'No,' de Gier said softly, 'we wouldn't disturb the joint for a few guilders. Piet is dead. He was hanging from one of the beams in his room.'
'Oh,' the girl said and covered her mouth with a shaking hand. The other girl, a fat little thing with glasses, began to cry.
'O.K., O.K.,' de Gier said. 'It can't be helped. Any of you two been to his room?'
Both girls shook their heads.
'No,' the fat girl said.
'No,' the beautiful girl said, 'not after five o'clock this afternoon. I saw the money on the table when I went up with Piet. I only stayed ten minutes or so and then I returned to the kitchen to prepare for supper. In fact, he told me to go, he wanted to write some letters.'
'He is the boss here, isn't he?' de Gier asked.
'Yes,' said the fat girl, 'he is the Society's director. The Society is supposed to belong to all of us members but he runs everything. And is he dead now?'
De Gier gave her his handkerchief and she rubbed her eyes.
He looked at the black stripes on the clean white cloth and realized dejectedly that they would never come out in the small washing machine in his apartment.
'You can keep the handkerchief,' he said to the girl, 'with the compliments of your police force.'
Her tears didn't impress him. He has seen the glint in her eyes. Death is sensation. Apparently she liked sensation.
He heard the doorbell and went to answer it. There was quite a crowd on the sidewalk and four parked cars, not counting his own. The colleagues had come quietly, without flashing blue lights or howling sirens. The experts didn't believe in a mad rush.
He shook a few hands and spoke to a fingerprint man, a close friend. He showed them all the way. The doctor and the experts to the dead man's room, the detectives to the restaurant where they started their investigation immediately. All they needed at this stage were names and addresses. De Gier told them to spend a little time on the two girls and Johan the barman, and to ignore van Meteren, whom he reserved for himself.
'Ah yes,' he said to the senior detective, 'if you find an old lady leave her alone as well. She is the dead man's mother. We'll see her later.'
'Who's 'we'?' the senior detective asked.
'Grijpstra and myself,' said de Gier.
The senior detective looked impressed and de Gier grinned at him.
'You are a comedian,' he said.
The doorbell rang again.
'Sir,' de Gier said when he recognized the chief inspector.
'Suicide?' the chief asked.
'Could be,' de Gier said, 'but he has a bruise on his temple.'
'Hm,' the chief said, and went upstairs. He left within a few minutes, and Grijpstra accompanied him to the door.
De Gier looked at Grijpstra.
'Usual behavior,' Grijpstra said. 'He looked around and grunted a bit. It's all ours.'
Peace returned to the gable house two hours later.
Grijpstra and de Gier sat at one of the restaurant tables and smoked and looked at each other.
'Twice in one day,' Grijpstra said.
'Too often,' said de Gier, 'twice too often.'
'But what do we make of it?' de Gier asked. 'Murder or no murder?'
Grijpstra blew some smoke out of his nostrils; de Gier watched the little hairs wave inside.
'Could be either of the two,' Grijpstra said, 'but it'll probably be murder. Somebody gave him a nice thump, using his fist, for I saw no possible weapon lying around and the bruise didn't seem very serious. Bam, Piet is on the floor, it doesn't need much to knock a small man over. He is unconscious or dazed. The rope is ready. Rope around the neck. You lift him up with one arm and put him on the stool. Other end of the rope on the hook in the beam. You kick the stool. You leave the room quietly. One minute's work. Half a minute maybe.'
'One or two killers?' de Gier asked.
Grijpstra gave him a fierce look and shook his head.
'Why two killers? Two men? Two women? One man and one woman? Why make it involved? One killer, not two or three. Killers are very scarce in Amsterdam so why would we suddenly run into a whole bunch of them?'
'But it isn't an easy job,' de Gier said carefully. 'He had to be carried around, and put on a stool. It may be difficult if you are by yourself.'
Grijpstra got up. 'Come with me, we are going to do a little work.'
They were busy for several minutes. De Gier stretched out on the floor and relaxed his body. Grijpstra pulled him to his feet, put him on the stool, slipped the noose around his neck.
They tried several times.
'You see?' Grijpstra said. 'Nothing to it. Your weight is more than Piet's, you must weigh a little over seventy kilos while he probably weighed ten or twelve kilos less. A very thin little chap. Anyone who isn't a hungry dwarf could have done it.'
'Yes,' said de Gier.
But later he disagreed again.
'It wasn't like that,' he said. 'Pay attention.'
'I am paying attention,' Grijpstra said and opened his eyes as wide as they would go.
'Right,' said de Gier. 'This Piet of ours is a morose fellow. He wants to die. Life isn't what it should be, he thinks. He can't remember ever having given permission for his own birth. And now he finds himself here, in a room in an old ramshackle house in the Haarlemmer Houttuinen, director of a nonsensical society that isn't going well anyway and gives him nothing but a lot of work and debts. He goes on thinking and works out that he is now over forty years old and that he will soon be an old man who won't be able to look after himself. And it annoys him that he is a little man, and that he always has to look up at people. Here he sits, in his empty room. Everything is stale. His ideas are gone and proved wrong. All he has is his own loneliness. It frightens him. He wants to leave, through the white gate which can be opened with the silver key. And he does have the silver key.'
'Beg your pardon?' said Grijpstra.
'Imagery from the East,' said de Gier. 'Comes from my reading and it fits the case for this is a Hindist Society. Death is the white gate and everybody has the silver key.'
'Excuse me,' Grijpstra said. 'I wasn't very good at school and I never read anything. But now I understand. The rope is the silver key.'
'Don't excuse yourself,' de Gier said. 'You are very clever. And books don't give any real information. Words, nothing but words. Hollow words. I read that too. The rope is the silver key but if you have the will to stop breathing for longer than two minutes you are also using the silver key.'
'Fine,' said Grijpstra. 'Piet wants to leave. Through the gate. Or into the tunnel, that's even better imagery. Death must be like a tunnel, I think, a tunnel that leads to the inexpressible. But now what happens? In your story he is still considering.'
De Gier got up and began to wander through the restaurant. 'He makes up his mind. But that sort of decision takes some doing. We never really decide anything, we take life as it comes and it drags us where it wants to drag us. It's all a matter of circumstances, of powers that control us. But to commit suicide is a decision. He decides but he helps himself by taking a drink. He drinks a lot. He becomes very drunk. Now he has to attach the noose to the beam. He climbs on the stool and he falls. He hurts his head. But he insists. And he manages to hang himself in the end.'
Grijpstra scratched the stubbles of his beard. De Gier was still wandering through the restaurant.
'I didn't notice any smell of liquor,' Grijpstra said, 'perhaps a whiff. A glass of sherry maybe. But I don't think
