Outsider in Amsterdam (5 page)

“What’s going on?” the old lady asked. “What are you all talking about? I have been listening to the grunting of voices for hours now. It is half past one, I want to sleep.”

Van Meteren put his arm around the old lady. “Come in, Miesje. These gentlemen are police officers. That’s Mister Grijpstra and that’s Mister de Gier.”

The detectives shook the thin hand, dotted all over with dark brown spots.

She sat down, with a straight back, on the edge of the settee.

“So what goes on?” she asked in a brittle voice. “Are they your friends, Jan? Traffic wardens?”

“No, Miesje. They are regular police. There has been an accident. Piet has had a bad fall.”

The old lady’s eyes, which had been closing slowly, suddenly opened.

“He is dead?” she shrieked.

Nobody answered.

“He is dead,” the old lady said and began to cry.

The sound of her sobs grated on the detectives’ ears. Her mouth dropped open and Grijpstra shuddered when he saw her tongue flapping and trembling with each fresh howl.

Van Meteren had rushed out of the room and came back with a glass of water and a very small white pill.

“Swallow this, Miesje.” The old lady swallowed. The sobs stopped abruptly. She responded to the brief snappy command.

De Gier was grateful; the sudden silence eased his nerves.

The old lady began to talk. She spoke slowly: it seemed that the pill had given her a dry mouth.

“This afternoon Piet told me that I shouldn’t complain so much and that the rhododendrons are in bloom. But my eyes are so bad. What are rhododendrons anyway?”

Her voice was gathering volume again.

“Rhododendrons are flowers, Miesje,” van Meteren said, still using his command voice. “Like tulips. And now you are going to your room and you are going to sleep. Tomorrow I’ll come to see you before I go to work.”

He pushed her out of the room.

“I can’t stand old ladies,” de Gier said, “and I most definitely can’t stand them if they are mad.”

“You’ll have to learn to get used to them,” said Grijpstra. “There’ll be more and more of them. It’s very difficult to find a doctor who’ll let old people die nowadays. Haven’t you been reading the papers? I wonder what was in that pill.”

“An opiate,” said van Meteren, who had returned. “It’s called Palfium. The doctor prescribes it; she can get as much as she wants. She has been taking these pills for years now and she is hopelessly addicted to them. Piet knew but he didn’t mind. It keeps her quiet. Without the pills she would have to go to an asylum and he preferred to keep her here. I’ll telephone the doctor tomorrow; he’ll probably have her taken away.”

“Did Piet take those pills as well?” Grijpstra asked.

“Not as far as I know.”

“But he could have taken them, his mother must have a bottle full of them on her bedside table.”

Van Meteren nodded thoughtfully.

“I don’t think so,” he said after a while. “Those pills are very strong. According to the doctor, they will stun a horse but Miesje can take two at a time and stay on her feet. She hasn’t got much of a stomach left. She has been operated for ulcers and I suppose most of the stuff goes straight down. If Piet had taken a pill he would have had to sit down and he probably would have gone to sleep. I have never seen him like that. He did drink a bit lately, he would come down to the bar and have a few whiskies. Three glasses would make him drunk enough to be able to laugh and talk to people. I take it you are suggesting that he took a pill today and that the pill knocked him over and caused the bruise on his temple?”

“Yes,” said de Gier.

“Perhaps,” van Meteren said, “but it would have been the first time that he took a pill. In my opinion anyway.”

“Why do you call her Miesje?” Grijpstra asked.

“Ach,” van Meteren said. “It’s just a trick. Whenever she is hysterical she screams. I thought I might make her calm down if I treated her as if she was a child. She was called Miesje once, when she was a child and wore laced boots and played hopscotch. When she behaves normally I call her Mrs. Verboom and when I think she will start one of her tantrums I call her Miesje. I take her on my lap and she’ll talk quietly and sometimes I cuddle her a bit.”

“Brr,” said de Gier.

Van Meteren grinned. “Yes. It’s quite ridiculous. Piet would do it too. I always laughed when I saw that tall skeleton sitting on his lap, he was such a small man. Perhaps it looks even funnier when she sits on my lap. But I have done other crazy things. I used to walk for miles with an Indonesian commando
on a string. It was knotted in such a way that he would throttle himself if he tried to run away. I would hold the string with one hand and the carbine with the other. And now I have an old crazy lady on my lap and call her Miesje.”

There was another knock on the door and a thin young man dressed in jeans and a T-shirt came in. De Gier looked at the long unwashed hair and remembered the barman.

“This is Johan,” van Meteren said, and the detectives said, “Good evening.” De Gier asked Johan to sit down and made room on the settee.

Grijpstra asked the usual questions but Johan could only shake his head. He hadn’t seen Piet after he had given him the takings of the shop at four o’clock. Three hundred and fifty-six guilders and some cents. Piet had phoned him later on the house phone to tell him that there was a difference of some thirty guilders but Johan hadn’t gone upstairs; he had been too busy getting the bar in order for the evening’s customers.

“What do you think has happened?” de Gier asked.

Johan shrugged his shoulders and didn’t reply.

Grijpstra grunted. He had been thinking that he had met the boy hundreds of times already. The inner city was full of duplicates of this boy. Well-meaning, unintelligent and knocked loose from their surroundings, full of protests and questions and wandering in a thin, almost two-dimensional thought-world where they could find no answers. “Maybe they don’t really want to find anything,” Grijpstra thought. “Maybe they wait for death, or a strong woman who will take them in hand so that they will find a daily routine again and start watching football on TV.” He thought of his oldest son and studied Johan without much sympathy. Grijpstra’s son wouldn’t watch football either. He preferred to lie on his bed, dressed in a striped shirt and an embroidered pair of trousers and watch the cracks in the ceiling.

“Suicide, I suppose,” Johan said after a few minutes of silence, which hung heavily in the room. “Who would want to murder Piet? He was a bit of a bore but he didn’t hurt anyone. He couldn’t if he tried.”

Grijpstra changed his opinion. The answer had been cleverer than he had expected.

“You don’t seem to be very upset,” de Gier said.

“No,” Johan said. “I am sorry. Perhaps I should be upset, but I can’t generate any feeling. Annetje and I were going to leave next week anyway. This is a commercial enterprise where the goal is money. Piet wanted to make a profit and he wanted the profit for himself. He was the owner of the business. We intended to leave him and find some other place with a bit of idealism behind it, or maybe start one of our own. Piet crooked us. I don’t really hold it against him. It’s my own stupidity, I should have seen it. He made us work for the great purpose but all we worked for was his wealth. Did you see the gold strap on his wristwatch?”

Grijpstra nodded.

“There are other things as well. There is a new station wagon parked outside. We earned it for him. He was a capitalist but he didn’t tell us.”

“You don’t like capitalists?” de Gier asked.

“I don’t mind them,” Johan said. “It’s a way of life. Free enterprise is a philosophy. It isn’t mine. I am against fascism and I would fight it if I had to, but I wouldn’t fight capitalism.”

“So you think it was suicide?” de Gier asked.

“Yes.”

“Enough,” Grijpstra said. “You need some sleep. All of us do. Tomorrow is another day. Try and remember anything that may be relevant and tell us about it tomorrow. The peace of the citizens has been disturbed and we, criminal investigators of your police department, have to repair the peace again. And you have to help us. Such is the law.”

He grinned, got up, and stretched his aching back.

* * *

Within a few minutes the detectives were walking toward their car. A late drunk came swaggering toward them, and de Gier had to jump aside.

“Out of my way,” the drunk shouted and grabbed a lamp post.

“Bah,” Grijpstra said. The drunk was pissing on the street and all over his own trousers.

“Watch it,” de Gier shouted. The drunk had fallen over and rolled off the sidewalk into the street.

Grijpstra, who was getting into the car, grabbed the microphone.

“An unconscious man on the sidewalk of Haarlemmer Houttuinen opposite number five. Please send the bus.”

“Drunk?” the voice of Headquarters asked.

“Very,” Grijpstra answered. “No need for an ambulance, the police bus will do.”

“Bus coming,” the voice said. “Out.”

“We better wait,” de Gier said. “I have pulled him off the street but he may roll over again. He is fast asleep.”

“Sure. We’ve got nothing else to do.”

They waited in silence for the small blue bus with its crew of two elderly police constables who dragged the drunk inside, cursing and sighing.

“Nice job,” de Gier said, waved at the constables and started the engine.

“So have we,” Grijpstra said, “nice and complicated. Murdered innocence dangling from a piece of string, surrounded by dear sweet people of which one is a black cannibal trained in guerilla warfare and another a crazy old female bag of bones.”

“I hope his mother has done it,” de Gier said.

“You love people, don’t you?”

“I don’t like jails,” de Gier said. “I had to visit some of our
clients in their cells this week. Cold, drafty and hopeless. Jail will get you if nothing else does. A day in jail means a year of crime.”

Grijpstra turned his heavy neck and stared at his colleague.

“Well, well,” he said, “have you forgotten how many people you have directed to the cold, drafty and hopeless cells?”

“Yes, yes,” de Gier said and lapsed into silence.

The silence lasted until they entered their office and he had to help Grijpstra to phrase the exact short sentences that framed their report and that they both signed, mentioning in cool print that everything the report contained was the truth as they, officers of the Queen’s law, saw it. Grijpstra typed, slowly, with four fingers, without making a single typing error.

De Gier didn’t speak when he left but Grijpstra didn’t mind. He had been working with de Gier for a number of years and they had never really fallen out.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
de Gier was in his bed. It was eight o’clock, he should have been up and in any case he should have been awake.

He wasn’t asleep either. He was applying a trick, a recipe he had discovered as a boy. Stretched flat on his back with his toes pressed against the iron bars of the old hospital bed that he had picked up at an auction some years before, he was maintaining, with some effort a state of semiconsciousness. He was, in fact, directing a dream. His body tingled, not the unpleasant tingle of cold hands after coming into a warm room, but an exciting all over tingle that made his entire body glow. He was very close to being free, free from his daily routine, his responsibility, his planet bound existence. Inside his tingling body his mind was at liberty to move, wherever he wanted it to go.

And, being a shrewd man, he was using his liberty for an immediate purpose. He made his mind go back to the room of the dangling corpse. He saw the Papuan again, and the old skeleton-woman, the restaurant and the guests, the kitchen and the girls. He didn’t try to achieve anything, he merely tried to force his mind to go back into the day before and he was reasonably successful until Oliver jumped on his stomach and cut the thin film that separated de Gier from reality.

He woke up and, reluctantly, looked at his watch. Five minutes past eight.

“Yes,” he said to Oliver and put the Siamese cat on the floor where it began to grumble and whine.

“Wait,” he said and walked to the small bathroom, looking at his plants in passing.

If it is true that a house is a projection of the occupant’s spirit then de Gier’s spirit was not quite ordinary. He had furnished the little two-room apartment with a bed, plants, and bookshelves. No table, no chairs, no TV. A detachable shelf, screwed to the wall above the bed, served as a table if he wanted to write, which wasn’t often. He ate in the kitchen, not much larger than an old-fashioned cupboard.

“Mmm,” he said, stopping near the geranium, which had started as a seed no more than a few weeks ago. “Mmm,” he said again when he admired his creeper, hanging down from a bookshelf.

“She grows,” he remarked to Oliver, who wasn’t interested, and began to splash cold water all over his chest and arms and poured hot water and lathered his face.

Oliver continued to grumble.

“We’ll have breakfast together,” de Gier said. “Go to the balcony and irritate the birds while I finish shaving.”

He moved the protesting cat with his foot and opened the balcony door. A seagull swooped low, expecting to be fed, and Oliver chattered with fury.

A few minutes later the cat and the detective ate, chopped heart and scrambled eggs. Then they drank, water and coffee. Then de Gier went out to catch his bus, an hour late, and the cat stretched into the still warm blankets of the unmade bed, imitating his master’s trick of being asleep without dozing off altogether.

“You are late,” said Grijpstra.

De Gier smiled, remembering the pretty dark-haired girl he had been sitting next to in the bus.

“I am often late,” he said.

“That’s true,” Grijpstra agreed. “Here, read this, the doctor’s report.”

They were in their large grey room of Headquarters. Grijpstra relaxed into a plastic chair and watched his colleague reading. Grijpstra smiled. He was content. His wife had been asleep when he came home at 2:30 in the morning. She was still asleep when he left. He had breakfasted by himself, helping himself to more toast and more eggs without any contradiction or argument. And, alone in the detectives’ room, he had watered the rubber plant and played drums on the set that, in a so far unexplained manner, had arrived in his and de Gier’s office about a year earlier. Found perhaps, or confiscated. Put there for a purpose that had been conveniently forgotten. Grijpstra had wanted to be a drummer when he was still a young man with a sense of adventure, and he had some talent. He often came early, to hit the three drums and clash the cymbals. Very softly of course, which, in drumming, is the finer art. He had, during those many early mornings, specialized in the “rustle,” the sweeping of the soft forklike instruments (which had come with the set of drums) on the stretched skin of the two smaller drums. Tsss, tsss and then BENG, but softly. And then a roll, a small roll, exciting because of its strict limitation. While de Gier read, Grijpstra grabbed the sticks and sounded the small roll.