The next morning de gier was in his bed. it was eight o'clock, he should have been up and in any case he should have been awake.
He wasn't asleep either. He was applying a trick, a recipe he had discovered as a boy. Stretched flat on his back with his toes pressed against the iron bars of the old hospital bed that he had, some years before, picked up at an auction, he was maintaining, with some effort, a state of semiconsciousness. He was, in fact, directing a dream. His body tingled, not the unpleasant tingle of cold hands after coming into a warm room, but an exciting all over tingle that made his entire body glow. He was very close to being free, free from his daily routine, his responsibility, his planet bound existence. Inside his tingling body his mind was at liberty to move, wherever he wanted it to go.
And, being a shrewd man, he was using his liberty for an immediate purpose. He made his mind go back to the room of the dangling corpse. He saw the Papuan again, and the old skeleton-woman, the restaurant and the guests, the kitchen and the girls. He didn't try to achieve anything, he merely tried to force his mind to go back into the day before and he was reasonably successful until Oliver jumped on his stomach and cut the thin film that separated de Gier from reality.
He woke up and, reluctantly, looked at his watch. Five minutes past eight.
"Yes," he said to Oliver and put the Siamese cat on the floor where it began to grumble and whine.
"Wait," he said and walked to the small bathroom, looking at his plants in passing.
If it is true that a house is a projection of the occupant's spirit then de Gier's spirit was not quite ordinary. He had furnished the little two-roomed apartment with a bed, plants, and bookshelves. No table, no chairs, no TV. A detachable shelf, screwed to the wall above the bed, served as a table if he wanted to write, which wasn't often. He ate in the kitchen, not much larger than an old-fashioned cupboard.
"Mmm," he said, stopping near the geranium, which had started as a seed no more than a few weeks ago and "Mmm," he said again when he admired his creeper, hanging down from a bookshelf.
"She grows," he remarked to Oliver, who wasn't interested, and began to splash cold water all over his chest and arms and poured hot water and lathered his face.
Oliver continued to grumble.
"We'll have breakfast together," de Gier said. "Go to the balcony and irritate the birds while I finish shaving."
He moved the protesting cat with his foot and opened the balcony door. A seagull swooped low, expecting to be fed, and Oliver chattered with fury.
A few minutes later the cat and the detective ate, chopped heart and scrambled eggs. Then they drank, water and coffee. Then de Gier went out to catch his bus, an hour late, and the cat stretched into the still warm blankets of the unmade bed, imitating his master's trick of being asleep without dozing off altogether.
"You are late," said Grijpstra.
De Gier smiled, remembering the pretty dark-haired girl he had been sitting next to in the bus.
"I am often late," he said.
"That's true," Grijpstra agreed. "Here, read this, the doctor's report."
They were in their large gray room of Headquarters. Grijpstra relaxed into a plastic chair and watched his colleague reading. Grijpstra smiled. He was content. His wife had been asleep when he came home at 2:30 in the morning. She was still asleep when he left. He had breakfasted by himself, helping himself to more toast and more eggs without any contradiction or argument. And, alone in the detectives' room, he had watered the rubber plant and played drums on the set that, in a so far unexplained manner, had arrived in his and de Gier's office about a year earlier. Found perhaps, or confiscated. Put there for a purpose that had been conveniently forgotten. Grijpstra had wanted to be a drummer when he was still a young man with a sense of adventure, and he I id some talent. He often came early, to hit the three drums and clash the cymbals. Very softly of course, which, in drumming, is the finer art. He had, during those many early mornings, specialized in the "rustle," the sweeping of the soft forklike instruments (which had come with the set of drums) on the stretched skin of the two smaller drums. Tsss, tsss and then BENG, but softly. And then a roll, a small roll, exciting because of its strict limitation. While de Gier read Grijpstra grabbed the sticks and sounded the small roll.
"Good," de Gier said, looking up.
"What's good?" Grijpstra asked.
"That roll. And this report too. So he had taken one of his mother's pills. Palfium, wasn't it? A trace of an opiate in the stomach. And the times fit. He must have died around seven P.M. and we arrived at eight."
The telephone rang.
"Yes, sir," Grijpstra said and pointed at the ceiling with a thick index finger. De Gier got up obediently. Within half a minute they were between the cactuses of the chief inspector.
"And?" the chief inspector asked.
Grijpstra told his story.
"And?" the chief inspector asked again.
Grijpstra said nothing.
The chief inspector got up and paced up and down. The detectives stared, at nothing in particular.
The chief inspector stopped in front of a cactus that was nearly five feet high, a stiff giant noodle, pimply and dotted with sharp cruel hooks. He watched the plant with concentration. De Gier grinned. He had seen the chief inspector measuring the monstrosity, using a tightly wound measuring tape in a metal container, which could be released and sprung by pressing a button and which he carried in his pocket. De Gier knew that he carried the measuring tape at all times, for the pocket of his tailor-made expensive suit bulged. For years de Gier had suspected him of carrying a mini-pistol until he had seen the tape-measure one day when the door of his office had been open and its occupant had been indulging in his secret pastime. De Gier was sure that the chief inspector was sorely tempted at this very moment to produce the tape and measure the cactus, which should have grown another millimeter or so since the previous day.
The chief inspector turned on his heels and faced the detectives.
"A nut," he said. "A crazy nut who wants to improve the world. He goes to a solicitor and registers a society. To improve the environment. A religious society, it can't be less, and containing a religion that he has created himself, or combined from a lot of ill-digested rubbish he has read or heard about. He buys an old rackety house at the Haarlemmer Houttuinen, fixes it up a little and whitewashes all its walls. He buys a second-hand imitation of an Asiatic statue and puts it in the hall, lights an incense stick and sells health food. Unwashed tomatoes and grains. The kind that sticks in your throat. A rat couldn't digest it. And carrot juice."
He interrogated the detectives with his eyes. Both nodded.
It was clear that the chief inspector had no liking for carrot juice. They knew what he liked. He liked Dutch gin, and shrimp cocktails, snails and peppersteak. Pineapple with whipped cream. And cognac.
"There's a bar as well," Grijpstra said.
The chief inspector looked surprised.
"A what?"
"A bar," repeated Grijpstra, "downstairs, as you go in, on the right, a bar where they sell gin and beer."
"Good idea," the chief inspector said. "With a glass of jenever you can get through to the other nuts. And when you have weakened their defenses you can make them eat unpeeled rice."
He thought.
"All right," he said, "but there is no base to the thing. It will attract the odd misfits who will come to join the faith, eager to penetrate the emptiness of purity above. Valhalla on earth. Or Nirvana. Or whatever it is called. What the great man does is new and so he is admired. The society is a success. He is making some money. Before you get into his temple you have to fork out twenty-five guilders, because the joint is 'members only.' True?"
Grijpstra nodded.
"And later, if you pass the test, you are allowed upstairs. You can enter the meditation room. Have you been there?"
"Yes, sir," de Gier said. "A large empty room with low seats of scraped pine topped with foamrubber cushions. And an altar. And a special higher seat with a cushion with an embroidered cover."
"Sure," the chief inspector said, "for the chief nut. And candles of course. And there they sit, legs crossed. A row of holy men. Piet is the high priest, the illuminated sage. I have read a little about it. There are various degrees apparently, first degree of the silence, second degree of the silence and so on. The more silence, the deeper the whatever. Perhaps they were wearing funny robes. Did you see any funny robes?"
"No, sir," Grijpstra said.
"Probably hidden in a cupboard."
The chief inspector thought.
"And after a while the whole thing falls to pieces. The sage becomes transparent and you can see through him. He has come to the end of his new value. At first he blames the others, which is usual human procedure, but finally he grasps that he, himself, is the fool. A crazy man. And, worse, a silly crazy man. So he takes one of his mother's pills, falls over, stays on the floor for a bit but manages to get up and finish the job. And when you came he was dangling from a deal beam that had been created for a nobler purpose, namely to support a merchant's ceiling."
There was silence in the room, a nice noble silence. Perhaps a second degree silence, de Gier thought.
"Well?" the chief inspector asked.
"Perhaps," Grijpstra said, "but I would prefer, if you are agreeable, to look into the matter."
The chief inspector grunted. "You have suspicions?"
"No," Grijpstra said, "but I can't imagine how he got that bump on his temple. He wouldn't have got it from a fall on the floor. He must have fallen against something, if he did fall. There wasn't much furniture in the room. It's a pity the wound didn't bleed, we might have been able to find traces somewhere in the room. I keep on thinking that he was hit, and if he was there may have been murder."
"Homicide," the chief inspector said. "Murder is always hard to prove although we can try, it's the least we can do. But the youngest silliest lawyer can convince the wisest judge it's been homicide, whatever we prove."
He sighed.
"And it might not even be homicide," resumed the chief inspector. "That Papuan of yours, is he really a Papuan? I didn't see him."
"Yes, sir," de Gier said. "His name is Dutch, van Meteren, but he is only one-eighth white, a rare specimen, an almost full-blooded Papuan in Amsterdam."
"There'll be others," the chief inspector said. "You can find anything in Amsterdam when you look for it. But I seem to remember that van Meteren pointed out that someone might have picked a fight with Piet and that Piet, after the fight, in a fit of depression had committed suicide. You might work on that for a bit. Murders are rare in this city. A homicide, well. But murder… And your theory would point to a murder, what with a fist-fight and a noose."
He shook his head.
The detectives recognized the sign and knew that the meeting was over.
Coffee break was getting close. They were waiting in their room, the trolley would be due any minute now. Their normal patrol duty was suspended.
All available time could be spent on thought.
"We have a case," Grijpstra said.
De Gier nodded. The trolley's wheels squeaked near the door, he jumped to open it and smiled at Treesje, the coffee-and-tea girl, a mini-skirted nineteen-year-old. Grijpstra coughed; he didn't approve of the beaming contact de Gier and Treesje had built up over the last few months. But even Grijpstra had to admit that Headquarters' coffee had much improved since Treesje's appearance had put a glint in most of the officers' eyes.
They were busy for a while, tearing the little paper bags, pouring sugar and thick coffee milk, stirring.
A constable brought a thick file.
"Ha," Grijpstra said, "the interrogation reports. Let's see."
De Gier got up and looked over his shoulder. "Hey," he said.
Grijpstra cleared his throat again. "Nice, what?"
It was nice. The detectives had noted the names and addresses of the restaurant's thirty-eight guests. Nothing special with two exceptions. The two exceptions had been found in the Hindist Society's bar. Two drug dealers, one once-convicted, the other a suspect. The conviction had been minor for lack of substantial proof.
"I have heard about them," de Gier said. "Michiels of the Drugs Department was talking about them the other day. Big birds, both of them."
"Wholesalers," Grijpstra said and smiled. "Two nice juicy wholesalers. I'll spend a phone call on them."
The chief inspector wasn't easy to handle that morning and Grijpstra had to repeat himself twice. Finally he hung up and de Gier gave him a questioning look.
"It's all right," Grijpstra said. "We'll be given some help. And the chief inspector promised to look through the files."
The help arrived within ten minutes and Treesje was summoned for more coffee and another display of long tapered legs and rounded thighs. Grijpstra was forced into another coughing fit. The two drugs-detectives read the reports and listened. They said "yes" half a dozen times and left.
Grijpstra wandered toward his drums, sat down, and vibrated a stick.
"Right," he said. "They can be happy. Off to the bars and the cafes. I wonder how much money they'll spend, tax money, all of it. While we work."
De Gier looked morose.
"How many hours have you spent in cafes? Quietly? With half a glass of jenever on the table?" Grijpstra asked.
Thousands," de Gier said.
"That's all over now," said Grijpstra.
De Gier half closed his eyes and dreamed. How many hours had he spent in bars? Listening, chatting, acting. And meanwhile the eternal search. Who knows something, who says something? Who knows whether the wholesalers were in contact with Piet? Piet who is dead now? Who knows Piet? Who knows the old gable house Haarlemmer Houttuinen 5? What happens over there? I don't mean the holy talk in the bar, the health food and the sitting-still in the temple room. What really happens? Would you like another drink? Shall I tell you another joke? Easy now. Talk to the girls. Listen to the girls. Wait for a little fight to break out, a nice argument. Stir it up a little. Whoever gets angry talks. Whoever gets jealous talks. Whoever's pride is touched talks. Or do you want some money perhaps? Here, have another drink first, there's plenty in the bottle. You name it you get it. A hundred guilders? Why not? If the story is worth it. You can tell me outside, on a bench in the park or under a tree in the square. And then you can drink as much as you like for a couple of evenings, or you can smoke something, or inject. Is there anything worse than the needle? The other stuff will release you, after a good fight, but when the needle has got you it keeps you.
"We'll do some work," Grijpstra said. "You go back to the house. Go right through it. It's a big house and we only saw a bit of it."
"And you?" de Gier asked.
"I am going to have a sniff at that Society. If you find anything important you can phone me and if I'm not here you can leave a message. And tonight I should be home."
"Car?" de Gier asked.
"You won't need the car. It's the right day for walking. You better phone the garage that the car is free today."
Grijpstra had looked through Piet's bookcase the night before and had found some files. One of the files contained bookkeeping and gave the name of a chartered accountant. Grijpstra had read a report, signed by the accountant, describing the Society's financial progress during the previous book-year. He had noted the accountant's name and address.
De Gier left. Grijpstra phoned the accountant.
"Police?" the accountant asked. "Certainly, I am at your disposal."
Grijpstra arrived ten minutes later. A beautifully restored house on the fashionable Keizersgracht, shadowed by elm trees, its gable elaborately sculptured and recently whitewashed. The accountant's secretary smiled and talked to him in a cultured voice. She took him to the oak-paneled inner office.
"Coffee?" the accountant asked. "If you please," Grijpstra said. "Cigar?" the accountant asked. "If you please," Grijpstra said.
The accountant knew. He had read the morning's paper.
"Were you surprised?" Grijpstra asked.
"Yes," the accountant said, and pulled a hand through his thick gray curly hair. "Yes, I was surprised. Piet wasn't the merriest type I knew, and he wasn't quite run of the mill of course, not very stable I may say, he had his moods. But suicide…?"
He looked at Grijpstra's passive face. Grijpstra sucked on the cigar.
"Or wasn't it suicide?" the accountant asked.
Grijpstra shrugged his shoulders.
"Murder?"
Grijpstra shrugged again.
"What can I do for you?"
Grijpstra sighed.
"This Society, what exactly was it?"
"Yes, yes, yes," the accountant said. "It wasn't much. But we earned some money. The bar was a paying proposition, the restaurant definitely made a profit and the shop was all right. A small but profitable business. You know the sort of thing they sell in these shops. Cent buying, guilder selling. Very good margin. They sold some books and leaflets and statues of Buddha and holy men. And chopsticks, machine-made in Hong Kong, you can buy them by the ton for next to nothing and he was selling them at one ninety-five a pair. Not bad. And the cost of the operation was ridiculously low, of course. That was the main thing, perhaps. There is always a good margin between buying and selling in business but the money goes to costs and you still make a loss. But Piet had found the right way of doing it. He hired idealists only, made them members of the Holy Society and paid mem a pittance a week. No social security, no minimum wage. He didn't even have to put them on the payroll. And if they didn't like it they could go back to the street, or the youth hostel, or the park. He always found others to replace them."
"What was he making?" Grijpstra asked.
The accountant produced a ledger from a metal filing cabinet.
"About two thousand guilders a week, I guess. A little more perhaps. He must have pocketed some as it came in."
"Did he pay taxes?"
The accountant looked sly.
"Not yet. The Society was only three years old. He had copied it from a similar thing in Paris, I believe; I think he worked in Paris for a while. No, he never paid any tax, only purchase tax. Nobody avoids purchase tax unless they sell in the street and run when the coppers arrive."
"No tax?" Grijpstra asked. "No company tax? No income tax?"
The accountant hadn't changed his expression. The sly look was still there. A professional slyness, a highly educated very smart fox who had made his lair in a gable house.
"No tax," he repeated. "Societies are very special, very vague material. A proper society makes no profit, whatever it makes it spends. It is allowed to form a slight reserve. If it makes a profit there is trouble with the inspection. There would have been trouble here and I have been warning Piet. After all, I am a chartered accountant, not a bookkeeper he could hire anywhere. I have a reputation to lose. I told him to change his Society into a normal commercial company with a balance sheet. I would have worked out his profit on the first three years and he would have paid some tax. I also told him that he could forget about my services if he refused. He might have gone on for years, quietly pocketing the money and improving his position. The inspection isn't very quick. But they would have caught him in the end and fined him right into bankruptcy."
Grijpstra looked up.
"You said 'we' just now. If I remember correctly you said 'but we earned some money.' Do you mean that you had a share in the business?"
The accountant laughed. "I see I am dealing with the police. No, no. Nobody is allowed to have a material interest in a society. But an accountant always identifies with his client and talks about 'we' and 'ours.' You can compare it to a mother who tells her small child 'now we are going to do a little whiddle' but the mother doesn't whiddle, the child whiddles."
Grijpstra grinned and told himself that he should remember to repeat the explanation to de Gier.
"So if Piet had continued on the way he was going he would have been in trouble?"
The accountant made his fingertips touch and looked at his interrogator from above, using his high seat and tall body to advantage.
"Perhaps. The inspection is busy, and very slow. Their servants are officials, nine-to-five men, moderately dedicated. With luck Piet could have gone on for years and years and even if the inspection had become suspicious, well, there would have been time. He could have sold out and run for it. He might had made a small fortune and retired, on an island somewhere. There are a lot of islands in the world."
"Piet was the only director?" Grijpstra asked.
"Yes. He asked me to join him but I refused. The Society's foundation was too rotten for me. His wife used to be a director but she never knew what went on. She left him anyway, you know that, don't you?"
"Yes," Grijpstra said, "and what did he do with the money?"
"Let's see," the accountant said and leafed through the ledger. "Here. The money wasn't spent. He invested some in the house, repairs and so on, improving its value considerably. There is a nice car in the Society, which Piet used, and he bought a small house in the South, in the country somewhere. A good buy, its present value should be three times what he paid for it. His own official income was six hundred guilders a month, plus free board and lodging. He paid income tax on the six hundred, which is next to nothing."
Grijpstra looked at the ceiling. The accountant waited patiently.
"So everything in the house, the stereo equipment, furniture, statues, inventory, stocks, were the Society's property?"
"Yes."
"And Piet could sell whatever he wanted to sell and pocket the money?"
"Yes," the accountant said. "In fact he was the Society. A difficult case, even for the inspection. If they had found out what he was doing they would have forced him to change it into a commercial company."
'To get a grip on him?"
"Exactly," said the accountant. "But what are you hinting at?"
Grijpstra smiled his special noncommittal smile and managed to put some human warmth in it.
"I don't quite know myself," he said. "I am gathering information, that's all. Who would benefit from Piet's death?"
"His wife," the accountant said, "but she ran away. To Paris I think; I seem to remember that Piet told me but I am not sure. If she is in Paris she can't have murdered him there. In any case, I know her and she is not the killing type. She is a rather lovely but very vague woman. She wouldn't hang anyone. And her little daughter is a toddler."
"Do you see any reason for suicide?" Grijpstra asked. The accountant sucked pensively on his cigar and began to cough. Suddenly he looked ferocious and the soggy cigar stub was killed with savage power.
"Bah. These cigars aren't what they are cracked up to be. Wet bags full of nicotine. Yagh."
Grijpstra waited patiently for the evil mood to pass.
"'Suicide,' you said. I am no psychologist," the accountant said.
"I am asking you ail the same," Grijpstra said pleasantly.
"I am an accountant. As an accountant I would say there might be a reason. I think I convinced Piet that his Society would have to disappear. He identified with the Society. Its death might mean his own death. And I think that the thought of having to pay a lot of money to the government upset him considerably. He might have had to pay as much as fifty thousand guilders, an amount he didn't have."
"Not in cash," Grijpstra said.
"Yes," the accountant agreed, "it wasn't all that bad. He could have raised the money on his property. I could have managed the mortgage for him, at a price of course. Mortgages are expensive these days."
"So he was upset," Grijpstra said. "He would have had to go to a lot of trouble to raise money to pay to the government."
The accountant put his fingertips together again and donned a pensive look.
"And there you may have your reason," he said suavely. "The government is the establishment and Piet fought the establishment. His Society was against the establishment. And now it looked like the enemy was winning."
"Aha," Grijpstra said. "And if his enemy would force him to change the Society into a commercial company he would have had to hire real staff and pay them real wages. It might have been the end of his small but profitable business."
"Quite," the accountant said.
Grijpstra studied the accountant, a tall wide-shouldered man, aged somewhere between fifty and sixty. A beautifully chiseled head. A chartered accountant, a man of standing, comparable to a surgeon, a bank director, an important merchant. An expensive office, an expensive image. Even an expensive name. Joachim de Kater. A "kater" is a tomcat. The tomcat watches how the others run to and fro, in the sweat of their brows, and every now and then the tomcat puts out his paw and flicks his nails and the others pay. A chartered accountant is a man trusted by the establishment. Whatever he says is believed and the tax inspectors talk to him as equal to equal. Grijpstra shuddered. Grijpstra is Dutch too and he feared the tax inspectors as the Calvinists had once feared the Spanish inquisition.
"Thank you," he said. "I won't take any more of your time."
"It was a pleasure to be of use," de Kater said, and stretched to his full length. His handclasp was firm and pleasant. His smile glinted in the dark room. Grijpstra studied the smile for a moment. Expensive teeth. Eight thousand guilders perhaps? Or ten thousand? The false teeth looked very natural, each individual tooth a work of art, and the back teeth all of solid gold.
Grijpstra walked past the water of the canal, in deep contemplation. Fifty thousand guilders, payable in one go perhaps, but perhaps not. The tax people always appear to be reasonable. They don't like to slaughter the goose who lays the golden eggs. They might have been prepared to wait a bit. Perhaps he should go to see them.
But on the other hand… Perhaps Piet panicked. He might have been petrified with fear, fear of the possibility of losing his easy trick to make money. And fear might have forced his head into the homemade noose.
Would it?
Grijpstra thought of the small head with the abundant dark red hair and the beautiful full mustache. The small head with the large bump on its temple. He saw the little corpse again, the naked feet and the neat little toes, pointed at the wooden floor.