word.'
'Any children?'
'One, but not mine. The fruit of a previous relationship. Some fruit, a little overripe apple, and stupid too-but what do I care, she went too.'
'So you are alone.'
Bezuur laughed again and the commissaris looked up. He wished the man wouldn't laugh. He had found a way of putting up with the pain in his legs but Bezuur's merriment shook his concentration and the pain attacked again.
'No,' Bezuur said, and stretched his right arm. The arm swept in a half circle.
'Girlfriends,' Grijpstra said, and nodded.
'Yes. Girls. I used to go to them but now they come here. It's easier. I am getting too heavy to run about.'
He looked at the floor, stamping his foot on die sodden rug. 'Bah. Beer. Something to do for the cleaning boys. You can't get charwomen anymore you know, not even if you pay them in gold bars. Some cleaning platoon comes here on weekdays, old men in white uniforms. They have a truck and the biggest vacuum cleaner you ever saw. Whip through the whole place in an hour. But the girls come on Fridays or Saturdays and they leave a mess and I sit in it. Bah.'
His arm made a sweeping movement again and Grijpstra followed the movement. He counted five empty champagne bottles. Someone had forgotten her lipstick on the couch. There was a stain on the white wall, just below the painting of Bezuur's wife.
'Turtle soup,' Bezuur said. 'Silly bitch lost her balance and the soup hit the wall. Good thing it missed die painting.'
'Who did the painting?'
'You like it?'
'Yes,' Grijpstra said. 'Yes. I think it is very well done. Like that picture of the two men in a small boat I saw on Abe Rogge's wall.'
Bezuur looked at the carton next to his chair, took out a bottle but put it back again.
'Two men in a boat? You saw that painting too, eh? Same artist. Old Mend of ours, a Russian Jew born in Mexico, used to go boating with us and he came to the house. Interesting fellow, but he wandered off again. I think he is in Israel now.'
'Who were the two men in the boat?'
'Abe and me,' Bezuur said heavily. 'Abe and me. Two friends. The Mexican fellow said that we belonged together, he saw it that night. We were on the big lake, the boat was anchored and we had taken the dinghy into the harbor. We came back late that night. The sea was fluorescent and the Mexican was wandering about on deck. He left the next day, he should have stayed a few more days, but he was so inspired by what he saw that night that he had to get back to his studio to paint it. Abe bought the painting and I commissioned this one later. That Mexican was very expensive, even if you were his friend, but he was pretty good.'
'Friends,' the commissaris said. 'Close friends. You were close friends with Abe, weren't you, Mr. Bezuur?'
'Was,' Bezuur said, and there was the same blubbery note in his voice again, but now he seemed close to tears. 'The bastard is dead.'
'You were close friends right up to yesterday?'
'No,' Bezuur said. 'Lost touch. Went his way, I went my way. I have a big business now and no time to play about on the street market, but I enjoyed it while it lasted.'
'When did you each go your own way?'
'Wasshit matter?' Bezuur said, and that was all they could get out of him for a while. He was crying now, and had opened another bottle, slopping half of it on the floor. The fit took a few minutes.
'Shorry,' Beznur said.
'That's all right,' the commissaris said, and rubbed his legs. 'We understand. And I am sorry we are bothering you.'
'What did Mr. Rogge and yourself study at the university?' Grijpstra asked. Bezuur looked up, there seemed to be some strength in him again and he was no longer slurring words.
'French. We studied French.'
'But you weren't so good at languages. Didn't you say so before?' the commissaris asked.
'Not too bad either,' Bezuur said. 'Good enough. French is a logical language, very exact. Maybe I would have preferred science but it would have meant breaking from Abe, I wasn't ready for that then.'
'Did you study hard?'
'Same way we got through high school, in my case anyway. Abe was more enthusiastic. He read everything he could find at the university library, starting at the top shelf on the left and finishing on the bottom shelf on the right. If the books didn't interest him he would flip the pages, reading a little here and there but often he would read the whole book. I just read what he selected for me, books he talked about.'
'And what else did you two do?'
Bezuur was staring at the portrait and the commissaris had to ask again.
'What else? Oh, we ran about. And I had a big boat in those days; we'd go sailing on the lakes. And we traveled. Abe had a little truck and we went to France and North Africa and once I talked my father into buying us tickets on an old tramp which went to Haiti in the Caribbean. The language is French over there and I said we needed the experience for our study.'
'Your father paid for Abe's ticket as well? Didn't Abe have any money himself?'
'He had some. German love-money. The Germans paid up after the war, you know, and they had killed both his parents. He got quite a bit; so did Esther. Abe knew how to handle money. He was doing a little business on the side. He was buying and selling antique weapons in those days.'
'Weapons?' the commissaris asked. 'He didn't happen to have a good-day, did he?'
'No,' Bezuur said, when the question had got through to him. 'No, no, cavalry sabers and bayonets, that sort of stuff. You think he was killed with a good-day?'
'Never mind,' the commissaris said. 'Did he ever live out of your pocket?'
Bezuur shook his head. 'No, not really. He accepted that ticket to Haiti but he made up for it in other ways. He only relied on himself. He would borrow money sometimes but he always paid up on time and later, when I was lending him big money, he paid full bank interest. The interest was his idea, I never asked for it but he said I had a right to it.'
'Why didn't he borrow from the bank?'
'He didn't want his transactions on record. He borrowed cash and he paid cash. He was pretending to be a small hawker, a fellow who lived off his stall.'
The commissaris looked at Grijpstra and Grijpstra asked the next question.
'Why did you both drop out of the university?'
Bezuur looked at his beer bottle and shook it. 'Yes, we dropped out, right at the end. Abe's idea, that was. He said the degree would be pure silliness, it would qualify us to become schoolteachers. We had learned all we wanted to learn anyway. We went into business instead.'
'The street market?'
'Yes. I started importing from the communist countries. In Rumania a lot of people speak French and we went there to see what we could find. The East Bloc started exporting cheaply in those days, to get hard currency. You could pick up all sorts of bargains. They offered wool and buttons and zippers, so we found ourselves in the street market. The big stores wouldn't buy at first and we had to unload the goods. We made good money, but then my dad died and left the road-working machinery business so I had to switch.'
'Were you sorry?'
'Yes,' Bezuur said and drained the bottle. 'I am still sorry. Wrong choice, but there was nothing else to do. There's more money in bulldozers than in colored string.'
'You cared about money?'
Bezuur nodded gravely. 'I did.'
'You still do?'
