A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  The killer had unscrewed the lightbulb from the standing lamp beside the blow-job chair. It was such a low-wattage bulb that the loss of light was less noticeable than the fact that the room was markedly less red. (The murderer had removed the scarlet stained-glass lamp shade, too.)

  Then, from the big briefcase in the blow-job chair, the moleman withdrew some kind of high-wattage floodlight, which he screwed into the socket of the standing lamp. Now Rooie’s room was ablaze with light. Neither the room nor Rooie was improved by this new light, which illuminated the wardrobe closet, too. Ruth could clearly see her ankles above her shoes. In the narrow part in the curtain, she could also see her face.

  Fortunately, the murderer had ceased his survey of the room. It was strictly how the light fell on the prostitute’s body that interested him. He pointed the ultrabright light more directly at Rooie’s bed, taking care to light his subject as brightly as possible. He impatiently slapped Rooie’s unresponsive right arm, for it had failed to stay where he’d placed it; he seemed disappointed that her breasts had gone so slack, but what could he do? He liked her best on her side, with one but not both of her breasts in view.

  In the glaring light, the killer’s bald head was gleaming with sweat. There was a grayness to his skin, which Ruth hadn’t noticed before, but his wheezing had lessened.

  The murderer appeared more relaxed. He proceeded to scrutinize Rooie’s posed body through the viewfinder of his camera. It was a camera Ruth recognized: a Polaroid of the old-fashioned, large-format kind—the same camera that her father used to take pictures of his models. The resultant black-and-white print had to be preserved with the bad-smelling Polaroid print coater.

  The killer wasted little time in taking one picture. Thereafter, he couldn’t have cared less about Rooie’s pose; he rolled her roughly off the bed so that he could use the towel under her to unscrew the floodlight, which he returned to his big briefcase. (The floodlight, although it had been on for only a short time, was clearly hot.) The murderer also used the towel to wipe his fingerprints off the small lightbulb he’d earlier unscrewed from the standing lamp; he wiped his prints off the stained-glass lamp shade, too.

  He kept waving the developing film in one hand. The film was about the size of a business envelope. The killer didn’t wait more than twenty or twenty-five seconds before he opened the film; then he went to the window seat and parted the curtains slightly, so that he could judge the quality of the print in natural light. He seemed very satisfied with the picture. When he came back to the blow-job chair, he returned his camera to the big briefcase. As for the photograph, he carefully wiped it with the bad-smelling print coater; then he waved the photo in the air to dry.

  In addition to his wheezing, which now was light, the murderer hummed an unfollowable tune—as if he were making a sandwich he was looking forward to eating alone. Still waving the already-dry print, the killer walked once to the door to the street, tested how to unlock it, and—opening the door a crack—peered briefly outside. He’d touched both the lock and the doorknob with his hand in the sleeve of his overcoat, leaving no fingerprints.

  When he closed the door, the killer saw Ruth Cole’s novel Not for Children on the table where the prostitute had left her keys. He picked up the book, turned it over, and studied the author’s photograph. Then, without reading a word of the novel, he opened the book in the middle and placed the photograph between the pages. He put Ruth’s novel in his briefcase, but the briefcase sprang open when he picked it up from the blow-job chair. With the standing lamp unlit, Ruth couldn’t see which of the contents of the briefcase had fallen out on the rug, but the murderer dropped to all fours; picking things up and returning them to the briefcase affected his wheezing, which was once more at whistlepitch when he finally stood up and clasped the briefcase firmly closed.

  The murderer gave a last look at the room, then. To Ruth’s surprise, he gave no last look at Rooie. It was as if the prostitute now existed only in the photograph. Then, almost as quickly as he’d killed her, the gray-faced mole departed. He opened the door to the street without pausing to see if anyone was passing in the Bergstraat—or if a neighboring prostitute was standing in her open doorway. Before he closed the door, he bowed to Rooie’s doorway, as if Rooie herself were standing only a few feet inside. He again covered his hand in his coat sleeve when he touched the door.

  Ruth’s right foot was asleep, but she waited a minute or more in the wardrobe closet, in case the killer came back. Then Ruth stumbled over the shoes as she limped out of the closet; she also dropped her purse, which, typically, was unzipped, forcing her to grope around on the dark, poorly lit rug, searching by touch for anything that might have fallen out. She could feel, inside her purse, everything that she knew was important to her (or had her name on it). On the rug, her hand encountered a tube of something too fat to be her lip gloss, but she put it in her purse, anyway.

  What she would later consider as her shameful cowardice—her craven immobility in the wardrobe closet, where she’d been frozen with fear—was now matched by a cowardice of another kind. Ruth was already covering her tracks, at once wishing and then pretending that she’d never been there.

  She couldn’t bring herself to take a last look at Rooie. She did pause at the door to the street, and for an eternity she waited inside the room with the door ajar—until she couldn’t see a prostitute in any of the other doorways, and there were no pedestrians on the Bergstraat. Then Ruth walked briskly into the late-afternoon light, which she liked so much in Sagaponack but which here had only the chill of a waning fall day about it. She wondered who would notice when Rooie didn’t pick up her daughter after school.

  For ten, maybe twelve minutes, Ruth tried to convince herself that she was not running away; that’s how long it took her to walk to the Warmoesstraat police station in de Wallen . Once she was back in the red-light district, Ruth’s pace slowed considerably. Nor did she approach the first two policemen she saw; they were on horseback—they towered above her. And at the door to the police station, at 48 Warmoesstraat, Ruth balked at going inside. She found herself returning to her hotel. She was beginning to realize not only what a coward but what an inadequate eyewitness she was.

  Here was the world-famous novelist with her penchant for detail; yet, in her observations of a prostitute with a customer, she had failed to come away with the most important detail of all. She could never identify the murderer; she could barely describe him. She’d made a point of not looking at him! The quality of his vestigial-like eyes, which had so forcefully reminded her of the moleman, was hardly an identifying characteristic. What Ruth had best retained of the killer was what was ordinary about him—his blandness.

  How many bald businessmen with big briefcases were there? Not all of them wheezed or had large-format Polaroid cameras—nowadays, surely, the camera was at least one defining detail. Ruth guessed it was a system of photography of interest only to professionals. But how much did that narrow the field of suspects?

  Ruth Cole was a novelist; novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she should prepare what she was going to tell the police—preferably in writing . But by the time she’d returned to her hotel, Ruth was aware of the precariousness of her position: a renowned novelist, an extremely successful (but unmarried) woman, is the cringing witness to the murder of a prostitute while hiding in the prostitute’s closet. And she would ask the police (and the public) to believe that she was observing the prostitute with a customer for “research”—this from a novelist on record as saying that real-life experience was second-rate in comparison to what one could imagine!

  Ruth could easily foresee the response to that . At last she’d found the humiliation she was looking for, but of course this was one humiliation that she wouldn’t write about.

  By the time she’d taken a bath and readied herself for her dinner with Maarten and Sylvia and the book-club people, she’d already written some notes about what to tell the poli
ce. Yet, by her degree of distraction at the book-club dinner, Ruth knew that she’d failed to convince herself that merely writing her account of the murder was as correct as going to the police in person. Long before the conclusion of the meal, she was feeling responsible for Rooie’s daughter. And as Maarten and Sylvia drove her back to her hotel, Ruth felt more and more guilty; by then she knew that she had no intentions of ever going to the police.

  The details of Rooie’s room, from the intimate point of view of the wardrobe closet, would stay with Ruth far longer than it would take the novelist to capture the appropriate atmosphere of a working prostitute’s chamber. The details of Rooie’s room would remain as near to Ruth as the moleman curled on the ledge outside her childhood window, his starry nose pressed against the glass. Her horror and fear of her father’s stories for children had come to life in an adult form.

  “Well, there he is—your never-ending admirer,” Maarten said, when he saw Wim Jongbloed waiting at the taxi stand on the Kattengat.

  “Oh, how tedious,” Ruth said wearily, thinking that she’d never been as glad to see anyone in her life. She knew what she wanted to tell the police, but she didn’t know how to tell them in Dutch. Wim would know. It was merely a matter of making the foolish boy think he was doing something else. When Ruth kissed Maarten and Sylvia good night, she was aware of the questioning look that Sylvia gave her. “No,” Ruth whispered, “I’m not going to sleep with him.”

  But the lovestruck boy had come to her with his own expectations. He’d brought some marijuana, too. Did Wim actually think he was going to seduce her by getting her stoned first? Naturally she got him stoned instead. Then it was easy to get him laughing.

  “You have a funny language,” she began. “Say something in Dutch to me, anything at all.”

  Whenever he spoke, she tried to repeat what he said—it was as simple as that. He found her pronunciation hysterical.

  “How do you say, ‘The dog ate this’?” she asked. She made up a number of sentences before she slipped in one she truly wanted. “ ‘He is a bald, smooth-faced man with an egg-shaped head and a nondescript body—not very big.’ I’ll bet you can’t say that fast,” she told him. Then she asked him to write it out so that she could try saying it herself.

  “How do you say, ‘He doesn’t have sex’?” Ruth asked the boy. “You know, like you,” she added. Wim was so stoned that he even laughed at that. But he told her. And he wrote out whatever she asked him to. She kept telling him to spell the words clearly.

  He still thought he was going to have sex with her later on. But, for the time being, Ruth was getting what she wanted. When she went into the bathroom to pee, she looked in her purse for her lip gloss and found the tube of Polaroid print coater, which she’d apparently taken from the floor of Rooie’s room by mistake. In the dim light of the prostitute’s room, Ruth had thought it had fallen out of her purse, but it was something that had fallen out of the murderer’s briefcase. It had his fingerprints on it, and hers. But what would hers matter? Because it was the only real evidence from Rooie’s room, the tube of print coater had to be given to the police. Ruth came out of the bathroom and coaxed Wim through another joint, which she only pretended to inhale. “ ‘The murderer dropped this,’ ” she told him then. “Say that. Write it out, too.”

  What saved her from having to have sex with him, or having to allow him to masturbate beside her again, was that Allan called. Wim could tell that Allan was somebody important.

  “I miss you more than I ever have,” Ruth told Allan, truthfully. “I should have made love to you before I left. I want to make love to you as soon as I’m back—I’m coming back the day after tomorrow, you know. You’re still meeting me at the airport, aren’t you?”

  Even stoned, Wim got the message. The boy looked around the hotel room as if he’d misplaced half his life in it. Ruth was still talking to Allan when Wim left. He could have made a scene, but he wasn’t a bad boy—just an ordinary one. The only peevish gesture he made in leaving was to take a condom out of his pocket; he dropped it beside Ruth where she sat on the bed, still talking to Allan. It was one of those special condoms that come in flavors—this one claimed to be bananaflavored. Ruth would bring the condom to Allan. A little present from the red-light district, she would tell him. (She already knew she wouldn’t tell him about Wim, or Rooie.)

  The novelist sat up transcribing what Wim had written into an orderly message, in her own handwriting—her own printing, to be exact. She carved every letter of the foreign language with the utmost care; she didn’t want to make any mistakes. The police would doubtless conclude that there’d been a witness to Rooie’s murder, but Ruth didn’t want them to know that the witness wasn’t Dutch. This way the police might presume that the witness was another prostitute—possibly one of Rooie’s neighbors on the Bergstraat.

  Ruth had a plain manila envelope, manuscript-size, which Maarten had given her with her itinerary. She put her notes for the police in this envelope, together with the tube of Polaroid print coater. When she handled the tube, she touched it only by the ends, holding it between her thumb and index finger; she knew she’d touched the body of the tube when she’d picked it up off Rooie’s rug, but she hoped she hadn’t marred the killer’s fingerprints.

  She hadn’t the name of a policeman, but she assumed she could safely address the envelope to the police station at 48 Warmoesstraat. First thing in the morning, before she wrote anything on the envelope, she went downstairs to the lobby of the hotel and got the correct postage from the concierge. Then she went out looking for the morning newspapers.

  It was the front-page story in at least two Amsterdam papers. She bought the newspaper that had a picture under the headline. It was a photo of the Bergstraat at night, not very clear. A police barrier had enclosed the sidewalk immediately in front of Rooie’s door. Behind the barrier, someone who looked like a plainclothes cop was talking to two women who looked like prostitutes.

  Ruth recognized the cop. He was the compact, powerful-looking man in the dirty running shoes and the baseball-type warm-up jacket. In the picture, he appeared to be clean-shaven, but Ruth had no doubt that it was the same man who’d followed her for a while in de Wallen; clearly both the Bergstraat and the red-light district were his beat.

  The headline read: MOORD IN DE BERGSTRAAT

  Ruth didn’t need to know Dutch to figure that out. While there was no mention of “Rooie”—the prostitute’s nickname—the article did mention that the murder victim was one Dolores de Ruiter, age fortyeight. The only other name mentioned in the article—it was also in the caption of the photograph—was the policeman’s, Harry Hoekstra, and he was referred to by two different titles. In one place he was a wijkagent , in another a hoofdagent . Ruth determined that she wouldn’t mail her envelope until she’d had time to ask Maarten and Sylvia about the newspaper story.

  She brought the article in her purse to dinner; it would be her last dinner with them before leaving Amsterdam, and Ruth had rehearsed how she would casually bring up the story of the murdered prostitute: “Is this a story about what I think it is? I’ve actually walked on this street.”

  But she didn’t have to bring it up. Maarten had already spotted the story and clipped it from the paper. “Have you seen this? Do you know what it is?” When Ruth pretended ignorance, Maarten and Sylvia told her all the details.

  Ruth had already assumed that the body would be discovered by the younger prostitute who used Rooie’s room at night—the girl she’d seen in the window in the leather halter top. The only surprise in the article was that there was no mention of Rooie’s daughter.

  “What’s a wijkagent ?” Ruth asked Maarten.

  “The cop on the beat, the district’s officer,” he told her.

  “Then what’s a hoofdagent ?”

  “That’s his rank,” Maarten replied. “He’s a senior police officer— not quite what you call a sergeant.”

  Ruth Cole left Amsterdam for New York on a late-mornin
g flight the following day, having had the taxi take her to the nearest post office en route to the airport. At the post office, she mailed the envelope to Harry Hoekstra, who was almost a sergeant in the Amsterdam police force—District 2. It might have surprised Ruth to know the motto of the 2nd District, which was inscribed in Latin on the police officers’ key rings.

  ERRARE

  HUMANUM

  EST

  To err is human, Ruth Cole knew. Her message, together with the Polaroid print coater, would tell Harry Hoekstra much more than Ruth had meant to say. The message, in carefully printed Dutch, was as follows:

  1. De moordenaar liet dit vallen.

  [The murderer dropped this.]

  2. Hij is kaal, met een glad gezicht, een eivormig hoofd en een onopvallend lichaam—niet erg groot .

  [He is a bald, smooth-faced man with an egg-shaped head and a nondescript body—not very big.]

  3. Hij spreekt Engels met, denk ik, een Duits accent .

  [He speaks English with, I think, a German accent.]

  4. Hij heeft geen seks. Hij neemt één foto van het lichaam nadat hij het lichaam heeft neergelegd.

  [He doesn’t have sex. He takes one photograph of the body after he has posed the body.]

  5. Hij loenst, zijn ogen bijna helemaal dichtgeknepen . Hij ziet eruit als een mol. Hij piept als hij ademhaalt. Astma misschien . . .

  [He has squinty eyes, almost totally closed. He looks like a mole. He wheezes. Asthma, maybe . . .]

  6. Hij werkt voor SAS . De Scandinavische luchtvaartmaatschappij? Hij heeft iets te maken met beveiliging .

  [He works for SAS. The Scandinavian airline? He has something to do with security.]