Outsider in Amsterdam (20 page)

The sweet expression on Constanze’s face didn’t change. “That’s right. I wasn’t feeling well that day. I took my daughter
to the crèche and wanted to go to work but I went home instead and spent the day by myself, in bed, until it was time to collect Yvette again. I wasn’t really ill, but very tired. I was playing truant really. It means I have no alibi, doesn’t it?”

“But you were in Paris, weren’t you?” her father asked. “You can’t be in Paris and in Amsterdam at the same time.”

“There are airplanes,” Grijpstra said.

“Yes,” Constanze said “but I wasn’t in a plane, I was home, in bed, in Paris.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Grijpstra asked.

“You didn’t ask me,” Constanze said. “I thought that perhaps you would never ask me.”

The mother poured the rest of the beer can’s contents into his glass. Her hand shook.

“Will you arrest me now?” Constanze asked.

“Should I?” Grijpstra asked.

“I didn’t kill Piet,” Constanze said.

Grijpstra sipped his beer, put it down, and plucked another feather off his trousers.

Constanze began to laugh again.

“You really looked very funny just now. What did you have in your hands? A gun?”

Grijpstra shook his head and looked at her as if he expected her to say something important.

“I really didn’t kill him, you know,” Constanze said. “I admit I have thought about it at times. He did annoy me, what with all the girls he tried to make and the way he treated me.”

“But you didn’t kill him,” Grijpstra said.

“No. I thought the best punishment would be to let him live. He suffered, in spite of all his so-called pleasures. He was a nasty depressive little man and he was attracting a lot of trouble. To allow him to go through all that trouble was my best revenge. And I can’t kill anyway, I couldn’t even kill a mosquito.”

“That’s true,” the father said. “When we have bugs here she would rather try to flap them out of the window using a newspaper. She is very soft-hearted.”

“Soft-hearted,” Grijpstra repeated, tasting the word.

“But you are a policeman,” the father continued. “You know what people are like.”

“I don’t know anything at all,” Grijpstra said, “and it’s time to go home. Thank you for the beer.”

“What about me?” Constanze asked. “You want me to go with you?”

“No. You get that eiderdown fixed,” Grijpstra said. “But I would like you to stay in Amsterdam until we know a little more. If you have to leave, let us know first, please.”

Grijpstra walked home. In another part of the city, de Gier was walking home as well. He walked carefully, worried that the alcohol in his blood might make him stagger. Gradually his condition improved.

That night he dreamt again. The little men in the bowler hats danced around him producing weird music by blowing into the barrels of their machine pistols. The gable houses of the inner city were leaning on each other, desperately trying to remain upright. Naked female nineteen-year-old bags of bones danced with the bowler-hatted little men and stopped every now and then to inject themselves. The canals were filled with miso soup. Old Mrs. Verboom had joined the party as well, and she wasn’t dressed, her breasts were shrunken empty bags of skin, she had stuck a rhododendron flower behind one ear. When Grijpstra waltzed past, in the arms of the directress of the mental home, de Gier woke up, squeaking with fear and disgust. He was wet through, fighting with his blankets, and Oliver, suddenly frightened and in a bad mood already because de Gier hadn’t given him his evening meal, growled and attacked the feet that were kicking
him. The wound bled and de Gier got up to bandage it. Oliver was clearly sorry, rolling over on his back and making endearing little sounds as if he were begging for forgiveness. De Gier tickled the animal’s belly.

“Go back to sleep,” he said and squeezed the cat suddenly so that Oliver grunted deeply, the air from his lungs being pushed past his vocal chords.

The next morning the two detectives were facing their officers. Neither of them felt well, and their eyes were hollow. The points of de Gier’s usually merry mustache drooped down and Grijpstra looked as if his clothes were too large for him.

The chief inspector studied his assistants one by one, pointing at each of them in turn with the small cigar he held between his lips. The commissaris was in the room as well, a small unsightly man with a wrinkled grey face.

“So what are we going to do about all this?” the commissaris suddenly said in an unexpected, deep voice.

“Go on,” Grijpstra said. “What else?”

“How?” the commissaris asked.

Grijpstra didn’t answer.

“What do you think of it?” the commissaris asked and looked at the chief inspector.

“Grijpstra is right, I think,” the chief inspector said. “We’ll shadow Beuzekom and his friend for a while and call them in for questioning from time to time. And we’ll be watching the other suspects as well. Perhaps something will happen, someone is bound to become nervous. Perhaps we’ll receive an anonymous tip. Perhaps the psychiatrist of the mental home will come up with something.”

“Perhaps,” the commissaris said. “Perhaps you need more men. We have more men. This seems to be a murder and murders have to be solved.”

The chief inspector lit his small cigar again.

“I have a plan,” he said and looked at Grijpstra. “You want to hear about my plan?”

“Yes sir,” Grijpstra said.

“We’ll start at the other end and we’ll stir the pot till the broth froths,” the chief inspector said.

There were question marks on the faces of the commissaris and the two detectives.

“I’ll explain,” the chief inspector said. “Piet Verboom dealt in hash. We can be quite sure about that now. He imported it in casks and pretended they came from Japan. We found the invoices but the miso paste didn’t come from Japan, it came from Pakistan. There is no miso paste in Pakistan, miso is a Japanese dish.”

De Gier came to life.

“But sir, we found miso paste in the casks. There was no hash in them at all, I am quite sure of it.”

The chief inspector nodded.

“You found miso. The casks you discovered had been bought by Piet from a wholesaler who imports from Japan. The casks you found in Piet’s cellar also came from the same wholesaler. But the stuff Piet imported came from Pakistan and was hash. The customs must have slipped up, for anything coming from Pakistan is suspect. Perhaps the customs were busy and didn’t check properly.”

“Right,” Grijpstra said. “The real hash came from Pakistan, was imported by Piet and sold to Beuzekom and Company. But why? Surely Beuzekom and Company could have imported the stuff themselves.”

“They could not,” the chief inspector said, “for they didn’t have a connection. We found Piet’s passport and he has been to Pakistan. We also checked with the passport people and they produced his old passport from their files. He has been to Pakistan at least twice in the last ten years. He probably showed his supplier a Japanese miso-paste cask and the packing was copied in Pakistan.”

“How much did he import?” Grijpstra asked.

“Quite a lot. Perhaps over a hundred casks in all.”

“Yes,” Grijpstra said, “I suspected that the five casks we found in Beuzekom’s house had been planted there, in case we got wise to them.”

“But what happened to the seventy-five thousand guilders that are missing?” de Gier asked.

“So far we have gone on facts, now we’ll have to begin to surmise. This Pakistan business is clear enough. We have found little wooden elephants full of hash, and fruitcases full of hash, all coming from Pakistan, so why not miso-paste casks full of hash? But hash is bulky and fairly cheap. If dealers want to make real money they have to sell the hard stuff. Hash costs from twenty-five guilders to thirty guilders a stick now but the consumer gladly pays from one hundred twenty-five to one hundred fifty for a teaspoonful of heroin. The dealer who can sell hash can sell heroin as well, the channels are the same. But heroin doesn’t come from Pakistan. Piet must have wanted to switch to new and bigger profits. If he had enough initiative to locate a supplier in Pakistan he must have thought that he could also find a heroin supplier. Heroin can be found in France, there are some refineries on the south coast where rough opium is transformed into powdered heroin, which can be packed into handy little sealed plastic bags.”

“Did Piet go to France?” Grijpstra asked.

“Perhaps,” the chief inspector said. “The French immigration doesn’t stamp a Dutchman’s passport anymore so we can’t prove anything. But he traveled from time to time and was away from his house at the Haarlemmer Houttuinen for weeks at the time. He may have been in France.”

“Yes,” de Gier said, “so perhaps he found a supplier and needed money to buy a large supply, so he scraped together all the money he could find.”

“That’s what I think,” the chief inspector said, “and when he did have the money, he was killed. Perhaps by someone who knew that the money was in the house. Perhaps by the heroin supplier. Perhaps by the customer. For Piet would have sold it to a wholesaler, he didn’t sell directly to the public.”

“Beuzekom and Company,” Grijpstra said, “but why should they kill him? They didn’t need the money that badly, they needed the business. Why hang a man who can sell you regular lots of goods you need for resale?”

“Yes, yes,” the chief inspector said. “Beuzekom has a lot of money. He is spending a hundred guilders an hour in some of the expensive bars of Amsterdam. He needs a continuous supply of heroin, not just one catch of seventy-five thousand guilders. I think you are right there. In fact, you can arrest Beuzekom if you like. I have spoken to the public prosecutor and he’ll give his permission if we apply for it. We could keep both Beuzekom and Ringma for a few weeks.”

“Interrogate them separately,” de Gier said.

“You think it would be a good idea?” the chief inspector asked and lit a fresh little cigar.

“No,” de Gier said, after some reflection.

“Why not?”

De Gier scratched his leg. “Beuzekom studied psychology, he is both clever and disciplined. We won’t break him, not even by keeping him in a wet cell on the ground floor and refusing to let him smoke. Perhaps we might break that little boyfriend of his but I doubt it. They have too much to lose. They live in splendor now and they know we have no real proof. They would prefer a few weeks of misery in a cell to losing their golden future.”

The chief inspector looked at his cactus.

“All right then, we’ll stir the pot. We’ll give the underworld a thorough shake-up. The goal will be to get at the drug dealers, the real big fellows, who can sell or buy drugs in quantities. I have a list here of all likely addresses. It’s a recent list compiled
by the Investigations Bureau. Some of the addresses are of cafés and bars but there are also benches in public parks, tram shelters, public lavatories, student hostels, sleep-ins, houseboats and houses that have been empty for some time. I’ll coordinate the raids from Headquarters and we’ll have every detective out on the job. The uniformed police will be helping as much as they can, I’ll be working with their chief. The action will start tomorrow night but you can begin earlier if you like. I would suggest that you put some pressure on that nasty young fellow who gave you the dead girl yesterday. He is a user and he will be buying his drugs somewhere. Find out where and go from there, and keep on going until you get a nicely sized fish on the hook.”

“Yes sir.”

“You can go and have some coffee now,” the chief inspector said. “You need it, I think.”

The detectives saluted and left the room.

“Good hunting, gentlemen,” the commissaris said.

“O
LIVER
,”
DE
G
IER
said as the cat strolled past the bed, “we’ll tie your paws behind your back, march you to the park opposite, set you up against a stake, and shoot you, and it will be done at the crack of dawn.”

Oliver looked over his shoulder and purred.

“No, no,” Constanze’s soft voice said and she nibbled de Gier’s ear. “I don’t mean that he has to be destroyed. He is a beautiful cat and I know some people who live on a farm and who would love to have a Siamese cat. And Oliver would be happier too, he could play on the farm and climb trees and chase mice. It would be a much more natural life for a cat.”

“Yes,” de Gier said and reached down to the floor, found his pack of cigarettes, took one out and lit it, using one hand, for his other was caressing Constanze.

“And you can get a bigger flat and I’ll be working as well so the rent won’t be any problem.”

“Yes,” de Gier said.

“And Yvette can go to school close by and she would spend a lot of time with my parents.”

“Mmm,” de Gier said.

“You don’t want to, do you?” Constanze asked and put a leg over his.

De Gier twisted out of her embrace and got out of bed.

“It’s time to have breakfast,” he said.

“You haven’t answered me,” Constanze said.

“I don’t know,” de Gier said. “I’ll have to think about it.”

He shaved while Constanze prepared breakfast. Early morning wasn’t the best time of the day for de Gier, not if he had to go to work, and he groaned while he scraped his face with a blunt blade.

“In fact, we could probably
buy
a nice flat.” Constanze’s voice came from the small kitchen.

“Flats are expensive,” de Gier said, taking the toothbrush out of his mouth.

“I have fifty thousand,” Constanze said. “The house at Haarlemmer Houttuinen was sold, you know, and the other little house that Piet owned in the South was sold as well. Together they netted over a hundred thousand and with the mortgage and the solicitor’s costs deducted I still have fifty thousand. Surely that would be enough for a deposit. We might even get a small house.”

“I didn’t know you were selling the property,” de Gier said as he came out of the bathroom. “Who is the buyer?”

“Joachim de Kater,” Constanze said, “our accountant. He was very helpful. It only took him a few days. We will sign the contracts at the solicitor’s office at the end of this week, and then I’ll have to make up my mind what to do. Return to Paris and buy an apartment for Yvette and myself or stay here.”