The sign of a drugstore came flying, and de Gier turned the wheel so that it sailed past and hit the street and broke, exploding into a cloud of plastic particles. He could hear Grijpstra grunt behind him. Two fire engines hurtled toward the Volkswagen and de Gier drove onto the sidewalk. The engine stalled, and they could hear the sirens of the red trucks, howling emptily.
“Must be on their way to a collapsed house.”
The commissaris didn’t acknowledge the sergeant’s remark but struggled on with his thoughts.
They came to the avenue where the commissaris lived. The sergeant had guided the car onto the sidewalk again to avoid the fallen trees and to minimize the commissaris’s exposure to the weather. When de Gier switched the engine off he looked at the commissaris’s face and smiled. His chief seemed his usual calm self, slightly amused, neat, gentle. The discipline of a long life of continuous effort had reasserted itself, the commissaris’s fear had been forced back into its lair, where it sat, cramped and uncomfortable, wrapped into itself, a black shapeless monstrosity, powerless and pathetic.
“I’ll see you three gentlemen tomorrow at nine,” the commissaris said cheerfully. “Don’t think about the case tonight, we’ll tackle it in the morning, it’ll still be fresh.”
“Sir,” the three men said. The sergeant wanted to get out of the car to open the commissaris’s door, but the little old man was in the street already, stumbling to the front door that was being held open by his wife, whose house-coat was being blown to the side. They saw her reach out and pull him in.
T
HE LARGE ROOM ON THE THIRD FLOOR OF
A
MSTERDAM
police headquarters breathed a quiet atmosphere of comfortable respectability. The room had been neutral when the commissaris moved into it, many years back. The service had supplied him with furniture—a desk, some chairs, some tables—a carpet, all noncommittal, gray and brown, well made but without any appreciable style. The commissaris had left the furniture where it had been put down but had built his own feeling around them. There was a profusion of plants on the windowsills now, and on the walls hung magnificent seventeenth-century portraits wangled from the stores of the Rijksmuseum, showing bright-eyed gentlemen dressed in velvet, with hooked noses and flam-boyant beards, men of past authority who had helped to form the city and contributed to its splendor of canals reflecting a few thousand ornamental but still simple gables. The faces on the portraits showed an unusual degree of intelligence and insight and a glint of humor, and it was difficult, at first glance, to relate the direct lineage that linked them to the commissaris, the mousy old man who now faced his three assistants. The commissaris’s shape could sink away into any crowd, and it would be possible to pass him several times in an hour without retaining the slightest recollection. And yet, by studying his face and the way he carried his sparse frame, much could be seen. The three detectives were seeing more of it now. They were also listening.
“A mess,” the commissaris had said. “This case is a mess, and I wish we could leave it alone. We could, easily. The lady had a little too much to drink, she was upset because of the gale, she slipped, she fell, she broke her neck. A report, that’s all we have to write. I could catch the whole event in half a page and everybody here would accept my version. What do you think?”
There were some mumbles that evolved into one audible word pronounced by Grijpstra: “No.”
“No?”
“No, sir.” Grijpstra’s bulky body filled the commissaris’s chair of honor, a heavy piece of furniture capped by wooden lions’ heads snarling on each side of his wide shoulders. Grijpstra felt fine. He had got up early and had been able to shave and have breakfast in peace, and he had found a clean suit and his favorite shirt, light blue with a detachable white collar, bought at half-price at the last sale of Amsterdam’s best clothing store.
“Why not?” the commissaris asked. “Do you think we have anything to go on? The clues point at a family fight culminating in manslaughter. We don’t have to presuppose ill will or planning. I am reasonably sure that we’ll come up with the reconstruction of a situation where tempers ran high because of irritation aggravated by the unusual weather. The lady was shoved and fell. There was no wish to kill. The case may sizzle out in court after a few hundred hours of work on our part, and we may have made some blunders on the way that may increase the suffering of some of our fellow beings we haven’t even met so far. You think we should go ahead?”
“Yes, sir.”
“De Gier?”
De Gier spread his long muscular hands. His large eyes gleamed; there seemed to be a slight movement in the up-swept ends of his mustache. “No, sir, you shouldn’t ask me. If you start the investigation I will work on it, with pleasure, I may say. There’s a puzzle. The girl was lying, I mink, and I would like to know the significance of the clues, of the whole situation. But perhaps mere is nothing mere; the gale gave a strange impact last night, everything was different. But I have no opinion about whether or not to take the case. Maybe you are right, maybe we’ll do more harm than good.”
“And maybe we shouldn’t concern ourselves with that,” Grijpstra said quietly. “We are the police, we are maintaining order, we have rules.”
“So if the rules lead to more disorder?” the commissaris asked, but he didn’t wait for Grijpstra’s reply. “Never mind. We’ll take the case. I am not asking you, Cardozo, I will ask you in a few years’ time. That doesn’t mean I don’t value your opinion but it has to be formed first.” He got up and walked over to the young detective, sitting straight up on a hard-backed chair. Cardozo got patted on his curly head and the commissaris retreated behind his glass-topped desk. “Right, so we proceed. This is the way I would want you to start out. We have the following persons involved: Elaine Carnet, dead, but she left her corpse mat has to be investigated. I want to know whether the wedding ring fits easily on her finger. Cardozo, you can go to the morgue when mis conference is over. Does anybody have the ring?”
Grijpstra pointed at a carton standing next to his chair. “In there, sir.”
“Good. I saw the fingerprint report. Surfaces have been wiped clean, in the expert’s opinion anyway. The statement wouldn’t hold in court—doorknobs are often in touch with garments and the result is a fingerprintless doorknob—but for us it is a clue. A suspect hiding tracks, or somebody else’s tracks. There is more information that is of interest. The doctor claims that Elaine Carnet had been drinking to the point of intoxication and that she was a habitual drinker but not quite an alcoholic. His report is documented properly and it will hold in court. So Elaine was drunk last night; her lack of self-control may have made her say something that invited an attack and got her pushed down the stairs. Who pushed her? The mysterious cigar smoker? We have Gabrielle Carnet, Elaine’s partner Mr. Bergen, and Elaine’s former lover the blond baboon, a man called Jan Vleuten, and that’s all so far, right?”
“Mr. de Bree, sir,” Cardozo said. “The suspected dog poisoner, the man I interviewed or tried to interview but he slammed the door in my face.”
“Good. We have him too, but he doesn’t want to see us. We need more material against him, preferably statements by witnesses who saw him feeding the dog. Maybe the witnesses can be found; the garden in which the poisoning took place can be seen by a fairly large number of people, the inhabitants of the houses next and opposite the Carnet house, opposite the rear of the Carnet house, that is. Something for you, Cardozo. Once you have been to the morgue you can do your rounds. If you produce some evidence, no matter how vague, we have a stronger case against your nasty Mr. de Bree and we can haul him in for questioning. So far he is out of reach although I could try to bluff him.”
“That leaves Gabrielle Carnet, Mr. Bergen, and this blond baboon, sir.”
“Yes, sergeant. We don’t know much about Gabrielle yet, in spite of my questioning last night. She’ll have to be seen again, maybe also by Cardozo, for he has met her twice now and mere should be some contact between them. I don’t think you should go, de Gier. You said you didn’t like her, is that right?”
De Gier nodded.
“Lack of sympathy doesn’t make questioning any easier, so Grijpstra can go. You and I can see Mr. Bergen and this blond baboon. It can all be done today. We may come up with other suspects, I hope not, however. There shouldn’t be too many suspects. Mrs. Carnet had a glass of wine with her killer and received him on the porch, not in her splendid living room. She knew the killer intimately and she gave me the impression of being a lonely woman, but the impression may be wrong. It
was
a strange night and the gale may have influenced our reasoning. Maybe Elaine Carnet had a lot of intimate friends and maybe all the friends hated her. Who knows, but we should find out today.”
The room was silent. A constable brought coffee and Cardozo served.
“Any questions?”
The safe, sir, and the portrait.”
The commissaris rubbed his hands. The safe and the portrait,” he said slowly. “Yes. Um. Um, um, urn. Very good of you, adjutant. You said that you and de Gier found a wall safe hidden by a painting while Cardozo and I were upstairs questioning Gabrielle. The safe contained a box, an old-fashioned cigar box, and the box had three hundred guilders
*
in it and some change. So perhaps it hadn’t been opened, for the money was there. But according to the fingerprint expert the safe’s handle had been wiped clean. You can ask Gabrielle about the safe when you see her today. Maybe she knows if her mother kept a lot of money in it. And then mere was the painting hung over the safe. We don’t have it here, do we?”
“No, sir.”
“A portrait of Elaine Carnet done when she was young. She was standing next to a piano and she was singing.”
“Yes, sir. The painting was signed ‘Wertheym.'”
The commissaris half-closed his eyes and breathed out sharply. “Well, what would that mean? Just a portrait done by a painter. But we might visit the painter. There may have been some relationship between him and Elaine and he may be able to tell us about her. Very likely not, but we won’t pass it up. Why don’t you visit this painter, adjutant, while Cardozo sniffs around the area of the Carnet house, and then you two can meet later to see Gabrielle. Will that do?”
“Certainly, sir.”
The commissaris looked at his watch. “Ten o’clock, we can finish our coffee in comfort and then all set out. Car-dozo?”
Cardozo shot forward on his chair, almost toppling off. His eagerness made de Gier smile and he pulled his mustache to mask his merriment.
“You are the only one who has something to work on. So far all our suspects are too smooth to grab. They have plenty of little hooks where we could fasten a string, but we don’t know where to look for them. But you have your Mr. de Bree, and we can be almost sure that he did try to kill that dog. We could hold on to him if you can produce some evidence, the slightest evidence will do. He is our only clear contact with the Carnet household: he knows both Elaine and Gabrielle, his garden borders on theirs, neighbors always know quite a lot about each other. It would be too much to expect that you can find witnesses to the actual death of Elaine—it must have happened late at night, when the gale was having its climax and it was raining heavily. But try anyway, take your time, visit everybody who lives in a house with a view of the Carnet garden.”
“Yes, sir.”
Grijpstra’s eyelids dropped as he looked away from Cardozo’s bright face. The young detective reminded him of a fellow pupil at school, a wiry little get-ahead, an eager-beaver pup mat would drool whenever he could catch a teacher’s attention. The pupil always got straight A’s. He was a general now, in charge of Dutch tank brigades, clumsily plowing down fences on German farms. Grijpstra was glad he wasn’t a general, but then, perhaps generals can get divorces easily. He stopped the thought. Whatever he tried to think about these days would always lead to divorce.
The commissaris stubbed out his cigar and the detectives got up but sat down again. The cigar hadn’t been the right signal. The commissaiis had left his desk and was wandering about the room, studying his plants.
He mumbled to himself, took an atomizer from a shelf, and sprayed a large fern that hung from the ceiling on a chain.
“Lovely, look at this new sprout, it’s all curled up like a bishop’s stave.” The detectives stood around the fern and made appropriate remarks. Only de Gier seemed really interested.
“You should have some ferns in your apartment, de Gier, they are both decorative and tranquilizing.”
“My cat will jump them and tear their leaves, sir.”
“Really? Tabriz? I thought she was a pleasant, sedate female. Well, just hang it high enough. It’ll rest your mind as you lie on your bed and it will give you good ideas. The mind really only functions well when it’s properly calmed.” He walked back to his desk and sat down. His small dried-out, almost yellow hands rested on the tabletop. He didn’t hear the detectives as they trooped out of the room.
“Sir?” de Gier asked from the door.
“Hmm? Yes. I’ll meet you in the courtyard in fifteen minutes, sergeant. We’ll visit Mr. Bergen first, the Carnet partner—find the address of Carnet and Company, please, they deal in furniture. I think I’ve seen their building, near the Pepperstraat somewhere.”
The sergeant closed the door slowly. He heard the last two words the commissaris said. “Messy. Yagh!”
*
A guilder is $0.40, or £0.25.
T
HE BUILDING IN THE
P
EPPERSTRAAT CONSISTED OF SIX
small, three-storied houses joined on die inside while still retaining their apparent individualities. Each house had its own ornamentation, very different from the others if observed carefully, but the overall effect created unity again. The commissaris stood in the narrow street while de Gier drove off again to find a parking place, and looked up to get a good view. He wondered why the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had given rise to so much perfect beauty and how the beauty could have got lost for so long. It was coming back now, there was hope again, but it had been gone for hundreds of years, drab years that had built other parts of the city, long cramped streets of soot-soaked grayness lining up houses that were an insult to humanity with their cramped quarters and stark, forbidding rooflines.