Just a Corpse at Twilight

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  "Always for a reason," Ishmael was saying. "Got to be the Lord who sent this woman. So here is Flash, marching along on the Boston boulevard, with a flask in his back pocket, in his Sunday whites, and there's Bigga, bouncing along, and divine design says they gotta meet, right, Krip?"

  Grijpstra nodded, wondering about the splashing against the windscreen. What was it, sea spray? Had to be spray, with the plane flying that low.

  "So Bigga wants the flask and Flash wants Bigga and divine design provides the side street and the alley off the side street and a garbage can in the alley, and Bigga puts Flash on the lid and sets herself down on him and . . ."

  Ishmael's two-tone whistle and the flat of his hand hitting his thigh rhythmically indicated their having sex.

  "Flash is a quiet man, but at that particular time and place Flash was yelling, and Bigga thought that it was she who caused this joyful agony, but it was the broken flask up Flash's ass." Ishmael sang:

  And all the Coast Guard's surgeons

  and all the Navy's men

  couldn't put Flash's rear end

  together again.

  Grijpstra wished he had never taken the English courses, never watched the American rentals. Full comprehension of Flash's anal problem turned his testicles to glass.

  He concentrated on the windscreen, with moisture splashing up, dribbling back to the hood. Ishmael had made the plane fly high again, at some five hundred feet, veering back to the coast. The weather was good: clear sky with thin cloud lines parallel to the horizon.

  "What's that fluid on the windscreen?" Grijpstra finally asked.

  Ishmael, still discussing the human necessity to make sense of things, even ofBigga on Boston Common, and the human refusal to allow for random occurrence, switched his window wipers on.

  "It isn't raining," Grijpstra said.

  The fluid was gasoline. Ishmael wasn't surprised. This had happened before. "You see, Kripstra, there's an old gas tank in the port wing and another in the starboard wing and the gas pump sucks in rust that clogs the tube to the engine and the pump keeps pumping so the tube bursts a bit."

  "So now the gas runs on top ofthe engine and not into the engine?" Grijpstra asked.

  The engine spluttered.

  Grijpstra reflected on whether ending equals beginning. Is death birth?

  "The engine's still trying." Ishmael checked the dashboard. "For a while." He patted his passenger's hand. "You're right, we don't want high-octane gasoline, the world's most popular explosive, run on top of a hot engine, do we, Krip?"

  "We do not," Grijpstra said.

  The hills ofJameson were in sight. So was the town itself, a crescent of pastel-colored Victorian mansions, with a second tier of more modest frame houses, mostly plain white, rectangular, for more regular folks. A few ofthe larger frame houses carried cupolas, little watchtowers, offering sea views. There were thin-spired churches. The bigger church showed the creator's giant eye on its front wall, sea blue, with long lashes, looking benevolently at the approaching airplane.

  Grijpstra only saw the hills with granite slopes, thinly overgrown by spruces, or just bare, glaring, harsh, waiting for the little plane to smash into them.

  "Jameson airstrip is on the other side ofthe hills there," Ishmael said, cutting the engine. "Can't make that, I think, not unless we want to catch fire. Let's aim for the critters, shall we?"

  The critters were sheep, running about nervously as the Tailorcraft, aimed at their meadow, lost height rapidly.

  The little plane was gliding quietly down, taking its time, giving Grijpstra a chance to check out the harbor, where Jameson's small fleet of lobster vessels had attached themselves to moorings, between ledges dotted with sea gulls and cormorants. Grijpstra saw a string of islands, one squidshaped, with a short body and numerous tentacles of dotted rock lines fanning outward. A peninsula reached into the sea from Jameson, bending toward the islands, of which the first, semi-attached with a bar of glistening wet sand and ledge, was clearly visible through what could be some ten feet of pale green water. He saw shoals of shiny fish, and cormorants, wings stretched, twisting and diving in pursuit.

  Grijpstra took in the beauty of the scene below, in spite of, or perhaps because of, being scared, the fear that sharpens perception.

  The plane landed, hopping about on clumps of grass, following the galloping sheep, twisting and turning.

  "It'll be your foot on the brake again," Ishmael said.

  Grijpstra pulled back his legs. The Tailorcraft, about to fall over, righted itself neatly.

  A large four-wheel drive came trundling up a dirt road, blue lights quietly flashing, then stopped at the fence. The vehicle was marked SHERIFF. Hairy Harry jumped out nimbly. The sheep's leader, a mighty ram with curled horns, left his flock to confront the intruder. The sheriff, turning back from replacing the field's wooden gate, put his hand on his gun.

  Ishmael came running. "Now, now," Ishmael said, maneuvering between beast and man, "none ofthat, Harry."

  The sheriff put the revolver away. "Rams scare me, Ishy." He spoke in a high childlike voice that matched his hairless head. A naked head, Grijpstra thought. Hairy Harry was still explaining. "We had a ram on the farm. I'd have to take a jug ofcold coffee out to my dad and the ram would run me down. I'd spill the coffee, my dad would beat on me." Hairy Harry smiled widely, showing good teeth, which he shouldn't have, Grijpstra thought, being that hairless and babylike. "You hear what I'm trying to tell you, Ishy?"

  "I hear you," Ishmael said, scratching the ram between his horns. "It's okay now, Harry."

  The sheriffkept his smile. "Saw you both come tootlin' down, thought I'd check you out, Ishy." Harry pushed up the rim ofa new-looking straw hat. "Was expecting you two in a way. Tad of trouble?"

  Ishmael mentioned rusty gas tubes and a persistent fuel pump. He walked the ram back to his sheep. "Sorry about using the common. This here is Kripstra, Sheriff."

  "Let's see what we have here," the sheriff said after shaking hands. "Wouldn't be bringing in anything from away, would we? Anything we wouldn't need here? Mind if I frisk you? Could you turn around, sir?"

  Grijpstra was patted down and asked to produce the contents of his pockets. The sheriff checked the wallet, studying an ID card with a photograph and the red, white, and blue colors of the Dutch flag. "Detective?"

  "Private," Grijpstra said.

  "Mr. Marlowe," Hairy Harry said, "Mr. Foreign Mar-lowe. You read Chandler, Krip? I'm a Charles Willeford man myself but Willeford's guy is a cop. Always wanted to meet with a private eye, though. Not too many of your kind around here, Krip." He pulled a thousand-guilder note from Grijpstra's wallet. "How much in dollars?"

  "Five hundred," Grijpstra said, "maybe a little over now."

  The sheriff counted the wad. "Twenty-two thousand guilders makes eleven thousand dollars?"

  "Right," Grijpstra said.

  "You carrying that much cash for a reason?"

  "For the trip," Grijpstra said. "It came up in a hurry. I thought I might need some."

  Hairy Harry returned the wallet. "That'll be all for now, sir. You'd have a purpose for your visit? Business? Pleasure?"

  Ishmael frowned. "You'd know that, Harry, from listening in on the open CB channel. You knew Rinus asked me to pick up a friend at Logan Airport. This is a free country, Harry."

  "Oh yes." Harry held his smile, keeping his message serious in its wording only. "Free not to bother well-meaning local folks going about their customary business, is that what you mean?"

  A jeep pulled up at the other side of the sheep fence and a uniformed deputy got out—a younger man, tall, military looking. The deputy saluted the sheriff and nodded at Ishmael.

  "This is Kripstra, Deputy Billy Boy," Ishmael said.

  "How're you doing, Kripstra." There was no question mark.

  Grijpstra said he was doing good anyway. Nice place, this Jameson.

  While Billy helped the sheriffto check the airplane and Ishmael's and Grijpstra's bags, G
rijpstra walked over to the Bronco. He was admiring the car's steel running boards when the sheriffjoined him.

  "Like 'em, Kripstra?"

  Grijpstra said he certainly did, he would like to equip his own Ford with running boards like that.

  "You drive an American vehicle, Kripstra?"

  Grijpstra said he did.

  "They still have American vehicles over in Europe? Between them Toyotas and such?"

  They sure had.

  Grijpstra became enthusiastic. He told Hairy Harry that Holland had been liberated by Americans and Canadians and the British. Poles too, a Polish regiment came from England. But it was the Americans who impressed young Grijpstra, standing on Dam Square in Amsterdam, clutching his mother's hand.

  "Those are Yanks, HenkieLuwie."

  The Yanks were in a tank looking down, chewing gum, grinning at little Grijpstra, who was waving his piece of orange cloth attached to a dowel—orange stood for the House of Orange, for the queen, for goodness, for the loving mother who'd come back to her country to rule it in peace, thanks to Yanks chewing gum in tank turrets.

  "So you're all still white Protestants out there in liberated Holland," said Billy, "and now you're joining your pal Rinus on Squid Island. What would that be for?"

  "To watch nature," Grijpstra said.

  "No kidding?"

  "Holland's getting too full," Grijpstra said. He told the sheriff and deputy what Katrien had been telling him, last time he called on the ailing commissaris to pay his respects. Katrien quoted recently published statistics. "Nine hundred Dutchmen to the square mile, nine hundred pigs to the same square mile, twenty-three cows to the same square mile, twenty-three cars to the same square mile."

  "How big a country are we talking about, Kripstra?"

  Grijpstra was still working on how much three hundred kilometers times a hundred kilometers, less allowing for a skinny waist and one southern leg reaching down, would come to in United States measurements when Ish-mael helped out. Holland, said Ishmael, which he hadn't believed was there—who could believe Squid Island's Rinus?—had turned up in Ishmael's encyclopaedia and was half the size of Maine. The sixteen million Dutchmen were also likely to exist. Ishmael's old Encyclopaedia Britannica only listed five million of the creatures, but that was in 1890 and didn't the human affliction keep multiplying all the time thanks to medical science? And sixteen million Dutchmen spread out in half the state of Maine, why, that would equal out at around nine hundred a square mile, as the man was saying. "That's a lot of crawling around in a space the size of Jameson, don't you reckon?"

  The sheriff said he liked people fine but people tended to exaggerate at times. He said Billy Boy was a great man for numbers. Hairy Harry asked Billy Boy to confirm Ishmael's statement.

  "That could be right, Hairy Harry."

  "How many of us in Maine now, Billy Boy?"

  "About a million, Hairy Harry."

  "Sixteen million customers," the sheriffsaid, "crawling all over each other, and you were in the police a good while, tending to their crawling, isn't that right, Kripstra?"

  Grijpstra said he had had that pleasure until two years ago.

  "And now you're watching nature, you and the other retiree cop? What else'd you be watching?"

  "Just nature," Grijpstra said.

  Hairy Harry apologized for any inconvenience he might have caused. He leaned out of his car window.

  "Good watching, Krip. We'll be watching your watching."

  Chapter 5

  Billy drove Ishmael and Grijpstra to Beth's Diner for a late breakfast. It was ten o'clock by then, but Billy Boy and Ishmael said that, as the lobster boats were coming in from early-morning trap lifting, the restaurant would be jumping. Grijpstra remembered his lack of dollars.

  "Rinus will have some," Ishmael said, "you could call him."

  "No phone on Squid Island," Grijpstra said.

  Billy Boy pulled a microphone from under the jeep's dashboard. "This is America, Krip. Everything works." He pushed the microphone's button. "Squid Island, this is your sheriff. Come in, Rinus."

  The radio produced a little static.

  "Must be out of the house," Ishmael said, "or he could be coming into town on the Kathy Three." Billy Boy pushed his button. "Kathy Three, this is your sheriff, come in, Kathy Three."

  The radio produced more static.

  "Flash and Bad George don't worry much," Ishmael said. "They're also hard of hearing. Their diesel might be thumping too."

  Grijpstra moaned.

  "You hungry?"

  Grijpstra had gained weight since leaving the force. He now liked to keep it up, to project an image of the heavy detective, the man of substance. Nellie helped: her cooking was designed to keep her men stout.

  "De Gier could be in the diner," Ishmael said. "If he isn't, he might be coming."

  Grijpstra noticed Akiapola'au after he'd eaten the stacked pancakes with whipped butter, the home tries with parsley, the extra large eggs over easy, the little steak to the side with the choice ofsauces, the pumpernickel toast, the fresh orange juice.

  "More coffee?"

  "Oh yes, miss."

  "I'm Akiapola'au, you can call me Aki."

  Aki said she was from Hawaii, the big island, Kona Coast. Had he ever been there, seen the volcano boil and the little finches eat dead flesh?

  Grijpstra burped politely behind his hand, saying, "Excuse me." He hadn't been to Hawaii, or anywhere really, he'd only been to Antwerp to eat mussels. Antwerp was just down the street from Holland, in Belgium, a few hours' drive, well worth the effort to eat mussels, but he wouldn't care to go further, and he wouldn't be here in America on the other side of the globe if his good friend Rinus hadn't insisted—so now where was Rinus?

  Grijpstra liked talking to Aki, who seemed fascinated by his accent. She was tall and lovely, exotic, black hair down to wide shoulders, doe-eyed, dressed in silk under her little apron—a tight skirt cut up along the thighs so that she could move around easily, her blouse low cut. "Nicely stacked," Grijpstra thought.

  "We've got mussels here," Aki said. "The locals think they're trash food, but they're good. My Beth could steam some."

  "Your Beth," Grijpstra said.

  Aki smiled. "Beth and I are a couple. She steams mussels with jalapeiios—my own crop, I grow them in planters."

  She had to go, there were mouths to feed, bearded mouths of bulky rough-looking men in yellow plastic coats, tall boots, turtleneck sweaters, flat hats with black braid on the visors.

  "It's cold on the water," Ishmael said, "always some ten degrees below what it is here on land, twenty at times. And it gets chilly on land; there's no Gulf Stream here like you have in Europe."

  "So Rinus sent you to pick me up in Boston?" Grijpstra asked.

  Ishmael smiled. "You didn't know, Detective?"

  Grijpstra sipped coffee.

  "A plane out of Woodcock County, Maine?" Ishmael asked. "Lots of counties in Maine." Ishmael squinted. "A coincidence? Me piddling next to you in an empty airport? Lots of restrooms in Logan Airport. Two coincidences too many maybe, Detective?"

  Grijpstra smiled, to show appreciation of Ishmael's humor. "So you do fly at night. You'd just arrived at Logan in the dark. You needed some time to rest. Is that why we waited?"

  "You knew or you didn't?" Ishmael said.

  "So how do I get to Squid Island?" Grijpstra asked. "You can't fly me there, and the Kathy Three isn't responding. Shall I row?"

  "You could get Aki to drive you to the Point," Ishmael said. "There'll be dories there, but you've got to watch out for the tide. It's low now, and low tide tends to pull you out to the ocean."

  Ishmael had to tend to his airplane. "Don't get stuck on the sand flats, Kripstra." Ishmael put money on the check that Aki had left on the table, shook hands with Grijpstra, said they'd meet again. "Enjoy your stay, Krip. Take care."

  Grijpstra didn't get that. Too much was happening. There was Jameson Harbor outside, apparently known as 'the Point,' whe
re rowboats were kept and where Ishmael seemed to live. Grijpstra got up and looked out ofa window. The harbor didn't appear pointed at all. And it was close. Why would Aki have to drive him to a nearby harbor? There were fishing boats tugging at their moorings and a good-size new-looking yacht, similar to the other expensive sailboat with the divine captain and his timeless crew that Grijpstra had seen from Ishmael's airplane. This yacht was tied down with a frayed-looking anchor cable that was yanking her sleek bow down sharply. Grijpstra read the yacht's name on the stern, in elegant white italics on varnished teak: Macho Bandido, He also saw a row of dories, obviously used to row fishermen to their boats. The dories were tied up to the quayside. He could maybe borrow one. He looked at the garland of islands at the end of the bay beyond the harbor. The tide would be out, baring sand banks that he could see stretching out behind markers. Squid Island must be beyond the sand banks. If his rowboat got stuck he would have to wait for high tide to come in and float him and then he'd have to row against the tide. Better be careful now. Wind direction? He checked the way the waves were rolling. Away from the harbor. Very nice. No big deal. Up. And away.

  Aki came by to pick up Ishmaers money. "More coffee, dear?"

  He watched the slender hand tipping the pot. He thanked Aki.

  Now, Grijpstra thought, there was a given set of circumstances here, and there was his intelligent self, and there had to be a way his intelligent self could manipulate those circumstances optimally. De Gier should be here to help but de Gier's absence, alas, proved his assholery. Grijpstra didn't want to think that way about a fellow musician he played "Endless Blues" with, practicing what had been called, by a slumming journalist writing about amateur jazz, a "loose irresistible shuffle beat," he didn't want to classify a colleague as such, a brother policeman he had shared a working lifetime with, twenty years of watching the city of Amsterdam getting steadily worse, from an unmarked rustbucket Volkswagen mostly, with no springs, ever-steamed-up windows and a radio that crackled in between directing its hapless crew to scenes of domestic violence: "Did your husband beat you, ma'am? "No, I fell." "Did your wife blacken your eye, sir?" "No, it's always black." "So who phoned for assistance, ma'am?" "The goddamn neighbors."