“A golden cabriolet,” Uncle Franz said, “dreamed up by no one else but my old friend Dr. Porsche.”
“Are you expecting visitors?” I asked.
“Me?” Uncle asked innocently.
I heard car doors slam and the clicking of high heels on cobblestones. I also heard a drunken male voice. “Time for a cold one, what do you think, Arlette?”
The voice that answered made my spine vibrate. I was reminded of Billie Hobday’s voice, or maybe Betty Carter’s.
“No,” the magical voice answered. “Not after all that sweet champagne at the club. Please. No.”
The male voice snapped. “Since when does Fastbuck Freddie pour cheap bubbly in his exclusive nightclub?” The voice became sarcastic. “You were kidding, weren’t you, dear? Okay. Now, let’s see that beautiful present you bought me for my birthday, with the money that stuck to your slender fingers at the club, eh, my sweet?”
Birthday? Uncle was right. This was serendipitous happenstance indeed. Uncle Franz and I, and now this arrogant pimp, all celebrating our birthdays on the first of August.
“It’s already in your car, Fred,” the wonderful voice said. “The old mechanic installed it this afternoon.”
“Since when do you know an old mechanic?” Freddie snarled. “Are you entertaining a client in your time off? Without telling me about the old codger? You’re not generating extra income, are you?”
“And we tried it out at the parking lot behind the club,” Arlette said. “It’ll sound even better here, with the river next to us. There is a button under the dashboard. You’ll have to press it.”
I noticed that I was shaking my head anxiously. Maybe Uncle Franz no longer drank alcohol but he still frequented the city’s nightclubs. Did he have designs on the woman or her pimp? What was that button connected to? Some hellish device?
I wrote the address on my notebook 1, Bickers Alley, added Grijpstra and de Gier, and moved the note to the officer at the next phone. She made the connection and passed her second phone to me so that I could listen in.
“Bickers Alley?” Adjutant Grijpstra’s hoarse voice asked. “That’s near Wester Dock, isn’t it? We are at the other side of the area, near the Orange Locks. A woman in the river, but the Water Police got her. Is this Bickers thing urgent?”
My colleague raised her eyebrows at me. I wrote another note, passed it along, and made a fist.
“Old gentleman and rooster about to bother a nightclub owner and his passenger. Look for golden Porsche. Parties celebrating mutual birthday.”
“Let’s have that again?” Sergeant de Gier said.
My colleague repeated the message.
“What about the rooster?” de Gier asked. “Is he having a birthday, too?”
I shook my head.
“Not the rooster.”
I heard Uncle Franz laugh in my other ear. I asked if the pimp and the lady were the people who were, according to his prediction of a little while ago, going to cause the trouble? Or suffer it?
“No need to whisper, Officer,” Uncle said. “I only have microphones in the alley, there are no speakers down there. They can’t hear me either. Not unless I shout down at them. From the roof here.”
“Who are those people?” I asked.
“Fastbuck Freddie is a royal pain,” Uncle Franz said. “Arlette is the sweetest thing around. Nice looking, too. The longest legs ever, Officer. Marlene Dietrich from Nigeria, with the mouth of a voodoo goddess. You couldn’t dream up Arlette, not even if you used all your hidden talents.”
I began to have a bad feeling about all this.
I heard a beer can clatter on the pavement. “Don’t litter, Freddie,” the female voice said.
“And why not, dearest?” Freddie asked in a stage whisper, telling her to leave the can be, “or the street cleaners will have nothing to do.”
I heard him curse because he couldn’t get his birthday present to work.
“Uncle?” I asked.
“I told you he was a pain,” Uncle Franz said, “stupid, too. Pressing that button isn’t enough, he has to turn the dashboard key first.”
“Is Arlette a stripper, Uncle?”
“Really,” Uncle Franz said, “that Freddie is dense. No wonder he has to live off women. What was that? Stripper, you said? Arlette is a very nice young lady who I happened to meet in town.”
“You’re still addicted to watching T&A, Uncle?”
He grinned. “Nothing more interesting was ever created, Nephew. Admiring female breasts and bottoms even beats putting submarines together. But there is a connection. The sea is female. U-boats are male, of course. What submarines are trying to do to the unlimited sea is admirable but hopeless.”
I heard muffled noises. “Poor Dizzy,” Uncle said. “Still wearing that stupid teapot warmer. There you go. Feeling better, dear?”
Dizzy clucked happily.
“Arlette is a fabulous cook,” Uncle Franz said. “The lady creates a fish soup, my boy, that surpasses anything I ever cooked for you on Thursdays.”
I had to admit interest now. Uncle was a gourmet cook and the dinners he put together most Thursday evenings were the highlights of my youth. He excelled at a mussel soup with curry, Oriental shrimp dishes, and there was the cod or haddock dish with mustard sauce and parsley. There was home-baked bread, butter he bought from a farm, and a pineapple and cream pudding.
“And for thanks you let the woman be publicly abused by her employer.”
Uncle Franz grumbled. “Freddie still hasn’t got it. Does he really expect an electrical gadget to work if he doesn’t switch on the current?”
“What is he trying to get going?” I asked.
“A surprise. One of my better ideas,” Uncle said, “but Freddie is even more ignorant than I expected . . . bah.”
“Why don’t you employ Arlette as your housekeeper, Uncle?”
“I am too old.”
Nonsense. Uncle Franz was never too old for anything. Or too ugly. Or too crazy. It had been quite an effort to get away from him. He was an amusing genius, too overwhelming for a slow soul like mine.
Uncle activated his microphones again. I heard how Freddie knocked his drunken head against the Porsche’s low roof. “What the fuck is the matter with the damned gadget? Nice present, Arlette. The gizmo doesn’t work, you know.”
“You have to turn the key, Freddie.”
“My little sow,” Freddie said, “What do you know about technical stuff? The car lights burn without me having to turn a key, right?”
“Why don’t you try turning the key, Fred?”
He imitated her voice. “Try turning the key. Just because you are a jungle bunny with a tight little ass you think you excel in the brains department too?”
Arlette sounded sad and tired. “When the old gentleman put it together it worked just fine.”
“Sure thing,” Freddie said. “He probably had screwdriver fingers, and a computer for a brain. I know the type. They touch a machine and the damn thing starts purring. Ouch, Christ almighty.” He knocked his head against the roof again. What on earth had happened to Grijpstra and de Gier, my infallible detectives?
Arlette suggested going home.
“Please,” Freddie snarled. “Who wants to go home now? I thought we wanted to share the sunrise. Okay, I am going to turn that stupid key now. There we go . . .”
A siren began to wail loudly.
“Yoho!” Uncle Franz shouted. “Dizzy, do your job, my fine beautiful bird.”
Dizzy’s cock-a-doodle-doo pierced my ears.
“Arlette? You hear that? A rooster! Haha!” Freddie kept pressing the siren button and Uncle kept cheering Dizzy on.
Dizzy was shut up by the teapot warmer. Uncle shouted, “Hey! You down there! Idiot! You know what time it is?”
F
reddie was shouting, too. “Don’t you have a clock, you old buzzard? Haha, Arlette, watch that clown up there. Hey, can you cock-a-doodle-doo, too? Old man?” The siren howled.
Sergeant de Gier, on the radio, asked what he could do for us.
“What is keeping you, Sergeant?”
“We got stuck,” de Gier said. “I tried a shortcut but there is road work here and we are bogged down in sand.”
“So?”
“So we radioed for a cab and it’s on the way.”
Fool. De Gier outranked me so I couldn’t say it. “Yes, Sergeant.”
I got back to the phone. “Uncle?”
“Nephew?”
“How is it going at your end?”
“Freddie is leaning against his car, drinking more beer. You want to hear him?”
Not really. I could call another patrol car but the matter was too delicate for uniforms to deal with.
“Isn’t this fun?” Uncle asked. “I can switch Freddie on and off. The way it should be, Walter. You are still in the midst of things but as you get older you will realize that we create our own universe, where we can move things.”
Typically lionesque. I have been listening to it for as long as I have known Uncle. It irritates me that there seems to be some sense behind his cryptic monologues. I even get it at times. Maybe because I was born on the first of August, too, and am, astrologically, a lion, too. A lion’s arrogance is hard to put up with. We really believe that the world will come to an end as soon as we get off it. I remember that as a toddler, I was taken to the zoo by Uncle, and he claimed that the thousand animals we saw there only existed while we observed them. He proved his theory by taking me to a spot where we couldn’t see the elephants. After that we walked to their quarters. “See?” Uncle asked. “When you can’t see them, they don’t exist. As soon as you see them, they do, however. You know what you are? You’re Walter the Elephant Creator. Now that you have dreamed them up you better get in there and climb upon their backs, make them do what you want, dear.”
I started crying but I was amazed, too. The gigantic animals needed a small child so that they could exist? And I could really ride them?
“The universe,” Uncle Franz said, “needs me to be.”
“You know, Arlette,” Freddie was saying in a beery voice, while kicking another can around in the alley, “this is an important day. August first. Today I have looked at my creation for exactly forty years, and you have viewed yours for twenty-six.”
I pride myself on my modesty. I appreciate modesty in others, too. The grandiose statements made by Freddie below in the alley and Uncle Franz up on the roof were irritating to me. I couldn’t get at Freddie but Uncle was on the telephone.
“Uncle,” I said, “you know what they say?”
“What do they say Nephew?”
“That pride leads to a fall.”
“They say a lot,” my educator said. “You know who they are? They are three obese Zen monks who live at the North Market. They are former disciples of Master Dipshit, an American Zen master with fake Japanese papers. Although they are not related, all three happened to be called Polsen. Because they keep repeating each other, they think they are in agreement.”
I had heard him say things like that before. I laughed.
“Maybe,” Uncle said, “you will get it one day, and to help you along I herewith appoint you as my successor and in order to give you the means to complete my quest you will also be my heir. Of everything.” He laughed. “Which is nothing.”
I had heard that before, too, but in the old days he needed alcohol and nude women to reach a state of illumination. What worried me was that he was now stone-cold sober. It also worried me that he might be serious about making me his heir. I had no need of his money and four stories filled with complete collections of what-nots. Why make life complicated? In my present state, I might not be happy but at least I wasn’t cluttered.
It seemed he was reading my objections. “I wasn’t altogether successful in my quest, Nephew, but maybe you, as my successor, have a chance to go further. You are young, strong, not given to attracting demons, sensitive enough to share, so you won’t have to be lonely like me.”
“Share?” I asked furiously. Who wants to share? Share misery? Why did he think I was living alone, trying to be minimal, to live as emptily as I could?
“Whoa,” Uncle said nervously, “things are going wrong here. That cop car of yours . . . where is it, Walter?”
I heard what was going wrong down in the alley. Freddie was beating Arlette, Arlette was crying.
“Gimme me that key, bitch. Let me try that siren again.”
Arlette was sobbing. She told him that he shouldn’t bother that poor old man up on the roof. She got her cheeks slapped for her trouble. Loud wailing. Uncle Franz was yelling down from the roof. Dizzy was crowing at full volume. Freddie was screaming that everybody better shut up so that the cops wouldn’t hear everybody, resulting in their useless interference. But what the hell, Freddie was screaming, what did he care? Everything he ever did was illegal. His permits at the club hadn’t been renewed. The Porsche wasn’t licensed because he hadn’t been able to show his driver’s license because it was suspended. Good thing he was a mighty astrological lion celebrating his own creation, for if anyone else had caused all this bullshit anyone else would be in deep shit. Yessir.
The microphones clicked off.
“Walter?” Uncle Franz asked. “Did you notice that Freddie is a lower lion?”
I asked if there were higher lions.
“Higher lions,” Uncle Franz said, “are majestic, lower lions are caught up by ego. You and I are of the higher type. We make good kings.”
“Do we love and respect our subjects, Uncle?”
“We serve and protect them, my boy.”
“And Freddie abuses his subjects?”
“Don’t ask stupid questions, my boy.”
As usual, Uncle Franz wasn’t altogether wrong. He, Freddie, and I, all three of us, obviously were leaders. Uncle Franz himself had always manipulated powerful forces optimally. Freddie drove a golden Porsche and had beautiful women dance in the nude on the stage of his nightclub. I directed police cars through the streets of one of Europe’s major cities. I wondered how Arlette deployed her royalty. Right now she was in exile but I could hear, in the energetic undulations of her jazzy voice, that she wasn’t planning to stay in exile for much longer.
“Uncle?”
“How can I help you, Nephew?”
“You have thought up this entire situation,” I said. “You are the good king, Freddie is the bad king, he caught the beautiful princess and abuses her. That idea of having the siren cut up the quiet night is yours.”
“You flatter me,” Uncle said.
“Siren,” I said. “There is symbolism here. The beautiful mermaids of the Rhine were called sirens. Their chanting caused sailors to wreck their ships on shoals.”
“You know,” Uncle Franz said. “I never thought of that.”
“You are setting Freddie up to have a bad accident,” I said, “so you can have the beautiful princess. Arlette.”
“Close,” Uncle said. “Damned close, Nephew.”
I heard Dizzy cluck.
“Sure, Dizzy,” Uncle said, “but Walter isn’t quite where we want him as yet, is he now? It’s better that way. He needs to be surprised or he’ll miss our ultimate meaning.”
My colleague held up her phone for me. Adjutant Grijpstra was on the line.
“We are lost,” Grijpstra said.
“Is the cab driver lost, too?”
“The cab driver is from Turkey,” Grijpstra said. “You know I often get lost and you know that Sergeant de Gier often gets lost with me. We can usually find our way by asking pedestrians, but it’s too early for pedestrians. Now what?”
Fortunately I am a born director. “Where are you, Adjutant?”
“Realen Canal.”
I was glad he knew that much. Realen Canal is close to Bickers Alley.
“Tell your driver,” I instructed my superior, “to switch off his engine. Okay? Good. Now all three of you, listen.” I used the other phone. “Uncle? Can Dizzy do his thing, please? His specially loud crow?”
Dizzy was good and loud. Freddie, having extracted his car key from Arlette’s grasp, accepted the bird’s challenge. The siren howled for all it was worth. The racket reached the listening ears of Grijpstra, de Gier, and their Turkish cab driver. The car rolled into Bickers Alley. Uncle Franz activated his microphones in the ivy-covered wall.
“Police,” Adjutant Grijpstra said.
“Sure thing,” Freddie said. “In a cab?”
“Police in a cab,” Sergeant de Gier said. I surmised that the detectives showed their identity cards and, possibly, their weapons, by unbuttoning their jackets and leaning back a bit, so that their guns would show in their armpit holsters. I do the same thing when I patrol out of uniform and happen to walk into a situation.
“My girlfriend and I,” Freddie said, “are enjoying the sunrise over the river. We are totally legal, Friends and Detectives.”
I could hear him kick beer cans around. “And while you are enjoying yourselves,” Grijpstra said morosely, “you’re making a bit of a mess here?”
“Shut the fuck up, Fats,” Freddie said impatiently. “Who is we? We did nothing at all, we didn’t abuse substances, we didn’t mess up the street, nothing.”
“Your name?” Grijpstra asked peacefully.
“Listen here,” Freddie said. “I’m a gentleman and a scholar. I happen to have a Leyden University summa cum laude degree in criminal law. I am an a-ca-de-mic, okay? You have heard of the term? Yes? And I’ll have you know that the law says that there is no need for a subject to identify himself if the subject is not a suspect.”
“You are a suspect,” Grijpstra said peacefully, “and I now formally place you under arrest.”
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