He kissed her again. He said something about her hair and how well the kimono looked on her and how glad he was that she had changed her clothes while he was talking on the telephone. And how slender her body was.
'Yes,' she said. 'You are a charmer. But why do you try to be a good detective?'
'To please the commissaris,' he said, trying to make the remark pass off as a joke.
'Yes,' Esther said seriously. 'I had a professor once I wanted to please. He seemed a very advanced little old man to me, and I loved him because he was so ugly and because he had such a big bald head. His mind was very quick but it was also deep, and I was sure he knew things that I should know. He was a strangely happy man and yet I knew that he had lost everything he cherished during the war and lived by himself in an old, untidy and very depressing house. I did very well in his class although his subject hardly interested me when I began. He taught medieval French and he made it come alive again.'
'Crime interests me,' de Gier said. 'It interested me before I began to work under the commissaris.'
'Why?' He lay back, stretching out an amorous arm which she didn't resist. 'Why do you like crime?'
'I didn't say I liked crime, I said it interested me. Crime is sometimes a single mistake, more often a series of mistakes. I try to understand why criminals make mistakes.'
'Why? To catch them?'
'I am not a hunter,' de Gier said. 'I hunt, because it is part of my work but I don't really enjoy it.'
'So what are you?'
He sat up, looking for his pack of cigarettes. She gave him the pack and flicked her lighter. Her kimono opened and she adjusted it.
'Must we talk?' de Gier said. 'I can think of better things to do.'
She laughed. 'Yes. Let's talk for a little while, I'll shut up in a minute.'
'I don't know what I am,' de Gier said, 'but I am trying to find out. Criminals are also trying to find out what they are. It's a game we share with them.'
His voice had gone up and Oliver woke and yowled.
'Oliver!' Esther said.
The cat turned his head and looked at her. He made a series of sounds, low sounds in the back of his throat, and stretched, putting a forepaw on her thigh.
'Go and catch a bird,' de Gier said, as he picked him up and put him on the balcony, closing the door after him.
'Don't be jealous,' Esther said.
'I am jealous,' de Gier said.
'Don't you have any idea what you are?'
'Yes,' he said and lay down on die bed, pulling her down, 'a vague idea. A feeling rather. But it will have to become a lot clearer.'
'And you became a policeman to find out?'
'No. I happened to become a policeman. I wasn't planning anything when I left school. I have an uncle in the police and he mentioned the possibility to my father and before I knew what I was doing I had signed a form and was answering questions and saying*yes' to all of them and then suddenly I was in uniform, with a stripe on my arm, and eight hours a day of classes.'
'My brother also wanted to find out what he was,' Esther said. 'It's dangerous to be like that. You'll get yourself killed.'
'I don't think I would mind,' de Gier said and tugged at her kimono.
They fell asleep afterward and de Gier woke up an hour later because Oliver was throwing his body against the glass balcony door, making it rattle. He got up and fed the cat, cutting the meat carefully into thin slices. He lay down again, without disturbing Esther, who lay on her side, gently breathing. Her breathing excited him again. He turned over and looked at the geraniums and forced his mind to concentrate. He wanted to think about the spiked ball, the ball which had smashed the life out of Esther's powerful brother. He knew this was the best time to think, when his body was almost all asleep, leaving his brain to function on its own. It had made him conclude, early that morning, that the ball had been connected to a line, probably an elastic line. He had remembered some little boys playing ball on the balcony of a hotel in France. He had been watching them from the lounge, several years ago now, during a holiday shared with a police secretary, who had turned out to be very high-strung and possessive and who had changed the promised pleasure of the trip into a series of fights and withdrawals. He had been trying to get away from her that day and had been on his way out through the lounge when he saw the kids. They had a ball attached to some heavy weight and they were hitting it with miniature bats. They couldn't lose the ball for it could only travel a certain length. He hadn't been trying to think of kids playing, he had only concentrated on the mystery of the spiked ball and the picture of the kids and their gadget had suddenly popped up.
The ball had been thrown or shot into Abe's room but it hadn't stayed there. He was sure that the killer had never been in the room. If he had, there would have been a fight. Esther and Louis Zilver were in the house at the time. They would have heard the fight. There would have been shouts, furniture would have been pushed around, bodies would have struggled and fallen. The killer would have had to leave the house after Abe's death. He would have had to take the risk that either Esther or Louis would see him. De Gier was sure that the murder had been planned. Planned with a hellish machine. He had seen an exhibition of hellish machines at the police museum. Fountain pens that spout poison, rings with hidden steel thorns moved by a spring, very involved machines that will trigger off an explosion, trapdoors, heavy weights that will fall at the right moment. But not a spiked ball that disappears after it has done its work. And yet he knew that he knew the answer. He had seen something once, something that was capable of moving a spiked ball. Where had he seen it?
It would have to be something ordinary, innocuous. Something the riot policemen could see without having second thoughts. And it had to be noiseless. A bang would have alarmed the constables who were uneasy anyway that day. Something the killer could carry through the Straight Tree Ditch and smile at the constables as he carried it.
His eyes were closing. He struggled. The answer was close; all he had to do was grab it.
He fell asleep and woke up two hours later. Esther wasn't on the bed. He heard her in the kitchen. She was stirring something in a pot. The smell reached him, a good smell which touched his stomach. A stew. She must have found the minced meat and the fresh vegetables. He got up and stuck his head into the small kitchen. She had some rice at the boil too.
They ate, and listened to records. De Gier felt happy, unbelievably and completely happy. He also felt guilty and he opened a can of sardines for Oliver.
15
The Albert Cuyp is a long narrow street cutting through one of Amsterdam's uglier parts, where houses are thin high slabs of bricks pushed together in endless rows, where trees won't grow and where traffic is eternally congested. The street market is the heart of an area consisting of stone and tar, and its splash of color and sound feeds some life into what otherwise wouldn't be much other than a hell of boredom, in which the human ant lives out its sixty or seventy years of getting up and going to bed, being busy in between with factory and office work, and TV programs and a bit of drinking at the corner bar. It was an area that both de Gier and Cardozo knew well, for it breeds crime, mostly sad and always nonspectacular. The neighborhood is known for its family fights, drug pushing in a small way, burglaries and a bit of robbery, committed by youth gangs who swagger about, waylaying the elderly passerby, stealing cars and motorized bicycles, and molesting lonely homosexuals. The area is doomed, for city planning will do away with it, blow it up with dynamite to make room for blocks of apartments set in parks, but the city works slowly and the street market will be there for many years to come, functioning as a gigantic department store, selling food and household goods cheaply, providing an outlet for the national industry's unsalable goods and for adventurer-merchants who import for their own account, or smuggle, or, rarely, buy stolen goods.
Cardozo had managed to force the gray van on to the sidewalk and was unloading bale after bale of gaily printed textiles, which de Gier stacked on the worn planks of a corner stall, assigned to them for the day by the
