She shrugged. “Max knows that I would be glad to do it, but he says I mustn’t. He is stubborn, something terrible. It’s a waste of money to send you, that’s all.”
“That’s not the only reason. I think I ought to know.”
“I’ve told you, there’s nothing else. Now if you don’t mind, I’ll go along without you.”
“Why should I mind?” In the harsh light of the street lamp she looked a little older than she had in Max’s softly-lit domain, but only by an hour or two. Max’s property.
I bent my head and kissed her forehead. I said, “I’ll bet you were a beautiful woman.”
“I am a beautiful woman,” said Anna serenely. She patted my arm and walked off down the street.
Forty-eight hours later I turned the key in the door of my apartment in Amsterdam and threw open the windows to the familiar maritime air. For the past two years I’ve rented the ground floor of a skinny old house on Verimus Straat that belongs to a youngish widow who lives on the upper floors. We maintain a pleasant, if formal, relationship. Our paths cross occasionally in the little entrance hall we share, and when they do we talk about the weather. My part of the house consists of a sunny, bow-windowed front room that serves me as office and sitting room and a small bedroom opening off it. At the very back there’s a tiny kitchen, and at the back of that a window looks out over a walled garden. A narrow road, little used, runs past the end of the garden, and beyond lies a stretch of low, open land — whence the sea-tasting breezes. I have no staff working for me there, but I keep duplicates of the files on current contracts. It’s a useful, peaceful place, and quite handy to Piet Bonta’s factory.
I slept until mid-afternoon, then I drove out in the direction of the coast along the road that took me to Ihmuiden, turning off to the north, as instructed, just past the ISOL Works on a potholed road through land that appeared unstable and was surely empty. Over my head a pewter sky hung heavy, wide, and unsupported — there appeared to be nothing to keep it from moving downward in a swift, enveloping motion. I told myself not to be fanciful. I had been under a lot of grey Dutch skies and none had ever fallen on my head.
Still, land and weather were oppressive, and my worries returned. I asked myself why they had sent me here and why I’d been fool enough to come. Besides the cash, of course. It must be very nice to be rich and not have to do foolish things for money.
Five miles beyond the turnoff I came to a cluster of little houses, then emptiness again, and then, alone in the fields, Gerrit Till’s house, a small, ill-proportioned place too tall for its base, standing in a stretch of empty fenland. I pulled to the side of the road and got out of the car. The place was dead quiet except for the whine of the wind in the wires over my head. What a place to live! I crossed the road, climbed the steps, and rang the bell.
Gerrit Till opened the door and I recalled Max’s reference to an Indonesian background. Dark Oriental eyes, sparkling with welcome, looked out at me from a round Dutch face, surmounted by a thatch of fair and greying hair.
“I’m Peter Hessberg.”
“Of course! I am expecting you. Come in!” His voice was deep, his English, like Anna’s, without accent but European in its cadences. He showed me into a room jammed with books and papers and heavy Dutch furniture. There was a smell of turpentine in the air. Business, said Gerrit Till, could wait a moment. First we must have a drink together — and he poured the inevitable portions of Genever. I accepted mine, smiling, very much at my ease — I found him charming, likeable.
He was talkative. How were Max and Anna? What did I think of the art market? Did I know there was quite a market suddenly in the paintings of Albert Boertson? Very odd. What did I think, was there any merit in them? It was so very good of me to come. He hoped I had had a pleasant journey. We talked, we drank. “Now,” he said, “if you will excuse me for a moment.”
He went out through a door toward the rear of the room, shutting it behind him. There would be a kitchen back there, I supposed — the usual layout. I realized with surprise that we were not alone in the house. I heard his voice, at least I supposed it to be his — just a murmur through the heavy door — and then a woman laughed, and I thought I heard her say es niet stom, es niet stom! — don’t be silly! — and then a man’s voice, his, no doubt, the words indistinguishable.
A moment later he came back into the room. The painting was under his arm. He placed it across the arms of a chair and stooped to look at it, grunting.
“I’m getting to be an old man, with old complaints,” he said with a laugh. “Would you believe it? I had a letter today from my mother, who is in Soerabaya. She worries and she scolds me — she thinks I am a boy still, a boy who does not take care of himself. She is very old now. I suppose I will always seem like a child to her. Well, come, let us examine this painting.”
I moved to his side.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?”
I nodded. It was very nice. An ordinary, pleasant landscape, sentimental in the way of the past century, and somehow very attractive. A quiet scene — blue sky, broken clouds above a broad valley, and in the foreground a wide-branched oak and a cow placidly cropping grass.
“Behold the cow,” said Gerrit Till. “I cannot look at her without wanting to sleep. All summer afternoon is in that cow.”
I agreed, laughing. “It’s very well done.”
“You realize that there is a little patch in the corner. Max knows about this, of course.”
“He told me you had had to do some work on it.”
“Can you smell it? Poof!” He wrinkled his nose. “You do not mind the smell of turpentine?”
“No, I don’t mind it.”
“It should vanish soon enough.”
He then disappeared himself through the door at the rear, returning with paper and string, and proceeded to wrap the painting neatly. “Voilà!” he said. “She is ready to travel.”
I was leaving when I remembered the money. He hadn’t mentioned it. I dug it out of my pocket — a packet of American bills of mixed denominations — and handed it to him.
He took it, smiling.
I said, “It doesn’t seem enough.”
“That’s true. It’s worth a little more. Max, of course, will get more. But I owe Max some favors. This is fine. I am satisfied.”
I drove back to Amsterdam. The weather hadn’t improved, but my spirits were considerably higher. Why not, I thought, have dinner with Piet Bonta? There was no reason to conceal the fact that I was in Amsterdam. Everything was on the up-and-up.
Piet, as I mentioned earlier, is head of the plant that reprocesses most of the equipment I buy and sell. We met at seven at a place run by Pauli BenBroek on the Reguliergraat — nothing fancy, but you get good food there, and plenty of it. We talked for a while about this and that. Maia and the kids were fine, the problems were almost solved with the last shipment of battery chargers I had shipped over — an ordinary conversation. And then Piet, shaking the sauce bottle over his rice, said that he didn’t know what the world was coming to. “You would think,” he said, “that at least outside the city you would be safe in your own home. But now I don’t know. Did you hear the radio?”
“I haven’t had it on. What happened?”
“Some fellow was shot to death this afternoon right in his own home. A harmless old man, it sounds like. Perhaps not old — I don’t remember.”