Until I Find You

traat, Els was still a prostitute, but she was also a self-appointed sheriff. Drugs had changed the red-light district and driven her out of it; alcohol and drugs had killed her only children. (Two young men--they'd both died in their twenties.)

Jack had been wrong to think that Els was about his mother's age, or only a little older. Even from street-level, looking up at her, he could tell she was a woman in her seventies; when Jack had been a four-year-old, Els would have been in her forties.

"Jackie!" Els called, blowing him kisses. "My little boy has come back!" she announced to the Sint Jacobsstraat. "Jackie, Jackie--come give your old nanny a hug! You, too, Nico. You can give me a hug, if you want to."

They went up the staircase to her apartment. The window-room was only a small part of the place, which was spotlessly clean--the smell of all the rooms dominated by the coffee grinder in the kitchen. Els had a housekeeper, a much younger woman named Marieke, who immediately began grinding beans for coffee. As a former farm girl, Els hated cleaning chores, but she knew the importance of a tidy house. She shared the prostitute duties with another "girl," she explained to Jack; the women took turns using the window-room, although Petra, the other prostitute, didn't live in the apartment.

"Petra's the young one, I'm the old one!" Els exclaimed happily. (Jack didn't meet Petra, but Nico told him she was sixty-one.)

Els, who claimed to be "about seventy-five," said that most of her regular customers were morning visitors. "They take naps in the afternoon, and they're too old to go out at night." The only customers who visited her at night were the ones off the street--that is, if they happened to be passing by when Els was sitting in her upstairs window. For the most part, she let Petra sit in the window. "At night, I'm usually asleep," Els admitted, giving Jack's forearm a squeeze. "Or I go to the movies--especially if it's one of your movies, Jackie!"

Els had always been a big woman with an impressive bust. Her bosom preceded her with the authority of a great ship's prow; her hips rolled when she walked. She was massive but not fat, although Jack noticed how her forearms and the backs of her upper arms sagged--and she walked with a slight limp. She had a bad heart, she claimed--"and perhaps an embolism in the brain." Els pointed ominously to her head; she still wore a platinum-blond wig.

"Every day, Jackie," she said, kissing his cheek, "I take so many pills, I lose count!"

Els had landlord problems, too, she wanted Nico to know; maybe the police could do something about the building's new owner. "Like shoot him," she told Nico, with a smile, kissing him on the cheek--then kissing Jack again. There'd been a rent dispute and a tax issue; the new landlord was a prick, in her opinion.

Els was a longstanding spokesperson for the prostitutes' union; she regularly spoke to high school students about the lives of prostitutes. The students, many of them only sixteen, had questions for her about first-time sex. Years ago, she'd had a husband; she'd been married for three years before her husband found out she was a whore.

She had a bruise on her face. Nico asked her if she was getting over a black eye--perhaps something one of her off-the-street customers had given her.

"No, no," she said. "My customers wouldn't dare hit me." Els had gotten into a fistfight at a cafe on the Nes, just off the Dam Square. She'd run into a former prostitute who wouldn't speak to her. "Some holier-than-thou cunt," she said. "You should see her face, Nico."

Jack thought that the holier-than-thou subject might make a good starting point for a conversation about his father. Els had not only known him; unbeknownst to Alice, Els had often gone to the Oude Kerk in the wee hours of the morning to hear William play the organ. Jack gathered that Els had not heard any racket from the Lord--just the music. To his surprise, Els told Jack that she had taken him to the Old Church one night.

"I thought that even if you didn't remember hearing William play, some part of you might absorb the sound," she said. "But I had to carry you there--you were asleep the whole way--and you never woke up or took your head off my breast the entire time. You slept through a two-hour concert, Jackie. You never heard a note! I don't know what you could possibly remember of any of it."

"Not much," he admitted.

Jack knew how hidden the organist's chamber in the Oude Kerk was. He knew that his father would never have seen him sleeping on the big prostitute's bosom--which was probably just as well, knowing his dad's opinion of what Nico had called "this environment."

Because Saskia and Alice were more popular--because they had more customers, Els informed Jack--Els was Jack's babysitter (what she called his "nanny") most of the time.

"And I was stronger than your mom or Saskia, so I got to carry you!" she exclaimed. She had lugged him from bed to bed. "I used to think you were like one of us--one of the prostitutes," she told Jack. "Because you never went to bed just once; because I was always taking you out of one bed and tucking you into another!"

"I remember that you and Femke almost came to blows," he said.

"I could have killed her. I should have killed her, Jackie!" Els cried. "But Femke was the deal-maker, and something had to be done. It's just that it was a bad deal--that's what made me so mad. Lawyers don't care about what's fair. What's a good deal to a lawyer is any deal that both parties will agree to."

"Something had to be done, Els--as you say," Nico said.

"Fuck you, Nico," Els told him. "Just drink your coffee."

It was good coffee; Marieke had made them some cookies, too.

"Did my dad see me leave Amsterdam?" Jack asked Els.

"He saw you leave Rotterdam, Jackie. He watched the ship sail out of the harbor. Femke had brought him to the docks; she'd driven him to Rotterdam in her car. Saskia would have none of it. She accompanied your mom and me and you to the train station in Amsterdam, but that was as much drama as she would tolerate. That was Saskia's word for the good-bye business--drama, she called it."

"So you took the train to Rotterdam with us?"

"I went with you to the docks. I got you both on board, Jackie. Your mom wasn't in much better shape than your dad. It seemed to be just dawning on her that she wouldn't see William after that day, although the deal was what she said she wanted."

"You saw my dad at the docks?"

"Fucking Femke wouldn't get out of the car, but your dad did," Els said. "He just cried and cried; he fell apart. He lay down on the ground. I had to pick him up off the pavement; I had to carry him back to the fuckhead lawyer's Mercedes."

"Did Tattoo Peter really have a Mercedes?" Jack asked her.