The Perfidious Parrot (2 page)

Grijpstra pushed the photograph away. “You mentioned Captain Souza. Captain of the ship?”

“He was there,” Carl Ambagt said. “Master Guzberto Souza, down in his cabin.” Ambagt’s smile was crooked. “Drunk out of his mind.”

“Not dead.”

“As if.” Carl Ambagt nodded. “Between balls and fucking.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Jenever. Our famous national brands. Dutch gin.” Carl spelled the brand names.
“Bols. Focking.”
Ambagt shook his head. “That’s what fueled our captain. Kept him going while
watching porno. That was his other thing, T&A on video. The never-ending show.”

“The captain informed you of the crime committed?”

“Captain Souza never noticed.”

“Not even the shooting?”

“Delirious,” Carl Ambagt said. “So what do you expect? A black man from Aruba. Dad hired Souza. I did say ‘Daaaaad, what are you doing, Daaaaad? Right?’ But it was too late. Dad and Guz, drinking themselves silly.” Carl checked his manicured nails. “Try and get between
that
situation.”

“This took place in St. Maarten?”

“Aruba.” Carl pointed at an imaginary map. “More to the left and down below, west, off Venezuela. But Dutch, of course. Amazing. Why do we hold on to those money-losing islands?”

Grijpstra pushed the Polaroid back. He wondered why he was encouraging his visitation by asking questions. Had he forgotten that Detection G&G was a
fata morgana
? A mere front? That the nameplate on the gable meant nothing? Sure, something: a hoax. Put up to fool the tax inspector. Behold this beautiful gable, Mr. Tax Man. Note the varnished front door, the polished bricks, the recently repainted woodwork, the blossoming geraniums in the window planters—will you just look at the stone steps, worn smooth by clients’ trampling feet. Yes, sir, we work here and earn good money, our wealth has a legitimate source. Okay, Mr. Tax Man? Now keep going, old fart.

However, no work was done behind this splendid gable at one of Amsterdam’s show canals, Straight Tree Ditch.

How the hell could all this have happened? Grijpstra screamed when the ghostly hand of his conscience grabbed him
during nightmares. How could he, a stolid public servant, and that faithful cooperator, de Gier, have stumbled into this demonic trap together?

It had happened. Three years ago. There, one bad day, Adjutant Grijpstra and Sergeant de Gier, of the municipal police, were doing their job in a ramshackle hovel in Blood Alley, Inner City, Amsterdam. De Gier forced a door. Rats scrambled about their feet. They entered a small room filled with empty bottles and porno posters. There was the sweetish foul smell of rotting food. The kitchen was an open dump. In the basement de Gier kicked his way through more refuse. An amateurishly built brick wall aroused suspicion. De Gier pushed it over with his foot. Behind the wall, in plastic bags, a treasure in small banknotes had served as rats’ nests. They counted the treasure. There was just over a million in undamaged notes.

So what does one do, being—as the police manual has it—“engaged in the correct exercise of your public service”? You hand in the loot, straight into the hands of your own superiors, at Headquarters, Moose Canal. Decent and admirable folks, all ladies and gents, in uniform, gold- and silver-braided. The superiors address you in well modulated tones. “Good job, Adjutant. That’s right, put it down there, Sergeant. All this goes straight to the Country’s Coffers. No, that’s all right, that will be a little job
we
would like to perform. On your behalf, colleagues. And thanks again, indeed. Enjoy the rest of your public service today, Adjutant, Sergeant.”

Then what do you notice? That superiors are inferior. That the authorities, so far respected by your dumb selves, are taking holidays in the Pacific, Fiji, the Marquesas, out-of-the-way places, out of an ordinary citizen’s reach. New cars appear in
POLICE PARKING ONLY
spots. There is revelry around the pleasure area of Leyden Square, Amsterdam. There are intimate meetings in the royal suites of the Amstel and l’Europe Hotels. Champagne pops and slurred voices make fun of the abysmal, abominable adjutant and his silly, stupid sergeant.

Haha! Hoho!

So to whom do you complain?

Your own chief has rheumatic troubles that keep him in his hot tub—he is about to retire anyway. The Chief Constable is in serious therapy, the Minister of Justice has been issued a golden parachute while preparing himself to walk the plank.

However, luck is with the lucky (Grijpstra grinned sadly). It turns out, that in the same ramshackle hovel in the same Blood Alley, by the same adjutant and detective-sergeant, another treasure is found. The second treasure is a multiple of the first. This time high denomination notes—hundreds, thousands—are stacked neatly in closed metal containers.

The detectives hesitantly open more lids. Could this be true? Swedish five thousand crown banknotes? American hundred dollar bills in ribbon-tied packages of one hundred? Even a few bars of gold?

“Oh dear.” De Gier had wanted to bandy about the most horrifying curses. The words, none of them able to represent the seriousness of the situation, had stuck in his throat.

Grijpstra mumbled, “Dear me.”

Nobody was informed of the reason for these exclamations. Well, sure, the commissaris heard, he would have found out anyway—why try to be clever?

“We’re going to keep the money, sir,” Grijpstra said.

“We will also resign,” de Gier said. The commissaris said he
was happy that they could make such a weighty decision themselves and that he would like to help invest the loot. “Grab some of the cash for your immediate necessities and bring me the rest. I’m good with numbers.”

The commissaris, in his old model Citroën, drove the money to the independent duchy of Luxembourg and opened an investment account in the name Grijpstra and/or de Gier with permission to sign on behalf of these beneficiaries—any transaction, any amount. The bank director thought the arrangement was unusual but, hey, who was he to refuse a sizable deposit?

It was all a matter of trust, of course.

The predictable hardly ever happens but the unexpected, invariably, does. For de Gier that truth emerged from a stale fortune cookie. Grijpstra heard it from a brown skinned man with magnetic eyes and a white goatee. “It always turns out different,” the street guru told him.

It did. Instead of graying gently while working hard to serve the community, Grijpstra—suddenly unemployed and wealthy—aged quickly while suffering anxiety attacks. Ulcers gnawed. Gums rotted. Veins varicosed. He regained his health after marrying his free-sex friend, Nellie. Nellie said she had known all along that this marriage would happen. “Whores,” Nellie said, “don’t have to bullshit, so we’re close to Truth.”

Grijpstra emptied out his rented apartment at the Leather-makers Canal and moved in with Nellie at Straight Tree Ditch.

Nellie owned her building outright. It contained a small bar, the ONE ON ONE, in the basement. “Hotel Nellie” occupied all of the four stories and there was a messy loft on top.

The unpredicted change closed the basement, moved Detection
G&G Inc. into the first two floors, made luxurious living quarters for Mr. & Mrs. Grijpstra on the next two floors and had de Gier—back from New Guinea and a sojourn in Maine in the USA—strip and refurbish the loft as an indoor garden cum camping ground.

“Things change,” the commissaris said at the housewarming party that he and his wife, Katrien, attended. “Fortune cookies and street gurus speak the truth.” He also quoted an obscure Dutch medieval poet who had versified on the theme that things are not what they appear to be. “Nothing but change is constant.”

Apart from the treasure-finders themselves, only the commissaris knew where all the money came from. Three Surinam-based drug dealers knew too, but they were found dead in Paramaribo, their hometown on the South American coast.

“But Henkieluvvie,” Nellie said. “Where did you get it?”

Grijpstra claimed that her building’s expensive restoration had been paid for from his savings plus a bank loan to be repaid from the future income of Detection G&G Inc. “Everything just dandy and hup ho,” Grijpstra said. De Gier confirmed that statement. The commissaris nodded affirmation. Nothing to worry about. Nellie was not to worry her beautiful blonde head.

“Sure,” Nellie said, preferring the present lucrative arrangement to giggling with and being bruised by paying and often out-of-control clients. Pacific Rim business gents, she had been specializing lately. Her selection paid better, but often played rough.

No more being a long-legged playpen dolly, Nellie thought.

No more following patrol car-radio orders when you are
ready for a smoked eel sandwich and whipped-cream coffee, Grijpstra thought.

No more administering, correcting and enforcing, de Gier thought.

“Released from the straightjacket,” the commissaris said. He used his grandfather’s smile. “And how are you going to get through the days, Henk and Rinus? No more ‘sir’ing me. I am Jan.”

“Doing nothing, sir,” Grijpstra said, citing his laziness.

De Gier agreed, citing his philosophical search for meaning that would require meditation. He even explained: “To see where I get to when I care nothing about nothing.”

The commissaris deemed the plan to be good but advised his former assistants to find some occupation. His wife agreed. “Emptiness filled with wealth creates camel-sized vermin,” Katrien said, quoting an ancient Dutch proverb. She claimed to know what she was talking about. Having inherited money that her husband helped her invest, Katrien—weighed down by wealth she had no use for—had needed therapy. “Stay busy,” Katrien said. “Do something you like doing.”

“If you can’t make it, fake it,” the commissaris said. “Start a business, hang out a shingle.”

Thus the birth of Detection G&G Inc.

Some jobs turned up. There was an insurance investigation, referred by a former police colleague, the recently promoted Simon Cardozo. There was a missing girl tourist to be located. Also a pension for the widow of a hashish dealer to be arranged with the dealers’s association. Three cases in one year. Minimal income, maximal spare time. Grijpstra painted dead ducks; de Gier carefully pried attractive looking weeds from between the
inner city’s cobblestones and grew them in artful planters he created from plywood found floating in canals. He arranged his wildflower and herbal garden in Nellie’s loft. He looked up the weeds in a picture book he found at an Old Man’s Gate stall. He lay about in a hammock amidst his plantation of bladder-wort, crimson clover and marsh bellflower, thought about clever Zen sayings and read Nietzsche in German.

“What are you
doing
?” Grijpstra asked at times, when, fleeing Nellie’s TV, he found de Gier staring at the floor, from above twisted legs, or bent over books.

De Gier liked to answer with oriental silence or Nietzsche-quotes in German.

“What do your exercises or books deal with?” Grijpstra asked once. “With nothing, okay? With the nothing that the Lord created things from and that still shines through.”

“I don’t really get it,” de Gier admitted.

They also liked to make music together, in a jazz cellar at the Endless Prayer Alley, Grijpstra on drums, de Gier behind his mini-trumpet. Leisurely. “Leisure” was the key. Cool. Relaxed.

We won’t be busy
.

The one who agreed to join de Gier “in doing by not doing,” after finding the second Blood Alley treasure, was Free Grijpstra. There were, however, other Grijpstras.

Busy Grijpstra, run to earth by oil-tanker-charterer Carl Ambagt, noted Free Grijpstra’s objection to Carl’s proposal. There was a conflict there. Continue daily relaxation or dip into some exciting action maybe?

Piracy near the Netherlands Antilles? Busy Grijpstra liked that.

Free Grijpstra was fading. Busy Grijpstra took over. Busy Grijpstra regressed to a modus operandi learned during some
twenty years of daily police work. Busy Grijpstra noted that the client, albeit unsympathetic, appeared to be energetic and intelligent. Carl, although short, had wide shoulders and, inside the blazer’s sleeves, bulging muscles. Sporting type? A gymnast? Weightlifting maybe. Ambagt’s flannel trousers had been neatly pressed. His shirt was made to measure, out of bleached linen. Its collar, in keeping with the current fashion, was buttoned down. The silk necktie, printed or maybe handpainted with—Grijpstra put on his glasses—the image of a nude woman, glowed under a massive golden pin shaped like an erect penis. Unsympathetic, intelligent, energetic, short, flashy fellow in his early forties.

While showing the complainant in, Grijpstra had noted Ambagt’s pigskin half boots, and while shaking hands he’d noticed a platinum bangle and a watch decorated with jewels. Rich little fellow. Powerful little fellow.

Complainant was still being emotional. “Poor sailor Michiel, riddled with bullets.” Ambagt wrung his small childlike hands. “That’s what you get when assholes use arms.” Ambagt’s gold fillings sparkled. He spoke easily, forgot to use his Rotterdam accent, added fewer question marks, toned down his arrogance.

“Action movie. There’s something for you, Mr. Detective. Last time we talked to Captain Souza he gave the tanker’s position as just south of Saba. After that we lost contact. Got us all worried, started up the old chopper-top, flew off, nosed about everywhere. Me and Dad in the chopper. Went back twice to refuel. Helicopters don’t fly far you know. Looked about for hours we did, checked out all the islands, starting at St. Maarten, all the way down to Barbuda, then Antigua; we counted off the French, the British, the Dutch Antilles, choppered
back north again, right up to Anguilla. At last, there she was, the old hulk. Drifted away from Saba, got herself tucked between Nevis and St. Kitts. You have to be careful there, lots of reefs and rocks and what have you. Had to put down the chopper on that little rear deck. You should have seen me and Dad, sliding about on the
Sibylle
. A real situation. Had to get that huge unwieldy tanker away from the reefs; steering all that bulk isn’t easy you know, even if I do have captain’s papers. There was a stretch where we didn’t have half a fathom under her keel. Fortunately the old cow was empty. High as a church tower and last time we’d seen her she was up to her chin in water. So where, for fuck’s sake, was her cargo?” Ambagt dried off his forehead with a silk handkerchief that he had unfolded angrily. “Nothing moved on board except two cats racing about like crazy. We heard them yowl as soon as we switched off the chopper’s engine.”