“And Gabrielle, she didn’t get on too well with her mother, I believe?”
“True, they did argue sometimes, but Gabrielle has had her own apartment for quite a long time now.”
“Whose idea was that?”
“Gabrielle’s. She is clever, and she certainly loved her mother. She could have moved out altogether but she stayed in the house.”
“Did Mrs. Carnet drink compulsively?”
The baboon moved a hand over his face. “Yes, I think so, the drinking was getting worse. Couldn’t she have fallen down the stairs?”
The commissaris got up. “Yes, she might have, mat would certainly be the best solution.”
“Where’s your car?” the commissaris asked when they were in the street again.
“A little farmer along, sir, near the Berlaghe Bridge.”
“I’ll give you a ride. Sergeant?”
“Sir.”
“I know it’s been a long day but I’d like you to go back to the Pulitzer Hotel and get Francesco’s passport. If he doesn’t want to give it up you can bring him to headquarters and lock him in for the night. I’ll clear it with the public prosecutor later on, but if you are tactful that won’t be necessary. Grijpstra?”
“Sir.”
“Do you want to go home now?”
“Not particularly, sir.”
“You can come with me, I want to pay another call on Mr. Bergen. You haven’t met him yet.”
He opened the door of the Citroen and took out the radio’s microphone.
“Headquarters?”
“Headquarters, who is calling?”
“CID, the Camet case. Any news from Detective Cardozo?”
“Yes, sir, he left a number, wants you to call him.”
“Any urgency?”
“No, sir.”
He pushed the microphone back. “I’ll call him from Bergen’s house.”
“We might have dinner somewhere, sir,” Grijpstra said from the back of the car.
“Later, if you don’t mind. I’d like to see Bergen first. Would you like to have dinner with us, sergeant?”
“Thank you, sir, but I’ll have to go home first to feed Tabriz and I’d like to get out of this uniform and have a shower.”
“Fine, how about nine o’clock at that Chinese restaurant next to the porno cinema in the old city? We’ve eaten there before, it’s a favorite hangout of yours, I believe.”
“Cardozo might like to come too, sir. He’s been complaining that he is always sent off on his own and that he loses track of what goes on.”
The commissaris smiled. “Yes, and he is right, of course. But I have his number and I’ll ring him later. He’s probably having his dinner now but he can have it again. By nine o’clock our preliminary investigation should be complete. It’ll be time to compare our theories, if we have the courage to bring them out, and to move into the next stage.”
“Setting up traps, sir?”
The commissaris turned around. “No, Grijpstra, the traps have been set up already and not by us. This time we’ll have to do the opposite, if we can. We’ll have to release our suspects, they are trapped already.”
“The opposite,” de Gier murmured. “Interesting.”
\\ 12 /////
Cardozomarched along, arms swinging, until he became aware of his own eagerness and dropped back into an exaggerated slouch. He had been out of uniform for some two years now, but he hadn’t yet lost the habit of being on patrol during working hours. He was still checking bicycles for proper lights and would start every time he saw a car going through the red. He also missed the protection of his mate. Policemen on the beat are hardly ever alone, detectives often are. His trained eyes were registering.
The neighborhood wasn’t known for crime but there were still traces. A young man on the other side of the street was moving about hazily. Drugs? Or just tiredness after a long day at grammar school? A badly dressed foreigner, possibly a Turk, a man with a wide brown face and a heavy coal black mustache, seemed interested in a bicycle thrown against a fence. A thief? Or an unskilled laborer on his way to an overcrowded room in a cheap boarding house in the next quarter, which was only a mile from there. Cardozo shrugged, he shouldn’t bother the man, even if he stole a bicycle right in front of his eyes. He was a murder brigade detective, a specialist. But he crossed the street. The Turk had stopped and was bending down to examine the bicycle’s lock. Cardozo’s hand touched the man’s shoulder. He shook his head and pulled back his jacket so that the pistol’s butt shone against his white shirt.
“Police. Move along now.”
The man’s teeth showed in a lopsided grin of fear. “Only looking.”
“Sure. Move along.”
The man stepped aside and began to run. Cardozo noted the man’s shoes, the soles had worn through. The seat of the man’s trousers was patched, badly, with a piece of different cloth. Poverty, a rare occurrence in Amsterdam, but the Turk would be outside the cradle of social security. If he starved he starved, there would be nowhere to go. Cardozo had only been introduced to poverty once, when he was on his way back from France during a holiday and had lost his wallet with his money and train ticket, slipped through a tear in his unlined summer jacket. He had noticed the wallet’s absence in a restaurant, just before he had begun to read the menu, and had wandered out into the street again. Lunchtime without lunch, in Paris where he didn’t know the way and could hardly ask for directions for lack of words. It had taken him all day to walk out of the city and find the expressway, and he had waited for hours at the side of the road as night fell and the traffic’s flow began to show gaps, long black lulls that increased as the night crept on. He had drunk from a tap at a gas station, suspiciously eyed by attendants in crisp uniforms. No coffee, no cigarettes. He had bummed a cigarette from another hitchhiker and smoked it hungrily. The hitchhiker was professional, a tanned young man carrying a brand-new shoulder pack stuck on aluminum tubes. A sporting type with muscular legs and high boots and an insulated wind-breaker and an American flag sewed on his pack. An efficient traveler who had planned his trip through Europe and who had his money in traveler’s checks, folded in a cup and buttoned away in his breast pocket. Cardozo had been carrying an old suitcase, reinforced with a frayed belt, and had shivered in the early morning’s chill, a lost little figure who was refused, with an imperative wave of her bejeweled and manicured hand, by the lady who gave the American his lift. Cardozo remembered the loneliness and hunger of the two days he had needed to get home, and the memory showed later when he had to deal with the lost and strayed of his own city.
The Turk disappeared around the corner and Cardozo followed slowly, turning again into the Mierisstraat. He pulled the polished bell handle and waited patiently until he heard Gabrielle’s voice behind the heavy oak door that swung open slowly, screening her.
“I’m sorry, I was just about to take a shower when you rang. I saw you through my window.”
“It’s all right, miss, I’ve come to ask you about that money you found. We heard about your telephone call through the radio but there were no details.”
“Come in, come in, we can talk inside.”
She was going up the stairs as he pushed his way through the glass door of the hall. Her bare feet were tripping out of sight at the staircase’s curve, they hardly seemed to touch the thick rug. The housecoat had fallen open when she welcomed him in the hall. He had seen the outline of her body as she hastily retied the sash. A small body, the body of a very young girl but with the fully developed breasts of a woman. She had said she was nearly thirty years old.
The terrier was waiting for them in Gabrielle’s sitting room. He greeted the visitor and Cardozo bent down and scratched the dog’s head and rubbed the firm woolly ears.
