Outsider in Amsterdam (16 page)

Grijpstra didn’t sound very pleasant; he was staring hard at the psychiatrist.

“Very well,” she said.

The nurse came.

“Has the patient said anything?”

“The patient had said a lot. She had screamed and howled and made a mess of her room.”

“Why?” de Gier asked.

“We took her bag and her jewelery and locked her into a room. The windows of the room don’t open.”

“Is she that dangerous?” Grijpstra asked.

“Mrs. Verboom is under observation,” the nurse said. “It’s standard procedure.”

“I see,” Grijpstra said and looked at de Gier.

De Gier smiled. “We are never allowed to lock up a person unless we have reasons to suspect criminal behavior.”

“This isn’t a police station,” the psychiatrist said. “This is a mental home.”

“I see,” said de Gier.

“Did she mention the name ‘Piet’?” he asked the nurse.

“She did,” the nurse said. “Piet is her son. She blamed him for her stay here. She called him names. And she threw her breakfast at the wall and made a mess. I had to call a colleague and we gave her an injection. She slept, but right now she is awake.”

“Can I take her for a walk in the park?” de Gier asked the psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist hesitated. “Do you think you can handle her?”

“My colleague is very good with women,” Grijpstra said.

The psychiatrist’s face cracked and showed some long yellow teeth.

“If I can’t, I’ll bring her back at once,” de Gier said, “but I would like to ask her a few simple questions that won’t do any harm.”

“All right,” the psychiatrist said.

“Do you think Mrs. Verboom could have killed a man?” Grijpstra asked the nurse.

The nurse looked at the psychiatrist.

“Why not?” the psychiatrist said. “If she can throw her breakfast at the wall and fight with the staff she must be a violent person.”

“Yes,” Grijpstra said, “but here she is in a nuthouse …” He looked at the psychiatrist. “I beg your pardon.”

“It’s all right,” the psychiatrist said and showed her teeth again. “Go on, please.”

“I mean to say,” Grijpstra continued, “that here she may think that she can do anything she likes. She has nothing to lose. But when she was still living in Amsterdam her situation was different. She was restricted by more or less normal surroundings.”

“Mad people have no brakes,” the psychiatrist said. “They may fear other people but they will do anything if they get the chance. They wouldn’t hesitate to kill, not if they are very aggressive as this patient obviously is. I am not saying that she
is a killer, but she could easily be one. As you said, she has nothing to lose.”

“She might lose her freedom,” de Gier said.

“Did she have any freedom in Amsterdam?” the psychiatrist asked.

“No,” de Gier said, “perhaps you are right. Her son kept her in her room, I am told. She never left the house.”

“You see?” the psychiatrist said.

De Gier got up. “I’ll take her for a walk now if I may,” he said.

“Hello, Miesje,” de Gier said.

The old lady turned sharply and looked at him with her small black glinting eyes.

“Who are you?” she shrieked.

“Jan van Meteren’s friend, don’t you remember?”

The expression on Mrs. Verboom’s face changed. “Ah yes,” she said softly. “I remember now. Parking police, aren’t you? You made a lot of noise that evening. What are you here for?”

“I’ve come to take you for a walk in the park, Miesje,” de Gier said and put on his best smile. “The weather is very nice. Are you coming?”

“There was a gale last night,” Mrs. Verboom said grumpily. “The windows rattled. I couldn’t sleep. It’ll probably be a mess outside.”

“Not at all. I’ll show you. You come with me,” he offered his arm.

“You see,” Mrs. Verboom said a little while later, “it
is
a mess. Branches on the ground everywhere. Quite a devastation.”

She seemed to like the sound of the word for she kept on repeating it.

“That’s enough, now,” de Gier said pleasantly. “It’s lovely out here, much nicer than inside in your room. Look, there’s a thrush on the branch over there. Isn’t he singing nicely?”

She wouldn’t look and he held her head and twisted it.

“Look!”

“I
am
looking,” Mrs. Verboom said. “I don’t like thrushes. Noisy birds. Piet used to have pigeons all around the house. Kuruku, kuruku all day long. They drove me out of my mind. I threw things at them but Piet told me I shouldn’t.”

“But Piet looked after you very well, didn’t he?” de Gier asked.

“The little rotter,” Mrs. Verboom said. “He always was. He was a bore during his schooldays and he was a little stinker before he went to school. Like his father, but his father left. Left me with Piet. I wanted to go on the stage, but I couldn’t, had to look after Piet. I often told him to leave and live with his father, but he wouldn’t.”

De Gier said nothing, walking next to her and holding her by the arm.

“Did you come to fetch me?” Mrs. Verboom asked. “I don’t like it here. We eat in a nasty big room and there’s an old woman at my table who lets everything go. She even vomits, right into her plate. Then I can’t eat anymore.”

“Bah,” de Gier thought.

“Did you come to fetch me?”

“No,” de Gier said. “Piet died and now you can’t go home anymore, the house is empty.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Verboom said. “He is dead.”

She sounded pleased.

“Why did you kill him?” de Gier asked.

Mrs. Verboom fought herself free and stopped. De Gier turned to look at her. The sharp glint had returned to her beady black eyes. The evil hit him and he felt himself tremble. Witches in the Middle Ages must have looked like that, old hags with shreds of hair hanging over their faces, suddenly appearing in an empty spot in the forest. A crow, muttering hoarsely to itself on a nearby branch, accentuated the scene.

Mrs. Verboom cackled. “Why are you looking at me like
that?” she asked. “You are nervous, aren’t you? Just like me. I’ve always been nervous. That’s why I am here. Maybe you should be here as well.”

The moment passed. She suddenly changed and became meek and docile. He walked her back to the front door where the nurse was waiting for them. He tried a few more questions but she didn’t reply, talking instead about the devastation the gale had wrought.

“Devastation,” she said merrily. “Terrible. What a mess!”

“Did she say anything?” the psychiatrist asked. De Gier shook his head. The psychiatrist had put on a jacket. “Lesbian probably,” de Gier thought. “Women who wear jackets like that are usually lesbian. Would explain her heavy voice. Wrong hormones, I suppose. Took this job because she likes to have power. Everybody must do as she says. If she says you are mad you stay here for the rest of your life. Until she tires of you.”

“No madame,” he said politely. “She said she didn’t like her son and she seems to be pleased that he died but she won’t say that she killed him.”

“Of course she wouldn’t,” the psychiatrist said. “A child won’t admit to stealing cookies. It takes the fun out of the game.”

“If you notice anything I would like you to phone us,” Grijpstra said, and got up. “This is my card.”

The psychiatrist opened the drawer of her desk, threw the card into it without reading it, and slammed the drawer shut.

“Never go mad,” Grijpstra said while they tried to find a road leading out of Aerdenhout.

“I’ll do my utmost,” de Gier said.

Within an hour they had returned the car to the courtyard of Headquarters. De Gier bicycled back to his flat and phoned Constanze the minute he came in.

“She took Yvette for a walk,” the father said.

“I’ll ring later.”

“Don’t worry, boy,” the father said. “She’ll ring you as soon as she comes home. She’ll go to see you tonight, she said so.”

“Heaven is full of blessings,” de Gier said as he put the phone down. “Stop sucking your tail, Oliver, or you’ll finish up in Aerdenhout.”

Oliver opened his mouth and the tail snapped back. Its end had been sucked into a point as sharp as a needle.

“B
AH
,”
DE
G
IER
said, “and bah and bah again.”

He and Grijpstra were in a marked police car, a white VW complete with its blue light, siren and loudspeaker. They were on normal patrol duty.

“Three times bah,” Grijpstra said. “Three is a holy figure, the bah of the father, the bah of the …”

“Don’t,” said de Gier, who was trying to worm his way between a streetcar and a parked tourist bus.

Grijpstra laughed.

“One can’t insult the great power above,” he said. “He is there and whatever we say fits in with him.”

“Who?” asked de Gier, who had got the car stuck and was waiting for the streetcar to move.

“God,” Grijpstra said.

“Ah,” de Gier said. “I see. You misunderstood me. I don’t mind the blasphemous talk. I said ‘don’t’ to the streetcar. It stopped and I wanted it to go on.”

“But you should mind,” Grijpstra said. “You are a policeman and a policeman has to do with the law, and the law has to do with religion. Don’t you remember that lecture last month?”

De Gier remembered. A retired state-police general had told them about law and religion. First there was religion, then there was law. Don’t misbehave for misbehavior displeases Divinity.
It was only much later that the law came down to earth and bold spirits stated that misbehavior displeases humanity.

“But why are you complaining?” Grijpstra asked. “I thought that you would be pleased. Wasn’t it your idea to apply for normal patrol duty today?”

“It was,” de Gier said, “but we are still stuck. This is merely a diversion. I applied for normal duty today because I couldn’t think of anything else to do and I didn’t want to sit in the office. Tonight we go and see the drug dealers.”

“Yes, we are stuck,” Grijpstra said. “We have been stuck before. We’ll be unstuck again.”

The radio began to crackle.

A deep, slightly hoarse, female voice said the call number of their car.

“That’s Sientje,” Grijpstra said. “Let me talk to her.” He took the microphone.

“One three,” he said, “over.”

“What’s your position?” Sientje asked.

“Het Singel, close to the Jeroenensteeg, going north,” Grijpstra said.

“Right, just where I want you. Please go to the corner of Singel and Brouwersgracht. There should be the dead body of a young girl or woman in one of the houseboats. I don’t know which one.”

“Crime?” Grijpstra asked.

“That’s all I know,” Sientje said. “Out.”

“Lovely voice,” de Gier said. “I wouldn’t want to meet her.”

“Why not?”

“She may be a disappointment.”

Grijpstra settled back in his seat and held on. De Gier had switched the siren on and above them the blue light sparked silently. The narrow Singel’s traffic tried to make way for them
and the VW raced dangerously at forty kilometers an hour, two wheels on the sidewalk.

“Easy,” Grijpstra said, and smiled.

De Gier looked ferocious, the top of his body stiffly erect, hands clasped to the steering wheel, jaws firmly closed and chin jutting out.

“A captain on a destroyer’s bridge,” Grijpstra thought, “plunging into the attack. A fighter pilot, zooming his powerful jet plane down into the desert to explode a row of tanks. A commando officer, all set to jump down from his helicopter hovering six feet above the ground, tommygun ready—and all the poor boy is doing is driving a little biscuit tin on the sidewalk, and he is armed with a thirty-two pistol loaded with bullets that will go haywire after fifty feet.”

But de Gier enjoyed himself as he screamed through a red light. He regretted that he was so close to his goal. Just another few hundred yards.

The inevitable crowd was waiting for them, some thirty people huddled close together, muttering to each other. A narrow corridor opened and de Gier said, “Excuse me,” and pushed through it.

The boat was old, a wreck, built from second-hand materials on the hulk of a small discarded river freighter. Its paint had peeled off long ago.

A youth waited for them on the plank that served as a gangway.

“A user,” Grijpstra thought as he brushed past him.

Thin unwashed hair framing the face of a living skeleton dressed in a pair of torn jeans, rope slippers and a shirt that had lost most of its buttons.

“Very far gone,” de Gier thought. “Hard drugs, heroin probably.” He looked into the boy’s eyes and saw the small pupils, contracted into black pinpoints.

“She is inside,” the boy said. “Please go inside.”

Grijpstra had switched on his flashlight. He couldn’t see much. The curtains were drawn and the windows hadn’t been washed for years. There wasn’t any furniture. A small paraffin stove with a kettle, a few cups on the floor. A dirty carpet and some blankets. He bent down to study the small shape underneath the blankets.

The girl wouldn’t be over nineteen, perhaps she was even younger. She was lying on her back, her mouth had fallen open and her dead eyes were staring at the rotten planks of the boat’s roof.

“Who are you?” a voice behind them said.

“Police,” de Gier said.

“Sorry,” the brother-officer of the Municipal Health Service said. “I didn’t recognize you, Sergeant. It’s dark in here. Just let me have a look at her.”

Grijpstra made room for him and shone his torch on the girl’s face. The Health Serviceman pulled the blanket down and grunted.

“Dead,” he said. “Suffocated in her own vomit. Nice. If that clot had turned her over, she would have been all right, but he probably didn’t notice she couldn’t breathe. Too busy, of course. You see, her pants haven’t been fastened. Must have covered her up later, when he saw that there was something wrong.”

“Stretcher,” the officer said to his mate.

De Gier didn’t hear. He was outside, in the street, leaning against a lamp post and trying not to be sick. Grijpstra joined him.

“I can’t stand that sort of thing,” de Gier said.

“Who can?” Grijpstra asked.

“I’ll never get used to it,” de Gier said.

“Who will?” Grijpstra asked.