The Corpse on the Dike

THE
CORPSE ON
THE DIKE

Also by Janwillem van de Wetering

FICTION

The Grijpstra-de Gier series

Other:

Inspector Saito’s Small Satori

The Butterfly Hunter

Bliss and Bluster

NONFICTION

The Empty Mirror

A Glimpse of Nothingness

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Hugh Pine

Hugh Pine and the Good Place

Hugh Pine in Brooklyn

Little Owl

for my friend Austin Olney

Copyright © 1976 by Janwillem van de Wetering

All rights reserved.

Published by
Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Van de Wetering, Janwillem. 1931-2008
[Gelaarsde kater. English]
The Corpse on the Dike / Janwillem van de Wetering.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-56947-049-7
eISBN 978-1-56947-830-1
1. Police—Netherlands—Amsterdam—Fiction. I. Title.
PT5881.32.A5G413 1995
8393’1364—dc20 95-24540
CIP

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5

Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

About the Author

1

T
HE LATE SUMMER EVENING WAS HOT AND HEAVY
. D
ARK
clouds had packed together until they covered the sky and the thick light seemed to distort the scene around the two lone fishermen in their small boat on the river. There had been some wind earlier on but now the water around the flat-bottomed dinghy hardly showed a ripple. The fish must have joined the general stillness of their environment, for Sergeant de Gier’s float, standing lonely and defiant, sparkling white against the dark gray of the water, looked as if it were stuck in glue.

“If this is fishing,” de Gier said, “it is even more boring than I’d thought it would be.”

Adjutant-Detective Grijpstra turned his heavy head and pouted his lips.

“This
is
fishing, isn’t it?” de Gier asked.

Grijpstra nodded.

“And there
are
fish here?”

Grijpstra nodded again.

De Gier studied his float. It wasn’t in the same place. It had moved. But how much had it moved? An inch? Or half an inch? He closed one eye. The float had been in line with the trunk of an old chestnut tree ashore and now it wasn’t quite in line anymore, so it had moved. Something had happened, for the first time in more than an hour something had happened. His float had moved.

But he didn’t really mind. De Gier, in spite of a reputation for efficiency and go-getting, which he had built up during ten years of crime investigation for the Amsterdam Municipal Police, wasn’t a highly motivated man. He had worked out, before he stepped into the dinghy that evening, that they wouldn’t spend more than two hours on the water. In order to come to that conclusion he had applied logic. They were there for a purpose: to catch an escaped prisoner. The facts he had been supplied with were simple enough. The prisoner, or rather the ex-prisoner, was supposed to be in one of the twelve little ramshackle houses that were leaning crazily against the dike their boat was now facing. If they could see the houses, the occupants of the houses, including the ex-prisoner, could see them. Whoever would be watching them from the windows of the little houses would think they were fishermen. But fishermen fish by daylight. In another hour it would be dark. It would be funny for fishermen to try to fish in the dark and the ex-prisoner would be a little suspicious. So, de Gier was thinking, if nothing happened out there he and Grijpstra would be rowing back. They would moor the dinghy and go home—Grijpstra to watch TV in his little house on the Lijnbaansgracht in the old city of Amsterdam and he, de Gier, to his small apartment in the suburbs to water the flower boxes on his balcony and to feed Oliver, the Siamese cat who would be rolling on the floor as soon as he heard the key in the lock, expecting to be picked up and fussed over. De Gier was looking forward to going home. He liked his flower boxes; his newly planted dark orange asters were doing well lately. He loved his cat Oliver—even if the poor neurotic animal was somewhat impossible—and he didn’t like fishing.

What if I catch something? he was thinking. He could see himself trying to pull the hook out of the mouth of a slimy jumping fish and shuddered. He didn’t want to hurt a fish. He shouldn’t have allowed Grijpstra to bait his hook. Perhaps a fish was approaching the bait right now, his stupid mouth wide open, ready to swallow the sharp curel steel. A fish ought to be caught with a net, in sparkling transparent cool water, off the shore of an island in the tropics. Palm trees. Nut-brown girls dancing around in short aprons made of banana leaves. Birds of paradise fluttering above the undergrowth. De Gier was smiling to himself.

Grijpstra was also smiling. His line of thought had been similar to de Gier’s at first but Grijpstra had dreamed himself into actually catching a fish, a big fish, a pike, a big whopper of a pike. He knew mere were pike in the river; he had seen a big stuffed one above the counter of a pub on the dike. He had been told the stuffed corpse was only a year old. Why shouldn’t he catch a pike now? First catch the pike, then catch the ex-prisoner, and show the pike to the other detectives? What’s wrong with success? He was visualizing the jealous grin of surprise on Adjutant Geurts’s face. Geurts was an ardent fisherman himself. Grijpstra always enjoyed annoying Adjutant Geurts.

“The light is going,” de Gier whispered. The colleagues will have to hurry out there or it’ll be over for today.”

Grijpstra grunted. He suddenly changed his mind. He didn’t want to catch the ex-prisoner anymore. He was enjoying himself on the water. Why did they have to bother the unfortunate man? But the man had to be caught, of course. The man had escaped from jail and had, of his own free will, a will that had been suspended by the authorities and that shouldn’t be free, interrupted a stretch of three years which an elderly and well-meaning judge, after much deliberation, had imposed because of a combination of broken regulations—regulations created by the state to protect its citizens against themselves. The man should have stayed in his gray concrete cell in the company of a gray metal bunk and a gray metal table and chair. The man should have been patient. But he hadn’t been. He had, while he had lived in the filtered light of his cell where the sun could only reach him through opaque thick reinforced glass panes, thought of a plan. And he had executed his plan.

He had picked his nose with a sharp nail, twisting it as cruelly as de Gier’s fishhook might twist itself, any second now, into the soft cold skin of the inside of the mouth of a fish. The nail drew blood and the prisoner caught the blood in his cupped hands and smeared some of it on his shirt, sucking the rest into his mouth. Before filling his mouth he had knocked on his door and shouted for the Eye, the nasty Eye who checked him, through a small slit, every hour. The Eye came and found the prisoner on the floor, blood dribbling down his chin. The Eye reported and came back with other Eyes and they took the prisoner to an ambulance. The prisoner had a friend in the hospital and he escaped that same day.

That was three months ago now. The authorities didn’t worry much. The police were informed. Adjutant Grijpstra had been called into the commissaris’
^*
office. He was shown the prisoner’s file.

“Small fry,” the commissaris said, “very small. Not even dangerous. You know him, don’t you? Didn’t you and de Gier deal with the case?”

“Yes, sir,” Grijpstra said and went on reading the file. “Catch him sometime,” the commissaris was saying, “but don’t go out of your way. No use looking for him. He’ll turn up at one of these addresses. Let the informers know; put a small price on his head. Why did he get three years? He is only a burglar, isn’t he?”

“Yes sir,” Grijpstra said, “but he keeps on being a burglar, that’s his trouble. A bad burglar. And unlucky.”

The commissaris sighed, “Tell me, I don’t feel like reading the file; it’s too thick.”

Grijpstra looked up and saw that the commissaris had only read a single piece of typewritten paper, with a photograph attached. The photograph showed the face of a bearded man, rather a pleasant face, a face with a sense of humor.

The commissaris gave the sheet to Grijpstra. The Head Office clerks had mentioned three addresses in Amsterdam, explaining that the first belonged to the elderly sister of the criminal and the other two to friends.

“He came quietly when we arrested him that time,” Grijpstra said. “Had been breaking into a shop but the owner happened to arrive that evening and caught him on the job. There was a struggle and the owner fell and hurt his head. It changed the charge. The public prosecutor wasn’t in a good mood. The prisoner’s counsel wasn’t very clever. Three years.”

The commissaris was shaking his head.

“Well, he’ll come quietly again. Don’t upset him. Talk to him. You are good at that, Grijpstra. And don’t rush. Sometimes we must rush and sometimes we must wait. This time we wait.”

Grijpstra sighed. “He has been in jail two years, sir. Let’s hope he hasn’t become violent.”

“Yes,” the commissaris said. “Jail!”

“Doesn’t improve them much,” Grijpstra said.