appeared to have been struck mute in midsentence—his mouth open, as if the Bach were coming from him. Whatever lecture he’d been delivering would have to wait for the toccata and fugue to be finished.
Outside on the Oudekerksplein, in the failing early-evening light, the prostitutes in their windows and doorways could hear the music, too. It was evident that they knew the piece Donker was playing; doubtless they’d listened to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor many times in the early-morning hours. By the prostitutes’ critical expressions, Jack and his mother knew that William played this piece better than young Frans.
Jack and Alice hurried away. It was no time to make inquiries of the unfriendly women—not while the music was playing. The great sound followed them to the Warmoesstraat; God’s holy noise pursued them past the police station. They were more than halfway to Tattoo Peter’s on the St. Olofssteeg before the vast organ was out of earshot.
Was William’s career as an organist in decline? Was he merely
It was a sound both huge and holy. It compelled even prostitutes, who are disinclined to do anything without being paid, to give themselves over to it absolutely—to just
7.
On November 9, 1939, Leith suffered its first German air raid. No damage was done to the port, but Alice’s mother miscarried in an overcrowded air-raid shelter. “It was back then that I should have been born,” Alice always said.
If Alice had been born “back then,” her mother might not have died in childbirth and Alice might never have met William Burns—or if she met him, she would have been as old as he was. “In which case,” she claimed, “I would have been impervious to his charms.” (Jack somehow doubted this, even as a child.)
If the boy couldn’t remember the name of the Surinamese prostitute who gave him a chocolate the color of her skin on either the Korsjespoortsteeg or the Bergstraat, he did remember that those two small streets, between the Singel and the Herengracht, were some distance from the red-light district—about a ten- or fifteen-minute walk—and the area was more residential and less seedy.
As to what rumor of William led Alice to make inquiries there, it was either Blond Nel or Black Lola who told her to consult The Bicycle Man, Uncle Gerrit. Black Lola was an older white woman whose hair was dyed jet-black, and Uncle Gerrit was a grouchy old man who did the prostitutes’ shopping on his bicycle. He carried a notebook in which the women wrote down what they wanted for lunch or a snack. He objected to the girls who gave him too extensive a shopping list, and he refused to shop for tampons or condoms. (If there were a Tampon or Condom Man who did errands for the prostitutes, Jack and his mom never met him.)
The women teased Uncle Gerrit incessantly. He would stop shopping for a particular prostitute, just to punish her for teasing him—usually for only a couple of days. A rake-thin prostitute named Saskia was in the habit of asking Alice and Jack to buy her a sandwich. Saskia was a ceaselessly ravenous young woman, and Uncle Gerrit was always mad at her. She gave Jack or his mom the money for a ham-and-cheese croissant almost every time she saw them. When Jack and Alice passed by again, they would give Saskia the sandwich—provided she wasn’t with a customer.
Because Saskia was a popular prostitute, Jack got to eat a lot of ham-and-cheese croissants. Alice didn’t mind buying a sandwich for Saskia with her own money. Like many women in the red-light district, Saskia had a story to tell, and Alice was a good listener—that is, if you were a woman. (Women with sad stories seemed to know this about Alice, probably because they could see she was a sad story herself.)
Saskia had a two-man story. The first man to hurt her was a client who set fire to the poor girl in her room on the Bloedstraat. He tried to squirt her in the face with lighter fluid, but Saskia was able to shield her eyes and nose with her right forearm; she was badly burned, but only from her wrist to her elbow. When the wound healed, Saskia adorned her burn-scarred arm with bracelets. In the doorway of her room on the Bloedstraat, Saskia would extend the arm into the street and jingle her bracelets. It got your attention—you had to look at her. Saskia attracted a lot of customers that way.
She was too thin to be pretty—and she never opened her mouth when she smiled at a potential client, because her teeth were bad. “It’s a good thing prostitutes aren’t expected to kiss their customers,” she told Jack, “because no one would want to kiss me.” Then she grinned at the boy, showing him her broken and missing teeth.
“Maybe not around Jack,” Alice cautioned her.
There was something wildly alluring about Saskia, with those jingling bracelets all on one arm—her left arm, the unburned one, was bare. Maybe men thought she was a woman who would lose control of herself; possibly her aura of a damage more internal than her burned arm attracted them. You could see, like a flame, the hurt in her eyes.
The second man in Saskia’s two-man story was a client who beat her up because she wouldn’t take her bracelets off. He’d heard about her burn and wanted to see the scar. (At the time, Jack assumed this was a man in even more need of advice than the prostitutes’ usual customers.)
Saskia made such a wail that four other women on the Bloedstraat and three girls who worked around the corner on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal heard her and came to her rescue. They dragged the man in acute need of advice out on the Bloedstraat, where they whipped and gouged him with coat hangers and hit him with a plumber’s helper—all this before one of the women got a clean shot at his head with the metal drain plug of a bidet, with which she beat him bloody. He was senseless and raving, and no doubt still in need of advice, when the police came and took him away.
“That was what happened to your teeth?” Jack asked Saskia.
“That’s right, Jack,” she said. “I show my burn scar only to people I like. Would you and your mom like to see it?”
“Of course,” the boy replied.
“Only if we’re not imposing,” Alice answered.
“You’re not imposing at all,” Saskia said.
She took them into her small room, closing the door and the curtains as if Jack and his mother were her customers. Jack was astonished by how little furniture there was in the room—just a single bed and a night table. The lighting was low—only one lamp, with a red glass shade. The wardrobe closet was without a door; mostly underwear hung there, and a whip like a lion tamer would use.
There was a sink, and the kind of white enamel table you might expect to see in a hospital or a doctor’s office. The table was piled high with towels, one of which was spread out on the bed—in case the men in need of advice were wearing wet clothes, Jack imagined. There was no place to sit except on the bed, which was an odd place to give or get advice, Jack thought, but it seemed natural enough to Saskia, who sat down on the bed and invited Jack and Alice to sit down beside her.
One by one, she took her bracelets off and handed them to Jack. In the red glow from the lamp with the glass shade, the boy and his mom examined the wrinkled, raw-looking surface of Saskia’s scar, which resembled a scalded chicken neck. “Go on, Jack—you can touch it,” she said. He did so reluctantly.
“Does it hurt?” he asked.
“Not anymore,” Saskia replied.
“Do your teeth hurt?” the boy inquired.
“Not the missing ones, Jack.” One by one, she let him put her bracelets back on; he was careful to do it in the right order, biggest to smallest.
Who could refuse to bring that thin, hungry girl a sandwich? Jack despised Uncle Gerrit, The Bicycle Man, for being so mad at Saskia that he refused to shop for her. But the cranky old prostitute-shopper had his reasons. He’d often parked his bicycle outside the Oude Kerk in the early-morning hours; he had more than once slipped into a pew in the Old Church and listened to the elevating music. Uncle Gerrit was a William Burns fan. Maybe Saskia wasn’t.
“You should talk to Femke,” The Bicycle Man said to Alice. “
