The Public Prosecutor Read Online Free Page A

language.
    “Good morning,” he answered in a neutral tone, briefly looking him up and down. J. Edgar Hoover only spoke to his chauffeur to tell him off or accuse him of things of which he was entirely innocent.
    “The Kaai,” said Albert when the chauffeur had taken his place behind the wheel.
    The distance from his house, a desirable residence on Amerikalei, given to his wife by her father Justice de Vreux on the tenth anniversary of their wedding, to the Court of Appeal on the Waalse Kaai was a little less than a mile. Albert considered it the height of luxury, which probably explains why he enjoyed it so much. “Completely absurd,” said Jokke Weyler one morning, having gone along for the ride. “Luxury is always absurd, Jokke,” he had replied. “But the classes are God’s creation, are they not?” One of their more affected expressions.
    Antwerp’s Court of Appeal on the Waalse Kaai was located next to a tarmac surface littered with garbage bags, which was supposed to pass for a car park. The building itself had seven stories and was a prime example of the ugliness that characterized third-rate Seventies postmodernism. The first floor had hexagonal windows that looked like the wide-open gullets of North Sea cod. Faulty drainage had left the frames discoloured and stained. The building was about twenty-five years old, but wear and tear was visible wherever you looked. Inferior building material and poor maintenance were to blame, an excellent example of what had become known as “Belgian laxity”. Albert avoided the Court’s public entrance at all times. At the rear of the building, near the Cockerill Kaai, there was an inconspicuous rusty metal door, which was always locked. Only he and the janitor had a key. The door opened into a gloomy corridor with coarse concrete walls leading to a elevator, which stopped only at his offices on the seventh floor. He considered himself a public figure and was not shy of the media, but starting the day in mystery was an exclusive privilege he reserved for himself. He deemed the hard-working diligence of the office staff on his arrival to be evidence that the Antwerp Public Prosecutor’s Office was running like clockwork. But he was unaware of the fact that the moment he pushed the button in the elevator, a red light flickered on the seventh floor, announcing to an attentive clerk that “Cardinal Richelieu” was on his way. The remainder of the staff were thus forewarned. He had acquired the nickname on account of the Roman elegance with which he wore his red toga and genuine ermine cape. At the Court of First Instance, they used to call him “line of least resistance”, which he put down with a fake smile to his talent for “appropriate delegation”. He preferred to limit the latter, aware that his subordinates might imagine they had achieved something while they were only entertaining themselves.
    He opened the elevator door, looked left and right into the empty corridor, frowned at the absence of activity and made his way pensively past a row of portraits, former public prosecutors, posing self-importantly like Renaissance prelates with white lace ruffles and ermine collars, draped with medals of honour. This illustrious gallery would include his own portrait in three years time, he thought. His soundproof, studded-leather office door was open. He headed directly towards his impressive Italian desk, with matching designer cabinets in solid rosewood. The interior had devoured a significant portion of the 1996 budget entry for “fixtures and fittings”. He sat down in his chair, the leather of which had an unfamiliar odour, vaguely reminiscent of some exotic aromatic plant. He cast a contemptuous glance at the bundle of exposed cables running at floor level along the wall. The computers acquired by the Court of Appeal in 1995 were yet to communicate with one another. Links to the other prosecutors’ offices and courts of the land were still impossible, in