The Sergeant's Cat

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  De Gier hadn’t drawn any conclusion. Like Grijpstra he had associated black with “Negro,” but he was in doubt. The man was no Negro. “Who else is black?” de Gier thought but the logic line of his thoughts was inter­rupted by the inquisitive expression on the face of the dark man.

  “Police,” Grijpstra said and produced his wallet, a large leather wallet consisting of a number of plastic compartments and a notebook. He shook the wallet, the plastic compartments dangled and a small card hung in front of their host’s eyes.

  The man came closer and concentrated on the docu­ment.

  “That’s a credit card of the Amsterdam-Rotterdam Bank,” the small man said.

  De Gier laughed softly and Grijpstra looked at his colleague. It was a heavy look, full of criticism.

  “I’m sorry,” said de Gier.

  Grijpstra dug in his wallet and after a while his square, fat fingers found his police identification with its blue and red stripes and photograph of a much younger Grijps­tra dressed in uniform with the silver button of his rank on both shoulders.

  The dark man bent forward and read the card.

  “H. F. Grijpstra,” he read in a clear voice. “Adjutant. Municipal Police of Amsterdam.”

  He paused.

  “I have seen it. Please come in.”

  “Extraordinary,” de Gier thought. “Fascinating. That fellow actually read the card. It never happens. Grijpstra always shows his credit card and nobody ever notices anything. He could have shown a receipt from the elec­tricity department and nobody would object, but this chap really reads the identification.”

  “Who are you?” Grijpstra was asking.

  “Jan Karel van Meteren,” the man said.

  They were in the corridor. There were three doors on the right, heavy oak doors. One of the doors was open and de Gier saw a bar and several young men with long hair and one elderly man with a bald head. Everybody was drinking beer. He had a glance of another young man behind the bar, dressed in a white T-shirt and dec­orated with a necklace of colored stones. Van Meteren was leading the way and they followed obediently. A staircase at the end of the corridor, again made of oak and recently polished. The floor of the corridor was cov­ered with slabs of marble, cracked but very clean. Near the staircase Grijpstra noticed a niche with an upright Indian figure, made of bronze, life-size and with the right hand raised in a gesture of solemn greeting. Perhaps the gesture symbolized a blessing.

  They climbed the staircase and came into a large open space with a high ceiling made of iron, painted white and with a relief of garlands picked out in gold. This was the restaurant, occupying the entire floor. De Gier counted ten tables, six seating four persons and four seating six persons. Nearly every chair was taken.

  Grijpstra had stopped while their guide waited patiently. He was admiring a statue, standing on a stone platform attached to the wall. It was a statue of a female deity per­forming a dance. The noble head on its slender neck seemed to contrast at first with the full breasts and the lewdly raised foot and Grijpstra was surprised that this naked sexual fig­ure represented divinity and that he accepted her divinity. Undoubtedly the figure was free, quiet, detached and pow­erful. Superior. The thought flitted through his head. Superior. And free. Especially free. The thought disap­peared as he walked on. De Gier had seen the statue but hadn’t allowed himself to be interested. He watched the guests without fixing any one of them in particular. A fixed stare is aggressive and invites attention. He didn’t want any attention and didn’t get any. The guests took him for another guest and thought he wanted to join them. One man took his hat and briefcase off a chair and made an inviting gesture. De Gier smiled and shook his head. He noticed that nobody seemed to talk; perhaps they were listening to the music that came from several stereo loudspeakers and was hitting the room in waves. De Gier liked the music; it reminded him of a performance in the Tropical Museum. The heavy rhythmical chords would come from a bass guitar and the dry sharp knocks from a set of drums; he imagined that the wheezing high notes setting the melody itself would be a flute, a bamboo flute probably.

  They were moving again, still following van Meteren. He led them through the restaurant and into a long narrow kitchen; through its windows there was a view of a garden full of red and pink rhododendrons. Two girls in jeans were busily stirring pots on a large stove. There was a sharp but not unpleasant smell of weird herbs. One of the girls wanted to object to the presence of strangers but stopped herself when she saw van Meteren.

  There was another narrow staircase and another cor­ridor. White walls and several doors. They passed three doors and van Meteren opened the last and fourth door.

  De Gier had a feeling that they had now penetrated into the secret part of the house; perhaps the silence of the corridor motivated the thought. The music of the restaurant didn’t reach this lofty level. Grijpstra entered the room and sighed. He saw the corpse and it moved, exactly as he had expected. It would be the draft, of course, all phenomena can be explained, but the slow ghastly movement chilled his spine. De Gier had now come in as well and watched silently. He noticed the small bare feet with their neat toes pointed at the floor. His gaze wandered upward and recorded the protruding tongue and the wide open bulging blue eyes. A small corpse that had belonged to a living man. A little over five feet. A thin man, well dressed in khaki trousers of good cloth, nicely ironed, and a freshly laundered striped shirt. Some forty years old. Long thick dark red hair and a full mustache, hanging down at the corners by its own weight. De Gier moved closer and looked at the corpse’s wristwatch. He grunted. A very expensive watch, worth a small fortune. He couldn’t remember ever having seen a gold strap of such width and quality.

  Both officers froze and quietly looked around, notic­ing as many details as possible. Almost automatically they had put their hands in their pockets. They had been trained in the same school. Hands in pockets cannot touch anything. This silent room was bound to be full of indi­cations, traces, tracks.

  They saw a large room, again with a high ceiling made not of cast iron but of plain sawn planks supported by heavy deal beams. There were several bookcases, well filled. There was a telephone in one of the bookcases, and an expensive TV set and a new complete encyclo­pedia. The furniture consisted of a low settee, a table and three chairs. There were some cushions on the floor, embroidered. The patterns were unusual. “Eastern designs probably,” de Gier thought. There was a typewriter on the table with a letter in it. De Gier bent down.

  Dear Sirs:

  I thank you for your letter of the tenth and have to inform you

  No further text. The letterhead looked expensive. hindist society, the address and the telephone num­ber.

  They saw a footstool lying on its side near the feet of the corpse. They saw a gramophone, a stack of records and a low bed covered with a batik cloth. The woven curtains were closed but allowed enough light to filter through to see every detail of the room.

  “What’s that?” Grijpstra asked, pointing at another low table covered with red lacquer and serving as a seat for a fairly large statue: a rather fat bald-headed man sitting cross-legged and staring at them with glass eyes.

  “An altar of sorts,” de Gier answered after some thought. “That copper bowl filled with sand must be an incense burner, and the brown spots in the sand are burnt-out incense sticks.”

  Grijpstra raised an eyebrow. “You know a lot today.”

  “I visit museums,” de Gier said.

  Grijpstra sniffed.

  “Incense?” he asked.

  De Gier nodded. The heavy sweet smell gave him a headache.

  “Who discovered the body?” de Gier asked van Meteren, who was standing near the door.

  “I did,” van Meteren answered. “I had to ask Piet something and as he didn’t answer when I knocked, I went back to my room. A little later I asked the girls in the kitchen if they had seen hi
m and they said he had gone upstairs. I looked into the other rooms; one of them belongs to his mother, and another is the temple. He wasn’t there. I thought he might be asleep and knocked again and then I opened the door and saw him hanging there. I telephoned the police and waited for you down­stairs. Nobody knows anything yet.”

  “Why didn’t you cut the rope?” asked de Gier.

  “He was dead.”

  “How did you know?”

  Van Meteren didn’t answer.

  “Are you a doctor?” Grijpstra asked.

  “No,” van Meteren said. “But I have seen a lot of corpses in my life. Piet is dead. Dead is dead. I could feel it. A dead body has no feel.”

  “Did you touch it?”

  Van Meteren shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t have to feel a corpse to know it is dead.”

  “So why didn’t you cut the rope?” asked de Gier again.

  “I couldn’t do it by myself,” van Meteren said. “Somebody would have had to hold the body. Besides, I wanted you to find it the way it was. Perhaps it will give you a lead.”

  De Gier looked again at the corpse. He had an idea that he had seen the man before and searched his memory. De Gier’s memory was well organized and he knew his way around his files. After a while he knew that he hadn’t seen the man before but that the strong chin, the long hair and the heavy mustache reminded him of a portrait he had seen in a museum in The Hague: a portrait of a Dutch statesman of the sixteenth century, a statesman and a warrior, on his way to battle. The warrior had been sitting on a horse and had a sword in his hand. A leader. Very likely this man had also been a leader, a boss. A little boss in charge of a small society. “Discipline,” de Gier thought. “That’s it. This house and this room reek of discipline. Everything is neat and clean. The girls in the kitchen are clean too, reasonably clean. Van Meteren is clean. There would be some con­nection between the corpse and van Meteren. Perhaps van Meteren is an employee of the Society. But why do I observe this?” de Gier asked himself. The answer came immediately. He hadn’t expected cleanliness when he had read the sign on the door. hindist society. He had associated the words with a mess. The new wisdom coming from the East is a messy business. He thought of the dirty, doped, vague, shad­owy people he had arrested in the street and interrogated at Police Headquarters. Petty theft, drug dealing in a small silly way, runaway minors, prostitution. All suspects stank. He had made them empty their pockets before locking them up and had been appalled at the dirty rags, the broken trin­kets, the lack of money. He had seen the photographs they carried around with them. Pictures of “holy men,” “gurus” or “yogis.” Skeletons with long matted hair and crazy eyes. The masters preaching the way.

  He had associated the word hindist with Hinduism or Buddhism. The religions of the East. Before he had begun to arrest the crazy tramps the words had had a different association. Peace and quiet, some form of detachment. Real wisdom. But gradually “messiness” had crept in.

  And now he had to admit that this place, this nest of nonsensical imitation faith, was, after all, clean. And he had been surprised. De Gier’s thoughts took only a few seconds and meanwhile Grijpstra had sighed again. The body was dead, no doubt about it, and they would have to cut the rope. They had to assume that the body was still alive. Only a doctor can determine death. He looked over his shoulder and nodded at de Gier.

  “You can telephone headquarters, if you like.”

  There was no need to say it. De Gier was dialing the number already. He didn’t have to say much. At head­quarters the machine was already in operation. Within a few minutes they would be arriving. Doctor, ambulance and the experts.

  While de Gier telephoned Grijpstra picked up the stool and put it right and climbed on top of it. He cut the rope with his switchblade, an illegal weapon that he carried against all regulations. The rope wasn’t thick and the knife very sharp. De Gier wanted to catch the corpse but van Meteren was quicker. He put the corpse down, very carefully, on the bed. No one thought that Piet would start breathing again.

  He didn’t.

  •

  Grijpstra bent down and looked at the dead face. “Have a look.”

  De Gier looked. “Ach, ach,” he said.

  Van Meteren looked as well.

  “A bruise,” van Meteren said, “near the temple, slightly swollen.”

  “You saw that very quickly,” de Gier said.

  “He has been hit,” van Meteren continued, “with a stick, or perhaps a fist. The doctor will be able to tell us.”

  “What exactly do you do in this house?” de Gier asked.

  Van Meteren straightened his back and rubbed it. He thought. The low forehead became wrinkled and the nose seemed to flatten itself even more. Suddenly de Gier knew what this man had to be. Not a Negro, but a Papuan. He remembered the photographs in his geography book at school. Papuan sitting on the beach, sharpening spears. But not a fullblooded Papuan, the nose wasn’t flat enough and the face showed other properties. Perhaps three-quarters Papuan or seven-eighths. That would explain the Dutch name. The Papuan’s language was pure Dutch, impeccable, overcorrect even. De Gier knew the way the Dutch Negroes spoke and the Indonesians. Van Meteren’s way of talking was more guttural.

  “I live here,” van Meteren said. “That’s all. I do nothing here. Piet ran the Society. I think that the girls will take over now, or Eduard or Johan. But Johan is in the bar and hasn’t been told yet and Eduard took the day off.”

  “All right,” de Gier said, “in that case I will go down. For the time being nobody is allowed to leave the premises. The cars from Headquarters can arrive any minute now. They’ll be sending more detectives and probably uni­formed policemen as well. It’ll be the usual hullabaloo.”

  De Gier ran down the stairs. Hullabaloo was the right word. Day after day nothing to do but to drive around and look around a little and now suddenly two corpses in one evening. They had found the first corpse early that eve­ning, or rather, they had seen a body change into a corpse. The woman was still alive when they found her, naked and bleeding in the shabby whorehouse at the canal. A knife in her belly. She died in the doctor’s arms; he had come immediately answering de Gier’s emergency call. The woman had been able to describe her killer while she kept her hands pressed against her body in a vain attempt to stop both pain and blood. An aging whore, a reasonably sweet person. De Gier had found the young man under a tree, right opposite the whorehouse. The boy was resting his back against an old elm tree and was staring into the canal’s murky water. The knife was still in his hand. He confessed at once. A pleasant boy, but not to be trusted with knives and middle-aged women who reminded him of his mother. They had taken him with them in the car and locked him up after they had taken his statement. Another job for the municipal psychiatrist. Most likely the boy wouldn’t even have to face court but be taken to an asylum straight away to rot there for the rest of his life while he filled his time making feltdolls and swallowing pills. Or they might release him after a while and put him on national assistance and the state’s money would buy another knife and another middle-aged woman would die.

  The dead prostitute hadn’t taken much of their time and Grijpstra and de Gier had gone out for another ride hoping to be able to fill the rest of their night’s shift with peacefully ambling about and stopping in a quiet café somewhere for a cup of coffee. And now this.

  De Gier strode into the restaurant. He found the ampli­fier and turned the knob the wrong way. The loudspeakers screeched and some forty startled faces stared at him. One of the faces, a heavily bearded one, lost its temper.

  “Look here,” the face said. “Would you mind leaving that amplifier alone? We are listening to that music!”

  De Gier walked up to the man and put a hand on his shoulder. “Never mind the music. I am a police officer, I have to request everybody here to stay put.”

  He raised his voice.
>
  “Something unpleasant has happened in this house tonight. Please remain seated. My colleagues will be here any minute now and we will have to ask some questions. It’s only a formality and we won’t keep you long. If anyone knows anything about what happened upstairs earlier tonight or this afternoon he can come and speak to me.”

  The faces began to mumble to each other. The two girls came from the kitchen and approached de Gier.

  “What happened?” the oldest girl asked. She was a beautiful girl with large green eyes and pigtails, and would be just over twenty years old.

  “You’ll be informed in due course,” de Gier said.

  “Is it about the money?”

  “Has money been stolen?” asked de Gier.

  “I don’t think so,” the girl said, “but Piet asked us this afternoon if we had been in his room. Johan had taken the shop’s money to Piet and put it on his table at four o’clock and Piet counted it and it was less than he expected. He probably didn’t count properly. Did you come because of that?”

  “No,” de Gier said softly. “We wouldn’t disturb the joint for a few guilders. Piet is dead. He was hanging from one of the beams in his room.”

  “Oh,” the girl said and covered her mouth with a shaking hand. The other girl, a fat little thing with glasses, began to cry.

  “Okay, okay,” de Gier said. “It can’t be helped. Any of you two been to his room?”

  Both girls shook their heads.

  “No,” the fat girl said.

  “No,” the beautiful girl said, “not after five o’clock this afternoon. I saw the money on the table when I went up with Piet. I only stayed ten minutes or so and then I returned to the kitchen to prepare for supper. In fact, he told me to go; he wanted to write some letters.”

  “He is the boss here, isn’t he?” de Gier asked.

  “Yes,” said the fat girl. “He is the Society’s director. The Society is supposed to belong to all of us members but he runs everything. And is he dead now?”

  De Gier gave her his handkerchief and she rubbed her eyes.