perhaps even a fist. Several blows perhaps. No knife. A hammer? A hammer perhaps, Grijpstra thought, and sat down on the only chair he saw, a large cane chair with a high back. He had seen a similar chair in a shop window some days before and he remembered the price. A high price. The table in the room was expensive as well, antique and heavily built with a single ornamental leg. There was a book on the table, a French book. Grijpstra read the title. Zazie dans le Metro. It had a picture of a little girl on the cover. Some little girl having an adventure on the underground. Grijpstra didn't read French. There wasn't much more to see in the room. A low table with a telephone, a telephone directory and some more French books in a heap on the floor. The walls of the room had been left bare, with the exception of one fairly large unframed painting. He studied the painting with interest. It took him a while to name what he saw. The picture seemed to consist of no more than a large black dot, or a constellation of dots against a background of blues, but it had to be a boat, he decided in the end. A small boat, a canoe or a dinghy, afloat on a fluorescent sea. And there were two men in the boat. The painting wasn't as sad as it seemed at first glance. The fluorescence of the sea, indicated by stripes of white along the boat, and continuing into its wake, suggested some gaiety. The painting impressed him and he kept on looking back at it. Other objects in the room held his attention for a moment but the painting drew him back. If the corpse hadn't been there, dominating the space by its awkward and grotesque presence, the room would have been a perfect setting for the painting. Grijpstra himself had some talent and he meant to paint seriously one day. He had painted as a young man, but marriage and the family which suddenly began to spread around him, and the small uncomfortable house on the Lijnbaansgracht opposite Police Headquarters, drowned in the holocaust of a TV which his deaf wife would never switch off, and the fat ever-present existence of the flabby woman who shouted at him and the children had frustrated and almost killed his ambition. How would he paint a small boat, afloat on its own on an immense sea? He would use more color, Grijpstra thought, but more color would spoil the dream. For the picture was a dream, a dream dreamed simultaneously by two friends, two men suspended in space, drawn as two small interlinked line structures.
He stretched his legs, leaned back and breathed heavily. This would be a room he could live in. Life would become a pleasure, for a hard day would never be a hard day if he knew he could return to this room. And the dead man had lived in this room. He sighed again; the sigh tapered off into a low groan. He looked at the low bed close to the window. There were three sleeping bags on the bed, one zipped and two unzipped. The man would have slept in the one bag and have used the other two for cover in case he needed it. Very sensible. No fuss with sheets. If a man wants sheets he needs a woman. The woman has to make the bed and change the sheets and take care of the other hundred thousand things a man thinks he needs.
Grijpstra would like to sleep on a stretcher and cover himself with an unzipped sleeping bag. In the morning he gets up and leaves the bed as it is. No vacuum cleaner. Sweep the room once a week. No TV. No newspapers. Just a few books maybe and a few records, not too many. Don't buy anything. Whatever you attract clutters up your life. He might invite a woman to the room, of course, but only if he could be absolutely sure that she would leave again, and would never stick plastic pins into her hair and sleep with them on. He felt his face. There was a scratch which had got there before he had fought his way through the riot. Mrs. Grijpstra had ripped his face with one of her pins; she had turned over and he had screamed with pain but she hadn't awakened. His scream had stopped her snore halfway and she had smacked her lips a few times and finished the snore. And when he had shaken her by the shoulder she had opened one bleary eye and told him to shut up. And no children. There are enough children in Holland.
'Why the hell…' he said aloud now but he didn't bother to finish the question. He had slipped into the mess so gradually that he had never been able to stop and twist free. The girl had looked all right when he stumbled across her path, and her parents too, and he was making a bit of a career in the police, and it was all dead right. His oldest son had gradually grown into a lout, with long dirty straight hair and buck teeth and a shiny screaming motorcycle. The two little ones were still very nice. He loved them. No doubt about it. He wouldn't leave them. So he couldn't have a room like this. All very logical. He looked at the corpse again. Had someone come in and hit the giant with a hammer, smack in the face? And had the giant stood there, seeing the hammer come and catching its impact full on the nose, without even trying to defend himself? Drunk perhaps? He got up and went over to the window. Three constables were poking at the cobblestones with their long truncheons.
'Anything there?'
They looked up. 'Nothing.'
'Did you find out about the stone throwing?'
'Yes,' the constable who had been there earlier shouted back. 'It has been quiet here all day. We were only here to stop people getting to the trouble spot.'
'Have you let anyone through?'
The constables looked at each other, then the first one looked up at Grijpstra again.
'Plenty. Anybody who had business here.'
'A man has been killed here,' Grijpstra shouted.
'Have you noticed anyone running about? Behaving in a funny way?'
The constables shook their heads.
'Thanks,' Grijpstra shouted and pulled his head in. He sat down again and closed his eyes, meaning to feel the atmosphere of the room but gradually drifting off into sleep. The sound of a ship's engine woke him. He looked out and saw a low launch of the Water Police moor outside. Some six men got off, the commissaris, a small dapper-looking elderly man first. Grijpstra waved and the men marched up to the door.
'Nice coffee,' de Gier had been saying meanwhile. 'Thank you very much. Drink some yourself, you need it. Please tell me what happened. Are you all right now?'
The woman sitting opposite him at the kitchen table tried to smile. A slender woman with dark hair, done up in a bun, and dressed in black slacks and a black blouse with a necklace of small red shells. She wore no rings.
'I am his sister,' she said. 'Esther Rogge. Call me Esther, please, everybody does. We have lived here for five years now. I used to have a flat but Abe bought this house and wanted me to move in with him.'
'Looked after your brother,' de Gier said. 'I see.'
'No. Abe didn't need anyone to look after him. We just shared the house. I have the first floor, he has the second. We hardly ever even ate together.'
'Why not?' de Gier asked, lighting her cigarette. She had long hands, no lacquer on the nails, one nail was broken.
'We preferred not to fuss with each other. Abe kept the refrigerator stocked and he just ate what he liked. If we happened to be both in I might cook something for him but he would never ask me to. He often ate out. We lived our own lives.'
'What did he do for a living?' de Gier asked.
Esther tried to smile again. Her face was still white and the shadows under her eyes showed up as dark purple stains but some life had returned to her mouth, which was no longer a slit in a mask.
'He was a hawker, sold things in the street. In the street market, the Albert Cuyp Market. You know the Albert Cuyp, of course?'
'Yes, miss.'
'Please call me Esther. I sometimes went to see him in the Albert Cuyp. I have helped him too when I had a day off. He sold beads, and all types of cloth, and wool and colored string and braid. To people who like to make things themselves.'
'Creative,' de Gier said.
'Yes. It's fashionable to be creative now.'
'You say your brother bought this house? Must have cost him some money or did he get a substantial mortgage?'
'No, it's all his. He made a lot of money. He wasn't just selling things in the street, you see, he dealt in a big way as well. He was always going to Czechoslovakia in a van and he would buy beads by the ton, directly from the factory, and he would sell to other hawkers and to the big stores too. And he bought and sold other things as well. The street market was for fun, he only went there on Mondays.'
'And you, what do you do?'
'I work for the university, I have a degree in literature.' De Gier looked impressed.
'What's your name?' Esther asked.
'De Gier. Detective-Sergeant de Gier. Rinus de Gier.'
