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Inhaltsangabe
A brutal killer, inspired by the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux, leaves each of his victims posed as if in a painting. Meanwhile cult film director Johnny Vos is making a low-budget biopic about the same artist. He hires women from Antwerp's red light district and from an internet voyeur house as extras in order to recreate the poses of Delvaux's famous sleepwalking nudes. When two prostitutes end up murdered, English film critic Frank Warner, in town to interview Vos, turns investigative journalist and becomes personally involved when his own girlfriend goes missing. In the search for the killer, everyone is implicated.
Simultaneously macabre and erotic, Antwerp will not release you until its final page has turned.
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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor
Nicholas Royle was born in Manchester in 1963. He is the author of five novels, including Antwerp. An assiduous champion of the short story, he has written more than 100 tales, which have appeared in a variety of anthologies and magazines. His latest collection is Mortality, shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. He has edited twelve anthologies, including A Book of Two Halves and The Time Out Book of New York Short Stories. He lives in Manchester with his wife and two children, where he teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.
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Antwerp by Nicholas Royle
Leadtext: 1 . Dark EntriesThe day Johnny Vos first laid hands on a woman's body started out like any other.
Johnny took the PATH train from Hoboken, New Jersey into New York City. He listened to the song of the grinding rails and rushing walls, his mind's eye full of the last thing he saw before heading underground - the castellated Manhattan skyline, like Bruegel's vision of the Tower of Babel. He travelled on an empty stomach, as always. On arrival he would get coffee and doughnuts from a street vendor.
The two places - Hoboken and Manhattan - were only fifteen minutes apart by train, yet divided by the Hudson River and a state line. So near yet so far, was pretty much how Hoboken residents tended to think of New York. Some kids growing up in the New Jersey town were frustrated by Manhattan's tantalising proximity: they became resentful. For Johnny Vos it worked just fine. It meant he could lead a double life. One thing in one place, another in the other. So in Hoboken he kept himself to himself, was no trouble to his folks, head forever buried in some art book, but then he would skip school and take the train, sex-tourist with fake ID, tall kid with five o'clock shadow. He'd carry the price of a few beers and haunt the strip joints around Times Square and 42nd Street, where he would sit in the dark and watch from under the curled rim of a Yankees baseball cap. He preferred the Mets, but actually wasn't that bothered, and a Yankees cap meant you didn't stand out.
He was rarely challenged and on the few occasions when his fake ID had to be produced it was barely glanced at. Around Times Square and 42nd Street no one really cared. This was 1980. People gave a shit a lot less than they do today. Especially around Times Square and 42nd Street. Johnny Vos was seventeen.
He came out of the station on 34th Street and cut across to 5th Avenue. There was a used bookstore at Fourth and 12th where the proprietor was happy to let people sit and read stuff. He had a good selection of art books and Johnny could pass a whole morning there. He regarded it as a form of education lacking at high school, where art class began and ended with Norman Rockwell. He gazed in wonder at Bosch's hallucinatory depictions of hell - a pretty good guess, he figured. His eyes were drawn to Grünewald, Friedrich, Ensor. He could tell the difference between the three Bruegels - Peter the Elder, Peter the Younger and Jan - he knew which one was cool and which two were not. The sense of history made him feel he belonged - somewhere, if not here.
He didn't pretend to be an expert, but he knew what he liked. He liked the old stuff. He was just looking at the pictures.
He checked out Rubens. The guy had seen some action. Johnny wondered if he'd used a different model each time. The thought was enough to make him look up from the book and check his watch. It was after 12.30pm. He always tried to leave it till at least one o'clock. It made him feel less seedy.
Without particularly hurrying, he covered twenty blocks in a half-hour. Ducking his head, he entered the Blue Zone at Broadway and 42nd. Waited while his eyes grew accustomed to the gloomy interior and his chest tightened in reaction to the smoke. Took a seat at the back. A waitress came by to take his order. On the wobbly stage, a girl with flabby thighs worked out a routine with leather chaps and a cowboy hat. It was tired stuff but it worked. Kind of.
Johnny got another beer, slipped lower in his seat. He figured three beers, maybe four, would be enough, but after two he felt no braver than when he'd boarded the PATH train. In his pocket was a matchbook with a handwritten address on the inside flap. He remembered how he'd felt when the girl, another girl in another bar, had written down the address the week before. He felt the same excitement now, mixed with a sharp anxiety. Watching the dancer on stage, he tried to convince himself this was enough, but he knew it was not. The writing down of the address had taken things a stage further. Where he was right now was not a place he could stay.
He left the bar and walked two blocks on unsteady legs until he reached a row of tenement houses. He was done rationalising and justifying. Too shy to work anything out with those girls at high school who might not have run away screaming, Johnny had got left behind. He missed the experiences his contemporaries took for granted, but soon was working on the basis that his own life was more adventurous, his world more real. He lived his life on the streets. This afternoon would be a rite of passage. No shit. But the nearer he got to the address on the matchbook, the more he wished he were dating Esther Balinski or Rachel Leibowitz, even with the compromise either would entail. He came to a halt outside the last house and examined a series of buzzers. He saw the one he wanted and leaned on it. Nothing happened. Johnny didn't even draw a breath.
Suddenly the door was no longer closed and a man had appeared. The man, only a few years older than Johnny, glanced at him and then was gone. Johnny caught the door and stepped into the hallway. The door snicked shut behind him. There was a sour smell. Something somewhere had gone off. A bare bulb failed to come on when Johnny pressed a switch. His breathing was shallow and wheezy. He thought about quitting but sensed that he'd never get even this far again. The stairs rose steeply. The effort and stress aggravated Johnny's asthma, but he couldn't stop now. On the first landing he scanned the doors to three apartments. Number six was ajar and Johnny could hear noise from within.
He checked the matchbook one last time and pushed open the door.
Once inside he could no longer hear the noise he'd been able to hear out on the landing. He could hear something else instead. A regular, muffled thump-thump, like a heartbeat amplified for effect on a soundtrack. It was a familiar sound, but he was too wired to work out what it was. Every object he saw, each sound he heard, it was as if he was sensing them for the first time.
He was in a narrow red-carpeted hallway. It was dark. Doors opened off it to the left and at the end. Coats were hung up on a series of hooks - a leather biker's jacket, threadbare woollen overcoat, denim bum-freezer with sheepskin lining. A cosy, warm smell came off them. Somebody lived here. A cheap Frieda Kahlo print, the artist's heart exposed, hung by the door on the left, which led to a tiny shower room with toilet. The shower head was dripping, but that was not the noise Johnny had heard on entering the apartment. He could still hear it and it was coming from the room at the end. He advanced slowly, aware of the wheezing coming from his chest. The wall beneath his fingertips was warm and greasy. When he reached the end of the hallway he stopped.
He knew what the noise was.
As he turned the corner into the room at the end, the first thing he saw confirmed it. A record spinning on a turntable, needle stuck in the run-out groove. He saw it by the light of a lamp with a beaded shade standing on a bookcase. The diffuse lamplight also fell softly on to the body of a woman in her mid to late twenties lying on the unmade bed in the middle of the room. She was naked and appeared fully relaxed, as if deeply asleep. Johnny held his breath and watched her, waiting for her to move as she sensed his presence. He didn't want to frighten her, but neither did he want to leave. A lump had formed in his throat. The tableau laid out before his eyes was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He'd seen this girl, Amber, before, of course, but partially dressed and in different surroundings. Here, in her own place, completely natural and totally naked, she was exquisite. She was lit like a nude in a painting, but not a Rubens or one of his contemporaries. The setting precluded any likeness to the Old Masters and the light was different. It was cooler, more modern, and the main difference was that painted nudes never aroused more than his aesthetic approval. The sight of Amber lying naked on her own bed aroused him in another way as well.
Taking deeper breaths, Johnny moved closer to the bed until he was standing right by it. He saw what he hadn't seen before: that Amber's right arm wore a tourniquet around the biceps. The tourniquet was a belt and Johnny felt a twinge of sadness that it wasn't even leather. A syringe lay on the floor on the far side of the bed where it had been dropped. He looked more closely at Amber's face. There were purple shadows under her eyes. So she looked a little tired - so what? It wasn't an easy life. His hand came to rest on her forearm. He felt a tingle of electricity. Her arm retained a trace of warmth.
He looked at her body, gazing in rapt wonderment at her breasts, which rested on her ribcage but had not altogether lost their shape. The smooth skin around the nipples was the same golden colour as her hair, even if that colour was artificial, as evidenced by the soft dark furze nestling below her flat tummy. Her right leg was drawn up, the knee leaning over her left leg.
He held her wrist, but there was no pulse. He picked up an empty powder compact from the floor and held the mirror over her mouth, but there was no final whisper of breath to cloud the glass.
The heartbeat thump of the needle in the run-out groove seemed to grow louder. He walked around the bed and stared at the record, trying to read the label as it revolved. He couldn't, so he lifted the arm and the record slowed to a stop. It was a single: 'Dark Entries' by Bauhaus. Johnny moved the arm back over the record and placed the needle at the beginning. Dust, hiss. Then the track began with a howl of feedback and a fusillade of guitars. Bass and drums thundering like a stampede of wild horses. A strange, hypnotic male voice sang of a hovel, a bed, pain, neon lights, avenues of sin. Johnny sat at the bedside and held the dead woman's cooling hand. The urgency of the rhythm, intensity of the vocals. Something on the floor, half under the bed, caught his eye. It was the record sleeve. The front bore the name of the single and the band and an image: a female figure in a feathered hat, a human skeleton. Johnny turned the sleeve over. The reverse side featured a small, indistinct photograph of the band and a credit line for the picture: 'Venus Asleep by Paul Delvaux.'
Johnny went back round the other side of the bed and sat down, holding the dead woman's hand as the needle once more went thump-thump in the run-out groove and the sky outside the tiny window turned deep red. He thought briefly about the man he had seen leaving the building. He tried to recall his face.
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