Outsider in Amsterdam (8 page)

“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 grey 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 the 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 there 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 ten. The ship is called
The Good Hope
. She belongs to my brother but he is on his way to India and 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.

Thérèse stared.

De Gier repeated his question.

Thérèse 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,” Thérèse 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 Thérèse.”

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 get 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 when she allowed her body to drop into his arms.

“Hey,” de Gier said and carefully put her back 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,” Thérèse 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 hanged 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 killed 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,” Thérèse 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,” Thérèse 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?”

Thérèse 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 Piet 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,” Thérèse 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?”

Thérèse 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.”