Outsider in Amsterdam, page 6
Grijpstra walked past the water of the canal, in deep contemplation. Fifty thousand guilders, payable in one go perhaps, but perhaps not. The tax people always appear to be reasonable. They don't like to slaughter the goose who lays the golden eggs. They might have been prepared to wait a bit. Perhaps he should go to see them.
But on the other hand... Perhaps Piet panicked. He might have been petrified with fear, fear of the possibility of losing his easy trick to make money. And fear might have forced his head into the homemade noose.
Would it?
Grijpstra thought of the small head with the abundant dark red hair and the beautiful full mustache. The small head with the large bump on its temple. He saw the little corpse again, the naked feet and the neat little toes, pointed at the wooden floor.
\\ 4 /////
DE GIER WALKED PAST THE MERCHANTS' MANSIONS ON the Prinsengracht using the long strides that, he believed, prevent the common policeman's complaint of flat feet. His mind was clouded by anger. He was angry with everyone in general and with Grijpstra in particular. De Gier didn't want to walk, he wanted to drive. But the police are stingy, and Grijpstra didn't like to be an exception. Why use a car if there is no immediate necessity?
But it was a nice day and de Gier's anger evaporated. The image of a terrible, silly and stupid Grijpstra slid from his mind. Grijpstra had been punished anyway. He, de Gier, was walking, wasting the state's time. He could have taken a streetcar. De Gier had gone further than Grijpstra had intended him to go. He was even saving the state the price of a tram ticket.
De Gier smiled. He had analyzed his own thoughts. He now faced the conclusion with courage. He was a petty little man himself. De Gier always tried to analyze his own thoughts, trying to find the real motivation of his actions. And always he had to conclude that he, de Gier, was a petty little man. But the conclusion didn't discourage him. He shared his pettiness with all of humanity. He didn't have a very high opinion of humanity. He had, once, when they were drinking together, told Grijpstra about his line of thought and Grijpstra had nodded his heavy head. It had been one of the rare evenings when Grijpstra had been prepared to talk. Unwilling to meet his family, and after a long day, he had accepted de Gier's invitation to have a meal at one of the cheap Chinese restaurants and afterward they had found themselves in a small bar of the Zeedijk, the long spine of the prostitution quarter. The owner of the bar had recognized them as plainclothes policemen and had filled and refilled their glasses, quietly and with a hurt smile on his cadaverous face. Grijpstra had done more than agree. He had finished his glass of jenever with one tremendous sip and raised a finger.
"You can," Grijpstra had said, "divide humanity into a few groups."
"Yes?" de Gier had asked, with his softest and most melodious voice. He had been almost breathless with anticipation. Grijpstra would talk!
"Yes," Grijpstra said. "Listen. First of all we have the big bounders. You know them as well as I do. Chaps with red heads and fat necks who drive large American cars and who smoke cigars. Their coats are lined with real fur. There are pimp-bounders and banker-bounders, but in essence they are all the same. The bounders have understood. They know what people want. People want to be manipulated and the bounders manipulate. They find out, or rather, they pay others to find out ((bounders are surrounded by very intelligent slaves) what people want to have and then they buy it cheaply and sell it for the most ridiculous amounts you and I can imagine. The principle works for goods as well as services. Bounders always make money. They never join a queue and they often go on holiday. The own big yachts on the Llsselmeer and villas in Spain. Their mistresses are kept in the best apartments of the Beethovenstreet. They never have any problems and they never make any problems. Whatever crops up is taken care of quickly or rather, as I have already indicated, is taken care of for them. They pay very little tax. They are the first group."
De Gier listened with all the concentration he could muster. The man behind the bar refilled their glasses.
"The second group," Grijpstra continued, slurring his words slightly, "is the biggest group. This is the group of the idiots. You can, if you like, subdivide this group into a fairly large number of subgroups, but why should you?"
De Gier shook his head energetically, he didn't want to subdivide.
"Very well," Grijpstra said, "if they are idiots anyway why should you? There is this type of idiot and that type of idiot but their skins are always gray, they have a variety of illnesses, they stand in queues, they take a holiday once a year, they drive small secondhand cars that break down continuously and they buy the expensive rubbish the bounders sell to them, and they pay a lot of tax of course. It is taken off their pay so that they won't notice much. They do as they are told, not just what the boss tells them to do but also what advertising tells them to do, and the TV, and the newspaper, and anybody who has a loud voice and a few simple words. They'll even get into a cattle truck to be taken to a concentration camp, and when the camps go out of fashion, to Yugoslavia or a Greek island, on a charter plane. They visit dirty whores and drink jenever made in a chemical factory. Your health!"
He raised his glass unsteadily, spilling a little jenever.
"Your health!" de Gier said and raised his glass obediently.
"They do whatever the bounder wants," Grijpstra continued. "And when they have celebrated their sixty-fifth birthday they shake hands and go away and you'll never see them again but it doesn't matter for they reproduce faster than they disappear. They are fond of rubber stamps and forms and name plates on the door, with an indication of their rank or degree. They like medals and titles and privileges. But they never have any rights, only duties. The duty to save and to buy and never mind what they do, the bounders will make money. It matters little what type of political system you apply to them, they will stay idiots, and when the bounder drives past they shout Hurray. Keeping time and arranged in rows. Hurray hurray hurray!"
Grijpstra had shouted loudly and the other guests joined the cheering.
"You see," Grijpstra said, "just as I have been telling you. But we still have the third group. It's a very small group. Do you know who I mean?"
"No," de Gier said, "but please tell me."
"The small third group," Grijpstra said, "is the group of the well-meaning. The gentlemen. The idealists. They have good ideas and they are often very intelligent. They don't push and they never do anything out of turn and they give the impression that they don't manipulate and that no one manipulates them."
"But that's very nice," de Gier said. "So there are some nice people after all."
"No," Grijpstra said, "you never heard me say that.
I called them the well-meaning. I meet them every now and then and I study them very carefully. Extremely carefully."
"And what do you see?" asked de Gier.
"Yes," Grijpstra said and rubbed his face with a tired hand. "I don't know really. I don't see very much when I study them. But I don't trust them at all. These well-meaning people are no good either, I am sure of it."
De Gier had often thought about Grijpstra's three groups and the older he became and the more he experienced, the more he believed in Grijpstra's theory. But he left some room on the side. De Gier didn't like theories that seemed to be watertight. De Gier believed in a miraculous surrealist world and he didn't want to give up his faith, mainly because the existence of this miraculous world seemed to be confirmed to him, and quite regularly, by the inexplicable beauty that echoed, he thought, in the perception of the half-conscious dreams he was subject to. It was happening again, right now, while he walked past the Prinsengracht's water. A seagull kept itself suspended above the hardly moving surface of the gracht, seemingly effortless, by the merest flick of its spread wings. A gable silhouetted sharply against a dark gray rain cloud, an old woman fed the sparrows throwing an ever-changing shadow-pattern on the cobblestones. A miraculous world, de Gier thought. Very beautiful. Perhaps the world is no good, but I am here. I walk here and I am doing something and although it probably serves no purpose, it's interesting. Fascinating even.
It was warm in the street and he was glad when he saw the Haarlemmer Houttuinen and knew that the coolness of the large house was waiting for him. But before he entered he had seen the car parked on the sidewalk, in the same place as he had parked the police VW the night before, and a little later he recognized the detective who greeted him in the corridor, a detective from the Bureau Warmoesstraat.
"Now what?" he asked his colleague
"Breaking and entering," the colleague said and took him to me restaurant where van Meteren and the four helpers of the dead Piet sat quietly around a table.
"Hello," de Gier said to van Meteren. "Don't you have to work today? It's past eleven."
Van Meteren smiled. "You here again? No, I don't have to work. I took the day off because of special circumstances. I wanted to organize the removal of Piet's mother. But somebody broke in last night and I telephoned again."
"When was that?" de Gier asked.
"I don't know. I went to sleep after you both left. It must have been between one-thirty and seven-thirty this morning. Someone kicked in the little cellar's door and they went all through the restaurant and the shop. I don't think they went upstairs for I should have heard them."
"Anything missing?" de Gier asked.
The detective shrugged his shoulders. "Not much. The tape recorder that was supposed to have been here in the restaurant and the money box from the shop. According to the girls here it only contained small cash, they had given the notes to their boss. And the boss is supposed to have committed suicide yesterday, but you should know all about that."
De Gier looked at his colleague and thought that he knew nothing at all. A corpse and now breaking and entering. Marvelous.
"Did you make your report?" he asked.
"Sure. The fingerprint man was here as well but mere has been quite a crowd here they tell me, and you must have touched a lot of objects as well last night. I was on my way out when you came in."
De Gier shook his hand and the detective disappeared, grumbling about the lack of staff and the impossibility of catching anyone nowadays. An old detective, close to retirement.
"Marvelous marvelous," de Gier said irritably to van Meteren, "and I came to see if we had overlooked anything yesterday."
He realized that he was treating van Meteren as yet another colleague.
"Can we go now?" the girls asked.
De Gier nodded.
"Where do you want to go?"
"Don't worry," Johan said. "We'll stay in town. Eduard and I found a houseboat at the Binnenkant, opposite number 10. The ship is called The Good Hope. She belongs to my brother but he is on his way to India and he left me the key."
De Gier noted the address.
"And what are you going to do?" he asked the girls.
"I am going with the boys," the fat girl called Annetje answered and moved closer to Johan. De Gier had to suppress an expression of horror, he didn't mind fat girls but if they were wearing dresses with flower patterns... He was sure that she was barefoot, and that her feet would be dirty. He dropped his pack of cigarettes and bent down to pick it up. Her feet were dirty.
"And you?" he asked the beautiful girl.
Thérèse stared.
De Gier repeated his question.
Thérèse began to cry.
"There there," van Meteren said and moved over so that he sat next to her.
"She is pregnant," he said to de Gier, "and she doesn't know where to go."
"It's all right," de Gier said to the girl. He had become interested and watched her closely. A lovely girl, long black hair, green cat's eyes, a tall rather thin girl but with a good full bosom. He dropped his matchbox. Her legs were long and well shaped and she wore sandals, and her feet were clean.
"Can't she stay here for the time being?" he asked van Meteren.
"I don't know. The place is closed. I sent a telegram to Piet's wife. Paris isn't far, she can be here any minute now. She used to be a director of the Society, together with Piet, and now she would be the only one in charge, I suppose. I never saw the Society's articles, perhaps the accountant can be of help. The house will probably be sold."
"But she could stay for the time being," de Gier insisted.
"I don't want to stay," Theiese said. She had stopped crying. "It's the house of a corpse. And now they have broken in as well. I'll go to my mother."
She gave an address in Rotterdam and de Gier wrote it down in his notebook. Johan, Eduard and Annetje said goodbye. Their bags were packed and had been stacked in the corridor, very neatly. De Gier touched Annetje's hand. Van Meteren got up as well.
"I'll see you later," de Gier said to van Meteren. "I'd like to have a few words with Th6rese."
When they were alone he offered a cigarette and lit it for her. She sucked on the Gauloise and began to cough. "Put it out," de Gier said, "it doesn't help. I wanted to ask you who caused your pregnancy."
"Piet," the girl said.
"Is that why his wife left?"
She shook her head. "His wife was used to it. Piet tried to make us all and sometimes he was lucky. I kept away from him at first but he insisted and it was hard to refuse him all the time. I lived here, and he could be rather charming at times."
"Was he really nice?" de Gier asked.
The girl stared.
"Was he?"
She began to cry again. "No. He was a bastard. With his insane health ideas. Why did I have to get involved in all this? Now I need an abortion if it isn't too late. And I don't want his child."
De Gier let her cry. Van Meteren showed himself in the open door but de Gier made a gesture and he disappeared.
"Did you have any fights with him?"
The girl wasn't listening. De Gier got up and held her by the shoulders but it complicated the situation for she allowed her body to drop into his arms.
"Hey," de Gier said and put her back, carefully, onto her chair. He repeated the question.
She nodded.
"Did you have a fight with him yesterday?"
She nodded again.
"In his room?"
"Yes," the girl said. "I shouted at him but he didn't answer. All he said was that I could leave if I didn't like it here, and that I was over twenty-one, and that he was married already. I should have been more careful. After that he shut up. I called him names. It has happened before. 'Karma,' he said. Everybody has to accept the consequences of his own actions. Karma is very useful. It teaches you things. Haha."
"Did you hit him?"
"I threw a book at his head."
"A heavy book?"
"Yes, a dictionary."
"Did it hit him?"
She didn't answer. He took her by the hand and they went upstairs. The dictionary was on the floor of Piet's room. There were other books on the floor as well.
"Can you remember whether it hit him? Did he fall over?"
"I don't know," Th&ese said. "I walked out of the room and slammed the door. I never looked around."
De Gier rephrased his question in several ways but got nowhere. She hadn't hung Piet. When he asked her she began to laugh, through her tears.
De Gier tore a sheet of paper from a notebook on the table and wrote a short statement. He read it to her and asked her to sign.
"You don't really think I hung him, do you?" she asked. De Gier didn't answer but telephoned Headquarters and was connected with Grijpstra. Grijpstra played his drums and spoke at the same time, the telephone hooked between his head and his shoulder.
"I am coming," Grijpstra said.
'Take the car," said de Gier, "it's a long walk," and hung up.
"The noose," he said to the girl. "Did you know that there was a noose in the room and someone had screwed a hook into one of the beams supporting the ceiling?"
"That hook has always been there," Thérèse said. "Piet used to have a mask hanging from that hook but it frightened me when I was on the settee with him and then he sold it. And that noose is nothing but an ordinary bit of rope isn't it? We have a lot of that sort of rope in the house. Piet used to import foods from Japan and it would come in lovely little casks, wound with rope. We used to take it off and use it for decoration. The noose was made with it."
"Did you see the noose?" de Gier asked quickly.
"No," the girl said. "Van Meteren told me."
"You think he committed suicide?" de Gier asked.
The girl looked indifferent. "It wouldn't surprise me. He wasn't quite right in the head, I think. When his wife left him he complained terribly. Even to me, while we were in bed together."
"What else did he complain about?" de Gier asked.
"Anything you like to mention. The purpose of life, and enlightenment. He thought he wasn't enlightened. He should be, he said, for he had lived according to the rules, but nothing had happened."
"Enlightenment?" asked de Gier.
"Yes," Th6rese said. "It always made me think of light bulbs. Buddhists, and Hindus too, I think, claim that you will be enlightened if you live according to the right rules. You should do everything you have to do as well as you can and meditate a lot and gradually you will begin to understand all sorts of things you never did before and you'll have visions, I believe. I don't know anything about it really. But I thought that enlightenment meant happiness, and absence of problems, and I think Piet thought that way too from the way he talked. But he kept all his problems, he said. And he didn't know what he was doing wrong."
"Suicide doesn't seem to be very Buddhist to me," de Gier said, "or Hindistic, or what he called it. A man who commits suicide stops trying and if you give up trying you won't get anywhere. Or not?"
Thgrese had sat down on the settee and rubbed her eyes. "Piet said that there had been Japanese, Samurai or monks, I can't remember what, who had committed suicide because they had found themselves to be in a hopeless situation. Then it's all right, he said. Admirable even. But you have to do it in the right way. First you have to clean your body and your spirit and then you have to find a quiet spot and meditate for a while and then, when everything has become very quiet and you have said goodbye, in your mind, to all you love, you can do it."
