The Perfidious Parrot (30 page)

Skipper Peter spent the morning handling telephones, faxing handwritten notes and working his E-mail keyboard. He bought Fokker Aircraft shares with savings and on margin. He bought at going prices. The share price was dropping and his brokers urged caution but he shouted them down. “Buy buy buy, you hear me?”

Buy, buy, buy, it was. Brokers like commissions.

So he was losing some money, Fokker Aircraft would soon pick up again. “Right?”

“Right,” the commissaris said, smoking his very last cigar on the poop deck. “Right you are, dear Peter.”

Hot tip, Fokker Aircraft. The Koreans were just waiting to take the ailing company over. Shares were down to eight guilders, but about to double, and double again. How much had Skipper Peter invested? Two hundred mill? Double that once and he had already overshot his target.

*   *   *

Grijpstra shook his head when, one lazy morning at home in Amsterdam, in bed, not two weeks later, Nellie gave him the paper. There she was, front page, color, the
Admiraal Rodney
seized by creditors, being chained to a mooring in St. Maarten’s port.

That evening de Gier and Sayukta were invited to dinner at the commissaris’s home. De Gier refused second servings of Javanese rice with shrimp crackers on the side. “Your favorite dish,” Katrien said indignantly. “Are you ill?”

“Rinus groans all night,” Sayukta complained. “I can’t stand it. I thought I had found my true hero and he keeps breaking out in a sweat and trembling.” Her wide eyes became wider. “Sometimes he cries.”

“He hasn’t heard the good news yet,” the commissaris whispered to his wife, winking. “He doesn’t know it’s all over. For Grijpstra too. Grijpstra doesn’t know either.”

The commissaris, in his weathered cane chair, between the weeds in his rear garden, about to light up his very last afterdinner cigar, asked de Gier how he felt now that the Ambagts no longer carried their burden.

“Nothing changed for me,” de Gier said sadly. “Those growing numbers in Luxembourg, they’re in my dreams.”

“No more,” the commissaris said. “They’re back to zero, dear.”

De Gier didn’t get that.

“Your loot is gone,” the commissaris said helpfully. “And the account is closed. You recall that you and Grijpstra gave me a power of attorney?”

De Gier laughed.

“Are you all right?” Katrien asked indignantly.

De Gier was about to leap about the garden when a thought struck. Had the commissaris invested his and Grijpstra’s money in Fokker Aircraft? That would have been stupid. But there was a flipside to that option. Stupidity in a teacher releases the smart pupil. Could de Gier now return to Key West and be bad there?

There was no need. “I invested in Meshti,” the commissaris told him, “and in the good sister Johanna, who take care of the destitute terminally ill.”

“That was a lot of money, Jan,” Katrien said. “Aren’t you overloading the dear sisters?”

The commissaris was hopeful. “They’re kind of special. They’ll take care of the money.”

“What money?” Sayukta asked.

“It’s a long story,” the commissaris said.

De Gier was sent to tell Grijpstra the good news.

“Good,” Grijpstra said.

“We still have that honestly earned Ambagt million,” de Gier said.

Grijpstra shrugged. “That’ll go to taxes.”

His prediction proved to be 63 percent true. There was still some left, to be invested in bonds by Nellie. The bonds’s guaranteed income wasn’t enough to support G&G’s lifestyle, not with Sayukta refusing to have de Gier live off her wages and de Gier having to pay rent for the loft. “To work,” Grijpstra said happily. G&G advertised. Clients came. By that time Grijpstra had news about Skipper Peter Ambagt. According to the boatswain who Grijpstra met in the jazz café Endless Blues, the old man dropped dead after the servant brought him the paper with the Fokker Failure headline. “He wasn’t too healthy
anyway,” the boatswain said. “His nose. Incontinent. Cirrhosis. Mood shifts. Not a happy man at all.”

“And the
Admiraal Rodney
?”

The FEADship, sold by auction and renamed
General Schwarzkopf
, was now anchored in the Gulf of Bahrain, facing Qatar. A sheik was the lucky bidder. The sheik, easy to get along with now that oil prices are rising again, and not really a Fundamentalist although he prays on the poop deck a lot, likes to dally. The boatswain dallied along but had overdone it a little, so he was given one week off.

And Carl?

The boatswain hadn’t seen Carl since Fokker Aircraft’s sudden nosedive.

A few weeks passed. De Gier, visiting Rotterdam to have dinner out with his sister, a once-a-year ritual, saw Carl at the next table in a medium-priced restaurant.

“How’re you doing?”

Carl said he was doing fine, thank you. Although the prediction by a certain Jonathan—Carl had once stayed at Jonathan’s Inn, more like a Bed & Breakfast, Jonathan was recommended once by Stewart-Wynne, remember Stewy, the guy in the jeep, right? Key West, right?—Well, Jonathan, a priest in his off time, voodoo, a seer, that sort of thing, on the Antillian island of Anguilla, had de Gier been to Anguilla? Well, Jonathan had “seen” Carl living in poorly furnished rooms, lino floors, bare minimum sort of thing, right? Okay, that had actually happened now, but Carl had found pleasing work.

“In the automotive business?” de Gier asked.

“Try again,” laughed Carl.

“Crude oil perhaps?”

“Once more,” laughed Carl.

De Gier raised his hands.

“Teaching Spanish,” Carl said.

“Teaching who?”

“Anyone who answers my ad in the
Rotterdam Herald
.”

“You like that?”

Carl said he loved that. He loved his lifestyle too. No nose-bleeding daddy-o, no endives or smashed beets, no nonpaying Cuban clients, no finance calculations that wouldn’t fit onto the screen of his pocket calculator, no tubes clogged by rats, or fuel lines by microbes, no helicopter that was allergic to sea-air, nobody to put up with but a baby crow he had found in the park the other day and who had the run of his rooms. Carl addressed de Gier’s sister, a quiet woman who knew what was what. “Whatever you do, ma’am, stay away from FEADships, and if you can’t do that, don’t equip them with choppers.” He turned to de Gier. “Right?”

“That little fellow was rich once?” de Gier’s sister asked after Carl rushed off to make his appointment with his next Spanish language pupil.

“He had enough,” de Gier said. “Enough is too much, you know that? Poor is better.
No
always outweighs
Yes
.” He patted his sister’s hand. “Not to be what we think we are, Catoh, is the key that unlocks the mystery.”

Catoh hated that. She had hoped that, now that her brother was forced to work again at last, and courted a sensible woman, and talked about buying a four-door car, he would be done with all that negative thinking.