Authors: Peter Buwalda
She eyed him pensively. She was thinking. And now, seven years later, he finally knew what about: the dead Sigerius. But instead of
telling him there was nobody alive anymore who wanted to slit his throat, she asked: “So why didn’t you just stop?”
It had started to rain. Cold droplets spattered on the back of his monitor and the photographic paper on his desk. With a shiver he reached over and slammed the window shut.
The key question, of course. Why didn’t he quit? He didn’t know himself, not exactly at least, it was a medley of motives, some of them clearer than others, something muddy that had kept him, despite intense attacks of guilt and doubt, from stopping. On and on, week after week. He could have given Haitink
five
different honest reasons, motivations he could classify from light to dark, from logical to completely off the wall, from courageous to cowardly and back again.
Just to be done with it, he pulled out the most superficial. An incentive for all ages: the dough. Moolah. Big bucks. The incredible mountain of dollars the website raked in. From day one, men from all corners of the globe signed up—at least he’d assumed it was men—and the filthy lucre started pouring in, thousands of dollars at first, pretty soon tens of thousands, month in month out, for four years—more money than they knew what to do with. Money they sank into a brand-new Alfa Romeo in which they floored it to a bank in Luxembourg, money with which they secretly bought a luxury yacht that never left the Mediterranean, money no one else knew they had. For Joni it was a dream come true, years ahead of schedule. He didn’t know anyone else with a subscription to the
Financial Times
. When they started she was twenty and already the owner of a portfolio of shares and stock options. She did her trading at the beginning of each trimester. “Hey Miss Frumpy,” he said when he first found her up in her student attic room sitting
cross-legged with the telephone in one hand and the stock market pages in the other, four in the afternoon in her nightie, window shades shut, plates caked with yesterday’s spinach pasta on the floor, “don’t you need to shower?” She still smelled deliciously like nighttime. “I earned 6,000 guilders today,” she said without looking up, “how about you?” On their first date, when he asked her why she was studying Technical Management Science, she did not give the typical freshman-girl answer—“to be involved with people in an organization”—but, simply, “to get rich quick.” He had burst out laughing, she wasn’t serious, but she
was
serious. “In home economics class you learn home economics, at the dance academy you learn to dance, and in Technical Get-Rich-Quick Science,” she said, smiling, “you learn to get rich quick.” And that is precisely what she was planning to do: Joni Sigerius envisioned herself starting her own business, taking it to the stock market, and selling it before she turned forty.
“I don’t know how you were doing at twenty-six,” he said to Haitink, “but I sure didn’t mind earning as much as Dennis Bergkamp.”
“That’s a football player, isn’t it? I
hate
football.”
“With a weekly evening photo session we earned as much as a pro footballer. At our peak in 1998 we had 11,000 subscribers …”
“Subscribers?”
“Paying members. Men willing to shell out twenty bucks a month.
Eleven thousand
. Tally that up, why don’t you.”
Haitink draped one slender leg over the other and flicked at an imaginary abacus on the wall behind him. “Yes,” she said after a few seconds, too short to have really worked it out, “that’s quite a bundle. Amazing. So it was all about the money?”
“Yeah. Well, that too. Mostly it was—”
“Hang on a second,” she interrupted. She leaned over to her desk
and reached for a large calculator. Several ticks later she looked up with girlish excitement. “Eleven thousand subscribers at twenty dollars a month,” she said, “and that for a year, that comes to … $2.6 million, that’s almost, no,
more than
five million guilders … Aaron, are you pulling my leg?”
“No. I’m dead serious. Sigerius—it’s
his
leg I was pulling.”
“But that’s … I mean …”
“It
was
insane and incredible and awesome, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Even keeping it a secret was fantastic … Addictive. Nobody knew, but meanwhile 11,000 guys
did
know, they knew
everything
… It was unbelievably exhilarating. A source of continuous conspiratorial … um …”
She looked at him musingly. “Sexual arousal?”
“Horniness, yeah. That’s the word I was looking for.”
He phoned the Thai take-out on the edge of town, ordered a green curry with rice, and showered in the half hour before the delivery scooter drove up the hill to his house.
It made you inhumanly horny. Naturally. Every week they almost floated out of his attic room, or wherever they did the shoot, in five-star hotels, on the
Barbara Ann
, at bed-and-breakfasts in Zeeland or East Groningen with museum flyers next to the electric kettle. It was always good. For years, their week was a cycle of horniness that started with provocative preparations, scouting out locations, buying new lingerie for Joni in chic or downmarket shops, with the ecstatic event taking place on Tuesday or Wednesday evening. They spent hours making the 100 to 150 photos they owed their clients, and the days that followed were consumed by an exhausted, satisfied after-session that consisted of examining what was being simultaneously examined on 11,000 other computers—by 1998
standards, a mind-blowing concept—and once they’d had enough of themselves they checked their bank balance, withdrew 1,000 guilders and drove to Paris, or to Berlin, or to Ameland for a new session. Their arousal seemed insatiable and its source inexhaustible. Sometimes it was like living in a dream, he imagined himself the rector of his own paradisiacal campus—until the high wore off. When the thrill passed, the real campus reappeared, a grassy campus with a damned real farmhouse, and in that farmhouse lived a real-life rector, Joni’s father, whom he stood next to in the university sport center’s showers twice a week.
He turned off the water. There was, he considered, also a reckless aspect to it, something masochistic. Constantly pushing his luck by gravitating ever closer to Sigerius. As though he were deliberately trying to get caught.
He paid for his food and ate it in his workroom. When the plate was empty he went back to the iMac and reread Joni’s e-mail. He noticed that he kept getting stuck at a remark that had, of course, stung him right from the start, but that he hadn’t yet found the time to get worked up about.
“I did live in San Francisco with Boudewijn Stol for a while,” she wrote, “maybe you still remember him.”
Boudewijn Stol—so she’d been with that goon after all. Behind the shock of Sigerius’s suicide, something else started to itch. Maybe it was just an old reflex, but he could not let go of the idea that Joni was taunting him with that “maybe you still remember him.” Of course he remembered him. So those two had shacked up. The minute he tried to imagine it, Joni under the same roof as that arrogant greaseball, he just about burst a blood vessel. The poison associated with that time! He was surprised how easily he fell back
into his old love spasm, an echo, certainly, but still: neuralgia he hadn’t felt in years. His and Joni’s story was also a story of four years of pathological jealousy. One-sided jealousy, mind you:
his
. The constant fear she would leave him. The fear of being dumped. Of being supplanted. At her parents’ house. Behind his camera. (He: “You know, I also kept it up because I knew I was expendable.” Haitink: “You mean you were afraid she’d carry on with someone else if you called it quits?” He: “Yes.” Haitink: “Was that realistic, do you think?” He: “It seemed to me a foregone conclusion.”)
The memories of Etienne Vaessen’s wedding came crashing over him, that intense exhaustion once again poured into his legs, his obnoxious recklessness, the humiliation—it all came rushing back. How he was wrung through the mangle of jealousy during the dinner that had kept them away from Roombeek on May 13, 2000.
They had been sitting glued to the hotel-room television for too long, and suddenly they had to rush. So while the horsemen of the apocalypse were galloping through their neighborhood in Enschede, they careered at 140 kph toward the Groeneweide estate. Joni fussed with his crookedly knotted bow tie; he mused sourly on the garish bash that awaited them. Arriving late, they parked the Alfa next to an enormous pond stocked with swans. “Don’t panic,” he exhorted her as they trotted up the broad marble stairs. They were courteously greeted by young men in livery, one of whom hurried ahead through the cool foyer decorated with gilded friezes and life-size oil paintings. Rooms off to each side were being prepared for the festivities later on in the evening, and somewhere in the depths of the estate a klezmerish ensemble could be heard rehearsing. They stopped before a pair of velvet-clad doors, which
the lackey carefully opened, revealing a banquet hall so vast that from a distance the company resembled a kindergarten class at their cookie break. The decor was even more over-the-top than he had expected. Amphoras with long-stemmed sunflowers; here, too, oil portraits and hunting tableaux; an ornamental plaster ceiling, blue and gold regimental-striped wallpaper, the parquet floor a geometric mosaic of various kinds of wood over which waiters skated back and forth.
Their Louis Seize chairs must have been empty, disturbingly empty, for a good twenty minutes, and as though she wanted to make up for lost time, Joni strode ahead of him, ticking across the slick floor, and sat down, smiling, at one of the empty places. His soles slipping out from under him, he creaked around the grid of lavishly set tables, his gaze focused above the alternately black and bare backs of the guests, his destination being the bridegroom’s reddened ear, into which he whispered their alibi, concise, euphemistic: there was some problem in Enschede, nothing to be alarmed about, carry on eating. When he walked via the other side of the dining room to his seat, he saw to his satisfaction that the news of the fireworks factory caused no more of a ripple than a pebble tossed into the surf. Vaessen was already laughing again.
Meanwhile Joni had struck up a conversation with an older man in a white dinner jacket. Something he was saying made her laugh, “… and when I got home that evening,” he caught, “she’d bought
another
thing with an electrical cord.” Next to the man sat a much younger woman with gathered-up brown hair who said something back that he didn’t catch. “Long story short, something had to be done,” the man said, exclusively to Joni. “Eventually she was bathing the garden gnome twice a day.” Aaron cleared his throat and pulled in his chair. It took the man a fraction too long
to notice him; he cut himself short as though Aaron was meddling in some way.
“Boudewijn Stol,” he said, and a tanned hand shot across the table. Aaron shook it, a sturdy, dry grip. He noticed Stol’s improbably tight curls, which were combed back with something greasy, Brylcreem maybe; after a few inches the graying coif turned wavy, distinguished, classic, exposing his high forehead. The man sat straight up in his white dinner jacket with his stumpy Carthaginian chin thrust forward: at once, all the black tuxedos in the banquet hall fell flat. Even before Aaron realized who this Boudewijn Stol was, he already hated him.
“I’m a colleague of Etienne’s,” Stol said to Joni, apparently in response to a just-asked question. “His boss, actually. At McKinsey Netherlands.”
Aaron nearly choked when he heard those words, Joni shifted in her chair, her heels scraped across the parquet floor. He glanced around and noticed that everything in this fairy-tale gala hall zoomed into sharper focus: the fifty-plus place settings, the clatter of countless knives and forks, the glistening platters, the shimmering dresses and glittering jewelry, the chatter emitting from dozens of mouths, the swirl of moving eyebrows, cheekbones, corsages—all at once. “His team leader?” he heard Joni ask. Quit showing off, he thought, and stared at his plate. Next to him sat a man with a mustacheless beard, whose sultry B.O. prickled his nose and whose whiskers scraped over the collar of his shirt like a dish-scrubber.
“Aha,” said Stol, “so the young lady is in the know. No, I’m not his team leader. I’m the managing partner in Amsterdam. Or franchise holder, whatever you want to call it.”
“How about ‘head honcho,’ ” Joni suggested. “Head Honcho of McKinsey Netherlands.”
“Don’t spread it around,” said Stol.
An hour ago when they sat watching Enschede burn, nothing had happened to him. Now suddenly
everything
was happening to him: bad things. Liters of blood were pumped with elephantine force into his head; his back, his hands, buttocks, face, and feet spontaneously ignited like matches. Heat radiated off him, even the lace-collared pursed and powdered mugs of the oil portraits in their gilded frames began to perspire. Head Honcho McKinsey, he thought, Jesus H. Christ, and as though someone were now
un
focusing the lens, the whole damn Sissi palace faded into a blotchy blur. He focused on Stol’s powerful neck, where a muscle twitched; the guy had a neck like an oak, a centuries-old trunk whose roots burrowed into virile, rounded shoulders under the white fabric of his dinner jacket. There was undoubtedly a fitness room in the head-office basement where he pumped his daily iron; this was the kind of guy who lifted sixty kilos but left the bench press at 120, just to knock the next monkey’s morale down a notch. Aaron rubbed his eyes with both hands. “My contacts,” he mumbled. A ropy bite of veal that had absorbed all his saliva had lodged itself under his tongue. He removed a contact lens from his eye and studied the plastic disc as though seeing it for the first time.
“So how many consultants do you manage, Mr. Stol?” he heard Joni ask.
“Mr. Stol doesn’t manage anything,” he said. “
Boudewijn
manages an office of about 150.”
Her laugh was full of excited admiration.
“But,” continued the smug voice, “as I’m sure you know, consultants are independent-minded. We feel quite confident, for instance, sending our little friend Vaessen here out to play. Once a week I read him the riot act, that’s more than enough.”