Outsider in Amsterdam (27 page)

“Yes,” Grijpstra said, “Verboom. Tell us about your relationship with him.”

“What do you think our relationship was?” van Meteren asked.

“Drugs,” Grijpstra said. “You both dealt in drugs.”

Van Meteren smiled.

“I wasn’t a dealer,” he said. “I was a bodyguard. Piet had convinced himself he wasn’t a mere drug dealer. He had combined it with mysticism. Meditation and self-discipline were
part of his ideas, but the whole process should be combined with drugs. Drugs accelerate the opening up of the mind. He kept on telling me that drugs were part of our evolution. And drugs, like mysticism, come from the Far East. It all sounded very logical when you listened to him. But drugs are dangerous, there are a lot of criminals in the trade. He felt safer when I was around.”

“And you kept your job as a traffic warden?”

“Of course,” van Meteren said. “It gave me something to do during the day. A traffic warden is a respectable person. Piet’s activities were always limited to the evenings and the weekends.”

Van Meteren was speaking very slowly now. The pill had begun to work. De Gier lit a cigarette and gave it to him. It was very quiet on the lake, the rhythmical muffled explosions of the diesel engine created a peaceful atmosphere. Runau had relaxed, and was steering the botter as he listened. A covey of waterfowl almost touched the mast with their wings. The coastline had become visible.

“Not a bad life, eh?” van Meteren asked. “I have spent days in the boat like this, during the weekends mostly. I have always felt very good on the water, doing nothing in particular, watching the birds and the clouds and fishing a bit, maybe.”

Grijpstra had stretched out on a bench, de Gier was sitting on the floor next to van Meteren while scribbling in his notebook.

“How’s the yacht?” van Meteren asked Runau.

“All right. The cleaning rags have done the trick. She isn’t leaking anymore and I have hosed most of the water out.”

“I am really sorry,” van Meteren said. “I hope I haven’t ruined her.”

“Don’t worry,” Runau said. “I came of my own free will. I knew something might happen.”

“Go on,” de Gier said.

Van Meteren smiled. “You want to know it all, hey? You’ll get it all, all you need is a little patience.”

“How do you feel now?” Grijpstra asked.

“Better. That pill must have been very strong. But let me tell you the rest of it. Piet had made a few long trips. He had been to Pakistan and he had been offered hash. Piet was a good businessman. He made a plan, got the stuff into the country and kept it for a while. He didn’t want to run too much of a risk and preferred selling to a wholesaler than directly to the consumer.”

“I thought he was an idealist,” de Gier said.

“He was, in a way. I am sure he believed what he preached, or perhaps it was the other way around. He wanted to make a lot of money so he thought of a high-minded theory to fit his facts.”

“So you hanged him,” de Gier said.

The Papaun’s eyes fixed on de Gier’s.

“Yes. So I hanged him. The hash was all right. I have smoked it myself. Often. Here on the lake, for instance. I don’t think it does any harm. I made the contact with Beuzekom. I found him by chance. He had parked his little Mercedes bus on a sidewalk and I gave him a ticket and noticed that he had a lot of tins in the car. Ringma was with him and became very nervous when I asked about the tins. I opened one of them and they offered to bribe me but I made an appointment instead and introduced them to Piet. Piet’s stuff was better and cheaper than what they had been buying so far. They bought everything Piet had to offer and asked for more. They paid cash as well.”

“How much?” de Gier asked.

“A lot,” van Meteren said. “Beuzekom is the most important hash dealer in Amsterdam. And he is hard to catch. He has been caught once but the man who gave his name to the police has disappeared.”

“Who financed Piet’s business?” Grijpstra asked.

“Joachim de Kater. Piet had no money, not much anyway. Short-term loans at very high interest. I was always around when there was money in the house, money or drugs. I would report sick at work or take a day off. Usually we could organize it all in one day.”

“How much were you making yourself?”

“Not as much as you would think,” van Meteren said, “about fifty thousand a year, maybe, and free board and lodging. And that was more than Piet had intended. I made him pay me. He was frightened of me. And he needed me, of course. He wouldn’t go anywhere without me. I spent the money on the motorbike and on this boat and I intended to save a hundred thousand. Take it to New Guinea with me.”

“With a Dutch passport?”

Van Meteren laughed.

“I may be a clown here but in New Guinea it would have been different; it is a very big island and I know it well. I would have found a nice spot and I had made some plans. Wild plans. I might have become a pirate, an admiral with thirty or forty canoes under me, each canoe with a crew of thirty cutthroats. I could have been a king.”

“King Doodle the First,” de Gier said. “But why did you read all that Dutch history?”

“Curiosity,” van Meteren said. “I lived here and I wanted to know where I lived. I read about your tribal wars and about the Romans, and the Spanish, and the French, and the Germans. Your history isn’t all that different from ours. Our wars are still tribal but there is only a difference in scale. I have been studying your methods.”

“And what did Piet make out of it?” Grijpstra asked.

“More than I did. But he was spending a lot. He was eating in expensive restaurants and spending money in the red quarter. And some of it went into the house at the Haarlemmer Houttuinen. The Society was making some money,
but not enough for all the building going on. A new roof alone cost him fifty thousand.”

“And Joachim de Kater kept on lending money?”

“Sure. He was making a fortune without lifting a finger. He took the risk that Piet wouldn’t repay the loan but he always insisted on guarantees and Piet was using the house as security, and that other house he owned in the south.”

“Did Piet have anybody else working for him?”

“No,” van Meteren said. “I was his only assistant. He didn’t believe in having a lot of people working for him. The Hindist Society was also run with the absolute minimum in manpower. He was a good merchant, he didn’t believe in spending his profit on wages. He also didn’t believe in sharing his secrets.”

The Papuan groaned. Grijpstra sat up and climbed onto the small roof of the cabin. A thin, ragged fog seemed to protect the botter.

“Beautiful,” Grijpstra thought. “A pleasure trip. Perhaps I should hire a boat and take the children for a day on the lake.”

He sighed and climbed down into the cabin again.

The Papuan had closed his eyes but opened them again when he heard Grijpstra come in.

“It was, in a way, a pleasant, easy business,” he said. “Beuzekom was a dangerous man perhaps, but he knew I carried a revolver and he was always very polite. When the casks had to be handed over, I made him and Ringma do all the carrying. I watched them, and that was all. Piet liked that. ‘You are my nice sweet Papuan,’ he would say. He also used to call me his ‘pet tiger.’ ”

“But you killed him,” de Gier said.

“Yes,” van Meteren said. “I waited for the right moment. I had to kill him, but it had to be a good kill.”

“
Had
to kill him?” Grijpstra asked.

Van Meteren nodded.

“Perhaps your people in The Hague were right when they
refused to accept me into the Dutch police. Perhaps I am still wild. You see, a Papuan chief is killed when his policy of government is wrong. Nobody can judge a chief, he is too powerful. So he is killed at the right moment. The killing is hardly discussed. The tribe decides, but quietly. A certain atmosphere forms itself and everyone agrees. Then one or two men kill the chief, the men who are closest to him. But, it’s hard to explain that to you perhaps, those men aren’t the killers. The
tribe
kills.”

The detectives stared at van Meteren.

“Do you understand?” he asked.

“A little,” de Gier said.

“Perhaps I can make it a little clearer,” van Meteren said. “A Papuan has no individual face, you see. He has a name and people know him by that name, but the name is only for convenience. In reality he has no name, no face, no individuality. He belongs to the tribe, and that’s all. He is part of a whole.”

He looked at the detectives who were still staring at him.

“I met with a tribe once who had never been in contact with either the Dutch or Papuans who were working for the Dutch. One of my patrol had a mirror in his pack and he gave it to one of the tribe’s warriors. The warrior was a tall, powerful man with a big nose and a bleached bone had been stuck through the nose. He looked into the mirror and laughed. I asked him why he laughed. He said he had seen a funny fellow who lived in the water.”

“What happens if you take a photograph of a group of Papuans and then show it to them?” de Gier asked.

Van Meteren smiled.

“You have understood, I see. Each one will recognize all his friends.”

“Except one man,” de Gier said. “There’ll be one man on the photograph he won’t recognize.”

“Exactly,” van Meteren said.

Runau came into the cabin, they had more coffee and lit cigarettes.

“So you waited for the right moment,” Grijpstra said.

“Yes. Thérèse had thrown a book at him. The book hit him on the temple with such force that he became dizzy. When I came into the room he was sitting on the floor, stunned, with his head in his hands. I ran to his mother’s room and made her give me a Palfium pill. She always had a little jar full of those pills. The doctor prescribed as many as she wanted. The pills might be bad for her, but she was old. With a pill in her stomach she would be quiet for a few hours. She is a very difficult woman to handle.”

“Yes,” de Gier said.

“Did Piet know you were giving him a drug?” Grijpstra asked.

“Perhaps, but he didn’t have time to think. I told him to swallow the pill and he swallowed. He didn’t have much resistance, he wasn’t used to drugs. He would never drink more than two beers or one whisky at a time and even when he smoked hash he would stop after the second cigarette. The pill made him very weak, perhaps he was hardly aware when I hanged him.”

“But why did you want to kill him?” de Gier asked. “You had been helping him with his business so you must have approved of what he did. Were you after the seventy-five thousand guilders?”

“He didn’t have the money,” van Meteren said. “He had already spent it.”

Grijpstra shook his head and looked as if he were going to say something but de Gier stopped him, touching his arm.

“What had he done with the seventy-five thousand, van Meteren?” de Gier asked pleasantly.

“He had bought heroin,” van Meteren said. “Beuzekom was always asking for heroin. Piet didn’t have any contacts, he could
only buy hash. When Beuzekom kept on asking for heroin Piet contacted Joachim de Kater. Joachim and Beuzekom didn’t know each other, Piet always saw them separately. Joachim was interested in the heroin idea. Heroin is very expensive and not as voluminous as hash. Heroin is like gold dust, it’s probably the most profitable commodity in the world. Piet told Joachim that he hadn’t been able to locate a source of supply, not even in Marseilles, and Joachim became tempted to locate a source himself. He thought he might have a better chance than Piet, and he was right. Joachim de Kater is a member of the establishment, and he had a second asset, he knew his way about in France. I believe he spent a few years in France as a young man, taking a course at the Sorbonne University.”

“We had Joachim checked out,” Grijpstra said, “but we didn’t find out that he had lived in France.”

Van Meteren smiled.

“Joachim was a bit like Piet. Very quiet, very secretive. He never boasted. People who don’t boast are very remarkable.”

“And dangerous,” Grijpstra said.

“And dangerous. Joachim found heroin and sold it to Piet. But Piet had to pay in cash. Joachim wasn’t going to lend him the merchandise. So Piet mortgaged his two houses, gave Joachim the money and received the heroin.”

“Cash on the barrelhead,” de Gier said.

“Ahoy,” Runau shouted and the detectives joined him. A low grey speedboat was approaching the botter. Two policemen, carbines at the ready, stood on the forecastle. The boat was approaching them at speed, its bow cutting the silent lake and causing a high sparkling white wave.

“Cut the engine,” de Gier said to Runau, “or they may fire at us. We have had enough action today.”

Grijpstra went back into the cabin.

“We have company,” he said to van Meteren. “You’ll be in the hospital soon. So
you
have the heroin now, haven’t you?”

“The lot,” van Meteren said, “and it will never reach the users. Heroin is the end of everything. Piet wouldn’t believe me when I tried to tell him. Hash is all right perhaps but I saw a lot of heroin addicts when I walked the streets as a traffic warden. They were all dying. Heroin is the evil spirit itself, it goes straight into the blood and it will never let go. It makes puppets out of us, crazy puppets who won’t last.”

“That’s why you hanged him?” Grijpstra asked. “Why not tell us?”

“You would have jailed him for a bit,” van Meteren said. “The police can’t change the law. I could, but no judge will believe me when I say that I killed him to stop him.”

The police boat touched the botter.

“What would you have done if we hadn’t caught you?” Grijpstra asked.

“Waited for at least a year, sold the botter and the Harley and gone back to New Guinea.”

“As King Doodle the First?” Grijpstra asked. “Would you have become a king? Or an admiral of a pirate fleet of war canoes?”

Van Meteren smiled.

“Perhaps. I might have become a hermit, who knows. There are a lot of small islands in my country. I might have retired and lived with the animals.”

“And the heroin?”

“I would have destroyed it. But I always reckoned with the chance that you might catch me so I kept it for the time being. It may still serve a purpose.”