It would have to be something ordinary, innocuous. Something the riot policemen could see without having second thoughts. And it had to be noiseless. A bang would have alarmed the constables who were uneasy anyway that day. Something the killer could carry through the Straight Tree Ditch and smile at the constables as he carried it.
His eyes were closing. He struggled. The answer was close; all he had to do was grab it.
He fell asleep and woke up two hours later. Esther wasn't on the bed. He heard her in the kitchen. She was stirring something in a pot. The smell reached him, a good smell which touched his stomach. A stew. She must have found the minced meat and the fresh vegetables. He got up and stuck his head into the small kitchen. She had some rice at the boil too.
They ate, and listened to records. De Gier felt happy, unbelievably and completely happy. He also felt guilty and he opened a can of sardines for Oliver.
15
The Albert Cuyp is a long narrow street cutting through one of Amsterdam's uglier parts, where houses are thin high slabs of bricks pushed together in endless rows, where trees won't grow and where traffic is eternally congested. The street market is the heart of an area consisting of stone and tar, and its splash of color and sound feeds some life into what otherwise wouldn't be much other than a hell of boredom, in which the human ant lives out its sixty or seventy years of getting up and going to bed, being busy in between with factory and office work, and TV programs and a bit of drinking at the corner bar. It was an area that both de Gier and Cardozo knew well, for it breeds crime, mostly sad and always nonspectacular. The neighborhood is known for its family fights, drug pushing in a small way, burglaries and a bit of robbery, committed by youth gangs who swagger about, waylaying the elderly passerby, stealing cars and motorized bicycles, and molesting lonely homosexuals. The area is doomed, for city planning will do away with it, blow it up with dynamite to make room for blocks of apartments set in parks, but the city works slowly and the street market will be there for many years to come, functioning as a gigantic department store, selling food and household goods cheaply, providing an outlet for the national industry's unsalable goods and for adventurer-merchants who import for their own account, or smuggle, or, rarely, buy stolen goods.
Cardozo had managed to force the gray van on to the sidewalk and was unloading bale after bale of gaily printed textiles, which de Gier stacked on the worn planks of a corner stall, assigned to them for the day by the market master, who had given them a knowing wink when de Gier, waving his license, looked him up in his little office.
"Good luck," the market master said. "You'll be after Rogge's killer, I bet. You'd better get him. Abe Rogge was a popular man here and he'll be missed."
"Don't tell anyone," de Gier said.
The market master was shaking his head energetically.
"I don't tell on the police. I need the police here. I wish you would patrol the market more regularly. Two uniformed constables can't cover a mile of market."
"There are plainclothes police as well."
"Yes," the market master said, "but not enough. There's always a bit of trouble here, especially on a hot day like this. We need more uniforms. If they see a shiny cap and nicely polished buttons they quiet down quickly. I have been writing to the chief constable's office. He always answers, but it's the same answer. Short of staff."
"Complain, complain, complain!" de Gier said.
"What do you mean?"
"What I say. Go on complaining. It helps. You'll get more constables."
"But they'll come from some other part of town and there'll be trouble down there."
"So someone else can start complaining."
"Yes," the market master said, and laughed. "I am only concerned about my own troubles. What about you? Will you catch your man?"
"Sure," de Gier said, and left.
But he wasn't so sure when he got back to the stall. Cardozo was complaining too. The bales were too heavy.
"I'll get you some coffee," de Gier said.
"I can get my own coffee. I want you to help me unload these bales."
"Sugar and milk?"
"Yes. But help me first."
"No," de Gier said and left the stall. He found a girl carrying a tray with empty glasses, who took his order. He ordered meat rolls too and hot dogs.
"You are new, aren't you?" The girl was pretty and de Gier smiled at her.
"Yes. First day here. We've been on other markets, never down here."
"Best market in the country. What do you sell?"
"Lovely fabrics for dressmaking and curtains."
"Will you give me a special price?" The girl reached out with her free hand and patted his cheek.
"Sure." He smiled again and she swung her hip at him in response. He wasn't in a hurry to get back to the stall, but Cardozo saw him and shouted and jumped up and down, waving his arms.
Together they finished the stall, draping some of the textiles in what they thought to be an attractive display.
"This is no good," Cardozo muttered as he worked. That fellow on the other side of the street knows who we are. He keeps on looking at us. Who is he anyway?"
De Gier looked and waved. "Louis Zilver. I asked the market master to give us a place close to him. He was Abe Rogge's partner. He's selling beads and wool and embroidery silk and all that sort of thing."
"But if he knows us he'll spread the news, won't he?"
"No, he won't, why should he?"
"Why shouldn't he?"
"Because he is the dead man's friend."
"He may be the dead man's killer."
De Gier sipped his coffee and stared at Cardozo, who was glaring at him from between two bales of cloth. "What are you so excited about? If he is the killer we are wasting our time here for we'll have to get at him in some other way. But if he isn't he'll protect us. He knows he is a suspect and if we find the killer he'll be cleared; besides, he may really want us to catch the murderer. He's supposed to be Rogge's friend, isn't he? There is such a thing as friendship."
Cardozo snorted.
"Don't you believe in friendship?"
Cardozo didn't answer.
"Don't you?"
"I am a Jew," Cardozo said, "and Jews believe in friendship because they wouldn't have survived without it."
"That isn't what I mean."
"What do you mean?"
"Friendship," de Gier said. "You know, love. One man loves another. He is glad when the other man is glad and sad when the other man is sad. He identifies with the other man. They are together, and together they are more than two individuals added up."
"You don't have to spell it out for me," Cardozo said. "I won't believe you anyway. There's such a thing as a shared interest and the idea that two men can do more than one. I can understand that but I won't go for love. I have been in the police for some time now. The friends we catch always rat on each other after a while."
"Love your neighbor," de Gier said.
"Are you religious?"
"No."
"So why preach at me?"
De Gier touched Cardozo's shoulder gingerly. "I am not preaching at you. Love your neighbor; it makes sense, doesn't it? Even if it happens to be a religious command."
"But we don't love our neighbors," Cardozo said, furiously pushing at a bale of lining which had fallen over. "We are envious of our neighbors, we try to grab things from them, we annoy them. And we make fun of them if we can get away with it and we kill them too if they don't want to put up with our demands. You can't prove history wrong. I was too young to have been in the last war but I've seen the documentaries, and I've heard the stories and seen the numbers burned into people's arms. We have an army to make sure that the neighbors across the frontier behave themselves and we have a police force to make sure that we behave ourselves within the frontiers. You know what the place would be like if the police didn't patrol it?"