Janwillem De Wetering: Death of a Hawker

"He was a hawker, sold things in the street. In the street market, the Albert Cuyp Market. You know the Albert Cuyp, of course?"

"Yes, miss."

"Please call me Esther. I sometimes went to see him in the Albert Cuyp. I have helped him too when I had a day off. He sold beads, and all types of cloth, and wool and colored string and braid. To people who like to make things themselves."

"Creative," de Gier said.

"Yes. It's fashionable to be creative now."

"You say your brother bought this house? Must have cost him some money or did he get a substantial mortgage?"

"No, it's all his. He made a lot of money. He wasn't just selling things in the street, you see, he dealt in a big way as well. He was always going to Czechoslovakia in a van and he would buy beads by the ton, directly from the factory, and he would sell to other hawkers and to the big stores too. And he bought and sold other things as well. The street market was for fun, he only went there on Mondays."

"And you, what do you do?"

"I work for the university, I have a degree in literature." De Gier looked impressed.

"What's your name?" Esther asked.

"De Gier. Detective-Sergeant de Gier. Rinus de Gier."

"May I call you Rinus?"

"Please," de Gier said, and poured himself more coffee. "Do you have any idea why this happened? Any connection with-the riots, you think?"

"No," she said. Her eyes filled with tears and de Gier reached out and held her hand.

"They threw something at him," the commissaris said, looking down at the corpse. "With force, considerable force. From the impact you would almost think they shot something at him. A stone perhaps. But where is it?"

Grijpstra explained what he had been able to deduct from his investigations so far.

"I see," the commissaris said pensively. "No stone, you say. And no bits of brick, I see. They were throwing bricks on the Newmarket Square, I am told. Red bricks. They break and pulverize when they hit something. There is no red dust on the floor here. Could have been a proper stone though and somebody may have found it and thrown it into the canal."

"There would have been a splash, sir, and the street has been patrolled all day."

The commissaris laughed. "Yes. Manslaughter and we are sitting right on top of it, have been sitting on it all day, and we never noticed. Peculiar, isn't it?"

"Yes, sir."

"And he can't have been dead long. Hours, no more. A few hours, I would say. The doctor'll be here in a minute, the launch has gone back to pick him up. He'll know. Where's de Gier?"

"Downstairs, sir, talking to the man's sister."

"Couldn't stand the blood, could he? You think he'll ever get used to it?"

"No sir, not if he is forced to look at it for some time. We were in the middle of the riot and he put up a good fight and he didn't mind the blood on my hand but if blood is combined with death it seems to get him. Makes him vomit. I sent him down just in time."

"Every man has his own fear," the commissaris said softly. "But what caused all this, I wonder? Can't have been a bullet for there is no hole, but every bone in the face seems to have been smashed. Hey! Who are you?"

He had seen a man walking past the door in the corridor, a young man who now entered the room.

"Louis Zilver," the young man said.

"What are you doing here?"

"I live here, I have a room upstairs."

"We are policemen investigating the death of Mr. Rogge here. Can we come to your room? The photographers and print people will want to have a look at this room and we can use the opportunity to ask a few questions."

"Certainly," the young man said.

They followed Zilver up a flight of narrow stairs and were shown into a large room. The commissaris took the only easy chair, Grijpstra sat on the bed, the young man sat on the floor, facing them both.

"I am a friend of Abe and Esther," Louis said. "I have been living in this house for almost a year now."

"Go ahead," the commissaris said. "Tell us all you know. About the house, about what went on, about what everybody does. We know nothing. We have just come in. But first of all I would like you to tell me if you know how Abe died and where you were at the time.''

"I was here," Louis said. "I have been in the house all day. Abe was still alive at four o'clock this afternoon. He was here then, right here in this room. And I don't know how he died."

"Go on," the commissaris said pleasantly.

LouisZilver's room was almost as bare as the dead man's room one floor below, but it had a different quality. The commissaris, who hadn't spent as much time with Abe Rogge's body as Grijpstra had, didn't notice the difference. He just saw another room in the same house, a room with a bare wooden floor and furnished with a neatly made bed and a large desk, cylinder-topped, showing an array of cubicles, stacked with papers in plastic transparent folders, and a bookcase covering an entire wall. Grijpstra defined the difference as a difference between "neat" and "untidy." Zilver had to be an organized man, or boy rather, for he wouldn't be much older than twenty. Grijpstra observed Louis, squatting patiently opposite his interrogators, and noted the large, almost liquid, dark eyes, the delicately hooked nose, the tinge of olive in the color of the skin stretched over high cheekbones, the long blue-black hair. Louis was waiting. Meanwhile he wasn't doing much. He had crossed his legs and lit a cigarette after placing an ashtray in a convenient place so that the commissaris and Grijpstra could tip the ash of their small cigars into it. The ashtray fascinated Grijpstra. It was a human skull, molded in plastic, a large hole had been left in the cranium and a silver cup fitted into the hole.

"Brr," Grijpstra said. "Some ashtray!''

Louis smiled. The smile was arrogant, condescending. "Friend of mine made it. He is a sculptor. Silly thing really, but it's useful so I kept it. And the meaning is obvious. Memento mori."

"Why do you have it if you think it's silly," the commissaris asked. "You could have thrown it out and used a saucer instead." The commissaris, who had spent the day in bed to ease the pain in his legs which had almost lamed him during the last few weeks, was rubbing his right leg. The hot needle pricks of his acute chronic rheumatism made his bloodless lips twitch. The commissaris looked very innocent. His shantung suit, complete with waistcoat and watch chain, seemed a little too large for his small dry body, and his wizened face with the carefully brushed, thin colorless hair expressed a gentle exactness.

"The man is a friend of mine, he often comes here. I think it would hurt him if I wasn't using his work of art. Besides, I don't mind having it around. The message of the skull may be obvious but it's true nevertheless. Life is short, seize the day and all that."

"Yes," the commissaris said. "There is a dead man in the house to prove the saying's worth."

The commissaris stopped to listen to the noises downstairs. Feet were clomping up and down the bare steps. The photographers would be setting up their equipment and the doctor would be getting ready to start his examination. A uniformed chief inspector, his jacket soaked and caked with soapstone powder, stomped his way into the room. The commissaris got up.

"Sir," the chief inspector said. "Anything we can do for you?"

"You have done enough today it seems," the commissaris said mildly.

"We haven't had any dead men outside," the chief inspector said. "Not so far, anyway."

"We have one here, one floor below. Got his face bashed in, hit by a stone or something, but we can't find the stone or whatever it was in his room."

"So my constables were telling me. Maybe your man was a reactionary, somebody the red mob outside may have disliked."