Until I Find You

addition to whatever Mrs. Wicksteed was sending her. Alice didn’t need money. However, the one way she hadn’t tried to make William come back to her was that she hadn’t exposed Jack to any risk; she hadn’t yet done something to herself that a child of his age shouldn’t see. But if she was a prostitute, Alice reasoned, and if Jack was exposed to that— well, how would it be for a boy growing up to remember his mother as a whore?

“ ‘What if Jack remembers that this is what you did to me?’ she asked your dad,” Nico Oudejans told Jack. “ ‘Since you like prostitutes so much that you play for them, William,’ your mother said, ‘what if Jack remembers how I became a whore because you stopped playing for me?’ ”

Nico told Jack that William played the organ for the prostitutes for strictly religious reasons. “He was a fanatical Christian, but the good kind of fanatic,” Nico explained. William had insisted that there be an organ service for the prostitutes—at that early hour of the morning when many of them stopped working. William wanted them to know that the Oude Kerk was theirs at that time, and that he was playing for them. He wanted them to come to the Old Church and be soothed by the music; he wanted them to pray. (William wanted them to stop being prostitutes, of course, but the music was the only way he ever proselytized to them.)

Not everyone at the Oude Kerk was in favor of William’s playing the organ for the prostitutes, but he silenced most of his critics by citing the zeal of St. Ignatius Loyola. William Burns said that he’d encountered a greater evil in Amsterdam than St. Ignatius had met on the streets of Rome. Ignatius had raised money among rich people; he’d founded an asylum for fallen women. It was in Rome where the saint announced that he would sacrifice his life if he could prevent the sins of a single prostitute on a single night.

“Naturally, some of the higher-ups at the Old Church expressed their doubts—after all, Loyola was a Catholic,” Nico Oudejans told Jack. “Among Protestants, your dad was sounding a little too close to Rome for comfort. But William said, ‘Look, I’m not trying to prevent the sins of a single prostitute’— although, in his own way, he was. ‘I’m just trying to make these women feel a little better. And if some of them hear Our Lord’s noise in the music, what’s the harm in that?’ ”

“ ‘Our Lord’s noise’?” Jack asked.

“That’s what William called it, Jack. He used to say that, if you could hear God’s noise in the organ, you were at heart a believer.”

“Did it work?” Jack asked. “Were any prostitutes converted?”

“He made believers out of some of those women,” Nico said, “but I don’t think any of them stopped working as prostitutes—at least not until long after your mother started. Some of the prostitutes didn’t like your dad—they thought he was yet another Christian do-gooder who disapproved of them. William had just found an odd way in which to disapprove! But more of the ladies hated your mother. They wouldn’t let their own children anywhere near the red-light district, but your mom dragged you through it every day and night—just to drive your dad crazy.”

“You told her you’d have her deported?” Jack asked. Another policeman came into the office and put more Dutch guilders on the table.

“Prostitutes who weren’t Dutch citizens used to get deported all the time,” Nico said. “But your dad didn’t want her deported. He didn’t want to lose you, Jack. At the same time, he couldn’t bear to see you in this environment.”

Jack asked about Frans Donker, the organ-tuner. Nico said that Donker had imitated, or had tried to imitate, everything William did. Donker had spent half his time trying to play the organ instead of tuning it. “And when your dad needed a good night’s sleep—when he was too tired to play for the ladies in the Oudekerksplein—Frans played for them. I think Frans Donker was a little simple; maybe someone had dropped him on his head when he was a baby,” the policeman speculated. “But your dad treated Donker like a helpless pet. William indulged Donker, he pitied him, he was always charitable to him. Not that Donker deserved it—that boy didn’t know what he was about.”

“He put baby powder on his ass,” Jack remembered out loud.

“Donker even imitated your dad’s tattoos, but badly,” Nico said. “Then he took a really stupid job— something only Donker would dream of doing—and we never saw him again in the district.”

“I think I know what Donker did,” Jack told the policeman. “He took a job on a cruise ship, playing the piano. He sailed to Australia, to be tattooed by Cindy Ray.”

“Yes, that’s it!” Nico Oudejans cried. “What a memory you have, Jack! That’s a detail even a cop like me had forgotten.”

Jack also remembered the dark-brown woman from Suriname; she was one of the first prostitutes to speak to him. He’d been surprised that she knew his name. She’d been in a window on either the Korsjespoortsteeg or the Bergstraat—not in the red-light district but in that same general area where Jack and his mom had met Femke. (And he’d thought that Femke was an unusual prostitute, when in fact she was a lawyer!)

The Surinamese prostitute had given him a chocolate the color of her skin. “I’ve been saving this for you, Jack,” she’d said. And he’d believed, for years, that she must have been one of his dad’s girlfriends—one of the prostitutes who’d taken William home with her, and had slept with him, as Jack’s mother had led the boy to believe. But that wasn’t true.

Jack’s father had not had sex with a prostitute in Amsterdam; William had only played the organ for them, a sound both huge and holy, which had compelled them to just listen. As for some of them—those who’d managed to hear the Lord’s noise in the music—William may have saved them from the sins of a single night, albeit later in their lives, when a few of them did stop being prostitutes.

“I called your dad the Protestant Loyola, which seemed to please him,” Nico Oudejans told Jack.

Nico also told Jack that the Surinamese prostitute was one of William’s earliest converts to Christianity; she’d heard God’s noise in the organ and had become an overnight believer.

Jack had lost count of how many policemen had come into the office and put their guilders on the table in front of Nico, but when another cop had come and gone, Jack asked Nico if he had won a bet on a game or a horse.

“I won a bet on you, Jack,” the policeman said. “I bet every cop in District Two that one day, before I retired, Jack Burns would walk into the Warmoesstraat station, and we’d have this little talk about his mom and dad.”

The next evening, Wednesday, Jack went with Nico to the Oude Kerk to hear Willem Vogel, the organist, rehearse. Vogel had officially retired from teaching and conducting, but he still wrote music for organ and choir—a CD of his compositions had recently been released—and he still played in the Oude Kerk, the long service on Sunday and the Wednesday-evening rehearsal. Willem Vogel was in his late seventies but looked younger. He had long, hairless hands and was wearing a sweater with sagging elbows; in the unheated church, a wool scarf was tied around his neck.

Jack had correctly remembered the narrow, brick-lined stairs leading to the organist’s hidden chamber above the congregation. The wooden handrail was on one side as you climbed; a waxed rope, the color of burned caramel, was on the other. There was a bare, bright, unshaded lightbulb behind the leather-covered organ bench; it cast the perfect, shadowless light upon the yellowed pages of the music. Vogel’s well-worn shoes made a soft tapping on the foot pedals; his long fingers made an even softer clicking on the keys.

Jack could hear only the drone of the choir, in the distant background, when the organ was soft or not playing. When Vogel played hard, you could barely hear the accompanying voices from the organ chamber. At a moment when the choir sang without him, Vogel opened a small piece of hard candy—neatly putting the paper wrapper in his pocket before popping the candy in his mouth.

The names printed on the stops (the registers) were meaningless to Jack. It was a world beyond him.

BAARPIJP

8 VOET

OCTAAF

4 VOET

NACHTHOORN