Grijpstra felt too relieved to be hurt. "Shouldn't you be inside working?" he asked mildly.
"I should be," the waiter said, "but I am not. I am here, taking five minutes off and smoking a cigarette. It's my last day at this establishment. I am starting a little snack bar in town next week."
"Where? Maybe I'll come and try it."
"Not you," the waiter said, threw down his cigarette, stamped on it, and walked away.
13
"We are early," the Commissaris said to the constable. "You can drive about for half an hour if you like. There's a nature reserve close by. I've been there before, I even have a special pass. It isn't open to the public."
He fished around in his wallet and gave the pass to the driver. The constable turned it around and studied the little map on its reverse side.
"I can find it, sir. It shouldn't be more than a few kilometers from here."
Grijpstra was still exhausted and happy to let events take their course. The soft suspension of the car was lulling him to sleep and when he woke up because the commissaris touched his arm they were in the reserve. Once a graveyard, the place had lain untended for a hundred years or so; then the municipal authorities had discovered it again and promoted it into a special area, enlarging the land by buying the surrounding farms and a small estate, complete with the ruins of a castle and a moat leading into an artificial lake. The city had dipped into a wildlife fund for the money, and botanists and biologists now roamed the reserve, trying to find out what supposedly extinct flora and fauna they might run into.
"Untouched by filthy hands," the commissaris mumbled as he gazed at the landscape. The constable was driving slowly so that they could enjoy the sight of beeches and oaks grown to gigantic sizes, a glade, covered with the lush yellow of gorse, undergrowth bustling with rabbits and a lone pheasant standing on a rock. "Look," the commissaris said, and pointed at a spotted deer, watching them quietly from the cover of a broken gravestone.
"I could hit him easily from here," the constable said and touched the automatic pistol, resting in its holster under his blazer. "A perfect shot, sir."
"You're joking," Grijpstra said grumpily.
"A policeman is a hunter," the commissaris said good-naturedly. "Don't scold the constable, adjutant. The thought occurred to me too."
He pointed his index finger at the buck. "Bam," the commissaris said. "You are dead. We'll have venison for dinner tomorrow."
The car was moving again. They were getting close to the lake and at a turn of the path they saw a flock of coots landing. The fat black little birds came in with their flat webbed feet spread, clumsily hitting the lake's still surface and splashing heavily before they flopped down, like puddings thrown in a comic movie.
"Ha," the constable said, but he wasn't laughing a minute later when the wide tires of the Citroen were crushing the first toads.
"What now?" the constable asked, and stopped the car, alarmed by the squashing noise which suddenly burst on his eardrums. He got out and looked at the tarmac. Some ten flattened baby toads showed themselves on the hot tar of the path.
The commissaris and Grijpstra had got out too.
"You should have avoided them," Grijpstra said. "Toads are getting scarce nowadays."
"He couldn't have," the commissaris said. "He didn't see them, did you, constable?"
"No, sir. I heard them when they squashed. Bah. Horrible sound, wasn't it? Like popping balloons."
"There are lots of them," Grijpstra said.
The grass on both sides of the path was alive with toads. They were coming from the lake, and the car and the three men were in their way. The path became covered with their small slimy bodies and there seemed no way of avoiding their hopping progress. They were everywhere, crawling over the policemen's shoes, pushing against the car's tires. They could hear them too now, an oozing sound, as if thick wet sticky mud were being pumped through countless drainpipes.
"Let's get out of here," the commissaris said, shaking the animals off his shoes and inadvertently stepping on them.
The constable slipped and would have fallen if Grijpstra's heavy hand hadn't caught his elbow. They got back into the car.
"If we drive away I'll kill thousands of them," the constable said.
The commissaris looked at the lake. "They are still coming, they may be coming all day. This must be their hatching time. Perhaps there is a plague of toads. That damned gatekeeper shouldn't have let us in. Get us out of here, constable, we have an appointment to keep."
The toads crawled and sucked and squashed for hundreds of yards and the Citroen kept on crushing them. The constable was cursing, holding the wheel as if he wanted to wrench it out of its socket. The slime of the small corpses filled the grooves of the tires, forcing the car to slide crazily, and twice they slipped off the path with spinning wheels. Grijpstra felt sick and blocked his ears to drown the continuous slushing and squeezing. He was trying not to think of the snails, which he imagined sliding about in his stomach in a sea of whipped cream, and was breathing deeply. He could see the constable's wide staring eyes in the rearview mirror.
"That's it," the commissaris said cheerfully. "We are through. Go forward and reverse a couple of times on that sandy spot over there, it'll clean out the tires."
"That girl will be our last suspect for the time being," the commissaris was saying, "but Abe Rogge must have had a lot of close relationships. We are facing a crowd, Grijpstra. Maybe we haven't even started yet."
Grijpstra didn't answer and the commissaris leaned forward to get a closer look. Grijpstra's state of nerves didn't seem improved at all; if anything it seemed worse. The adjutant's skin looked gray and he wasn't able to control his hands, which were fidgeting with the end of his tie.
"Sir," the constable said, and pointed at a small freshly painted houseboat.
Grijpstra grunted and got out of the car. The commissaris wanted to follow but checked himself. Grijpstra was hopping about on one foot on the quay, yelling.
"Now what?" the commissaris asked.
"Careful, sir," Grijpstra shouted. "The pavement is full of shit."
The commissaris looked. It must have been a large dog, a large sick dog perhaps. The turds, of greenish yellow color, covered several cobblestones and Grijpstra had stepped right in the middle. The constable closed his eyes, opened them again and forced his body to move. He walked around the car, opened the trunk and found a hard brush with a long handle. Grijpstra held on to a lamppost while the constable set to work.
"You are an excitable fellow," the commissaris said. "Haven't you ever stepped into dog turds before, adjutant?"
"Often," Grijpstra said irritably. "Every day of my life, I think. I attract dogshit. If there's one turd in a street I plow right through it. Some people think it's funny. I amuse them."
"I don't think it's funny," the commissaris said, "and neither does the constable."
"De Gier thinks it's funny. Yesterday, when we went to fetch the car in the police yard, I stepped into a turd and I was running so I slithered all over the pavement. He laughed, the bastard laughed! Tears in his eyes! Slapping his thighs! But dogshit is the same to me as a bleeding corpse to him. / don't laugh when he is leaning against walls and fainting and carrying on!^M
"Hmm," the commissaris said, "but you are clean now. Thank you, constable. Let's get into that boat before anything else happens."
The girl was waiting for them in the doorway.
"Anything wrong?" she asked the adjutant. "Why were you jumping about?"
"Stepped in some dog droppings, miss."
"The German shepherd next door did that. He hasn't been feeling well lately. I meant to clean it up today but I forgot. Take your shoes off, my boat is all spick and span for once."