Mr. Dubber remained puzzled.
“The Netherlands are a kingdom,” de Gier explained.
“Doesn’t the king like imprisoning bad guys?”
“The queen, actually,” de Gier said.
“Please,” Douglas Dubber said, “what does your queens have to do with not apprehending and punishing bad folks?”
“We,” Grijpstra said gruffly, showing the visitor his uniform hat, decorated with a bronze crown, “we, the police, represent the crown, which is worn by the queen, and the crown represents the Netherlandic Idea of God, who, we assume, is forgiving rather than vengeful.”
“That’s the theoretical aspect.” De Gier smiled. “It’s mostly applied in Amsterdam. In the provinces the Dutch divinity may be seen as sterner.”
“Do you have jail space in the provinces?” Mr. Dubber asked.
“Some,” de Gier said. “Not too much, though. The provinces are stingy. They build other facilities with the taxpayers’ money, a soccer field here, a swimming pool there.”
“It also could be that we Dutch are lazy,” Grijpstra said gruffly.
“So what are you jokers up to?” Mr. Dubber’s eyes were still round with bewildered surprise. “Are you telling me you don’t accept my complaint? Am I to be wifeless because you believe in some kind of flaky idealism?”
“We do make an effort,” Grijpstra said, a little more pleasantly now that he had seated himself behind his desk. “It wouldn’t surprise me if we found your missing wife, Mr. Dubber. Within the next twenty-four hours. We often do find missing persons. Usually because they come to us.” He put out a heavy hand. “You have a photo?”
While Douglas Dubber went through his pockets, de Gier pulled up a chair for his visitor.
“Here.” Dubber tried to open a passport. His fingers trembled. De Gier took the passport from him and used a scanner to enlarge the photo. He and Grijpstra studied Emily Dubber’s attractive face on their computer screens. “Marilyn Monroe,” they both said. Dubber smiled tiredly. “She did win a look-alike contest once, but that was way back. This picture is old.”
“What do you think happened?” Grijpstra asked.
“She has been murdered,” Dubber whispered.
The detectives tsked at such an outrageous idea. “Now, now,” Grijpstra said.
“Murders are rare here,” de Gier said. “What makes you think such a thing? Really, sir.”
“I have not,” complainant said, “seen Emily since last Friday night when she walked out on me. She was angry but”—he held up the passport—“she did not take this. She didn’t pack any clothes either. Left most of her makeup kit.” He weakly thumped his knee. “Where the hell is the woman?”
“Picked up a lover?” de Gier asked. “Bought clothes and other necessities with her credit card?”
“Do you think so?” Dubber asked. “What about her diamond? And her shiner?”
“Shiner?” Grijpstra asked.
Dubber pointed at his eye.
“You hit her?”
“She hit me first,” Dubber said. “Where it hurts. She knocked my jenever glass out of my hand. I wanted to hit her on her nose, which was full of coke. Tit for tat, right? I missed I got her eye. It started swelling right away. She wouldn’t want to run around town looking like that for several days.”
The detectives looked at their computer screens, where Emily Dubber smiled back at them.
“What’s this about a diamond?” Grijpstra asked.
“In a ring,” Dubber said. “I just bought it for her, twenty thousand dollars’ worth of big bauble. And do you think she was grateful?” Dubber found the credit-card receipt for the ring, crumpled in the breast pocket of his elegant jacket. “Look.”
“What do you do, Mr. Dubber?” de Gier asked. “For a living, I mean. Are you rich?”
The suggestion cheered the complainant somewhat. He told the detectives he was a Wall Street-based financial adviser, that he sent out a costly newsletter in which he picked stocks for the aggressive investor. He was on vacation in The Netherlands as his maternal grandfather was Dutch-born and had told him tales. He wanted to see windmills spin; drink jenever; eat sole á la meuniere; splash, wearing big yellow wooden shoes, through juicy cow pats; see lines of cut willow trees flanking endless ditches between endless pastures; eat smoked eel on fresh white buns. So far, he and Emily, who also had Dutch origins, hadn’t gotten around to doing any of that, except for drinking the thick, syrupy juniper-flavored gin that Emily didn’t care for, that made Douglas hard to deal with. Or so said Emily, who he thought was hard to deal with while stoned on the cocaine she had been buying in the bars around the Tulip Hotel, where they were staying.
“A twenty-thousand-dollar diamond ring, on your credit card?” Grijpstra asked. “How big was that stone, sir?”
“Big,” Dubber said. He looked sad now. He said that without his wife he noticed Amsterdam’s downside. There was the constant drizzle and a cold summer wind that got to him every time he turned a corner. There was a carillon jingling on the half hour from a church tower close to the hotel. There was the raw herring that he kept eating and that gave him a thirst for more jenever, which, as yet, he hadn’t acquired a taste for. There was his rental Mercedes, hauled off by the police because of a parking problem. There was also the public transportation that he couldn’t figure out at all. “You have to make me feel good again,” Mr. Dubber told the detectives. “I need Emily. We had planned some romance. I need to walk hand in hand with her, along those nice walkways you have here, along the canals, under the elm trees, when the weather breaks again. When you find her for me, I promise we will go easy on the substances and maybe even visit a museum.” He gestured. “Van Go!”
“Van Gogh” de Gier said. “There’s a throat-scrape at the end. And the o is not long like in Ophelia but short like in osprey.”
Grijpstra excused de Gier. “The sergeant is a language lover.”
“Whatever,” Dubber said. “The guy who cut his ear off. Because a whore said it looked pretty and he wanted to give her a present. You know? The painter?”
“Sure,” Grijpstra soothed, “Van Go. Just as you say, sir.”
“I need my wife,” the unhappy Mr. Dubber insisted. “I want to have her with me. She can give me some company in return for the stone. Figure out your streetcar schedules. So I can get around more.” He frowned at de Gier. “Do you have a wife?”
De Gier said he shared daydreams with the cat Tabriz, on a rocking chair he’d found in the street, his only piece of furniture, except for a hospital bed, which he kept between potted weeds in the loft he rented from Grijpstra’s girlfriend, city weeds that he grew to bushlike heights fertilized by manure he picked up at the police stable.
Dubber wasn’t paying attention. “Crazy Van Go, made a present of his pretty ear to a hooker squatting in a picture window!” He laughed out loud. “I tried that, too, you know.”
The detectives looked at Dubber’s ears.
“Just the whores,” complainant said. “The ladies in the windows on the canals here, great lookers, but they don’t speak English. Thai, Russian, whatever, how can I order ‘specialties’ if they don’t speak the lingo?”
Dubber began to mumble. Grijpstra went back to studying Emily’s face on his screen, de Gier wrote down some of the words that floated in the complainant’s otherwise inaudible monologue. Bitch. Bungle. Bald. Bullshit. Bad. Buddhist. Bar. Bongo. B-words, de Gier called them when he reported to the commissaris later that day. “Not the MF-word?” the commissaris asked. “You’re sure complainant is American? They usually use the MF-word when under stress.”
“No, just B-words, sir,” de Gier said.
Mr. Dubber’s distraught litany came to an end. He looked around the small white-and-grey office. “Hey, you have a coffee machine there. Hey, is that a refrigerator? Any
cold beer to spare?”
Grijpstra got the coffee machine burbling and de Gier, using the edge of his metal desk and his hand, chopping, as tools, cracked open a bottle of lemonade flavored with sugared ginger. He smiled an apology. “No alcohol, Mr. Dubber.”
“Are you guys on the straight and narrow?” Dubber asked. “Just during office hours, I hope.”
“The straight and narrow, at any hour,” de Gier said.
“Aren’t all good cops bad drunks?” Doug asked.
“Bad drunks shouldn’t drink,” Grijpstra said.
“Did you go all the way?” Doug looked hurt when Grijpstra nodded. “AA and all?”
“I stay away from AA, too, now,” de Gier said, “I just want to quit drinking, I don’t want to hear more sob stories. I promised I would go back at the very first slip.” He winked. “The thought of seeing those turkeys again should make me stop forever.”
“Stop drinking,” Doug asked, “or stop listening to other addicts’ stories?”
“He combines the two,” Grijpstra said, speaking kindly for the first time. “A double negative may make a positive.” He looked grave again. “All drunks are crazy, but the craziness doesn’t show too much while they’re sober.” He looked wise before looking sorry.
“That’s what his girlfriend tells him,” de Gier told Dubber.
“When did you quit?” Dubber asked de Gier.
De Gier looked at his watch.
“That recent?”
“Checking the month,” de Gier said. “I quit almost a year ago. Maybe I could go back to AA meetings. Maybe they have thought of a few new stories.”
“Don’t count on it,” Doug said. “The stories never change, even if you shift locations. No matter where you go—LA, Frisco, Chicago, New York, same difference—tattoos on your Johnson that you can’t recall having ordered, maxed credit cards you didn’t know you carried, cars that have gotten dented overnight and parked where you didn’t leave them, lost wallets. The worst is when you can’t find your own toilet.” Dubber fingered his unshaven cheeks. “And now my own wife is gone. And me out of state.” He rubbed with more force. “Out of country. Out of continent, even.” He felt his temples gingerly, as if the arteries under his fingertips might burst. “How do I handle this?” His bloodshot eyes stared at Grijpstra’s pin-striped waistcoat. “I can’t go home without her, can I?” He produced a crumpled set of airplane tickets. “Do you think I can get a credit?”
“Where did you think she might have gone?” Grijpstra asked, gently now.
“Not far, not on her own, that is, certainly not in the dark. She doesn’t have good night vision,” Dubber said, holding his lemonade up against the light of the room’s narrow window. “This is a mystical color, don’t you think? Like it is illuminated from within.” He swallowed, then inhaled sharply. “Got a bit of a bite, all right.”
De Gier refilled Dubber’s glass. “The Tulip Hotel is on the Emperor’s Canal, at the corner of Palace Street. Did you make inquiries at bars around there?”
Dubber had not. Emily would indeed have gone to one of the nearby bars where he had been told not to return—a matter of a few fistfights and a broken mirror and such. He had found watering holes further afield, and had been spending time with the Thai and the Russian window-ladies, living on street stall bought raw herring, with chopped onions on the side, and taking naps in his hotel room. All that had made time fly, until he noticed that Emily wasn’t with him. And hadn’t been at his side since Friday evening. “It is Monday now, yes?”
It was Monday morning, de Gier told him. “What was your wife wearing when you saw her last.”
“A red dress,” Dubber said.
“Had she walked out on you before?” Grijpstra asked.
“Not this trip,” Doug said. “In Manhattan she does often, then she comes back the next day. She is pretty, you know, longer legs than Marilyn, real big . . .” He thought for a moment. He shook his head. “Really mammal. A man like me needs that. Don’t know why, but there it is. There they are.” He sighed, stared at his baggy knees, unpolished and scuffed shoes, dirty fingernails, the stains on his necktie. He sighed again. “I don’t feel good. I need a shower.” He raised his eyes, not his head. “So can you guys find her?”
De Gier was looking at Emily’s face again, which still smiled back at him.
“Notice her cheekbones?” Dubber asked. “Even higher than Marilyn’s. They call those ‘money bones’ in the trade. She is a model. That’s how I met her. There are clubs in Manhattan where we financial gurus get to meet movie star look-alike Manhattan models.”
“Did she do porn?” Grijpstra asked.
Dubber smiled as he made a fist and shook it in Grijpstra’s face. He took a sip of the strong coffee. “If I drank this stuff back home it would kill me. I am a ten-mug-a-day man.” The coffee made him talkative again. “Soft porn only, calendar posing, bathing suits, maybe a few movies, a stag party once in a while.” Dubber looked wistful. “We made a deal: no charge if I took her to Las Vegas for the weekend. When we went a second time, we came back married.”
“And she likes drugs,” de Gier said.
Dubber shrugged. “And she cooks. And she puts buttons on coats when I lose them. Give a little, take a little.”
“Emily still picks up men in bars?” de Gier asked.
“Uh-huh.” Dubber nodded. “When I am mad at her and won’t give her money and she thinks the other guys can come up with free cocaine.”
“And you mind?”
“Mind, schmind.” Dubber frowned furiously. “Sure I mind, but jeez, this is the big bad world, we gotta face that.” He gestured widely. “So she stays out a night but that’s only the flip side.” He got up but quickly sat down again. “There’s a flip side to her flip side. I have this big apartment near Wall Street and I mess it up when I am alone. Before Emily, all I had for company was a bunch of starving goldfish. Emily cleans the algae off the aquarium walls, throws out the dead ones, feeds the live ones. Things get better and better every day.” He smiled weakly.
Grijpstra rose heavily. “Okay, sir, we know enough to start a search.” He pulled a color copy from the printer. “Thirty-five-year-old white female, blond, blue-eyed, tall, with a movie-star figure. One discolored eye. We’ll be in touch.”
De Gier, maintaining his charming and polite smiles and pleasantly modulated baritone voice, saw complainant off to the open elevator. When he came back, Grijpstra mentioned insurance. “Pushed Emily into a canal, you think?”
De Gier didn’t think the suggestion was an impossibility.
The commissaris, chief of the Murder Brigade, a frail older man, fortified behind an antique executive desk, supported by standing lions sculptured in oak, in a high-ceilinged room decorated with geraniums on wide windowsills, picked up on the detail of the twenty-thousand-dollar diamond ring. “Could be a simple case of greed and lack of concern for the other parties,” he said brightly. “Which boils down to the same thing, of course.” He smiled encouragingly. “Maybe a mugging that turned into a kidnapping?” A sudden ray of sunlight shone between his thin fingers as he raised his hands to urge them into activity. “You two better check on bars where bald bad bungled Buddhists bang bongos. Get Cardozo to help out, and Ketchup and Karate. No uniforms. We may still be in time. Start after dinner tonight, when the district starts cooking.”
They were not in time.
An alert sorter at Amsterdam’s generator, where the city’s garbage is converted into energy, had, by then, noted a human arm dangling from an elongated carton as he operated a crane to hoist inflammables into the incinerator. The carton had been brought in by a garbage barge, one of many stationed on the city’s canals during the day, to be hauled to the generator after sunset, weekends excluded. The barges are receptacles for rubbish deposited by citizens living along the canals. All dumping is supposed t
o be supervised by uniformed officials who guard the barges, but there is only one inspector to each barge and there are the calls of nature, quick trips to sandwich shops, goofing off in the barges’ cabins, which provide periods during which the unspeakable can happen. The carton, originally used to pack a standing lamp, had been dumped by an unknown party onto a barge stationed at the intersection of the Brewer’s and Emperor’s Canals. It contained Emily Dubber’s nude and soiled remains.
Grijpstra and de Gier, reached by cell phone, left the interviewing of bartenders and bar regulars to Detective-Constable-First-Class Simon Cardozo, a curly-haired young man in a corduroy suit, and out-of-uniform Constables Ketchup and Karate, while they took a cab to the morgue. Assistant pathologist Herbert Janssen, new to his trade, had vomited next to the dead body and was cleaning up as the detectives came, shivering, into the refrigerated room.
“Bad,” Dr. Janssen said. “The autopsy will be later but I can tell you right now that somebody chopped the lady’s right ring finger off, and that somebody repeatedly prodded an eighteen-inch-long artifact into her vagina. At this point, I would guess the prodding led to internal bleeding that proved to be lethal.”
Sergeant de Gier choked, coughed, covered his mouth, turned on his heel, and ran out of the room. Grijpstra shrugged. “He does that.” He turned back to the body. “Coke in the nose? Would you mind checking?”
“There’s a white powdery substance in the nose,” Dr. Janssen confirmed. He pointed at the corpse’s upper arm. “There are fresh needle marks, too.” He tried to drop the arm but it resisted gravity. “Rigor mortis,” the young doctor said. “I would guess she has been dead for several days.” He pointed at something small and white, moving slowly on the blotched skin of a thigh. “That, Detective, is a maggot.”
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