The Sergeant's Cat

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  De Gier was smoking a clumsily rolled cigarette outside the morgue’s front door.

  “You don’t smoke anymore,” Grijpstra said. “Where did you get that?”

  “The doorman hands them out on request,” de Gier said hoarsely.

  Grijpstra went back into the building and came back smok­ing, too.

  “Nellie will smell that,” de Gier said. “You’ll yell at each other again. If that keeps happening I don’t want to live on top of you guys anymore. It gets too noisy.”

  “I’ll move out with you,” Grijpstra said.

  De Gier held up his cigarette so the tobacco wouldn’t fall out. “A hypothesis, please?”

  “Murder?” Grijpstra said, furiously sucking at his cigarette. “Malicious forethought? Premeditated violence? Sickos at large? An onslaught of planned horror?”

  De Gier preferred to suppose manslaughter. “We suspects never seem to be big planners. We say afterward that we made all these important decisions but forget that this seems to be true only in hindsight.” He contemplated a wisp of smoke rising from Grijpstra’s tobacco creation. “Most of us are just foolish.” He sang hoarsely, “Do-ing what co-mes na-tu-ral-ly.”

  “It still could be murder,” Grijpstra said. “Don’t underes­timate us too much.” He inhaled and coughed. “Some of us sometimes manage to be premeditating assholes.”

  It was after hours by then, but the detectives, shaken by the confrontation with the corpse of ex-model ex-Emily Dubber, felt in need of guidance again. Instead of facing the home front commanded by Grijpstra’s girlfriend at her hotel at Straight Tree Ditch, they took a cab to Queen’s Avenue, in Amsterdam’s el­egant residential district.

  The commissaris was in his bath, easing rheumatic pains with almost too hot water, while his wife sat next to the tub, trying to knit her husband a waistcoat for the winter, but hardly able to see yarn and needles in the steamy air. Only the pet turtle seemed comfortable, marching slowly to and fro. The detectives stood at the far end of the large marble-floored room. The com­missaris shook his small head, comically decorated with soggy wisps of hair standing up like ghostly ears. “Beautiful Amster­dam, designed to soothe distraught spirits with its Golden Age parks and canalside architecture, and now look what happens.”

  Grijpstra and de Gier, uncomforted, were mumbling good­byes when Cardozo phoned in on Grijpstra’s cell phone. “I am at the Buddha Bar in Bonefield Alley,” Cardozo whispered. “I have been interrogating Pirate, the bartender, and Regular, who is a poet. I got some information. Your lost lady, a blonde in a red dress, black-eyed, a cokehead, attractive, was here last Friday. She be­came friendly with a character called Bungle Bongo, a poet and the bar’s main dealer. Bungle’s girlfriend, a sunburned woman named Trudi, made a scene when Bungle and Emily Dubber left together. Your complainant, Mr. Dubber, is known here, too. He wasn’t here Friday night. He couldn’t be, as he was thrown out earlier last week for being a nuisance and told never to return ever.”

  “Are Bungle and Trudi there now?” Grijpstra asked.

  “No,” Cardozo said, “but I have an address for them. Houseboat Row at Behind Canal. Supposedly they’re neigh­bors.”

  “Don’t go away,” Grijpstra said. He relayed Cardozo’s intel to the commissaris.

  “Bullshit Buddhists?” the commissaris asked from his bath, remembering de Gier’s earlier reporting. He waved away shrouds of steam.

  “Bullshit Buddhists?” Grijpstra said into the phone.

  “Bald bad bullshit Buddhists,” de Gier said.

  “Bald bad bullshit Buddhists?” Grijpstra asked Detective-Constable-First-Class Cardozo.

  “There are several here,” Cardozo said. “Bartender Pirate and client Regular would fit the description but it seems this Bungle Bongo guy defected from Buddhism a while ago. The suspect shifted to the stars.”

  “Stars?” Grijpstra asked.

  “A less subtle philosophy than Buddhism,” Cardozo said. “Pirate was telling me that Bungle is weak, he wants to hold on to something. Buddhism believes in nothing. There is this re­lated faith now that holds with star folk, angels, that are due to come and save us. Adjutant?”

  “Dear?” Grijpstra asked.

  “I think,” Cardozo whispered urgently, “we should move. Constables Ketchup and Karate want to go to Houseboat Row now. They say this trail is hot. I am trying to restrain them.”

  “So you have suspects?” Grijpstra asked. “Possible miscre­ants who were seen with the lady when she was both alive and dressed, wearing a diamond ring?”

  “It might seem to appear that way,” Cardozo said. “But Trudi spent Friday night with this poet character Regular, she only left Regular’s place late Saturday morning. It looks like Bungle Bongo is the guy to go after.”

  “We don’t know as yet exactly when Mrs. Dubber died, so Trudi may be implicated too,” Grijpstra said. “Okay, go ahead, we’ll met you at Houseboat Row. In case we are late, make sure Ketchup and Karate keep their hands in their pockets. Order them not to show violence to the suspects. Nice and gentle does it. No arrests if at all possible. Remember our on­going problem: zero jail space.”

  Bungle Bongo, a short, fat street musician whom Grijpstra remembered having confronted at Amsterdam’s central Dam Square, where, irritated by the man’s monotonous compositions, he had suggested that Bungle relocate to Rotterdam, was not home. Bungle’s address was a dented, sixty-foot-long steel cargo boat, decommissioned at least half a century ago. Another de­crepit vessel, a mastless flat-bottomed worm-eaten sailboat, was moored next to Bungle Bongo’s. A hand-lettered sign on the sailboat said Trudi, attack rats trained and kenneled. Cardozo was inside Trudi’s floating home when his superiors arrived. Ketchup and Karate, small-sized effeminate-looking men, were on the cargo boat’s deck, hands in pockets, peering into the boat’s cabin through dirty portholes. “Mrs. Dubber was killed here all right,” Ketchup told Grijpstra. “This Trudi says she tried to get into Bungle’s cabin, this one, when she arrived Saturday morning late, but it was locked, like now. Bungle was on deck, smoking dope. Trudi looked through that porthole over there and saw a nude female body in a hammock. The hammock moved because of the current in the canal, and the body moved with it, but it had no life of its own. It didn’t look asleep, she says, it looked more dead.”

  “Trudi recognized Emily Dubber?” de Gier asked.

  “It was dark in the cabin,” Ketchup said. “The witness is nervous. Let me at her, Sergeant, me and Karate will slap her around a bit. We can threaten her with arrest for drug possession if she doesn’t tell us where Bungle Bongo is now. All these boats are loaded with dope. We’ll soon find some.”

  “And,” Karate told de Gier, “this Trudi saw Bungle drag­ging a carton taped shut with lots of silver duct tape into his Volkswagen bus on Sunday morning. The vehicle never came back and neither did the suspect. Maybe Trudi helped him carry the carton. Let me at her, Sergeant. Please?”

  “Something about a riding whip that her boyfriend, Bongo, likes to swish around,” Cardozo said when he came out of the houseboat next door. “This Bungle likes to ride women like horses. He has composed songs about that, and recites poetry on the subject. Trudi thinks he used the instrument on the tourist lady; she would never play that game with him herself.”

  De Gier was introduced to Trudi, a woman with a pro­nounced sunburn, obtained by use of a machine that took up about a third of her living quarters. She told him the rat sign was to keep Jehovah’s Witnesses from bothering her. The rats on her boat were neither trained nor kenneled. She said her profession was cook in a halfway house for recovering drug ad­dicts in the inner city. Bungle Bongo worked there, too. He sold drugs to the inmates, to supplement their government-issued rations. Trudi had met Bungle at a meditation class. Bun­gle had been a Buddhist but had recently removed all his spiritual paraphernalia from his boat. “No more fish-head drums and incense, H
e is a star child now. He was talking about joining their commune.”

  “Where?” Grijpstra asked.

  Trudi shrugged. “Somewhere in the south I think he said.”

  “Where is he now?” de Gier asked.

  “Who cares?” Trudi asked. “Good riddance. I am still a Buddhist.” She pointed at a calendar, dated a year back, showing the wrong month, under a reproduction of a Tibetan scroll, depicting a demon waving six arms holding bloody skulls, ges­turing from a raging fire in which he sat in the lotus position. “That’s what inspired him. He said he had completed Buddhism and that this picture, which I had hung here for a purpose, with­out knowing it, leads to the next step, which would be this angelic thing. He believes Judgment Day is about to happen. The point of no return has been passed by self-willed humanity and God will send angels to see what can be saved and then burn hopeless sinners.”

  “Good idea,” Grijpstra said.

  De Gier studied the calendar picture. “So this image here points to a future, to somewhere where things are going to get better? Once all these skulls the demon/angel holds there are burned?”

  “Isn’t that silly?” Trudi asked. “I don’t believe it. True Buddhism believes in nothing. I believe in nothing. No hope. Nothing gets better. Let go of hope. Bungle is a loser, I kept telling him that. He believes in loss and gain, he is stuck.”

  “De Gier,” Grijpstra asked, “what is the witness saying?”

  “Are you saying Bungle Bongo is still stuck in dualism, ma’am?” de Gier asked.

  Trudi looked wise, and stayed quiet, to show she was an­swering him by using Buddhist silence.

  “I don’t get this,” Grijpstra said, after helping himself to a cigarette Trudi offered. “If this Bungle friend of yours, thank you, ma’am”—he puffed contentedly after she had struck a match for him—“if your neighbor and lover is a philosophical man concerned about Divine Judgment, who hopes for this an­gelic end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it that you mentioned just now, then why would he poke a riding whip into a woman friendly enough to go home with him, and cut off her finger so he could steal her ring?”

  “Your colleague,” Trudi said, “said it just now. He is stuck in dualism. It makes a loser like Bungle clumsy. It’s tricky to be free of things, like I am, but I can do it because I am a pure Buddhist.”

  •

  Grijpstra and de Gier had themselves driven back to the Buddha Bar in Bonefield Alley. “I like these cabs,” de Gier said. “I don’t miss the old VW patrol car. Isn’t it nice not to have to worry about parking space and engine failure and malfunction­ing radios and traffic?”

  “There isn’t all that much traffic anymore,” Grijpstra said. “Taking traffic out of the inner city has worked. Some things do go right. It confirms my minimal faith in the possibility of problem solving.”

  “The inner-city traffic problem got solved by happen­stance,” the cab driver said. “We merely stumbled into a new set of aldermen who couldn’t stand wasting time, on their way to the brothels, while sitting in their stationary cars. Or,” the driver said, “it could be that the crisis got so bad that the mayor had no option but to make parking impossible by raising rates and blocking most potential parking space by installing these steel penis poles that even a tank can’t push over.” He glared at Grijpstra in his mirror. “Don’t assume any goodwill. I won’t have that in my cab.”

  “Some of us might be anonymous saints,” Grijpstra replied.

  “What?” de Gier asked.

  Grijpstra apologized. He had merely wanted to keep the dialogue going.

  Pirate, the bartender at the Buddha Bar, so called because of an eye patch and a bandanna printed with a repetitive skull and bone motif that covered his bare skull, called over Regular, a small man, also bald, with a third eye tattooed on his forehead, who introduced himself as the poet in residence. Yes, he knew Bungle Bongo, they were drinking buddies. “And Buddhist brothers,” Pirate said. That too, Regular said, but Bungle Bongo had recently wavered from a faith that, Bungle claimed, had become, at present levels of insight, unacceptably depressing.

  “So he moved on to the star people?” Grijpstra asked. “Would you happen to know where we could locate that or­ganization?”

  Regular wasn’t sure. All he knew, from Bungle’s recent mutterings—Bungle had been drinking and snorting heavily lately—was that the star folks, or the angelics, as Bungle preferred to call his guides, lived in the hills on the Belgian border, and that he visited them from time to time, intending to join their commune, but there was an entrance fee that he hadn’t managed to scrape together yet.

  “What does Suspect look like?” de Gier asked.

  “Oh, it’s going to be like that, is it?” the poet Regular asked. “We have labeled the subject of our scorn on mere hear­say?”

  “Describe Bungle Bongo,” de Gier ordered gently, staring into Regular’s eyes.

  Regular said that Bungle Bongo looked just like him, Reg­ular, but Bungle was white, a native of the mother country, not of Suriname, South America, the former Dutch colony where Regular himself originated—he thought—it was all so long ago now, another dream, like the present where he seemed to have dreamed himself into Amsterdam.

  “Bungle looks like me, too,” Pirate confirmed. “I am bald, too, but I have the bandanna and the eye patch. Otherwise, we are birds of a feather.”

  Cardozo, the next morning, in the commissaris’s office, re­ported on searching Bungle Bongo’s houseboat after obtaining a warrant. The riding whip Bungle purportedly used for sexual play was found and confiscated. So was the red dress Emily had been wearing, and a computer. Cardozo had brought the laptop along, got it going, and connected it to the commissaris’s tele­phone outlet.

  A list of Bungle Bongo’s favorite websites was found: free porno by hobbyists, The Telegraph, a newspaper on-line, weather predictions, stock tips.

  “Here,” the commissaris said, “Pleiades. Seven stars, home of the angels who are responsible for creating incarnate life on earth. The place of origin of the Day of Judgment process that will soon interrupt our human degeneration so that the human life experiment can finally be resurgent in the next millennium. Click on that, please, Cardozo.”

  “How do you know about stuff like that, sir?” Grijpstra asked while waiting for the Pleiades website’s home page to appear.

  “How could I not know?” the commissaris asked, as sur­prised as Grijpstra. “Ideas reach me all the time. Don’t tell me they don’t reach you.”

  “Reach me from where, sir?”

  The commissaris shook his head in amazement. “From everywhere. The papers, the Net, people talking on a streetcar, Katrien coming back from playing bridge, even Turtle is in on it. You mean you haven’t heard about the Pleiades, Adjutant?” He kept shaking his head. “You’re kidding. That isn’t nice, Henk, trying to trick an old man approaching his retirement.”

  “I suppose you’re in on this, too,” Grijpstra said to de Gier. De Gier said he had met a woman at a jazz bar who had filled him in on the subject. He had also read about the coming change in essential human development in a Colombian novel. An in­teresting idea, de Gier told Grijpstra, poking the adjutant in the stomach with a hard finger. The Day of Judgment sorting wasn’t, according to this Colombian source, to be a moral affair but just a means of getting rid of useless incarnate life forms. Bad guys wouldn’t go to hell. They would simply disappear. The world’s population was to be decreased by forty percent at least, more if borderline cases were to be eliminated, too. “In view of our continuing effort to figure things out, you and I might be saved,” de Gier said, “but would we want to be saved? The Colombian novelist says this will happen around 2011. We would be too old. Better to get out early and come back in new bodies.” De Gier frowned. “Tricky stuff, you know. It has been worrying me lately.”

  “He reads South American literature now,” G
rijpstra told the commissaris. “In Spanish. Between his pots of grass in Nel­lie’s loft. It has probably interfered with his perception. It sure doesn’t make him happy.”

  “To be happy is to be silly,” the commissaris said. He stud­ied the Pleiades website’s pictures and text. “Right, there we are, stars, angels, that scene down there, with the nude blonde being taken from a ship, looks like a detail taken from a Hieronymus Bosch triptych. And over there, a diamond flashing, amazing how it all fits together. Do you see a place where we can contact these visionaries, Cardozo?”

  Cardozo brought up an email screen. The commissaris dictated a note. “Dear Pleiades. This is the Amsterdam Po­lice, Murder Brigade, Adjutant Henk Grijpstra, Police Head­quarters, Moose Canal. Do you have a recent arrival who brought you a valuable diamond ring as entry fee? Alias Bun­gle Bongo, real name”—he consulted his notes—“Nicolaas Sieker.” Cardozo typed the name in. The commissaris con­tinued dictating. “We have reason to believe that the dia­mond was cut off the finger of the corpse of Emily Dubber, an American tourist who died because of injuries caused by a riding whip inserted into her vagina. Please make a citizen’s arrest of your candidate member and give us your address so that we can pick up Mr. Sieker for questioning. ASAP, if you please. Thanks. Sincerely.”

  The detectives had coffee while they gave the Pleiades commune time to answer the commissaris’s missive.

  “Try now,” the commissaris said.

  “Dear Adjutant Grijpstra,” the answering email said, “we abhor violence, but in view of what you describe, our security will hold Sieker if your note turns out to be real. We will look up your number in the book and phone you.” The call came in within minutes. The caller identified himself as Piet, elected (for one year) chairman of the democratic Pleiades guidance com­mittee. Piet gave Grijpstra the address of his commune, housed on a former farm near the city of Kerkrade, in the province of Limburg, on the Belgian border.

  The commissaris, assisted by Cardozo and Ketchup and Ka­rate, left within minutes, in the commissaris’s private old-model Citröen. Grijpstra and de Gier interviewed Mr. Dubber at the Tulip Hotel.