Bonita Avenue by Peter Buwalda Read Free Book Online

leading to Brussels’ Grote Markt. He walked to the edge of the sloping sidewalk and looked around. There she was, she had turned right onto the Putterij; quickening his pace, he closed the dark gap of twenty meters, and before he knew what he was doing he placed his hand on the heavy fabric of her coat. She stood still and turned around. She looked surprised, startled. Her meticulously made-up skin covered her jaws and cheekbones like wrinkled paper.
    “Tineke,” he mumbled, “I …”
    “I beg your pardon?” she asked kindly.
    “Tineke,” he said, more forcefully this time, “I don’t know if this is the best …”
    This time she really looked at him, he could see she focused. She stuck out a hand that briefly touched his arm, as though that extra tactile assistance might help. “Weren’t you sitting across from me just now in the tr—?” Her face changed again, she raised her droopy eyelids as far up as possible, her mouth became an astonished, scarlet “O.”
    “Aaron!” she cried, “of course! Aaron Bever. But my boy, what …” She let go of the handgrip on her suitcase, it toppled over. She took a step toward him, grasped his shoulders, and gave him two kisses. Over her fragile shoulders he saw a car pull up to the curb, a sporty dark-blue BMW that flashed its headlights twice. She turned and waved. When she looked back at him, she said: “We’re in a hurry. I have to be going. But Aaron, I absolutely didn’t recognize you. You’ve … changed. Enschede was so long ago …” She clutched his lower arm, looked straight at him. “Oh dear …” she said, “but how are
you
 … things turned out so badly …”
    He was too flabbergasted to reply. Any moment the door of the BMW could swing open and Sigerius would come walking their way. He gasped for breath, felt dizzy. Since he could think of nothing else to say, he stammered: “Say, Tineke, how’s Siem? Is that him?” He gestured feebly at the impatient car.
    She let go, just as abruptly as she had grasped him. She took a step back, her face slammed shut like a lead door.
    “
What?
” she spat. “You must be joking.”
    “No,” he said. “Why?” He felt his eyes go watery.
    “You rotten kid,” she said. “What do you want from me? What are you doing here? Are you stalking me?”
    The car door opened. A small man of about forty-five got out, his wavy black hair and trimmed beard glistening under the street lights. They looked at each other. The man, who in an unnerving,aggressive way was not Sigerius, smiled politely. Another car swerved around them, honking, and behind the BMW a minibus switched on its flashers.
    Tineke reached for the handle of the passenger door.
    “You don’t know?” she said. “You really don’t know, do you?” She laughed awkwardly, her face a scrawny grimace of disbelief. “Siem is dead.” She shouted over the traffic. “He’s been dead for eight years. We buried him in early 2001. Or are you just trying to upset me?”
    “No,” he said.
    Then she got in.

2
    According to his résumé, Sigerius has a pretty good understanding of coincidence. In his Berkeley days, and later in Boston, he taught practical courses in probability theory and stochastic optimization to first-year math and physics students. He was paid to impart the sensation of mathematical order amid chaos to classrooms full of emotionally stunted number nerds. These were chess players, ZX-spectrum scholars, Rubik’s wizards, not one of whom claimed a place on a university athletic team, no basketball, no baseball; they had come to Berkeley to serve quantum physics, to unleash the digital revolution. Before he bombarded the boys and that single stray girl with discrete stochasts, probability space, and Bayes’s theorem, he challenged them to relate the most spectacular piece of coincidence they’d ever experienced. Let’s have it, your most outrageous twist of fate, your spookiest fluke. As a teaser he made a probability