Janwillem De Wetering - Outsider in Amsterdam

"Suicide, I suppose," Johan said after a few minutes of silence, which hung heavily in the room. "Who would want to murder Piet? He was a bit of a bore but he didn't hurt anyone. He couldn't if he tried."

Grijpstra changed his opinion. The answer had been cleverer than he had expected.

"You don't seem to be very upset," de Gier said.

"No," Johan said. "I am sorry. Perhaps I should be upset, but I can't generate any feeling. Annetje and I would have left next week anyway. This is a commercial enterprise where the goal is money. Piet wanted to make a profit and he wanted the profit for himself. He was the owner of the business. We intended to leave him and find some other place with a bit of idealism behind it, or maybe start one of our own. Piet crooked us. I don't really hold it against him. It's my own stupidity, I should have seen it. He made us work for the great purpose but all we worked for was his wealth. Did you see the gold strap on his wristwatch?"

Grijpstra nodded.

"There are other things as well. There is a new station wagon parked outside. We earned it for him. He was a capitalist but he didn't tell us."

"You don't like capitalists?" de Gier asked.

"I don't mind them," Johan said. "It's a way of life. Free enterprise is a philosophy. It isn't mine. I am against fascism and I would fight it if I had to, but I wouldn't fight capitalism."

"So you think it was suicide?" de Gier asked.

"Yes."

"Enough," Grijpstra said. "You need some sleep. All of us do. Tomorrow is another day. Try and remember anything that may be relevant and tell us about it tomorrow. The peace of the citizens has been disturbed and we, criminal investigators of your police department, have to repair the peace again. And you have to help us. Such is the law."

He grinned, got up, and stretched his aching back.

Within a few minutes the detectives were walking toward their car. A late drunk came swaggering toward them, and de Gier had to jump aside.

"Out of my way," the drunk shouted and grabbed a lamp post.

"Bah," Grijpstra said. The drunk was pissing on the street and all over his own trousers.

"Watch it," de Gier shouted. The drunk had fallen over and rolled off the sidewalk into the street.

Grijpstra, who was getting into the car, grabbed the microphone.

"An unconscious man on the sidewalk of Haarlemmer Houttuinen opposite number five. Please send the bus."

"Drunk?" the voice of Headquarters asked.

"Very," Grijpstra answered. "No need for an ambulance, the police bus will do."

"Bus coming," the voice said. "Out."

"We better wait," de Gier said. "I have pulled him off the street but he may roll over again. He is fast asleep."

"Sure. We've got nothing else to do."

They waited in silence for the small blue bus with its crew of two elderly police constables who dragged the drunk inside, cursing and sighing.

"Nice job," de Gier said, waved at the constables and started the engine.

"So have we," Grijpstra said, "nice and complicated. Murdered innocence dangling from a piece of string, surrounded by dear sweet people of which one is a black cannibal trained in guerilla warfare and another a crazy old female bag of bones."

"I hope his mother has done it," de Gier said.

"You love people, don't you?"

"I don't like jails," de Gier said. "I had to visit some of our clients in their cells this week. Cold, drafty and hopeless. Jail will get you if nothing else does. A day in jail means a year of crime."

Grijpstra turned his heavy neck and stared at his colleague.

"Well, well," he said, "have you forgotten how many people you have directed to the cold, drafty and hopeless cells?"

"Yes, yes," de Gier said and lapsed into silence.

The silence lasted until they entered their office and he had to help Grijpstra to phrase the exact short sentences that framed their report and that they both signed, mentioning in cool print that everything the report contained was the truth as they, officers of the Queen's law, saw it. Grijpstra typed, slowly, with four fingers, without making a single typing error.

De Gier didn't speak when he left but Grijpstra didn't mind. He had been working with de Gier for a number of years and they had never really fallen out.

The next morning de gier was in his bed. it was eight o'clock, he should have been up and in any case he should have been awake.

He wasn't asleep either. He was applying a trick, a recipe he had discovered as a boy. Stretched flat on his back with his toes pressed against the iron bars of the old hospital bed that he had, some years before, picked up at an auction, he was maintaining, with some effort, a state of semiconsciousness. He was, in fact, directing a dream. His body tingled, not the unpleasant tingle of cold hands after coming into a warm room, but an exciting all over tingle that made his entire body glow. He was very close to being free, free from his daily routine, his responsibility, his planet bound existence. Inside his tingling body his mind was at liberty to move, wherever he wanted it to go.

And, being a shrewd man, he was using his liberty for an immediate purpose. He made his mind go back to the room of the dangling corpse. He saw the Papuan again, and the old skeleton-woman, the restaurant and the guests, the kitchen and the girls. He didn't try to achieve anything, he merely tried to force his mind to go back into the day before and he was reasonably successful until Oliver jumped on his stomach and cut the thin film that separated de Gier from reality.

He woke up and, reluctantly, looked at his watch. Five minutes past eight.

"Yes," he said to Oliver and put the Siamese cat on the floor where it began to grumble and whine.

"Wait," he said and walked to the small bathroom, looking at his plants in passing.

If it is true that a house is a projection of the occupant's spirit then de Gier's spirit was not quite ordinary. He had furnished the little two-roomed apartment with a bed, plants, and bookshelves. No table, no chairs, no TV. A detachable shelf, screwed to the wall above the bed, served as a table if he wanted to write, which wasn't often. He ate in the kitchen, not much larger than an old-fashioned cupboard.

"Mmm," he said, stopping near the geranium, which had started as a seed no more than a few weeks ago and "Mmm," he said again when he admired his creeper, hanging down from a bookshelf.

"She grows," he remarked to Oliver, who wasn't interested, and began to splash cold water all over his chest and arms and poured hot water and lathered his face.

Oliver continued to grumble.

"We'll have breakfast together," de Gier said. "Go to the balcony and irritate the birds while I finish shaving."

He moved the protesting cat with his foot and opened the balcony door. A seagull swooped low, expecting to be fed, and Oliver chattered with fury.

A few minutes later the cat and the detective ate, chopped heart and scrambled eggs. Then they drank, water and coffee. Then de Gier went out to catch his bus, an hour late, and the cat stretched into the still warm blankets of the unmade bed, imitating his master's trick of being asleep without dozing off altogether.

"You are late," said Grijpstra.

De Gier smiled, remembering the pretty dark-haired girl he had been sitting next to in the bus.

"I am often late," he said.

"That's true," Grijpstra agreed. "Here, read this, the doctor's report."

They were in their large gray room of Headquarters. Grijpstra relaxed into a plastic chair and watched his colleague reading. Grijpstra smiled. He was content. His wife had been asleep when he came home at 2:30 in the morning. She was still asleep when he left. He had breakfasted by himself, helping himself to more toast and more eggs without any contradiction or argument. And, alone in the detectives' room, he had watered the rubber plant and played drums on the set that, in a so far unexplained manner, had arrived in his and de Gier's office about a year earlier. Found perhaps, or confiscated. Put there for a purpose that had been conveniently forgotten. Grijpstra had wanted to be a drummer when he was still a young man with a sense of adventure, and he I id some talent. He often came early, to hit the three drums and clash the cymbals. Very softly of course, which, in drumming, is the finer art. He had, during those many early mornings, specialized in the "rustle," the sweeping of the soft forklike instruments (which had come with the set of drums) on the stretched skin of the two smaller drums. Tsss, tsss and then BENG, but softly. And then a roll, a small roll, exciting because of its strict limitation. While de Gier read Grijpstra grabbed the sticks and sounded the small roll.