Until I Find You

The Poortvliets had a family-law practice; they not only took divorce and child-custody cases, but they also settled inheritance disputes and were engaged in estate planning. What had made William Burns's case difficult was that he was still a citizen of Scotland, although he had a visa that permitted him to work in Holland for a limited period of time. Alice, who was a Canadian citizen, had no such visa--but in the case of foreigners who were apprenticed to Dutch tattoo artists, the police allowed them several months to earn a tax-free living. After that, they were pressured to leave or pay Dutch taxes.

There could be no child-custody case in the Dutch courts, because Jack's mom and dad weren't Dutch citizens. As outrageously as his mother was exposing Jack to her new life as a prostitute, his father had no means to claim custody of the boy. Alice, however, could be made to leave the country--chiefly on the grounds that, as a prostitute, she had repeatedly engaged in sex with underage boys. And she was a magnet for more widespread condemnation within the prostitute community. (As if the hymn-singing and prayer-chanting in her window and doorway weren't inflammatory enough, Alice had dragged her four-year-old through the district.)

"You were carried, day and night, in the arms of that giantess among the whores," Marinus Poortvliet told Jack.

"Half the time you were asleep, or as inert as groceries," his brother, Jacob, said.

"The prostitutes called you 'the whole week's shopping,' because in that woman's arms you looked like a bag of groceries that could feed a family for a week," Marinus explained.

"So Dutch law had the means to deport my mom, but not to gain custody of me for my dad," Jack said, just to be sure. The two sons nodded.

That was when Femke arrived, and Jack once again felt intimidated by her--not because she was a fearsome and different kind of prostitute, but because she struck him as a great initiator. (No matter what experience you thought you'd had, Femke could initiate you into something you'd never known or even imagined.)

"When I look at you in your movies," she said to Jack, without bothering to say hello, "I see someone as pretty and talented as your father, but not half so open--so utterly unguarded. You're very much guarded, aren't you, Jack Burns?" she asked, seating herself in the leather reading chair. And Jack had once thought she'd taken up that position in her sidewalk window to attract customers off the street!

"Thank you for seeing me," Jack said to her.

"Very much guarded, isn't he?" she asked her sons, not expecting so much as a nod or a shake of the head from either of them. It wasn't a real question; Femke had already decided upon the answer.

At seventy-eight, only a couple of years older than Els, Femke was still shapely without being fat. Her elegance of dress, which she had seemingly been born with, made it abundantly clear to Jack that only an idiot (or a four-year-old) could ever have mistaken her for a whore. Her skin was as unwrinkled as the skin of a well-cared-for woman in her fifties; her hair, which was her own, was a pure snow-white.

"If only you'd been Dutch, I would have got your dad custody of you in a heartbeat, Jack. I would have happily sent your mother back to Canada childless," Femke said. "The problem was, your father forgave her. He would forgive her anything, if she just promised to do the right thing by you."

"Meaning good schools, a safe neighborhood, and some vestige of stability?" Jack asked.

"Those aren't bad things, are they?" Femke said. "You seem to be both educated and alive. I daresay, in the direction your mom was headed, that wouldn't have happened here. Besides, she was at least beginning to accept that William would never come back to her--that began to happen in Helsinki. But that William would accept the pain of losing all contact with you--if Alice would just take you back to Canada and look after you, as a mother should--well, what a surprise that was! To your mother and to me. We didn't expect him to agree to it! But we'd both underestimated what a good Christian William was." Femke did not say Christian in an approving way. "I was just the negotiator, Jack. I wanted to drive a harder bargain for your dad. But what can you do when the warring parties agree? Is a deal not a deal?"

"You drove him to the docks, in Rotterdam?" Jack asked her. "They both went along with it, right till the end?"

Femke looked out the window at the slowly passing traffic on the Singel. "Your little face on the ship's deck was the only smiling face I saw, Jack. Your mother had to hold you up, so you could see over the rail. You were waving to that giant whore. The way your dad dropped to the ground, I thought he'd had a heart attack. I thought I'd be taking a body back to Amsterdam--in all likelihood, in the backseat of my Mercedes. The big prostitute picked him up and carried him to my car; she carried him as easily as she used to carry you! Mind you, I still thought yo

ur dad was dead. I didn't want William in the front seat, but that's where the huge whore put him. I could see then that he was alive, but barely. 'What have I done? How could I? What am I, Femke?' your father asked me. 'You're a flaming Christian, William. You forgive too much,' I told him. But the deal was done, and your dad was the only man on earth who would stick to his side of a bargain like that. From the look of you, Jack, your mom stuck to her side of the bargain, too--sort of."

At that moment, Jack hated them both--his mother and his father. In his mom's case, the reasons were pretty obvious. In his dad's case, Jack suddenly saw him as a quitter. William Burns had given up on his son! Jack was furious. Femke, a retired lawyer but a good one, could see the fury on Jack's face.

"Oh, get over it. Don't be a baby!" she told him. "What's a grown man in good health doing wallowing around in the past? Just move on, Jack. Get married, try being a good husband--and be a good father to your children. With any luck, you'll see how hard it is. Stop judging them--I mean William and your mother!"

From the way her two grown sons fussed over her, Jack could tell that they adored her. Femke once more looked out the window; there was something final about the way she turned her face in profile to Jack, as if their meeting were over and she had nothing more to say. Nico Oudejans had asked her to see Jack, and she probably had a fair amount of respect for Nico--more than she had for Jack. She'd done her duty, her face in profile said; Femke wasn't freely going to offer Jack more information.

"If I could just ask you if you know what happened to him--starting with where he went," Jack said to her. "I assume he didn't stay in Amsterdam."

"Of course William didn't stay," she said. "Not when he could imagine you on every street corner--not when your mother's image was engraved in the lewd posture of every prostitute, in every gaudy window and dirty doorway in the district!"

Jack didn't say anything. By their imploring glances and gestures, Femke's sons were urging him to be patient. If he just waited the old woman out, Jack would get what he'd come for--or so Femke's sons seemed to be saying.

"Hamburg," Femke said. "What organist doesn't want to play in one of those German churches--maybe even somewhere Bach himself once played? It was inevitable that William would go to Germany, but there was something special about Hamburg. I can't remember now. He said he wanted to get his hands on a Herbert Hoffmann--a famous organ, probably."

Jack took some small pleasure in correcting her; she was that kind of woman. "A famous tattooist, not an organ," he told Femke.

"I never saw your dad's tattoos, thank God," Femke said dismissively. "I just liked to listen to him play."

Jack thanked Femke and her sons for taking the time to see him. He took a passing look at the prostitutes in their windows and doorways on the Bergstraat and the Korsjespoortsteeg before he walked back to the Grand, this time avoiding the red-light district. Jack was glad he had the videocassette of Wild Bill Vanvleck's homicide series to look at, because he didn't feel like leaving the hotel.

There was more than one episode from the television series on the videocassette. Jack's favorite one was about a former member of the homicide team, an older man who goes back to police school at fifty-three. His name is Christiaan Winter, and he's just been divorced. He's estranged from his only child--a daughter in university--and he's taking a training course for policemen on new methods of dealing with domestic violence. The police used to be too lenient with the perpetrators; now they arrested them.

Of course the dialogue was all in Dutch; Jack had to guess what they were saying. But it was a character-driven story--Jack knew Christiaan Winter from an earlier episode, when the policeman's marriage was deteriorating. In the episode about domestic violence, Winter becomes obsessed with how much of it children see. The statistics all point to the fact that children of wife-beaters end up beating their wives, and children who are beaten become child-beaters.

The social message wasn't new to Jack, but Vanvleck had connected it to the cop's personal life. While Winter never beat his wife, the verbal abuse--Winter's and his wife's--no doubt damaged the daughter. One of the first cases of domestic violence that Christiaan Winter becomes involved in ends in a homicide--his old business. In the end, he is reunited with his former team.