Outsider in Amsterdam ac-1

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  "Yes," said de Gier.

  "Perhaps," van Meteren said, "but it would have been the first time that he took a pill. In my opinion anyway."

  "Why do you call her Miesje?" Grijpstra asked.

  "Ach," van Meteren said, "it's just a trick. Whenever she is hysterical she screams. I thought I might make her calm down if I treated her as if she was a child. She was called Miesje once, when she was a child and wore laced boots and played hopscotch. When she behaves normally I call her Mrs. Verboom and when I think she will start one of her tantrums I call her Miesje. I take her on my lap and she'll talk quietly and sometimes I cuddle her a bit."

  "Brr," said de Gier.

  Van Meteren grinned. "Yes. It's quite ridiculous. Piet would do it too. I always laughed when I saw that tall skeleton sitting on his lap, he was such a small man. Perhaps it looks even funnier when she sits on my lap. But I have done other crazy things. I used to walk for miles with an Indonesian commando on a string. It was knotted in such a way that he would throttle himself if he tried to run away. I would hold the string with one hand and the carbine with the other. And now I have an old crazy lady on my lap and call her Miesje."

  There was another knock on the door and a thin young man dressed in jeans and a T-shirt came in. De Gier looked at the long unwashed hair and remembered the barman.

  "This is Johan," van Meteren said, and the detectives said, "Good evening." De Gier asked Johan to sit down and made room on the settee.

  Grijpstra asked the usual questions but Johan could only shake his head. He hadn't seen Piet after he had given him the takings of the shop at four o'clock. Three hundred and fifty-six guilders and some cents. Piet had phoned him later on the house phone to tell him that there was a difference of some thirty guilders but Johan hadn't gone upstairs, he had been too busy getting the bar in order for the evening's customers.

  "What do you think has happened?" de Gier asked.

  Johan shrugged his shoulders and didn't reply.

  Grijpstra grunted. He had been thinking that he had met the boy hundreds of times already. The inner city was full of duplicates of this boy. Well-meaning, unintelligent and knocked loose from their surroundings, full of protests and questions and wandering in a thin, almost two-dimensional thought-world where they could find no answers. "Maybe they don't really want to find anything," Grijpstra thought. "Maybe they wait for death, or a strong woman who will take them in hand so that they will find a daily routine again and start watching football on TV." He thought of his oldest son and studied Johan without much sympathy. Grijpstra's son wouldn't watch football either. He preferred to lie on his bed, dressed in a striped shirt and an embroidered pair of trousers and watch the cracks in the ceiling.

  "Suicide, I suppose," Johan said after a few minutes of silence, which hung heavily in the room. "Who would want to murder Piet? He was a bit of a bore but he didn't hurt anyone. He couldn't if he tried."

  Grijpstra changed his opinion. The answer had been cleverer than he had expected.

  "You don't seem to be very upset," de Gier said.

  "No," Johan said. "I am sorry. Perhaps I should be upset, but I can't generate any feeling. Annetje and I would have left next week anyway. This is a commercial enterprise where the goal is money. Piet wanted to make a profit and he wanted the profit for himself. He was the owner of the business. We intended to leave him and find some other place with a bit of idealism behind it, or maybe start one of our own. Piet crooked us. I don't really hold it against him. It's my own stupidity, I should have seen it. He made us work for the great purpose but all we worked for was his wealth. Did you see the gold strap on his wristwatch?"

  Grijpstra nodded.

  "There are other things as well. There is a new station wagon parked outside. We earned it for him. He was a capitalist but he didn't tell us."

  "You don't like capitalists?" de Gier asked.

  "I don't mind them," Johan said. "It's a way of life. Free enterprise is a philosophy. It isn't mine. I am against fascism and I would fight it if I had to, but I wouldn't fight capitalism."

  "So you think it was suicide?" de Gier asked.

  "Yes."

  "Enough," Grijpstra said. "You need some sleep. All of us do. Tomorrow is another day. Try and remember anything that may be relevant and tell us about it tomorrow. The peace of the citizens has been disturbed and we, criminal investigators of your police department, have to repair the peace again. And you have to help us. Such is the law."

  He grinned, got up, and stretched his aching back.

  Within a few minutes the detectives were walking toward their car. A late drunk came swaggering toward them, and de Gier had to jump aside.

  "Out of my way," the drunk shouted and grabbed a lamp post.

  "Bah," Grijpstra said. The drunk was pissing on the street and all over his own trousers.

  "Watch it," de Gier shouted. The drunk had fallen over and rolled off the sidewalk into the street.

  Grijpstra, who was getting into the car, grabbed the microphone.

  "An unconscious man on the sidewalk of Haarlemmer Houttuinen opposite number five. Please send the bus."

  "Drunk?" the voice of Headquarters asked.

  "Very," Grijpstra answered. "No need for an ambulance, the police bus will do."

  "Bus coming," the voice said. "Out."

  "We better wait," de Gier said. "I have pulled him off the street but he may roll over again. He is fast asleep."

  "Sure. We've got nothing else to do."

  They waited in silence for the small blue bus with its crew of two elderly police constables who dragged the drunk inside, cursing and sighing.

  "Nice job," de Gier said, waved at the constables and started the engine.

  "So have we," Grijpstra said, "nice and complicated. Murdered innocence dangling from a piece of string, surrounded by dear sweet people of which one is a black cannibal trained in guerilla warfare and another a crazy old female bag of bones."

  "I hope his mother has done it," de Gier said.

  "You love people, don't you?"

  "I don't like jails," de Gier said. "I had to visit some of our clients in their cells this week. Cold, drafty and hopeless. Jail will get you if nothing else does. A day in jail means a year of crime."

  Grijpstra turned his heavy neck and stared at his colleague.

  "Well, well," he said, "have you forgotten how many people you have directed to the cold, drafty and hopeless cells?"

  "Yes, yes," de Gier said and lapsed into silence.

  The silence lasted until they entered their office and he had to help Grijpstra to phrase the exact short sentences that framed their report and that they both signed, mentioning in cool print that everything the report contained was the truth as they, officers of the Queen's law, saw it. Grijpstra typed, slowly, with four fingers, without making a single typing error.

  De Gier didn't speak when he left but Grijpstra didn't mind. He had been working with de Gier for a number of years and they had never really fallen out.

  \\ 3 /////

  The next morning de gier was in his bed. it was eight o'clock, he should have been up and in any case he should have been awake.

  He wasn't asleep either. He was applying a trick, a recipe he had discovered as a boy. Stretched flat on his back with his toes pressed against the iron bars of the old hospital bed that he had, some years before, picked up at an auction, he was maintaining, with some effort, a state of semiconsciousness. He was, in fact, directing a dream. His body tingled, not the unpleasant tingle of cold hands after coming into a warm room, but an exciting all over tingle that made his entire body glow. He was very close to being free, free from his daily routine, his responsibility, his planet bound existence. Inside his tingling body his mind was at liberty to move, wherever he wanted it to go.

  And, being a shrewd man, he was using his liberty for an immediate purpose. He made his mind go back to the room of the dangling corpse. He saw the Papuan again, and the old skeleton-woman, the r
estaurant and the guests, the kitchen and the girls. He didn't try to achieve anything, he merely tried to force his mind to go back into the day before and he was reasonably successful until Oliver jumped on his stomach and cut the thin film that separated de Gier from reality.

  He woke up and, reluctantly, looked at his watch. Five minutes past eight.

  "Yes," he said to Oliver and put the Siamese cat on the floor where it began to grumble and whine.

  "Wait," he said and walked to the small bathroom, looking at his plants in passing.

  If it is true that a house is a projection of the occupant's spirit then de Gier's spirit was not quite ordinary. He had furnished the little two-roomed apartment with a bed, plants, and bookshelves. No table, no chairs, no TV. A detachable shelf, screwed to the wall above the bed, served as a table if he wanted to write, which wasn't often. He ate in the kitchen, not much larger than an old-fashioned cupboard.

  "Mmm," he said, stopping near the geranium, which had started as a seed no more than a few weeks ago and "Mmm," he said again when he admired his creeper, hanging down from a bookshelf.

  "She grows," he remarked to Oliver, who wasn't interested, and began to splash cold water all over his chest and arms and poured hot water and lathered his face.

  Oliver continued to grumble.

  "We'll have breakfast together," de Gier said. "Go to the balcony and irritate the birds while I finish shaving."

  He moved the protesting cat with his foot and opened the balcony door. A seagull swooped low, expecting to be fed, and Oliver chattered with fury.

  A few minutes later the cat and the detective ate, chopped heart and scrambled eggs. Then they drank, water and coffee. Then de Gier went out to catch his bus, an hour late, and the cat stretched into the still warm blankets of the unmade bed, imitating his master's trick of being asleep without dozing off altogether.

  "You are late," said Grijpstra.

  De Gier smiled, remembering the pretty dark-haired girl he had been sitting next to in the bus.

  "I am often late," he said.

  "That's true," Grijpstra agreed. "Here, read this, the doctor's report."

  They were in their large gray room of Headquarters. Grijpstra relaxed into a plastic chair and watched his colleague reading. Grijpstra smiled. He was content. His wife had been asleep when he came home at 2:30 in the morning. She was still asleep when he left. He had breakfasted by himself, helping himself to more toast and more eggs without any contradiction or argument. And, alone in the detectives' room, he had watered the rubber plant and played drums on the set that, in a so far unexplained manner, had arrived in his and de Gier's office about a year earlier. Found perhaps, or confiscated. Put there for a purpose that had been conveniently forgotten. Grijpstra had wanted to be a drummer when he was still a young man with a sense of adventure, and he I id some talent. He often came early, to hit the three drums and clash the cymbals. Very softly of course, which, in drumming, is the finer art. He had, during those many early mornings, specialized in the "rustle," the sweeping of the soft forklike instruments (which had come with the set of drums) on the stretched skin of the two smaller drums. Tsss, tsss and then BENG, but softly. And then a roll, a small roll, exciting because of its strict limitation. While de Gier read Grijpstra grabbed the sticks and sounded the small roll.

  "Good," de Gier said, looking up.

  "What's good?" Grijpstra asked.

  "That roll. And this report too. So he had taken one of his mother's pills. Palfium, wasn't it? A trace of an opiate in the stomach. And the times fit. He must have died around seven P.M. and we arrived at eight."

  The telephone rang.

  "Yes, sir," Grijpstra said and pointed at the ceiling with a thick index finger. De Gier got up obediently. Within half a minute they were between the cactuses of the chief inspector.

  "And?" the chief inspector asked.

  Grijpstra told his story.

  "And?" the chief inspector asked again.

  Grijpstra said nothing.

  The chief inspector got up and paced up and down. The detectives stared, at nothing in particular.

  The chief inspector stopped in front of a cactus that was nearly five feet high, a stiff giant noodle, pimply and dotted with sharp cruel hooks. He watched the plant with concentration. De Gier grinned. He had seen the chief inspector measuring the monstrosity, using a tightly wound measuring tape in a metal container, which could be released and sprung by pressing a button and which he carried in his pocket. De Gier knew that he carried the measuring tape at all times, for the pocket of his tailor-made expensive suit bulged. For years de Gier had suspected him of carrying a mini-pistol until he had seen the tape-measure one day when the door of his office had been open and its occupant had been indulging in his secret pastime. De Gier was sure that the chief inspector was sorely tempted at this very moment to produce the tape and measure the cactus, which should have grown another millimeter or so since the previous day.

  The chief inspector turned on his heels and faced the detectives.

  "A nut," he said. "A crazy nut who wants to improve the world. He goes to a solicitor and registers a society. To improve the environment. A religious society, it can't be less, and containing a religion that he has created himself, or combined from a lot of ill-digested rubbish he has read or heard about. He buys an old rackety house at the Haarlemmer Houttuinen, fixes it up a little and whitewashes all its walls. He buys a second-hand imitation of an Asiatic statue and puts it in the hall, lights an incense stick and sells health food. Unwashed tomatoes and grains. The kind that sticks in your throat. A rat couldn't digest it. And carrot juice."

  He interrogated the detectives with his eyes. Both nodded.

  It was clear that the chief inspector had no liking for carrot juice. They knew what he liked. He liked Dutch gin, and shrimp cocktails, snails and peppersteak. Pineapple with whipped cream. And cognac.

  "There's a bar as well," Grijpstra said.

  The chief inspector looked surprised.

  "A what?"

  "A bar," repeated Grijpstra, "downstairs, as you go in, on the right, a bar where they sell gin and beer."

  "Good idea," the chief inspector said. "With a glass of jenever you can get through to the other nuts. And when you have weakened their defenses you can make them eat unpeeled rice."

  He thought.

  "All right," he said, "but there is no base to the thing. It will attract the odd misfits who will come to join the faith, eager to penetrate the emptiness of purity above. Valhalla on earth. Or Nirvana. Or whatever it is called. What the great man does is new and so he is admired. The society is a success. He is making some money. Before you get into his temple you have to fork out twenty-five guilders, because the joint is 'members only.' True?"

  Grijpstra nodded.

  "And later, if you pass the test, you are allowed upstairs. You can enter the meditation room. Have you been there?"

  "Yes, sir," de Gier said. "A large empty room with low seats of scraped pine topped with foamrubber cushions. And an altar. And a special higher seat with a cushion with an embroidered cover."

  "Sure," the chief inspector said, "for the chief nut. And candles of course. And there they sit, legs crossed. A row of holy men. Piet is the high priest, the illuminated sage. I have read a little about it. There are various degrees apparently, first degree of the silence, second degree of the silence and so on. The more silence, the deeper the whatever. Perhaps they were wearing funny robes. Did you see any funny robes?"

  "No, sir," Grijpstra said.

  "Probably hidden in a cupboard."

  The chief inspector thought.

  "And after a while the whole thing falls to pieces. The sage becomes transparent and you can see through him. He has come to the end of his new value. At first he blames the others, which is usual human procedure, but finally he grasps that he, himself, is the fool. A crazy man. And, worse, a silly crazy man. So he takes one of his mother's pills, falls over, stays on the floor for a
bit but manages to get up and finish the job. And when you came he was dangling from a deal beam that had been created for a nobler purpose, namely to support a merchant's ceiling."

  There was silence in the room, a nice noble silence. Perhaps a second degree silence, de Gier thought.

  "Well?" the chief inspector asked.

  "Perhaps," Grijpstra said, "but I would prefer, if you are agreeable, to look into the matter."

  The chief inspector grunted. "You have suspicions?"

  "No," Grijpstra said, "but I can't imagine how he got that bump on his temple. He wouldn't have got it from a fall on the floor. He must have fallen against something, if he did fall. There wasn't much furniture in the room. It's a pity the wound didn't bleed, we might have been able to find traces somewhere in the room. I keep on thinking that he was hit, and if he was there may have been murder."

  "Homicide," the chief inspector said. "Murder is always hard to prove although we can try, it's the least we can do. But the youngest silliest lawyer can convince the wisest judge it's been homicide, whatever we prove."

  He sighed.

  "And it might not even be homicide," resumed the chief inspector. "That Papuan of yours, is he really a Papuan? I didn't see him."

  "Yes, sir," de Gier said. "His name is Dutch, van Meteren, but he is only one-eighth white, a rare specimen, an almost full-blooded Papuan in Amsterdam."

  "There'll be others," the chief inspector said. "You can find anything in Amsterdam when you look for it. But I seem to remember that van Meteren pointed out that someone might have picked a fight with Piet and that Piet, after the fight, in a fit of depression had committed suicide. You might work on that for a bit. Murders are rare in this city. A homicide, well. But murder… And your theory would point to a murder, what with a fist-fight and a noose."

  He shook his head.

  The detectives recognized the sign and knew that the meeting was over.

  Coffee break was getting close. They were waiting in their room, the trolley would be due any minute now. Their normal patrol duty was suspended.

  All available time could be spent on thought.