Hard Rain

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  "And you never got back on her lap?"

  "No. It got worse from then on. You have no idea what Willem would do. Later, when I got good at gymnastics, there was a girl we both liked. I would do my best to impress her. Willem never bothered about gymnastics. There was an exhibition, and just before it was my turn, he tripped me on the stairs. I hurt my ankle and had to drop out."

  "Willem got the girl?"

  "He took her to the party," the commissaris said. "It took me forever to find out how truly evil Willem was. I always excused him. He would come over to the house, we'd play together, we studied too—or rather, I'd study and he'd copy my notes, or borrow them and never give them back. And then, at law school, we shared a holiday in Paris. Willem had a car by then."

  "Another love story?" the commissaris's wife asked. "You lost again? You got me, you know. I didn't really like Willem. I was very pleased you seduced me when we went out sailing that day, in his brother Ernst's boat."

  "Katrien," the commissaris said softly, "will you admit it now? You wanted Ernst Fernandus. Go on, let's have it out at last. That was thirty-five years ago. You can be honest, we're all old dodderers by now."

  "Maybe," his wife said. "It was such a lovely day and Willem had been rude again and you asked me to your room afterward and I knew I shouldn't go, but you said it was just for coffee, and then it was kind of stuffy in your room and you said there was no need to be overdressed."

  "Ernst looked like Tarzan," the commissaris said. "Tarzan with a golden beard. He'd had his first poetry published by then. He owned that wonderful sailboat. Ernst was everything a romantic girl could wish for. Every time he looked at you, you squeaked."

  She took his hand. "I squeaked a lot in those days. I was a silly girl. You know who got Ernst that night? Fleur. Willem went home by himself, on two wheels in his stupid car. Wasn't he pathetic? And you got me. It was the first time for me. Now tell me what happened in Paris."

  "Yes," the commissaris said, "maybe I won that time. And maybe I won in Paris, too, but that's a bad tale. You sure you want to hear it?"

  She squeezed his hand. "Yes. Keep talking, Jan, the plane is going down, I never like it when airplanes land."

  "We went dancing on the Champs Elysees," the commissaris said, "and I met a girl. Jacqueline, she was called. A pretty girl. Her father had a small grocery in the Fourteenth District. I wrote her phone number down, intending to call her the next day—she was going to show me a museum, I think—but when I woke up in the hotel, Willem had taken the piece of paper from my jacket. He wasn't there. He had phoned her, saying I was unwell, and taken her for a ride in the Bois de Boulogne. A motorcar was very special in those days. I didn't see much of Willem for the rest of the week, because he kept taking Jacqueline out. It turned out that she was rather old-fashioned and he couldn't get close to her unless he met her parents. Then she still wouldn't give in, so Willem said he'd marry her."

  "Are we about to land now?" his wife asked.

  "Not yet."

  "Tell me when I can open my eyes."

  "Willem got her pregnant," the commissaris said. "He lost interest at once. That was about a year later. Before then Willem kept driving up and down to Paris. Jacqueline was really a rather lovely girl. He brought her up to Amsterdam a few times, to impress all of us —and to annoy me, of course."

  "Are we landing?"

  "Now," the commissaris said. "Open your eyes. We're safe. Do you want to hear the rest of it?"

  "So Willem has a child in Paris?"

  "He killed it."

  "An abortion?"

  "Much worse," the commissaris said. "He tried to kill Jacqueline. We had become philosophers by then, and Willem was reading Nietzsche. I didn't care too much for Nietzsche, but even so, the man made some good points. I won't bore you with the argument, but Willem and I somehow agreed that all morals were nonsense. Morals were merely rehashed tribal laws, and enlightened souls such as ourselves didn't have to bother with good and evil. We could do as we liked. I agreed in theory—maybe I still do—but I insisted that we should never hurt others."

  "You've hurt me many times, Jan."

  He patted her shoulder. "Yes, but that was in spite of my good intentions. I didn't put rat poison in your porridge because I'd made you pregnant, did I, now?"

  "Oh, Jan, did WHIem do that to the poor girl?"

  "He certainly did," the commissaris said, waiting for impatient passengers to file out of the plane. "And mostly to prove a point. You see what I'm getting at?"

  "No, Jan. Shouldn't we get out?"

  They walked through the airport's main building, arm in arm, a small, dapper old man with a slight limp, and a tall, silver-haired, dignified woman. "Katrien," the commissaris said, "don't you see? Willem wanted to show me how ruthless he was. He set me up. We were playing snooker one evening in the university café and he told me that Jacqueline would die that very night and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Willem had done his homework for once. A medical student gave him literature on arsenic. Jacqueline was the only member of her family who liked to eat porridge. Willem put the rat poison in a container she kept in the kitchen. He was supposed to be the future son-in-law and was free to wander about her parents' house. They trusted him; they didn't know their daughter was pregnant. Then Jacqueline got ill."

  "Willem intended her to-lose the baby?"

  "He intended her to die, Katrien."

  "Did she?"

  "No. I took the train to Paris that same night and found Jacqueline in very poor shape indeed. The family doctor didn't know what was wrong. The poor girl was dying by then. I told the doctor about the poison. She was rushed to the hospital and her stomach was pumped. She lost the baby but regained her health."

  "And the police?"

  "I was questioned," the commissaris said. "They wrote to Willem and ordered him to visit them, but he never did. There was no proof. The police had a weak case."

  They were waiting for the luggage. "So you won, Jan."

  "Yes," the commissaris said, "and I broke with Willem. From then on, I only saw him during class. Willem didn't go to too many lectures, but we graduated at the same time."

  "There are our bags," his wife said. "You missed them."

  "They'll come around again."

  "Did Willem graduate cum laude too?"

  "No," the commissaris said, "but he became an attorney, and in due course replaced his father as president and main shareholder of the Banque du Credit. He set up that Society for Help Abroad, which exploits illegal gambling clubs and drug joints for the young."

  "And keeps the profits," the commissaris's wife said. "I read that long magazine article to you about the Society. The gambling clubs are brothels, too. The journalist said he could prove that. Why don't you close the Society down?"

  The commissaris grabbed the bags. "I can't. Willem operates in a hole in the law. Nonprofit societies are protected. It's not my department, either. His bank is bad, too, and again outside my reach."

  "Fleur has a half-brother," his wife said. "Bart. We met Bart once. Baron Bart de la Faille. Maybe he has shares too."

  "All I remember is a little boy," the commissaris said, "a spoiled little brat, a late child by old de la Faille's second wife. She died of cancer. Watch the luggage, please, I'll go and find a cart."

  "And young IJsbreker must have had some shares," his wife said when he came back, "and he's dead." She walked ahead of her cart-pushing husband and called a cab. "Through the park, please," the commissaris told the driver.

  "Could you drive slowly?" the commissaris's wife asked. "We always enjoy the park so much, especially in the spring."

  "Turtle will be waiting for you in the garden," she said as she leaned into her husband's arm. "Look at the tall poplars, Jan, and the fresh leaves on the maples." The commissaris didn't answer. "Jan? Don't think of bad Willem. You're a good man with an excellent reputation. Everybody thinks highly of you. The children are doing well. I love you. Please enjoy the park."r />
  "Yes," the commissaris said. "Nice."

  "You won, Jan."

  "Yes." His small hand tapped her shoulder.

  "So enjoy."

  A heron sailed majestically across the road. "Yes," the commissaris said. "I do." He leaned over and kissed his wife's cheek.

  * The ranks of the Dutch Municipal Police are. in descending order, chief constable, commissaris, chief inspector, inspector, adjutant, sergeant, constable first class, constable.

  \\ 3 /////

  "MORNING," SERGEANT DE GIER SAID CHEERFULLY. He was a tall, wide-shouldered man, sprawled behind a dented metal desk in the far corner of a gray room. "Had a good holiday?"

  The heavyset adjutant, looking even more portly in his three-piece dark blue suit, bought a size too large to accommodate his not-too-well-distributed bulk, lumbered on.

  "Hello?" de Gier asked. "Remember me? Your assistant of the last ten years or more?"

  "Bah," Adjutant Grijpstra said. He turned, walked back to the door, and pushed the latch shut. He walked over to de Gier's desk and turned on his heel.

  "No," de Gier said. "Please. The last time that door was replaced, I had to pay half the cost. No, Adjutant."

  "Ha!" Adjutant Grijpstra shouted. His hand slid under his jacket and was back at once. A silver line linked his hand and the door. A stiletto trembled in the door's plywood.

  "One day you'll be sorry," de Gier said. "Your knife's point penetrates the wood by three inches. Someone might get seriously hurt."

  Someone was rattling the door's handle.

  "Just a minute," Grijpstra shouted. He walked back to the door and pulled back the latch.

  A young man, dressed in a rumpled corduroy suit, his small face topped by unruly wavy hair, stumbled into the room, holding his chest with both hands. He moaned and doubled up before his legs gave way.

  "See?" de Gier said. "In Cardozo's case there's no big loss—he can easily be replaced—but you might hit Jane, the loveliest member of our force, or Miss Antoinette, the commissaris's new secretary. I haven't had time to convince her yet."

  "Stop spoiling my practice," Grijpstra said, dropping his weight heavily into a swivel chair. "Besides, I usually aim high."

  "Convince Miss Antoinette of what?" Cardozo asked, picking himself up.

  "Of my harmlessness," Sergeant de Gier said, smiling. "She thinks I want a permanent relationship, but I'll never interfere with her freedom, of course. All I'm hoping for is just a few hours of shared warmth."

  "After she pays for the meal," Grijpstra rumbled. "No."

  "No what?" de Gier asked. "If I pay for the meal I have a hold on her. She'll feel she owes me. I don't mind owing her. I'm prepared to be as humble as she likes a man to be."

  "No, I didn't have a good holiday," Grijpstra said. "Campgrounds are too noisy, and we were washed out in the end. Nellie lost her tent. First it was pressed down by all the water and then it blew away. Best thing that happened. I went home and rested for a week."

  "Did you take Nellie to your house?" Cardozo asked.

  "Of course not," Grijpstra said.

  "Really," de Gier said, stretching. As his arms reached up, the butt of his oversize pistol was visible under his stylish jacket. "You mean Nellie still doesn't know your wife is gone? Why are you keeping up that farce?"

  "Suppose my wife comes back?" Grijpstra asked. "Two women in my small, comfortable, empty, whitewashed home?"

  "I thought your divorce went through," Cardozo said from behind the wobbly little table that served him as a desk.

  "She might just come back," Grijpstra said. "You never know. And if I took Nellie home for a week, she might just stay. Nellie has her own hotel. My wife lives in a huge villa with her sister in the country. I don't move in with them, do I?" He frowned furiously. "And what is it to you?"

  "Why do you feel threatened, Adjutant?" De Gier asked. "Your wife left you because she doesn't like you. Nellie loves her freedom above all. All women do, these days. Why couldn't you extend a normal courtesy to a fellow human being, regardless of sex? A lonely woman who just lost her tent and who has only one week of her hard-earned holiday left before she has to return to the daily grind of running an overcrowded hotel singlehanded?"

  Grijpstra rummaged in the drawer of his desk. He found a cigar, bit off the tip, and spat it into the waste-paper basket. "So what else is new? You two been busy? Any business? Can we get out of my private life?"

  Cardozo watched the adjutant's slender knife. "You're getting better, Adjutant—you're hitting the door now."

  "I hit what I intend to hit," Grijpstra said.

  "How come you never tell us beforehand what you're aiming at?" Cardozo asked.

  "Ah," Grijpstra said. "Answer that yourself." He turned his chair around. "Sergeant, report."

  "Dead banker," de Gier said. "Suicide. I saw a report signed by Halba and Adjutant Guldemeester. Being up north, I wasn't in on that. Three dead junkies, overdosed on pure heroin in a houseboat at the Binnenkant. Guldemeester checked that out, too. A German terrorist got shot. Big trouble at Headquarters here, but that's internal politics, of course. You don't care for politics, do you now?"

  "No," Grijpstra said. "Anyone have the file with the daily reports?"

  De Gier got up and presented the adjutant with a sheaf of dog-eared pink paper held by a transparent plastic cover. "It's all in here."

  Grijpstra leafed through the file. "The dead banker lived at the Binnenkant? The junkies' boat was berthed in the Binnenkant canal?"

  "Yes, I saw that." De Gier crossed his long legs on his desk. "Same location. The houseboat happens to be just opposite the banker's home. I asked Adjutant Guldemeester, but he claims the two incidents are unrelated."

  "What's with politics?" Cardozo asked. "I care. Any interesting gossip?"

  De Gier leaned back as far as his creaky chair allowed. "A carton of weaponry was lifted from the ballistics room. Our two pathologists are at war with each other. It seems that half the charwomen keeping this place clean are illegal aliens. Coins have been filched from the coffee machines. Several attractive female prisoners have a way of being taken out of their cells at night by unspecified personnel."

  Grijpstra looked up from the file. "That isn't gossip, that's fact."

  "The gossip is that changes for the better are now due, Adjutant." De Gier's large brown eyes twinkled. "Some colleagues are saying so. There's leakage to the press. Journalists are writing up our mess. There was a lengthy editorial in Saturday's paper that wondered why so few crimes are solved and why highly placed officers keep being issued with new expensive cars. It also mentioned the new chief constable and his apparent failure to deal with ineptitude and gross corruption."

  "The chief constable just sits around," Cardozo said. "Chief Inspector Halba sneaks around. Adjutant Guldemeester helps him sneak."

  "Four corpses." Grijpstra closed the file and shook it. "So that houseboat where the junkies died is opposite the house where the banker lived? Did you see the other complaint referring to the Binnenkant?"

  "The helpless old lady?" de Gier asked. "Saying some musicians are drumming her out of her home? I've seen that complaint before. Doesn't she live at number 20?"

  Grijpstra pushed himself free of his chair and walked over to the opposite wall. His stubby finger prodded at the city's map. "Number 20 should be just behind the houseboat where the junkies died. Old ladies don't sleep well, they like sitting at their windows late at night. The night the banker died was the night the big thunderstorm broke. Maybe the old lady watched the spectacle from her apartment. The report says she lives upstairs and the musicians make their racket in the lower part of the house. If she lives upstairs, she can look over the houseboat and see the banker's house across the water. Maybe she noticed something unusual. She could even have heard the shot. The corpse was found near a front window."

  "Near an open front window," de Gier said. "The hapless banker could have been watching the bad weather, too. All that thunder reminded
him of gunfire. He looked for his gun."

  "For his Walther PPK pistol, according to the report," Cardozo said. "Expensive. An appropriate weapon for an influential man to have around."

  "An illegal weapon," Grijpstra said. He walked back to his desk. He picked up the file and pointed it accusingly at de Gier. "And the junkies just happened to die on their boat across the street? The very same night?"

  "You know, Adjutant," de Gier said gently, "this is not our case. Besides, it's closed."

  Grijpstra dropped the file and pounded it softly with both fists. "The report is too brief. Is the commissaris back yet?"

  "You wouldn't suggest," de Gier said, "that a case closed by colleagues should be reopened, would you now?"

  Cardozo brought out his notebook. "It's the junkies that get me. Do you know that I had a junkie visit me here? An American who said he lived in a houseboat on the Binnenkant? His name was Jimmy. One of the dead is called James T. Floyd in the report. Isn't 'Jimmy' short for 'James'?"

  "Ask de Gier," Grijpstra said. "Our intellectual sergeant knows all about everything. He even reads French literature."

  "Sergeant?" Cardozo asked.

  De Gier nodded.

  Cardozo checked his notes. "Jimmy called here a month ago. Pity the file doesn't give physical descriptions." He reached for his telephone and dialed. "Mr. Jacobs? How're you doing? You're not? I'm sorry. Is that right? You don't want to be doing? That's okay, then. Listen, a question, Mr. Jacobs. You have a dead young man there, an American, James T. Floyd of Berkeley, California, it should say so on the tag on his toe. I want to know what he looks like. Sure, I'll wait." Cardozo held his hand over the phone's mouthpiece. "Yagh! I can hear Jacobs pull the metal box out of the fridge." He dropped his hand off the receiver. "Tall? Long blond hair? Missing front teeth? Thank you, Mr. Jacobs, that's what I wanted to hear." Cardozo replaced the phone.

  "You're acquainted with the deceased," Grijpstra said. "That's nice."

  Cardozo grimaced sadly. "Yes, Jimmy came to tell me about some planned murder. That's what I like about specialization. We're the Murder Brigade, so if a visitor says 'murder,' he's sent to us. Pity I didn't believe him at the time."