“About what?” I ask.
“I may have told them a little bit about our conversation,” he stammers. “About what you said.”
“It wasn’t much of a surprise,” W says. “It was obvious something has been wrong since you came back. And I knew that scar wasn’t from a bicycle accident. It doesn’t look like something you’d get from a fall.”
“My story was I got hit by a tree branch.”
“But you got beaten up by skinheads,” Henk tells me. “The same ones the girl threw the book at the day before.”
“I think he knows what happened to him,” Broodje says.
“Crazy that you saw the same guys,” Henk says.
“More like bad luck,” Broodje says.
I don’t say anything
“We think you have that post-traumatic thing,” Henk says. “That’s why you’ve been so depressed.”
“So you’ve scrapped the celibacy theory?”
“Well, yeah,” Henk says. “Because you’re getting laid now and you’re still depressed.”
“You think it’s because of this,” I say, tapping the scar. “Not because of the girl?” I look at W. “You don’t think maybe Lien was right?”
The three of them try not to laugh. “What’s so funny?” I ask, feeling irritated and defensive all of a sudden.
“This girl didn’t break your heart,” W says. “She just broke your streak.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.
“Willy, come on,” Broodje says, waving his arms to calm us all down. “I know you. I know how you are with girls. You fall in love and then it disappears like snow in the sun. If you’d had another few weeks with this girl you’d get tired of her, just like you do all the others. But you didn’t. It was almost like she dumped you. So you’re pining.”
You’re comparing love to a stain? Lulu had asked. She’d been skeptical at first.
Something that never comes off, no matter how much you might want it to. Yes, stain had seemed about right.
“Okay,” W says, clicking his pen. “Let’s start at the beginning, with as much detail as you can muster.”
“The beginning of what?”
“Your story.”
“Why?”
W starts explain about the Principle of Connectivity and how police use that to track down criminals, via who they associate with. He is always talking about theories like this. He believes that all of life boils down to mathematics, that there’s a numeric principal or algorithm to describe every event, even the random ones (chaos theory!). It takes me a while to understand that he means to use the Principle of Connectivity to solve the mystery of Lulu.
“Again, why? The mystery’s solved,” I snap. “I’m pining over the girl who got away, because she got away.” I’m not sure if I’m irritated because I think this is true or because I think it’s not.
W rolls his eyes, as if this is beside the point. “But you want to find her, don’t you?”
By that night, W has spreadsheets and graphs and on the mantel, below the fading Picasso poster, an empty poster board. “Principle of Connectivity. Basically, we track down the people we can find and see what connections they have back to your mystery girl,” W says. “Our best bet is to start with Céline. Lulu may have gone back for the suitcase.” He writes Céline’s name and draws a circle around it.
The thought has crossed my mind a number of times, and each time, I’ve been tempted to contact Céline. But then I think back to that night, the raw, wounded look on her face. In any case, it doesn’t matter. Either the suitcase is at the club, and Lulu hasn’t gone back for it, or it’s not there and she did somehow retrieve it and she found my notes inside and chose not to respond. Knowing does nothing to change the situation.
“Céline is off the table,” I say.
“But she’s the strongest connection,” W protests.