The Corpse on the Dike (13 page)

“We’ll get everything we have,” the sergeant said and sprinted back to his motorcycle radio.

“Tommy gun,” he shouted at the radio. “Send everything you can find. We have a wounded constable already and there’ll be buckets of blood if this goes on. I don’t know how well these cadets have been trained, but bring in the State Water Police and an airplane. They have a boat out there as well, a fast cruiser, and I don’t want it to disappear.”

“Right,” Headquarters said. The buzzers at Headquarters were pressed and every available man, uniform and plainclothes, answered the Grand Alarm. The trucks on the courtyard came to life and the men of the radio room began to telephone all available off-duty personnel. The horsemen were the first to report; they were told to forget about their horses, the distance being too great, and to get into the trucks; an adjutant broke carbines out of a rack and handed them out to whoever presented himself; men helped themselves to spare clips without bothering to sign forms; and the low craft of the State Water Police growled in the harbor as a Piper Cub started its engine at Schiphol airport. Within an hour there were forty policemen on the dike, ten on the river and one in the air. More kept joining them and a commissaris worked out later that some ninety men had taken part in the campaign.

But Grijpstra and de Gier went on sleeping and the commissaris made more coffee and spent time with his turtle. Their names weren’t on the lists kept in the radio room and they could only be called if an emergency connected with the death of Tom Wernekink came up. They heard about everything when they arrived at their offices at nine sharp that morning. By that time the fugitives were in custody. Five arrests had been made and an Uzi automatic weapon and five pistols had been confiscated. Detectives were now combing the area, making a house-to-house search, and a dozen fresh policemen were patroling the dike.

Grijpstra went to the radio room to watch the reports coming in on the Teletype. The commissaris was already there.

“Sir,” Grijpstra said.

“Morning, adjutant,” the commissaris said pleasantly. “Where is your assistant?’

“Reading the reports that have already been distributed,” Grijpstra said. “Some show out there! The cartons contained TV sets and other electric stuff. We must have run into something big.”

“Yes. The cruiser was full of stolen goods as well. And so were the basements of several houses. The detectives have made some more arrests.”

“The Cat,” a voice said behind him. “Let’s go get the Cat. Now!”

“Quiet,” the commissaris said. He had jumped at the sudden shouting close to his ear. “Quiet, de Gier! I am not deaf.”

“The Cat,” de Gier said. “Let’s go!”

De Gier was in the corridor when Grijpstra ran after him. They reached the VW at the same time and de Gier honked the horn impatiently as the constable at the gate came ambling out of his lodge.

“Easy,” the constable said. “The alarm is over.”

“Not yet,” de Gier said and raced the car out the gates.

“I’m getting old,” Grijpstra said as de Gier went through the fourth red light. “I saw the reports and my mind didn’t click.”

“Nonsense. It would have clicked. Buyer and seller of odd lots, bullshit. The bastard was lying through his teeth during that performance in the commissaris’ office yesterday. You couldn’t know, for you weren’t there. The Cat with Boots On, ha, ha!”

“What?” Grijpstra asked.

“He came to see us yesterday. We asked him what he did for a living. Told us a beautiful story about how clever he was. Buys anything going and sells it from a warehouse in town. Odd lot man, bullshit! Sells stolen goods; that’s what he does. He must be connected with the men who were arrested this morning. That dike is all connected. They’re all in it. That informer too, the Mouse. He must have been right in the middle of it for years, but he never told us anything.”

“Tell me more,” Grijpstra said. “What was he like? Where did you find him? Did you go to his house?”

De Gier told him as well as he could but he was having some trouble. They had taken a marked car and had the siren and blue light going, but Amsterdam is a busy town at nine-fifteen in the morning and they weren’t making much headway. De Gier tried everything he could think of, using the part of the road reserved for the streetcar, the sidewalks and even the footpath of a park, but he kept getting stuck in the tangled traffic. He managed, however, and Grijpstra even heard about Ursula and laughed.

“It would happen to you, wouldn’t it?”

“It could have happened to you as well,” de Gier shouted. “That woman isn’t after any particular kind of man; she just wants a man, a boom-boom man, and you’re more boom-boom than I.”

Grijpstra slapped his thigh. “Never!”

“Here,” de Gier said and braked.

They jumped out of the car and pounded on the door. There was no answer.

“Round the back,” Grijpstra shouted.

De Gier ran. The pistol was in his hand. The Cat hadn’t reached the river when de Gier shouted at him. The Cat looked very silly with half his mustache shaved off. He was only wearing a pair of jeans and was barefoot.

“Stop,” de Gier shouted and fired, pointing the pistol at a cloud.

The Cat stopped.

The Cat surrendered in style to de Gier and four uniformed constables who had come running when they saw the commotion.

“Shit,” the Cat said; “you were quick, weren’t you, sergeant. Why are you shooting guns in my garden? Tell me the charge.”

“Why were you shaving off your mustache?” Grijpstra asked, pulling the Cat’s arms round his back and clicking handcuffs on his wrists.

“Got tired of all the hair,” the Cat said. “What’s the charge? And who are you?”

“Adjutant Grijpstra,” Grijpstra said, “at your service. The charge is receiving stolen goods and theft, perhaps, and other crimes maybe. We’ll work it out at the station. You’d better get dressed.”

“I can’t dress with irons on my wrists,” the Cat said indignantly.

“We’ll take them off again.”

De Gier pointed his pistol at the Cat as Grijpstra took off the handcuffs in the Cat’s bedroom. The Cat opened cupboards and drawers and dressed leisurely.

“Don’t you want your golden suit and your boots?” de Gier asked.

“No. But I want to shave off the rest of my mustache.”

“No,” Grijpstra said, “not yet. I’d like the commissaris to see you like this, and the photographer. Fighting on the dike, arresting thieves, a tommy gun blazing away with the street full of police and detectives going from house to house, and here you are shaving off your mustache. And you run—in your jeans and bare feet—when we come to see you. I think it’s strange, don’t you?”

“No,” the Cat said, “and I want some coffee before I go. Ursula!”

Ursula, dressed in a housecoat, came from the kitchen. Her long legs were partly uncovered and the full breasts were standing under the flimsy garment.

“Watch it,” Grijpstra said as de Gier’s eyes strayed.

“Yes, watch it, sergeant,” the Cat said; “you have a murderous weapon in your hand and your finger is very close to the trigger, and the barrel is very close to my chest. Besides, she is mine, not yours.”

“Mine,” Ursula said, “what mine? I’m not a cow. And what’s all this, Cat? Are they taking you away?”

“I am afraid we are, miss,” Grijpstra said.

“Who are you?”

“Detective-Adjutant Grijpstra, Amsterdam municipal police.”

Ursula inclined her head and the long hair fell over her face. She shook it back.

“Look after him, adjutant,” she said. “He is nice and he means well. What are they charging you with, Cat?”

“It’s my mind,” the Cat said; “they don’t like what’s going on in my mind. I’m different, and they represent the common law. I am not common; that’s my trouble.”

“Were you in the fight this morning?” Grijpstra asked.

The Cat laughed. “Me? I have never been in a fight in my life. I buy goods and I sell goods and I talk and listen a lot.”

“But you are friendly with the people on the dike,” de Gier said, “and they
did
fight. They even wounded two policemen, I hear, one in the foot and one in the arm. They were firing away as if there were a war on. And the dike is full of stolen goods. I would like to go through your house.”

“No,” the Cat said. “Your rank is too low. You can’t search the house without a warrant. You’re lucky I let you in as it is. Get a warrant, sergeant.”

“Don’t be silly,” Ursula said. “There’s nothing in the house.”

“OK,” the Cat said and smiled. “Search the place if you like.”

De Gier found nothing. “Where is your warehouse?”

“In town, but it’s no use going there; it’s locked and I have the key. I’ll go with you if you like.”

“Later,” Grijpstra said.

“I want my coffee.”

“Later. We have coffee at the station. Sorry, miss, for the intrusion. We’ll have to go now.”

“Be nice to him,” Ursula said.

8

B
ICKERS ISLAND USED TO BE A FORGOTTEN CORNER OF THE
city of Amsterdam. Its maze of narrow streets, quays lined with high sixteenth-century warehouses, wharves where hundreds of years ago the flat-bottomed sailing and cargo vessels were built, canals, gardens, and even a few merchant mansions, had all rotted, sagged and fallen together into crumbling heaps where rats were no longer frightened of the few people who refused to move. But the city had come to life again and cared about itself. The island had been rediscovered by architects and artists, backed by the Public Works Department, and gradually the warehouses were being restored, the gardens cleaned up and replanted with shrubs and trees and the canals dredged. It was still a quiet place, however, for it was out of the way; one could walk about in peace and concentration without jumping about like a demented monkey for fear of being crushed by the onslaught of modern traffic.

The commissaris, having stumbled onto the island during a murderous adventure when he was still a sub-inspector in his early twenties, had made the place his favorite haunt. He could often be found there, during weekends and holidays, wandering about the alleys, sitting on a wooden bench in a public garden, standing on the quay craning his neck to admire a gable top or dreaming in the courtyard of a deserted mansion. He always ended up in the same small pub, the last of its kind, where a very old landlord—a living skeleton—still poured jenever for his few guests from a stone bottle. It made a gay tinkling sound as he filled the delicate tulip-shaped glasses with the amber-colored, syrupy, almost frozen, explosive. The tinkling sound was caused by a narrow metal spout, screwed onto the bottle and as old as the pub itself. The pub was three times as old as its present owner and its weird lugubrious atmosphere never failed to excite the commissaris, whose pleasures, although few, were always intense.

It was five o’clock in the afternoon, on the day after the arrest of the Cat and the release of Mary van Krompen, set free by the commissaris himself. He had carried her bag to the door himself and sent her home in his own chauffeur-driven car. The day had been spent so far in clearing up odds and ends, left over by the commotion on the dike. Apart from the Cat’s, nine arrests had now been made, and most of the detectives on the Force were engaged in typing reports after having interrogated their suspects. A disturbed mayor had called a meeting at City Hall where he asked the chief constable questions and later the commissaris and two of his colleagues were summoned by telephone to come and explain how such a boisterous act of aggression could have occurred in their pleasant and tolerant town. The commissaris hadn’t said much apart from a remark that he meant to go into the matter further.

The four guests had the small pub to themselves. At the request of the commissaris the landlord had locked his door and hung out a dirty crumpled cardboard sign saying that the pub was closed because of death. The owner had written the sign thirty years ago when his wife died.

De Gier, impeccable in a new blue denim suit, made by a Turkish tailor—an illegal immigrant and a friend—sat on a high barstool, studying a little man with a pencil-lined mustache and a bald head sitting opposite and below him on a low chair. Grijpstra was leaning against the bar, holding a small glass of jenever in his hand and chewing a sausage. He was also studying the man on the low chair. The commissaris was looking out the window, contemplating the shape of the wreck of a botter and imagining what it would have been like to go to sea to catch a load of shrimp in such a small craft, thirty feet long at the most, with only two men in the crew and no engine to help maneuver the vessel.