“It is.”
“Don’t you ever miss having someone in your life, though?” he asked.
“Of course I do.”
“No, I don’t mean Bastiaan. I mean someone else.”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I’m part of that generation of gay men who were lucky if they met someone once. I don’t have any interest in starting something new. For me, it was Bastiaan or no one.”
“Not even Julian?”
“Julian was different,” I said. “Julian was always an impossibility. But Bastiaan was reality. Bastiaan was the love of my life, not Julian. Julian was just an obsession, although I did love him and I still miss him. We had some resolution at the end but not enough.” I shook my head and sighed. “Honestly, Ignac, I look back at my life and I don’t understand very much of it. It seems like it would have been so simple now to have been honest with everyone, especially Julian. But it didn’t feel like that at the time. Everything was different then, of course.”
“Liam says that Julian felt the same way. That he didn’t know why you didn’t tell him how you felt when you were teenagers.”
I turned to him in surprise. “You’ve talked to Liam about us?” I asked.
“The subject has come up,” he said carefully. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“No,” I said. “I suppose not. I’m glad you two are friends.”
“Of course we’re friends,” he said. “He’s my brother.”
“The two things don’t always follow.”
“They do in our case.”
“Well, I’m glad,” I said. Liam was, in fact, godfather to Ignac and Rebecca’s first set of twins, but there was a part of me that sometimes felt envious of their relationship. They were the older and younger brother that both had always sought, connected by a father of sorts who had been there for one and not for the other.
“And if someone showed up now?” he asked.
“Someone…?”
“Someone to love.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe? Probably not.”
“OK.”
“Can I ask you something?” I said, ready to broach a subject that we had never, in more than twenty years, discussed.
“Of course.”
“It’s just because we’re here,” I said. “In Slovenia. And it makes me realize that we’ve never talked about Amsterdam, have we? Not about the city. But about what happened there.”
“No,” he said. “No, we haven’t.”
“Sometimes I think there’s something wrong with me,” I said, lowering my voice even though there was no one sitting outside to overhear us. “Because I feel no remorse at all. No guilt.”
“Why would you?”
“Because I killed a man.”
“You didn’t kill him,” he said, shaking his head. “Jack Smoot did.”
“No, we all did it,” I said. “We were all there. And I was a part of it as much as anyone.”
“My father got everything that was coming to him,” insisted Ignac. “If Jack Smoot hadn’t stabbed him, then God only knows what would have happened. Remember, I knew him. You didn’t. He would have never let me go. Never.”
“I know that,” I said. “And I don’t regret any of it.”
“Do you think about it a lot?”
“Not a lot, no. But sometimes. Why, don’t you?”
“No, never.”
“OK.”
“I’m not sorry, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I’m not sorry either,” I said. “He’d never have left you in peace, that much was obvious. But I must admit, I often wondered what Smoot did with the body. I’ve spent twenty years wondering whether the police might catch up with us.”
“They won’t. The body is long gone.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I just am.”
I looked across at him in surprise. “Do you know what happened to it?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Smoot told me.”
“I didn’t realize you were still in touch,” I said.
“Only occasionally.”
“I was always nervous about contacting him. I thought I should keep as much distance between us as possible just in case. But as it happens I heard from him after Bastiaan died. He wrote me a letter. I always wondered how he knew. I thought perhaps Arjan or Edda had come into the bar and told him.”
“And did you write back?”
“I did,” I said. “But that was the end of it. Maybe I should write again sometime. Assuming he’s still alive.”
“Oh he’s still alive all right,” said Ignac. “I saw him the last time that I was in Amsterdam.”
“You went to MacIntyre’s?” I asked in surprise.
“Of course I did. I go whenever I’m there, which is pretty often, because my Dutch publisher brings me over for every book. Nothing’s changed. He’s older, of course. But the bar is still making money. And he seems happy enough. The last time I was there I even met the woman from the photograph.”
“What photograph?”
“Remember the picture on the wall next to your favorite seat? Where you and Bastiaan always used to sit?”
“The one of Smoot and his boyfriend from all those years ago?”
“Yes, but there was a young woman standing next to them, half cut off by the frame.”
“Oh yes,” I said, recalling it. “It was taken on Chatham Street.”
“We were supposed to meet her that night, remember? She was on holiday in Amsterdam. Turns out that she helped dispose of the body. So we have her to thank too.”
I thought about it, recalling Smoot putting the body in the trunk of a rental car before stepping into the passenger seat next to a woman and driving away. His visitor from Dublin. His old friend. The woman who’d saved his life when his lover was killed.
“And did you talk about it?” I asked, hoping that they hadn’t. Years might have gone by but I still thought it was foolish to discuss the events of that night with strangers.
“No,” he said. “Not a word. Smoot told me later, that’s all.”
“So what did he do?” I asked again. “How did he get rid of it?”
He smiled and shook his head. “Like I said. You don’t want to know.”
“I do.”
He sighed and shrugged his shoulders. “All right,” he said. “You remember how the people of Amsterdam, during the seventeenth century, would tie millstones around the necks of convicted homosexuals before throwing them into the canals and leaving them to drown?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s what he did. He would have sunk right to the bottom and never resurfaced.”
“Jesus,” I said, feeling a shiver run through me. “I don’t know what to say.”