Janwillem De Wetering - The Rattle-Rat

Why would a dory be on fire?

Doeke sobered a little and attempted logical thought. He remembered that he was still a constable first-class, even now, early on a day off, dressed in civilian clothes and unfortunately rather drunk. Whatever was happening there could not be in order and he would have to make a report. Where was a phone?

At the Central Railway Station. Doeke ran, with long elastic jumps. The burning dory was still visible from the Inner Harbor Quay. Doeke swayed, but he kept running, and the alcohol diluted in his tall, muscular body. He dialed the local alarm number in the station's telephone booth and reported, succinctly and to the point, mentioning his name and rank and the booth's telephone number. The sergeant in charge of the radio room at headquarters, at the Moose Canal, only had to press a button. The State Water Police answered at once and the sergeant over there pressed another button. A patrol boat crewman grunted in reply. Doeke's telephone rang within three minutes.

"Yes?" Doeke asked.

"That's understood," Doeke said. He was running again, still swaying a little. Ten minutes later he jumped down from the bridge at the Harbor Building, overlooking Admiral's Quay, and almost missed the flat gray patrol boat, because he was still far from sober. The sailor policemen steadied their colleague. The engine of their craft murmured with quiet energy.

"Inner Harbor," Doeke said.

The boat cut through the murky water, underneath the bridges of the Open Harbor and the Front. The sailor policemen had greeted Doeke with a slight display of helpful friendliness, but weren't too hopeful, for they expected a false alarm. A fire on the water? Noticed by a drunken constable of the shore? They would see what they wouldn't see.

"Now where is the disturbance located?"

Doeke's finger slid vaguely across the chart. "Well, here, maybe? I was on Prince Henry Quay-here, I would say. A dory, I thought, with flames spouting up, some black smoke too-quite a cloud."

They looked about in vain, some thirty minutes. Doeke was taken back to the shore, on the Singel, where he lived in an attic. "Pleasant duty," Doeke said formally, and the sailor cops said good night.

What could the disturbance have been? Lightning? There had been a thunderstorm earlier in the day. Some soft thunder, in the outskirts of the city. Warm summer weather- didn't that sometimes lead to sudden electricity bursting from low clouds? The sailor policemen didn't think so, this time. Destructive youth? Boys like to light matches. A floating box stuffed with burning paper? Or maybe a vision, after all? Doeke had been fairly active and had slept little for a few days. Extra hours of duty, long hours of study for his upcoming sergeant's exam. Add a few hours of serious drinking, the hurt of a recently broken engagement, a visit to a most attractive and most unhelpful whore-tensions not broken by proper relaxation-so what do you see? Fire on water?

The sailor cops wrote the unsubstantiated phenomenon in their report and a note was filed in the radio room of Municipal Headquarters. The night changed once again into day.

Waling Wiarda was up early and out for a walk-not on his own time, for Waling was working. A chief of the Department of Public Parks goes for walks in his line of duty, to check the growth of the city's living greenery. While walking, Waling recited a poem. In the cracks of rocks that form the quay walls were supposed to (oh, wild and wondrous glory… of flowers, splendid…) grow some extraordinarily tall mountain-ash berries, which were weakening the mortar. City official Wiarda, dressed in khaki municipal corduroy, tried to remember the rest of the Flemish poet's wordplay, but the lines wouldn't come to mind and he hummed musically instead, visualizing the flowers' glory. The waterworks engineers shouldn't complain so much, Chief Wiarda thought. So the mountain-ash bushes were six feet tall, and their roots were unsettling the rocks, so what? The quays had been around for hundreds of years, they would last a while longer. His duty was to make sure there was still some natural life in this godforsaken town. More wildflowers, more fre'sh leaves, pom-pom (he was humming again), the wild and won' drous glory. Flowers would raise the spirits of the citizens. By encouraging the city's greenery he was doing good work. The chief stooped to admire a large cluster of golden dandelions, not of the common variety. Strong stems, shiny leaves. Very nice, right? But just look at that mess floating in the harbor. Ah, another report to be drawn up, bristling with understated sarcasm. Stinking garbage, torn plastic, all in the wrong colors, unmentionables glued together, cubic yards of disease breeding filth, and-well, why not?-a burned-out dory. A dented aluminum wreck, eight feet long, pushing its prow stupidly against the smooth rocks, damaging the blooming bushes with its inane destructive bashing. Wiarda lowered himself carefully, finding support by holding on to the ashes' branches. Maybe he was a provincial, talked down to by the city slickers, but in Friesland, his home, such degeneration would not be allowed, and thanks to him, the country bumpkin, prepared to work for the country's worst part, it wasn't as bad here as it would certainly be without him. He would never give up fighting against filth. This very day he would type out his umpteenth report and deliver it personally to City Sanitation.

"Sanitation," snarled Wiarda. That department was the sloppiest of them all; he wouldn't be surprised if they had dumped this rubbish themselves.

"Himel," groaned the chief, invoking heaven in his own language. Wiarda was a devout Christian. What could he have done that heaven punished him now by providing a glimpse of the awful contents of hell? The punishment was still going on. Wiarda, frightened out of his surface calm, felt his feet slip, and saw his well-polished boots dip into the dirty slime that surrounded the dead dory. He clawed bis way up and staggered about on Prince Henry Quay.

A motorcycle cop came by and stopped to see why Wiarda was waving. The policeman lifted his orange helmet and held a hand behind an ear. "What's that?"

"Corpse," babbled Wiarda. "Blackened, down below."

They looked together, brother officials, attached to safety by the wild mountain-ash and their own clasped hands.

"I'll pass it on," the cop whispered.

The Water Police patrol arrived again, in another vessel, manned by other sailor cops, the Municipal Murder Brigade showed up in an old model Volkswagen, and marked police cars spewed constables who placed striped fences to hold traffic off. A black limo arrived too, filled with well-dressed gentlemen who had brought equipment to document the event on film and videotape.

What did they all see? Human remains in a blackened aluminum rowboat. The dory was lifted on a pickup truck and taken to Headquarters. Doeke Algra was awakened by detectives, and wrote his report, sitting next to Waling Wiarda, supervised by Adjutant Grijpstra of the Murder Brigade and supplied with coffee by his assistant, Sergeant de Gier.

"It doesn't have to be murder," the adjutant said.

'They do meet with accidents, you know," the sergeant explained. "There's no telling what people will get themselves into. A fisherman, maybe? An open can of gasoline? A cigar lit with a careless match?"

Doeke and Waling didn't think so, Doeke because of the floating fire that reminded him of the fears of his holy early youth, and Waling because he couldn't forget the hollow eye sockets of the partly burned skull that had stared at him in terror from the semiliquid filth of this damned city's waterways.

"No?" Grgpstra asked, rubbing the almost white stubble that covered his heavy head. "What a coincidence that both of you are Frisians. I am too, you know. My parents came from the port of Harlingen."