by John Irving
Natasja Frederiks said that Harry’s taste in novels was “escapist,” but Harry adamantly believed it was Natasja who was escaping the world with her idiotic nonfiction of idle wishfulness about how to change it!
Among contemporary novelists, Sergeant Hoekstra’s favorite was Ruth Cole. Natasja and Harry had argued about Ruth Cole more than about any other author. The lawyer who’d volunteered her services to The Red Thread because she said she “identified” with prostitutes asserted that Ruth Cole’s stories were “too bizarre”; the lawyer who was a champion of rights for prostitutes, but who was not allowed to speak at any of the organization’s meetings, claimed that the plots of Ruth Cole’s novels were “too unlikely.” What’s more, Natasja didn’t like plot. The real world (which she so fervently sought to change) was without a discernible plot of its own, Natasja said.
Natasja, who (like Harry) would one day quit volunteering for The Red Thread because the prostitutes’ organization represented fewer than a twentieth of the active prostitutes in the city of Amsterdam, accused Ruth Cole of being “too unrealistic” for her tastes. (At the time both Harry and Natasja would quit their volunteer work for The Red Thread, the Thursday-afternoon meetings for first-time prostitutes drew less than five percent of the first-time prostitutes working in de Wallen .)
“Ruth Cole is more realistic than you are,” Harry had told Natasja.
They’d broken up because Natasja said Harry lacked ambition. He didn’t even want to be a detective—he was content to be “just” a cop on the beat. It was true that Harry needed to be on the streets. If he wasn’t out there walking, in his real office, he didn’t feel like a policeman at all.
On the same floor where Harry’s official office was, the detectives had their own office; it was full of computers, at which they spent too much time. Harry’s best friend among the detectives was Nico Jansen. Nico liked to tease Harry that the last murder of a prostitute in Amsterdam, which was the murder of Dolores de Ruiter in her window room on the Bergstraat, had been solved by his computer in the detectives’ computer room, but Harry knew better.
Harry knew it was the mystery witness who’d really solved the prostitute’s murder; it had been Harry’s analysis of the eyewitness account, which, after all, had been addressed to him, that had eventually told Nico Jansen what to look for in his overpraised computer.
But theirs was a friendly argument. The case was solved—that was the main thing, Nico said. However, it was the witness who still interested Harry, and he didn’t like it that his witness had slipped away. It was all the more maddening to him because he was absolutely certain that he’d seen her—he’d actually seen her—and she’d still got away!
The middle drawer of Sergeant Hoekstra’s desk heartened him; there was nothing in it that he needed to throw away. There were a dozen old pens and a few keys that Harry didn’t recognize, but his replacement might derive some satisfying curiosity from speculating what the keys were for . There was also a combination bottle opener and corkscrew— even in a police station, one could never have enough of those —and there was a teaspoon (not too clean, but one could always clean it). You never knew when you might get sick and need a teaspoon to take your medicine, Harry thought.
He was about to close the drawer, leaving the contents undisturbed, when an item of even more remarkable usefulness caught his eye. It was the broken handle to the desk’s bottommost drawer, and no one but Harry knew what a truly useful little tool it was. It fit perfectly between the treads of Harry’s running shoes; he used it to scrape the dogshit off his soles, if and when he stepped in any. However, Harry’s replacement would not necessarily realize the broken handle’s value.
Using one of the pens, Harry wrote a note, which he put in the middle drawer before closing it. DON’T FIX BOTTOMMOST DRAWER, BUT SAVE BROKEN HANDLE. EXCELLENT FOR GETTING DOGSHIT OFF SHOES. HARRY HOEKSTRA.
Thus encouraged, Harry took the three side drawers of the desk in order, starting at the top. In the first of them was a speech he’d written but had never delivered to the members of The Red Thread organization. It concerned the matter of underage prostitutes. Harry had reluctantly assented to the position taken by the prostitutes’ organization that the legal age for prostitutes be lowered from eighteen to sixteen.
“No one likes the idea of minors working in prostitution,” Harry’s speech had begun, “but I like less the idea of minors working in dangerous places. Minors are going to be prostitutes, anyway. Many brothel owners won’t care if their prostitutes are only sixteen-year-olds. What’s important is that the sixteen-year-olds can make use of the same social services and health-care facilities that the older prostitutes use, without being afraid that they will be turned over to the police.”
It was not cowardice that had prevented Harry from giving his speech; Harry had contradicted the “official” police position before. It was that he hated the whole idea of allowing sixteen-year-olds to be prostitutes only because you couldn’t stop them from being prostitutes. On the issue of accepting the real world and making an educated guess about how to make it marginally safer, even a social realist like Harry Hoekstra would have admitted that certain subjects depressed him.
He had not given the speech because, in the long run, it would have been of no practical help to the underage prostitutes—just as the Thursday-afternoon meetings for first-time prostitutes were of no practical help to the vast majority of them . They didn’t or wouldn’t attend the meetings; in all likelihood, they didn’t know that the meetings existed —or if they had known, they wouldn’t have cared.
But perhaps the speech would be of some practical use to the next cop who sat at his desk, Harry thought, and so he left the speech where it was.
In regard to the middle of the three side drawers, Harry was at first alarmed to see that it was empty. He stared into the drawer with the dismay of a man who’d been robbed in a police station; then he recalled that the drawer had been empty for as long as he could remember. The desk itself was a testimony to how little Sergeant Hoekstra had used it! In truth, the alleged “task” of cleaning it out was entirely focused on the unfinished business that—for five years now—Harry had faithfully kept in the bottommost drawer. In his view, it was the only police business that stood between him and his retirement.
Since the handle to the bottommost drawer had broken off and become Harry’s tool of choice for removing dogshit from his shoes, he now had to pry the drawer open with his pocketknife. The file on the witness to the murder of Rooie Dolores was disappointingly thin, which belied how often and how closely Sergeant Hoekstra had read and reread it.
Harry appreciated a complicated plot, but he had a stodgy preference for chronological stories. It was ass-backward storytelling to find the murderer before you found the witness. In a proper story, you found the witness first.
Ruth Cole had more than a policeman searching for her. She had an old-fashioned reader on her case.
The Prostitute’s Daughter
Rooie had started as a window prostitute in de Wallen during Harry’s first year as a street cop in the red-light district. She was five years younger than he was, although he’d suspected her of lying about her age. In her first window room, on the Oudekennissteeg—the same small street where Vratna would later hang herself—Dolores de Ruiter had looked younger than eighteen. But that was how old she was. She’d been telling the truth. Harry Hoekstra had been twenty-three.
In Harry’s opinion, “Red” Dolores had generally not told the truth, or she’d told mostly half-truths.
On her busiest days, Rooie had worked in her window room for ten or twelve hours straight, during which time she’d accommodated as many as fifteen clients. She made enough money to buy a ground-floor room on the Bergstraat, which she rented part-time to another prostitute. By then she’d lightened her workload to only three days a week, five hours a day, and she could still afford two vacations a year. She usually spent Christmas at some ski resort in the Alps, and every April
or May she went somewhere warm. She’d once been in Rome for Easter. She’d been to Florence, too—and to Spain, and Portugal, and the south of France.
Rooie had a habit of asking Harry Hoekstra where she should go. After all, he’d read those countless travel books. Although Harry had never been to any of the places Rooie wanted to go, he’d researched all the hotels; Harry knew that Rooie preferred to stay in “moderately expensive” surroundings. He also knew that, while her warm-weather holidays were important to her, Rooie took greater pleasure from the ski resorts at Christmastime; and even though she would take a few private ski lessons every winter, she never got beyond the beginner level. When she’d finished with the lessons, she would ski only half-days by herself—and only until she met someone. Rooie always met someone.
She’d told Harry it was fun to meet men who didn’t know she was a prostitute. Occasionally they were well-off young men who skied hard and partied harder; more often they were quiet, even somber men who were no better than intermediate skiers. Her particular fondness was for divorced fathers who got to spend only every other Christmas with their children. (Generally speaking, the fathers with sons were easier to seduce than the fathers with daughters.)
It always gave Rooie a pang to see a man and a child in a restaurant together. They were often not talking, or their conversation was awkward—usually about the skiing or the food. She could detect in the fathers’ faces a kind of loneliness that was different from but similar to the loneliness in the faces of her colleagues on the Bergstraat.
And a romance with a father who was traveling with his child was always delicate and secretive. For someone who didn’t have many real romances in her life, Rooie believed that delicacy and secrecy were enhancing to sexual tension; also, there was nothing quite like the carefulness required when one had to take into consideration the feelings of a child.
“Aren’t you afraid that these guys will want to come see you in Amsterdam?” Harry had asked. (She’d been to Zermatt that year.) But only once had someone insisted on coming to Amsterdam. Usually she’d managed to discourage it.
“What do you tell them you do ?” Harry had asked her another time. (Rooie had just returned from Pontresina, where she’d met a man who was staying with his son at Badrutt’s Palace in St. Moritz.)
“Red” Dolores always told the fathers a comfortable half-truth. “I make a modestly good living from prostitution,” Rooie would begin, watching the shock settle in. “Oh, I don’t mean I’m a prostitute!” she then would say. “I’m just an impractical landlady who rents to prostitutes. . . .”
If pressed, she would elaborate on the lie. Her father, a urologist, had died; she’d converted his office to a prostitute’s window room. Renting to prostitutes, though less profitable, was “more colorful” than renting office space to doctors.
She loved to tell Harry Hoekstra the stories she’d made up. If Harry had been, at best, a vicarious traveler, he had also vicariously enjoyed Rooie’s little romances. And he knew why there was a urologist in Rooie’s story.
An actual urologist had been Rooie’s constant admirer, and her most regular client, well into his eighties—before dropping dead in the prostitute’s room on the Bergstraat one Sunday afternoon. He’d been such an unfailing sweetheart that he often forgot to have the sex he’d paid for. Rooie had been very fond of the dear old man, Dr. Bosman, who swore to her that he loved his wife, his children, and his innumerable grandchildren—the family photos of whom he showed to Rooie with unflagging pride.
The day he died, he sat fully clothed in the blow-job chair, complaining that he’d eaten too much for lunch—even for a Sunday. He asked Rooie to fix him a bicarbonate of soda, for which he confessed to having an even greater need (at the moment) than he had for what he called her “inestimable physical affections.”
Rooie was forever grateful that her back was turned to him when he expired in the chair. After she’d fixed the sodium bicarbonate, she turned to face him, but old Dr. Bosman was dead.
Rooie’s penchant for half-truths had betrayed her then. She’d called Harry Hoekstra and told him that an old man was dead in her window room, but that at least she’d saved him from dying in the street. She’d seen him looking decidedly unwell, half-staggering on the Bergstraat, and she’d brought him into her room and sat him down in a comfortable chair, where he’d begged her for a bicarbonate of soda.
“ ‘Tell my wife I love her!’ were the old man’s last words,” Rooie had informed Harry. She’d not told Harry that the dead urologist had been her oldest and most regular client; she’d genuinely wanted to spare Dr. Bosman’s family the knowledge that their beloved patriarch had died with his long-standing whore. But Harry had figured it out.
There was something about how peaceful Dr. Bosman looked in “Red” Dolores’s blow-job chair—that, and how noticeably upset Rooie had been. In her own way, she’d loved the old urologist.
“How long had he been seeing you?” Harry immediately asked her. Rooie burst into tears.
“He was always so nice to me!” Rooie had cried. “No one was ever as nice to me. Not even you, Harry.”
Harry had helped Rooie work on her story. It was basically the lie she’d first told him, but Harry helped her get the details right. Exactly where on the Bergstraat had Rooie first noticed that the old doctor was “half-staggering,” as she’d put it; exactly how had she got him to come inside her room? And didn’t she have to help him to the chair? And when the dying urologist had asked the prostitute to tell his wife that he loved her, had his voice been strained? Was his breathing restricted? Had he been in any obvious pain ? Surely Dr. Bosman’s wife would want to know.
The widow Bosman had been so grateful to Rooie Dolores that the merciful prostitute had been invited to the old urologist’s memorial service. Everyone in Dr. Bosman’s family had spoken to Rooie of their deep gratitude to her. Over time, the Bosmans had made the prostitute a virtual member of their family. They developed the habit of inviting Rooie to their Christmas and Easter dinners, and to other family gatherings— weddings, anniversaries.
Harry Hoekstra had often reflected that Rooie’s half-truth about Dr. Bosman was probably the best lie he’d ever been associated with. “How was your trip?” Harry would always ask the prostitute, whenever she’d been away. But the rest of the time he asked her: “How are the Bosmans?”
And when Dolores de Ruiter had been murdered in her window room, Harry had notified the Bosmans straightaway; there was no one else he needed to inform. Harry also trusted that the Bosmans would bury her; in fact, Mrs. Bosman organized and paid for the prostitute’s funeral. Quite a sizable representation of the Bosman family was in attendance, together with a scattering of policemen (Harry among them) and a similarly small number of women from The Red Thread. Harry’s ex-girlfriend Natasja Frederiks was there, but by far the most impressive turnout came from Rooie’s other family—namely, the prostitutes, who’d attended in droves. Rooie had been popular among her colleagues.
Dolores de Ruiter had lived a life of half-truths. And what was not the best of her lies—indeed, what Harry thought of as one of the most painful lies he’d ever been associated with—became evident at the funeral. One after another, the prostitutes who’d known Rooie took Harry aside to ask him the same question.
“Where’s the daughter?” Or, looking over the multitude of old Dr. Bosman’s grandchildren, they would ask: “Which one is she? Isn’t the daughter here?”
“Rooie’s daughter is dead,” Harry had to tell them. “In fact, she’s been dead for quite a number of years.” In truth, only Harry knew, the prostitute’s daughter had died before she was born. But that had been Rooie’s well-kept secret.
Harry had first heard of Rooie’s Englishman after the prostitute returned from a ski holiday in Klosters. On Harry’s advice, she’d stayed at the Chesa Grischuna, where she’d met an Englishman named Richard Smalley. Smalley was divorced and spending Christmas with his six-year-old son, a neurasthenic wreck of
a boy whose perpetual nervousness and exhaustion Smalley blamed on the boy’s overprotective mother. Rooie had been touched by the two of them. The boy clung to his father, and he slept so fitfully that it had been impossible for Richard Smalley and Rooie to have sex. They’d managed “some stolen kisses,” as Rooie had told Harry—“and some pretty intense fondling.”
She’d had all she could do to keep Smalley from coming to Amsterdam to see her in the ensuing year. The next Christmas, it was the ex-wife’s turn with the neurasthenic son. Richard Smalley returned to Klosters alone. Over the course of the year, in letters and in phone calls, he’d persuaded Rooie to join him for Christmas at the Chesa—a dangerous precedent, Harry had warned Rooie. (It was the first time she’d spent a second Christmas at the same ski resort.)
She and Smalley had fallen in love, the prostitute informed Harry upon her return to Amsterdam. Richard Smalley wanted to marry her; he wanted Rooie to have his child.
“But does the Englishman know you’re a prostitute?” Harry had asked. It turned out that Rooie had told Richard Smalley she was an ex prostitute; she’d come halfway to the truth, which she hoped would be far enough.
That winter she rented her window room on the Bergstraat to two more girls; with three girls paying her rent for the room, Rooie could almost match what she’d earned as a prostitute. It would at least be enough for her to live on until she married Smalley—and more than enough “supplementary income” after she was married.
But when she married (and moved in with) Smalley, in London, Rooie became an absentee landlady to three window prostitutes in Amsterdam; while Rooie had been careful not to rent to drug addicts, she couldn’t oversee how the girls were treating her old place on the Bergstraat. Harry had tried to keep an eye on the room, but Rooie’s tenants took liberties; soon one of the girls was subletting to a fourth prostitute, and quickly there was a fifth—one of them was a drug addict. Then one of Rooie’s original tenants left; she’d skipped two months’ rent before Rooie even knew she was gone.