Trave crossed the Channel on the early morning ferry to Calais and then took the train to Antwerp. He had never been to the city before and was unprepared for the baroque grandeur of the central railway station, with its gilt and marble interior and huge metal and glass dome. It was like a cathedral — there was even a rose window above the entrance, surmounted, however, not by Christ in glory but by a golden clock. In Antwerp the trains ran on time.
Trave had obtained an address but no telephone number for Jacob Mendel from the lawyers who had acted for David Swain at his first trial two years earlier. The house was in the Jewish Quarter, which ran in a tangle of crooked streets south from the station. It didn’t seem too far on the street map that Trave had brought with him from England, and so he decided to walk. Almost immediately he found himself in a strange, utterly foreign world. It was the lunch hour, and crowds of Hasidic Jews thronged the pavements in their dark suits and white shirts, with curled sidelocks emerging from under their black felt hats. Everywhere was a hubbub of activity: cafes and synagogues and kosher delicatessens, and on Pelikaanstraat Trave passed by endless diamond shops with narrow storefronts and glittering wares watched over by morose merchants sitting perched on stools behind thick reinforced-glass windows.
Trave soon felt hopelessly lost amid a sea of trams and bicycles. The roads with their long Flemish names all seemed to twist and turn into one another, and he had just made up his mind to stop and ask directions when he looked up and saw that he was standing opposite the side street that he was looking for. Jacob’s house was halfway down — a nineteenth-century apartment building constructed around a small cobbled courtyard. There were names on the letter-boxes, but Mendel was not one of them, and Trave was about to start knocking on the apartment doors when a voice called to him from behind in a language he didn’t understand.
He turned around and found himself looking down at a small elderly woman with a bent back and a black scarf covering her hair. She was standing a few feet away in a low doorway under the entrance arch that Trave hadn’t noticed when he came in. She had a walking stick in her hand.
‘I’m English,’ he said hopefully. ‘I am looking for Jacob Mendel.’
Surprisingly the old woman seemed to understand.
‘No Mendel here. Why you want him?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘To talk to him about his brother. I’m a friend.’
‘Friend! Everyone says that,’ she said with a sneer.
‘Well, I am one,’ said Trave. ‘Jacob wants to find out who killed his brother, and I want to find out too. I want to help him.’
The old woman looked at him blankly and Trave realized with a sinking heart that she hadn’t understood a word he’d said. Her English was obviously very limited, and Trave didn’t know a word of Dutch.
‘Parlez-vous francais?’ he asked, switching to French, but the old woman ignored him. Instead she looked him up and down, staring intently, and then waved her walking stick toward his feet. For a moment he thought she was going to attack him with it, but then realized that she was giving him an instruction: ‘You wait,’ she said, and then turned around and went back through the doorway behind her.
She emerged again a minute later, holding out a big book, a piece of paper, and a pencil. Trave opened the book and found that it was written in incomprehensible lettering, which he assumed to be Hebrew.
‘I can’t read this,’ he said, pointing to the text and tapping the side of his head to try to make her understand his ignorance.
Impatiently she pulled the book back, closed it, and pushed the blank piece of paper down on top of the cover and made as if to write.
‘You write,’ she said. ‘Then you come back.’
‘When?’
‘Four,’ she said, holding up four fingers. ‘Maybe.’
Trave nodded and began to write:
Jacob — I am the police inspector who was in charge of David Swain’s case. Like you I do not believe Swain killed your brother. Perhaps we can help each other to find out who did?
William Trave
When he was finished, Trave caught the old woman’s eye as he handed the note back to her.
‘Please,’ he said, pointing to his chest. ‘I mean good.’
‘Yes, yes. Friend,’ she said, and Trave took comfort from the fact that at least she didn’t pronounce the word with the same derision with which she’d spoken it earlier. ‘Now you go,’ she ordered. And Trave went.
With more than two hours to kill, he wandered the streets in a state of distraction. Would Jacob come? Would he know anything? Trave had no answers to his questions. He began to feel hemmed in by the rows of tall medieval guild houses in the old town with their myriad of leaded windows, and so he headed west toward the river. Leaning on the parapet, Trave gazed out over the wide expanse of the Scheldt and watched as the afternoon turned from blue to grey in a moment as a bank of low clouds came funnelling up the river from the North Sea. He shivered suddenly, feeling the January cold in his bones, and turned to go back.
The old concierge was waiting for him under the entrance arch. ‘Badge,’ she said. ‘Show me badge.’
Trave complied, and she examined his credentials for a moment before beckoning him inside her doorway. Trave took off his hat and followed her into a surprisingly spacious room with two windows overlooking the main street through which the last of the winter sunshine was picking a golden, glowing path across the spotless wooden floor. There was no sign of Jacob Mendel, but on the other side of the room an old lady with bright blue eyes was sitting in a rocking chair beside a brightly burning fire. Trave could see that she must once have been very beautiful, but now her skin was wrinkled and pulled tight over the bones of her face so that it seemed as if she was made of antique porcelain, like the teacup she was holding in her hand. She was dressed entirely in black with her silver-grey hair tied up into a bun at the nape of her neck, and an enormous white cat lay stretched across her lap, apparently fast asleep.
‘Excuse me for not getting up, Mr Trave,’ she said in accented but otherwise perfect English, gesturing to an armchair facing her on the other side of the fire. ‘Mrs Morgenstein’s cat does not like to be disturbed. Would you like tea?’
Trave shook his head as he sat down, but the concierge handed him a cup regardless, before vanishing behind a curtain into the interior of the apartment.
‘It seems I have no choice in the matter,’ he said wryly. ‘Mrs Morgenstein was a lot more formidable earlier.’
‘Yes, she can be quite frightening when she chooses,’ said the old lady, smiling. ‘But it’s because she’s protective — she’s the kindest person when you get to know her. I miss her since we moved. And her cat.’
‘We?’ repeated Trave, looking perplexed.
‘I’m sorry, Inspector. I don’t mean to talk in riddles. I’m Aliza Mendel, Jacob’s grandmother. I expect you’re wondering where Jacob is?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s gone, I’m afraid. Where I don’t know. It’s nine months now since he left, and he is my last living relative, so you can understand why I am worried.’ Aliza screwed up her eyes, resisting a spasm of pain that momentarily contorted her features. ‘It is why I am here, Inspector: to ask you if you find Jacob to give him a message from me.’
‘What message?’ asked Trave. He wanted to help the old lady if he could. He remembered what had happened to Jacob’s parents, her son and daughter-in-law, in the war.
‘Tell him to come back to Antwerp and stop digging into the past. No good will come of it. I know that.’
‘I’ll give him the message if I find him, but I doubt he’ll listen to me. He’s a determined young man. I remember that from watching him at the trial when he gave his evidence.’
‘Yes — determined, headstrong, foolhardy. And obsessed too — obsessed with the letter Ethan wrote to him before he died. Jacob can’t stand it. That’s the problem. He can’t bear it that his brother wanted to tell him something but died before he had the chance. I suppose he thinks he could have saved Ethan’s life if Ethan had confided in him. There’s no basis for him thinking that, but he still feels it, and like you, he’s convinced that this man, Swain, had nothing to do with Ethan’s death. He says it was a set-up, a conspiracy. And I’m sure he thinks the same about poor Katya’s death as well, which I read about in the newspaper, although I haven’t seen him since that happened.’
