Michael Niemann

The Valentin Vermeulen Stories

The Rob Fortgang Chronicles

Those books about me tell you all about my job at the United Nations, but nothing about how I got there. I figured it’s about time I tell you a little bit about myself.

How does a kid who grew up on a farm in western Belgium end up being a globetrotting investigator for the United Nations?

First,  let’s get the formalities out of the way. My name is Valentin Vermeulen. I’m six feet tall, I started out with blond hair, but it’s getting grayer these days.  My face is on the large side. Rugged would be a kind description, drawn usually captures my expression better, especially when I’m in the field. I carry a European Union/Belgian passport.

I was born a few years before The Clash started performing just across the North Sea. I used to fantasize about London. I’d be walking on the dike, staring across the steel gray water, and imagined being in a big city, seeing Joe Strummer and his band on stage.

My village wasn’t on any map. Just a bunch of small farms, raising milk cows and the crops necessary to feed them. Once a day, the coop truck stopped to pick up the 100 gallons of milk our cows produced. Thinking back, I’m still amazed that my dad stuck it out as long as he did. By the late 1970s, the European Community was awash in milk and small producers like my father were totally unprofitable. The government wanted to consolidate farms and eventually, he threw in the towel. I only learned much later how hard he’d struggled. He never quite survived the loss of the farm

We moved to Antwerp in 1983. Talk about culture shock. The biggest city in Belgium, a huge port, and me, the kid from the boondocks, right in the middle. The beginning was tough. But the hick from the sticks could stand on his own and learned the ropes. After high school I was drafted and served in the Belgian military. The weird logic of bureaucracy assigned me to military intelligence. Good thing, too, instead of crawling through the dirt, I got to sit inside and analyze intelligence reports. The Cold War was still a thing then and we were paranoid enough to see Soviet spies everywhere. As a draftee I didn’t do any spying in mufti, but I did get to take a course on clandestine investigations, something that paid off later. It wasn’t really my thing, though. Gorbachov was in power and I could see that the Cold War was about to end. So I quit as soon as the conscription time ended.

I enrolled at the law faculty of the University of Saint Ignatius of Antwerp. Justice had always been such an abstract idea and seemed to have little to do with the law. Observing my dad being pushed off the farm taught me that. It was all legal and it was unjust. How could that be? At the university, I learned that law isn’t some abstract concept, but something made and remade every day. Once I figured that out, I found my calling. I specialized in financial crimes.

That first year, I also found my first real love, Marieke, who was studying social work. We married right away and ten months later, our daughter Gaby was born. In hindsight, it was all too fast, we should’ve been more careful. But at the time we couldn’t wait to start our family.

I got good marks and the Crown Prosecutor’s office in Antwerp hired me right after I got my law degree. I was the financial guy in the organized crime unit. The cases kept on coming, each one as complex as the global connections that coalesced in our port city. I spent eighty to ninety hours a week at work. Once on a case, I couldn’t let it go. Worse than a dog with a bone. There were nights when I slept on the sofa in the coffee room because I stayed so long, it wasn’t worth going home.

My family noticed. I didn’t. When Marieke filed for divorce, I had a dim understanding that all wasn’t well, but no clue how bad things were. We fought. A lot. Gaby couldn’t take it and ran away. The police didn’t do much. I searched for her and found her in some hell hole, strung out on heroin. I got her clean again, but she refused to speak to me for a long time. The short of it was, I had to get out of Antwerp, away from it all. And that’s how I ended up at the United Nations. You’ll learn more about it in Percentages of Guilt, due out in 2020. I’m happy that Gaby and I are reconciled and I’m on speaking terms with my ex.

The best thing that’s happened since was my meeting Tessa Bishonga, a Zambian journalist, in El Fasher, Sudan. Even though out initial interactions were rather bristly, we found ourselves on the same side all the time and we fell in love. The rest you can read in the novels.