walked ahead of her cart-pushing husband and called a cab. 'Through the park, please,' the commissaris told the driver.
'Could you drive slowly?' the commissaris's wife asked. 'We always enjoy the park so much, especially in the spring.'
'Turtle will be waiting for you in the garden,' she said as she leaned into her husband's arm. 'Look at the tall poplars, Jan, and the fresh leaves on the maples.' The commissaris didn't answer. 'Jan? Don't think of bad Willem. You're a good man with an excellent reputation. Everybody thinks highly of you. The children are doing well. I love you. Please enjoy the park.'
'Yes,' the commissaris said. 'Nice.'
'You won, Jan.'
'Yes.' His small hand tapped her shoulder.
'So enjoy.'
A heron sailed majestically across the road. 'Yes,' the commissaris said. 'I do.' He leaned over and kissed his wife's cheek. * The ranks of the Dutch Municipal Police are. in descending order, chief constable, commissaris, chief inspector, inspector, adjutant, sergeant, constable first class, constable.
\\ 3 /////
'Morning,' Sergeant De Gier said cheerfully. He was a tall, wide-shouldered man, sprawled behind a dented metal desk in the far corner of a gray room. 'Had a good holiday?'
The heavyset adjutant, looking even more portly in his three-piece dark blue suit, bought a size too large to accommodate his not-too-well-distributed bulk, lumbered on.
'Hello?' de Gier asked. 'Remember me? Your assistant of the last ten years or more?'
'Bah,' Adjutant Grijpstra said. He turned, walked back to the door, and pushed the latch shut. He walked over to de Gier's desk and turned on his heel.
'No,' de Gier said. 'Please. The last time that door was replaced, I had to pay half the cost. No, Adjutant.'
'Ha!' Adjutant Grijpstra shouted. His hand slid under his jacket and was back at once. A silver line linked his hand and the door. A stiletto trembled in the door's plywood.
'One day you'll be sorry,' de Gier said. 'Your knife's point penetrates the wood by three inches. Someone might get seriously hurt.'
Someone was rattling the door's handle.
'Just a minute,' Grijpstra shouted. He walked back to the door and pulled back the latch.
A young man, dressed in a rumpled corduroy suit, his small face topped by unruly wavy hair, stumbled into the room, holding his chest with both hands. He moaned and doubled up before his legs gave way.
'See?' de Gier said. 'In Cardozo's case there's no big loss-he can easily be replaced-but you might hit Jane, the loveliest member of our force, or Miss Antoinette, the commissaris's new secretary. I haven't had time to convince her yet.'
'Stop spoiling my practice,' Grijpstra said, dropping his weight heavily into a swivel chair. 'Besides, I usually aim high.'
'Convince Miss Antoinette of what?' Cardozo asked, picking himself up.
'Of my harmlessness,' Sergeant de Gier said, smiling. 'She thinks I want a permanent relationship, but I'll never interfere with her freedom, of course. All I'm hoping for is just a few hours of shared warmth.'
'After she pays for the meal,' Grijpstra rumbled. 'No.'
'No what?' de Gier asked. 'If I pay for the meal I have a hold on her. She'll feel she owes me. I don't mind owing her. I'm prepared to be as humble as she likes a man to be.'
'No, I didn't have a good holiday,' Grijpstra said. 'Campgrounds are too noisy, and we were washed out in the end. Nellie lost her tent. First it was pressed down by all the water and then it blew away. Best thing that happened. I went home and rested for a week.'
'Did you take Nellie to your house?' Cardozo asked.
'Of course not,' Grijpstra said.
'Really,' de Gier said, stretching. As his arms reached up, the butt of his oversize pistol was visible under his stylish jacket. 'You mean Nellie still doesn't know your wife is gone? Why are you keeping up that farce?'
'Suppose my wife comes back?' Grijpstra asked. 'Two women in my small, comfortable, empty, whitewashed home?'
'I thought your divorce went through,' Cardozo said from behind the wobbly little table that served him as a desk.
'She might just come back,' Grijpstra said. 'You never know. And if I took Nellie home for a week, she might just stay. Nellie has her own hotel. My wife lives in a huge villa with her sister in the country. I don't move in with them, do I?' He frowned furiously. 'And what is it to you?'
'Why do you feel threatened, Adjutant?' De Gier asked. 'Your wife left you because she doesn't like you. Nellie loves her freedom above all. All women do, these days. Why couldn't you extend a normal courtesy to a fellow human being, regardless of sex? A lonely woman who just lost her tent and who has only one week of her hard-earned holiday left before she has to return to the daily grind of running an overcrowded hotel singlehanded?'
Grijpstra rummaged in the drawer of his desk. He found a cigar, bit off the tip, and spat it into the waste- paper basket. 'So what else is new? You two been busy? Any business? Can we get out of my private life?'
Cardozo watched the adjutant's slender knife. 'You're getting better, Adjutant-you're hitting the door now.'
'I hit what I intend to hit,' Grijpstra said.
'How come you never tell us beforehand what you're aiming at?' Cardozo asked.
'Ah,' Grijpstra said. 'Answer that yourself.' He turned his chair around. 'Sergeant, report.'
'Dead banker,' de Gier said. 'Suicide. I saw a report signed by Halba and Adjutant Guldemeester. Being up north, I wasn't in on that. Three dead junkies, overdosed on pure heroin in a houseboat at the Binnenkant. Guldemeester checked that out, too. A German terrorist got shot. Big trouble at Headquarters here, but that's internal politics, of course. You don't care for politics, do you now?'
'No,' Grijpstra said. 'Anyone have the file with the daily reports?'
De Gier got up and presented the adjutant with a sheaf of dog-eared pink paper held by a transparent plastic cover. 'It's all in here.'
Grijpstra leafed through the file. 'The dead banker lived at the Binnenkant? The junkies' boat was berthed in the Binnenkant canal?'
'Yes, I saw that.' De Gier crossed his long legs on his desk. 'Same location. The houseboat happens to be just opposite the banker's home. I asked Adjutant Guldemeester, but he claims the two incidents are unrelated.'
'What's with politics?' Cardozo asked. 'I care. Any interesting gossip?'
De Gier leaned back as far as his creaky chair allowed. 'A carton of weaponry was lifted from the ballistics room. Our two pathologists are at war with each other. It seems that half the charwomen keeping this place clean are illegal aliens. Coins have been filched from the coffee machines. Several attractive female prisoners have a way of being taken out of their cells at night by unspecified personnel.'
Grijpstra looked up from the file. 'That isn't gossip, that's fact.'
'The gossip is that changes for the better are now due, Adjutant.' De Gier's large brown eyes twinkled. 'Some colleagues are saying so. There's leakage to the press. Journalists are writing up our mess. There was a lengthy editorial in Saturday's paper that wondered why so few crimes are solved and why highly placed officers keep being issued with new expensive cars. It also mentioned the new chief constable and his apparent failure to deal with ineptitude and gross corruption.'
'The chief constable just sits around,' Cardozo said. 'Chief Inspector Halba sneaks around. Adjutant Guldemeester helps him sneak.'
