Before every court date, Astrid forms a game plan for her testimony, then thinks about how Wim might react to each move she makes. But she knows that he is probably sitting in his cell, playing a similar game of conjectural chess, trying to anticipate how she will react to his stratagems. “I can’t see my brother in the courtroom, but I can hear him,” she told me. “He’s maybe two or three metres away from me. I can hear his laugh. I can predict everything he is going to do.” Astrid has not spoken with Wim outside the courtroom in more than three years. I asked her if she felt as though she were still communicating with him. “I am,” she said.

After Salman Rushdie published “The Satanic Verses,” in 1988, the Ayatollah Khomeini, of Iran, declared the book blasphemous and issued a fatwa urging Muslims to murder him. Rushdie spent the next decade in hiding, under round-the-clock police protection, a life that he later described as “a fretful, scuttling existence.” In 1998, the Iranian government announced that it was no longer enforcing the fatwa, and the danger to Rushdie subsided. The threat to Astrid Holleeder is much more limited—only one person wants her dead—and I wondered about the circumstances in which she might be able to emerge from hiding. If Wim’s trial ends in a conviction, he will likely be imprisoned for the rest of his life. But, when I asked her if she would be safe at that point, she said, “No. There’s no happy ending. I know him very well. As long as he has the slightest hope of freedom, we have a chance to live. But as soon as he hears the life sentence it will be only revenge.” In his cell, there will be nothing to focus on but retaliation. “I will pay for what I’ve done,” she concluded. “Even if he kills my kid or kills Sonja, because he can’t get to me.” Sonja agrees: “Even if he’s convicted, he will not let us be.”

Astrid speaks about this alarming prospect in her customary straightforward manner, with no trace of indignation. “If I were in his shoes, being betrayed like that, I would do the same,” she said. “I would kill him.”

While the mega-trial grinds on, Astrid is furthering her publishing career. In October, 2017, she released a second book, “Diary of a Witness,” an account of her time in hiding. “Judas” will be published in English later this summer, and she is working on a third book, the subject of which she will not disclose. In court, Wim has suggested that Astrid was always obsessed with money and fame, and that she is shamelessly exploiting her family’s story. “Now she has plenty of money,” he said. “She will notice that it does not make people happy.” Astrid has responded, angrily, that she made a very comfortable living as an attorney. But she freely acknowledges that she hopes to sell as many books as possible, because the profits might provide a means of escape. She mentioned to me several times that she would like to move her extended family out of the Netherlands, perhaps to America.

Another potential outcome, which the Holleeder sisters are trying not to dwell on, is an acquittal. Thus far, the mega-trial has unfolded very much on Wim’s terms. Weeks of testimony have been devoted to analysis of the recorded conversations, and to scrutiny of his sisters, from Sonja’s finances to Astrid’s sex life. When Janssen alleged that Astrid had been romantically linked to a prominent drug trafficker, she denied it with a tart riposte: “Have you seen me fucking him?” Janssen conceded, primly, that he had not. Later, Astrid told me, “These lawyers want to have a discussion with me, but they aren’t from the street, so I fuck with them. I can talk dirty all day. The judges are confused, because they know me as a lawyer.”

Astrid might cherish the clarity and order of the law, but the trial feels like a circus. Astrid and Sonja are under oath, because they are witnesses, but Wim, as a defendant, is not, and he freely makes misleading statements and throws out red herrings. Even with three judges, the court seems incapable of constraining the hullabaloo. “You are a fabulist, a liar, and a parasite!” Wim barked at Astrid a few weeks ago.

“You destroyed my life!” Astrid shouted back. “I should have shot you through the head!”

Family tension was on abundant display at the trial, but I was surprised to hear relatively few details about the murders of which Wim stood accused. When I asked Astrid about this imbalance, she explained that, in a Dutch criminal case, due process can be taken to extremes: “They don’t want to have a European court reverse them and say that they didn’t give him every opportunity to defend himself. So they give him a lot of space.” A verdict is unlikely before next year, and Astrid noted to me that one Dutch criminal trial lasted a decade. For now, at least, Wim’s mega-trial has been hijacked by psychodrama. When I asked Astrid about her outburst regarding shooting Wim in the head, she said that he had been provoking her with the tone of his voice, in a manner that others in the courtroom couldn’t recognize. (One of the judges subsequently admonished both siblings for their theatrics.)

During the lunch at Sonja’s house, Astrid’s niece, Frances, had mused, “It would have been nice to prosecute him in the U.S.”

“It would have been nice to prosecute him in Iran,” Astrid replied.

At times, Astrid seemed to be manipulating the proceedings with an aplomb to match her brother’s. She made it clear to me—and to Wim, in court—that she has not supplied prosecutors with all her recordings. She’d made a habit of taping not just Wim but anyone who might later be inclined to lie about her. “The problem with criminals is that they change their stories,” she told me. “They’re like whores. They’ll spread their legs for whoever pays.” In her testimony, she has suggested that, if other witnesses lie, she may unveil further recordings, in order to impeach their testimony. “Wim knows I know about other murders,” she said. “This is my insurance. If anything happens to my children or my grandchildren, the tapes will come out.” Once, in court, when she felt that the judges were not giving her adequate time to speak, she threatened, “If you do not let me finish, I’ll put everything I cannot tell you here on YouTube, and then we will have a public resource that everyone can take notice of.”

Sander Janssen suggested that part of the reason that the trial is dragging on is the weakness of the prosecution’s case. “If you have a murder weapon and someone’s DNA on it, you don’t need all this testimony,” he noted. Astrid and Sonja, he continued, were basically saying, “We know he did this, because we’ve lived with him all his life.” But, Janssen said, it wasn’t clear why anyone should trust them: “Willem says we should regard them not as normal female citizens but as fellow-criminals, which they have been, from Day One.” I asked him what would possibly motivate the sisters to frame their brother for murder at such high personal cost. “That will be one of the most important questions for the court to answer,” Janssen replied, adding, vaguely, “We are still investigating.”