“Yes,” Gabrielle said, “very funny. And I am to blame, of course. Francesco phoned last night and foulmouthed me too. As if it’s my fault that I’m his half-sister. He has forgotten that I have been helping him, but I won’t help anybody anymore.”
“So will you make a statement now, Miss Carnet?”
“About what?”
“That Mr. Pullini pushed your mother down the stairs. We do have some sort of a witness’s statement but it isn’t
“Anything,” Gabrielle said, “anything you like. I’m tired of this tangle. That idiot Bergen thinks he can be jealous too, and that he can use me. Nobody can use me.” Her voice no longer purred and her eyes seemed to have shrunk and were glittering with fury. De Gier took his chance.
“There was something between you and Mr. Bergen, Miss Camel?”
“Something? What is something? We have been on business trips together and maybe we had a little too much to drink and maybe I let him get away with being such a powerful male. That was a long time ago, a year maybe. But he fussed. He fussed so much that his wife heard about it and finally left him.”
“He thought he loved you?”
“Love.” Her eyes narrowed and her lips pouted.
“You didn’t love him?”
“Of course not.”
The baboon had gotten up and was walking to die door.
“Are you leaving, Mr. Vleuten?”
“I may as well. I was waiting for the nurse to come back but it seems she won’t. I have things to do. So have you, I imagine.”
“We’ll have to find Mr. Bergen.”
The baboon stopped near the door. “Where?”
“Exactly. Where could he be?”
The baboon turned and leaned against the wall. “A good question. Have you seen him recently? I was wondering what brought on this sudden attack? He was shouting a lot but I didn’t understand him.”
Grijpstra explained.
“Cancer?”
“He thinks he has cancer, that he has a week to live.”
The baboon fingered his bandage. “I see. So I became die enemy. I’ve been the enemy before, when he thought I would marry Elaine and take the business away from him. But I didn’t and I thought that obstacle was removed. Maybe it wasn’t, maybe he kept on blaming me.”
Grijpstra leant his bulk against the wall of the sterile little room and smoked peacefully. “For taking Miss Carnet away?”
“Possibly. But there were other reasons. He was manufacturing them, ever since we met, I think. Perhaps it started when I was bringing in a lot of orders.”
“Jealousy?”
The baboon was still stroking the bandage. “More than that, I think. Bergen never felt very secure. He didn’t want to blame himself so he found me. The fact that he took a shot at me just now may prove that theory.”
Grijpstra looked at die smoke crinkling out of his cigar. “You won, he lost. Quite.”
“Not quite. Unless you can define what constitutes die ideas ‘to win* and ‘to lose.'” The baboon’s eyes were twinkling.
“Yes, Mr. Vleuten?”
“You should have seen that damned cow. Zooming at him and then turning and disappearing again. I would never have thought that the thing would protect me. I had constructed it for die absolute opposite. It was supposed to frighten me.”
“Oh, you’re so crazy.” Gabrielle had snuggled into the baboon’s arm. She was looking into his face, touching his cheek gendy with her pointed nails.
“I’m not so crazy,” die baboon said. “I’m just trying to do things from a different angle. Only trying. It’s hard to go against the flow, maybe it’s impossible. What happened this morning rather underlines that, doesn’t it? I create an object of fear, maybe ridiculous to others but really fearsome to me, and it saves my life. But I won’t give in.”
“Mr. Bergen,” de Gier said firmly, “we’ve got to find him. Do you have any idea where he is, baboon?”
“Bergen is under great stress. He is wandering around,” Grijpstra added. “You must have gotten to know the man fairly well. Can you think of any place Bergen would go if he thought he was in real trouble?”
The baboon was looking out the window. “Yes,” he said slowly, “yes, perhaps I know.”
“Where?”
“He surprised me once. I always thought the man had no soul, you know, that he was only concerned with selling furniture. But we came back from a trip once, in his car, and we were late, we had been speeding, for he wanted to be home in time for dinner. When we got near the city it was after seven o’clock and he said his wife wouldn’t have waited for him and he turned die car off die highway. We went to a little village on the river and had dinner there and some brandy afterward, and later we went for a walk.”
“He went to that village on purpose? You didn’t just happen to find it on your way?”
“No, he knew the place, he had been there before. He told me mat his father used to take him to the village sometimes and that they would always have dinner in mat pub and then go for a walk. We ended up in a small cemetery, very old, with moss-covered stones, and we walked about He seemed very peaceful mat evening. I had never seen him like that before.”
“What’s the name of the village?”
“Nes. I can take you there. Nes on the Amstel. Only a few houses and a church and the pub. We had to cross the river in a little ferry to get to it.”
De Gier had opened the door. “Shall I get the water police?” he asked Grijpstra.
“No. Why don’t you go with the baboon and Miss Carnet can come with me. I’ll follow the Rolls. Nes is only about a quarter of an hour from here. Perhaps we’ll still be in time. If we get assistance we’ll delay ourselves unnecessarily. What sort of handgun did Bergen use, baboon?”
“A revolver.”
“He only took one shot at you?”
“Yes.”
“So he has five bullets left.” Grijpstra groaned and sighed simultaneously.
“A nice little job. Shall we go?”
\\\\\ 20 /////
It took awhile before Grupstra had timb to talk to Gabrielle. He was busy with his radio while the Volkswagen, gray and inconspicuous, followed the regal backside of the Rolls along the road clinging to the river. The radio room had connected him with the commissaris, and their conversation was linking their separate adventures.
“Very well, sir, so Papa Pullini is now at the hotel talking to his son?” Grijpstra looked at the microphone. He hadn’t released the button yet, so the commissaris couldn’t reply. “And you expect Francesco to come in sometime today to make his peace with us?”
The button sprang back and the commissaris’s soft voice mixed with the high-pitched sound of the car’s engine and the squeak of its battered shock absorbers.
“Yes, adjutant, that side of die case should be fixed. Cardozo will be here to take their statement, I think he’ll be able to follow Francesco’s English. Cardozo tells me that he’s found the tobacconist mat sold the cigars Francesco smoked when he visited Mrs. Carnet. I think I’ll be joining you and the sergeant presently, but I’ll probably arrive too late. You have almost reached Nes, you say?”
“Almost, sir, I can see the ferry sign, it should be just around the corner, and the village should be a few hundred yards farther down.”
“Right. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Out.”
Grijpstra replaced the microphone and turned to Gabrielle “You’ve had an exciting morning, Miss Carnet.”
“It’s still going on.” She had used the time to adjust her make-up and comb her hair and seemed to have recovered some of her composure. “A real crisis, isn’t it? I never expected Bergen to lose himself so completely. He was a raving maniac when he attacked the baboon. I’d gone into the bathroom when the bell rang, but when I heard the shot…”
Grijpstra mused. He remembered the young woman who had shot her husband. It had happened a few weeks before, early in the morning. Just after nine, he and de Gier had just gone out on their patrol and were waiting at the first traffic light. The couple was about to get divorced and the man had been ready to go to work when his wife shot him in the face, point-blank, with no more man a foot between the pistol’s muzzle and the man’s forehead. She had telephoned the police herself, and the detectives had arrived within a matter of minutes. The woman was crying when de Gier took the weapon out of her hand. A hopeless case. The couple had a little son, four years old, wandering about in the apartment. Father dead, mother in jail. They had taken the boy to the crisis center, he hadn’t dared to check what they had done with him. The crisis center wasn’t a good place to check with, its staff was continuously overworked. He hoped that the center had found good foster parents and that the boy wasn’t being shifted around.