Death of a Hawker (2 page)

"Police," Grijpstra boomed.

The motorcycle veered and charged the mob which had begun to form again behind the detectives.

Grijpstra fell. Two boys, in their late teens, had heard him shout "Police" and they both attacked at the same time, kicking the adjutant's shins. De Gier was quick, but not quick enough. He hit the nearest boy on the side of the chin and the boy sighed and crumpled up. The other boy had been hit with the same movement, not by de Gier's fist but by his elbow. The elbow's sharp point hit the boy on the side of his face and he howled with pain and ran off.

"All right?" de Gier asked, helping Grijpstra back to his feet.

They ran on but an armored van was in their way now and a spout of water hit them from behind. De Gier fell. Now the water gun changed its position, and was aiming at Grijpstra's large bulk when the gunner saw the red stripes on the police card which the adjutant waved.

"Go away," a police officer shouted at the detectives. "What the hell do you think you are doing here? We don't want any plainclothesmen around."

"Sorry, sir," Grijpstra said. "We have a call from the Straight Tree Ditch; this is the only way to get there."

"Let them wait," the inspector roared, his young face pale with fear.

"Can't. Manslaughter."

"All right, all right. I'll give you an escort although I can't spare anyone. Hey! You and you. Take these men through. They are ours."

Two burly military policemen answered the command, both with torn braid dangling from their shoulders.

"Shit," the nearest of the two said. "We have had everything today short of gunfire and we'll have that too if this goes on much longer."

"Nobody went for his gun so far?" Grijpstra asked.

"One of your young chappies did," the military policeman said, "but we quieted him down. His mate had caught a brick in the face. Upset him a bit. Had to take the gun away from him in the end; said he would shoot the fellow who got his mate."

Grijpstra meant to say something positive but a bag of soapstone powder hit them and he couldn't see for a while.

"Messy, hey?" the military policeman said. "They must have tons of that damned powder. We caught a man on the roof using a heavy catapult; he was our first prisoner. I'd like to see the charge report we'll come up with. It will be crossbows next and mechanical stone throwers. Have you seen their armored trucks?"

"No," de Gier said. "Where?"

"We got them early fortunately, two of them. There's nothing you can do when they come at you. Friend of mine jumped straight into the canal to get away. The crowd was very amused."

"Did you catch the driver?"

"Sure. Pulled him out of the cabin myself, had to smash the window for he had locked himself in. That's one report I am going to write myself. He'll get three months."

"Nice day," Grijpstra said. "Let's go. We have a lady waiting for us."

They got to the lady ten minutes later. They only got into one more fight. Grijpstra was bitten in the hand. De Gier pulled the woman off by the hair. The military policemen arrested the woman. Her artificial teeth fell out as they threw her into a van. They picked up the teeth and threw them in after her.

But our detectives were in no mood to appreciate beauty. Grijpstra's shins hurt him and the wound on his hand was ugly. His short bristly hair was white with soapstone powder and his jacket had been torn by an assailant whom he had never noticed. De Gier limped next to him and snarled at a policeman who told them to be off. There were no civilians about, for the canal offered no room for mobs, but the police had sealed its entrance to prevent access to the Newmarket Square. Red and white wooden fences had been hastily installed and riot police guarded the roadblocks, staring at the curious, who, silently, stood and stared back. There was nothing to see, the fighting in the square being screened by high gable houses. The atmosphere of the canal was heavy, loaded with violence and suspicion, and the policemen, forced into idleness, hit their high leather boots with their truncheons, splitting the silence. Far away the revving engines of motorcycles and trucks could be heard, and the whining of the water cannon, and the subdued yells of the combatants, eerily setting off the clamor of machines. Demolition was still continuing, for the houses had to come down, the sooner the better, and the cranes, bulldozers and automatic steel hammers and drills were adding their racket to the general upheaval.

"We are police, buddy," de Gier said to the cop, and showed his card, which had got cracked when he fell.

"Sorry, sergeant," the constable said, "we trust nobody today. How is it going out there?"

"We are winning," Grijpstra said.

"We always win," the constable said. "It's boring, I'd rather watch football."

"Number four," de Gier said. "Here we are."

The constable wandered off, hitting the canal's castiron railing with his stick, and Grijpstra looked up at the four-storied house, which was number four according to a neatly painted sign next to the front door. "Rogge," said another sign.

"Took us three quarters of an hour to get here," de Gier said. "Marvelous service we are giving nowadays, and there's supposed to be a dead man with a bloody face in there."

"Maybe not," Grijpstra said. "People exaggerate, you know. Adjutant Geurts was telling me that he was called to investigate a suicide last night and when he got to the address the old lady was eating nice fresh toast with a raw herring spread on top of it, and there were chopped onions on top of the herring. She had changed her mind. Life wasn't so bad after all."

"A man with a bloody head can't change his mind," de Gier said.

Grijpstra nodded. "True. And he won't be a suicide."

He rang the bell. There was no answer. He rang again. The door opened. The corridor was dark and they couldn't see the woman until the door had closed behind them.

"Upstairs," the woman said. "I'll go first."

They turned into another corridor on the second floor and the woman opened a door leading to a room facing the canal. The man was lying on his back on the floor, his face smashed.

"Dead," the woman said. "He was my brother, Abe Rogge."

Grijpstra pushed the woman gently aside and stopped to look at the dead man's face. "You know what happened?" he asked. The woman covered her face with her hands. Grijpstra put his arm around her shoulders. "Do you know anything, miss?"

"No, no. I came in and there he was."

Grijpstra looked at de Gier and pointed at a telephone with his free hand. De Gier dialed. Grijpstra pulled his arm back from the woman's shoulders and took the telephone from de Gier's limp hand.

"Take her outside," he whispered, "and don't look at the body. You two have some coffee, I saw a kitchen downstairs; I'll see you there later."

De Gier was white in the face when he led the woman outside. He had to support himself against the doorpost. Grijpstra smiled. He had seen it before. The sergeant was allergic to blood, but he would be all right soon.

"The man's head is bashed in," he said on the phone. "Do what you have to do and get us the commissaris."

"You are in the riot area, aren't you?" the central radio room asked. "We'll never get the cars through."

"Get a launch from the State Water Police," Grijpstra said. "That's what
we
should have had. Don't forget to get the commissaris. He is at home."

He replaced the phone and put his hands into his pockets. The windows of the room were open and the elm trees outside screened the pale blue sky. He looked at their leaves for a while, resting his eyes on their delicate young green and admiring a blackbird which, unperturbed by the weird atmosphere of his surroundings, had burst into song. A sparrow hopped about on the windowsiil and looked at the corpse, its tiny head cocked to one side. Grijpstra walked over to the window. The blackbird and the sparrow flew off but gulls continued swooping down toward the canal's surface, looking for scraps and dead fish. It was the beginning of a spring evening which the occupant of the room would have no part of.

How? Grijpstra thought. The man's face was a mess of broken bones and thick bright red blood. A big man, some thirty years old perhaps. The body was dressed in jeans and a blue bush jacket. There was a thick golden necklace around the muscular neck and its skin was tanned. He has been on holiday, Grijpstra thought, just returned probably. Spain. North Africa perhaps, or an island somewhere. Must have been in the sun for weeks. Nobody gets a tan from the Dutch spring.

He noted the short yellow curls, bleached by exposure, and the beard of exactly the same texture. The hair fitted the man's head like a helmet. Strong fellow, Grijpstra thought, could lift a horse off the ground. Heavy wrists, bulging arms.

He squatted down, looked at the man's face again and then began to look around the room. Not seeing what he was looking for, he began to walk around, carefully, his hands still in his pockets. But the brick or stone wasn't there. It had seemed such a simple straightforward solution. Man looks out of the window. Riot outside. Someone flings a brick. Brick hits man in the face. Man falls over backward. Brick falls in the room. But there was no brick. He walked to the window and looked down into the street. He still couldn't see a brick. The helmeted policeman who had stopped them earlier was leaning against a tree staring at the water.

"Hey, you," Grijpstra shouted. The policeman looked up. "Has there been any stone throwing here this afternoon?" "No," the constable shouted back. "Why?"

"Chap here has his face smashed in, could have been a stone."

The constable scratched his neck. Til go and ask the others," he shouted after a while. "I haven't been here all afternoon."

The stone may have bounced off this man's face here and fallen back into the street. Get some of your friends, please, and search the street, will you?"

The constable waved and ran off. Grijpstra turned around. It could have been a weapon, of course, or perhaps even a fist. Several blows perhaps. No knife. A hammer? A hammer perhaps, Grijpstra thought, and sat down on the only chair he saw, a large cane chair with a high back. He had seen a similar chair in a shop window some days before and he remembered the price. A high price. The table in the room was expensive as well, antique and heavily built with a single ornamental leg. There was a book on the table, a French book. Grijpstra read the title.
Zazie dans le
Metro.
It had a picture of a little girl on the cover. Some little girl having an adventure on the underground. Grijpstra didn't read French. There wasn't much more to see in the room. A low table with a telephone, a telephone directory and some more French books in a heap on the floor. The walls of the room had been left bare, with the exception of one fairly large unframed painting. He studied the painting with interest. It took him a while to name what he saw. The picture seemed to consist of no more than a large black dot, or a constellation of dots against a background of blues, but it had to be a boat, he decided in the end. A small boat, a canoe or a dinghy, afloat on a fluorescent sea. And there were two men in the boat. The painting wasn't as sad as it seemed at first glance. The fluorescence of the sea, indicated by stripes of white along the boat, and continuing into its wake, suggested some gaiety. The painting impressed him and he kept on looking back at it. Other objects in the room held his attention for a moment but the painting drew him back. If the corpse hadn't been there, dominating the space by its awkward and grotesque presence, the room would have been a perfect setting for the painting. Grijpstra himself had some talent and he meant to paint seriously one day. He had painted as a young man, but marriage and the family which suddenly began to spread around him, and the small uncomfortable house on the Lijnbaansgracht opposite Police Headquarters, drowned in the holocaust of a TV which his deaf wife would never switch off, and the fat ever-present existence of the flabby woman who shouted at him and the children had frustrated and almost killed his ambition. How would he paint a small boat, afloat on its own on an immense sea? He would use more color, Grijpstra thought, but more color would spoil the dream. For the picture was a dream, a dream dreamed simultaneously by two friends, two men suspended in space, drawn as two small interlinked line structures.

He stretched his legs, leaned back and breathed heavily. This would be a room he could live in. Life would become a pleasure, for a hard day would never be a hard day if he knew he could return to this room. And the dead man had lived in this room. He sighed again; the sigh tapered off into a low groan. He looked at the low bed close to the window. There were three sleeping bags on the bed, one zipped and two unzipped. The man would have slept in the one bag and have used the other two for cover in case he needed it. Very sensible. No fuss with sheets. If a man wants sheets he needs a woman. The woman has to make the bed and change the sheets and take care of the other hundred thousand things a man thinks he needs.

Grijpstra would like to sleep on a stretcher and cover himself with an unzipped sleeping bag. In the morning he gets up and leaves the bed as it is. No vacuum cleaner. Sweep the room once a week. No TV. No newspapers. Just a few books maybe and a few records, not too many. Don't buy anything. Whatever you attract clutters up your life. He might invite a woman to the room, of course, but only if he could be absolutely sure that she would leave again, and would never stick plastic pins into her hair and sleep with them on. He felt his face. There was a scratch which had got there before he had fought his way through the riot. Mrs. Grijpstra had ripped his face with one of her pins; she had turned over and he had screamed with pain but she hadn't awakened. His scream had stopped her snore halfway and she had smacked her lips a few times and finished the snore. And when he had shaken her by the shoulder she had opened one bleary eye and told him to shut up. And no children. There are enough children in Holland.

"Why the hell..." he said aloud now but he didn't bother to finish the question. He had slipped into the mess so gradually that he had never been able to stop and twist free. The girl had looked all right when he stumbled across her path, and her parents too, and he was making a bit of a career in the police, and it was all dead right. His oldest son had gradually grown into a lout, with long dirty straight hair and buck teeth and a shiny screaming motorcycle. The two little ones were still very nice. He loved them. No doubt about it. He wouldn't leave them. So he couldn't have a room like this. All very logical. He looked at the corpse again. Had someone come in and hit the giant with a hammer, smack in the face? And had the giant stood there, seeing the hammer come and catching its impact full on the nose, without even trying to defend himself? Drunk perhaps? He got up and went over to the window. Three constables were poking at the cobblestones with their long truncheons.

"Anything there?"

They looked up. "Nothing."

"Did you find out about the stone throwing?"

"Yes," the constable who had been there earlier shouted back. "It has been quiet here all day. We were only here to stop people getting to the trouble spot."

"Have you let anyone through?"

The constables looked at each other, then the first one looked up at Grijpstra again.

"Plenty. Anybody who had business here."

"A man has been killed here," Grijpstra shouted.

"Have you noticed anyone running about? Behaving in a funny way?"

The constables shook their heads.

"Thanks," Grijpstra shouted and pulled his head in. He sat down again and closed his eyes, meaning to feel the atmosphere of the room but gradually drifting off into sleep. The sound of a ship's engine woke him. He looked out and saw a low launch of the Water Police moor outside. Some six men got off, the commissaris, a small dapper-looking elderly man first. Grijpstra waved and the men marched up to the door.