The Sergeant's Cat

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

I said it gives you cancer, but he began to cackle and said that cancer is like worms, pretty-colored worms that dig around inside you and finally carry you off.

  “You don’t mind being carried away?”

  He said he didn’t. I wanted to go then, but he offered me a cigar. He still looked lonely, so I thought I’d wait.

  “I’ve been lucky,” he said. “I’m over sixty-five. If I’d been under, they would have put me in the institution that makes you go to class. Know what I mean?”

  “Not quite,” I said.

  He gave up on his cigar—the leaves kept coming off—and shook the tin. The tin was empty, so he looked at my cigar. I gave it to him. He thanked me. “Class is terrible,” he said. “Frightening, too. I was in the institution maybe ten years ago. It scared me, so I became normal and got the hell out.” He shook his head. “Such goings-on. They give you wooden shoes and clothes that scratch, and when there’s food, they ring a bell and you can’t just go and eat—they expect you to play hop­scotch in the corridors first.” He mused for a while. “There was a big guy who scared me. In class, that was. He would crush cans with his bare hands and look at me like he wanted to do the same thing to me.”

  “So you got out?”

  He showed his brown teeth. “Yes. I told them the urge had gone. It hasn’t, but what the hell. I got into the business of the mannequins. It kept me busy, I had to work for a change.” He waved his hands excitedly. “I got up early, went to the fairs, sold them, delivered them myself in the van. I was all over the place.”

  “And the urge?” I asked—he had me curious now.

  “Still there,” he said, not too unhappily. “But I took care. I didn’t shout ‘pow-pow’ anymore, and I didn’t point at them. I just sort of mumbled. They couldn’t hear what I said.”

  “Mannequins?”

  A nurse came. “Visitors’ hour is over, Gramps,” she said.

  I was ready to go, but Willems pushed me back into my chair. “You’re cute,” he told the nurse. “I wish I’d known you when you were still in the colonies. I would have lured you from the jungle with some beads and then, while you played with them, I would have jumped you. Ha!”

  “You would?” the nurse said. She was brown and Indo­nesian and very pretty.

  “Can’t he stay?” Willems asked her softly. “I never get visitors and I haven’t finished telling him my story yet.”

  “Right,” the nurse said. “I’ll go back to the jungle for a while. But don’t take too long. We’ve got to clean up here, and you’ll need your nap.”

  She left the porch and Willems and I looked at her leaving. She had good legs and there were strong supple lines under her tight uniform.

  “Nice,” Willems said. “I had a mannequin like that once. I sold her in the end. Pity. But the customer offered a good price and she was somewhat damaged here and there. She’d been in the van too long and the van was soft in the springs. If they bounce around too much, they scratch.”

  “So what were these mannequins?” I asked.

  “For shop windows. My deceased uncle used to own that business. He got them from the factory in Germany, slightly damaged merchandise, bought at a discount. I used to help him, and when he croaked, I took over. It was easy, really. If I paid the invoices, the Germans would send more. You should have seen them.

  “I went to all the fairs where the storekeepers buy, and I would sit in my own little corner, with all the mannequins around me stark naked, and I would adjust their arms and heads so they could beg the clients to take them away. ‘Release us from this wicked sorcerer,’ they would scream, and I would sit between them, quietly.”

  “Were you gesturing, too?”

  “Me? Never. I just look pathetic. When I don’t make an effort, I always look pathetic.” Willems pushed up his glasses and stared at me. His eyes didn’t focus. The corners of his mouth hung down—his cheeks, too. “Well? Am I right?”

  I agreed.

  He was grinning at me again. “The business sort of pros­pered. Because the mannequins were cheap. I didn’t earn much, but I wasn’t starving either. Not that I ever needed much money. I lived in my room with a view of Leyden Square. I had a good position—my windows were right above the sandwich shop there. All I ever wanted to do was sit at the window, look at the crowd, and polish the Maxim—oil its works sometimes, tighten a screw here and there, adjust a spring.”

  I thought I hadn’t heard right. “The Maxim, Mr. Willems?”

  He was distracted by a sudden gust of wind that made the glass doors of the porch rattle, but I managed to catch his atten­tion again. I’m still a policeman, after all, even if I only run the uniform store these days. And a Maxim is a machine gun.

  He was nibbing his hands. “Yes. The cops took it away. Good thing, maybe. Perhaps it was time to retire. The cops said the Maxim was too much of a risk. Fully automatic arms are illegal and possession will land you in jail—and in my case it was worse because the gun was loaded, complete with all its parts and a couple of boxes of ammo.”

  “You mean you had a .50 caliber machine gun?”

  “Sure had. But it was easy to get. I served with the RAF during the war, and later with the Dutch air force here. I was even a hero. You want to hear?”

  I wanted to hear.

  “I escaped to England,” Willems said. “In 1943, the Jerries wanted me to work in a factory somewhere, but I wasn’t game. I lived on the coast before they moved us to make room for the Atlantic Wall, their bunkers and so forth, but I still knew the way. My brother knew the way, too, and he found out where the Jerries kept their boats. He got us one, engine and all. We dressed up to look like Kraut sailors and one day we went. They saw us, but on account of our clothes they thought we were them. Easy, like eating Momma’s pie—it always is when you really want something.

  “Once we were out, the British saw us and picked us up. We joined the RAF, him as a pilot. But he crashed somewhere. I flew on a Lancaster, in one of those plastic bubbles. She was a big mother—four engines, guns everywhere, full of bombs. Up and down we went, to Germany and back, me with my Maxim. I was lucky, too—I got one of them Messerschmitts coming right at me. Press the button, there she went in smithereens. That’s what I always wanted—know what I mean?”

  I didn’t, but Willems explained, rubbing his pointed chin, dribbling a little spittle every now and then. As a kid he used to have toy guns, and he pointed them at pedestrians and cars—“Pow-pow, you’re dead.” People laughed then, but they stopped laughing when Willems wasn’t a kid anymore and was still shouting “Pow-pow.”

  “Why did you want them dead, Mr. Willems?”

  He gave me a surprised look. “Because. Logic argumenta­tion. The only way.”

  I pretended I agreed, but he didn’t seem to believe me.

  “No! You don’t use logic—nobody does! Listen, Mister Visitor, this world is no good. I knew that from the start. My father used to clean windows and he was drunk most of the time. One day he missed the ladder and whap, there he was, out of it. Very clever of him. This life isn’t even for the birds. It’s a mistake, nothing else.

  “Look at us—you ever see anyone smile? Or even take quiet pleasure in what he does? Life’s nothing but trouble, hard labor, and misery—nothing works out. Meanwhile, it rains. With death at the end. Notice I don’t even mention war. There’s that, too, and disease.” He shook his head. “Never get into it.”

  “But you did get into it, Mr. Willems,” I said.

  His bird’s claw grasped my knee. “Could I help it? Did I have a choice? No questions asked, there I was.” His small eyes glinted.

  “Do you really mind that much, Mr. Willems?”

  He laughed. “Maybe not so much, but that’s because I found a way out. Here in Holland everybody always builds, always makes things bigger. Better. Healthier even.” He raised a finger. “But that’s where we a
re wrong. We’ve got to think the other way around. We don’t have to build, we have to break. I thought the Jerries understood—they destroyed a lot when they came. Rotterdam, for instance. I happened to be there when they dropped their bombs. Did that city burn! For days I ran about, fire everywhere I went—bricks flying, beams burst­ing.” And his finger touched my thigh. “I thought it was de­stroyed. But I was wrong.”

  “Rotterdam didn’t burn?”

  “Yes, but not enough. And the Germans wanted to build, too. Destroy, yes, but then build forever—a new world, sky-high, fools that they were.” He was whispering now, but a new thought cheered him up. “The British were better. You should have seen what that Lancaster did, and the other planes. All of Germany was burning down.

  “Night after night I watched from my bubble on that air­plane’s belly. Everything below was red with flames, even the smoke. And the Maxim in front of me was always ready to fire, like when the Messerschmitt popped up. Yes, and pop she did, into a thousand bursts and bangs.”

  Willems was lost in his thoughts.

  “And they let you take the Maxim home?”

  He laughed and slapped my knee. “Now what did you think? Because I’m crazy I only talk craziness? Never. When the Führer gave in, they sent me back to Holland. I was security sergeant at an airport. When the Maxim arrived in a box, all I did was fill in a form. ‘There you are, Sergeant,’ the soldiers said. ‘Thank you, boys,’ I answered.”

  “As easy as that?”

  He shrugged. “Just after the war? With everything upside-down?”

  “Where did you take the gun?”

  He looked sly. “I stored it safely and then had it taken to my room when they demobilized me. Then I reassembled it carefully, loaded it, and pointed it at the crowd on Leyden Square.”

  The thought staggered me. “For thirty-five years?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “Loaded and ready?”

  “Only during the evenings. Otherwise I locked it away.”

  “But you were in an institution,” I said.

  “Only for six months. I kept my room, and the Maxim was in the box.”

  “But you never fired it.”

  He scratched behind his ear. His spectacles came undone. “No.”

  “Good.”

  “Bad,” Mr. Willems said loudly. “Bad. And weak. To think of the right solution is one thing, to go ahead is another. I’ve been childish, I know. I should have fired my darling, just once, on a summer night. A long burst, and then another. To prove a point.” He produced his handkerchief and dabbed at his eyes. “I only fantasized instead, night after night. And now I’m here. A wasted end of a wasted life.”

  He was crying and rubbing at the tears impatiently. “The detectives have my Maxim. They came one evening. I still re­member the older one’s name. Grijpstra, he’s called. They took the gun and wished me good night, and the next morning the ambulance came and brought me here. It was my own fault. I’d still be home if I hadn’t placed the mannequin on the roof.”

  The nurse was back and staring at me. “Yes,” I said, and shook Mr. Willems’s hand.

  It was my day off, but I drove back to Amsterdam. I’m still with the police, although they won’t put me on active duty since I lost the use of one leg. I went to Headquarters and found Adjutant Grijpstra in the canteen, together with his sergeant. The sergeant’s name is de Gier, but he’s often called “the movie star” because of his good looks. Grijpstra is my age—fifty-two. I know him well; we went to police school together. I went and sat next to him and interrupted his argument with de Gier. They were each chiming that it was the other’s turn to pay.

  When I paid, they calmed down somewhat.

  “A Mr. Willems,” I said. “Is the name familiar?”

  They thought for a while.

  “Tell me more,” de Gier said.

  “A machine gun, and a mannequin.”

  Grijpstra eyed me morosely. “What’s he to you? Not a relative, I hope?”

  I described my meeting with Willems.

  “Oh—right,” Grijpstra acknowledged. “Thanks to de Gier’s intelligence, we nabbed him. When the chief-constable heard about it, he came all the way down from the top floor to shake the sergeant’s hand.”

  “So what’s the story?”

  Grijpstra pointed at de Gier.

  “No,” de Gier said. “Not me. I should never have inter­fered with that business. I’ve told you before, Adjutant, we should have let the suspect be.”

  Grijpstra is a kindly fellow. He married badly and lives an unhappy life, but if you don’t raise your voice and keep pushing, he’ll open up.

  “Yes,” he said now. “You know the Café Tivoli? A big building on Leyden Square? With a flat roof? Went broke a while back and has been empty ever since. Okay. There was a mannequin on the roof a few months back, the kind they use in store windows. But it had been dressed up to resemble a little old guy. He had a bald head, with a bit of fringe left on, and a small nose with spectacles stuck to it. A suit, shoes—very real­istic. And beside the mannequin was a machine gun, pointed at the square.

  “It was imitation, naturally. The weapon was a stovepipe with a funnel attached to one end of it, the ammo consisting of pine cones sewn into a strip of canvas. The sight was made out of twisted wire. It looked real enough, especially from the square, and frightened the citizens so much the desk sergeant thought he should send somebody to check it out.”

  “We happened to be around,” de Gier said.

  “So we went up,” Grijpstra explained. “I tore my trousers and got myself dirty and the sergeant almost slipped off the roof—there’s a lot of bird dung up there and it was raining, of course—but we did make it in the end. De Gier insisted on a thorough investigation—he even went back to get a camera.”

  De Gier nodded. “Of course.”

  “Of course,” Grijpstra repeated. “The sergeant is an artist, you see, and a psychologist as well, and interested in furthering his career. We removed the mannequin. It fell apart on the way down, but we still had the photographs, so the sergeant put them up in our room at Headquarters and spent a day or two studying them.”

  I looked at de Gier. He looked away.

  “And finally,” Grijpstra said, “our supersleuth came up with this. ‘Whoever created this apparition,’ he said, ‘is crazy, and evil, too. We will make an arrest.’”

  “Which was wrong,” the sergeant said.

  “Which was right,” said Grijpstra.

  “Yes,” I said. “And then?”

  Adjutant Grijpstra rubbed the tabletop with his hand. “We found him. It wasn’t hard. We knew what he looked like and that he had to be around the square. We ran into him the next evening when I took the sergeant to the sandwich shop to spend some money on him.”

  “Ha,” de Gier said. “The smoked eel was on me. But the adjutant is right. We walked into him easily enough and fol­lowed him to his room. The machine gun was there, oiled and greased and fully loaded.”

  “So you had him removed to the nuthouse,” I said.

  “Where else?” Grijpstra asked. “How is he now?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Having his meals on time and being looked after by an Indonesian beauty. Very good of you, Adjutant. A true danger to society if I ever came across one. Not a nasty sort of chap, really, but had he ever pressed that trigger, there would have been a lot of blood on the cobblestones.”

  “It is the task of the police to protect civilians against themselves,” Grijpstra said.

  De Gier got up. “We should have let the suspect be. What he explained that evening is absolutely dead right. An original thinker reasoning from a correct point of view. If we learn to destroy the environment and keep at it until there’s nothing left we will have done with all misery once and forever. Life is suffering, so it follow
s that no life equals no suffering. Getting rid of the whole thing is the only way out.”

  De Gier walked to the canteen’s counter and engaged the girl behind it in flirtation. She is a lovely creature, of the same type as Willems’s nurse.

  “One wonders,” I said to Grijpstra, “if your sergeant should really be allowed to be a policeman.”

  Grijpstra got to his feet. “I have to go on patrol. The Lord only knows what the civilians are up to now.”

  I repeated my statement.

  “De Gier is an excellent policeman,” Grijpstra said softly. “Bright and diligent. He has been studying Buddhism lately and contemplating the meaning of suffering. But I don’t think he has obtained the right insight yet. Nice to see you again.” He started to leave. “Do you think Willems is happy in that home?”

  I thought about it. I said he probably was.

  The Bongo Bungler

  Complainant looked like he had slept in his expensive suit and had cleaned dishes with his silk necktie. As the middle-aged tourist reported his wife missing, the desk sergeant referred Douglas D. Dubber to the Depart­ment of Criminal Investigation, better known as the Murder Brigade. At Moose Canal Headquarters of the Amsterdam Municipal Police the disheveled Mr. Dubber saw Adjutant Grijpstra, a burly man with short grey hair, and his assistant, Sergeant de Gier, younger, athletic, handsome, charming, polite.

  “You’re the good cop,” Mr. Dubber wearily told the ser­geant.

  De Gier said his colleague Grijpstra was the good cop, too. He told the foreign visitor that the bad-cop/good-cop combi­nation is not used much in The Netherlands. All Dutch cops are expected to respect their clients. The practical reason for Netherlandic-cop goodness, de Gier explained in fluent English, was lack of jail space. No use going all out to make arrests if you can’t put the bad folks behind bars anyway.

  “We tend to try to look at their good sides should they have them,” Grijpstra said gruffly in passable English.

  Mr. Dubber didn’t get it immediately. “You have that many people locked up that you are out of cells?”

  “The state gave us few cells to start out with,” de Gier said “So we try to mediate, be reasonable, to use the maximum benefit of all possible doubts. Our practice aims at getting people to quiet down a bit, so they can go fishing, watch their savings accounts grow, play with their kids, visit their parents.”