by John Irving
“I didn’t think so,” the Thai prostitute said. “They couldn’t even tell me what they wanted. They just wanted to watch, but they didn’t even know what they wanted to watch!”
The other Thai prostitute who remembered the unusual couple was the old sadist with a reputation for terrorizing her clients. “The Dutch boy had a beeeg one,” she declared. “He really wanted to do it. But his mommy wouldn’t let him.”
“That boy was ready to fuck anything, except me,” the transvestite from Ecuador told Harry. “The woman was merely curious. She wasn’t going to have sex. She just wanted to know about it.”
If the Dutch boy had been with the mystery woman in Rooie’s closet, Harry was sure the two of them would have tried to stop the killing. And, almost from the beginning, Harry had doubted that the witness was a first-time prostitute; unless she’d been an “illegal,” even a first-timer would have gone to the police. And if she’d been an “ illegal,” who would she have found to write her eyewitness account in such perfect Dutch?
A Jamaican prostitute on the Slapersteeg also remembered Ruth Cole. “She was small. She said she was lost,” the Jamaican told Harry. “I took her out of the alley by her arm. I was surprised she had such a strong right arm.”
That was when Sergeant Hoekstra realized that he had seen the mystery woman himself ! He suddenly recalled the woman he’d followed through de Wallen one early morning; she’d had an athletic way of walking. She was small, but she looked strong. She certainly hadn’t looked “lost.” She’d looked purposeful, and Harry had followed her not only because she seemed out of place, but also because she was strikingly attractive. (Not to mention vaguely familar! It’s a wonder Harry failed to recognize her from her book-jacket photos.) When he became aware that she’d noticed him following her, Harry had gone back to the Warmoesstraat station.
He’d spoken to the two fat prostitutes from Ghana last. The unknown tourist had paused on the Stoofsteeg long enough to ask the prostitutes where they were from; in turn they’d asked Ruth Cole where she was from, and she’d told them she was from the United States. (What Harry had learned from the prostitutes from Ghana— namely, that his witness was an American—would turn out to be a more important bit of information than he’d first thought.)
Nico Jansen had come to a dead end on his computer. The Polaroid print coater with the azure-blue cap could have been purchased in either Amsterdam or Zurich. That (according to the mystery witness) the murderer looked like a mole, that he wheezed, that he had squinty eyes (“almost totally closed”) . . . of what use was this without a fingerprint in Zurich that matched the thumbprint on the tube of Polaroid print coater in Amsterdam?
And that the witness had thought the murderer worked for SAS, the Scandinavian airline, proved to be a false lead. Despite the examination of the prints of every male employee working in security for SAS, a matching thumbprint could not be found.
Only because Harry Hoekstra knew English so well, and German a little, was the murderer ever caught. It turned out that the most important piece of information in the eyewitness’s account was the observation that the murderer spoke English with what might have been a German -sounding accent.
It was the day after Nico Jansen told Harry that the detectives had come to a dead end in regard to Rooie’s murder. Harry had gone back to the eyewitness account again. Suddenly he saw what he’d been missing. If the murderer’s first language was German, SAS might not be SAS—in the German alphabet, as in the Dutch, a is pronounced as ah . In the German alphabet, e is pronounced as ay . And to an American witness, S E S would have sounded like S A S. The murderer had nothing to do with the Scandinavian airline. The murderer had something to do with security for a company called SES!
Harry didn’t need Nico Jansen’s computer to find out what SES was. The International Chamber of Commerce was happy to help Harry find a company with those initials in a German-speaking city, and in less than ten minutes Harry had identified the murderer’s employer. The venerable Schweizer Elektronik- und Sicherheitssysteme (SES) was located in Zurich; the company designed and installed security alarms for banks and museums all over Europe.
It gave Harry some small pleasure to find Nico Jansen in the detectives’ room, where the computers always bathed the faces of the detectives in an unnatural light and bombarded them with unnatural sounds. “I’ve got something for you to feed into your computer, Nico,” Harry had said. “If you want me to talk to your colleague in Zurich, my German’s better than yours.”
The detective in Zurich was named Ernst Hecht; he was getting ready to retire. He’d presumed he would never find out who had killed a Brazilian prostitute in the area of the Langstrasse almost six years before. But the Schweizer Elektronik- und Sicherheitssysteme was a small but important security-alarm company; for insurance reasons, every employee of the company who’d ever designed or installed a security system for a bank or a museum had been fingerprinted.
The thumb that matched the thumbprint on the Polaroid print coater belonged to a former employee, a security-alarm engineer named Urs Messerli. Messerli had been in Amsterdam in the fall of 1990 to prepare an estimate for the expense of a fire- and motion-detection system in an art museum. He’d routinely traveled with an old Polaroid camera that used 4X5 Land film, type 55, whose black-and-white prints were preferred by all the engineers at SES. They were large-format prints, with negatives. Messerli had taken over six dozen photographs of the interior of the art museum in Amsterdam in order to know how many fire- and motion-detection devices would be needed and exactly where they should be installed.
Urs Messerli was no longer working for SES because he was very ill. He was hospitalized, presumed to be dying of a lung infection related to his emphysema, which he’d had for fifteen years. (Harry Hoekstra thought that someone suffering from emphysema probably sounded a lot like an asthmatic.)
The Universit‰tsspital in Zurich was famous for its care of emphysema patients. Ernst Hecht and Harry didn’t have to worry about Urs Messerli slipping away before they could talk to him, not unless Messerli slipped away into death; the patient was on oxygen most of the time.
And Messerli suffered from another, more recent misfortune. His wife of some thirty years was divorcing him. While he lay dying, literally gasping for breath, Messerli’s wife was also insisting that she not be written out of her husband’s will. She’d discovered several photographs of naked women in his home-office. Shortly after he’d been hospitalized, he’d asked her to look for some important papers— namely, a codicil to his will. Frau Messerli had come upon the photographs quite innocently.
By the time Harry flew to Zurich, Frau Messerli was still innocent of the most important content of those photographs of naked women, which she’d given to her divorce lawyer. Neither she nor her lawyer realized that they were photographs of prostitutes who were dead; that the women were naked was all that concerned them.
Harry had no difficulty identifying Rooie’s photograph in Ernst Hecht’s office; and Hecht had easily recognized the murdered Brazilian prostitute from the area of the Langstrasse. What had surprised both policemen was that there were a half-dozen other photographs.
The Schweizer Elektronik- und Sicherheitssysteme company had sent Urs Messerli all over Europe; he’d killed prostitutes in Frankfurt and in Brussels, in Hamburg and The Hague, in Vienna and Antwerp. He hadn’t always killed them in the same efficient way, nor had he always lit his subjects with the same floodlight from his big leather briefcase, but he had always posed his dead girls in a similar fashion: lying on their sides with their eyes closed, and with their knees drawn up to their chests in a modest, little-girlish posture, which was why Messerli’s wife (and his wife’s lawyer) had never suspected that the naked women were dead .
“You must congratulate your witness,” Ernst Hecht had told Harry. They were en route to the Universit‰tsspital to see Urs Messerli before he died—Messerli had already confessed.
“Oh, I will thank her,” Harry had said. “When
I find her.”
Urs Messerli’s English was exactly as the mystery-woman witness had described it: Messerli spoke English well, but with a German-sounding accent. Harry chose to speak to Messerli in English—especially since Ernst Hecht’s English was pretty good, too.
“In Amsterdam, on the Bergstraat . . .” Harry had begun. “She had auburn hair and a good figure for a woman her age, but fairly small breasts . . .”
“Yes, yes—I know!” Urs Messerli had interrupted him.
A nurse had to pull off the oxygen mask in order for Messerli to be able to speak; then he would gasp—he made a sucking sound—before the nurse covered his mouth and nose with the mask again.
His grayness was far in advance of how gray he’d been when Ruth Cole had seen him and likened him to a mole; now his skin resembled ash. The enlarged air spaces in his lungs made a sound of their own, which was separate from his ragged breathing; it was as if you could hear the damaged tissue that lined the walls of the air spaces breaking away.
“You had a witness in Amsterdam,” Harry told the murderer. “I don’t suppose you got a look at her.”
For once, the vestigial-like eyes opened wider—like a mole discovering sight. The nurse removed the oxygen mask again. “Yes, yes—I heard her! Someone was there!” Urs Messerli gasped. “She made a small sound. I almost heard her.” A paroxysm of coughing overcame him. The nurse once more had to cover his mouth and nose with the mask.
“She was in the wardrobe closet,” Harry told Messerli. “All the shoes had been turned—they were pointed toes-out—and she was standing among the shoes. You probably could have seen her ankles, if you’d looked.”
Urs Messerli was inexpressibly saddened by this news, as if he would have enjoyed at least meeting the witness—if not killing her.
This happened in April ’91, six months after Rooie’s murder—one year after Harry Hoekstra had almost taken Dolores de Ruiter to Paris. That night in Zurich, Harry wished he had taken Rooie to Paris. He didn’t have to spend the night in Zurich; he could have flown back to Amsterdam at the end of that same day, but for once he wanted to do something that he’d only read about in a travel book.
He declined Ernst Hecht’s invitation to dinner. Harry wanted to be alone. Thinking of Rooie, he was not entirely alone. He’d even chosen a hotel that he thought Rooie would have liked. Although it was not the most expensive hotel in Zurich, it was too expensive for a cop. But Harry had traveled so little that he’d saved a fair amount of money. He didn’t expect the 2nd District to pay for his room at the Hotel Zum Storchen, not even for one night, yet that was where he wanted to stay. It was a charmingly romantic hotel on the banks of the Limmat, and Harry chose a room that looked across the river at the floodlit Rathaus.
Harry took himself to dinner at the Kronenhalle, across the Limmat. Thomas Mann had eaten there—and James Joyce. There were two dining rooms with original paintings by Klee, Chagall, Matisse, Miró, Picasso. Rooie wouldn’t have cared, but she would have liked the B¸ndnerfleisch and the shredded calf ’s liver with Rösti .
Harry usually drank nothing stronger than beer, but that night at the Kronenhalle he had four beers and a whole bottle of red wine by himself. He was drunk when he returned to his hotel room. He fell asleep with his shoes on, and only the phone call from Nico Jansen forced him to wake up and properly undress for bed.
“Tell me about it,” Jansen said. “It’s finished, right?”
“I’m drunk, Nico,” Harry replied. “I was asleep.”
“Tell me about it, anyway,” Nico Jansen said. “The bastard killed eight hookers—each one in a different city, right?”
“That’s right. He’ll be dead in a couple of weeks—his doctor told me,” Harry said. “He has a lung infection. He’s had emphysema for fifteen years. It sounds like asthma, I guess.”
“You seem cheerful,” Jansen said.
“I’m drunk,” Harry repeated.
“You should be a happy drunk, Harry,” Nico told him. “It’s finished, right?”
“All but the witness,” Harry Hoekstra said.
“You and your witness,” Jansen said. “Let her go. We don’t need her anymore.”
“But I saw her,” Harry said. He didn’t realize until he said it, but it was because he’d seen her that he couldn’t get her out of his head. What had she been doing ? She’d been a better witness than she probably knew, Harry thought. But all he said to Nico Jansen was: “I just want to congratulate her.”
“Jesus, you are drunk!” Jansen told him.
Harry tried to read in bed, but he was too drunk to comprehend what he was reading. The novel, which had been halfway-decent airplane reading, was too challenging to read when he’d been drinking. It was the new novel by Alice Somerset, her fourth. It would be the last of her Margaret McDermid detective novels—the title was McDermid, Retired .
Notwithstanding his usual disdain for crime fiction, Harry Hoekstra was a big fan of the elderly Canadian author. (While Eddie O’Hare would never have thought of seventy-two as “elderly,” that’s how old Alice Somerset, alias Marion Cole, was in April ’91.)
Harry liked the so-called Margaret McDermid mysteries because he thought that the Missing Persons detective possessed a convincingly accurate amount of melancholy for a cop. Also, Alice Somerset’s novels weren’t really “mysteries”; they were psychological investigations into the mind of a lonely policewoman. For Harry, the novels believably demonstrated the effect of those missing persons on Sergeant McDermid—meaning, of course, those missing persons whom the detective could never find.
Although, at the time, Harry was at least four and a half years away from retiring, it didn’t help him to read about a policewoman who had retired—especially since the point of the novel was that, even after she’d retired, Sergeant McDermid went on thinking like a cop.
She becomes a prisoner of those photographs of the forever-missing American boys. She can’t bring herself to destroy the photos, even though she knows the boys will never be found. “One day she would find the courage to destroy them, she hoped.” (That was the end of the novel.)
She hoped ? Harry thought. That’s it ? She just hoped ? Shit! What kind of an ending was that? Thoroughly depressed and still awake, Harry looked at the author photo. He was irritated that you could never get a good idea of what Alice Somerset looked like. There was the matter of her face, turned away; and she always wore a hat. The hat really pissed Harry off. A nom de plume was one thing, but what was she—a criminal?
And because Harry couldn’t get a good look at Alice Somerset’s face, her hidden face reminded him of his missing witness. He’d not got a good look at her face, either. Naturally he’d noticed her breasts, and there’d been an attitude of alertness to her whole body; but what had also impressed him was the way she’d seemed to study everything. That was part of the reason he’d been drawn to study her . Harry realized that it wasn’t only because she was the witness that he wanted to see her again; whoever she was, she was a woman he wanted to meet.
That April ’91, when the newspapers in Amsterdam carried the story of the capture of the prostitute-killer, there was something anticlimactic about the murderer being deathly ill. Urs Messerli would never leave the Universit‰tsspital—he would die that same month. A serial killer of as many as eight prostitutes should have generated more of a sensation, but the story was headline news for less than a week; by the end of May, it was gone from the news altogether.
Maarten Schouten, Ruth Cole’s Dutch publisher, was attending the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in Italy when the story broke. (It was not news in Italy because none of the murdered prostitutes had been Italian.) And from Bologna, every year, Maarten traveled to New York; now that their boys were grown up, Sylvia went with him to both places. And because Maarten and Sylvia missed the news about finding Rooie’s killer, Ruth missed hearing about it, too. She would go on thinking that the moleman had got away with it—that he was still out there .
It was
four and a half years later, in the fall of 1995, when Harry Hoekstra, who was pushing fifty-eight and almost retired, saw the new Ruth Cole novel in the window of that bookshop on the Spui, the Athenaeum. He immediately bought it.
“It’s about time she wrote another novel,” Sergeant Hoekstra said to the salesgirl.
All the booksellers in the Athenaeum knew Harry. His fondness for Ruth Cole’s novels was nearly as familiar to them as the gossip that Sergeant Hoekstra had met more of his girlfriends in the Athenaeum, while browsing for books, than anywhere else. The booksellers at the Athenaeum liked to tease him. While they didn’t doubt his fondness for reading travel books and novels, they also enjoyed telling the sergeant that they suspected he came to their bookshop not only to read .
My Last Bad Boyfriend, which Harry bought in English, had a godawful title in Dutch— Mijn laatste slechte vriend. The salesgirl who waited on Harry, and who was quite a knowledgeable young bookseller, explained to him the possible reasons why Ruth Cole had needed five years to write what didn’t appear to be a very long book. “It’s her first novel in the first-person voice,” the young bookseller began. “And I understand she had a baby a few years ago.”
“I didn’t know she was married,” Harry said, looking more closely at Ruth’s jacket photo. She didn’t look married, Harry thought.
“Then her husband died, about a year ago,” the bookseller said.
So Ruth Cole was a widow, Sergeant Hoekstra supposed. He studied the author photo. Yes, she looked more like a widow than she looked married. There was something sad in one of her eyes, or else it was some kind of flaw. She stared warily at the camera, as if her anxiety were an even more permanent part of her than her grief.
And to think that Ruth Cole’s previous novel was about a widow— and now she is one! Sergeant Hoekstra thought.
The trouble with author photos, Harry mused, was that they were always so posed. And the authors never seemed to know what to do with their hands. There were a lot of clasped hands and folded arms and hands in pockets; there were hands on chins and hands in the hair. They should just keep their hands by their sides or in their laps, Harry believed.