The Finger’s widow gives up eventually and stops coming to the station.
Some time later I hear she’s on the booze and having it off with a postman. Apparently he’s a Communist.
Everyone knows everything. But at the same time bugger all. Normally you’d think that the killing of a policeman would have every unit keyed up and ready to go, that a ruthless manhunt would ensue until the murderer or murderers had been collared. But that’s not how it works in an occupied city. A smokescreen goes up about ‘current lines of enquiry’ that are being followed closely. Even when he was alive you couldn’t find many people who were keen on the Finger. His real friends are in the White Raven and no cops set foot in the place, apart from me. When he dies it’s a sigh of relief more than anything that passes through the corridors of the Vesting Straat station. A man like him must have had ambitions. By his age he should have been a good bit further than one stripe more than me on his sleeve. A real promotion never came his way and that says enough. But the debt still has to be settled. A dead policeman demands reprisals, preferably without the intervention of any judges or courts. One’s been crossed off on this side, then a few need to be crossed off on the other side, preferably without too much trouble or them having anything remotely to do with the case. The debt is settled by shadowy figures who are not necessarily on the force. Field Command announces ‘the deportation of ten Communists as a reprisal for the murder of the police officer E. Vingerhoets’. Maybe that’s why we’re told those stories about that screw in Breendonk slaughtering Communists, even if most of them contradict each other. True or false, they show that the murder has not gone unavenged. At the end of the day the books must balance, that’s what it comes down to. I no longer hear Meanbeard jabbering about vengeance. That tells me enough. It means people have been picked up and carted off, identified by Meanbeard and approved by mein Freund Gregor. Lode doesn’t approach me about the Finger’s death and I’m happy to leave it at that. Who’s to say he had anything to do with it? Who’s to say I had anything to do with it? A spider doesn’t necessarily come rushing out at the slightest trembling of its web. It generally takes more vibrations, more people expressing their will, a larger group demanding a sacrifice or wanting to see some situation or other resolved. That’s how things work these days. Maybe that’s how they’ve always worked, but now action and reaction follow that trajectory, deeds and consequences, without any fuss, without any excuses, rough and merciless, unseen and in the dark, but with everyone’s full knowledge.
A week later for a change there’s something truly interesting to read in the orders of the day, which we are meant to consult every time we go on duty. We have been strictly forbidden with immediate effect—‘en vigueur avec effet immédiat’ as they would write in the statute book—from picking up work dodgers. Orders from the mayor! And the attorney general! Are the bigshots in the town hall starting to feel the heat on the backs of their necks?
‘About bloody time,’ Gaston says, wiping the beer froth off his lips.
‘What difference does it make? How many times have we reported back that nobody was home? We never hauled in anyone unless they gave us a mouthful or we didn’t like the look of them.’
‘Come now, Wilfried! So cynical!’
Gaston laughs.
‘And weren’t the foreigners so-called work dodgers too?’
Gaston and I have stopped using the word ‘Jew’ in our conversations. A tacit agreement.
‘Watch it, whippersnapper, or I won’t buy you a beer.’
‘Landlord! Another round!’ I call.
‘The cat’s amongst the pigeons now. He’s pulling out his wallet.’
After the beers have been put down on our table, Gaston bends towards me, amusement glinting in his eyes.
‘Just between you and me, do you realize what this is going to lead to? I don’t know if I’ve already told you this or not, but our inspector’s actually a pal of mine—’
‘You could have fooled me—’
Gaston grabs me by the shoulder and starts whispering. ‘Don’t tell anyone, but he’s married to the daughter of, um… Wait. No, that’s too difficult to explain. Anyway, someone in my family. And then you soon find out one thing and the other. Turns out this whole palaver about the ban on picking up work dodgers has gone off like a bomb at headquarters. Everyone with an extra stripe on his shoulder’s shitting himself, all the way up to the commissioner, apparently. You understand that.’
‘No, I don’t understand it.’
‘Come on, mate. Think it through. We’ve been picking up people the whole bloody time, foreigners, people from here… And guess what?’ Gaston lowers his voice. ‘Suddenly the word from town hall is that it’s against the constitution. Get it? We’ve been breaking the law. And we are the law!’ Gaston starts to chuckle. ‘If anybody ever finds out… that we’ve been following orders that were completely illegal… Do you follow me?’
‘Like a cyclist in the Tour de France.’
Gaston laughs even louder. ‘I’ll have to remember that one. Anyway, you can ride at the front of the peloton, as quick and smart as you are. Look, lad, to be honest, I don’t want to make a fuss about it, but… this is priceless!’
Priceless indeed. Up to this point our actions have been guided by a tacit agreement: there is no alternative and, what’s more, everything’s normal. But some people’s fear of a day of reckoning has begun to grow. They’ve started to shift responsibility: from the attorney general to the mayor, from the mayor to the police commissioner, and so on all the way along. In the middle section of
