John Irving - Until I Find You

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 your 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 Am-sterdam.”

“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.

Vanvleck’s homicide series was more in the vein of understated realism than anything on American television; there was less visible violence, and the sexual content was more frank. Nor did happy endings find their unlikely way into any of the episodes—Christiaan Winter is not reunited with his family. The best he can manage is a civil conversation with his daughter in a coffeehouse, where he is introduced to her new boyfriend. We can tell that the veteran policeman doesn’t care for the boyfriend, but he keeps his thoughts to himself. In the last shot, after his daughter gives him a kiss on the cheek, Winter realizes that the boyfriend has left some money on the table for the coffee.

This was noir warm, which was Wild Bill at his best—at least this is what Jack said to Nico Oudejans when Nico called and asked Jack his opinion of Vanvleck’s series. Nico liked the series, too. Nico didn’t ask Jack how the meeting with Femke had gone. Nico knew Femke; as a good cop, he knew every detail of Daughter Alice’s story, too. Jack told Nico about Herbert Hoffmann being a tattoo artist, not an organ. Naturally, Nico asked if Jack was going to Hamburg.

He wasn’t. Jack knew actors may be more highly skilled at lying than other people, but they are no more adept at lying to themselves—and even actors should know better than to lie to cops.

“What more do I need to know?” Jack asked Nico, who didn’t answer him. The policeman just kept looking at Jack’s eyes—then at his hands, then at his eyes again. Jack began to speak more rapidly; to Nico, Jack’s thoughts were more run-on than consecutive, but the cop didn’t question him.

Jack said that he hoped, for his father’s sake, that William had another family. Jack wouldn’t invade his father’s privacy; after all, William hadn’t invaded Jack’s. Besides, Jack knew that Herbert Hoffmann had retired. Alice had revered Hoffmann, but Jack would leave Herbert Hoffmann in peace, too. So what if Hoffmann had almost surely met William Burns?

“Now that you’re getting close, maybe you’re afraid to find him, Jack,” Nico said.

It was Jack’s turn not to say anything; he just tried to look unafraid.

“Maybe you’re afraid that you’ll cause your father pain, or that he won’t want to see you,” the policeman said.

“Don’t you mean that I’ll cause him more pain?” Jack asked.

“Now that you’re getting close, maybe you don’t want to get any closer—that’s all I’m saying, Jack.”