Janwillem De Wetering - Tumbleweed

De Gier nodded.

"You, Grijpstra?"

"No," Grijpstra said, "I haven't got any binoculars."

"Never mind. I'll borrow a pair from the police station. They are heavy but they are better than mine. You'll have to be careful for they cost a fortune. Well, have a good time."

"Shit," Grijpstra said as the door closed behind the adjutant. "Shit and shit again. Now why did you have to get me into it? You got me sick on the boat with your revolting sausage, peeling the skin off it as if it were a boiled monkey's pecker, and now you want me to stump through the mud in the middle of the night to see a lot of floppy birds jumping at each other. A joke is a joke but this is ridiculous. Sometimes you overdo it, you know."

He was red in the face and thumping the table with his fist.

"Do you think I like it?" de Gier said, his face just as red. "And who was telling the adjutant that I liked birds. You know I was only egging you on on the ferry. What do I know about coot and cormorants and whatnots? Just a few names I happened to remember. We need this man, don't we? And we can't upset him by refusing his invitations? I don't like drinking jenever in the middle of the day but I accepted just to please him. And I don't like playing billiards. And I am damned if I'll walk through the mud while you are stinking and snoring in your bed."

Grijpstra had begun to laugh and de Gier, after having tried unsuccessfully to stare him down, joined him. Soon they were hiccuping and helplessly patting the table.

Grijpstra shouted for more jenever and they finished up playing billiards, giggling at each other.

"Three-thirty in the morning," de Gier said.

"Promise never to tell anyone."

"I promise," de Gier said.

They shook hands and went to the dining room for a late lunch.

By nine o'clock that night they were fast asleep, worn out by thirty games of billiards and some seven or eight glasses of old cold jenever each.

"Excuse me," a pleasant well-modulated voice said. "Do you mind if I sit down at your table for a moment?"

The commissaris looked up from his plate of fried noodles and shrimps. He had been eating and looking at the map, spread out on the table next to his plate, at the same time. He felt a little perturbed by the interruption; he had refused Silva's invitation to lunch in order to be by himself and he had, after having walked about for a few minutes, found a cheap clean-looking Chinese restaurant where he could enjoy his favorite food. And now there was someone else, standing patiently next to him and wanting something.

"Please," the commissaris said, "please sit down." He shook hands.

"Van der Linden," the neatly dressed man said. "I saw you at the airport yesterday, I saw you again in the lounge of the hotel last night and now I see you for the third time in two days. In it is quite unheard of to meet the same man three times in two days without knowing his name, so I have taken the liberty of making your acquaintance."

The commissaris smiled, looking at the face of the old gentleman. Mr. van der Linden would probably be close to seventy but a pair of very alive eyes twinkled in his face which seemed to be covered with old white-yellowish leather.

"I am a tourist," the commissaris said. "Surely you must see thousands of tourists wandering through your city."

Mr. van der Linden smiled and the waxed ends of his mustache vibrated. "No, sir. Excuse me for contradicting you. You are not a tourist."

"No?" the commissaris asked.

"No. A tourist has no purpose. He wanders about, looking at the shop windows. He wears an open shirt with a flower pattern, or striped, and he talks in a loud voice. He has to, for otherwise he loses his identity."

"Ah."

"A tourist doesn't wear a shantung suit with a waistcoat. Your waistcoat intrigues me. I haven't seen anyone wear a waistcoat for years."

The commissaris looked down at his waistcoat. "It went with the suit," he said guiltily, "and it isn't warm. It isn't lined, you see. And it has handy pockets. I always wear a waistcoat. My lighter goes into the left pocket and my watch into the right. It's a matter of habit."

Mr. van der Linden roared with laughter. "You don't have to explain yourself to me," he said. "It's I who should explain myself. I am a lawyer, you see, I have practiced here for many years, more than I can remember, and I didn't leave when I retired. I got used to the place. You are a police officer, aren't you?"

"Yes," the commissaris said.

"You are here to investigate the death of Maria van Buren."

"Yes."

"I was expecting a Dutch police officer to come out. Usually when one of us gets into trouble out there the causes can be found here."

"Do you have an idea that could help me?" the commissaris asked, opening his tin of cigars and holding it out.

"No, thank you. I am not allowed to smoke anymore. It's a great pity. We always have Cuban cigars here and to smoke one in the evening, sitting under the tamarind tree in the garden, is a true pleasure. Was a true pleasure. Yes, perhaps I have an idea. You found what Maria was doing out there, in Amsterdam I mean. It's 'out there' to me now, strange isn't it, and I am a true Dutchman."

"A macamba," the commissaris said.

"You have been learning already. Maria was a very courageous girl. She had ideals, strange ideals. Some girls have ideals, not too many of them, fortunately perhaps. They might stop having children one day and it would be the end of us."

"It might be the best ideal of all," the commissaris said, trying to blow a smoke ring:

"Yes. Quite. An interesting theory. Will you be staying long?"

The commissaris shook his head.

"Pity. I have a bottle of old brandy left and we could drink it under my tree and discuss a world without people. It's a beautiful thought. We wouldn't be there to regret the fact that we wouldn't be there."

"Maria was the mistress of at least three rich men," the commissaris said.

"Yes. My mind was wandering. It often does, nowadays. But Maria wasn't a prostitute. I knew her as a child and I think she had the mind of a discoverer, and explorer. She wanted to find out. She liked men, of course, any beautiful woman does. Men will confirm the fact that a woman is beautiful. I think she was experimenting with manipulating people."

"And someone objected and killed her."

"That's one possibility," Mr. van der Linden said. "Another thought which occurred to me was that somebody would object to her way of life in general."

"We have reason to believe that she dabbled in sorcery."

"Sorcery," Mr. van der Linden repeated, and laughed.

"You don't believe in sorcery?"

"Of course I believe in it. I have lived a long time, and most of my life I have spent on this island, and on similar islands. Black magic works, I am convinced of it. It's a lot of mumbo jumbo of course but so is advertising, and nobody will deny that advertising works. But black magic is silly, like advertising."

"Magic is silly?" the commissaris asked.

"Black magic is. Not the real thing. Black magic is a perversion of the real thing and all perversions are silly. The desire to hurt others is childish."

"You think Maria practiced black magic?"

Mr. van der Linden spread his hands on his knees and looked at them for a while. His body became still, his face relaxed. "Yes," he said in the end.

"Do you think it killed her?"

The commissaris had to wait for the answer again. "Yes," Mr. van der Linden said.

The car bounced a little on a bad patch of tar and the commissaris lost the thread of his thoughts. He had changed the pattern of his theory so that Mr. van der Linden's remarks would fit in, but now he remembered that Silva had told him not to miss the forest. The forest was supposed to be two hundred yards long and there would be a dip in the road. If he reached the dip he was supposed to stop the car and get out. Silva had told him to spend at least five minutes in the forest to try to recapture the old atmosphere of the island, the atmosphere that it had in the beginning of the fifteenth century, when Indian tribes still lived in , Indians who fished and hunted and who welcomed strangers and took care of them and who built large huts which fitted in with the landscape and whose religion centered around magic.