The Corpse on the Dike

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  I had an adventure yesterday. I was walking about on the beach looking for a woman I’d met the night before—a nice woman with a nice figure. She had been alone and I had said something about the moon and the sea. I’d had a flask of cognac with me. She’d had a sip and I’d had a sip and it all ended the way I had wanted it to end. She hadn’t seemed to be very enthusiastic but she had made the right movements and what more does a tourist want? Love in the moonlight on a deserted beach, heigh-ho and a bottle of Yo. I thought she might be on the beach again but that was silly of me, of course, for she had told me she was a nurse and would be on duty during the day. Anyway, I was ambling about when I saw a sand hill, a very steep hill and I climbed it to enjoy the view of the sea. The view was fine and I fell asleep. When I awoke I had moved to the edge of the hill; suddenly I felt myself rolling down. I didn’t think it was so bad at first, but then I saw that I was heading for some sharp rocks and that I was actually in danger of losing my life. And I was frightened. I didn’t want to lose my life. I, Tom Wernekink, wanted to live. Wasn’t that a surprise? I managed to live, as you can see, for this isn’t a letter from the Other Side, conveyed to you through the good offices of Madame Raqama, who will go into a trance at the drop of a hat and a twenty-five guilder note. I, your friend Tom, am writing the letter in my own spidery, illegible and unbalanced handwriting.

  But it made me think. It destroyed my daydream of the Ideal Suicide. Karel and I worked it out the other day, plunging through a bottle and a half of Pernod. It was a complicated daydream but not quite impossible, I think. I’ll try to describe it to you.

  1) I study the currents and the times of high and low tide.

  2) I buy three bottles of sleeping pills—no reason to be stingy—and a large bottle of the very best cognac.

  3) I wait for the moon to be full; suicide is an act of lunacy and the first four letters of the word LUNA name our old friend, the round, mysterious, gently frightening body that rules the night.

  4) I go to the beach.

  5) I swim—holding on to the cognac bottle and the pills somehow—to a rock; the rock actually exists and it’s about two miles from the shore here.

  6) I manage to reach the rock and clamber on top of it; I sit down and sing my one and favorite song. I can’t tell you the words of the song since it is a magic song and the words are mine alone. I’m sorry, Liza, but mat’s the way it is: every man must have at least one secret, mine is the song.

  7) While I sing I watch the moon—obvious, of course, but I am giving you the complete recipe.

  8) I swallow all the sleeping pills and drink the cognac. The bottle isn’t full anymore, for I have already drunk some before swimming out.

  9) I throw the bottles into the sea, stretch out and fall asleep.

  10) The tide changes. A wave carries me off the rock and in the direction of the horizon.

  11) The current takes over and I am moving at some speed.

  12) I die.

  13) The sharks come and eat me, bite-tear-swallow-gulp.

  A nice clean death, don’t you think? No rubbish, no nothing. I won’t leave a farewell note. Tom Wernekink has joined the great beyond.

  But I won’t do it. What a pity. First I thought I wouldn’t do it because it would be too much trouble. Working out the tides and the current and all that. But if I can fill in complicated export forms, I can make a few simple calculations, can’t I? No, there’s another reason. It’s you, Liza. I admire you. If you can live I can. I am damned if I know why I should live but I’ll go on. Still, I hope I won’t live too long. I’ve really had enough of it. The angel should come and fetch me. I wonder what the angel of death will look like in Holland. He has to conform to the environment, of course. You know what I think? I think he will wear a dark suit, pointed shoes, and a dark tie. And he’ll kill me with a pistol. It’ll be late at night and he will call me, and when I come he will kill me. In a respectful manner, for angels are polite. They are very evolved and our reasoning and wishing and daydreaming and general silliness makes them smile. But when we really want them to come, they will come. Such is the law.

  Enough of this. I can imagine you clearly. You are under the oak tree, reading this through that extraordinary pair of glasses you have. I must rush; the bus will be leaving in a few minutes and Karel can’t drink without me. We have our responsibilities. Don’t forget to tell Father to water the laburnum and give my love to the birds, the milkman, the postman and the mayor. Good day, dear Liza; see you soon.

  The letter wasn’t signed. Grijpstra folded the letter carefully and slid it into his side pocket. The commissaris would be interested, and de Gier, of course. He was interested himself. He sighed, but this time the sigh was sad. But he cheered up again. He wouldn’t be at home for dinner. He would phone from the station and have a meal in the old city of Amsterdam, by himself, in a cheap Chinese restaurant. Then he would walk home and go to bed.

  * * *

  In the train, just before he fell asleep, a last thought flitted through his mind. “Catch the angel.” He promised himself that he would. They would solve the case. It was a strange case but they had had strange cases before. The commissaris would solve it, de Gier would solve it, he would solve it. But they hadn’t solved it yet.

  7

  GRIJPSTRA SLEPT QUIETLY AND IN HIS SLEEP THE BRIGHT-EYED songbird was with him again. De Gier slept but kept on turning, and Oliver jumped up everytime his master turned and patiently found a new place to curl up in. De Gier dreamed about Ursula whom he was following through endless corridors. The commissaris didn’t sleep. The pain had awakened him earlier than usual that morning and he was sitting in his study with a cup of very strong coffee and a small cigar. He had opened the doors to the garden and was observing the small turtle that lived in a wooden box under the rhododendron bushes. The turtle was rowing itself through the high grass on his way to a few lettuce leaves that the commissaris had put on the threshold of his study. The commissaris had no acquaintances and few friends, and of his friends only the public prosecutor and the turtle knew how to be with him in silence. The commissaris sipped his coffee and the turtle plowed on in the clear light of the early morning.

  The motorcycle and its sidecar glided through the clear light of the early morning. It wasn’t yet six o’clock and both the constable, riding the silent BMW, and the sergeant, who was sitting on the edge of the sidecar, were dog-tired. They had taken part in a large exercise about sixty kilometers north of Amsterdam and all they wanted to do now was to park the cycle and sidecar in the large traffic police garage and catch a tram home. There they would grunt at their wives and go straight to bed and sleep for at least ten hours. The thought that they would have two consecutive days off was keeping them within the bounds of sanity and the constable was riding at exactly fifty kilometers per hour, in spite of the absence of all other traffic. The sergeant was staring straight ahead. He tried to forget the endless repetitions of the night. They had been doing anti-riot practice with a complete team of a dozen motorcycles, twenty horsemen and a hundred constables on foot, and cadets from the police schools of The Hague and Amsterdam. They had raced up and down through the narrow streets of a sham village made up of wooden fronts—a stage belonging to a film company. The sergeant still saw the enemy, some fifty policemen gladly taking the part, running toward them, screaming and waving sticks. He wanted a cigarette now but a sergeant on a sidecar cannot smoke. He has to sit erect in his white leather coat, goggles and helmet. The sergeant was sitting erect.

  The constable saw the two men first but he didn’t say anything. He could have spoken to the sergeant in his normal voice—the engine of a BMW is quiet enough—but the constable didn’t say anything. He wanted to go home. His wife would be in bed waiting for him and she was young and warm and cuddly.

  Two men were unloading large cartons off a truck parked in front of a small house on the Landsburger dike. They were too busy to see the motorcycle combination bearing down on them. The sergeant had
also seen the men and his eyes, shielded behind the goggles, suddenly opened wide. The police only see irregularities: a car weaving in traffic, a brand-new Mercedes with a dirty hippie at the wheel, a man running on the sidewalk, or two men unloading a truck early in the morning. His gloved hand reached out and touched the body of the constable. His other hand pointed at the truck and moved up and down. The constable obeyed.

  When the front wheel of the motorcycle almost touched the rear of the truck, the two men shifting cartons inside saw the policemen’s helmets. They jumped down, each on one side of the motorcycle combination. The constable tried to grab the man on his side but his gloved hand had no power and the man slipped away. A second later he was clambering down the dike.

  The sergeant was tearing off his gloves. The other man was running down the grassy slope of the dike. The policemen were shouting at the fugitives and opening their leather coats to get at their pistols. It took them a while to get the pistols out and by that time the first shot had been fired by the man farthest away. The bullet whined and hit the truck. The constable was firing too now, flat on his stomach and peering over the edge of the dike. He was aiming carefully and his bullet grazed the first fugitive’s shoulder.

  “Crazy,” the sergeant thought. “Crazy! To fire a gun at six o’clock in the morning.” He crawled back to the motorcycle, pressed a button and spoke into the large microphone attached to the cycle’s tank.

  “Headquarters,” a quiet voice answered. “Come in, sergeant.”

  “Request for assistance,” the sergeant said. “Landsburger dike. We’re engaged in a fire fight.”

  “I’ll see what I can do for you,” the voice said, unable to hide its surprise, “but there aren’t too many cars about. How many men do you want?”

  “Send the lot,” the sergeant said. He walked two steps, dropped down to the ground and joined the constable.

  “There’s another man down there now,” the constable said, “and he’s firing as well. What is this?”

  “Do you have any cartridges left?” the sergeant asked.

  “One.”

  “No spare clips?”

  “One spare clip, and you?”

  “Two shots left and one spare clip. They probably have cases full of ammo down there.”

  One of the men at the foot of the dike moved and the sergeant fired. The man began to yell.

  “I didn’t hit him in the stomach, did I?” the sergeant asked the constable. “I was aiming low. I couldn’t have hit him in the stomach; it must be his foot or his knee.”

  The constable raised his head and shouted at the men to surrender but another shot was fired and he had to duck.

  The wounded man was still yelling and the others had dropped out of sight. They could hear two sirens coming closer.

  ‘Two cars,” the sergeant said; “that’s a lot of cars at this time of the day. We’re lucky.”

  The VWs screamed to a stop near the truck and four constables came running toward them.

  “Down, down,” the sergeant shouted and the men dropped.

  “What have you got, sergeant?” a young constable asked, skidding along on his stomach in proper commando style. “Do they have guns down there?’

  “Keep your head down; there are two men with pistols and there must be a third pistol near the wounded man. Go back to your car and ask for an ambulance. Ask for the platoon as well.”

  “All of them?” the constable asked. “There must be forty men in reserve in the barracks.”

  “No, only a dozen at the most; the others were out on exercise with us all night. Ask for a dozen only and tell them not to send anyone who was on duty last night.”

  “OK,” the constable said and grinned as he ran back to the car. The platoon consisted of cadets only and there was normally little for them to do. He could imagine the excitement in the barracks as the alarm sounded. He remembered his own three months on platoon duty—three months between the end of police school and graduation to constable. Within two minutes they would be tearing about, struggling into their uniforms, grabbing pistols and carbines, and racing out to the armored truck, which, siren howling and lights blazing, would rush them out to the dike.

  “Ambulance,” he said to the radio, “and the platoon. Sergeant says a dozen men only and not to send anybody who was out tonight. Bring carbines; we’re having a proper haw-haw out here.”

  “Who is wounded?” Headquarters asked. “Police?”

  “No.”

  “OK,” Headquarters replied. “Keep us informed. Out.”

  It took the platoon truck thirteen minutes exactly to arrive. By that time a new volley of shots had been fired and a constable was holding his foot. He was very white in the face and was clenching his teeth; his friend was holding him by the shoulder and talking to him in a soothing voice.

  The cadets, commanded by two sergeants, were swarming down the dike from two sides. Four cadets were firing carbines at a wooden shed where the two men were last seen. As the ambulance took the wounded policeman away and another ambulance parked at the curb to wait for the wounded man below, a short rattle increased the tension.

  ‘Tommy gun,” the sergeant of the motorcycle said to his mate, “a fucking tommy gun. Did you hear that?”

  The constable pointed at the river. “Came from the cruiser over there.”

  “We’ll get everything we have,” the sergeant said and sprinted back to his motorcycle radio.

  “Tommy gun,” he shouted at the radio. “Send everything you can find. We have a wounded constable already and there’ll be buckets of blood if this goes on. I don’t know how well these cadets have been trained, but bring in the State Water Police and an airplane. They have a boat out there as well, a fast cruiser, and I don’t want it to disappear.”

  “Right,” Headquarters said. The buzzers at Headquarters were pressed and every available man, uniform and plainclothes, answered the Grand Alarm. The trucks on the courtyard came to life and the men of the radio room began to telephone all available off-duty personnel. The horsemen were the first to report; they were told to forget about their horses, the distance being too great, and to get into the trucks; an adjutant broke carbines out of a rack and handed them out to whoever presented himself; men helped themselves to spare clips without bothering to sign forms; and the low craft of the State Water Police growled in the harbor as a Piper Cub started its engine at Schiphol airport. Within an hour there were forty policemen on the dike, ten on the river and one in the air. More kept joining them and a commissaris worked out later that some ninety men had taken part in the campaign.

  But Grijpstra and de Gier went on sleeping and the commissaris made more coffee and spent time with his turtle. Their names weren’t on the lists kept in the radio room and they could only be called if an emergency connected with the death of Tom Wernekink came up. They heard about everything when they arrived at their offices at nine sharp that morning. By that time the fugitives were in custody. Five arrests had been made and an Uzi automatic weapon and five pistols had been confiscated. Detectives were now combing the area, making a house-to-house search, and a dozen fresh policemen were patroling the dike.

  Grijpstra went to the radio room to watch the reports coming in on the Teletype. The commissaris was already there.

  “Sir,” Grijpstra said.

  “Morning, adjutant,” the commissaris said pleasantly. “Where is your assistant?’

  “Reading the reports that have already been distributed,” Grijpstra said. “Some show out there! The cartons contained TV sets and other electric stuff. We must have run into something big.”

  “Yes. The cruiser was full of stolen goods as well. And so were the basements of several houses. The detectives have made some more arrests.”

  “The Cat,” a voice said behind him. “Let’s go get the Cat. Now!”

  “Quiet,” the commissaris said. He had jumped at the sudden shouting close to his ear. “Quiet, de Gier! I am not deaf.”

  “The C
at,” de Gier said. “Let’s go!”

  De Gier was in the corridor when Grijpstra ran after him. They reached the VW at the same time and de Gier honked the horn impatiently as the constable at the gate came ambling out of his lodge.

  “Easy,” the constable said. “The alarm is over.”

  “Not yet,” de Gier said and raced the car out the gates.

  “I’m getting old,” Grijpstra said as de Gier went through the fourth red light. “I saw the reports and my mind didn’t click.”

  “Nonsense. It would have clicked. Buyer and seller of odd lots, bullshit. The bastard was lying through his teeth during that performance in the commissaris’ office yesterday. You couldn’t know, for you weren’t there. The Cat with Boots On, ha, ha!”

  “What?” Grijpstra asked.

  “He came to see us yesterday. We asked him what he did for a living. Told us a beautiful story about how clever he was. Buys anything going and sells it from a warehouse in town. Odd lot man, bullshit! Sells stolen goods; that’s what he does. He must be connected with the men who were arrested this morning. That dike is all connected. They’re all in it. That informer too, the Mouse. He must have been right in the middle of it for years, but he never told us anything.”

  “Tell me more,” Grijpstra said. “What was he like? Where did you find him? Did you go to his house?”

  De Gier told him as well as he could but he was having some trouble. They had taken a marked car and had the siren and blue light going, but Amsterdam is a busy town at nine-fifteen in the morning and they weren’t making much headway. De Gier tried everything he could think of, using the part of the road reserved for the streetcar, the sidewalks and even the footpath of a park, but he kept getting stuck in the tangled traffic. He managed, however, and Grijpstra even heard about Ursula and laughed.