Janwillem De Wetering - The Rattle-Rat

"You fret," Big Cardozo said. "So you're still temporarily with the Murder Brigade? So what? You want to be fixed? Whatever is fixed can't move freely. Move away, float lightly through the city, think of a theory and find some facts that'll hold it up. Aren't you lucky that you can finally work alone? Others hold hands while they stumble about, but you, carried by your very own cleverness, make your individual moves, relentlessly closing in on the culprit who cowers in darkness."

"Now, now," Little Cardozo said.

Both Cardozos joined and got up. The unity left the canteen. It was about to do something. What had Cardozo in mind, while he slouched out of the canteen indifferently, under his untidy uncut curls, in his crumpled corduroy suit, loosely swaggering down the corridor? Coughing. Sneezing.

Just for a moment the unity split again so that Little Cardozo could tell Big Cardozo that he was suffering from flu. He might go home. Nobody would miss him. A temporary Murder Brigade member, left quite alone?

Big Cardozo leaned on Little Cardozo. "Get going."

Cardozo had to take a leak. The foaming ray of liquid that connected him to a tiled wall in the toilet made him think of water. His lighter's flame reminded him of fire. The combination of the two associations evoked the file photographs of the remnants of Douwe Scherjoen. Where were the remnants found? In a dory. The dory had been confiscated and should be somewhere in the building.

He found it, stored in a basement corner. The brand name was still visible. LOWE. Cardozo deciphered the serial number pressed into a small copper plate, welded inside the bow. The dory looked old. Would he find out who sold that brand of boat, in a remote past, to some forgotten client? How many times would the dory have changed owners in between? Stolen? Given away? Lost and found? Where had it been found last? In the Inner Harbor. He checked the large wall map near the main entrance of the building. The Inner Harbor ends at Prince Henry Quay. Cardozo's roaming finger rubbed pink quays, extended into blue water. Boats are moored to quays.

He caught a streetcar. He walked up and down all quays, and boarded all vessels attached to the quays. Had anyone lost a dory?

"Not me," a skipper said, "but over there, in the corner where the garbage floats, there used to be a dory, and it isn't there now. Filched by the boys who come here to annoy us. Useless dory, damaged, no good to anyone. It was tied up with a bit of red wire."

So far, so good. The dory in Headquarters' basement had some red wire attached to the bow. He thanked the skipper. "Righto," the skipper said.

Cardozo sat on a rotten post. He was the killer. He absolutely loathed Douwe Scherjoen. He closed his eyes to darken his view, so that it might be night, cloudy, pitch black all around. He had shot Douwe a few minutes ago, but he wasn't quite done. Douwe's corpse was in the way. Had he committed murder in a frenzy of hatred? Probably not. Angry amateurs will shoot a man in the chest. He had shot Douwe intelligently, according to a premeditated plan, from the rear, of course. Was the dory so that he wouldn't have to drag the corpse a great distance?

Or had fate played tricks on him and complicated the scheme? Fate's often unreasonable chaos may upset the best of plans. Very well, the dory was here, but he hadn't brought a sufficient quantity of gasoline. No, he hadn't thought of bringing any gasoline at all, and would have to find it now, but where? Suck it from a car's tank through a tube? Where would he get the tube? Nobody ever carries a tube. Had he ripped it off a cookstove somewhere? Cookstoves are found in kitchens. Was his kitchen close by, in his home?

Close by. Cardozo opened his eyes. His gaze wandered over the long row of houses on Prince Henry Quay. There would be a number of side streets too. If the suspect lived in the neighborhood, Cardozo was now faced with a multitude of suspects. Add to that all the skippers of the vessels moored nearby.

Was he getting anywhere? He was getting hungry.

At this stage of an investigation, any point is a starting point, Cardozo thought as he tripped over the high threshold of a small Chinese restaurant called Wo Hop. Mister Hop caught his prospective client and guided him to a table. Cardozo read the specials on the menu. Fried noodles. Fried rice.

"Fried noodles," Cardozo said. "Beer."

The restaurant consisted of a bare room furnished with plastic chairs and tables. Neon light reflected from Hop's shaven skull. The other customers were longhaired louts with skin diseases, silently picking scabs when they weren't coughing or sneezing. In the back of the room, young Chinese men in loud shirts conducted a conversation in which nouns were musically stretched, and then abruptly swallowed. Car-dozo noticed their crewcuts and staccato movements. Karate types, he thought.

So I can start anywhere, Cardozo thought. What would a sheep dealer be doing near the harbor? Delivering sheep for transport to the Near East?

The noodles arrived in a bowl. Hop dropped off a pair of chopsticks and a glass of beer. The bottle's label was Chinese. Would Chinese buy Frisian sheep? From Dingjum? From New Zealand more likely, thought Cardozo. There should be no food shortage in China now. They probably wouldn't need any foreign sheep at all.

He ate and drank, without tasting much. When Hop presented the bill, Cardozo noticed the man's cold eyes, like slivers of ice. Even the glow of Hop's golden canines was cold. Scherjoen had also been equipped with golden dentures. Could that line connect? Why should it? Cardozo thought.

He wandered through the neighborhood. The memory of Wo Hop's presence wandered with him, bathed in neon light. Cardozo couldn't understand why he couldn't lose Hop's image. What more could the Chinese be than a bit player in gray clothes, vertically adorned by old-fashioned suspenders like those worn by laborers in antique pictures? The owner of a small-time eating place, a retreat of footsore junkies and Chinese sailors, a hardly exotic migrant like so many, chained to their marginal establishments, saving hard-earned guilders that might, one faraway day, buy them a return ticket to Hong Kong or Singapore, home cities that their spirits had never left. Cardozo walked a little faster and managed to leave Hop behind. He stopped a few minutes later to stare at a car. Why? Perhaps he was tired and had to rest his eyes on an interesting object. Why interesting? Because it was a new Citroen, of a model that the commissaris had been talking about. Because Cardozo had seen Grypstra and de Gier leaving Headquarters' courtyard in the commissaris's new car, waving airly, ordering him to "do something" from an electronically dropped window. Was this the same car? There wouldn't be too many new silver super-Citroens about. Cardozo walked around the car. No, this had to be a different vehicle; it bore a white oval sticker marked FR. Dutch cars were marked NL. What would FR mean? Friesland. The sticker was unofficial, marking fervent national feeling, claiming independence for a province absorbed by the country. FR, meaning "free." All nonsense. Frisians also had their own money that not even Frisian stores would accept, and their own postage stamps, equally without any value. Amazing, that unquenchable desire to be cut off. His brother Samuel had read him a newspaper article on the problem. "Pathetic," Samuel had said. "We don't go about wearing an embroidered / on our chests." Samuel did wear a golden star of David on a chain around his neck, and collected Israeli stamps.

Free? Cardozo thought. Who is free? I'm not free. I jump when others pull my strings. "Do something, Cardozo."

The Citroen, parked half on the sidewalk, fronted a health-food store. Cardozo went in. "Has that car been here long?"

"What of it?" snarled the woman behind the counter. She had been constructed of large bones, covered by a square cloth slit by a blunt knife to leave a hole for her thin neck. She had to push matted hair away to squint at this party who offended her by his presence. "A poison sprayer," the woman screamed. "Oh, I know the type. A juggler of genes. An injector of hormones. Ha! Our greedy farmers. They wear their little caps and pretend to bring us the gifts of the earth, but they swindle us out of our money and buy capitalist cars and obstruct the sidewalk and I can't even park my bike, does anybody ever think of me?"