The Pilgrim Conspiracy

They moved on to a famous spot on the Rapenburg canal. It was here in front of the old university library in 1620 that the Pilgrims boarded boats bound for Delfshaven, where they would eventually set sail for England.

The tour ended on the Vliet, the canal where the Pilgrims finally left Leiden forever. A statue of a man waving a final farewell to the travellers had been erected on the canalside.

The group walked back towards the Pieterskerk.

Peter’s conversation with Tony had left him feeling unsettled – as if their conversation had been unfinished.

‘Tony, getting back to what we were talking about earlier,’ said Peter, ‘do you really have no idea where these threats are coming from? And why do you think that they might be connected to what happened here?’

‘It’s just a hunch,’ Tony said. ‘I don’t know. I’ll tell the police this afternoon. But you know, and this is just speculation, really, but maybe they should be looking at the Catholic Church. There are plenty of orthodox Catholics who still haven’t accepted that Rome’s word is no longer law. They see us Masons as godless devil-worshippers. But the States are home to an enormous number of different groups. We’ve got radical evangelists, trigger-happy born-again Christians who would happily annihilate everyone who isn’t pro-life. We’ve got fascist white supremacist militias. And we’ve got tree-hugging hippies who see the Pilgrims – and maybe the Freemasons too – as the start of where it all went wrong in America, the beginning of the end for the indigenous population. I could go on, I really could. It’s no wonder the Freemasons are usually the first organisation that dictatorships decide to ban.’

‘Who could say?’ Peter mumbled to himself. ‘Who could say?’

But that’s all in the USA, he thought. How on earth can events over there be linked to Coen Zoutman’s tragic death here?

They reached the university’s Academy Building near the Nonnenbrug Bridge.

Although he’d not actually spoken to any of them, Peter said goodbye and shook hands with everyone in the group. He waved at Jeffrey.

‘Well, Peter,’ Tony said. ‘I’m sorry our meeting was in such unpleasant circumstances. But I hope that we’ll meet again in better ones someday.’

‘I hope so too.’

‘If you ever decide to attempt the “great crossing” yourself,’ Tony said, ‘feel free to come visit me. Or us.’ He gave Peter his business card.

Peter smiled. According to one of his colleagues who had lived in the States for a while, it was advisable to take such remarks with a grain of salt. ‘You can visit me anytime’ was more polite small talk than an invitation to actually visit someone.

But who knows, Peter thought.

Before Peter left, Tony gave him the sort of brotherly bear hug that Americans were famous for.

As he walked away, Peter wondered why Tony had taken him aside to tell him what he had told him, but it would have looked odd to go back and ask him.

I suppose you’re inclined to be more candid than usual when you’re talking to people you think you’re never going to see again. It can be cathartic to tell your story to an outsider, someone who’ll listen to you like a confessor.

Peter couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but he had a strange feeling that something else had been going on, something that transcended the simple conversation they’d had. Like he’d been watching a subtitled film in which the lines spoken by the actors had been entirely different from the words on the screen.

Chapter 8

Rijsbergen and Van de Kooij followed the coroner’s team as they carried Coen Zoutman’s body down the stairs.

The building manager, Frank Koers, was waiting for them in the function room. He had spread out a floor plan of the building on one of the tables and placed glasses on the four corners to stop it from rolling back up.

They stood around the table like generals studying a terrain map to devise a plan of attack.

Frank traced a finger over the floor plan. ‘As you can see,’ he said, ‘in the temple itself there’s only one way in and out: this door here. No hidden escape routes, no secret tunnels or doors. The city architect, Jan Neysingh, designed an initiation chamber that was added to the first floor in 1950.’

Rijsbergen nodded. He blinked slowly, like he was taking a mental photograph of the plans in front of him.

‘And here,’ Frank Koers said, sliding his finger over the paper again, ‘on the ground floor, we have the main entrance, the hall with the toilets. Then the entrance to this room with …’ he pointed with his left hand at a door in the corner of the room ‘… a smaller room next door. That room leads to a large extension that runs the length of the garden. These doors …’ he pointed to the two sets of double doors at the end of the function room ‘… take you outside to the garden. It’s an enclosed yard with high walls. Not easy to get over.’

‘But what if you did manage to climb over them?’ asked Van de Kooij, who was furiously scribbling notes. ‘Where would you end up?’

‘Then you’d come out in the back gardens belonging to the houses on this block,’ Frank said. ‘And if you climbed over all of their walls, eventually you’d end up behind the synagogue on the Levendaal. But I’ve never gone beyond the garden myself. You’d have to take a look for yourself.’

‘Well, let’s do that then,’ Van de Kooij said eagerly as he emphatically underlined the last few words on his notes.

Rijsbergen rolled his eyes, just briefly enough for his partner not to notice.

They opened the garden doors and went into the back yard. It was clear that it was rarely used. The tiles were edged in moss, the plastic chairs were coated in green algae, and there was a pile of sand in which a few overgrown but withered weeds had taken root. A metre-wide border ran along the wall, filled with little more than soil, and covered for the most part with a thin layer of moss.

‘Your technical team was in here yesterday with floodlights,’ Koers said. ‘They took a lot of photos, so if someone left shoeprints, I’m sure they’ll have found them. But I think you’ll see straight away …’ he pointed to the strip of soil ‘… that nobody has set foot there for a very long time.’

‘But if you were a bit of an athletic type, you could get over that easily, couldn’t you?’ Van de Kooij said to no one in particular. To demonstrate that he fit this description himself, he took off his jacket.

‘Stop right there, Spider-Man,’ said Rijsbergen.

‘It doesn’t seem likely that the killer left the building this way,’ said Koers. ‘It would attract too much attention, and you wouldn’t get very far anyway because there’s another garden behind here with yet another wall. The only way to get back onto the street is by going through a house. And that’s what this person has done; they’ve simply left the building through the front door.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Van de Kooij. He put his jacket on the ground and took a run at the wall. With one enormous stride, he leapt over the border and grabbed onto the top of the wall with both hands. He used the bricks that stuck out here and there as footholds, like a free climber gripping onto a cliff face.

He managed to reach the top of the wall surprisingly quickly. He looked down at the other two men triumphantly before turning around to assess the area behind the wall.

‘Yep,’ he said. ‘I can see gardens.’

‘Come on, get down,’ Rijsbergen said.

He smiled at Frank Koers, silently apologising for his colleague’s behaviour.

Van de Kooij gave the impression that he would gladly tackle the walls in all the other gardens on the block to hunt for possible clues. He looked behind him one more time, like a general on horseback surveying the battlefield, and then he jumped down.

They went back inside.

‘We’ll knock on some doors on this block,’ Rijsbergen said, an announcement that seemed to be intended for both Koers and Van de Kooij. ‘And they’ll all get an official letter from the police asking them to contact us if they’ve seen anything unusual. Will you still be here later?’

‘Yes, it’ll take me a while to tidy up here. Your colleagues have been through everything, emptied the bins, taken even more photos. They weren’t pleased that we had washed all the crockery and glasses. But yes, I’ve enough to keep me busy here all morning.’

They said goodbye to the building manager. Once they were back outside, they walked along the Steenschuur towards the Korevaarstraat where they turned right.

There was no one home at most of the houses they called at. The handful of people who did open their front doors claimed not to have seen or heard anything. Some of them hadn’t even been aware that a murder had taken place so close to their homes.

One resident allowed them to take a look in her back garden, which only confirmed Rijsbergen’s opinion that the murderer could not have escaped that way.

‘Let’s go back to the station,’ he said.

They exchanged very few words as they walked back to the car on the Steenschuur.

Just as Van de Kooij was about to drive away, the door to number 6 flew open.

Frank Koers ran towards the car and knocked urgently on the window, which Van de Kooij immediately opened.

‘I thought I heard your car. I was waiting for you. Can you come back inside? I’ve found something.’

Van de Kooij parked the car again.

Koers waited for them in the doorway, hopping impatiently from foot to foot.

He led them back into the function room where everything had been put back in its place, and went over to the building plan that was still unfurled on the table. As they got closer, Rijsbergen noticed a creased napkin made of thick, almost linen-like paper on the table that hadn’t been there earlier.

‘Here,’ Koers said. ‘They must have missed this when they were going through the bins. It was crumpled up in a ball.’

Rijsbergen leaned forwards to examine what was on the smoothed-out napkin.

‘I was going to throw it away, but then I suddenly saw …’ Koers pointed at a corner of the napkin ‘… that there was something on it. I opened it up and … look!’

They found themselves staring at what looked like a hastily sketched map with the names of various rooms written on it in tiny letters.

It was a map of the Masonic Hall.

Chapter 9

The long walk had made Peter hungry. He decided to have lunch in the university restaurant in the Lipsius Building on the Cleveringaplaats.

He had just one lecture on his schedule that afternoon, ‘An Introduction to the History of the Golden Age’. It was actually more of a seminar than a lecture, one of a series of twelve sessions in which Peter delivered a mini-lecture introducing the theme, and then, after a short break, gave the floor to two students who took over the session and explored the material in a practical way. They were free to do this however they chose: a debate with controversial propositions, a game, or perhaps a discussion of a current event related to the contents of the lecture.

Many of his students dreaded having to coordinate the second half of the session. Some of them were so wracked by nerves that they blushed from the neck up. But afterwards, they always admitted that it hadn’t been as difficult as they’d thought it would be.

The Archaeology department had recently moved to the Bio Science Park, a nondescript and rather dull site on the outskirts of town. The faculty shared the park with several businesses linked to the university, including many pharmaceutical companies.

Peter had the good fortune to be associated with two faculties, one of them being Humanities, which included the History department. This had allowed him to take an office in the building that housed the History department, although he made sure that he showed his face in the Archaeology department a couple of times a week.

To describe the view from his new office window as less attractive than the one he had previously enjoyed would have been something of an understatement. The window faced a solid brick wall that belonged to the Botanical Gardens. But the many advantages of working in the centre of town – close to the university library and the Lipsius restaurant, and near to where Fay, Judith and Mark worked – made up for the uninspiring view.

Peter had met Judith Cherev more than twenty years ago when he had supervised her PhD thesis on Judaism in Leiden. She had been a student in her early twenties, and he had been a lecturer nearing forty. In the years since, they had developed a close friendship. These days, Judith worked at the University of Leiden’s Religious Studies department as a lecturer in Judaism, and she freelanced as a researcher for the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam.

Her partner Mark Labuschagne was a professor in New Testament Studies who specialised in early Christianity, but he was equally at home in the study of ancient religions. He read Greek, Latin and Aramaic with the same ease that most mere mortals read English. His own history included multiple stays in a secure ward in Endegeest psychiatric hospital in Oegstgeest. As was often the case with brilliant minds, the line between his genius and his madness was thin.

Peter, who for an atheist had an unusually keen interest in Christianity and more than a passing knowledge of the Bible, enjoyed talking to Mark about anything that was related to the Christian faith.

Judith and Mark lived in a little house in the Groot Sionshof, one of the dozens of courtyards in Leiden, green oases of tranquillity in the urban desert of stone and concrete.

Peter’s new office was the same size as his old one, which meant he had been able to set it up in exactly the same way. The bookcases, his desk, the long sofa and the coffee table all stood in their usual places, and the same three pictures that he had always had in his office hung on the walls here too: Pope John Paul II in his popemobile; Gustave Wappers’ painting of Burgomaster Van der Werff suggesting to the starving citizens during the Spanish Siege of Leiden that they kill him and eat him rather than surrender; and a reproduction of The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci.

Peter greeted a few students as they passed by. He didn’t actually know any of them, but since they appeared to recognise him, he returned their hellos.

He ate lunch in the Lipsius restaurant – soup with a bread roll and a salad – reading the university’s weekly newspaper, the Mare, as he ate.

He had been at the university for so long now that he knew many of the people featured in its pages.

Peter glanced at his watch and realised with alarm that it was almost one o’clock. His lecture was officially supposed to start in just a minute or two. Luckily, he could fall back on the tradition of the ‘academic quarter’, which meant that a lecture always began fifteen minutes after the hour, but even so, he still needed to hurry.

He cleared his tray away and went to the History department next door to the Lipsius Building to drop by his office and pick up everything he needed for the lecture.

When he checked his phone, he saw that he had missed a call. The caller had left a voicemail.

He listened to the message as he jogged back to the Lipsius Building, where the lecture rooms were located on the first floor.

‘Hello, Meneer de Haan.’ Peter was surprised to hear the voice of the police detective he’d met at the Masonic Hall the night before. ‘This is Detective Chief Inspector Rijsbergen. We’d like to come by this afternoon to speak to you and your partner.’

Rijsbergen left his telephone number and asked Peter to call him as soon as possible. Peter shoved his phone into his pocket. He didn’t have time to call him back now.

The corridor was deserted when he arrived. He grumbled under his breath, thinking that the students would all have left as soon as they had realised he wasn’t there. But when he looked through the window next to the door, he saw that they were all patiently waiting inside the lecture theatre. He muttered a brief apology, and not wanting to lose any more time, jumped straight into his lecture, shrugging off his jacket, taking his things out of his bag and turning on the computer as he talked.

Peter spoke from memory, broadly outlining the early history of the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, while the students industriously typed his words on their keyboards. Or at least, that was what he hoped they were doing. Almost all of them took notes on their laptops, and usually, all he could see were the backs of their screens, row upon row of them like black gravestones.

They could be chatting on Facebook or watching their favourite series on Netflix for all I know.

He briefly went over the history of the Dutch West India Company or WIC, which was organised similarly to the VOC. He explained that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the WIC had a state-sanctioned monopoly on trade and shipping in West Africa south of the Tropic of Cancer, and in the Americas, and on all the islands between Newfoundland and the Strait of Magellan.

After the coffee break, two students took over the session. One of them was Sven, the student who had been at the Freemasons’ open evening.

He was wearing the same T-shirt he’d worn the night before. Peter again noticed that he repeatedly pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with the index finger of his right hand. Peter couldn’t tell whether this was out of necessity or if it was just a tic he had developed.

The young man next to him had shoulder-length hair, and he was wearing a faded black T-shirt with the name of a band on it that Peter had never heard of.

‘Today, Stefan and I have decided not to focus on the Dutch West India Company’s despicable slave trade, which was the source of the money that built all the grand canal houses in Amsterdam,’ Sven said, pulling no punches as he started his presentation. ‘We all know that story well enough already.’

‘In our presentation,’ Stefan continued, taking over from Sven, ‘we want to focus on how the colonists’ arrival in both North and South America had disastrous consequences for the native people there. The T-shirt that Sven is wearing today refers to the Native Nations’ protests on the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the Bahamas in 1492. They oppose the celebration of this event because, in the five hundred years since his arrival, the indigenous population has been decimated. That’s why they chose “We will not dance on the graves of our fathers” as their motto.’

‘But ultimately, the blame lies with all colonists,’ Sven said. ‘The French, the English, the Dutch and the WIC, the Irish … everyone who went to the Americas to steal the land and dispossess the indigenous populations – with no other purpose than to line their own pockets. That’s why Stefan and I have joined a protest group dedicated to drawing attention to the history of the North American Indians during the four hundredth Anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival in America.’

‘In our opinion,’ Stefan continued, ‘the American Indians were the victims of an act of genocide. It was a deliberate attempt to eradicate what was considered to be an inferior race. This genocide, which was largely successful, was given a biblical justification. America was seen as the new promised land.’

There was murmuring and shuffling at the word ‘genocide’.

‘Obviously, we’d like to hear your opinions on this,’ Sven went on, ‘but I already know that some of you will say: “But they didn’t set up concentration camps. They didn’t have a conference where they decided on a Final Solution.” However, we cannot discuss the settlers without also addressing the devastating effect they had on the Native American population, America’s original inhabitants. The history books describe these colonists as intrepid pioneers, bravely seeking a place where they would be free to follow their faith. But the liberty they were seeking – the liberty to practise their own religion, to have self-determination free from state interference, to no longer fear for their lives, liberty that they eventually found there – came at the cost of the lives and liberties of hundreds of thousands, even millions of other people. American history books cultivate the myth of the empty frontier, the promised land, as I just said, that had only been waiting for the God-fearing Pilgrims to flee persecution in Europe and come and exploit it.’

Stefan took over.

‘As Sven just mentioned, the idea of it being empty was a myth. In fact, it had been inhabited for thousands of years. The indigenous Americans hadn’t built cities or cultivated vast swathes of land. They didn’t even have the concept of land ownership as we know it. But there were territories that tribes believed they had a right to, and there were wars over them – there’s no need to portray them as noble savages – but they didn’t build fences around them. They hunted, but only killed what they needed for their own immediate use. They lived in harmony with nature. They didn’t exhaust her resources. In his famous speech in response to President Franklin Pierce’s call for the purchase of tribal lands, Chief Seattle, the chief of the Sioux Indians, said …’

He looked down at his notes. ‘“How can you buy or sell the sky – the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. Yet we do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water. How can you buy them from us? Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.”’

Stefan looked back up at the room.

‘And that’s why—’ he said, but he didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence.

‘Sorry, but I’m going to have to stop you there for a moment,’ Peter said. ‘We can discuss the serious subject of genocide shortly, but let me just say this. It’s very noble, that Chief Seattle speech, but as a historian, I want to make sure you’re aware of something. Or were you already planning to tell us that it’s highly unlikely that Chief Seattle ever said those words?’

‘No, uh … what do you mean?’ Stefan asked, slumping his shoulders.

‘Listen, Stefan,’ said Peter, getting up. ‘I looked into this once when I was supervising a student’s dissertation. It’s like this, and I’ll try to make it brief. Chief Seattle actually did make a speech in 1854, but it’s doubtful whether anyone wrote it down at the time. A journalist who was there, Dr Henry A. Smith, wrote a report about it in his newspaper in 1887, almost thirty-three years later. Yes, that’s thirty-three years later. In principle, nobody really doubts that a speech was made, but it would have been made in the language of Seattle’s tribe, Salish, and that was not a language that Smith was familiar with.’

Out of the corner of his eye, Peter saw that some of the students were looking at him with obvious admiration.

‘You can carry on shortly. But I wanted to interrupt you because this is a valuable lesson for you as historians. Smith didn’t understand Seattle’s language, so someone else must have told him about the contents of the speech. He didn’t publish anything until thirty-three years after the event. Then, in the 1960s, the poet William Arrowsmith brought out another version of the speech based on the one published by Smith. He copied large parts of it, but he added some of his own ideas. Another version emerged in the 1980s, which is the version you’ve just quoted from, the one that you’ll see most often on the internet and on those beautiful posters. That version bears little resemblance to the words originally spoken by Chief Seattle. It was written by Ted Perry, a teacher in Texas, and it was originally intended to be used in a film about ecology. The text he wrote struck a chord with the growing number of people interested in the environment, people who believed that the Indians were the original protectors of Mother Earth. It was a romantic image that easily caught on with environmentalists. So I have no problem with you quoting Chief Seattle. It’s an inspiring speech. Even I think it’s an inspiring speech. But I would advise you to bear in mind that you should take those words with a grain of salt and ask yourself how likely it is that they were spoken by an Indian chief.’