Tonio (47 page)

Why the madman suddenly addressed me in English, I didn't know, nor did I give a damn, but enough was enough.

11

In a blind fury, I turned and grabbed the pest-poet by the lapels. I hurled him in a single flowing motion — oof, standing up he turned out to be quite tall and heavy — straight over an empty bicycle rack on the sidewalk. Only once I saw the man sprawled out on his fakir bed of curved metal tubes did I realise my mistake. He was not the poet who had been vexing me, but — as I soon found out — a Canadian student of Dutch literature. His Amsterdam friends rushed to his aid. I offered him my hand and, accompanied by a thousand excuses, pulled him off the bike rack. While explaining my mistake, I brushed off his clothes and asked if he was hurt. Oh, no, not at all. Could I offer him a drink? Certainly. I ordered a trayful of drinks at the bar, including for the Canadian's hosts. We drank round after round (I paid), to the brotherhood between our parts of the world, separated by distance but related by migration; we drank to the literature of both our countries, and toasted our friendship, which was growing more intimate by the minute.

‘How lucky,' spake the Canadian, ‘that our little tussle was just a small misunderstanding.'

I gave the policeman an account of that evening and enquired as to how this could have led to charges of battery. He quoted from the police report: the Canadian had discovered bruises on his back the next morning while showering, which led to the decision to press assault charges after all.

‘You don't say. Doesn't it mention the hangover I caused him?' I asked the desk officer. ‘I mean, all those rounds I stood them … I might have been out to poison the Canadian tourist with alcohol.'

‘Hearing your version of the incident,' the policeman replied, ‘his charges don't stand much chance. My colleague has your statement in the computer. I'm pretty sure this is the last you'll hear of it.'

All the same, a few weeks later, when I figured the whole business had blown over, I received a three-hundred-and-fifty-guilder summons in the mail. For that amount, I could buy off the assault charges. Having no desire to embark on an idiotic court case, I was pathetic enough to pay it — something I will never do again.

So here I was at the Koninginneweg police station for the third time, this time to hear precisely how my son had died in a traffic accident.

From this very bureau, a police van with two young officers drove off toward my house on the Johannes Verhulststraat early that bright Whitsun morning. The female officer later sent me a condolence card: how awful she felt having to bring us news that would possibly change our lives forever. It was the most difficult moment of her still-fresh career, she wrote.

12

The receptionist reappeared at the counter. Another bureau staff member led us up some stairs and past bare walls to what was perhaps once the hayloft for the coach-horses. We were introduced to officers Hendriks and Windig.

The officer who had accompanied us offered us something to drink. Miriam and I asked for a glass of water; the men from the accidents unit chose coffee. There was a plate of assorted butter cookies on the low table, the kind of mix that fancy bakeries call a ‘mélange'. Miriam and I passed. Perhaps that was why the policemen also left it untouched, even though everybody knows how delicious a butter cookie is with a cup of coffee.

Agent Hendriks, four stripes per shoulder, took the lead. He asked if we had any questions. I glanced at Miriam, who, with glistening eyes, nodded almost imperceptibly — a sign that I could go ahead.

‘The car that hit Tonio …' I began, ‘… is there any evidence that he was speeding?'

‘No, that's still being investigated,' Hendriks answered hesitantly. ‘The driver came here immediately after the accident for questioning. He spent a short while in a holding cell. I happened to be on duty that night, and came straight over here. A colleague and I questioned him. He'd already done a breathalyser test, which showed that he had not been drinking. The man had come from his job, something in the café or restaurant business. He was terribly shaken up by the accident, and when he heard the next day that it was fatal … well, you can take it from me that he was crushed.'

‘Back to that questioning,' I said. ‘Did the man deny that he was speeding?'

‘Not categorically,' Hendriks answered. ‘But he said he had kept to the speed limit. This is corroborated by his passenger, but he's what we call an unreliable witness, because he might be biased in favour of the driver. There were other witnesses. A pedestrian and a taxi driver. They gave first-hand — that night, I mean — accounts, and will be questioned again in the course of the inquiry.'

‘Might technical investigation reveal any new facts?' I asked. The smell of the cookies started intensifying. ‘You warned me yourself over the phone about those yellow outlines drawn on the road surface … so I assume …'

‘Oh, certainly.' Officer Windig took over. ‘The force of the impact, the angle at which the bicycle and the automobile collided, these things still have to be thoroughly investigated. The results might take some time. The car has been impounded, and is in the lab together with the victim's bicycle, where they're being subjected to a battery of tests. For instance, the bike may have left an imprint in the car body. A detail like that can help up fit together the pieces of the puzzle.'

‘Moreover,' continued Hendriks, ‘CCTV films have emerged from a security camera on the Max Euweplein. From Holland Casino, if I'm not mistaken. They're in our possession, and are being studied. We're talking about images taken from quite a distance, but they still might shed some light on the situation.'

‘As long as I don't have to see them,' Miriam said. ‘I cherish the very first photo taken of our son, when he was in the incubator. A faded Polaroid. I hardly even dare look at that …'

With security-camera images in the back of my mind, the kind you saw on TV family-search programmes or of jeweller or petrol-station robberies, I tried to envision the last moving documentation of Tonio's life. Jerky images of him cycling into view — only to be obscured by the equally jerky images of a charging
BMW
. How did I know he'd been hit by a
BMW
? Because I'd always hated that vulgarly expensive make.

‘By the way, what kind of car was it?' I asked, in fact only to have my
BMW
suspicion confirmed.

‘A Suzuki,' officer Hendriks said. ‘A red Suzuki Swift.'

Hendriks took a folder out of the leather bag he had wedged between his feet, and laid it on the table. In order to make more room, he slid the plate of cookies in my direction, which made the buttery smell all the more penetrating. He opened the folder and thumbed through a stack of papers, until he found a situation sketch of the Hobbemakade/Stadhouderskade intersection, complete with a childlike drawing of a red compact car.

‘My responsibility for this accident only seems to be getting bigger,' I said.

The officer gave me a quizzical look.

‘He's writing a book about the murder of —' Miriam began. I looked at her and shook my head. It did not seem like an opportune moment to inform the Amsterdam police force of a novel about the murder of a female officer in Amstelveen. ‘You tell them,' she said.

‘I'm working on a novel,' I explained, ‘in which three Suzuki Swifts play a role. Right before the story begins, a red Suzuki Swift is repainted black. Just because. To add to the suspense, throw the reader a red herring. The red Suzuki in your drawing is about to be dunked into black paint.'

‘No, really, I think you're mistaken …' It was all a bit too non-explicit for officer Windig. ‘Oh, you mean … or …'

‘The gentleman is referring to the hearse,' Hendriks said softly. He spread a number of photos of the intersection out on the table. They were Google Earth printouts, taken by daylight. ‘Just to give you an overview of the traffic situation. Don't worry, there's nothing upsetting in them.'

In order to study the satellite pictures more thoroughly, I had to lean forward in my chair, bringing my nose right above the plate of butter cookies. No matter how fresh they were, if you had no appetite (for instance, because the situation sketch next to them had arrows pointing to where your son was killed by a car), the sweet smell at once turned rancid.

13

A Holland Casino security camera had captured Tonio's fatal fall on CCTV, while inside, the Wheel of Fortune spun, and then came to a standstill.
Rien ne va plus
. And so the end of his conscious life was immortalised on film. Just like the violent death of Tonnis Mombarg, from
Homo duplex
, was registered by a traffic camera of the Department of Public Works and Water Management.

I was reminded of the first time Tonio was filmed. He was two. Having just returned to the city from that cursed Loenen, we resided on the Leidsegracht. I was to be interviewed in the living room by a team from Flemish television. The interview hadn't begun yet; we were still working out the details. Tonio sat next to me on the sofa, to all appearances interested only in his bottle of warm chocolate milk, which he sucked with dozy, sighing satisfaction. As soon as they gave the ‘roll ‘em!' sign and the camera began to hum (television cameras still hummed back then), Tonio rose theatrically from the sofa. More or less obliterating his seated father from the eye of the camera, he gaily flung back his curly head, his bottle planted almost perpendicularly in his mouth. It was a film role he had thought up all on his own.

With the Holland Casino images, his career as a spur-of-the-moment film actor had come full circle.

14

In my fantasy, I had seen Tonio career recklessly toward his fate over the Max Euweplein footbridge so many times that, as gruesome as it was, I could hardly shake the image. It was even harder to get used to a
new
situation sketch, even though it was nearer to the truth.

Tonio did not come from Paradiso, not from Jenny, and did not cycle down the footbridge on his way to the Vondelpark entrance across the road. His accident took place at the row of traffic lights a full curve further, with him coming from the opposite direction: from Zuid, from Hobbemastraat, back from club Trouw.

Likewise, the image of a flashy
BMW
with tinted windows held tight in my mind's eye, not willing to be replaced by that beefed-up shopping cart, a Suzuki Swift. This car (in black) become a national icon due to the incessant replays on television of an attempted attack on the royal family — repeated shots of that wrecked little car, with its shattered and bulging windows, looking as though it was wrapped up in a cobweb, rocking with its sprung bonnet like a broken-winged crow. It had rammed blindly into the eyeless De Naald monument.*

[* The attack on the Dutch Royal Family occurred on 30 April 2009 at Apeldoorn, Netherlands, when a man drove his car at high speed into a Koninginnedag (
Queen's Day
, the national holiday) parade. The vehicle, a black Suzuki Swift, drove through people lining the street watching the parade, resulting in eight deaths (including the assailant) and ten injuries. It missed the royal family's open touring bus and crashed into a obelisk-shaped monument, The Needle, at the side of the road.]

15

The death of a boy we thought we had done such a fine job of protecting — didn't this fact provide irrefutable evidence that the world was a life-threatening whirlpool of chaos?

Tonio perished in the middle of one of western civilisation's safest cities, on a nearly traffic-free night, surrounded by signs meant to rein in disorder: arrows and crosswalks painted on the asphalt, traffic signs, flashing stoplights, speed limits. After Tonio was run over like random road kill, the quasi-organised world immediately resumed its course.

I pointed to the stoplights. ‘I understand these are turned off at night. Is that a money-saving measure?'

‘No,' said Hendriks, ‘it's got nothing to do with economising. It's a question of safety. At night it can be more dangerous at certain intersections to leave the traffic lights functioning. The cyclist gets impatient waiting at a red light, wonders why he needs to wait for green when there's nothing coming, and … he goes ahead and crosses. And, sure enough, a car unexpectedly approaches, which accelerates to make it through yellow. No, trust me, they've thought this one over.'

‘Were the stoplights turned off altogether,' Miriam asked, the only one of us with a driver's licence, ‘or were they flashing?'

The policemen glanced at each other. ‘That's not entirely clear,' Windig said. ‘We would expect them to be flashing. But that's being looked into. You'll be given a definitive report of all the results of the investigation … in due course.'

The discussion turned to the details of the collision itself. It was clear that Tonio had not been run over; he was hit and thrown. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Miriam cringe every time the description became too graphic.

‘The victim,' officer Hendriks said, ‘had a … well, he was pretty badly wounded all along his left side. We gather this from the photos taken by the forensic photographer directly after the victim's death.'