The Perfidious Parrot

FICTION

The Grijpstra-de Gier series:

Outsider in Amsterdam

Tumbleweed
The Corpse on the Dike
Death of a Hawker
The Japanese Corpse
The Blond Baboon
The Maine Massacre
The Mind-Murders
The Streetbird
The Rattle-Rat
Hard Rain
Just a Corpse at Twilight
The Hollow-Eyed Angel

OTHER
Inspector Saito’s Small Satori
The Butterfly Hunter
Bliss and Bluster
Murder by Remote Control
Seesaw Millions
NONFICTION
The Empty Mirror
A Glimpse of Nothingness
Robert van Gulik: His Life, His Work

CHILDREN
’
S BOOKS
Hugh Pine
Huge Pine and the Good Place
Huge Pine and Something Else
Little Owl

This tale is based on imagination. We all know that the Military only misbehaves while under orders. Helicopters most likely thrive on salt air. Rotterdam, Holland (I was born there) is beautiful and filled with pleasant people. How could the Amsterdam Police (I served with them for seven years) possibly be corrupt?

“You want stiffs?” Carl Ambagt asked in a singsong voice while he shot linen cuffs from beneath the sleeves of his cashmere blazer. “Listen, Mr. Detective, if you need corpses before you can get going, Dad and I will give you corpses. No problem.” The visitor gestured magnanimously, as if giving away precious objects. “No charge, free, they’re all yours. Stiffs galore.”

Private detective Henk Grijpstra didn’t care for visitors. He looked over the head of this one who kept talking in a high penetrating voice. The open window offered a view of budding elm leaves and bright red gables on the other side of Amsterdam’s Straight Tree Ditch. He prayed. He wanted an elm branch to enter the window, grab the visitor and
Whop
, into the canal. After that, nothing but ducks quacking. Life goes on.

A fellow forty years old. A short fellow. Grijpstra didn’t care for short forty-year-old fellows, and this one was arrogant, with
the musical Rotterdam way of talking, each sentence ending on a lilting tone. “Right?” The endless Rotterdam question.

Beat the short forty-year-old fellow to death.

Visitor, visitation.

It irritated Grijpstra that he still thought in religious terms. Whatever you learn while young can be practiced throughout life, says the Dutch proverb. Learn young, be stuck forever, Grijpstra thought.

If there were a Lord would He grant a Grijpstra prayer?

Fuck
this fellow, Grijpstra prayed. Lord?

Grijpstra constrained his wishful thinking. He was from Amsterdam, the capital, the spiritual heart of Holland, the center, the creative core of the Netherlands.

Rotterdam, Holland’s second city, is considered—by Amsterdam—to be a working town. But that’s all right. Rotterdam is tolerated by Amsterdam, providing the upstart town keeps its distance. Some people work, that’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with work, if someone needs to do it, that’s perfectly fine—good luck to the working folks of Rotterdam. But let them stay home, not bother their betters with useless and repetitive information that lilts at the end.

“Right?”

Grijpstra’s hands, invisible behind a stack of empty folders on his desk top, groped about for something to hold on to. The antique desk was a present from Grijpstra’s former chief. The commissaris had used the desk as a fortress from whence he defended his privacy. Since his retirement, at age sixty-five, the commissaris’s defenses had been leveled. Detective-Adjutant Grijpstra retired too, ahead of time in his case. Sergeant-Detective de Gier quit as well, to help Grijpstra do nothing,
well, at least do very little. The partners of
Detection G&G Incorporated
preferred peace and quiet in their spacious offices.

“Several corpses, Mr. Ambagt?” Grijpstra asked,
sotto voce
.

“Ah well, just one I’m really sure of,” Ambagt said contritely—but arrogantly again, Grijpstra thought, as if the little asshole was proud of his assholery, jeez.

Ambagt was sitting comfortably, in the luxurious brown leather easy chair reserved for clients. This client did not seem impressed by the vast room under its high ceiling, supported by ancient hand-hewn beams. Even Grijpstra himself did not impress this intruder from the lower spheres and the detective
was
impressive: big, burly, wide in the chest, with steel gray brushed-up hair, bouncy thick eyebrows, a wrestler dressed up for the occasion. There Mr. Grijpstra presented himself to an annoying world, in a three-piece tailored suit, complete with watch chain. The silver tie, with a design of small turtles, a present from Katrien, the commissaris’s wife, upon the start of his new career, accentuated solid elegance. The superior clothes enhanced the intelligence of faded blue eyes in what Nellie, Grijpstra’s new wife, liked to call a “rugged countenance.”

“Not counting the missing persons,” Carl Ambagt semi-shouted, happy to add to the misery. “All we found was a befuddled Captain Souza, and a dead sailor, Michiel. Otherwise not a single soul.” Ambagt dropped his voice, to indicate tragedy. “Me and Dad were just in time, the tanker was about to land herself on rocks. Right?”

“Right on rocks, not right on rocks?” Grijpstra asked, bewildered by the Rotterdam way of questioning reality. “Yes or no?”

“No. Right?”

“And the missing persons?” Grijpstra asked.

“Let me explain, right?” Carl Ambagt asked.

Carl Ambagt handled an imaginary machine pistol and imitated spraying deadly bullets.

“This tanker of yours …” Grijpstra said.

“… the supertanker
Sibylle
was robbed of its contents. The cargo was pirated,” Ambagt said. “Do you have any idea how much money we are talking about?”

Grijpstra looked detached. His visitor didn’t have to know that the image of a crewless gigantic tanker, illegally drained of a valuable cargo, fascinated Grijpstra. In his long career with the department of Serious Crime of the Amsterdam Municipal Police such an immense felony had never come his way. He envisioned the steel vessel, a quiet ghost ship towering above tropical seas. Ambagt had told him the location: the Caribbean. The event had taken place close to the semi-Dutch isle of St. Maarten (its north half is French). Grijpstra didn’t know any tropical islands personally but he now saw pictures, a collage of impressions taken from TV and magazine advertising: golden beaches, waving palm fronds, and several swimming, sunning, ball-playing young women. He was there too, hands behind his back, his contemplative eyes shaded by the wide brim of a straw hat. “Panama Jack” Grijpstra. Grunting pleasurably, the day-dreamer observes brown and black breasts, legs and buttocks. How about his new wife, Nellie—wouldn’t she be jealous? Not at all, Nellie has just joined the picture. There she is on a surfboard, subtly pink all over. What a winner, this ex-model Nellie, nominated once to become Miss Holland, chosen Number Two because of too ample breasts. The other beach
ladies, however, are attractive too, performing seductively on the golden sand, almost struck by the pirated supertanker
Sibylle
. A charming multicolored collection. Strange, really, Grijpstra thought, once you start traveling, racism doesn’t work too well. Out there the minority is a majority. Object becomes subject. Relativity wipes out the racist view. Good thing he didn’t consider himself to be racist. Didn’t know what the attitude meant really.

“The chartered supertanker
Sibylle
,” the short fellow said. “Never invest in those suckers, they leak. Giant rustbuckets, that’s all they are. But we do use our own crews. You may be thinking
accident
now, right? Wrong. The sailor, Michiel, was riddled by bullets.”

“You don’t say.” Grijpstra’s voice stayed flat, touched by just a little compassionate vibration. A bleeding corpse, missing mates. This client talked trouble.

“Quite a bit of wind,” Ambagt was saying, “we had a problem with our spinning top. A heaving deck doesn’t make for easy landings.”

“Spinning top?”

“Helicopter,” Carl said.

“The alleged piracy of a supertanker, involving murder, close to St. Maarten, in the Antilles, in the Caribbean Sea,” Grijpstra summed up. “You landed your helicopter on the vessel and noted evidence of foul play.”

Carl Ambagt stared beyond Grijpstra’s bulk. “Ah yes.”

Grijpstra noted signs of what could be true emotion while his visitor relived painful moments.

“On the bridge,” Carl Ambagt said, “was Michiel’s body. All innocent-like. Nice looking young chap too.” Carl Ambagt
took a Polaroid from his wallet. He studied the picture. “Michiel, the sailor, in his blue banded T-shirt. Named for our famous buccaneer admiral, Michiel de Ruyter. Remember him from the history books? Seventeenth century. Beat the bloody British time and again. Burned a British war fleet right at home, on the Thames. A great strategist. Dad has studied him, you know. Dad likes strategy—it’s made us rich and famous.”

“I have never heard of you,” Grijpstra said.

“You have now,” Ambagt said. “Here. Look at Michiel’s body.”

“What are all these holes?” Grijpstra shuddered. “Was your sailor tortured?”

“Gulls,” Carl Ambagt whispered. “You know that seagulls like carrion? They pick at dead bodies. We saw it from the sky, me and Dad—red shreds of Michiel’s flesh, within an oval of white gulls. Like an eye. Red pupil, white oval. Pecking seagulls. The whole thing was like an eye that stared at us. The eye of the raped
Sibylle
.”