through the sequence of events: the first meeting in Paris, the correspondence. Star’s arrival in Amsterdam, their departure, the two subsequent telephone calls Anneke had made, the long silence that came after them, the months of waiting, and then the news of her death. As Fricke spoke, Gini could feel some memory, some echo of this, inching its way forward from the back of her mind: school trips—it was connected to that; someone, somewhere, recently had mentioned something similar, but Gini could not recall who or when.
“So you think Star came to Amsterdam to get her, Fricke, is that right?”
“Yes. I’m sure he wasn’t here before that. She told me he was coming. She said she was going to see him—she was so excited. And that was the day before she left.”
“He must have had a very powerful influence over her to make her do something so risky.”
“He had. It was like—like he summoned her, came to claim her. He told her he’d been looking for her all his life, and the second he saw her, he knew she was the one. Like it was destiny, or fate.”
“And she believed that—why? Because she was fourteen and it made her feel—special, singled out?”
“I guess so. She said—when she phoned—she said he was powerful. She kept talking about that. He read the tarot cards for her. He said he could show her who she was.”
“I see.” Gini lowered her eyes to her notebook. Again she had the sensation that Anneke was so close to herself. That intoxicating sense of self-discovery, she could remember that so well. With Pascal, in Beirut, and now. She always felt that when she was with him, she knew who she was. But if Anneke’s story was, in some respects, a mirror image of her own, its outcome had been very different. Anneke had been unlucky, undiscerning, and certainly foolish—though Gini would never condemn her for that. She had fallen in love with a man who was dangerous, even evil: from the moment Mitchell had started his story, she had never doubted that.
“Go on, Fricke,” she said, looking up. “All this helps me, and it may help Mina too. You must have asked Anneke a lot of questions. You were talking on the telephone—what? Ten minutes each time, more? Think, Fricke.”
“She said he asked about us a lot. He’d get her to describe our parents, me. He wanted to know about—oh, ordinary things. Family things. What we did at Christmas, where we went on vacation, how my parents first met.”
“Did he talk to her about his own family, where he came from?”
“No, never. Anneke said he hated women who asked questions, she’d learned that. And every time she asked, he got angry, really angry. So she thought maybe he’d had something horrible happen when he was a child. Like maybe he’d been abused, or fostered out, or put in a home, something like that. But that was just guesswork. He never said one word about his parents, where he grew up.”
“And the anger—she used that word?”
“Yes. The first time she called. She said he was really hard to handle, because one minute he’d be really quiet and sweet, and the next, for no reason, he’d go completely crazy. Freak out. Start screaming at her.”
“Rapid mood swings?”
“I know.” Fricke met her eyes. “Afterward, when she didn’t call again, I got afraid. I thought maybe he was on something. But Anneke said he was clean. She said she could handle the moods, she was the only one who could. He told her she had the soothing gift—that’s what he called it. He’d make her lie down next to him and stroke his forehead some special way. She was proud of that.”
Gini made no comment. She was listening to the alarm bells in her head. On something, or more than that? Out of the shadows around Star she could see a word emerging—sociopath.
“Anything else, Fricke? How did they spend their time? They traveled around, but Anneke wouldn’t say where.” She flicked back through her notes. “They listened to music, smoked a little grass… what else?”
There was one other activity that was an obvious addition to that list, and Gini knew she was going to have to ask about it eventually. She waited. Fricke was frowning, trying to think.
“He had this thing about being clean,” she said at last, surprising Gini. “That’s it. Because Anneke was laughing about it. She said when he spent time with the travelers he’d let himself go, but the second they left them, he was a fanatic for washing. He’d take baths, three, four times a day. Shower, go to bed, get up in the middle of the night and shower again. She said that. What else? He read. He read a lot. She mentioned that.”
“Did she say what kind of books?”
“Yes. She said he liked war books. Books about weaponry.”
“Weaponry?” Something cold moved along Gini’s spine. “Fricke—you’re sure? Tarot cards and books on weapons? That doesn’t seem to fit.”
“That’s what she said. She was boasting, telling me how clever he was. Like he had this fantastic memory. He had this book with hundreds of pictures of guns, different kinds of guns, some catalogue thing, and they used to play this game. She’d test him. She’d cover up the name and the details so he could see just the picture, and then he’d identify them. Every single one. And not just that, he knew their—what would you call it?”
“Technical specifications?”
“Yeah—that. Their size, the kind of ammunition they used, how many rounds they could fire in what time. He knew all that. No mistakes. He was word perfect, every time.”
More alarm bells, much louder now. Gini bent over her notebook, anxious lest Fricke read the reaction in her face.
“But he didn’t actually have a gun, Anneke never said that? He just liked looking at pictures of them, right?”
“Oh, no. He didn’t have a gun. It wasn’t serious. Just like a party trick.”
“Fine. Fricke, this is very helpful. It gives me a profile. A shape. And I know Anneke met him in Paris—that’s a strong lead. I have this address book. I’m just wondering… When Anneke was due to meet him here, when he came to Amsterdam for her—she didn’t mention where she was meeting him?”
“No.”
“Suppose she’d been selecting the meeting place, where might she have chosen?”
Fricke deliberated for a few minutes. “The Antica,” she said finally. “It’s a coffee house. They sell grass there. It’s licensed. Anneke used to go there with the boy who broke up with her. It’s
cool—it’s got a good atmosphere. She might suggest that. Or she might just suggest they meet on some street.”
“Is the Antica easy to find?”
“Sure. It’s near the Singel Canal. It’s well known. Ask anyone. It won’t help. The police already took Anneke’s picture there a thousand times.”
“A thousand and one won’t hurt.” Gini smiled. For the first and only time, Fricke returned her smile. Then she looked at her watch.
“Look. I have to get back. My mother worries—if I’m late, she’ll call my violin teacher.”
“Just one more question, Fricke. I think you probably know what it is.”
The girl had risen; she stopped, then sighed.
“Yeah. Sure. Did Anneke mention sex, right?”
“Was she sleeping with him, Fricke? I was told she was, but I’m not sure. Something about this man puzzles me. Sex seems too obvious, too simple.”
“It puzzles me too.” Fricke met her eyes. “I mean, usually, Anneke would say straight out. If she was screwing a boy, she’d tell me. It was no big deal. She’d say, hey—we did it last night, and it was really good, or not. But with Star… she never mentioned sex. Not once. I assumed—well, I assumed that was what they did most of the time. Listened to music. Smoked a little grass. Made love. She was crazy about him, obsessed, so I couldn’t understand. So in the end, the second time she called, I asked her. I said, and so you’re having sex, right?”
“And how did she answer?”
“She didn’t answer.” Fricke’s face contracted. “She started crying. And then she hung up.”
Chapter 12
THE ANTICA COFFEE HOUSE was in an old section of Amsterdam, in a narrow street lined with bookshops and small art galleries. Inside, it consisted of one large, pleasant room lined with paneled booths; on a rack, newspapers in several different languages were available to patrons; at several tables, people were playing chess. The atmosphere, cosmopolitan and faintly bohemian, reminded Gini of the older cafés in Greenwich Village in New York, except that the air smelled strongly of marijuana, and grass was openly on sale at the bar, along with drinks and cigarettes.