Outsider in Amsterdam

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De Gier walked past the merchants' mansions on the Prinsengracht using the long strides that, he believed, prevent the common policeman's complaint of flat feet. His mind was clouded by anger. He was angry with everyone in general and with Grijpstra in particular. De Gier didn't want to walk, he wanted to drive. But the police are stingy, and Grijpstra didn't like to be an exception. Why use a car if there is no immediate necessity?

But it was a nice day and de Gier's anger evaporated. The image of a terrible, silly and stupid Grijpstra slid from his mind. Grijpstra had been punished anyway. He, de Gier, was walking, wasting the state's time. He could have taken a streetcar. De Gier had gone further than Grijpstra had intended him to go. He was even saving the state the price of a tram ticket.

De Gier smiled. He had analyzed his own thoughts. He now faced the conclusion with courage. He was a petty little man himself. De Gier always tried to analyze his own thoughts, trying to find the real motivation of his actions. And always he had to conclude that he, de Gier, was a petty little man. But the conclusion didn't discourage him. He shared his pettiness with all of humanity. He didn't have a very high opinion of humanity. He had, once, when they were drinking together, told Grijpstra about his line of thought and Grijpstra had nodded his heavy head. It had been one of the rare evenings when Grijpstra had been prepared to talk. Unwilling to meet his family, and after a long day, he had accepted de Gier's invitation to have a meal at one of the cheap Chinese restaurants and afterward they had found themselves in a small bar of the Zeedijk, the long spine of the prostitution quarter. The owner of the bar had recognized them as plainclothes policemen and had filled and refilled their glasses, quietly and with a hurt smile on his cadaverous face. Grijpstra had done more than agree. He had finished his glass of jenever with one tremendous sip and raised a finger.

"You can," Grijpstra had said, "divide humanity into a few groups."

"Yes?" de Gier had asked, with his softest and most melodious voice. He had been almost breathless with anticipation. Grijpstra would talk!

"Yes," Grijpstra said. "Listen. First of all we have the big bounders. You know them as well as I do. Chaps with red heads and fat necks who drive large American cars and who smoke cigars. Their coats are lined with real fur. There are pimp-bounders and banker-bounders, but in essence they are all the same. The bounders have understood. They know what people want. People want to be manipulated and the bounders manipulate. They find out, or rather, they pay others to find out ((bounders are surrounded by very intelligent slaves) what people want to have and then they buy it cheaply and sell it for the most ridiculous amounts you and I can imagine. The principle works for goods as well as services. Bounders always make money. They never join a queue and they often go on holiday. The own big yachts on the Llsselmeer and villas in Spain. Their mistresses are kept in the best apartments of the Beethovenstreet. They never have any problems and they never make any problems. Whatever crops up is taken care of quickly or rather, as I have already indicated, is taken care of for them. They pay very little tax. They are the first group."

De Gier listened with all the concentration he could muster. The man behind the bar refilled their glasses.

"The second group," Grijpstra continued, slurring his words slightly, "is the biggest group. This is the group of the idiots. You can, if you like, subdivide this group into a fairly large number of subgroups, but why should you?"

De Gier shook his head energetically, he didn't want to subdivide.

"Very well," Grijpstra said, "if they are idiots anyway why should you? There is this type of idiot and that type of idiot but their skins are always gray, they have a variety of illnesses, they stand in queues, they take a holiday once a year, they drive small secondhand cars that break down continuously and they buy the expensive rubbish the bounders sell to them, and they pay a lot of tax of course. It is taken off their pay so that they won't notice much. They do as they are told, not just what the boss tells them to do but also what advertising tells them to do, and the TV, and the newspaper, and anybody who has a loud voice and a few simple words. They'll even get into a cattle truck to be taken to a concentration camp, and when the camps go out of fashion, to Yugoslavia or a Greek island, on a charter plane. They visit dirty whores and drink jenever made in a chemical factory. Your health!"

He raised his glass unsteadily, spilling a little jenever.

"Your health!" de Gier said and raised his glass obediently.

"They do whatever the bounder wants," Grijpstra continued. "And when they have celebrated their sixty-fifth birthday they shake hands and go away and you'll never see them again but it doesn't matter for they reproduce faster than they disappear. They are fond of rubber stamps and forms and name plates on the door, with an indication of their rank or degree. They like medals and titles and privileges. But they never have any rights, only duties. The duty to save and to buy and never mind what they do, the bounders will make money. It matters little what type of political system you apply to them, they will stay idiots, and when the bounder drives past they shout Hurray. Keeping time and arranged in rows. Hurray hurray hurray!"

Grijpstra had shouted loudly and the other guests joined the cheering.

"You see," Grijpstra said, "just as I have been telling you. But we still have the third group. It's a very small group. Do you know who I mean?"

"No," de Gier said, "but please tell me."

"The small third group," Grijpstra said, "is the group of the well-meaning. The gentlemen. The idealists. They have good ideas and they are often very intelligent. They don't push and they never do anything out of turn and they give the impression that they don't manipulate and that no one manipulates them."

"But that's very nice," de Gier said. "So there are some nice people after all."

"No," Grijpstra said, "you never heard me say that.

I called them the well-meaning. I meet them every now and then and I study them very carefully. Extremely carefully."

"And what do you see?" asked de Gier.

"Yes," Grijpstra said and rubbed his face with a tired hand. "I don't know really. I don't see very much when I study them. But I don't trust them at all. These well-meaning people are no good either, I am sure of it."

De Gier had often thought about Grijpstra's three groups and the older he became and the more he experienced, the more he believed in Grijpstra's theory. But he left some room on the side. De Gier didn't like theories that seemed to be watertight. De Gier believed in a miraculous surrealist world and he didn't want to give up his faith, mainly because the existence of this miraculous world seemed to be confirmed to him, and quite regularly, by the inexplicable beauty that echoed, he thought, in the perception of the half-conscious dreams he was subject to. It was happening again, right now, while he walked past the Prinsengracht's water. A seagull kept itself suspended above the hardly moving surface of the gracht, seemingly effortless, by the merest flick of its spread wings. A gable silhouetted sharply against a dark gray rain cloud, an old woman fed the sparrows throwing an ever-changing shadow-pattern on the cobblestones. A miraculous world, de Gier thought. Very beautiful. Perhaps the world is no good, but I am here. I walk here and I am doing something and although it probably serves no purpose, it's interesting. Fascinating even.

It was warm in the street and he was glad when he saw the Haarlemmer Houttuinen and knew that the coolness of the large house was waiting for him. But before he entered he had seen the car parked on the sidewalk, in the same place as he had parked the police VW the night before, and a little later he recognized the detective who greeted him in the corridor, a detective from the Bureau Warmoesstraat.

"Now what?" he asked his colleague

"Breaking and entering," the colleague said and took him to me restaurant where van Meteren and the four helpers of the dead Piet sat quietly around a table.

"Hello," de Gier said to van Meteren. "Don't you have to work today? It's past eleven."

Van Meteren smiled. "You here again? No, I don't have to work. I took the day off because of special circumstances. I wanted to organize the removal of Piet's mother. But somebody broke in last night and I telephoned again."

"When was that?" de Gier asked.

"I don't know. I went to sleep after you both left. It must have been between one-thirty and seven-thirty this morning. Someone kicked in the little cellar's door and they went all through the restaurant and the shop. I don't think they went upstairs for I should have heard them."

"Anything missing?" de Gier asked.

The detective shrugged his shoulders. "Not much. The tape recorder that was supposed to have been here in the restaurant and the money box from the shop. According to the girls here it only contained small cash, they had given the notes to their boss. And the boss is supposed to have committed suicide yesterday, but you should know all about that."

De Gier looked at his colleague and thought that he knew nothing at all. A corpse and now breaking and entering. Marvelous.

"Did you make your report?" he asked.

"Sure. The fingerprint man was here as well but mere has been quite a crowd here they tell me, and you must have touched a lot of objects as well last night. I was on my way out when you came in."

De Gier shook his hand and the detective disappeared, grumbling about the lack of staff and the impossibility of catching anyone nowadays. An old detective, close to retirement.

"Marvelous marvelous," de Gier said irritably to van Meteren, "and I came to see if we had overlooked anything yesterday."

He realized that he was treating van Meteren as yet another colleague.

"Can we go now?" the girls asked.

De Gier nodded.

"Where do you want to go?"

"Don't worry," Johan said. "We'll stay in town. Eduard and I found a houseboat at the Binnenkant, opposite number 10. The ship is called The Good Hope. She belongs to my brother but he is on his way to India and he left me the key."

De Gier noted the address.

"And what are you going to do?" he asked the girls.

"I am going with the boys," the fat girl called Annetje answered and moved closer to Johan. De Gier had to suppress an expression of horror, he didn't mind fat girls but if they were wearing dresses with flower patterns… He was sure that she was barefoot, and that her feet would be dirty. He dropped his pack of cigarettes and bent down to pick it up. Her feet were dirty.

"And you?" he asked the beautiful girl.

Therese stared.

De Gier repeated his question.

Therese began to cry.

"There there," van Meteren said and moved over so that he sat next to her.

"She is pregnant," he said to de Gier, "and she doesn't know where to go."

"It's all right," de Gier said to the girl. He had become interested and watched her closely. A lovely girl, long black hair, green cat's eyes, a tall rather thin girl but with a good full bosom. He dropped his matchbox. Her legs were long and well shaped and she wore sandals, and her feet were clean.

"Can't she stay here for the time being?" he asked van Meteren.

"I don't know. The place is closed. I sent a telegram to Piet's wife. Paris isn't far, she can be here any minute now. She used to be a director of the Society, together with Piet, and now she would be the only one in charge, I suppose. I never saw the Society's articles, perhaps the accountant can be of help. The house will probably be sold."

"But she could stay for the time being," de Gier insisted.

"I don't want to stay," Theiese said. She had stopped crying. "It's the house of a corpse. And now they have broken in as well. I'll go to my mother."

She gave an address in Rotterdam and de Gier wrote it down in his notebook. Johan, Eduard and Annetje said goodbye. Their bags were packed and had been stacked in the corridor, very neatly. De Gier touched Annetje's hand. Van Meteren got up as well.

"I'll see you later," de Gier said to van Meteren. "I'd like to have a few words with Th6rese."

When they were alone he offered a cigarette and lit it for her. She sucked on the Gauloise and began to cough. "Put it out," de Gier said, "it doesn't help. I wanted to ask you who caused your pregnancy."

"Piet," the girl said.

"Is that why his wife left?"

She shook her head. "His wife was used to it. Piet tried to make us all and sometimes he was lucky. I kept away from him at first but he insisted and it was hard to refuse him all the time. I lived here, and he could be rather charming at times."

"Was he really nice?" de Gier asked.

The girl stared.

"Was he?"

She began to cry again. "No. He was a bastard. With his insane health ideas. Why did I have to get involved in all this? Now I need an abortion if it isn't too late. And I don't want his child."

De Gier let her cry. Van Meteren showed himself in the open door but de Gier made a gesture and he disappeared.

"Did you have any fights with him?"

The girl wasn't listening. De Gier got up and held her by the shoulders but it complicated the situation for she allowed her body to drop into his arms.

"Hey," de Gier said and put her back, carefully, onto her chair. He repeated the question.

She nodded.

"Did you have a fight with him yesterday?"

She nodded again.

"In his room?"

"Yes," the girl said. "I shouted at him but he didn't answer. All he said was that I could leave if I didn't like it here, and that I was over twenty-one, and that he was married already. I should have been more careful. After that he shut up. I called him names. It has happened before. 'Karma,' he said. Everybody has to accept the consequences of his own actions. Karma is very useful. It teaches you things. Haha."

"Did you hit him?"

"I threw a book at his head."

"A heavy book?"

"Yes, a dictionary."

"Did it hit him?"

She didn't answer. He took her by the hand and they went upstairs. The dictionary was on the floor of Piet's room. There were other books on the floor as well.

"Can you remember whether it hit him? Did he fall over?"

"I don't know," Th amp;ese said. "I walked out of the room and slammed the door. I never looked around."

De Gier rephrased his question in several ways but got nowhere. She hadn't hung Piet. When he asked her she began to laugh, through her tears.

De Gier tore a sheet of paper from a notebook on the table and wrote a short statement. He read it to her and asked her to sign.

"You don't really think I hung him, do you?" she asked. De Gier didn't answer but telephoned Headquarters and was connected with Grijpstra. Grijpstra played his drums and spoke at the same time, the telephone hooked between his head and his shoulder.

"I am coming," Grijpstra said.

'Take the car," said de Gier, "it's a long walk," and hung up.

"The noose," he said to the girl. "Did you know that there was a noose in the room and someone had screwed a hook into one of the beams supporting the ceiling?"

"That hook has always been there," Therese said. "Piet used to have a mask hanging from that hook but it frightened me when I was on the settee with him and then he sold it. And that noose is nothing but an ordinary bit of rope isn't it? We have a lot of that sort of rope in the house. Piet used to import foods from Japan and it would come in lovely little casks, wound with rope. We used to take it off and use it for decoration. The noose was made with it."

"Did you see the noose?" de Gier asked quickly.

"No," the girl said. "Van Meteren told me."

"You think he committed suicide?" de Gier asked.

The girl looked indifferent. "It wouldn't surprise me. He wasn't quite right in the head, I think. When his wife left him he complained terribly. Even to me, while we were in bed together."

"What else did he complain about?" de Gier asked.

"Anything you like to mention. The purpose of life, and enlightenment. He thought he wasn't enlightened. He should be, he said, for he had lived according to the rules, but nothing had happened."

"Enlightenment?" asked de Gier.

"Yes," Th6rese said. "It always made me think of light bulbs. Buddhists, and Hindus too, I think, claim that you will be enlightened if you live according to the right rules. You should do everything you have to do as well as you can and meditate a lot and gradually you will begin to understand all sorts of things you never did before and you'll have visions, I believe. I don't know anything about it really. But I thought that enlightenment meant happiness, and absence of problems, and I think Piet thought that way too from the way he talked. But he kept all his problems, he said. And he didn't know what he was doing wrong."

"Suicide doesn't seem to be very Buddhist to me," de Gier said, "or Hindistic, or what he called it. A man who commits suicide stops trying and if you give up trying you won't get anywhere. Or not?"

Thgrese had sat down on the settee and rubbed her eyes. "Piet said that there had been Japanese, Samurai or monks, I can't remember what, who had committed suicide because they had found themselves to be in a hopeless situation. Then it's all right, he said. Admirable even. But you have to do it in the right way. First you have to clean your body and your spirit and then you have to find a quiet spot and meditate for a while and then, when everything has become very quiet and you have said goodbye, in your mind, to all you love, you can do it."

De Gier thought about the crease in Piet's trousers, the combed hair, the beautiful mustache.

"What did you think of Piet's religion?" he asked. "This Hindism?"

"Bah," the girl said, "it made me puke. He talked such a lot of rot. Nothing really exists. Everything is illusion, everything changes and comes to an end. Life is a dream and nothing matters. It seems real but it isn't."

De Gier thought.

"But that could be true," he said.

"It is true," the girl said, "but you shouldn't hear P. et saying it. If one really knows that nothing is important and that we are only here to perform some sort of exercise (he used to say that as well), then one doesn't behave the way Piet behaved."

"And how did he behave?"

"In a silly way," Therese said. "Boring, depressive. He was very attached to property as well. He always said that property was just an idea and didn't matter and that we only have things so that we can use them and enjoy them, but that we should always be detached from them. But he was attached to every bit of furniture in the house, every book, every record. If you borrowed from him you would have to return it almost immediately. I never had a chance to finish a book. And he never gave anything away. He gave me things when he was trying to make me but I had to give it all back to him later. A little statue, a few shells, a record. I might as well give it back, he said, then we could share it. And he was always cleaning and polishing his car. And every day he calculated the exact worth of the Society. He was the Society. We were members but we weren't allowed to really touch it. Even when we went to the little house he bought in the south he checked the food we took with us and if he thought it was too much he would take it from the bag and put it back on the shelf. But when he went himself he took all he wanted."

De Gier shook his head.

"But if you disliked him so much, then why did you go to bed with him?"

Therese began to cry again.

"I don't know," she said. "Why did I? He kept on coming to my room and I don't make contact easily with people. When a man smiles at me I never know what to do. And men are always so difficult, they flirt and make silly jokes and Piet didn't. He said he wanted to go to bed with me and asked me to take my clothes off. The first few times I said 'No' but one evening I did."

Not bad, de Gier thought. He had heard about the method but had never met it in actual life. Perhaps I should try it on the girl in the bus, de Gier thought. I look her straight in the face and say "Miss, my name is Rinus de Gier. I want to go to bed with you. Here is my card. Could you come to my flat tonight? I'll be home from seven P.M. onward but don't come after eleven for then I am usually asleep."

"Are you listening to me?" Theiese asked.

"Sure, sure," de Gier said.

"Can I go then? Or do you still think that I hung Piet?"

"You can go," de Gier said. "If anything comes up I'll phone you. I have your address and your number."

"What could come up?" Theiese asked. "Piet is dead and I am pregnant and I must find a way to stop being pregnant."

Grijpstra had come in and de Gier told him what he had found out.

"Well, well," Grijpstra said, "throwing books, hey?"

Therese said nothing.

"Never mind," Grijpstra said. "Have a good trip to Rotterdam," and he gave the girl a kind look.

Together they searched the house again, room by room. They had plenty of time and worked slowly. They were disturbed by voices and went to investigate. The men from the city's health service had come to collect Mrs. Verboom. They were going to take her to a clinic for neuroses, near the coast.

Mrs. Verboom allowed herself to be taken away quietly. She didn't recognize the detectives. Van Meteren had given her another Palfium tablet and the old lady was only partly conscious and could hardly walk. Van Meteren carried her bag.

"How did you manage that so quickly?" de Gier asked when van Meteren returned.

"The physician helped. He wanted Mrs. Verboom to go to a clinic anyway and now that Piet isn't here to frustrate the idea it was very easy. She'll never be allowed to live in a normal house again. She is really mad, you know."

"In what way?" Grijpstra asked.

"Perhaps I shouldn't have said she is mad," van Meteren said sadly. "What is madness? She only thinks of herself, perhaps that is mad enough. And she can't look after herself. She is over eighty and needs opiates. An elderly drug addict. They won't cure her but perhaps they can keep her happy until she dies."

"You are right," Grijpstra said. "We live in a socialist country and suffering is prohibited by law."

"Suffering," van Meteren said disdainfully.

"You don't believe in it?" asked de Gier.

"No," van Meteren said. "Suffering is very egotistic."

"Nothing is important," said de Gier, who had learned a lot that day.

"Come off it," said Grijpstra, who had had enough. "This Eastern philosophy is all very well but we have work to do. We are dealing with a corpse, and with breaking and entering, and with theft. Maybe it isn't important but I would like to know who we have to arrest, just for the hell of it."

"That's all right," van Meteren said. "Work is all part of it. Do what you have to do, as long as you don't think it is important."

Grijpstra looked furious and van Meteren smiled and went up to his room.

A little later, in Piet's room, Grijpstra began to growl. De Gier recognized the sound, it reminded him of Oliver's growl when the cat was on the balcony and sensed the presence of the neighbor's Alsatian dog, separated from the cat by a thin glass plate. At such moments de Gier was frightened of his own cat, silly Oliver, suddenly transformed into a puffed up ball of rage, with a thick sweeping and twisting tail, spitting pure hatred.

"Yes, adjutant, what is it?" he asked sweetly.

"This," Grijpstra growled and pointed at a file that he had found on one of the bookshelves. "Look at this. Piet Verboom mortgaged his house, a couple of weeks ago, for fifty thousand guilders. That's a lot of money, a year's wage of a well-to-do man. The house looks all right but it is rackety and three hundred years old. Fifty thousand is about the most you can get on a mortgage, I am pretty sure. The money has been paid into his bank account and he has drawn it out again, together with another twenty-five thousand he had to his credit. It was taken out in cash. Where is it?"

"Any money left on the account?" de Gier asked.

"About ten thousand. This means that he has drawn about everything the Society owned in ready cash. And we found nothing. If it is here it must have been hidden in an impossible spot. If it is here. It's probably somewhere else by now."

"Stolen," de Gier said.

Grijpstra nodded.

"Then we have the motive."

"Certainly," Grijpstra said, and sat down.

"And the opportunity. Everybody had the chance to kill him. Van Meteren for instance. He must have killed quite a few people in New Guinea and he could have used the seventy-five thousand. And Mrs. Verboom, she is mad of course. But would she have wanted the money? She is over eighty years old."

"Money is money," de Gier said. "Old crazy people like to use it just like everyone else. Perhaps she has it in her bag and plans to spend it on a cruise around the world or a year in a luxury hotel in Madeira. There's an English hotel over there that caters to rich old ladies. Somebody told me about it."

"Possibly," said Grijpstra. "I wasn't trained along the new lines like you were. Psychology and all that. Perhaps you should go and visit her in the clinic."

"Nice," de Gier said. "Any more bright ideas?"

"A suspect has to be interrogated, even if she is as crazy as the government."

"True."

"And then we have Th6rese, she didn't like Piet either. She threw'dictionaries at him. And the boys, Eduard and Johan. Perhaps they got tired of being used and squeezed dry. Perhaps a joint venture of Eduard, Johan and Annetje. They worked for nothing for a long time and now, suddenly, rich! For seventy-five thousand you can buy a nice new houseboat and cover the floor with Persian carpets."

"Second-hand carpets," de Gier said.

"Sure."

De Gier scratched his neck. "Everybody could have nipped up the stairs. Perhaps the girls were so busy stirring the health food that they didn't notice. Or they were looking at the rhododendrons. You can't watch rhododendroms and a staircase at the same time. Anyway, why would they have watched anything? Any of the thirty-eight guests could have done it, but what I can't understand is the breaking and entering. Do you think they were looking for the money?"

Grijpstra sat up.

"They hung him, you mean, and they wanted to grab the money. But it wasn't there. So they came back later?"

"Came back?" de Gier asked. "Perhaps they never left. The breaking and entering was a little sideshow. They just went on living here, quietly."

"Not quietly. Criminals are usually rather nervous. Fidgety."

"Next?" de Gier asked.

"Let's look through the house again," Grijpstra said. "We haven't found anything but it doesn't matter. There are still plenty of detectives around, in spite of the shortage. Let them have a try."

He telephoned. Six constables arrived and searched the house. They knocked on beams, removed floorboards, unscrewed drainpipes and put hands into lavatories. Two went through the shop, like moles. White moles, for they upset some bags of flour.

De Gier watched them and smiled. He had been a mole too, some years back.

He was still smiling when he climbed the stairs.