Death of a Hawker

8

A pudding for a face, Grufstra thought, turning his head to watch Klaas Bezuur. Nobody had said anything for at least a minute. The commissaris, at the far end of the vast room, which covered almost three quarters of the modern bungalow, had made Grijpstra think of his youngest son's rag doll, a small lost object thrown into a large chair. The commissaris was in pain. Self-propelled white-hot needles were drilling into the bones of his legs. He was breathing deeply and had half-closed his eyes, fighting the temptation to close them completely. He felt very tired, he badly wanted to go to sleep. But he had to keep his mind on the case. Klaas Bezuur, the dead man's friend, was facing him.

A pudding, Grijpstra thought again. They have dropped a pudding on a human skull, a pudding of blubbery fat. The fat has oozed down, from the cranium downward. It covered the cheekbones and then it slowly dripped down to the jaws and clung to the chin.

Bezuur was sitting on the edge of his chair, straight up. His round belly hung over his belt and Grijpstra could see folds of flesh, hairy flesh, embedding the navel. The man was sweating. The sweat from his armpits was staining his striped tailor-made silk shirt.

Bezuur's face gleamed and drops were forming, joining each other in miniature streams, gliding down, hesitating near the small pudgy nose. It was very hot, of course. Grijpstra was sweating too.

A big man, Grijpstra thought. Over six feet, he must weigh a ton. He'll eat a hundred guilders a day, easily. Bowlsful of cashew nuts probably, and shrimps, and a bucket or two of potatoes, or spaghetti, and a loaf of bread thrown in, bread covered with fried mushrooms and smoked eel and thick slices of ham.

Bezuur reached out and grabbed a bottle of beer out of a carton placed near his chair. He broke off the cap and filled his glass. The thick foam rose quickly and flowed down the sides of the glass, spilling onto the thick rug.

"More beer, gentlemen?"

The commissaris shook his head. Grijpstra nodded. Bezuur tore the cap off another bottle. More foam was sucked into the rug. "Here you are, adjutant."

They looked at each other in the eye and raised their glasses, grunting simultaneously. Bezuur drained his glass. Grijpstra took a carefully measured sip; it was his third glass. Bezuur had had six since they came into the room. Grijpstra put the glass down gingerly.

"He is dead, the bastard," Bezuur said, and viciously replaced the glass on a marble-topped side table. It cracked and he looked at it dolefully. "The silly stupid bastard. Or perhaps he was clever. He always said that death is a trip and he liked traveling. He used to talk a lot about death, even when he was a boy. He talked a lot and he read a lot. Later he drank a lot too. He was an alcoholic when he was seventeen years old. Did anybody tell you?"

"No," Grijpstra said. "You tell us."

"An alcoholic," Bezuur said again. "Became one when we entered the university. We were always together, at school and at the university. We passed our high school examinations when we were sixteen. Wonderkids we were. We never worked but we always passed. I was good at mathematics and he was good at languages. When we did work we worked together. A deadly team we were; nobody and nothing could tear us apart. We only worked when we came to an examination and then we would only put in the bare minimum. It was pride, I think. Showing off. We would pretend we weren't listening at classes but we soaked it all up, and we remembered the stuff too. And we made secret notes, on scraps of paper; we didn't have notebooks like the other kids. And no homework, homework was for the birds. We read. But he read more than I did and at the university he began to drink."

"He did?" Grijpstra asked.

"Yes."

Bezuur's hand shot out and another bottle lost its cap. He looked at the cracked glass, and turned around to look at the kitchen door. He must have had mote glasses in the kitchen but it was too far, and he drank from the bottle, tossing the cap on the floor. He looked at Grijpstra's glass but it was still half full.

"I think he was drinking a bottle a day. Jenever. He would drink any brand as long as it was cold. One day he couldn't get his pants on in the morning, his hands trembled too much. He thought it was runny but I worried and made him see a doctor who told him to layoff. He did too."

"Really?" Grijpstra asked. "He stopped drinking straight off? Just like that?"

"Yes. He was clever. He didn't want to be a drunk; it would complicate his routine."

"Stopped drinking straight off, hey," Grijpstra said, amp; airing his head.

"I told you he was clever," Bezuur said. "He knew it would be difficult to break the habit so he did something drastic. He disappeared for a while, three months I think it was. Went to work on a farm. When he came back he was off it. Later he began drinking again but then he knew when to stop. He would cut out at the third or fourth glass and drink soft stuff."

"Beer?"

"Beer is not so soft. No, lemonades, homemade. He would fuss about, squeezing the fruit, adding sugar. With Abe everything had to be dead right."

Bezuur tipped the bottle again but it was empty and he slammed it on the table. The bottle cracked. He glared at it.

"You seem a little upset," Grijpstra said.

Bezuur was staring at the wall behind Grijpstra's chair. "Yes," he said, "I am upset. So the bastard died.

How the hell did he manage that? I spoke to Zilver on the phone. He reckons they threw a ball at him, a metal ball, but nobody can find it. It that right?"

He was still staring at the wall behind Grijpstra's chair and Grijpstra turned around. There was a painting on the wall, a portrait of a lady. The lady was wearing a long skirt of some velvety material, a hat with a veil, an elaborate necklace, and nothing else. She had very full breasts with the nipples turned upward. The face was quiet, a delicate face with dreaming eyes and lips which opened in the beginning of a smile.

"Beautiful," Grijpstra said.

"My wife."

Grijpstra looked around the room.

Bezuur laughed, the laugh sounded bubbly and gushy, as if a pipe had suddenly burst and water was flowing down the wall.

"My ex-wife, I should say, perhaps, but the divorce isn't through yet. She left me some months ago now and her lawyers are squeezing me and my lawyers are having a lovely time, writing lots of little notes at a guilder a word."

"Any children?"

"One, but not mine. The fruit of a previous relationship. Some fruit, a little overripe apple, and stupid too-but what do I care, she went too."

"So you are alone."

Bezuur laughed again and the commissaris looked up. He wished the man wouldn't laugh. He had found a way of putting up with the pain in his legs but Bezuur's merriment shook his concentration and the pain attacked again.

"No," Bezuur said, and stretched his right arm. The arm swept in a half circle.

"Girlfriends," Grijpstra said, and nodded.

"Yes. Girls. I used to go to them but now they come here. It's easier. I am getting too heavy to run about."

He looked at the floor, stamping his foot on die sodden rug. "Bah. Beer. Something to do for the cleaning boys. You can't get charwomen anymore you know, not even if you pay them in gold bars. Some cleaning platoon comes here on weekdays, old men in white uniforms. They have a truck and the biggest vacuum cleaner you ever saw. Whip through the whole place in an hour. But the girls come on Fridays or Saturdays and they leave a mess and I sit in it. Bah."

His arm made a sweeping movement again and Grijpstra followed the movement. He counted five empty champagne bottles. Someone had forgotten her lipstick on the couch. There was a stain on the white wall, just below the painting of Bezuur's wife.

"Turtle soup," Bezuur said. "Silly bitch lost her balance and the soup hit the wall. Good thing it missed die painting."

"Who did the painting?"

"You like it?"

"Yes," Grijpstra said. "Yes. I think it is very well done. Like that picture of the two men in a small boat I saw on Abe Rogge's wall."

Bezuur looked at the carton next to his chair, took out a bottle but put it back again.

"Two men in a boat? You saw that painting too, eh? Same artist. Old Mend of ours, a Russian Jew born in Mexico, used to go boating with us and he came to the house. Interesting fellow, but he wandered off again. I think he is in Israel now."

"Who were the two men in the boat?"

"Abe and me," Bezuur said heavily. "Abe and me. Two friends. The Mexican fellow said that we belonged together, he saw it that night. We were on the big lake, the boat was anchored and we had taken the dinghy into the harbor. We came back late that night. The sea was fluorescent and the Mexican was wandering about on deck. He left the next day, he should have stayed a few more days, but he was so inspired by what he saw that night that he had to get back to his studio to paint it. Abe bought the painting and I commissioned this one later. That Mexican was very expensive, even if you were his friend, but he was pretty good."

"Friends," the commissaris said. "Close friends. You were close friends with Abe, weren't you, Mr. Bezuur?"

"Was," Bezuur said, and there was the same blubbery note in his voice again, but now he seemed close to tears. "The bastard is dead."

"You were close friends right up to yesterday?"

"No," Bezuur said. "Lost touch. Went his way, I went my way. I have a big business now and no time to play about on the street market, but I enjoyed it while it lasted."

"When did you each go your own way?"

"Wasshit matter?" Bezuur said, and that was all they could get out of him for a while. He was crying now, and had opened another bottle, slopping half of it on the floor. The fit took a few minutes.

"Shorry," Beznur said.

"That's all right," the commissaris said, and rubbed his legs. "We understand. And I am sorry we are bothering you."

"What did Mr. Rogge and yourself study at the university?" Grijpstra asked. Bezuur looked up, there seemed to be some strength in him again and he was no longer slurring words.

"French. We studied French."

"But you weren't so good at languages. Didn't you say so before?" the commissaris asked.

"Not too bad either," Bezuur said. "Good enough. French is a logical language, very exact. Maybe I would have preferred science but it would have meant breaking from Abe, I wasn't ready for that then."

"Did you study hard?"

"Same way we got through high school, in my case anyway. Abe was more enthusiastic. He read everything he could find at the university library, starting at the top shelf on the left and finishing on the bottom shelf on the right. If the books didn't interest him he would flip the pages, reading a little here and there but often he would read the whole book. I just read what he selected for me, books he talked about."

"And what else did you two do?"

Bezuur was staring at the portrait and the commissaris had to ask again.

"What else? Oh, we ran about. And I had a big boat in those days; we'd go sailing on the lakes. And we traveled. Abe had a little truck and we went to France and North Africa and once I talked my father into buying us tickets on an old tramp which went to Haiti in the Caribbean. The language is French over there and I said we needed the experience for our study."

"Your father paid for Abe's ticket as well? Didn't Abe have any money himself?"

"He had some. German love-money. The Germans paid up after the war, you know, and they had killed both his parents. He got quite a bit; so did Esther. Abe knew how to handle money. He was doing a little business on the side. He was buying and selling antique weapons in those days."

"Weapons?" the commissaris asked. "He didn't happen to have a good-day, did he?"

"No," Bezuur said, when the question had got through to him. "No, no, cavalry sabers and bayonets, that sort of stuff. You think he was killed with a good-day?"

"Never mind," the commissaris said. "Did he ever live out of your pocket?"

Bezuur shook his head. "No, not really. He accepted that ticket to Haiti but he made up for it in other ways. He only relied on himself. He would borrow money sometimes but he always paid up on time and later, when I was lending him big money, he paid full bank interest. The interest was his idea, I never asked for it but he said I had a right to it."

"Why didn't he borrow from the bank?"

"He didn't want his transactions on record. He borrowed cash and he paid cash. He was pretending to be a small hawker, a fellow who lived off his stall."

The commissaris looked at Grijpstra and Grijpstra asked the next question.

"Why did you both drop out of the university?"

Bezuur looked at his beer bottle and shook it. "Yes, we dropped out, right at the end. Abe's idea, that was. He said the degree would be pure silliness, it would qualify us to become schoolteachers. We had learned all we wanted to learn anyway. We went into business instead."

"The street market?"

"Yes. I started importing from the communist countries. In Rumania a lot of people speak French and we went there to see what we could find. The East Bloc started exporting cheaply in those days, to get hard currency. You could pick up all sorts of bargains. They offered wool and buttons and zippers, so we found ourselves in the street market. The big stores wouldn't buy at first and we had to unload the goods. We made good money, but then my dad died and left the road-working machinery business so I had to switch."

"Were you sorry?"

"Yes," Bezuur said and drained the bottle. "I am still sorry. Wrong choice, but there was nothing else to do. There's more money in bulldozers than in colored string."

"You cared about money?"

Bezuur nodded gravely. "I did."

"You still do?"

Bezuur didn't appear to hear.

"One last question." Grijpstra said brightly. "About this party last night. When did it begin and when did it end?"

Bezuur scratched the stubbles on his bloated cheeks. The small eyes looked sly in their greasy sockets. "Alibi, hey? And I don't even know when Abe was killed. Zilver didn't tell me. Party started at about nine in the evening. I can get the girls to testify if you like. I should have their names and phone numbers somewhere."

"Callgirls?"

"Yes. Sure. Whores."

He was looking through the pockets of a jacket which he had taken from the couch. "Here you are, telephone numbers, you can copy them. The names are fancy, of course. Minette and Alice, they call themselves, but they answer their phones if you need them. Better try tomorrow, they'll be asleep now. I had them driven home in a taxi at five o'clock this morning. They had a gallon of champagne each, and another gallon of food."

Grijpstra jotted down the numbers. "Thank you."

"Excuse me, sir," the constable said. He had been standing in the open door for some time.

"Yes, constable?"

"You are wanted on the radio, sir."

"Well, we have finished here, I think," the commissaris said. "Thank you for your hospitality, Mr. Bezuur. Contact me if you think I should know something which you haven't mentioned now. Here is my card. We would like to solve the case."

"I'll let you know," Bezuur said and got up. "God knows I'll be thinking about it all the time. I have done nothing else since Zilver phoned."

"I thought you were having a little party here, sir," Grijpstra said, keeping his voice flat.

"I can think while I have a party," Bezuur said, taking the commissaris' card.

"Another dead body in the Straight Tree Ditch, sir," the female constable from the radio room said. "Water Police found it. It was dangling from a rope tied to a tree, half in the water and partly hidden by a moored boat. The Water Police suggested we should contact you. They had seen the telegrams* reporting the other murder last night. Same area, sir. Sergeant de Gier is there now. He's got Detective-Constable Cardozo with him. They are in their car waiting for instructions. Would you like to speak to them, sir?"

"Put them on," the commissaris said, gloomily looking at the microphone which Grijpstra was holding for him.

"Cardozo here, sir."

"We are on our way to you now," the commissaris said, nodding to the constable at the wheel who started the car. The constable pointed at the roof and raised his eyebrows. "Yes," the commissaris mouthed silently.

The siren began to howl and the blue light flashed as the car shot away. "Anything you can tell us at this stage, Cardozo?"

"Sergeant de Gier knows the dead person, sir. An old man dressed up as a lady. Used to be on the force, sir." Cardozo's voice had gone up, as if he was framing a question.

"Yes, I know her, Cardozo. How did she die?"

"Knife in his back sir. He must have been killed in a public telephone booth here; we found a track. He was dragged across the street and dumped into the canal. The killer used a short rope, strung under the corpse's armpits and attached to an old elm tree. The rope didn't kill him. The knife did."

"Do you have the knife?"

"No, sir. But the doctor said it was a knife wound. Penetrated the heart from the back. A long knife."

"When did she die?"

"Early this morning, sir, the doctor thinks."

"We'll be there soon."

"The Water Police want to have the corpse, sir. Can they take it? It's quiet now but the riots may start any minute again and we are blocking the street with our cars."

"Yes," the commissaris said tiredly, looking at a city bus which was trying to get out of the Citroen's way. The constable at the wheel was attempting to pass the bus and several cars were coming from the opposite direction. The siren was screaming ominously directly above them. The commissaris put a restraining hand on the constable's shoulder and the car slowed down obediently.

"They can have the body, Cardozo. Over and out."

Grijpstra was watching the oncoming traffic too and sighed happily when the Citroen nosed back behind the bus. "Bloody fool," he said to the constable. "What are you trying to do, be a hero?"

The constable didn't hear him. The bus pulled to the side of the road, having finally found a spot free of cyclists, and the Citroen jumped off again, careening wildly.

"Oh, shit," Grijpstra said softly.

"Quite," the commissaris said.

"Pardon, sur?"

That wasn't very clever of me," the commissaris said, "asking that poor old lady to be on the force again. I might as well have shot her on the spot."

^• All Amsterdam police stations are connected by teletype. Important events are immediately recorded and distributed. The messages are known as "telegrams."