but deal them out themselves. Arms crossed, shouting defiantly at the world: come on, I dare you.
Stefaan Vandersanden had everything it took to make it big, although he may have let himself be bossed around too much in his early youth. He was too quick to defer to rules and orders. If help was needed with the clean-up at school, he didn’t slip through the swinging doors and out onto the playground like everyone else but stood there waiting for instructions, often the only one to do so. A classmate who hadn’t finished his homework on time would get the answers from Stefaan, free for the asking. If some roughneck was fixing for a fight, Stefaan would just so happen to find himself nearby. It didn’t really help that he was skinny and clever, the usual combination for children who tend to get knocked around. When he was eighteen his father died, and he knew he had two choices: slide into grief or fight to survive. The clever, timid, country boy in wooden shoes from a West Flanders farming village became a respected top student at the great University of Leuven. Unlike his father, Stefaan was determined not to let himself be pushed to the edges of life. He sank his teeth in and held on tight.
Stefaan graduated summa cum laude as a doctor of medicine from the University of Leuven and let the professor who served as his dissertation advisor talk him into spending a year at Wharton Business School in Pennsylvania. Those two diplomas together would open any door, the professor said. Stefaan’s preference was to open all the doors himself, the doors to his own company. The day he returned to Flanders he ordered a package of printed business cards. His former sense of inferiority was transformed into one of limitless spunk. He had to start at zero, without a red cent in the bank. He had made some money working in a small print shop during his studies in America, which he had sent home—at least whatever he didn’t need himself to survive on campus. He went without meals and wore corduroy trousers in the summer, just to send money to his widowed mother. It was a twisted kind of pride all too familiar to migrants in a strange land. In the print shop he would reach his ink-black fingers into his pants pocket, groping for dimes to drop into the money box to send poor inner-city children to camp. On the day of his graduation Stefaan left this all behind. Now it was up to him. He was going to start his own business, and he needed every dime to invest in his own laboratory. He returned to Flanders, since that’s where it was going to happen.
It’s amazing how your goal comes right up to meet you as soon as you get it clearly in your sights. Stefaan was always bumping into CEOs, people from the pharmaceutical sector, and investors. And at the least opportunity the twenty-eight-year-old Stefaan would fish one of his gold-edged business cards out of his wallet. He’d corner speculators who liked to play patron and treat them to lavish lunches. No sooner had the aperitif been served than he would make his pitch, without the slightest embarrassment. He knew the rules from the marketing boys at Vlerick Management School, who were beginning to make a name for themselves in Flanders. Their advice was to start out with some serious bullshitting about wines, Napa Valley, and golf courses. Stefaan broke these rules with relish, and with success. He saw no point in the unwritten law that you had to begin by discussing trivialities, when both parties knew perfectly well that the reason they had come here to Comme Chez Soi was to seal some cold-blooded deals. Business partners who didn’t share the same mentality would never become serious investors. The first three meetings at which he plunged right in with enthusiasm and fervour had taken an average of two and a half hours. Each time, he was able to scoop up more money than he had ever thought possible. He didn’t even have to hold a knife to their throats or get involved in any other sordid business.
Stefaan had a plan about the laboratory he was going to launch that was fairly megalomaniacal and rather vague. Dr. Paul Janssen of Janssen Pharmaceuticals had done it before him: immediately after graduating from medical school you start your own company, develop a new medicine, put it on the market, and promote it as widely as possible. Stefaan was well aware of his intellectual capacities. With his expertise he could build up a knowledge monopoly in Flanders and exploit it to his advantage. Many of the big industrial companies didn’t have enough in-house knowledge, or their specialists hadn’t been properly re-trained in years, and as a result there were gaps in their awareness of the latest developments. This was the hole in the market that Stefaan would take advantage of. With every meeting he had, he could feel the man in the suit opposite him growing more and more intrigued, bending forward, and whispering insistently about what they could do for each other—three different, impeccably dressed, pear-shaped men in their fifties with cuff links on their stiffly ironed dress shirts—until Stefaan almost had to shove them off his lap.
The success of the first three meetings led him to approach the fourth with the utmost confidence. Even if it didn’t result in any spectacular commitments, it really couldn’t fail. He hadn’t counted on the fourth investor being a son of a bitch, a man whose best friend was the CEO of a big pharmaceutical firm. The man let him wait more than half an hour. Pure intimidation, Stefaan knew, and he calmly buttered a second piece of bread. After another hour, and five ‘I’m-waiting-for-someones’ later, he settled his bill with the waiter and slunk away. The investor’s friend hadn’t liked the sound of it—an unknown, overly ambitious little doctor, fresh out of Wharton, wanting to set up an independent laboratory.
The next day the pharmaceutical company’s lawyer contacted Stefaan and demanded that he put an end to this lab business immediately, before he had even gotten started. The lawyer threatened to wipe out his entire future by instituting legal proceedings from which he would never recover financially. Within the space of five hours, one investor after another let him know that they were withdrawing their sponsorship. Furious and determined never again to let himself be bullied, Stefaan went to the headquarters of the dictatorial pharmaceutical firm. He was given an interview with the big boss, astonished him with his diplomas and knowledge, and left the building with a top-salary position.
His first years back in Belgium were marked by hard work and assisting his mother every now and then. Melanie wanted to sell the farm and use the proceeds to build a bungalow. After all those years she could no longer bear to look at the high wooden crossbeam from which a rope, along with her husband, had once hung. Stefaan went to the handsome office of the notary on Steen Street in Bruges to attend the public sale of his parents’ house. He was wearing a tight-fitting black jacket that dated back to his father’s funeral. He pushed the notary’s door open, listened to his own footsteps echo in the oak-panelled hallway, and crossed over to a room whose door was ajar. With a boundless lack of interest, and after a full five minutes, the woman who was pounding away on her typewriter finally deigned to look up at him, regarding him with total contempt as if he were something the cat had dragged in. He smiled at her, unable to think of a more suitable response. His jacket creaked as he handed his dossier to Mieke De Kinder. As he recalls she was wearing some kind of dark, severe outfit, but that’s not what Mieke remembers. That bit about the look of contempt may have been true because whenever she concentrates, the corners of her mouth always droop automatically. Without a word having been spoken she knew that this was just another man who took her for the notary’s secretary. And that may have been why she unconsciously looked at him as if she were about to give him a good thrashing.
After their first brief conversation she came to have a different view of him, as Mieke would tell him once they had been properly married. She no longer saw a piece of filth in a tight, ill-fitting jacket but a shrewd, sharp-eyed man, a serious sort, with a nice, jet black crew cut (no unwashed hippie hair for him) and an honest smile. A good-natured, mysterious man enveloped in an air of melancholy that could just as easily pass for general astuteness. The type that doesn’t know his own appeal. It would be exaggerating to say it was love at first sight. Something far more exciting happened to her in the beautiful, oak-panelled, eighteenth-century office of the notary than an ephemeral fluttering of infatuation. It was her husband who presented himself to her on the platter of a banal public sale, although there was a great deal of work to be done on this man. That didn’t deter her in the least. She saw it as a project to throw herself into, with all the drive and precision she possessed. She saw the rough basic structure of a man she could knead into the image and likeness of her ideal mate.
A great deal had to happen before the two got closer together,
