The House with Nine Locks, page 7
There were other stories about de Smet, less credible and more lurid. Toussaint heard them in fragments, in snatches of overheard conversation and chance remarks: de Smet had spent the war down a mine in Germany, rather than being sent home like most Flemish prisoners of war; his mother had been a burlesque dancer; his father had died in the Central Prison in Leuven, while awaiting trial for bigamy. It was even implied – nobody would say it outright – that de Smet had drowned a man in Antwerp, some hoodlum who wouldn’t talk. Toussaint did not know what to believe. Most of the time, his boss seemed too quiet, too ordinary to have that kind of past. The clean-shaven face, the short hair, the small mouth and hard, humourless gaze brought to mind the greyest of bureaucrats, or a schoolteacher who had long since lost interest in teaching.
Finally de Smet spoke: ‘Where was this found?’
‘Tournai. Two days ago.’
‘Tournai? That’s Bastide’s branch, isn’t it?’
‘Correct,’ Declercq said.
De Smet sighed. For some reason, it wasn’t what he wanted to hear. ‘How many?’
‘Six that we know of.’
De Smet turned the note over. Leopold II gave way to a painting by Peter Paul Rubens: Four Studies of a Moor’s Head. De Smet leaned closer, poring over the image with the magnifying glass. Toussaint had never seen him so completely absorbed. There was an intensity – was it an appetite? – that was rare, even for him.
De Smet put the magnifying glass down. That was when it happened: he picked up the 500-franc note and held it to his nose, inhaling deeply, his eyes closing. ‘Esparto,’ he said. ‘French.’
Declercq nodded. ‘Indeed.’
Toussaint knew about esparto: it was a type of grass that grew in North Africa and Spain. At mills in Italy, Germany and France it was mixed with wood pulp to make a unique grade of paper – paper used to make banknotes by the National Bank of Belgium, among others. It seemed at least one of the stories about de Smet was true.
‘The intaglio work is exceptional,’ de Smet said.
‘I’d go further.’
‘Further?’
‘I’d say it’s original, in a sense.’
Toussaint laughed. ‘Original? What does that mean?’
Declercq looked at him over the top of his spectacles. ‘It means, Sub-Lieutenant, that the intaglio plates were not copied from existing banknotes, which would usually be the case.’ Declercq turned back to Major de Smet. ‘I don’t believe this level of precision and depth could have been achieved by that means. A banknote of this type is a three-dimensional object. The cross-hatching, the several layers of shading, these can only be rendered with this degree of accuracy by using the original films, or the original plates.’
‘All of which are guarded,’ Toussaint said, ‘and all of which are accounted for.’
‘One would certainly hope so,’ Declercq said.
De Smet held the note up to the light. ‘The watermark’s faint. Post manufacture, I’d say. Is that how Bastide spotted it?’
‘That and the letterpress,’ Declercq said. ‘The typeface is imperfect. It’s most evident in the 3s and the letter T.’
De Smet looked at the note again. ‘I didn’t see that.’
‘A commercially available typeface, not bespoke.’
‘No other flaws?’
‘Not at normal magnification.’
‘You’ll be checking the stacks?’
‘As fast as we can, of course. It’ll take time.’
De Smet replaced the acetate and closed the folder. ‘Perhaps, in the circumstances, it would be best to keep word of this … contained, as far as possible.’
‘Not my decision, Major, but it will be my recommendation, if it’s yours.’
De Smet got his feet. ‘It is.’
He took off the gloves and placed them on the desk, his movements deliberate and measured. It took effort to maintain the surface of calm, Toussaint could tell. He put his own gloves next to de Smet’s. Obviously, he wasn’t going to need them.
‘Thank you, Monsieur Declercq,’ de Smet said. He tucked the document wallet under his arm. ‘Please keep me informed.’
They got as far as the lobby when the silence became unbearable.
‘He was wrong about original plates, wasn’t he? I mean, they’re kept in a vault.’
‘Then he must be,’ de Smet said.
‘So why the secrecy? If there are forgeries in circulation, isn’t it better to tell everyone?’
‘Not yet.’
The doorman gave them another nod. Outside, it was starting to rain.
‘It’s standard procedure. If we want people to be on the lookout—’
‘This isn’t a standard case.’
De Smet handed over the document wallet and unlocked the car. Toussaint climbed in beside him. By the light of the windscreen, the 500-franc note looked like any other. Toussaint wasn’t sure he would even have noticed the faintness of the watermark, if he hadn’t already been told about it. While de Smet was reversing into the main road, he gave the paper a furtive sniff. There was no doubt: it smelled like money, except that – it was hard to explain – holding it, touching it, gave him a thrill that real money never had. Somehow, the craft that turned paper into gold was more magical, more mysterious, when it was practised illicitly.
‘I still don’t understand.’
‘If the flaws become known, they might be corrected. The letterpress work at any rate. In which case …’
‘They’d be almost impossible to detect.’ Toussaint saw it now, the scale of the crisis de Smet wanted to avoid. Undetectable forgeries could be circulated on a large scale. Bank vaults could fill up with them before anyone realised. ‘But so far, there have only been six notes, in one bank branch. Doesn’t that suggest a very small operation?’
De Smet overtook a truck on the Rue Ravenstein. The driver of an oncoming Mercedes sounded his horn.
‘Perhaps. But Bastide’s vigilant. Exceptionally so. What he spots others would miss. My guess is, they already have.’
‘What do we do?’
‘Every forged note is the start of a trail. We locate as many as possible, we follow them to their source. We hope our adversary gets careless.’
‘And if he doesn’t?’
‘Citizens need to believe their money has value, that their wealth, great or small, is real. They need to believe the state when it says so.’ De Smet put on his wipers. For a moment, the road ahead was obscured by a smear of water and soot. ‘If for any reason they stop believing, if the spell is broken, then what? What’s left?’
A week passed without further sightings of Declercq’s counterfeits, then another week and another. De Smet examined and re-examined the banknotes in question, but if he learned anything new he didn’t share it. Sub-Lieutenant Toussaint began to wonder if Declercq’s notes were really counterfeits at all, and not the result of some sloppy workmanship at the Bank of Belgium. When it came to printing currency, it was not unheard of for mistakes to creep in. The resulting notes were often worth far more to collectors than their face value – which struck Toussaint as a slippery kind of irony. But then, when he had all but forgotten about the whole business, another pair of notes turned up at a bank branch in Brussels, just a few blocks from Federal Police Headquarters. It was followed soon afterwards by sightings in Leuven, Axel, Charleroi and Oudenaarde. Most of the reports came from bank personnel. But here and there other recipients had raised the alarm: a typesetter in Liège, a print dealer in Balen, a customs official in Ostend.
In the room at the top of the building de Smet put up a large map of the country. The location of each report was plotted with a black enamelled push pin.
‘How does this help us, sir?’ Toussaint asked, because de Smet had never done anything like it before.
De Smet did not look up from the report he was reading. ‘There are approximately seventy thousand retail outlets in Belgium, Sub-Lieutenant. With limited resources, we can either stake out a few and hope to be extremely lucky, or look for a pattern in the data.’
‘But I don’t see any pattern here,’ Toussaint said.
‘That’s because the forger doesn’t want you to. He’s counting on you being impatient, inexperienced and lazy.’ De Smet turned over a page of the report. ‘You might at least consider disappointing him.’
ELEVEN
Ghent, 1956
In Flanders they had raised the school leaving age by one year. Adelais had to wait until she was fifteen before she could start looking for a job. The factories in the north of the city, in Heilig-Kerst and the Canal Zone, were the obvious places to start, but few of them had vacancies, and the ones that did would not take her. They did not say so outright, but she was left in no doubt that her leg had a lot to do with it, even though, as far as she could see, the machines on the shop floor were all operated by hand.
‘Your friend Sebastian, isn’t his father a big wheel at one of those places?’ her father said. ‘A word from him and you’d be in.’
But Adelais did not want to work at Textile des Flandres. She did not want to ask Sebastian for the favour, and she did not want his father to be her boss. Instead, she went every day to the Wouters’s house and looked through the Situations Vacant in the Staatscourant van Gent. Unfortunately, almost all the vacant situations were for men with trade skills – electricians and carpenters – or women with shorthand and typing, neither of which Adelais knew. When a new canning factory opened forty minutes away in Wondelgem, she joined the queue of people applying to work there, but by the time she reached the front all the posts had been filled.
Adelais needed to bring in some money. There was still no refrigerator and no telephone. More importantly, the customers coming and going from her father’s workshop were fewer now than ever. Some days, her father did not even bother to open up. He got out of bed at ten and shuffled about the place unshaven, demanding to know why there was never anything to eat in this damned house, or why it was impossible to get a decent cup of coffee. Adelais soon discovered that her mother had been cutting back on luxuries, coffee being one. When Uncle Cornelis sent her two hundred francs for her birthday – inside a card that said Don’t tell Mama! – she had gone out and bought a bag of beans. Helping her father get a proper breakfast in the mornings made her feel a little less useless.
After a couple of months, Adelais had a stroke of luck. Mrs van Hove, who ran the greengrocer’s shop at the corner of Azaleastraat, had a cousin who owned a bar in the Canal Zone. Aux Quatre Vents was an establishment where the customers paid for their drinks in advance and were issued with a chit that they handed to the barman. It was a way of making sure nobody ended up drinking for free. The proprietor, a Mrs Claes, wanted someone to man the till, someone who didn’t have to be paid very much, but was good with numbers. Adelais, who had always been among the top three in maths at school, fitted the bill perfectly. Even her leg was not a problem. Once installed on the high stool in her booth by the door, she was expected to stay there until the time came to go home.
Adelais was afraid her mother would not approve of her working in a bar, but the only word of objection came from her father: ‘Why do all the bars in this town give themselves French names? What’s wrong with Flemish names?’ He accepted the money she handed over though, all the same.
Aux Quatre Vents occupied a windy corner lot a hundred metres from the Handelsdok. Through the steamy windows, Adelais could see the tops of the steel cranes towering over the quays. For much of the time the place was almost empty, but then a freighter would come down the canal from Antwerp or Holland and it would fill up. In an attempt to attract more local business, Mrs Claes had decided that the decor should have an American theme. Behind the bar was a picture of a blonde film star sitting on a hay bale. On the opposite wall hung a Coca-Cola sign, shaped like a bottle cap, and a display of sports pennants blazoned with the names of places and teams – Cincinnati Red Legs, St Louis Browns, Brooklyn Dodgers – that Adelais could only imagine. The biggest investment had been an old American jukebox. The bar was roomy enough for a small dance floor, which mostly went unused, except on Fridays and Saturdays, when customers came in with their dates. Adelais liked to watch the dancers, even though most of them were not very proficient, frowning with concentration, sweat on their brows – unless they were drunk. The drunk ones laughed like hyenas as they stumbled about.
Now and again, an old Walloon called Albert, who worked on the docks, would come in and play his accordion. Most of the melodies were sad, but Mrs Claes, who was a big, muscular woman not much given to sentiment, said his music reminded her of when she worked in Paris before the war. Sometimes, if there weren’t too many customers around, she would sing along in French. It was not clear what kind of work Mrs Claes had done in Paris. Adelais had asked a couple of times, but nobody had given her an answer.
As well as alcohol and coffee, Aux Quatre Vents offered sandwiches and snacks, which were prepared during the course of the day and placed in a glass cabinet at the end of the bar. Sometimes Adelais was allowed to take home what had not been sold. She was glad of the food. Her mother was often out in the evenings, doing charitable works with the Beguines of St Elizabeth. It meant the midweek stews were a thing of the past. Adelais got enough to eat at the bar, but she worried about her father. He had grown thinner in recent years, his face drawn, his clothes loose about him. Often he gave off a sour smell like the crates of empty wine bottles that were stacked around the back of the bar.
Adelais usually took a tram home after work, but sometimes Sebastian would turn up outside the bar on his father’s bicycle. During the summer they would ride up and down the riverfronts or mingle with the tourists on the Graslei. At other times, they would go straight back to Sint-Amandsberg. Adelais never knew when he was going to show up. She had told him not to telephone the bar unless it was an emergency, because Mrs Claes did not like her abandoning her post at the cash register. In any case, Sebastian never seemed to know when he would be free. He had been given a place at the university and had to work hard. He did not mind, he said, because Ghent was the best place in the country to study architecture.
‘One day, I’ll have lots of rich clients and that’s where I’ll find my investors for the Astrid.’ He would set out his plans as they slalomed along the cobbled streets. ‘I just hope it hasn’t been sold by then. That would be a disaster.’
Now and again, he would show up with sketches under his arm. They depicted one aspect or another of the hotel – the lobby, the ballroom, the dining room, the gardens – fully refurbished and operational. Sebastian, it turned out, was a skilled draftsman. He would ask Adelais for her opinion on the decor in the bedrooms or the layout of the flower beds and then, a week or two later, would return with a new sketch reflecting her choices. With each new picture, their grand project seemed a little less fantastical. Visions of the Astrid came to Adelais when she slept. She saw wedding parties dancing in the ballroom, and men in dinner jackets drinking cocktails. She saw herself sitting on the swings in the garden, watching hot-air balloons fill the sky. It was painful to wake up from those dreams each morning and find herself back in her bed on Schoolstraat, with another day in front of her like all the others.
Sometimes Adelais dreamed she was the countess Astrid herself, drifting across the ballroom in a long red dress, like Grace Kelly’s in Dial M for Murder, which she had seen at the Plaza on Veldstraat – except that the countess had been an excellent dancer, by all accounts, and Adelais could not dance at all.
TWELVE
One evening in October, Adelais came home to find a porcelain figure of the Virgin Mary standing on the kitchen dresser. The Virgin wore robes of pale blue and white, and a halo of stars supported by a wire frame. When plugged into a socket the stars lit up. Her mother was kneeling on the floor in front of it. Tears were running down her face.
Adelais did not know what to say. The mother of Christ had wept at the foot of the cross. Stabat mater dolorosa – they sang about it in the Sint-Jacobskerk at Easter. Maybe her mother’s tears were merely a reflection of the Virgin Mary’s, brought on by contemplation of that pitiful scene. Maybe they were nothing very much to worry about.
When she saw her daughter, Odilie de Wolf got off her knees and dried her eyes on her sleeve. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and turned off the electric halo. She picked up the kitchen knife and got on with chopping vegetables by the sink.
The porcelain figure was the first thing her mother had bought for herself in years. It was as if she wasn’t worthy to possess anything nice, anything she didn’t need to keep body and soul together. But there were plenty of people less kind and hard-working than she was, Adelais thought, and they did not have any compunction about treating themselves.
As she lay in bed that night, it came to her that her mother did not feel valued. That was what lay behind the appearance of the Virgin Mary in their kitchen, and the long hours doing charitable work with the Beguines of St Elizabeth. But it was not too late to change that. Her mother had a birthday coming up. Adelais decided to buy her something special, something she would never buy for herself. Thanks to her job in the bar, she had some money at last. The only question was what to buy.
She found the answer the very next day at the Friday market. There, hanging in a second-hand clothes stall, was a camel wool overcoat. Mrs Wouters had one just like it. It was narrow at the waist, with a flared skirt, and black fur on the cuffs and lapels. Mrs Wouters looked beautiful in it – Adelais had heard her mother say so. How could she not want one for herself? The only difference was that this coat had a large brown stain on the lining, and one of the big grey buttons was missing.
The stallholder wanted more for the coat than Adelais could muster, but she promised to keep it back until the following Friday. Adelais still had some of the money Uncle Cornelis had given her, and with the help of another pay packet, and a fifty-franc loan from Hendryck the barman, she amassed the sum she needed with a few francs left over. After buying the coat and stowing it at the bar, she devoted her free time to the search for replacement buttons. She had tried every shop in the city before she returned, aching but triumphant, with five buttons covered in grey felt. They were not exactly the right size or shade, but close enough that nobody would suspect a switch. Mrs Claes helped her tackle the stain, using a mixture of white vinegar and lemon juice, and when that proved ineffective, lent Adelais the money for dry-cleaning. Forty-eight hours before her mother’s birthday, the coat was pressed, spotless and wrapped in tissue paper, just as if it were new.
