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De Gier walked past the merchants' mansions on the Prinsengracht using the long strides that, he believed, prevent the common policeman's complaint of flat feet. His mind was clouded by anger. He was angry with everyone in general and with Grijpstra in particular. De Gier didn't want to walk, he wanted to drive. But the police are stingy, and Grijpstra didn't like to be an exception. Why use a car if there is no immediate necessity?
But it was a nice day and de Gier's anger evaporated. The image of a terrible, silly and stupid Grijpstra slid from his mind. Grijpstra had been punished anyway. He, de Gier, was walking, wasting the state's time. He could have taken a streetcar. De Gier had gone further than Grijpstra had intended him to go. He was even saving the state the price of a tram ticket.
De Gier smiled. He had analyzed his own thoughts. He now faced the conclusion with courage. He was a petty little man himself. De Gier always tried to analyze his own thoughts, trying to find the real motivation of his actions. And always he had to conclude that he, de Gier, was a petty little man. But the conclusion didn't discourage him. He shared his pettiness with all of humanity. He didn't have a very high opinion of humanity. He had, once, when they were drinking together, told Grijpstra about his line of thought and Grijpstra had nodded his heavy head. It had been one of the rare evenings when Grijpstra had been prepared to talk. Unwilling to meet his family, and after a long day, he had accepted de Gier's invitation to have a meal at one of the cheap Chinese restaurants and afterward they had found themselves in a small bar of the Zeedijk, the long spine of the prostitution quarter. The owner of the bar had recognized them as plainclothes policemen and had filled and refilled their glasses, quietly and with a hurt smile on his cadaverous face. Grijpstra had done more than agree. He had finished his glass of jenever with one tremendous sip and raised a finger.
'You can,' Grijpstra had said, 'divide humanity into a few groups.'
'Yes?' de Gier had asked, with his softest and most melodious voice. He had been almost breathless with anticipation. Grijpstra would talk!
'Yes,' Grijpstra said. 'Listen. First of all we have the big bounders. You know them as well as I do. Chaps with red heads and fat necks who drive large American cars and who smoke cigars. Their coats are lined with real fur. There are pimp-bounders and banker-bounders, but in essence they are all the same. The bounders have understood. They know what people want. People want to be manipulated and the bounders manipulate. They find out, or rather, they pay others to find out ((bounders are surrounded by very intelligent slaves) what people want to have and then they buy it cheaply and sell it for the most ridiculous amounts you and I can imagine. The principle works for goods as well as services. Bounders always make money. They never join a queue and they often go on holiday. The own big yachts on the Llsselmeer and villas in Spain. Their mistresses are kept in the best apartments of the Beethovenstreet. They never have any problems and they never make any problems. Whatever crops up is taken care of quickly or rather, as I have already indicated, is taken care of for them. They pay very little tax. They are the first group.'
De Gier listened with all the concentration he could muster. The man behind the bar refilled their glasses.
'The second group,' Grijpstra continued, slurring his words slightly, 'is the biggest group. This is the group of the idiots. You can, if you like, subdivide this group into a fairly large number of subgroups, but why should you?'
De Gier shook his head energetically, he didn't want to subdivide.
'Very well,' Grijpstra said, 'if they are idiots anyway why should you? There is this type of idiot and that type of idiot but their skins are always gray, they have a variety of illnesses, they stand in queues, they take a holiday once a year, they drive small secondhand cars that break down continuously and they buy the expensive rubbish the bounders sell to them, and they pay a lot of tax of course. It is taken off their pay so that they won't notice much. They do as they are told, not just what the boss tells them to do but also what advertising tells them to do, and the TV, and the newspaper, and anybody who has a loud voice and a few simple words. They'll even get into a cattle truck to be taken to a concentration camp, and when the camps go out of fashion, to Yugoslavia or a Greek island, on a charter plane. They visit dirty whores and drink jenever made in a chemical factory. Your health!'
He raised his glass unsteadily, spilling a little jenever.
'Your health!' de Gier said and raised his glass obediently.
'They do whatever the bounder wants,' Grijpstra continued. 'And when they have celebrated their sixty-fifth birthday they shake hands and go away and you'll never see them again but it doesn't matter for they reproduce faster than they disappear. They are fond of rubber stamps and forms and name plates on the door, with an indication of their rank or degree. They like medals and titles and privileges. But they never have any rights, only duties. The duty to save and to buy and never mind what they do, the bounders will make money. It matters little what type of political system you apply to them, they will stay idiots, and when the bounder drives past they shout Hurray. Keeping time and arranged in rows. Hurray hurray hurray!'
Grijpstra had shouted loudly and the other guests joined the cheering.
'You see,' Grijpstra said, 'just as I have been telling you. But we still have the third group. It's a very small group. Do you know who I mean?'
'No,' de Gier said, 'but please tell me.'
'The small third group,' Grijpstra said, 'is the group of the well-meaning. The gentlemen. The idealists. They have good ideas and they are often very intelligent. They don't push and they never do anything out of turn and they give the impression that they don't manipulate and that no one manipulates them.'
'But that's very nice,' de Gier said. 'So there are some nice people after all.'
'No,' Grijpstra said, 'you never heard me say that.
I called them the well-meaning. I meet them every now and then and I study them very carefully. Extremely carefully.'
'And what do you see?' asked de Gier.
'Yes,' Grijpstra said and rubbed his face with a tired hand. 'I don't know really. I don't see very much when I study them. But I don't trust them at all. These well-meaning people are no good either, I am sure of it.'
De Gier had often thought about Grijpstra's three groups and the older he became and the more he experienced, the more he believed in Grijpstra's theory. But he left some room on the side. De Gier didn't like theories that seemed to be watertight. De Gier believed in a miraculous surrealist world and he didn't want to give up his faith, mainly because the existence of this miraculous world seemed to be confirmed to him, and quite regularly, by the inexplicable beauty that echoed, he thought, in the perception of the half-conscious dreams he was subject to. It was happening again, right now, while he walked past the Prinsengracht's water. A seagull kept itself suspended above the hardly moving surface of the gracht, seemingly effortless, by the merest flick of its spread wings. A gable silhouetted sharply against a dark gray rain cloud, an old woman fed the sparrows throwing an ever-changing shadow-pattern on the cobblestones. A miraculous world, de Gier thought. Very beautiful. Perhaps the world is no good, but I am here. I walk here and I am doing something and although it probably serves no purpose, it's interesting. Fascinating even.
It was warm in the street and he was glad when he saw the Haarlemmer Houttuinen and knew that the coolness of the large house was waiting for him. But before he entered he had seen the car parked on the sidewalk, in the same place as he had parked the police VW the night before, and a little later he recognized the detective who greeted him in the corridor, a detective from the Bureau Warmoesstraat.
'Now what?' he asked his colleague
'Breaking and entering,' the colleague said and took him to me restaurant where van Meteren and the four helpers of the dead Piet sat quietly around a table.
'Hello,' de Gier said to van Meteren. 'Don't you have to work today? It's past eleven.'
Van Meteren smiled. 'You here again? No, I don't have to work. I took the day off because of special circumstances. I wanted to organize the removal of Piet's mother. But somebody broke in last night and I telephoned again.'
'When was that?' de Gier asked.
'I don't know. I went to sleep after you both left. It must have been between one-thirty and seven-thirty this morning. Someone kicked in the little cellar's door and they went all through the restaurant and the shop. I don't
