Chapter 2
The Man in the Café
You’re picking up where you left off.
I slept with the key under my pillow, like a little girl waiting for the tooth fairy, and woke at six with the “47” label printed into my cheek.
I looked at it for a long time in the grey light falling from the skylight. By day, it looked like a key. Nothing more. An old brass key of the kind you can buy by the handful at the Sunday flea market on the Zand, with a card label that could mean anything at all: a locker number, a room, a cellar, a left-luggage box. Forty-seven. I came up with forty-seven absurd explanations in ten minutes, and then it occurred to me that normal people, after a night like that, call the police.
I picked up my phone. I tapped the one, then the zero.
Don't give it to anyone.
I put the phone down. I slipped the string of the label over my head, tucked the key under my jumper, against my skin, where it was cold for a minute and then not at all, and I went to work.
In winter, while the boats are asleep, I pick up extra shifts at 't Gieterke, a neighbourhood café on the Sint-Annarei, two hundred metres from my flat. Ten dark wooden tables, a stove that roars, yellowed photographs of the bell foundry that occupied the house last century, hence the name, and Lieve behind the counter, sixty-one, white hair cut in a pudding-bowl, who makes the best rice tart in town and knows it. The tourists don't come this far. They stay on the other side of the water, between the Markt and the Rozenhoedkaai, photographing the same gables from the same angle. At 't Gieterke we serve neighbours, pensioners who read the Brugsch Handelsblad from the first page to the last, students from the conservatoire who make a hot chocolate last three hours.
I wiped tables. I served coffees. I listened to Mr Claeys tell me for the fortieth time about the winter of 1963, when the reien froze so hard you could skate all the way to Damme. Every five minutes I put my hand to my jumper, over the key, and felt it there, hard against my breastbone.
I had washed the blood off my jacket in cold water before leaving, but a brown stain was still there, on the back, which I hid by hanging the jacket on the peg with its back to the wall.
At ten o'clock Jasper sent me a selfie: red nose, hair sticking up in tufts, a tartan blanket round his shoulders. I am the Lady of the Camellias. Did you cover the boats on your own? Heroine. Anything to report?
I looked at the screen. I typed: A man fell into my boat, we hid under the tarp, he gave me a key and he knew my name.
I deleted it letter by letter.
Nothing. Get better.
He replied with a coffin and three hearts.
The door opened at ten to eleven. The Belfry carillon had just rung the three-quarters, very far off, over the rooftops, and the little bell above the café door took over, as if the two of them had passed the word along.
He was whistling.
That was the first thing I noticed, before his face. A man came in whistling, not loudly, without realising it, a jaunty little tune I took a moment to place: The Four Seasons, Spring, cheerfully murdered. He knocked his shoes on the mat, unwound a grey cashmere scarf, took off a midnight-blue coat, long, beautifully cut, the kind you don't find in the shops on the Steenstraat, and hung it on the peg, still whistling.
Then he turned round, and I dropped the tray.
Not completely. I caught the tray. Not the two empty cups on it. They smashed on the floor with a noise that made the whole room look up, Mr Claeys included, and Lieve shouted “Mila!” from the counter, in the tone she uses to mean that's coming out of your wages.
It was him.
The same face. The same grey-green eyes, the colour of March water. The same mouth, the same nose, the same small dimple at the corner of the chin that I had seen in the beam of my head torch, twenty centimetres from me, under a tarp. Except that he was clean-shaven, his dark hair was cut short and carefully combed, he was wearing a caramel-coloured polo neck, and he looked as though he'd slept eight hours in a bed that smelt of lavender.
He crouched beside me to pick up the pieces.
“I always have that effect,” he said. “It's a burden. Leave it, you'll cut yourself.”
He picked up the shards one by one, with his fingertips, put them on my tray, and smiled at me.
He didn't recognise me.
Or he was very, very good at it.
He ordered a black coffee. He sat at the table by the window, the one with a view of the water of the Sint-Annarei and the private boats moored under their tarps, and took out a sketchbook and a pencil.
I brought the coffee. My hands were hardly shaking at all.
“What are you drawing?”
“The house opposite. The stepped gable. See the third step, counting from the top? It was redone in the sixties with Boom brick instead of Bruges brick. It drives me mad. Nobody can see it, but I can, and I haven't slept since.”
“What are you, an insomniac bricklayer?”
“Worse. An architect. Heritage, restoration, listed façades. I spend my days explaining to property owners that they're not allowed to change their window frames.”
He held out his hand.
“Thomas Verlinde. I have an office on the Spiegelrei, right on the water, with windows too big to ever heat the place.”
I looked at his hand. He was still wearing his gloves. Fine leather gloves, brown. He followed my gaze, laughed, pulled off the left glove with his teeth and held out his left hand again.
“Sorry. My mother would kill me.”
I shook it. It was warm, dry, a hand that had never carried anything heavier than a pencil.
“Mila,” I said.
And I waited.
Nothing. Not a flicker. He repeated “Mila” the way you taste a wine, nodding, and said it was pretty, that it sounded like the name of a boat. I felt my cheeks go hot and hated myself.
So I tested him.
“Were you over by the Rozenhoedkaai last night? Around eleven?”
“Last night? Last night I was in Ghent, at a lecture on the slate roofs of the Lys valley. Two and a half hours of slides. I promise you it's less thrilling than it sounds. Why?”
“I thought I saw you.”
“In that fog? You've got better eyes than me. I couldn't even see my own feet on the way home.”
He smiled. I found nothing in that smile. Not a crack. Not a chip. I was looking at the face of the man I had held against me under a tarp twelve hours earlier, and that face was telling me politely that it had never seen me before.
There were three possibilities, and I counted them on my way back behind the counter. One: it was the same man, and he was a liar of genius, capable of shaving, combing his hair, patching up a hand cut to the bone and strolling into the café where I worked whistling Vivaldi. Two: it was a different man, and the world was suddenly full of duplicate faces, and I was going mad. Three: I was already mad, and the key against my breastbone didn't exist.
I put my hand to my jumper. The key existed.
He stayed an hour. He drew the gable. He talked to Mr Claeys about the winter of 1963 as if he'd never heard the story, and Mr Claeys was so happy he forgot to finish his newspaper. He made Lieve laugh, which never happens; Lieve only laughs at funerals. On his way out, he stopped in front of the glass counter.
“Is that rice tart?”
“The best in Bruges,” said Lieve.
“Then I'll be back this afternoon. Keep me a slice. A big one.”
He looked at me as he said it. Not at Lieve. At me.
The little bell jingled. He went out whistling Spring, and I watched him walk along the Sint-Annarei, the midnight-blue coat open, hands in his pockets, until he turned the corner by the bridge.
“You're blushing,” said Lieve.
“It's the stove.”
“The stove's been out for ten minutes, my girl.”
I don't know how many times I looked at the door that afternoon. I know I touched up my mascara in the toilets at two o'clock and called myself an idiot in the mirror at five past two. I know I wanted him to come back in a way I hadn't felt since Grégoire, since Namur, since that wedding dress left in its garment bag in my mother's wardrobe. And I know I was afraid. Not a vague fear. A precise fear, the shape of a key and the temperature of my skin.
If it was him, why was he pretending?
If it wasn't him, who was the man in the boat?
He came back at a quarter to four, just after the Belfry had struck, in a gust of fine rain. His hair was wet and he looked pleased with himself. He ate his rice tart standing at the counter, in three mouthfuls, eyes closed, and announced to Lieve that he wanted to marry her. Lieve said she was already spoken for, by the tart. He laughed. He asked me what time I finished. I said seven. He said what a shame, he had a site meeting at six. He said another time, then. He said it as if it went without saying that there would be another time.
Then he paid.
He took a handful of coins out of his pocket, and pulled off his right glove to count them, and held his hand out to me, open, flat, the coins in the hollow, the way you hold out bread to a horse, smiling.
“Help yourself. I'm hopeless at sums, that's why I do façades.”
I looked down at his hand.
His right palm was smooth, pink, unmarked. Not a cut, not a scratch, not even a trace.