The Perfidious Parrot

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  De Gier thought that frightening the commissaris was not altogether such a bad idea. A cure for conceit?

  Grijpstra didn’t totally disagree. The chief did, perhaps, tend to exaggerate his eternal right-ness. It was amazing that hubris didn’t push him over at times. “You know what I mean?”

  De Gier knew exactly what Grijpstra meant. They were walking on the beach by then, kicking cans and containers deposited by the surf. The commissaris had a downside. Admiring the man was silly, to follow him could be madness.

  They discussed the case in hand. “How did your Special Forces know that Stewart-Wynne was wise to their piracy?” Grijpstra asked.

  They knew, de Gier told him, because Stewart-Wynne had asked too many questions on the islands and swaggered about too much on Key West. Sergeant Ramona Symonds questioned the Eggemoggin Hotel chamberboy as to who he had let into the insurance inspector’s room.

  The chamberboy had shown Stewart-Wynne’s suite to two big bad men. He broke down when Ramona grilled him. It wasn’t his fault that the big bad men were overwhelming. Military types—short hair/tight jeans/T-shirts/muscles. The one with the mirrored-sunglasses was addressed by the one with the hairy wrists as “Captain.” They found nothing, the chamberboy said, sobbing.

  “Nothing to find?” Grijpstra asked.

  There was a mini-cassette, sewn into the inside of Stewart-Wynne’s cowboy hat, found by Harry the bicycle cop when he searched the corpse.

  “Good,” Grijpstra said. “Proves cops are better than soldiers.”

  But de Gier still disliked Harry. “Luck comes to the lucky.”

  “You listened to the tape?” Grijpstra asked.

  Sure. Fine testimonial material. Drunken dialogues conducted by privateering U.S. military men, all easily recognizable voices. Voices of black bartenders. Voice of a Swedish prostitute, well known in St. Maarten and Key West. Boastful swashbuckling talk. Played back for de Gier as a reward for his brilliantly staged apprehension of the hit man Mickey.

  Grijpstra asked, “Did these clearly recognizable American military voices, that can be checked against voices of suspects in the Key West barracks, mention the killing of the young blond sailor by gunfire?”

  Yes. Regrets had been expressed. There had been no need for murder. But what with all the adrenaline going, the activity, the haste—shit happens. Besides, the sailor had gestured in a threatening manner. Maybe the boy had been armed.

  Grijpstra frowned sadly, then gazed irritably at his shoes, smeared with St. Eustatius beach tar. “But if the pirates suspected that Stewart-Wynne had managed to collect incriminating material, why didn’t they get rid of him here? In the Antilles?”

  De Gier pointed at little boys that had been following them all the way from Old Rum House and were now peeking out from between thorn bushes. Statia was too small. Foreigners were too visible. If they killed each other there would be dozens of witnesses. Besides, the military had to return to their Key West base after successfully completing their exercises in the area.

  “You’re perfectly sure of all that?” Grijpstra asked.

  De Gier didn’t have to be perfectly sure of anything. To have an idea that surmounted reasonable doubt—that was what was needed now. They weren’t playing cops anymore, they were just in it for the money. No suspects to be dragged to court. No analysis of elements that would add up to grounds for an arrest. No trouble. Nice work, if you cared to think about it, after all. Plus one million U.S. dollars, the world’s most acceptable currency. De Gier smiled.

  Grijpstra looked at the litter, pushed by the surf to the far side of the beach. “Why don’t they clean up here?”

  “They don’t do anything here,” de Gier said. “What is it to us? We eat the last fish sprinkled with the last parsley chopped by the last serviceable knife in a bankrupt hotel, we take the last plane home and are happy ever after.”

  Grijpstra shook his head. “Right.” He frowned. “It’s the same ocean though. Our home is on it too.”

  De Gier tried to keep smiling.

  Grijpstra wondered what happened to the remainder of the Sibylle’s crew. The young blond sailor got pecked by seagulls. The captain died of loss of his legs. What about the others? The first mate? Engineer? Communications officer? Another sailor? Were they hit on the head and heave-ho’d across a railing?

  “The voices on Stewart-Wynne’s tapes mentioned them,” de Gier said. “The surviving crew was needed to get the tanker to the transfer pier. Afterward the crew sailed the tanker back to the ocean, and were picked up by helicopter and dropped off at another island. De Gier thought that island was St. Kitts, formerly British. The Sibylle’s crew members were given money enough to buy tickets out and to spare and were happy and thankful.”

  “They were threatened too?”

  “Of course,” de Gier said.

  “And they’ll be crewing on some other tanker now?”

  De Gier shrugged. “Maybe later. First they’ll have to get high on the payoff money. It may take a while.”

  “You’re sure they weren’t fish food?”

  De Gier was not sure of anything, he had said so before.

  “Don’t get nasty,” Grijpstra said.

  If de Gier wanted to get nasty he would do just that.

  “You know what I think,” Grijpstra said, “I think that our theorizing is incomplete. What if the soldiers were in cahoots with the Ambagts.”

  “To steal their own cargo so they could collect the insurance?”

  “Of course,” Grijpstra said. “Castro wasn’t paying. I say the soldiers may have been hired to work for a fee but it’s more likely they were told they could keep whatever the fence paid them when they brought him the Sibylle.”

  De Gier danced around Grijpstra. “And then the Ambagts hired us to catch the soldiers they’d hired?”

  Grijpstra stamped around de Gier. “And to make them pay back the entire value of the cargo they’d sold off to a fence?”

  Walking along they agreed there was only one course of action left open. See the fence. There he was, they told each other, pointing at the hills ahead, at parked tankers, at gleaming storage tanks, at buildings shadowed by palm trees. They would just walk into the oil fortress, threaten to expose the boss as a buyer of stolen goods, make him transfer the value of twelve million gallons of crude at current prices to their account in Amsterdam, go home and repay the Ambagts, less eight-hundred thousand dollars, the balance of their fee.

  “Right?” Grijpstra shouted.

  “Right,” de Gier shouted.

  They marched on, in step, swinging their arms, one-TWO, one-TWO. It was a hot day getting hotter. They slowed down, passing ruined warehouses where merchants once made fortunes. A guide, in a beige uniform with a badge, offered to show the two tourists around. She led them to a slave house where people had been stored for export. The tourists were shown the fortress’s cannons where sleeping Dutch marines were woken by French marines, advancing in stocking feet. But free America was no longer buying smuggled goods but buying directly. No need for middlemen on little islands. The disappointed French left, the Dutch raised their flag again, but Statia’s bankrupt merchants went back to Holland and the former slaves were free to apply for Dutch social assistance. “Which is where we are now,” the guide said, finishing her tour and refusing a tip.

  Grijpstra was sweating. De Gier knocked on the door of Tulip’s Rental. Tulip herself, a shiny giant behind an oak desk that, she said, had served Admiral Rodney once, had her husband show them her passenger car. It came with a taped voice that talked to the renters. “Your right front door is not closed.” “You’re low on fuel.” “Your oil is leaking.” “All your systems are dwindling.” The voice spoke with a Chicago accent.

  “What is dwindling?” Grijpstra asked.

  “To become less,” de Gier said.

  A small boy, hiding behind bushes, pushed a black goat into the road. De Gier braked. The goat, unhurt, began bleating. “You hit my goat,” the boy sh
rieked. De Gier got out and paid him five dollars.

  Grijpstra petted the animal. “Nice goat you have there, friend.” The boy handed out two large glass blue beads. He explained his gift. “Delft blue” beads were valuable in the slave trade. Winners of African tribal wars exchanged their prisoners for beads. When the slave trade was abolished hundreds of cases of beads were emptied out onto St. Eustatius’s beaches. The beads disappeared in the sand but sometimes turned up again, were picked up by kids and sold to tourists. “Treat them good and they’ll bring you luck,” the goat owner said.

  De Gier folded his bead into a handkerchief. Grijpstra dropped his in his jacket’s breast pocket. Boy and goat went back to their station behind the bush.

  The car wouldn’t start. Carl Ambagt came by in a fenderless jeep, Tulip’s other rental. He stopped when he saw de Gier’s and Grijpstra’s raised thumbs.

  Carl was no longer mad at his detectives. He did get irritated again when, half a mile further along, he had to wait. Two municipal pick-ups had stopped alongside each other, facing in opposite directions. The vehicles blocked the narrow shoulder-less road. The drivers were deep in conversation. Carl honked impatiently. The drivers retaliated by lengthening their islandic get-together.

  Like all tribulations this one ended too. The jeep drove on and passed stables and fenced off fields where two horses scratched around between withered weeds. There was a handwritten FOR SALE sign. Stores and cafés stood empty behind open doors hanging forlornly from single hinges: sinister black holes containing lukewarm still air.

  Grijpstra found a map in the jeep’s glove compartment and called off road names: Jeems, Paramira, Zeelandia, the names of bankrupt plantations. There were no street signs on the narrow potholed roads. A disheveled white woman on large bare feet, black with dust and beach tar, smiled distractedly around broken teeth. “Transfer Station?” She tried her smile again. “Better go home, dearies.” She shuffled off.

  “Life in the Caribbean,” Carl said. “Maybe it is too easy, right?”

  The ever present small black boys pointed the way to the transfer station. The road was closed off by barbed-wire fencing, tall and forbidding looking. Behind the open gate were men armed with long rubber truncheons. The men, imposing like wrestlers, or professional boxers, wore camouflage uniforms above spit-and-polish ankle high boots. The visors of their hats pointed straight ahead.

  “Are you men soldiers?” Carl asked.

  The men shook their heads.

  “Security guards of the oil company?”

  The men nodded.

  “Can we come in?”

  The men shook their heads.

  “We wanted to ask a few questions about the Sibylle,” de Gier said. “A tanker. Whether she off-loaded here. Can we talk to your chief?”

  The men shook their heads.

  “We don’t really know what his name is,” Grijpstra said. “Your manager, the boss.”

  The man raised their truncheons, then brought them down on the palms of their free hands. The slapping was rhythmical. It looked like the men were about to walk through the gate and beat up their unwelcome visitors.

  Carl turned the jeep slowly and carefully.

  “Bye,” Carl said.

  The men presented their truncheons.

  “You call him the chief fence?” Carl asked Grijpstra, as he drove around potholes, pointing the vehicle at Oranjestad, four miles down the road. “Dad calls him Little Abner. That’s what the buyer looks like. Like in the cartoon?”

  26

  A HISTORICAL ENQUIRY

  “Puzzle?” the commissaris asked.

  “Missing piece?”

  “Sir,” de Gier said. “Where exactly do we fit into the plans of the firm Ambagt & Son?”

  “Look at it this way,” the commissaris said. “Skipper Peter finally told me that another supertanker, also chartered by Ambagt & Son, the Rebecca, is on her way here. The same song again. The Rebecca carries a full load of Iranian crude destined for Cuba. The idea is not to let her pursue her itinerary, for Cuba won’t pay Ambagt & Son.”

  Grijpstra and de Gier, considering the new information, and remembering that Skipper Peter was a genius in arranging connections, and what else is business other than the arranging of connections, saw a connection.

  The commissaris guided their line of consideration. “Think of the business Ambagt & Son conducted with Soviet oil sold to a previous pariah, South Africa. The difference here is that South Africa paid Ambagt & Son and Ambagt & Son didn’t pay the Soviets and that Ambagt & Son did pay the Iranians and won’t be paid by Cuba. Times change. Methods change. Greed remains.”

  De Gier saw where he and Grijpstra might fit in. Grijpstra saw it too. A little later. “Piracy,” de Gier said. “Not by the military this time.”

  “How so?” the commissaris asked kindly.

  “Military personnel are only free agents in their time off,” de Gier said. “They happened to be having time off here in the Antilles when the Sibylle came by but they’re having their time off in Key West right now.”

  “And their equipment,” Grijpstra added.

  “The military were too violent for our simple merchants,” the commissaris said. “There is not all that much money in murder. Besides, murder severs connections.”

  De Gier agreed. “Let the suckers go so that they can come back to be cheated all over again.”

  “Continuity,” Grijpstra remembered, “a principle of profit.”

  The commissaris was pleased that his pupils had been learning. The Law Enforcement industry, forever financed by unavoidable taxation, is always ready to arrest, incarcerate and kill, but a commercial enterprise has to be wary of displeasing its clients.

  “So,” de Gier theorized. “Our client is out of pirates but then Karate and Ketchup pop up in St. Maarten and recommend Detection G&G Incorporated as just the ticket.”

  “But we are set up from the start,” Grijpstra theorized along. “Not told what we are really in for. Led by the nose, manipulated, egged on, cajoled …”

  “Carrot-ted, stick-ed,” the commissaris added.

  “Pure genius,” de Gier said. “Carl had the top score on the exam he took for admission to Holland’s first school of business while he was stealing super Fords for sly Pa Peter …”

  “Gradually,” the commissaris said, “subtly, we were puppeteered by this cute little fellow and his bloody-nosed pater toward the pending arrival of the Rebecca. Exact timing was, of course, essential. When, in the beginning, we resisted, Ketchup and Karate were told to become forceful, there was the beating, the drowning, the amusing little interplay with the feather on my hat but …”

  “… we gave in too quickly? Is that why we had our days off in Key West?” De Gier was astounded. He became indignant. “But I must have felt that, sir. I tried to slow us down.” De Gier pointed accusingly at Grijpstra. “I did something right. Remember, in the Amsterdam café, I said we shouldn’t do this?”

  “The rush was my fault,” the commissaris said. “I was getting bored watching your investments double. I was so eager that the Ambagts had to slow their ocean passage.”

  “There was nothing wrong with the Rodney?” Grijpstra asked.

  “Probably not,” the commissaris said smoothly. “In a way I am glad we’re in this. Amsterdam is too friendly.” He beamed at his pupils. “There is deliberate nastiness out here. Showing us up as simpletons.” He raised a finger. “Conscious evil, not the wishy-washy tolerance we got used to.”

  Grijpstra saw no conscious evil intent. “The Ambagts happened to be greedy. The frog-fellows happened to be violent. We happened to be silly. The Rebecca happens to be on the way.”

  The commissaris, enjoying the view from his room at the Old Rum House, sipped a drink that de Gier, self-taught herbologist, had brewed from wild lemon verbena. “Sure this won’t kill me, Rinus?”

  “Mildly euphoric. Peps you up so to speak. Sorry about the jam jar, sir. All I could find in the kitchen.
>
  “Happenstance,” de Gier said now. “That trouble with the FEADship was real. The boatswain told me when I ran across him on the beach early this morning. Normally the ship runs smoothly. Grijpstra was right, sir. It all just happened.”

  The commissaris objected that conscious effort can turn bad means to good ends but got twisted in his argument. He gave in. “All right then, we do happen to be here on time.”

  Grijpstra held his jam jar against the light, frowning at the pale green liquid. He shrugged and sipped, then shook his head, surprised at the fresh taste. “Are we really going to be pirates now and help the Ambagts in their deals with the fence?”

  “Who?” The commissaris sat up, spilling his liquid. “A player I am not aware of?”

  “The oil buyer at the St. Eustatius international oil terminal,” Grijpstra said. “Alias Little Abner.”

  “We couldn’t get into the transfer station,” de Gier said. “Uniforms guard the gate.”

  “Just phone the buyers,” the commissaris said. “They’ll be in the Statia phone book. I’ll do it for you.” He winked slyly.

  De Gier scratched his bottom nervously. “Uh. Sir?”

  “Rinus?”

  “Can’t we drop out at this point?” de Gier asked. “You got us the two hundred thousand up front. Grijpstra can have it if he likes, become legitimate again by declaring income and be happy with Nellie.”

  Grijpstra jumped up. “Whoa. What about you?”

  “I was thinking of trying out Key West,” de Gier said.

  The commissaris could see that. “You might be happy there, Rinus.”

  “See if I care,” Grijpstra said, shaking both fists in de Gier’s face.

  “You could stay here on Statia,” the commissaris told Grijpstra. “You like church music. Play drums in the church de Gier was telling me about, with the see-through ladies singing. But first we deliver. We did take the Ambagts’s money you know.”

  “No honor among thieves, sir,” de Gier said. “Old Peach-nose and Little Diddums lied to us.”

  The commissaris faced his own temptation. There was Aruba, the saintly cat-man, the practice of Sisters Meshti and Johanna, the broiled fish at the everything café. Meanwhile Turtle waited in the Amsterdam garden. And Katrien. “First we’ll be pirates.” He limped about enthusiastically. “Another childhood wish fulfilled. Do you know that I secretly wore an eye patch as a kid and waved my grandfather’s army saber? And I called myself Francis Drake.”