A Widow for One Year

by John Irving

  Rooie was pregnant when she returned to Amsterdam to assess the condition of her room on the Bergstraat. Some instinct made her hang on to the place, which was barely breaking even—and after a few necessary repairs and some serious cleaning bills, the room was probably costing her money. The Englishman wanted her to sell it. But Rooie found two ex-prostitutes, both of them Dutch, who wanted to get back into the business; by renting exclusively to them, Rooie thought she could meet the maintenance costs. “The hell with trying to make a profit,” she’d told Harry. “I just want to keep the place, in case things don’t work out in England.”

  She must have known then, when she was seven months pregnant, that things weren’t going to “work out” with Richard Smalley. She’d eventually gone into labor in London, and it had been a bad birth from the beginning. Despite an emergency C-section, the fetus was stillborn. Rooie never saw her dead daughter. It was then that Smalley had started in with the predictable recriminations. There was something wrong with Rooie, which had caused the stillbirth; and what was wrong with her had something to do with her past life as a prostitute—she must have done too much fucking.

  One day, unannounced, Rooie was back in her window on the Bergstraat; that was when Harry learned about the end of Rooie’s marriage, and her stillborn daughter. (By then, of course, Rooie’s English was pretty good.)

  The next Christmas, she’d gone again to Klosters and stayed once more at the Chesa Grischuna, but that would be her last holiday in a ski town. Although neither Richard Smalley nor his neurasthenic son was there, some word of who Rooie was must have got around. In unpredictable situations, which she couldn’t foresee, she was aware that she was being treated as an ex-prostitute—not as an ex-wife.

  She swore to Harry that she’d overheard someone on a gondola whispering the words “Smalley’s whore.” And in the Chesa—where she ate every evening alone—a small, bald man in a velvet dinner jacket with a flaming-orange ascot had propositioned her. A waiter had brought Rooie a complimentary glass of champagne from the bald man, together with a note in hand-printed English capitals.

  HOW MUCH? the note had asked. She’d sent back the champagne.

  Shortly after this final visit to Klosters, Rooie had stopped working in her window on weekends. Later still, she stopped working nights, and soon she was leaving her window in midafternoon—in time to pick her daughter up from school. That was what she told everyone.

  The other prostitutes on the Bergstraat would occasionally ask to see pictures. Naturally they understood why they’d never seen the alleged daughter in the vicinity of the Bergstraat; most prostitutes kept their work a secret from their younger children.

  The prostitute with whom Rooie shared her window room was the most curious, and Rooie had a photograph that she liked to show. The little girl in the photo was about five or six; she was happily seated on Rooie’s lap at what looked like a family dinner party. She was one of Dr. Bosman’s grandchildren, of course; only Harry Hoekstra knew that the photograph had been taken at one of the Bosmans’ Easter dinners.

  So that was the prostitute’s daughter, whose absence had never been as noticeable as it was at Rooie’s funeral. At that confused gathering, some of the prostitutes had asked Harry to remind them of the missing daughter’s name; it wasn’t a common name. Did Harry remember what it was?

  Of course he did. It was Chesa.

  And following Rooie’s funeral, at what amounted to the wake—for old Mrs. Bosman, who was paying, believed in wakes—the name of the dead daughter had been sufficiently repeated among the prostitutes so that the old widow herself approached Harry. (He was awkwardly attempting to dispose of a hard-boiled egg that he didn’t want to eat; the egg had some kind of caviar on it.) “Who’s Chesa ?” old Mrs. Bosman asked.

  Harry then told her the whole story. The story moved Mrs. Bosman to tears, but the old lady was no fool. “Of course I knew that my dear husband was visiting the prostitute,” she confided to Harry. “But the way I see it, she did me a kindness—and she did keep him from dying in the street!”

  Only a few years before her murder, Rooie Dolores had reduced her annual vacations to one warm-weather holiday in April or May. She’d spent her last Christmases with the Bosmans; there were so many grandchildren that Rooie had a lot of presents to buy. “It’s still cheaper than going skiing,” she’d told Harry. And one dark winter—it was the winter before she was killed—Rooie had asked Harry to join her on her warm-weather holiday on a fifty-fifty basis.

  “You’re the one with the travel books,” she’d teased him. “ You pick the place and I’ll go with you.” Whatever had been the charm of those divorced fathers, taking perpetual vacations with their subdued children, it had finally worn thin with her.

  Harry had imagined taking a trip with Rooie for a long time, yet her invitation both surprised and embarrassed him. The first place he’d thought of being with her was Paris. (Imagine being in Paris with a prostitute!)

  Harry had started writing in the margins of his travel books, and underlining key sentences about the appropriate hotels. One of the first hotels Harry considered staying in was the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, the same hotel where Ted had taken the photograph of Marion with Thomas’s and Timothy’s feet . But the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire was not as highly recommended as the Hôtel de l’Abbaye or the Duc de Saint-Simon. Harry had decided that he wanted to stay somewhere in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, but he believed that the choice of their hotel should be left to Rooie.

  Harry brought his Paris guidebooks, replete with his underlinings and marginalia, to Rooie’s room on the Bergstraat. He’d had to linger in the street until she finished with a customer.

  “Oh, Harry!” she’d cried. “You want to take an old whore to Paris ? April in Paris!”

  Neither of them had ever been to Paris. It would never have worked out. Harry could imagine Rooie liking Notre-Dame and the Tuileries, and the antique shops that he’d only read about; he could see her happily on his arm in the gardens of the Luxembourg. But he couldn’t quite picture her at the Louvre. After all, she lived in Amsterdam and she’d not once been to the Rijksmuseum! How could Harry have taken her to Paris?

  “Actually, I don’t think I can get away,” he hedged. “April gets busy in de Wallen .”

  “Then we’ll go in March,” Rooie told him. “We’ll go in May ! What’s it matter?”

  “I don’t think I can really do it, Rooie,” Harry had admitted to her.

  Prostitutes are familiar enough with rejection; they handle it pretty well.

  After he’d got the call that Rooie had been murdered, Harry looked around her room on the Bergstraat for the guidebooks, which Rooie hadn’t returned. They were stacked on the narrow reading table in the WC.

  He also noted that the murderer had bitten Rooie, and that the way her body had been carelessly pushed off the bed made it seem there had been nothing ritualistic about the killing. She’d most likely been strangled, but there were no thumbprint or fingerprint bruises at her throat; this pointed to her being choked with a forearm, the hoofdagent had thought.

  That was when he saw the wardrobe closet with the shoes pointed toes-out; a pair of them had been kicked out of alignment with the others, and there was a space in the middle of the row where another pair of shoes would have fit.

  Shit! There was a witness ! Harry had known then. He knew that Rooie had been one of the few prostitutes who went out of her way to do a kindness for the first-timers. He also knew the way she did it: she let the first-timers watch her with a customer, just to see how it was done. She’d hidden a lot of girls in her wardrobe closet. Harry had heard about Rooie’s method at one of the meetings for first-time prostitutes at The Red Thread. But Rooie hadn’t gone to those meetings for quite some time; Harry wasn’t even sure if The Red Thread still held meetings for first-time prostitutes.

  In the open doorway to Rooie’s window room, the sniveling girl who’d found Rooie’s body sat sobbing. Her name was Anneke Smeets. She wa
s a recovered heroin addict—at least she’d convinced Rooie that she was recovered. Anneke Smeets was not dressed for working in the window; usually she wore a leather halter top, which Harry had seen hanging in the closet.

  But in the doorway Anneke looked plain and disheveled. She wore a baggy black sweater with stretched-out elbows and jeans that were ripped in both knees. She had no makeup on, not even lipstick, and her hair was dirty and stiff. The only suggested wildness, amid everything that was plain about her, was that Anneke Smeets had a tattoo of a lightning bolt (albeit a small one) on the inside of her right wrist.

  “It appears that someone might have been watching from the wardrobe closet,” Harry began.

  Still sobbing, the girl nodded her head. “It looks like it,” she agreed.

  “Was she helping out a first-timer?” Harry asked Anneke.

  “Nobody I knew!” said the sobbing girl.

  And so Harry Hoekstra suspected—even before Ruth Cole’s eyewitness account arrived at the Warmoesstraat station—that there’d been a witness.

  “Oh, God!” Anneke suddenly cried. “Nobody picked her daughter up from school! Who’s going to tell her daughter?”

  “Somebody already picked her up,” Harry lied. “Somebody already told the daughter.”

  But he told the truth, a few days later, when his best friend among the detectives, Nico Jansen, wanted a word with Harry—in private. Harry knew what the “word” would be about.

  There were the Paris guidebooks on Jansen’s desk. Harry Hoekstra wrote his name in all his books. Nico Jansen opened one of the travel books to the part about the Hôtel Duc de Saint-Simon. Harry had written in the margin: The heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, a great location.

  “Isn’t that your handwriting, Harry?” Jansen asked him.

  “My name’s in the front of the book, Nico. Did you miss my name ?” Harry asked his friend.

  “Were you planning a trip with her?” Detective Jansen asked. Harry had been a cop for more than three decades; at last he knew how it felt to be a suspect.

  Harry explained that Rooie took a lot of trips—all Harry did was read the travel books. He’d long been in the habit of lending her his guidebooks, Harry said. She’d been accustomed to asking him where she should stay and what she should see.

  “But you didn’t have a relationship with Rooie, did you, Harry?” Nico asked. “You never actually took a trip with her, did you?”

  “No, I never did,” Harry replied.

  It was generally a good idea to tell the cops the truth. Harry hadn’t had a relationship with Rooie; he’d never taken a trip with her, either. That much was true. But the cops didn’t have to know everything . It wasn’t necessary for Nico Jansen to know that Harry had been tempted. Oh, how he’d been tempted!

  Sergeant Hoekstra Finds His Witness

  Nowadays, Sergeant Hoekstra wore his police uniform only on those occasions when the red-light district was overrun with tourists or out-of-towners. (He’d worn it to Rooie’s funeral, too.) And when it came to giving tours, Harry was the 2nd District’s cop of choice—not only because he spoke better English (and German) than any other policeman in the Warmoesstraat station but also because he was the acknowledged expert on the red-light district, and he loved to take people there.

  He’d once shown de Wallen to a group of nuns. He not infrequently showed “the little walls” to schoolchildren. The window prostitutes would calmly look the other way when they saw the children coming, but once a woman in a window had abruptly closed her curtain; later she told Harry that she’d recognized her own child among the group.

  Sergeant Hoekstra was also the 2nd District’s cop of choice when it came to talking to the media. Because false confessions were common, Harry had quickly learned never to give the exact details of a crime to the press; on the contrary, he often provided the journalists with false details—this tended to expose the crazies in a hurry. In the case of “Red” Dolores’s murder, he’d managed to draw out a couple of false confessions by telling the journalists that Rooie had been strangled after “a violent struggle.”

  The two false confessions were from men who said they’d choked Rooie to death with their hands. One of them had persuaded his wife to scratch his face and the backs of his hands; the other had convinced his girlfriend to kick him repeatedly in the shins. In both cases, the men looked as if they’d been party to “a violent struggle.”

  As for the actual method of Rooie’s murder, the detectives had wasted no time at their computers; they’d conveyed the necessary information to Interpol in Wiesbaden, Germany, whereupon they discovered that there’d been a similar slaying of a prostitute in Zurich about five years earlier.

  All Rooie had been able to do was to kick off one of her shoes. The prostitute in the area of the Langstrasse in Zurich had managed a little more resistance; she’d broken a fingernail in what must have been a brief struggle. Some fabric, presumably from the killer’s suit pants, was caught under the prostitute’s broken nail; it was a high-quality fabric, but so what?

  The most convincing connection between the Zurich murder and Rooie’s murder in Amsterdam was that in Zurich there’d also been a standing lamp with the lamp shade and the lightbulb removed but undamaged. The Zurich police hadn’t known the part about photographing the victim. The murder in Zurich hadn’t had a witness; nor had anyone mailed the Zurich police a tube of Polaroid print coater with a perfect print of the presumed killer’s right thumb.

  None of the prints taken from the prostitute’s room off the Langstrasse in Zurich had matched the Amsterdam thumbprint, however, and in Wiesbaden there was no matching thumbprint in the Interpol file, either. The second print on the tube was a clear, small print of a right index finger. It indicated that the probable witness had picked up the print coater with “her” thumb and index finger at either end. (The witness must have been a woman, everyone had decided, because the fingerprint was so much smaller than the print of the probable murderer’s thumb.)

  Another small but clear print of the witness’s right index finger had been taken from one of the shoes pointed toes-out in Rooie’s wardrobe closet. And the same right index finger had touched the inside doorknob of Rooie’s window room—doubtless when the witness had let herself out on the street, after the murderer had gone. Whoever she was, she was right-handed, and she had a glass-thin, perfectly centered scar on her right index finger.

  But Interpol had no match for the probable witness’s right index finger, either—not that Harry had expected Interpol to match that print. He was sure that his witness wasn’t a criminal. And after a week of talking to the area’s prostitutes, Harry was also sure that his witness wasn’t a prostitute. She was probably a goddamn sex-tourist!

  In a short period of time, less than a week, every prostitute on the Bergstraat had seen the likely witness as many as a half-dozen times! And Anneke Smeets had talked to her. The mystery woman had asked for Rooie one night, and Anneke—in her leather halter top, and brandishing a dildo—had told the tourist Rooie’s alleged reason for not working at night. Rooie was with her daughter, Anneke had said.

  The prostitutes on the Korsjespoortsteeg had seen the mystery woman, too. One of the younger whores told Harry that his witness was a lesbian, but the other prostitutes had disagreed; they’d been wary of the woman because they couldn’t tell what she wanted.

  As for the men who walked and walked past the window prostitutes— always looking, always horny, but never making a decision—they were called hengsten (“stallions”), and the prostitutes who’d seen Ruth Cole walking past their windows called her a female hengst . But of course there is no such thing as a female stallion, which is why the mystery woman made the prostitutes uneasy.

  One of them said to Harry: “She looked like a reporter.” (Reporters made the prostitutes very uneasy.)

  A foreign journalist? Sergeant Hoekstra had rejected the possibility. Most of the foreign journalists who came to Amsterdam with a professional interest i
n prostitution were told to talk to him .

  From the prostitutes in de Wallen, Harry discovered that the mystery woman hadn’t always been alone. There’d been a younger man with her, maybe a university student. While the witness Harry was looking for was in her thirties and had spoken only English, the boy had definitely been Dutch.

  That had answered one question for Sergeant Hoekstra: If his missing witness was an English-speaking foreigner, who had written the eyewitness account in Dutch? And some additional information shed a little light on the carefully printed document that the witness had mailed to Harry. A tattooist whom Harry regarded as a handwriting expert had looked at the meticulous lettering and concluded that the text had been copied .

  The tattooist’s name was Henk, and he did most of the lettering at the tattoo museum in the red-light district, the so-called House of Pain. (His specialty was a poem—any poem you wanted—tattooed in the shape of a woman’s body.) According to him, the witness’s pen had paused too long on every letter; only someone copying a foreign language would have written each letter so slowly. “Who has to work this hard not to make a spelling mistake?” Henk had asked Harry. “ Someone who doesn’t know the language—that’s who.”

  The prostitutes in de Wallen did not think Harry’s witness and the Dutch boy had been a sexual couple. “It was not just the age difference,” said the Thai prostitute whom Ruth and Wim had visited on the Barndesteeg. “I could tell they’d never had sex with each other.”

  “Maybe they were working up to it,” Harry had suggested. “Maybe they were going to have sex.”