The Death of a Much Travelled Woman (23 page)

There was nothing in these notes to indicate that Anja and Abby were lovers. There was, unfortunately, something to indicate that Anja had not been selling the letters to a university collection at all. A suspicion that was confirmed by two letters with U.S. stamps.

These were typed, with a very black, decisive ribbon, and the tone was firm, but the signature at the end looked old and ill, not bold at all.

Dear Miss de Joost,

You are correct. The copy of the letter you sent from me to Amanda Lowe is indeed legitimate—it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. It was the product of an unwise passion between two college girls and as such, should be relegated to the trash bin. However, as I think it is unlikely you—or the party you say you are acting for (can she really still be alive after all these years? I know I am, but I feel it is much too old)—would be willing to throw it away, I am prepared to pay for this letter and any others you may have.

Dear Miss de Joost,

I really cannot abide greed. What seemed to be a simple transaction, a simple and quick erasure of the past, has now turned nasty. I cannot pay the price you name. And I do not like the hint that if I do not come up with the full, exorbitant amount, you will “take your business elsewhere,” as you so delicately put it. Take it elsewhere and go to hell. I would rather be outed, than made a damn fool of.

I rustled throughout the other papers on the desk. “Is that all, just the two letters from her? Maybe Anja never sold the collection at all. But how strange. She went right to
her
.”

“Maybe she thought she could get more money from her.”

“But clearly Abby had no idea of what was going on. She thought Anja was going to—had, in fact—sold the letters to some university.”

“Until the writer sent Abby a note telling her about what one might perhaps call blackmailing.”

“So Abby had received just a couple of cash advances from Anja. Those were the receipts. But Anja had the letters. She could get whatever price she wanted, either from the writer herself or from other universities.”

“Abby must have been on her way to Amsterdam to confront Anja, when…”

“But the letters between Amanda Lowe and the writer must be somewhere around here then,” said Joke, rustling around in the drawers of the desk.

“What are you doing in my flat?” said a voice from the doorway. She was in her white karate uniform and the belt around her solid waist was black. “What are you doing in my desk?”

I tried to take the defensive. “There’s a lot that you haven’t told me, Anja.” I held up the letter from Abby and the writer. Behind me I could sense Joke moving away in the direction of the window. It was fine for the Human Pretzel to think about clambering down three stories, but I knew that my only way out was the door.

“It’s not what you probably think,” she said. “I’m not a blackmailer. Abby wanted more money, and so I tried to raise the price. The next thing I know the writer is yelling about extortion.”

“But why did you write to her in the first place, not a university special collections or a library?” I was covering for Joke, hoping she could get to the window and out while I distracted Anja. It was clear to me now that she not only had the means—the gray Fiat she had never mentioned—but the motive. She had deceived Abby; Abby had found out; she had decided to kill Abby.

Anja came closer to us and the desk. “I know it looks awful. But you must believe me that I didn’t expect things to turn out the way they did. I didn’t expect Abby to be killed. I was going to explain it all to her on Tuesday when we met.”

“So she was coming to Amsterdam to meet you?”

“Yes. But I got so worked up by the whole thing that I decided to drive there and see if I could catch her at the train station…”

“You caught her all right,” I couldn’t help saying angrily. Joke chose that moment to jump out the window.

“Where’s she going?” cried Anja, rushing toward me. “She’ll be hurt.”

“She can take care of herself,” I said. “As for where she’s going—to the police I imagine.”

“The police! But I didn’t do anything to Abby. She was already dead when I got to the Gare Midi.” Instead of coming back into the room, Anja began to climb out the window herself. I didn’t know what to do. Out of the corner of my eye, I suddenly saw a bundle of old letters, tied with a faded ribbon, that had fallen off the side of the desk.

“All right,” I said, in as calm a voice I could manage. “Let’s just say I believe you. Would you come back in and explain? If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to fear from the police.”

Slowly she returned to where I was standing, and said, “But that’s the trouble, when you do one thing wrong, it makes it look as if you’re capable of anything.”

I perched on the desk chair and motioned for Anja to sit down, where she wouldn’t have a view of the fallen packet of letters.

“It started when Abby found the letters in a box in the apartment,” Anja said. “I remember how excited she was when she came to me to tell me who they were from. ‘They’re worth a fortune to scholars,’ she said. And then Abby asked me if I’d help her sell them.”

“Why? Why didn’t she do it herself?”

“Because of her brother. That’s when I heard the whole story about the inheritance and how Abby wasn’t supposed to sell anything from the apartment. She was afraid, if her brother knew she’d sold them, he’d either want all or part of the money, or else he would try to use that to get her out of the apartment.”

Anja sighed. “I told her I really hadn’t done anything like that before and wasn’t sure I felt comfortable. But she said she’d tell me who to contact.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Anja shook her head. “I read the letters, and they seemed so…personal. And I knew the writer was still alive. It seemed a really awful thing to do to her. Not to say she’s a lesbian of course, but to do it behind her back. So I thought, Well, why not give her the opportunity to buy the letters herself? I truly wasn’t thinking of it as blackmail. I just wrote her and sent her a copy of one of the letters and said I had all of them. I only asked whether it was legitimate. I did not name a price at first until I checked with Abby; she told me what to ask. That’s when the writer got so angry and accused me of blackmail, and then she wrote a letter to the old address she had for Amanda Lowe and begged her not to go along with this. That’s the letter Abby got.”

We could hear feet coming up the stairs. Heavy feet. Probably police feet. All of a sudden I was no longer sure that Anja had killed Abby. I thought it was a shame in fact, that the last thing Joke heard before she dove out the window was that Anja had driven her Fiat to the Gare Midi.

There was a powerful knock on the door, and I rose to let them in. I wanted to tell them, “I don’t really think she did it,” but caution stopped my protest as they handcuffed her to take away for questioning.

The next morning found me again on a very early train to Brussels, this time with the letters in my bag. I read them, one by one, all the way through the Low Countries, and then I read them again. They were beautiful and true, the words of a twenty-year-old in love with a woman for the first time. Why and when had she become ashamed of that part of her life? Who had made her feel ashamed?

In my case it was my mother; in Abby’s case her father. We had both been around the same age—sixteen. We’d both laughed about it afterward, years after we had left home and weren’t speaking to our relatives. We had been two tough girls, Abby and I, talking about first loves with a knowing look. Never talking about the shame, the anger, and the hurt of it.

When I arrived in Brussels, it was still only nine. I should be getting a discount from the railway for all the trips I’d taken. I took a cab to the Avenue Louise and woke up Rachel. I knew that Thomas was coming at eleven to make another inspection of the apartment, and I wanted Rachel to delay him as long as possible. Then I went to the post office, where I made a few phone calls to New York. Within an hour, I knew more than I needed. I headed for his hotel.

He wasn’t a neat man, the chambermaid told me. She gestured in disgust at clothes dropped anywhere, at the crumbs from his breakfast croissant all over the sheets, and at the papers and letters flung around on the dressing table. I had pressed a franc note into her hands and told her I was his secretary, here to pick up some papers for his meeting today that he’d forgotten. We commiserated over his messiness; then I started searching. After only a few minutes, I found what I was looking for. It corroborated what a bookseller friend in New York had found out for me, that Lowe’s Antiquarian Bookshop, while still alive, was in grave trouble.

Here on the desk was a letter from Abby to her brother, offering to trade the apartment in Brussels, with its many fabulous and valuable antiques, for ownership of Lowe’s.

“I know that it’s not an equal exchange,” she’d written. “Our aunt’s things are worth far more than the store, especially since you’ve run it into the ground, but I still have a sentimental attachment to it. I’d be willing to trade fair and square. As for inventory, I have my own collection, and my connections, and I have a deal coming up that I expect to bring in quite a bit.”

Oh Abby, Abby, I thought. Why did you brag to him? Why did you tell him the apartment had valuable antiques? Why did you hint at a deal?

I had not cried for Abby when I heard the news of her death, or when I was at the apartment with Rachel or when I stood outside the Gare Midi and looked at the spot where it had happened. But sitting in Thomas’s hotel room, on a bed still scattered with croissant flakes, I cried as I read Abby’s letter. I cried because that was how I had remembered her and loved her: as a dreamer, a liar, a deal-maker, a sentimental girl with a tough and impish face.

I suppose my story should turn now to how I managed to get the police in Brussels to investigate the possibility that Thomas had indeed killed his sister. How they discovered that he had come into Brussels on Tuesday morning, and had rented a gray Fiat. How they found traces of Abby’s blood on the fender of the car, and his fingerprints all over the place. But I find that the subject saddens me. I’m glad he was caught and punished, of course, but his imprisonment will never bring back Abby to me.

As for the rest of us—Anja, quite chastened after a night in jail, went back quietly to doing what she did best, selling books. I sometimes stop there when I pass through Amsterdam, and I come away with books I never meant to buy on subjects that are suddenly fascinating.

After Thomas’s conviction, Rachel could have fought to keep the flat, for there were no other relatives. Instead, the Belgian state took it. Rachel said she didn’t care; she was just relieved to be out of there. She came with me to Amsterdam for a visit instead, and in the way of many people who come to Amsterdam, she simply stayed. Abby was her true love, but she will probably go happily into old age running the Hotel Virginia with Eloise.

As for the famous letters themselves, Eloise took it upon herself to return them to the woman who wrote them so long ago. “Once,” Eloise said, “I would have seen this as an opportunity to make my name. I would have edited the letters and published them without her permission. Not any more. I guess I’ve completely lost my ambition.”

But some time later a letter came in the mail from the famous writer.

Dear Eloise,

Yes, I have burnt them, as you feared I might. I had become brave during the extortion attempt, and then I lost that bravery, as I have lost it before. Perhaps other letters will be found (I was prolific then). It’s hard to keep secrets in this life, much less beyond. Though of course by then I will not care. I did read the letters—once—before I burned them. Amanda was a dear friend of mine once. It all came back to me. It wasn’t love, not in that way, but it was love no less. Save or burn
this
letter as you will.

The other day, back in London, I walked down Coptic Street, on a light, cool, spring evening. Birds sang—where do those birds live, who live on Coptic Street? There was the smell of lilac wafting on a breeze—where could those lilac bushes grow, in the midst of the city? For a minute or two, I was many years younger, going to meet my lover Abby. I could almost see her running toward me from the other direction, heedless of traffic, running quick and joyous without looking at anything but me.

E
VERYONE WANTS TO BE
a writer, I’ve found. Everyone thinks it couldn’t be that hard. If you spend a lot of time around writers, as I do, the idea becomes even more plausible. They’re not really that smart, some of them. They’re not really that talented, some of them. All that separates us from them is a book, and sometimes not even that.

I’m a translator, from Spanish to English, which means that although I don’t often get credit for, say, the last Gloria de los Angeles novel you picked up, the words in the novel are in fact my words. My English words. My choices. I wrote
crimson
, when I could have written
blood red
. In many cases, I’ll tell you modestly, I’ve improved the words I was given. Texts are fluid. Words can be substituted, each brick of the house removed and replaced. Afterwards, is it still the same house? The original author thinks so. But I know differently.

If what a writer writes is words, then I am a writer. I have books full of my words. But I am not a writer. Not a real one. I used to think I might be. I used to mull over how I might start, used to wonder how to cross the bridge from nobody to novelist. What separated me from them?

Plot and character? When you’ve translated as many books as I have, it’s not hard to look at the creakiness of some story lines, the thinness of most characterizations and to think, “I could do better than that. At least I couldn’t do worse.” I didn’t have much to say as a writer, but again, neither do lots of authors with books on the bestseller list. They have intriguing lives, or beautiful faces, or strange little gimmicks, but very few interesting ideas. I’d be in good company.