Tumbleweed

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  "So?"

  "Maybe. But I don't think so. Perhaps you are right. He is in a terrible state. Every time we ask him a question he wipes his face with that large handkerchief and he gets tears in his eyes and finally he cries. He hasn't got an alibi. But he threw that stiletto of yours into the commissaris' cigar box. That was really silly, wasn't it?"

  "Yes," Grijpstra said, "that was silly. But we would have found out about his darts anyway. He knew we would, so perhaps it was very clever to play along with us."

  "A lover and a genius," de Gier said.

  "He deals in nuts, remember? He set himself up in business after he had been in jail twice. He runs his own business so well that he owns a nice house in a good area and a brand-new red Rover. A Rover is a pretty posh car. I have spoken to two of his clients pretending I wanted some information about his commercial reliability. They spoke very highly of him. He does all his own selling and buying and he has only one employee, an old spinster who answers his phone when he isn't there. I am convinced that he is an intelligent man; to build up a good business in a few years' time takes brains. And discipline."

  "You think we should arrest him?"

  "No," Grijpstra said, "we can only hold him for a few days. There is no evidence at all. We'll have to make him confess."

  "Play cat and mouse? Make him come every day, and men give him a break, and then make him come every day again? Phone him at his house with odd questions?"

  Grijpstra didn't answer.

  "It's a nasty game, you know. Last time we did it the man had a nervous breakdown and his wife nearly divorced him and he was innocent."

  "Yes," Grijpstra said, "I won't forget that case."

  "To hell with it," de Gier said, and jumped up. "The boss is away and we have no real plans for today. Let's go."

  "Where? It's raining."

  "To my flat," de Gier said.

  They got to the flat within a quarter of an hour and de Gier put on a record for Grijpstra and took Oliver with him into the kitchen. Oliver growled and scratched at the door.

  "You can have him later. Let me make some pancakes."

  "Pancakes," he said a little later. "You like pancakes. You can have them with ham, with honey, or with syrup. And this is good coffee. You can have a good cigar as well. Put your feet on that chair."

  "Yes," Grijpstra said, "I'll do all that. Put jam on the pancakes. And watch your cat."

  Oliver was growling in a corner and sharpening his nails on the carpet while he was fixing Grijpstra with his clear blue slanting eyes.

  "Shit," Grijpstra said. "There must be something wrong with you that you like that cat."

  "He is called Oliver. And he sleeps in my arm."

  "Frrrooo," Grijpstra said softly.

  He ate his pancakes, burped, and lit his cigar.

  De Gier put on another record and together they listened to church music, an organ playing Bach. Oliver jumped on Grijpstra's lap, purred, and fell asleep. De Gier was stretched out on the floor, his head cradled in his arms. The record came to an end.

  "Beautiful," Grijpstra said, and opened his eyes. He scratched Oliver behind the ears. The cat began to purr again.

  "You see," de Gier said.

  "Perhaps."

  "If the commissaris thought Holman had done it he wouldn't have gone to ."

  "No," Grijpstra said. " is a warm island. The commissaris has an eternal pain in his legs. He wanted to warm his legs. He'll be on a deck chair somewhere now, on the terrace of a hotel. He took the opportunity when it presented itself. The case is stuck and the lady comes from . He has to investigate her background. It takes only eight hours to fly there and the State is paying for his ticket."

  "We can't solve the case while he is away," de Gier said, rolling over on his back, "it'll make him look silly."

  "She didn't blackmail the diplomat."

  "Why not?"

  "She couldn't have. He isn't married."

  De Gier sat up. "You are forgetting the Secret Service. They are in this too. She may have known secrets the diplomat shouldn't have told her about."

  "Ha," Grijpstra said. "What secrets? Belgium isn't at war. They are like us. Belgium is a small comfortable country spending its time manufacturing things and selling them."

  "Exactly. Commercial secrets or secrets involving the economy. Certain nations (he was dropping his voice) are very interested in ruining the economy of the Common Market. Diplomats always know too much and beautiful women are sent to lure them to their houseboats. The diplomats boast."

  "No," Grijpstra interrupted, "not our diplomat. He wouldn't have wasted his time boasting. He went to her boat to sleep with her. He made her perform. He played with her or he made her play with him. And then he got into his clothes and into his black Citroen and he drove home."

  "You don't suspect the diplomat?"

  "No," Grijpstra said.

  "The colonel?"

  Grijpstra hesitated.

  "No?"

  "The colonel is separated from his wife. She lives in the States somewhere," he said. "She'll probably know that he won't spend his nights by himself. Mrs. van Buren couldn't have blackmailed him that way."

  "Atomic warheads," de Gier said.

  "Yes. But we won't have to follow up on that. The military police is after him. And he has an alibi."

  "He could have sent a killer, some paratrooper or ranger or special-service man or whatever they call their murderers. Americans kill each other at the drop of a hat."

  De Gier laughed.

  "The drop of a hat," Grijpstra repeated.

  "Nobody wears hats anymore."

  "They drop them."

  "Not the colonel," de Gier said.

  Grijpstra sighed. "You know we are getting close, don't you?" de Gier asked.

  "Yes," Grijpstra said.

  "IJsbrand Drachtsma," de Gier said in a firm voice.

  "He has an alibi."

  "So he says."

  "The commissaris has checked it."

  "So the commissaris says."

  "You don't believe him?"

  "Oh sure, I believe him. He spoke to the German businessmen Drachtsma had to his house that evening and they said they were there with him. There is no way of getting to Amsterdam from Schiermonnikoog unless you use the ferry, and the ferry only goes twice a day at this time of the year. Schiermonnikoog has no airport. But Drachtsma is a wealthy man."

  "Ha," de Gier said. "A helicopter picked him up, on the beach. It dropped him on another beach where a fast car was waiting for him. He raced it to Amsterdam, let himself into the houseboat with a key, and swish and plop."

  "Yes," Grijpstra said.

  "Balls."

  "Yes. There are nine hundred people to the square mile in Holland. The helicopter couldn't have picked him up without them seeing it. True, true. So he didn't do it."

  "A pity," de Gier said, "because he is dangerous all right. The diplomat doesn't scare me and if the colonel was after me I would offer to buy him a drink but if IJsbrand Drachtsma..."

  "You are serious?"

  "I am," de Gier said. "He escaped to England in 1943 when the Germans were watching every inch of the beaches."

  "And the engine of his rowboat broke down."

  "Just imagine what it must have been like," de Gier said. "Twenty or thirty hours to go and the beaches looking at you with a thousand eyes. Nasty German eyes peeping out from under their heavy helmets, and machine guns and cannon everywhere and fighter planes in the sky and you sit there in your nutshell tinkering with an outboard engine and the others are rowing and dropping their oars and cursing.

  "Would be fun," Grijpstra said.

  "I always wanted to do it, but I was a little boy then. Where were you?"

  "I spent the last year on a farm, working and trying to repair an old motorcycle. Took me all winter and then the war was over and it wouldn't go."

  "Doesn't he scare you?" de Gier asked.

  "No. I have nothing to lose. Besides, he irritat
es me. Cocksure, that's what he is. He has spent a lifetime winning."

  "You haven't lost, have you?"

  "No," Grijpstra said, "or perhaps I have. There isn't much difference. But he doesn't know. You remember the way he smiled to us when the commissaris introduced us as his assistants?"

  "He smiled down."

  "Of course he did. It looked friendly but it wasn't."

  "He didn't kill her, because he wasn't there. He must have sent someone."

  "But why would he have wanted her dead?"

  "Blackmail," de Gier said. "What else? He is married and she was threatening to break up his marriage. Perhaps he has all his property in his wife's name. The house in Schiermonnikoog, the house in Amsterdam, his yacht, his airplane, the houseboat, his shares."

  "We should meet his wife."

  "There's something else," de Gier said, "something I haven't told you about."

  "You should tell me everything," Grijpstra said.

  "Yes, but perhaps this is silly."

  "Go on, go on," Grijpstra said.

  "O.K.," de Gier said "you know little Cardozo?"

  "Isn't he one of the new detectives?"

  "Yes, that young fellow, short, wears a brown imitation fur coat, looks like a musician."

  "What about him?"

  "I asked him to wait in the corridor when we were grilling Drachtsma, trying to grill him I should say for he was winning that time. I wanted to know how Drachtsma would behave after we had done with him. Cardozo hung about outside and when Drachtsma came out Cardozo was walking behind him, pretending he was going somewhere. They went to the main entrance downstairs together. The door is always locked and the constable who watches the door has a button which he has to press to release the lock. Drachtsma showed his slip, the constable pressed his button, and the door opened. It's a door you have to push."

  "Yes, yes," Grijpstra said, "I know the door. I go through it a hundred times a day."

  "Quite. But Drachtsma didn't push the door, he kicked it, with his great smelly boot, and as he went through it he farted. A nasty noisy smelly fart."

  "And Cardozo got it right in the face?"

  "He did."

  "You shouldn't trust these young detectives, they tell you what you want to hear."

  "No," said de Gier. "Cardozo is ail right. He told me what he saw, and what he smelted in this case."

  "Yes," Grijpstra said, "and Drachtsma's home is on Schiermonnikoog. Right?"

  Grijpstra got up, forgetting Oliver who had to wake up suddenly and who dug his claws into Grijpstra's legs. Grijpstra yelled and Oliver hung on. Grijpstra backed into the bookcase and de Gier tried to help. A vase fell and broke on the floor splashing water on Oliver who had dropped to the ground. Oliver yelled and bit de Gier on the leg. It took a little while before the room became quiet again.

  "He is a challenge," Grijpstra said, "keeps you on your toes. Every policeman should have a cat like that; I will suggest it to the chief constable. We'll be the most aware police force on earth."

  "Yes. I am glad you appreciate him now. So we go to the island. When?"

  "Tomorrow," Grijpstra said. "First boat tomorrow and we'll play it easy. It is a nice island; I have been there before, I even know the local chief of police. He is an adjutant and he likes birds. Let's be tourists and see what we can see. The commissaris is on an island too."

  De Gier was putting his jacket on and looking at himself in the mirror. He was mumbling to himself.

  "We still have the afternoon," Grijpstra said. "Go to the gymnasium and practice some judo. You have been getting lazy lately. You aren't as good as you used to be. I saw Geurts throw you twice in two minutes the other night. Geurts, of all people!"

  "The instructor had asked me to let Geurts get some exercise," de Gier said.

  "Sure."

  "You don't believe me?"

  "Sure."

  "Listen here," de Gier said. "Half the fun of judo is to let somebody else throw you. You learn to fall that way. It's very important to be able to fall."

  "Sure," Grijpstra said.

  "All right," de Gier said, "and what are you going to do this afternoon?"

  "I am going to fire thirty rounds at the range and then I'll clean my pistol. And I'll ask the sergeant if I can fire the carbine a few times and then I'll find someone who knows about knife throwing. I'll throw a knife until I hit something with it and then I'll go home."

  "I hope it will take you all night," de Gier said, and dialed a number. "The boat leaves at ten A.M. tomorrow," he said, putting the phone down. "I'll pick you up at seven."

  "No," Grijpstra said. "We can't take the car. There are no cars allowed on the ferry and we may have to spend a few days on the island. We'll take the train. I'll meet you at the station at six-thirty."

  10

  THE KLM PLANE BEGAN ITS DESCENT TOWARD PLESMAN Airport, , and the commissaris woke up. His small wizened face looked almost eager and he acknowledged his own excitement with good-natured understanding. He hadn't traveled much in his life although he had wanted to, and apart from the south coast of France, where he had spent a number of holidays with his family, first in cheap hotels and later in a rented cottage, he only knew the world through books which he collected, buying them second-hand from the book stalls in the Old Man's Gate in the inner city. He had looked through the few books which mentioned , immediately after he had come home to tell his wife that he was leaving the next morning, and while his wife fussed and packed his suitcase and found his passport and his medicines, he turned the pages of a thin volume written by a poet who had lived on the island. He read the lines aloud, repeating some of the words. "Cunucu," the commissaris said.

  "Yes, dear?" his wife asked.

  "Cunucu, that's the outback, the outback of ."

  "Outback?" his wife asked.

  "Fields," the commissaris said, "with nothing on it. Just cactuses, I imagine, and a few goats maybe. There used to be forests and Indians."

  "Ah," his wife said, folding up a shirt. "Do you want a lot of ties?"

  "Not too many. I wonder who chopped the forests down. I hope the Spanish did. They had it before us, you know."

  "Indians?" his wife asked.

  "There aren't any left."

  "Where did they go?" his wife asked, tucking some socks into a corner of the suitcase.

  "We must have murdered them. Or the Spanish did."

  "Ah," his wife said.

  "A land of grasshoppers and prophets," the commissaris read aloud. "I wonder what that means." He looked at his wife but she had stopped listening.

  He was looking at the cunucu now, a dry brownish veld stretching on for miles, and he was pressing his nose against the little window. The thorned bushes and pale green cactus trees seemed thrown about haphazardly. A dreary land, but then he looked at the coastline and changed his mind. The sea was breaking against rough cliffs, sending up rhythmical spray in high sparkling waves, sundrenched curtains, transparent and cool. "Lovely," the commissaris thought, rubbing his dry hands. "I must go out there. I'll hire a car and go by myself."

  He saw the road, a narrow strip of tar, following the coastline. There were a few cars. The plane was low now and the view very clear. He saw an old Negro riding a donkey. He also saw the airport and a row of old-fashioned planes, bombers which he remembered having seen during the war. He recognized the Dutch markings on their gray sides. Dutch bombers on an island in the Caribbean. He shook his head. But he was still excited. There would be much to see, much to think about later, when he would be back in his garden in Amsterdam fighting the pain in his legs. Then he noticed that the pain had stopped. There was no pain at all, not even the slight twinge vibrating in his bones which had never left him during the last five years. The discovery stunned him. No pain. He saw himself living on this island, in a cottage, or even in an adobe hut like the one he had just seen on the cunucu. He would sit in the shadow of a tree and smoke a cigar and there would be no pain. But then the twinge returned and he
shrugged.

  "Silva," the big man with the suntanned face said as he carefully shook the commissaris' hand. "We are honored. It has been a long time since I welcomed a Dutch police officer. Did you have a good flight?"

  The commissaris smiled and mumbled a polite phrase. They were standing at the bar of the airport.

  "Jenever?" Silva asked. "Or rum? Rum is the drink here."

  "Do you make rum in ?"

  "Two daiquiris," Silva said to the barman. "No," he said, "we don't make anything here. The rum comes from Jamaica, packed in drums, rum jelly. We mix it with water in a little factory somewhere. Your health!"

  They drank and the commissaris smacked his lips. The iced rum cocktail went down well. The twinge in his legs had gone again. He wondered if he should tell Silva about it; he suddenly felt very friendly.

  "Silva," he said, "that's a Portuguese name, isn't it?"

  Silva nodded. "Yes. There are many Portuguese names on the island, and Spanish, and English. But I am Dutch. I was born here but I studied in Holland and I came back. Most of us don't come back "

  "You like your island," the commissaris said "

  Yes. I love the island. It's nothing but a dry rock, of course."

  The commissaris sipped his rum and studied the tall healthy-looking man, trying vainly to place him, but none of the general information his brain stored would fit. It seemed as if he belonged to a different species of man, in spite of the blue eyes and the dark brown hair. He had seen healthy suntanned men with blue eyes and dark brown hair before. A policeman, definitely. That much was clear. He would have recognized him as a policeman anywhere but when he tried to find out what, in particular, made Silva a policeman, he was groping again. Well, he would find out later.

  "A dry rock?" he asked. "But you have beaches, surely, and the sea is all around."

  "The sea is there," Silva said. "It's always there, nibbling at our foundation. The rock is mushroom-shaped, standing on a slim stem and the sea keeps on eating it away. One day the stem will break and we will all go down. But the rock itself is bare. It supports some hotels, and the refineries, and the tourists and the oilmen spend their money here and meanwhile we sit around and drink a little, and gamble a little, and gossip about each other and tomorrow is another day."