The Perfidious Parrot

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  “A travès de los siglos,” Carl Ambagt said, “por la nada del mundo, yo, sin sueño, buscàndote, el paraiso perdido.”

  De Gier sat on the other visitor’s chair. “That’s what most of us are doing, all right.”

  “What are most of us doing?” Grijpstra asked.

  “Throughout the centuries,” de Gier said, “dealing with the world’s lack of substance …”

  “Por la nada del mundo,” Carl Ambagt said dreamily, “Nicely put, right? ‘Nada’ doesn’t just mean ‘insubstantiality’ you know, but indicates an illusion, an appearance of the earthly bullshit we keep creating for ourselves, insisting that it would be reality …”

  “… and I,” de Gier continued translating, “restlessly, keep searching for …”

  “… for ‘paradise lost,’ ” Ambagt said, “meaning truth in this case, the beautiful essence of being that forever, a travès de los siglos, is beyond our reach.”

  “A tax inspection poem,” Grijpstra said. “Only a tax inspector can think up such endless misery, dear sir. Beat the shit out of him, Rinus, I knew he was no good.”

  “A poem indeed,” Ambagt said. “Later, the poet will face a bouquet of shadows, un boquete de sombras, and quiet folks standing up in their graves, and a bunch of sad birds, aves tristes, trying to sing with dried-out voices, cantos petrificados … a work of art by Alberti,” Ambagt sighed. “No Mexican but a Spanish poet. I found his work in a Puerto Juarez bookstore, however, on the Yucatán, magic land of the Mayas.” He addressed Grijpstra. “Isn’t Spanish the most beautiful language ever?” He addressed de Gier. “So where did you learn the lingo, eh?”

  De Gier looked past Ambagt’s head.

  “In his loft planted with weeds,” Grijpstra said gruffly. “Upstairs, in this house. De Gier absorbs foreign languages between sneezeweed and purple fringed orchid. And yourself, you fickle fellow?”

  “I started learning Spanish at Erasmus University, I completed my studies being bedded by Mexican lady-whores.” Carl Ambagt laughed. “An ideal program.”

  “Erasmus University is exclusive,” Grijpstra said. “Isn’t your background rather humble?”

  Ambagt blushed. “You noticed?”

  “Answer the question,” Grijpstra shouted.

  “I got a scholarship,” Ambagt said. “I am a genius as you must have noticed.” He patted his own shoulder. “Number One on the admission exam. Once in, I did well but I truly excelled in Spanish. But school was boring. I dropped out. Dad had started up the car business by then and I had to help out with the inventory. The teachers were glad to see me go.” He smiled. “Lot of jealousy, you know. Not only was my intellect superior to theirs but I was driving a Jaguar, visiting the better brothels.”

  “Kicked out of Holland’s most prestigious university of commerce,” Grijpstra nodded. “Came to a bad end. As was to be expected.”

  Ambagt raised his hands. “Whatever you want to call it, but what else is an end but a fresh start, right, Fats? So what? Right?”

  “So I don’t believe you, you asshole,” Grijpstra shouted while hitting his desk top. “So you like visiting brothels do you? So that’s how you got to know this house. You came after Nellie. The ONE ON ONE bar. You noticed the new sign. You decided to check out the present situation.”

  “Confess,” de Gier said kindly. “If you do maybe I won’t beat you.”

  Ambagt looked surprised. “This place was a dive?” He looked about him, noticing mahogany wainscotting, a portrait—in oils—of a magnificently bearded constabulary captain in a lace collar over a velvet tunic, orchids in a Chinese vase on the wide windowsill, a leather bound encyclopedia in twenty-four volumes, a medieval crossbow decorating a white plaster wall. “One wouldn’t think so.” He pointed at empty wall space. “Why don’t you hang a Rembrandt etching? You guys are loaded.”

  Bad Detective de Gier brandished his gloved hands.

  Good Detective Grijpstra smiled kindly. “Now, dear. Who recommended us? Tell us.”

  Ambagt let that pass. He was here to do business. He offered a million, a hundred thousand up front to cover expenses, if Detection G&G Inc. would recover, in any which way the firm cared to do that, one uninsured cargo of crude oil, lost due to piracy of the Sibylle.

  Grijpstra’s egos battled. Busy Grijpstra lost.

  “No,” said Free Grijpstra.

  “You’re not serious,” Ambagt said.

  “Yes,” said Free Grijpstra.

  “Me and Dad,” Carl said, “we’re talking dollars.” He looked at de Gier. “Same green shit you see in movies. Franklin himself, smiling at you ten thousand times. Ten thousand times one hundred dollars. What say? You’ll do it, right?”

  “Not right,” de Gier said.

  Carl snarled. “Now look here.” He showed de Gier his small fists. “What if I visited Mr. Tax Man some time soon? I can do that without getting hurt myself. Me and Dad are not registered in this stupid country. The tax man can’t get me and Dad but he sure as hell can get you. What is the source of your income, he’ll ask. And what will you say? Earnings, what earnings? And you live here. You have this building. Mr. Tax Man just loves nicely restored buildings. Impound. Auction. You and Fats do some time in jail. I won’t even send cookies.”

  It was quiet in the vast room.

  “Right?” Ambagt asked. “One million? With one hundred thousand up front for expenses?”

  “Go visit Mr. Tax Man,” Grijpstra said.

  De Gier rubbed his gloved hands softly. “You do that, dear.”

  3

  THE LADY LIKES TO STRIP

  In a billiard café for Men Only—Run Alley, Inner City of Amsterdam, between Prince and Gentlemen Canals—Grijpstra and de Gier met, that very evening, with two colleagues from the good old days.

  Constables First Class Karate and Ketchup, both short of stature, both dressed in leather, wearing tight pants and calf-high neo-Nazi boots—Ketchup long-haired with beard and mustache, Karate shaven, skin-headed, lightly powdered and delicately made-up, said they had no idea what recommendation Grijpstra and de Gier might mean.

  Grijpstra was quiet between the dry ticking sounds made by his billiard cue hitting ivory balls. He was making a nice sequence, too nice for de Gier to match. Grijpstra’s success was upsetting de Gier who, long ago, had stopped banging his own cue on the floor as applause.

  De Gier was quiet too. He had, after smiling coldly at his guests, accused Ketchup and Karate of meddling. “You know we are retired. So why send us that fink?”

  “What fink, Sergeant?”

  “The little whippersnapper from St. Maarten,” de Gier said. “You two corrupt cops maintain a holiday house in the Caribbean. You met the despicable loudmouth Carl Ambagt in some bar. Blah blah and yackety-yack and then he pops up in our very own office. Trying to make us an offer we can’t refuse.”

  “Forty-year-old fink,” Grijpstra said. “Talks bullshit. Tits and ass on his necktie. Polished nails. Works out. Overwhelms in Spanish. Learned wheeling and dealing at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, of all towns. How the hell did you two dare to …”

  “Who?” Ketchup asked.

  “What?” Karate asked.

  That was when they started playing billiards. Karate, being even shorter than Ketchup, also being a guest, got the first shot. His white ball hit three sides, then nothing. Ketchup’s shot turned out badly too. De Gier, inspired by a jazz improvisation on Miles Davis’s “So What,” performed by a black pianist on the baby grand in the back of the café, slid gracefully around the billiard table. The balls clicked lightly, he overreached, he missed. Now, with Grijpstra in charge, the clicking kept on. Another point. Another point.

  The pianist paused. It was 12 A.M., time to go home, but the café filled up with quiet men. The men bowed toward the bar before sitting down. A lady behind the bar, statuesque and firmly shaped, polished glasses. The lady was dressed in red velvet, the neck of her gown was open down to well below the navel. Louis Armstrong blew “Basin Street Blu
es” out of a late model CD-playing juke box, activated by the pianist who had paused in his playing. Colored lights flashed while Louis Armstrong played complicated, yet fluent, trumpet phrases.

  “You,” Karate said, “want to know if we know a fellow. We know all kinds of fellows. This fellow wouldn’t by chance resemble the comic character, Tin Tin?”

  “Now that you mention it,” de Gier said. “Exactly. Tin Tin.”

  Grijpstra agreed. “Short-haired. Blond. Silly looking.”

  “Let me see now,” Ketchup said. “A native of Rotterdam? Lives with his aged father on an ocean going yacht, of a type known as a FEADship? With a motorized cream stirrer tied to her rear deck? We would not be discussing the Admiraal Rodney?”

  Grijpstra broke his self-imposed silence. He looked up. “That fellow.”

  “That fellow we don’t know,” Ketchup said.

  “But we do understand that you think that we think that that fellow is the one we referred to your office,” Karate said.

  “Because of our alleged state of corruption,” Ketchup said, “and because he made a criminal impression.”

  “Of the uncatchable type,” Karate said. “Because we are supposed to be hunting that type.”

  “But not catching,” Ketchup said, “because we, as new-modish law enforcers working pursuant to present police instructions, prefer to let them get away.”

  “Knowing,” Karate said, “that they will lead us to other criminal contacts.”

  “Who, once identified,” Ketchup said, “will lead us, yet again, to other criminal contacts.”

  “Who we won’t catch either,” Karate said, “knowing that, once again, they will bring us into contact with other criminals.”

  “Who we won’t …”

  Grijpstra interrupted his billiard series. “CUT THAT OUT!” he shouted, threatening his guests with his cue.

  “This former almost over-correct adjutant-detective, now an escapee from public service,” Ketchup said, speaking slowly, softly and articulately, and addressing Karate, “this finder of illegal treasure, and his fellow-escapee, who we once knew as a heroic detective-sergeant, think that we, as an exception to the rank and file of ex-colleagues, have swung down too far … as they call it …”

  “… so,” continued Karate, equally softly and articulately, “if suddenly a suspect client appears in their make-belief office, a fink in his forties who doesn’t want to tell who sent him, then …”

  “… we have to be the senders,” Ketchup said.

  “Bah,” said Grijpstra, who, missing his ball, almost tore the billiard table’s cloth. The lady behind the bar leaned in Grijpstra’s direction while looking at him through the glass that she had just polished. She had large, now almost completely visible, perfectly shaped breasts. The glass framed and enlarged her staring eye.

  Grijpstra, hit by the stare, stepped back. “Sorry, darling.”

  “Maybe you better sit down,” de Gier said, pulling up a chair.

  “You are real good at anything you deign to put your hand to,” Karate said Grijpstra. “Including billiards. Do you know that I truly admire you?”

  “If,” Ketchup said, “you hadn’t commanded us while you were still serving the public, Karate and I would have reached abject depths. You were our example. You have no idea how much we miss you. Except for Inspector Cardozo, all our present superiors are total assholes.”

  “I,” Karate said, “would call them brown paper bags filled with foul farts.”

  “You know what makes this worse,” Grijpstra said, flattered and annoyed, “is that Carl Ambagt does indeed resemble Tin Tin. I refused to see that. Nellie and I have the Tin Tin comics complete.”

  “How come you chose us?” de Gier asked. “The Yellow Pages are filled with detectives.”

  “Not with those who can do big things,” Karate told Grijpstra. “Only you can do that. And de Gier is so gutsy.”

  “The sergeant speaks big languages and pulls big punches,” Ketchup said.

  “But de Gier is a little too quick on the uptake,” Karate told Grijpstra, “while you, on the other hand, are nicely heavy, slow, old-fashioned, drag your feet splendidly.”

  “But you’re insistent,” Ketchup said.

  “Reasonable and solid,” Karate said.

  “You know how to push ahead,” Ketchup said.

  “And when,” Karate said.

  “An expert.”

  “And the commissaris backs you both.”

  “A pirated pumped-dry supertanker is too big for us.”

  “Me and Ketchup have neither fore- nor hindsight,” Karate said, “we’re only good in action.”

  “And we don’t mind helping out,” Ketchup said.

  “You say something, Rinus,” Grijpstra said.

  De Gier, watching the barlady’s breasts and listening, simultaneously, to Louis Armstrong’s version of “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” asked “What?”

  “Ketchup said we wouldn’t mind stepping in if required,” Karate said.

  “You know,” de Gier told Ketchup and Karate, “sometimes, while in my hammock among the weeds, I think about you two. I see you then as devilish henchmen, figures out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, disgusting worms with broken eggs for heads that ghostlike ants crawl from, black-winged bats rising from a smoking chimney, turds gone bad in a transparent pot being filled by a shackled boorish retard.”

  “No kidding?” Karate asked.

  “I thought we were just us.” Ketchup blushed. “You’re serious, sergeant? We’re creatures shaped by a genius like Bosch?”

  The lady brought drinks, beer for the corrupt constables, sodas for the retired detectives. She also brought cigars. Ketchup and Karate lit up, nonsmokers de Gier and Grijpstra, after some hesitation, lit up too. Everybody’s eyes slid along the lady’s cleavage. The lady, smiling dreamily, took her time biting off cigar ends with perfect teeth, striking long matches, offering flames, blowing out flames. The cleavage stayed poised. Grijpstra wondered how that could be for a cleavage is nothing, empty space, it does not exist. How can emptiness be poised?

  “You’re getting a cut,” de Gier said to the constables after the lady had moved to another table. Grijpstra now saw her back. The long gown was slit. She had smooth calves and her thighs flowed up gradually, creamy-white, untouched, virgin ladylike territory. That such beauty was allowed! Grijpstra thought.

  Ten percent commission on what de Gier and Grijpstra would collect was offered by Ambagt & Son Inc. to Ketchup and Karate. The constables admitted to it, why not? But once again de Gier had been too quick, too jumpy, grabbing hold of the first motivation that happened to pop up. Did de Gier really think that greed mattered here? Did Ketchup and Karate really need a hundred thousand dollars? For what? Money makes things serious so they had named a figure, but profit was not an issue here. They already owned everything. Their cottage on St. Maarten. Their apartment facing the Amstel River in Amsterdam. The car of all cars. A flat-bottomed sailboat on Holland’s Inland Sea. Two Harley Davidsons on St. Maarten. Even the evil of the situation did not, basically, interest these corrupt cops. Sometimes evil did matter, they admitted to that too—there was a fascination in trying to figure out just how bad things could get on a rapidly worsening planet. So, yes, there was money, and violence and whatever the shadowside offers but what mattered ul-ti-ma-te-ly was, Ketchup explained, what the commissaris always called the ‘joy of living fully’. If there was a possibility of doing a really good job here, within their own expertise, a challenge to their training, Karate explained, speaking clearly and without being interrupted by Ketchup—for the couple had invested in a good relationship together, so why spoil it—what really mattered was just to do a good job.

  “You are called Ketchup because you like to see blood,” de Gier said, “and you are called Karate because you like to split the enemy into two.”

  Ketchup said that this was just the surface, little things on the side, quirks and eddies; their tr
ue characters were pure.

  An example of what they liked to achieve? Very well. Take the barlady here for instance, take this facility where they happened to meet right now, billiard balls and jazz, a space filling up right now with quiet men. Here was an example of what Ketchup and Karate had helped to bring about.

  The lady, before she bought the bar, was—in her little house with the big show window in Long Street—happy. She lived alone. She craved solitude for she was autistic. She could not bear being touched but she did like sexual togetherness abstractly, give and take, at a distance.

  What did the autistic-but-sexy lady do? She undressed every evening in her living room, street level, no curtains. She undressed slowly, dreamily, in front of a Biedermeyer couch, covered with blue velvet, between palm trees in copper pots, against a backdrop of an empty off-white wall. No decorations on that wall for she herself was the decoration. She exhibited her own nude shape to quiet men, standing quietly in the Long Street outside.

  Grijpstra nodded his appreciation. “What kind of lighting?”

  “Two candles,” Karate said, “in giant brass holders.”

  “Church candles,” Ketchup said.

  De Gier watched the barlady. The barlady, leaning toward him, watched a horizon, well beyond the wall.

  “But she does notice you,” Karate said kindly.

  The café was filling up slowly, with old-fashioned gents and artistic types and young ones, some with shaven skulls, some with hair all over. The male audience bent down slowly, lips pursed, ready to sip syrupy ice-cold jenever from high-stemmed tulip shaped glasses, filled to the rim.

  “Taking off the head.” A Dutch solemn custom.

  The pianist played again, “Around Midnight” by Thelonious Monk, but 12 P.M. was long gone.

  “Great,” Grijpstra said.

  Yes indeed, the constables said, but the way the lady did it in her house in Long Street could no longer be tolerated, of course. Long Street filled up every night, with row upon row of quiet men. Traffic became a problem. Plain-looking neighbor women dropped flowerpots on the frozen figures below but the audience kept coming. Some men wore old-fashioned army helmets, decorated with the Dutch lion in bronze; others wore cooking pots with folded towels inside.