I glanced back toward the bar, wishing he would return there. To my relief, two tourists entered the bar and Smoot looked around and sighed.
“I better get back to it,” he said, lifting his cane and hobbling back to serve them.
“Have you eaten?” I asked Bastiaan, wanting to get out of there quickly in case Smoot returned. “Would you like to grab some dinner with me?”
“Of course I would,” he said, grinning at me as if there could be no doubt about the answer. “Did you think I came back here just to look at Jack Smoot’s missing eye?”
Ignac
We discovered Ignac lying up against the doorway of our apartment in Weesperplein on a freezing cold Saturday night a few weeks before Christmas.
Bastiaan had moved in two months earlier and the simple pleasure of our cohabitation made me wonder why I had ever cared what other people might think. It had been seven years since I’d left Dublin and during that time I had neither gone back to my homeland nor communicated with anyone from my past. The truth was, I had no idea what had happened to any of them, whether they were even alive or dead. Nor, for that matter, did they have any clue what had happened to me. The notion that I might never return, however, saddened me, for as much as I loved Amsterdam, I still thought of Ireland as home and occasionally longed to be walking down Grafton Street while the carol singers were performing outside Switzer’s or taking a stroll along the pier at Dun Laoghaire on a chilly Sunday morning before enjoying lunch in a local pub.
To my surprise, it was Charles I thought about the most. He might have been a hopeless adoptive father and I might never have been a real Avery but nevertheless I had grown up in his house and buried inside me were tender feelings toward him, feelings that seemed all the stronger for our estrangement. I thought of Julian less frequently and when I did it was no longer with desire or lust. Instead, I wondered whether he had forgiven me for the lies I had told him and for the terrible crime I had committed against his sister. For the most part, I tried not to think of Alice at all, pushing her out of my mind whenever she appeared, for while I did not blame myself for all the hardship I had caused others in my life, I certainly blamed myself for the pain I had caused her. Still, in my na?veté I assumed that enough time had passed for them both to have moved on and perhaps to have forgotten me. I couldn’t possibly have guessed the things that were taking place in my absence.
There was something enchanted about walking along the river on cold nights like that, the lights on the Amstel Hotel illuminating the cyclists as they made their way up and down Sarphatistraat, the sightseeing barges sailing past us with tourists taking photographs through misted-up windows. Bastiaan and I could hold hands as we made our way home and passing couples didn’t bat an eyelid. In Dublin, of course, we would have been assaulted, beaten to within inches of our lives, and when the Gardaí finally arrived to scrape us off the pavement they would have laughed in our faces and told us that we had no one to blame but ourselves. In Amsterdam, we exchanged Christmas greetings with strangers, remarked on the cold weather and felt under no threat at all. Perhaps it was the fact that we lived in such peace that made the appearance of the wounded boy huddled on our doorstep in the snow such an incongruous sight.
I recognized him instantly from our two previous encounters. He was wearing the same clothes that I had seen him in on the night of the altercation with his deerstalker pimp and his hair was as haphazardly bleached as it had been when I’d watched him stepping into the taxi with the Manchester Utd supporter. But his face was swollen above the right cheek now and a dark bruise beneath his eye was preparing to flower into a rainbow of colors over the days ahead. Dried blood ran from his lip to his chin and I could see that he had lost one of his lower teeth. Bastiaan moved toward him quickly, reaching for his wrist to check for a pulse, but it was obvious that the boy was still alive, just very badly beaten.
“Should we call an ambulance?” I asked.
“I can take care of him,” said Bastiaan, shaking his head. “It’s mostly superficial. But we’ll have to take him upstairs.”
I hesitated, uncertain whether I wanted to bring a stranger into our home.
“What?” he asked, looking toward me.
“Is it safe?” I said. “You realize he’s a rent boy, right?”
“Yes, and one who’s been badly assaulted. Do you want to just leave him out here to freeze to death? Come on, Cyril, help me pick him up.”
I acquiesced grudgingly. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel for the boy but I had seen what his pimp was capable of and didn’t particularly want to involve myself. But by now Bastiaan had already started to lift the boy and he turned to me with a frustrated expression that asked what was I waiting for and soon we were dragging him upstairs to our apartment, where we propped him up in an armchair as he opened one eye sleepily and looked back and forth between us, mumbling something indecipherable beneath his breath.
“Get me my bag,” said Bastiaan, nodding toward the corridor. “It’s in the wardrobe,” he told me. “You’ll see a black leather satchel above my suits.”
I did as instructed and watched from the doorway as Bastiaan spoke quietly to the boy, trying to get some sense out of him. At one point, he roused himself and lashed out, shouting unintelligible words at us both, but Bastiaan held his arms until he collapsed back into a half-sleep.
“How old do you think he is?” I asked.
“Fifteen. Sixteen at most. He’s so thin. He can’t weigh more than sixty kilos. And look.” He lifted the boy’s right arm and showed me a series of pockmarks that ran along his arm, puncture wounds from hypodermic needles. He took a bottle from his bag and soaked a ball of cotton wool in liquid from it before applying it to the red marks. The boy winced a little as the coldness of the liquid touched his skin but didn’t wake.
“Should we call the police?” I asked, and Bastiaan shook his head.
“There’s no point,” he said. “The police will only blame him. They’ll take him to a cell to dry out but he won’t get the help he needs.”
“Does he need a doctor?”
Bastiaan turned to me with an expression that mingled amusement with irritation. “I am a doctor, Cyril,” he said.
“I mean a real doctor.”
“I am a real doctor!”