The Corpse on the Dike

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  THE

  CORPSE ON

  THE DIKE

  Also by Janwillem van de Wetering

  FICTION

  The Grijpstra-de Gier series

  Outsider in Amsterdam The Streetbird

  Tumbleweed Rattle-Rat

  Death of a Hawker Hard Rain

  The Japanese Corpse The Sergeant’s Cat

  The Blond Baboon (short stories)

  The Maine Massacre Just a Corpse

  The Mind Murders at Twilight

  Other:

  Inspector Saito’s Small Satori

  The Butterfly Hunter

  Bliss and Bluster

  NONFICTION

  The Empty Mirror

  A Glimpse of Nothingness

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  Hugh Pine

  Hugh Pine and the Good Place

  Hugh Pine in Brooklyn

  Little Owl

  for my friend Austin Olney

  Copyright © 1976 by Janwillem van de Wetering

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Van de Wetering, Janwillem. 1931-2008

  [Gelaarsde kater. English]

  The Corpse on the Dike / Janwillem van de Wetering.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-56947-049-7

  eISBN 978-1-56947-830-1

  1. Police—Netherlands—Amsterdam—Fiction. I. Title.

  PT5881.32.A5G413 1995

  8393’1364—dc20 95-24540

  CIP

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  About the Author

  1

  THE LATE SUMMER EVENING WAS HOT AND HEAVY. DARK clouds had packed together until they covered the sky and the thick light seemed to distort the scene around the two lone fishermen in their small boat on the river. There had been some wind earlier on but now the water around the flat-bottomed dinghy hardly showed a ripple. The fish must have joined the general stillness of their environment, for Sergeant de Gier’s float, standing lonely and defiant, sparkling white against the dark gray of the water, looked as if it were stuck in glue.

  “If this is fishing,” de Gier said, “it is even more boring than I’d thought it would be.”

  Adjutant-Detective Grijpstra turned his heavy head and pouted his lips.

  “This is fishing, isn’t it?” de Gier asked.

  Grijpstra nodded.

  “And there are fish here?”

  Grijpstra nodded again.

  De Gier studied his float. It wasn’t in the same place. It had moved. But how much had it moved? An inch? Or half an inch? He closed one eye. The float had been in line with the trunk of an old chestnut tree ashore and now it wasn’t quite in line anymore, so it had moved. Something had happened, for the first time in more than an hour something had happened. His float had moved.

  But he didn’t really mind. De Gier, in spite of a reputation for efficiency and go-getting, which he had built up during ten years of crime investigation for the Amsterdam Municipal Police, wasn’t a highly motivated man. He had worked out, before he stepped into the dinghy that evening, that they wouldn’t spend more than two hours on the water. In order to come to that conclusion he had applied logic. They were there for a purpose: to catch an escaped prisoner. The facts he had been supplied with were simple enough. The prisoner, or rather the ex-prisoner, was supposed to be in one of the twelve little ramshackle houses that were leaning crazily against the dike their boat was now facing. If they could see the houses, the occupants of the houses, including the ex-prisoner, could see them. Whoever would be watching them from the windows of the little houses would think they were fishermen. But fishermen fish by daylight. In another hour it would be dark. It would be funny for fishermen to try to fish in the dark and the ex-prisoner would be a little suspicious. So, de Gier was thinking, if nothing happened out there he and Grijpstra would be rowing back. They would moor the dinghy and go home—Grijpstra to watch TV in his little house on the Lijnbaansgracht in the old city of Amsterdam and he, de Gier, to his small apartment in the suburbs to water the flower boxes on his balcony and to feed Oliver, the Siamese cat who would be rolling on the floor as soon as he heard the key in the lock, expecting to be picked up and fussed over. De Gier was looking forward to going home. He liked his flower boxes; his newly planted dark orange asters were doing well lately. He loved his cat Oliver—even if the poor neurotic animal was somewhat impossible—and he didn’t like fishing.

  What if I catch something? he was thinking. He could see himself trying to pull the hook out of the mouth of a slimy jumping fish and shuddered. He didn’t want to hurt a fish. He shouldn’t have allowed Grijpstra to bait his hook. Perhaps a fish was approaching the bait right now, his stupid mouth wide open, ready to swallow the sharp curel steel. A fish ought to be caught with a net, in sparkling transparent cool water, off the shore of an island in the tropics. Palm trees. Nut-brown girls dancing around in short aprons made of banana leaves. Birds of paradise fluttering above the undergrowth. De Gier was smiling to himself.

  Grijpstra was also smiling. His line of thought had been similar to de Gier’s at first but Grijpstra had dreamed himself into actually catching a fish, a big fish, a pike, a big whopper of a pike. He knew mere were pike in the river; he had seen a big stuffed one above the counter of a pub on the dike. He had been told the stuffed corpse was only a year old. Why shouldn’t he catch a pike now? First catch the pike, then catch the ex-prisoner, and show the pike to the other detectives? What’s wrong with success? He was visualizing the jealous grin of surprise on Adjutant Geurts’s face. Geurts was an ardent fisherman himself. Grijpstra always enjoyed annoying Adjutant Geurts.

  “The light is going,” de Gier whispered. The colleagues will have to hurry out there or it’ll be over for today.”

  Grijpstra grunted. He suddenly changed his mind. He didn’t want to catch the ex-prisoner anymore. He was enjoying himself on the water. Why did they have to bother the unfortunate man? But the man had to be caught, of course. The man had escaped from jail and had, of his own free will, a will that had been suspended by the authorities and that shouldn’t be free, interrupted a stretch of three years which an elderly and well-meaning judge, after much deliberation, had imposed because of a combination of broken regulations—regulations created by the state to protect its citizens against themselves. The man should have stayed in his gray concrete cell in the company of a gray metal bunk and a gray metal table and chair. The man should have been patient. But he hadn’t been. He had, while he had lived in the filtered light of his cell where the sun could only reach him through opaque thick reinforced glass panes, thought of a plan. And he had executed his plan.

  He had picked his nose with a sharp nail, twisting it as cruelly as de Gier’s fishhook might twist itself, any second now, into the soft cold skin of the inside of the mouth of a fish. The nail drew blood and the prisoner caught the blood in his cupped hands and smeared some of it on his shirt, sucking the rest into his mouth. Before filling his mouth he had knocked on his door and shouted for the Eye, the nasty Eye who checked him, through a small slit, every hour. The Eye
came and found the prisoner on the floor, blood dribbling down his chin. The Eye reported and came back with other Eyes and they took the prisoner to an ambulance. The prisoner had a friend in the hospital and he escaped that same day.

  That was three months ago now. The authorities didn’t worry much. The police were informed. Adjutant Grijpstra had been called into the commissaris’* office. He was shown the prisoner’s file.

  “Small fry,” the commissaris said, “very small. Not even dangerous. You know him, don’t you? Didn’t you and de Gier deal with the case?”

  “Yes, sir,” Grijpstra said and went on reading the file. “Catch him sometime,” the commissaris was saying, “but don’t go out of your way. No use looking for him. He’ll turn up at one of these addresses. Let the informers know; put a small price on his head. Why did he get three years? He is only a burglar, isn’t he?”

  “Yes sir,” Grijpstra said, “but he keeps on being a burglar, that’s his trouble. A bad burglar. And unlucky.”

  The commissaris sighed, “Tell me, I don’t feel like reading the file; it’s too thick.”

  Grijpstra looked up and saw that the commissaris had only read a single piece of typewritten paper, with a photograph attached. The photograph showed the face of a bearded man, rather a pleasant face, a face with a sense of humor.

  The commissaris gave the sheet to Grijpstra. The Head Office clerks had mentioned three addresses in Amsterdam, explaining that the first belonged to the elderly sister of the criminal and the other two to friends.

  “He came quietly when we arrested him that time,” Grijpstra said. “Had been breaking into a shop but the owner happened to arrive that evening and caught him on the job. There was a struggle and the owner fell and hurt his head. It changed the charge. The public prosecutor wasn’t in a good mood. The prisoner’s counsel wasn’t very clever. Three years.”

  The commissaris was shaking his head.

  “Well, he’ll come quietly again. Don’t upset him. Talk to him. You are good at that, Grijpstra. And don’t rush. Sometimes we must rush and sometimes we must wait. This time we wait.”

  Grijpstra sighed. “He has been in jail two years, sir. Let’s hope he hasn’t become violent.”

  “Yes,” the commissaris said. “Jail!”

  “Doesn’t improve them much,” Grijpstra said.

  The commissaris agreed but he didn’t pursue the subject. The commissaris was an old man, close to retirement. He had been in jail himself, during the war, when the Gestapo had wanted to learn about the way the Dutch Resistance worked. The commissaris had been a senior officer in the Resistance and he hadn’t felt like cooperating with the German investigators. The commissaris had been lodged in the same jail the bad burglar had now managed to escape from but the time had been different. A little blood dribbling down a prisoner’s chin hadn’t impressed the Germans much during those days. The commissaris remembered how he had eaten a piece of bread that one of his fellow prisoners, blinded by blood which ran into his eyes from a cut just above the eyebrow caused by the wedding ring of an interrogating German police officer, had accidentally dropped into the shitbucket. The commissaris had taken the bread out, wiped it clean, and eaten it. It had been a bad jail. It was, in spite of changed circumstances, still a bad jail. But the state needed jails. The commissaris grunted and rubbed his right leg, which was hurting him more that day than his left. The rheumatic pain lessened somewhat and didn’t bite as deeply into the bone as it had before. He went on rubbing his leg. He couldn’t remove the pain and he couldn’t do away with jails.

  Grijpstra looked up from the file. “It says here, sir, that the man is close to his sister. Used to live with her. She never married and the man is a widower. So he’ll probably look her up. The address is on the dike, do you know the dike, sir?” Grijpstra had gone to the large map of Amsterdam on the commissaris’ wall. His thick forefinger traced a rapid course from Police Headquarters to the north, crossing the IJ River and veering off toward the left.

  “There,” he said, “Landsburger dike.”

  The commissaris followed Grijpstra’s finger and thought. “Yes,” he said after a while, “there is a wharf over there, a small wharf. I was called out there once, years ago now, because a laborer had broken his neck falling down a scaffolding. The doctor thought that he might have been pushed, and he very likely was but we couldn’t prove it.”

  “There are some small old houses there,” Grijpstra said, “full of funny people. Asocials they are called nowadays. Unemployed. Drunks. Old age pensioners. Half-wits. Smalltime criminals. I have been there often, thefts mostly and drunken fistfights when they’ve had trouble dividing the loot. The man’s sister will be living in one of those houses. There was a council plan once to clear the dike and widen it and build blocks of apartments but the houses are old, three hundred years old maybe, and have been placed on the list of monuments. Evenutally they will be restored.”

  The commissaris was behind his desk again, flipping the pages of a notebook. “We have an informer on the dike,” he said.

  “I know, sir. He is called the Mouse.”

  “Do you know him?” the commissaris asked.

  Grijpstra pulled a face.

  “You don’t like him?”

  “Who likes an informer?” Grijpstra asked the ceiling of the commissaris’ office.

  “But you pulled a very nasty face,” the commissaris said pleasantly.

  “He is a nasty man, sir. Squeaky nasty little man. Too small to be called a rat. He gave me a tip last year, turned in his own friend—man he had been playing billiards with for years—and on a very small charge too. But the charge stuck.”

  “Cheer up, Grijpstra,” the commissaris said, “cheer up. We have jails and we have informers. And we have criminals. And we are policemen. And it is raining. Cheer up.”

  “Sir,” Grijpstra said.

  Grijpstra shifted his weight and the dinghy moved.

  “Easy,” de Gier whispered, “sit still. This is a small boat. If you tip it over we’ll be in the drink and we’ll drown. And if we don’t drown we’ll look silly. And we’ll be wet. Easy!”

  “You are a sportsman, aren’t you?” Grijpstra asked.

  “Not here. This water is bound to be very dirty.”

  Grijpstra sighed. He started thinking about the exprisoner again. He’ll be having tea with his sister now, Grijpstra thought. He only came for the day but the Mouse saw him all right and he spent a quarter of a guilder on a telephone call. It’ll be on his bill afterward, together with the blood money. And now detectives Geurts and Sietsema will be in a car, parked close to his front door. They’ll be using the van watching the front door through slits. Soon they’ll be knocking on his door and if he is silly enough to run to the river and jump into one of the rowboats, he’ll be ours. De Gier will start the outboard and we may have him before he has got his oars out, and if de Gier fumbles the State Water Police will catch him. Their launch is right around the next corner and they have a constable under that tree over there, with a pair of binoculars and a radio. The poor silly blighter hasn’t got a chance. He’ll be back in jail tonight, for another year. They may put him in a special cell for a while. Jailers don’t like prisoners who get away. They may play tricks on him. Maybe I should call on him sometime, see that he is all right. Buy him a carton of cigarettes. Grijpstra nodded to himself. Yes. I’ll do that.

  De Gier was also thinking. He had sucked in his lips and narrowed his eyes. I am a small-time policeman, de Gier was thinking, catching small-time criminals. I should have slipped him a note. De Gier stared at his float, which had moved again although he hadn’t seen it move. There would be rain soon, rain and thunder and lightning. The heat was getting oppressive and the color of the clouds had darkened. A great blue heron that had been close to their dinghy, partly hidden by the half-sunk wreck of a river launch, rose slowly into the sky, flapping its large wings. The plume on its thin delicate head moved up as the stately bird started its slow ponderous f
light. But he will be caught anyway, de Gier went on thinking. It’s a small country and he isn’t very intelligent. Can’t get away. We know his routine and he can’t change his routine. Always the same thing. Find out which way they walk and put a trap on their path. They won’t change their paths.

  The portable two-way radio that Grijpstra held between his feet squeaked.

  “Hello,” said Grijpstra.

  “Now,” the radio said.

  “Right.”

  The detectives pulled in their fishing rods and unscrewed the parts. De Gier pulled the string on the small outboard engine. It came to life immediately. De Gier allowed it to idle; it made very little noise, puttering gently in the heavy atmosphere of the sultry evening. De Gier smiled. He had expected trouble but the Water Police sergeant who had lent them the boat hadn’t exaggerated when he had praised the qualities of the machine.

  “Check your pistol,” Grijpstra said.

  The two pistols—Grijpstra’s large model, which he carried in a holster on his belt, and de Gier’s light model, which he carried in a special holster in his armpit—clicked as cartridges slid into their barrels.

  I won’t hit him, de Gier thought. Not even if he runs. I’ll outrun him rather.

  De Gier will outrun him, Grijpstra thought. He’s got long legs.

  “There,” Grijpstra said.

  The man was running through the garden at the back of the house. He jumped into a rowboat moored at the small landing stage.

  “Police,” Grijpstra shouted. The dinghy was picking up speed. The man was sliding his oars into position.

  “Stop,” Grijpstra boomed, “you can’t get away; there’s a launch waiting for you as well. Put up your hands.”

  The ugly snout of the Water Police launch was edging round the bend in the river.

  The man put up his hands. His oars were sliding into the river. Grijpstra lifted one of them out of the water with his left hand.

  “Thank you,” the man said. “This is my sister’s boat. She doesn’t want me to lose her oars.”

  * * *

  Geurts and Sietsema were waiting for them in the garden.