10By six o’clock the following morning—Wednesday—I was standing with Erika in front of a waterfront dive. Garbage overflowed from the can at the sidewalk’s edge. I smelled vegetable peelings, their rotting odor blending with the briny scent of the Scheldt River.
Less than a kilometer to the north, Antwerp’s gigantic port operated day and night. But at the edge of downtown on the next-to-the-last day of the year, people were still sleeping. All I heard was the lap of water in the canal and the murmur of a pigeon nested nearby.
Erika rapped twice on the glass of the entry door. The sound echoed off the cobblestones; then both sound and echo disappeared into the early-morning mist.
Someone was moving in the murky darkness on the other side of the door. A white-clad torso topped by a stubbl
