Janwillem De Wetering: Outsider in Amsterdam

"Ha!" de Gier said. "But surely he can't have been that much of a failure. This place looks reasonably successful. It is clean for one thing and the restaurant was almost full. He must have been making some money and some people must have admired him one way or another."

"Sure," van Meteren said, "and the atmosphere here is quite pleasant. I have always been reasonably happy here and it would be a pity if it's all over and done with now. And Piet's ideas were all right, but he wasn't the right man to put them into effect. Perhaps if he had admitted that he was a beginner himself and had lost some of his pride. He wanted to be a great master and it must have been a shock to him when people belittled him. His own wife called him a lesser nitwit when she left, the others called him other things. He has been walked over a lot lately…" He didn't finish his sentence.

"Who else lives here?" Grijpstra asked.

Van Meteren counted them off on his fingers. "His mother, eighty-three years old, second door on the right from here, not altogether sound in mind."

"Old age?" asked Grijpstra.

"No, not just old age. A bit mad I would say. Then there is me, you know me. On the next floor there is Therese, the girl with the pigtails. Annetje, the other girl, sleeps in the servant quarters, on the other side of the courtyard. She shares her room with Johan. Eduard lives in the little cabin at the end of the garden. He had his day off today but he may have been here this afternoon, you'll have to ask him. Johan has been working, he had the shop today and has been barman during the evening."

Someone knocked at the door. Van Meteren called "Yes" but nothing happened. He got up and opened the door and the detectives saw a very old lady, tall and angular, dressed in a gown set off with lace, a thick woollen scarf hung over her shoulders. Two glinting sharp eyes stared at them. The aggressive nose reminded de Gier of a sparrow hawk's beak.

"What's going on?" the old lady asked. "What are you all talking about? I have been listening to the grunting of voices for hours now. It is half past one, I want to sleep."

Van Meteren put his arm around the old lady. "Come in, Miesje. These gentlemen are police officers. That's Mister Grijpstra and that's Mister de Gier."

The detectives shook the thin hand, dotted all over with dark brown spots.

She sat down, with a straight back, on the edge of the settee.

"So what goes on?" she asked in a brittle voice. "Are they your friends, Jan? Traffic wardens?"

"No Miesje. They are regular police. There has been an accident. Piet has had a bad fall."

The old lady's eyes, which had been closing slowly, suddenly opened.

"He is dead?" she shrieked.

Nobody answered.

"He is dead," the old lady said and began to cry.

The sound of her sobs grated on the detectives' ears. Her mouth dropped open and Grijpstra shuddered when he saw her tongue flapping and trembling with each fresh howl.

Van Meteren had rushed out of the room and came back with a glass of water and a very small white pill.

"Swallow this, Miesje." The old lady swallowed. The sobs stopped abruptly. She responded to the brief snappy command.

De Gier was grateful; the sudden silence eased his nerves.

The old lady began to talk. She spoke slowly: it seemed that the pill had given her a dry mouth.

"This afternoon Piet told me that I shouldn't complain so much and that the rhododendrons are in flower. But my eyes are so bad. What are rhododendrons anyway?"

Her voice was gathering volume again.

"Rhododendrons are flowers, Miesje," van Meteren said, still using his command voice. "Like tulips. And now you are going to your room and you are going to sleep. Tomorrow I'll come to see you before I go to work."

He pushed her out of the room.

"I can't stand old ladies," de Gier said, "and I most definitely can't stand them if they are mad."

"You'll have to learn to get used to them," said Grijpstra. "There'll be more and more of them. It's very difficult to find a doctor who'll let old people the nowadays. Haven't you been reading the papers? I wonder what was in that pill."

"An opiate," said van Meteren, who had returned. "It's called Palfium. The doctor prescribes it, she can get as much as she wants. She has been taking these pills for years now and she is hopelessly addicted to them. Piet knew but he didn't mind. It keeps her quiet. Without the pills she would have to go to an asylum and he preferred to keep her here. I'll telephone the doctor tomorrow; he'll probably have her taken away."

"Did Piet take those pills as well?" Grijpstra asked.

"Not as far as I know."

"But he could have taken them, his mother must have a bottle full of them on her bedside table."

Van Meteren nodded thoughtfully.

"I don't think so," he said after a while. "Those pills are very strong. According to the doctor they will stun a horse but Miesje can take two at a time and stay on her feet. She hadn't got much of a stomach left. She has been operated for ulcers and I suppose most of the stuff goes straight down. If Piet had taken a pill he would have had to sit down and he probably would have gone to sleep. I have never seen him like that. He did drink a bit lately, he would come down to the bar and have a few whiskies. Three glasses would make him drunk enough to be able to laugh and talk to people. I take it you are suggesting that he took a pill today and that the pill knocked him over and caused the bruise on his temple?"

"Yes," said de Gier.

"Perhaps," van Meteren said, "but it would have been the first time that he took a pill. In my opinion anyway."

"Why do you call her Miesje?" Grijpstra asked.

"Ach," van Meteren said, "it's just a trick. Whenever she is hysterical she screams. I thought I might make her calm down if I treated her as if she was a child. She was called Miesje once, when she was a child and wore laced boots and played hopscotch. When she behaves normally I call her Mrs. Verboom and when I think she will start one of her tantrums I call her Miesje. I take her on my lap and she'll talk quietly and sometimes I cuddle her a bit."

"Brr," said de Gier.

Van Meteren grinned. "Yes. It's quite ridiculous. Piet would do it too. I always laughed when I saw that tall skeleton sitting on his lap, he was such a small man. Perhaps it looks even funnier when she sits on my lap. But I have done other crazy things. I used to walk for miles with an Indonesian commando on a string. It was knotted in such a way that he would throttle himself if he tried to run away. I would hold the string with one hand and the carbine with the other. And now I have an old crazy lady on my lap and call her Miesje."

There was another knock on the door and a thin young man dressed in jeans and a T-shirt came in. De Gier looked at the long unwashed hair and remembered the barman.

"This is Johan," van Meteren said, and the detectives said, "Good evening." De Gier asked Johan to sit down and made room on the settee.

Grijpstra asked the usual questions but Johan could only shake his head. He hadn't seen Piet after he had given him the takings of the shop at four o'clock. Three hundred and fifty-six guilders and some cents. Piet had phoned him later on the house phone to tell him that there was a difference of some thirty guilders but Johan hadn't gone upstairs, he had been too busy getting the bar in order for the evening's customers.

"What do you think has happened?" de Gier asked.

Johan shrugged his shoulders and didn't reply.

Grijpstra grunted. He had been thinking that he had met the boy hundreds of times already. The inner city was full of duplicates of this boy. Well-meaning, unintelligent and knocked loose from their surroundings, full of protests and questions and wandering in a thin, almost two-dimensional thought-world where they could find no answers. "Maybe they don't really want to find anything," Grijpstra thought. "Maybe they wait for death, or a strong woman who will take them in hand so that they will find a daily routine again and start watching football on TV." He thought of his oldest son and studied Johan without much sympathy. Grijpstra's son wouldn't watch football either. He preferred to lie on his bed, dressed in a striped shirt and an embroidered pair of trousers and watch the cracks in the ceiling.