"What was he making?" Grijpstra asked.
The accountant produced a ledger from a metal filing cabinet.
"About two thousand guilders a week, I guess. A little more perhaps. He must have pocketed some as it came in."
"Did he pay taxes?"
The accountant looked sly.
"Not yet. The Society was only three years old. He had copied it from a similar thing in Paris, I believe; I think he worked in Paris for a while. No, he never paid any tax, only purchase tax. Nobody avoids purchase tax unless they sell in the street and run when the coppers arrive."
"No tax?" Grijpstra asked. "No company tax? No income tax?"
The accountant hadn't changed his expression. The sly look was still there. A professional slyness, a highly educated very smart fox who had made his lair in a gable house.
"No tax," he repeated. "Societies are very special, very vague material. A proper society makes no profit, whatever it makes it spends. It is allowed to form a slight reserve. If it makes a profit there is trouble with the inspection. There would have been trouble here and I have been warning Piet. After all, I am a chartered accountant, not a bookkeeper he could hire anywhere. I have a reputation to lose. I told him to change his Society into a normal commercial company with a balance sheet. I would have worked out his profit on the first three years and he would have paid some tax. I also told him that he could forget about my services if he refused. He might have gone on for years, quietly pocketing the money and improving his position. The inspection isn't very quick. But they would have caught him in the end and fined him right into bankruptcy."
Grijpstra looked up.
"You said 'we' just now. If I remember correctly you said 'but we earned some money.' Do you mean that you had a share in the business?"
The accountant laughed. "I see I am dealing with the police. No, no. Nobody is allowed to have a material interest in a society. But an accountant always identifies with his client and talks about 'we' and 'ours.' You can compare it to a mother who tells her small child 'now we are going to do a little whiddle' but the mother doesn't whiddle, the child whiddles."
Grijpstra grinned and told himself that he should remember to repeat the explanation to de Gier.
"So if Piet had continued on the way he was going he would have been in trouble?"
The accountant made his fingertips touch and looked at his interrogator from above, using his high seat and tall body to advantage.
"Perhaps. The inspection is busy, and very slow. Their servants are officials, nine-to-five men, moderately dedicated. With luck Piet could have gone on for years and years and even if the inspection had become suspicious, well, there would have been time. He could have sold out and run for it. He might had made a small fortune and retired, on an island somewhere. There are a lot of islands in the world."
"Piet was the only director?" Grijpstra asked.
"Yes. He asked me to join him but I refused. The Society's foundation was too rotten for me. His wife used to be a director but she never knew what went on. She left him anyway, you know that, don't you?"
"Yes," Grijpstra said, "and what did he do with the money?"
"Let's see," the accountant said and leafed through the ledger. "Here. The money wasn't spent. He invested some in the house, repairs and so on, improving its value considerably. There is a nice car in the Society, which Piet used, and he bought a small house in the South, in the country somewhere. A good buy, its present value should be three times what he paid for it. His own official income was six hundred guilders a month, plus free board and lodging. He paid income tax on the six hundred, which is next to nothing."
Grijpstra looked at the ceiling. The accountant waited patiently.
"So everything in the house, the stereo equipment, furniture, statues, inventory, stocks, were the Society's property?"
"Yes."
"And Piet could sell whatever he wanted to sell and pocket the money?"
"Yes," the accountant said. "In fact he was the Society. A difficult case, even for the inspection. If they had found out what he was doing they would have forced him to change it into a commercial company."
'To get a grip on him?"
"Exactly," said the accountant. "But what are you hinting at?"
Grijpstra smiled his special noncommittal smile and managed to put some human warmth in it.
"I don't quite know myself," he said. "I am gathering information, that's all. Who would benefit from Piet's death?"
"His wife," the accountant said, "but she ran away. To Paris I think; I seem to remember that Piet told me but I am not sure. If she is in Paris she can't have murdered him there. In any case, I know her and she is not the killing type. She is a rather lovely but very vague woman. She wouldn't hang anyone. And her little daughter is a toddler."
"Do you see any reason for suicide?" Grijpstra asked. The accountant sucked pensively on his cigar and began to cough. Suddenly he looked ferocious and the soggy cigar stub was killed with savage power.
"Bah. These cigars aren't what they are cracked up to be. Wet bags full of nicotine. Yagh."
Grijpstra waited patiently for the evil mood to pass.
"'Suicide,' you said. I am no psychologist," the accountant said.
"I am asking you ail the same," Grijpstra said pleasantly.
"I am an accountant. As an accountant I would say there might be a reason. I think I convinced Piet that his Society would have to disappear. He identified with the Society. Its death might mean his own death. And I think that the thought of having to pay a lot of money to the government upset him considerably. He might have had to pay as much as fifty thousand guilders, an amount he didn't have."
"Not in cash," Grijpstra said.
"Yes," the accountant agreed, "it wasn't all that bad. He could have raised the money on his property. I could have managed the mortgage for him, at a price of course. Mortgages are expensive these days."
"So he was upset," Grijpstra said. "He would have had to go to a lot of trouble to raise money to pay to the government."
The accountant put his fingertips together again and donned a pensive look.
"And there you may have your reason," he said suavely. "The government is the establishment and Piet fought the establishment. His Society was against the establishment. And now it looked like the enemy was winning."
"Aha," Grijpstra said. "And if his enemy would force him to change the Society into a commercial company he would have had to hire real staff and pay them real wages. It might have been the end of his small but profitable business."
"Quite," the accountant said.
Grijpstra studied the accountant, a tall wide-shouldered man, aged somewhere between fifty and sixty. A beautifully chiseled head. A chartered accountant, a man of standing, comparable to a surgeon, a bank director, an important merchant. An expensive office, an expensive image. Even an expensive name. Joachim de Kater. A "kater" is a tomcat. The tomcat watches how the others run to and fro, in the sweat of their brows, and every now and then the tomcat puts out his paw and flicks his nails and the others pay. A chartered accountant is a man trusted by the establishment. Whatever he says is believed and the tax inspectors talk to him as equal to equal. Grijpstra shuddered. Grijpstra is Dutch too and he feared the tax inspectors as the Calvinists had once feared the Spanish inquisition.