The Perfidious Parrot

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  The ugly neighbor ladies phoned the police.

  The lady, questioned by Constables First Class Ketchup and Karate—saluting politely and excusing their intrusion—promised to install curtains. She did, but the problem persisted for the curtains were transparent. The performance, vaguer now, became more interesting to the quiet men outside.

  “Obscuring sometimes intensifies,” de Gier said.

  Sure, and the improved performance caused more trouble. Gridlock became complete. The neighbor women dropped bigger pots.

  They kept phoning the police.

  A solution was searched for. As the commissaris often said, the constables knew that solutions are formed by fitting problems into each other. Find the perfect fit. There was this empty billiard café that could, any moment now, be invaded by squatters.

  “You bought this café?” de Gier asked.

  Just for a moment, the constables said. They bought it at the time to help out an aged and retiring owner who wanted to enter a home serving the special food he craved. No regular fare. Extras cost money. Indonesian food, red hot sambal, grilled pork on wooden sticks, noodle soup, sushi, no porridge if you please, no kale, hold the mashed potatoes.

  “You profited by selling the old gourmet’s café to the undressing lady?” Grijpstra asked.

  Who cares for profit? the constables asked rhetorically, although they were pleased to note that the lady had not been poor.

  “She is now?” de Gier asked.

  She was making up the difference, and her outlay of capital bought her considerable pleasure. The lady now performed in her own business, for a paying audience, and had good living quarters upstairs.

  “Is she going to step out of that dress soon?” Grijpstra asked.

  She would step out of everything. Karate pointed to a balcony under which the pianist now played “Stella by Starlight.” The stripping lady’s bedroom was behind the balcony. She would climb the stairs soon, slowly, and take her time on the little balcony.

  The silent men tensed. The pianist played Monk’s “Goodbye.” The audience got up quietly and arranged its chairs into two parallel crescents. The men looked up quietly at the still empty balcony. The barlady sleepwalked graciously, across the café, up the stairs. The pianist kept playing. A long Goodbye.

  “Deep Goodbye,” Karate said.

  The constables whispered proudly, while the lady stepped out of her slip dreamily, absentmindedly rolled down her stockings—knowing that she was alone—turned and bent her beautiful body, caressed her breasts and thighs, and, finally, slowly, ever so slowly, retreated into her boudoir … no, she had forgotten something, what could it be? Had she forgotten what she had forgotten? Oh well, gracefully she turned—while the silent men sighed their thanks—kept turning, slipped into her boudoir.

  The empty balcony was dark.

  There was no applause for this was not a real happening—she didn’t know they were there, they didn’t really know they were there either.

  “So didn’t we combine this nicely?” Karate asked. “Empty café at Run Alley, illegal undressing at Long Street?”

  “And now, once again, we prove our skill at combining,” Ketchup said.

  “A ghost tanker pirated between Caribbean islands,” Karate said.

  “Two unemployed super detection agents,” Ketchup said.

  “Goodbye,” breathed the pianist into his microphone.

  The silent men left the café quietly.

  Grijpstra left too much money on the table and joined the silent men. De Gier got up too.

  “So you’re going to do this?” Karate asked.

  De Gier laughed. “Never.”

  4

  ASSAULTED BY SKELETONS

  The early morning was beautifully clear. Just an hour before sunrise de Gier strode down Run Alley, turned into Skin Alley, turned left onto Singel Canal’s eastern quay and aimed for Stulp Church and ancient Hekel Veld—Torture Field surrounding Stulp Church—that venerable God-serving building.

  Grijpstra had taken off without waiting for de Gier in his gleaming new Full Size Fourwheel drive. U.S. made. Airbags. Tax deductible driving cost: 77 cents per kilometer. Eight cylinders. “Get in, win the war,” the salesman said proudly. “Superpower, sir. Makes the little guys run.”

  “Whose side are you on?” said the commissaris, who had come along to watch Grijpstra spend big money.

  The salesman wasn’t sure. Depressed by the Nearing End he himself rode a bike now. He admired clients like daredevil Grijpstra, polluting the country, clogging narrow streets, being out for Self only. “Drive this monster away, sir. Ignore silly cyclists.”

  De Gier wondered if he had offended Grijpstra. Was Grijpstra eager to give in now? Was he, de Gier, playing spoilsport? But what about their wondrous plan of never ever working, growing noxious weeds, enjoying anarchy, playing atonal jazz, and ignoring a terminally dark life by reading weird shit?

  Outcast de Gier felt lonely, depressed.

  A lugubrious atmosphere pervaded the dark mouths of quiet alleys. Nobody but bad folks, crazy people—freaks would be about in the inner city.

  It’s a good thing I am out of this, de Gier thought. That was all he aimed for, outness. Banished to the loft, between his potted alien nipplewort and hairy lettuce. Refusing to be part of anything. Avoiding the pain of belonging.

  What, de Gier thought, can happen to what isn’t?

  Karate and Ketchup passed him at speed, cheering the lone pedestrian from their Dodge Viper GTS, eight liter, ten cylinder, 450 PK. The red convertible, as it came from an unexplainable source, was known as the “Wondrous Wagon.” The constables touched their noses with their thumbs and wiggled their pinkies.

  Definitely on the outs—left behind by his final friend, made fun of by perverts—de Gier felt threatened.

  Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to call up the spirit of Hieronymus Bosch. Bosch pictures were magical. Invoking Bosch might mean doom and damnation.

  Doom and damnation started with a slow zuffing sound emerging from Hell Alley. The alley’s shadows moved closer. Like in Bosch’s pictures, horror was built up from known, harmless parts. The vacuum cleaner-like zuffing made de Gier look up. Anyone cleaning house at two in the morning? No, but it was okay, the sound came from a slowly approaching moped. What could possibly be wrong with a moped-riding lady, or a dog in a basket on the luggage carrier of said moped? Well, certainly, it was rather odd that both woman and mongrel wore identical straw hats, decorated with gaudy felt flowers. Realistically wilting felt flowers. The woman’s face was painted white, with a big red mouth that made sucking noises. She stopped and got off the moped. “Coming along, dearie?”

  The dog’s body was skin on bones. Its slavering head was pure hyena. It growled and drooled. The moped lady suggested discount oral sex.

  “No, thank you.”

  “I didn’t really want to do it anyway,” the woman shrieked, astride her moped again. The dog stared at de Gier in consternation. Did de Gier know what exquisite pleasures he was missing?

  The moped, whose rear light, between the trees lining the quay in the before-sunrise darkness, gleamed correctly, had covered a block before de Gier could move again.

  He shouldn’t have smoked the cigar offered by the stripping lady. He hadn’t smoked for a while and the burst of raw nicotine must have hit him square in the stomach. The sound of softly splashing waves made de Gier nauseous. How could the canal splash when there was no wind? De Gier stepped between parked cars, held on to a tree and bent down to the water. What was going on here? A swan pulled her sinuous neck from her wings. Swan and de Gier saw the cause of the splashing simultaneously. In the midst of the canal a rowboat moved in a furious circle, making waves.

  “Hello?” de Gier called.

  The rowboat stopped circling and approached him, rear end first. The rower, cursing himself rhythmically, pushed his oars. The reversing rowboat closed in on swan and de Gier.

  “ ‘Hello’ what, if yo
u please?” The thin man wore a threadbare dufflecoat. Its hood had been pulled halfway down the rower’s face. A sharp chin and an oversized equally sharp nose stuck out of the gap between hood and collar.

  “Why are you cursing yourself?” de Gier asked.

  The rower seemed to expect that question. “My meditations have maddened me, sir.”

  “You are a monk?” de Gier asked.

  The monkish snout pointed at a heavy book, bound in yellow plastic, that contrasted with the tarred wood of the boat. The boatman’s voice sounded flat, like that of a teacher holding forth in a dark room on a sunny afternoon while the class waits for the bell. “Praying doesn’t help, I move in circles.” The fox-like face looked frightened. The rower pulled in his oars. “My solution is to damn the self rather than pray to the non-self.” The monk folded his hands while his head bent back. “Damn me, by God.”

  The night-rower crossed himself, taking his time, while repeating the curse.

  The rower said that he was a linguist, had earned a Ph.D. in Netherlandic Language and Literature, before joining his order. He claimed to be the first to understand Holland’s most popular and forceful curse, the Dutch self-malediction. God damn me. God verdom me. His thesis had been titled “Of the Mystic Qualities of Netherlandic Cursing.” Once again the Low Countries proved their superiority. There had been windmill and dikes, the invention of book printing, the microscope, euthanasia, and now there was true insight into a superior, so far not essentially understood, linguistic habit of damning the guilty self. That’s right, the ego. The British/American god-damnit was the curse of denial, of trying to blame some unnamed third party for the suffering of living. German Gottverdammt showed even more ignorance, aggravated by fear. Germans wouldn’t even mention the source of their pain, that, by intoning the destructive mantra, they were trying to get rid of. “It’s me that did it,” the monk said solemnly, “it’s me that I want damned deep into hell, not it, not the other.”

  The swan flew off, flapping its angel’s wings in loud protest.

  “Fly back to heaven, Angel,” the monk shouted sadly. “You are guiltless. I am not. I have to curse my way out. You enter through the front gate. I’ll sneak in through the servant’s entrance.”

  He pushed his oars into their locks, waved at the fleeing bird, started up his cursing again and rowed off at speed.

  A vision?

  Had the lady stripper drugged him? De Gier remembered the rowing monk from a Hieronymus Bosch triptych. The left panel shows a heavenly scene. On top, a barefoot God wears a dress, below demons crawl around a pool. A floating monkish figure reads a book.

  De Gier strode onward.

  Triptych. Three confrontations with the subconscious threefold?

  Panel 1: Whorish moped woman and hellhound. Panel 2: Self-cursing monk. Panel 3: Deadly skeleton dance.

  The members of the gang of muggers that attacked de Gier a few minutes later wore dark sweatsuits painted with white day-glow skeletons. The battle resembled a Japanese ? movie where the white hero (de Gier wore a cream-colored sports jacket) is assaulted by bad guys in black. White uses special throws that makes Black keel over like ninepins. De Gier obliged, moving nimbly like the athlete he was, kicking and punching, using shoulder throws, even successfully trying out the complicated turn-throw (opponent’s left arm grabbed by defendant’s right hand), somersaulted sideways, but in the end Truth beat Fancy. The tallest and biggest skeleton retreated ten yards, then rushed, butting de Gier’s chest with its hard-plastic death head. De Gier staggered, spread his arms, slumped over backwards.

  Torture Field’s cobblestones opened into a bottomless hole. The vanquished hero fell, kept falling, fainted.

  5

  AN OLD MAN ABOUT TO LEAVE

  Grijpstra and Inspector Simon Cardozo observed de Gier eating his hot oatmeal porridge, carefully spooning the gray paste from the edge of his bowl. The raisins, banished to the center, he kept for later.

  “You in pain?” Grijpstra asked.

  “Never,” a nurse in spotless whites, by the name of Sayukta, formerly of the Dutch colony of Surinam, a brown-skinned woman with roots in India, said sweetly. “Your friend is full of opium and belladonna. He’s doing just fine.”

  De Gier saw Sayukta double: a gracious golden twin who caressed him with four hands and smiled at him with two full-lipped mouths. A comforting hallucination? With the compliments of Bosch?

  “Your patient is not my friend,” Grijpstra said.

  “Yours maybe?” the nurse asked Inspector Cardozo.

  “Certainly not, Nurse,” the inspector said gruffly, annoyed by the way she pronounced the word “friend.”

  “Because he is so handsome,” Sayukta said. “Quite rare in straight men, such beauty. No wedding ring either. So I was thinking …”

  “All yours,” Grijpstra said gruffly.

  He and the inspector would have made real-guy jokes if de Gier’s roommate, behind a screen, hadn’t been harrumphing in a frightening manner. De Gier’s visitors pointed at the screen and wiggled their eyebrows. De Gier mimicked too, relaxing his jaw and neck muscles so that his head hung sideways, drooling.

  “Acchch,” Grijpstra said compassionately.

  Cardozo, who didn’t like death, sighed deeply.

  “My ribs are broken,” de Gier said peevishly.

  “Maybe cracked a little,” Grijpstra said.

  “Happens all the time,” Cardozo said. “You’re aging now. Bones get brittle.”

  “You wouldn’t even be here,” Grijpstra said, “if Cardozo hadn’t flashed his police card at the paramedics.”

  Inspector Cardozo, youngish looking under a load of wild curls above a corduroy suit in need of dry-cleaning, said that de Gier’s ribs might be a trifle damaged but were certainly not broken. Ketchup and Karate, by chance, happened to be driving past Stulp Church and had noticed a mugging/manslaughter in progress. Their timely interference had saved de Gier’s life.

  “Ketchup and Karate?” de Gier asked, mildly interested in spite of the injected opiate. “They made an arrest?”

  “The bad boys had run off,” Grijpstra said. “You had lost consciousness. First things first.”

  “Ketchup reported they had seen you at Singel Canal,” Cardozo said, “and then later, near Torture Field they noticed the Skeleton Gang hanging out. Two-thirty in the morning, nobody about but their ex-sergeant and dressed up bad boys. K&K went home but came back again, once they considered what might have happened.”

  “Back in the car, back to the inner city,” Grijpstra said. “They checked out the alleys and sure enough, there you were being clobbered. What did you do to those poor skeleton fellows? Annoy them in some way?”

  “Showing off again?” Cardozo asked.

  “Good thing you had some back-up.” Grijpstra smiled.

  De Gier started on his residue of raisins.

  Inspector Cardozo listed more reasons as to why K&K had not made an arrest. They weren’t on duty. Their private car was not connected to police communications. De Gier seemed to be in need of medical attention. The Skeleton Gang had a reputation for violence. To go after them would have taken energy and time.

  Grijpstra also reported that the yacht mentioned by their prospective client, young Ambagt, did appear to exist. Water Police constables saw the Admiraal Rodney moored at a quay near Grass Road Complex on the Northern side of Amsterdam harbor. There was even a telephone number that Grijpstra found through Information. Grijpstra called it. He was put through to Carl who promised to pick up Grijpstra and Inspector Cardozo by sloop at Dry Dock Point opposite the Central Railway Station. Grijpstra checked his watch. “Right now. We’re late. See you,” he told de Gier. “Get better. You may be needed.”

  De Gier gave his empty porridge bowl to Sayukta. The nurse left the room. “I thought,” de Gier said, “that Detection G&G had refused the job, Henk.”

  Grijpstra shrugged. “Sure. But I thought I’d just take a look at the vessel. Curiosity. We are det
ectives.”

  “Will we let those bastards force us?” de Gier asked.

  Grijpstra stood quietly in the open door.

  De Gier touched the bandage covering his chest. “You think this scares me?”

  “There is a draft,” the dying man wheezed from behind his screen. “Mind closing the door, gents?”

  Grijpstra disappeared. The door clicked behind Cardozo’s back.

  “They’re gone, sir,” de Gier said.

  “Gone is good,” the dying man said. “I’ll be gone too. The euthanasiasts will be helping out soon. Won’t that be something?” He laughed weakly.

  “You don’t mind?” de Gier asked.

  The dying man sighed contentedly.

  “Aren’t you getting any porridge?”

  “No more porridge,” the dying man said contentedly, “ever.” He giggled.

  “Want to watch TV?”

  “No more TV,” the dying man said contentedly. “TV used to be okay sometimes but now with all the advertising.… First they describe Babywipes and then the next spot sells chocolate. And they expect you to keep watching?”

  “Your family?”

  The dying man grunted happily.

  “Is your family coming to see you?”

  “No more family ever,” the dying man said contentedly. “Would you mind calling the exotic lady?” He giggled. “Nice nurse?”

  De Gier pressed his red buzzer.

  “Ain’t she something?” the dying man asked after Sayukta had come and gone. “I didn’t need to spit, you know, I was pretending. I wanted to feel her arm around my neck again.”

  Constable First Class Karate, impeccably uniformed, carrying a plastic report file, entered the room smartly. “Everything hunkydory, sergeant?”

  Rage made de Gier speechless.

  Karate, his back perfectly upright, his legs parade-parallel, sat on the straight plastic chair. “Ketchup and I did save your life. You could maybe be grateful?”