"Did he ever take you with him?"
"No," Constanze said, "he never asked me but I wouldn't have gone anyway. Motorbikes scare me. I had a boyfriend who had a motorbike when I was a girl and we had an accident on it. I walked on crutches for months. Never again."
"Did you like him?"
Constanze looked at him, eyes half-closed. "Why? Are you jealous? Or is this an interrogation? Like last night?"
"No," de Gier said.
"Did you think I had something with that Papuan?"
De Gier didn't answer.
She put down her fork and looked at him. Her eyes were wide open now.
"I am sorry. I shouldn't have said that. I have nothing against color. Van Meteren was always very good to me. But as a man… I don't think I ever thought about him that way."
De Gier felt her foot against his.
A few minutes later she mentioned van Meteren of her own accord.
"Yes," she said, "a strange man. It must have been difficult for him to live here. He could never forget New Guinea, of course, and here he would never be accepted. People were nice to him, I think. But nice is not enough. They stared at him. Perhaps it would have been all right if he could have been a regular policeman. He would have had his self respect. He has been a policeman all his life. Do you know he could tell stories? I laughed a lot about the story of the white official who had been sent to New Guinea as an assistant district commissioner. He had hardly arrived when they sent him on an inspection and the very first time he went into a native village he ran into a tribal war. A tall thin lad, twenty-five years old perhaps, raised in a little Dutch city, and there he was with painted demons, dancing and yelling and clubbing each other. They never touched him. Maybe they left him alone because he was white. He had nothing to do with it. Big black hooligans with bones through their noses and feathers in their hair, and someone beating a drum. When it was all over the official was raving mad and they had to fly him back. He spent years in an asylum."
"That's a funny story?" de Gier asked.
"Maybe not," Constanze said and laughed. "You think the poor chap had come to maintain order. Doing his duty and so on. But I thought it was funny. Maybe you would have thought so too if you had heard van Meteren tell it. He acted both sides, the wild ones, and the official. He was really very good."
"He acted the white fellow as well?" de Gier asked.
"Yes," said Constanze, "ask him to tell the story, you'll see."
"I will," de Gier said, and paid the bill. It was only half of what it should have been.
"I wonder what they are hiding," de Gier thought. "That waiter's papers won't be in order, that's for sure. Maybe there is something wrong with the owner as well. Or they were the fellows who hid Lee Fong."
He wondered if he should mention the matter to the Aliens Department at Headquarters.
"Maybe not," he thought.
Constanze moved close to him in the car. "Let's drive to the park."
He parked the car as close to the park as he could get. She guided him to a pond. "Crumble some bread and throw it in."
"There are no ducks," he said.
"Never mind. Just do as I say."
The crumbs hit the pond's surface and caused a strange spectacle. Great carp, some of them seemed more than two feet long, fought for the bread. The water foamed. The pond seemed full of carp. De Gier couldn't imagine where they had all come from. The smacking of their thick pink lips filled the air around him.
"Did you like that?" Constanze asked when he had finished the bread.
"Yes," he said. He thought the time had come and put his arms around her. She kissed him back and then pushed him away.
"Where do you live?" she asked.
"Five minutes from here," he said.
"Let's go there."
In the flat he asked her to wait at the door while he caught Oliver and locked him up in the kitchen. She slipped past him. He fed Oliver.
By the time he got into the bedroom she had little on.
He helped her take her panties off.
\\\\\ 8 /////
Grijpstra watched his wife, a formless lump under the blankets, and listened to the chief inspector whose loud voice hollered from the telephone.
The voice went on and on, connecting sentences, repeating itself. Mrs. Grijpstra's head became visible. She scowled. "Why," Grijpstra asked himself, "do curlers have to be pink? Why not brown? If they were brown they would blend with her hair, I wouldn't notice them so much, and I would be less irritated. I wouldn't have such a foul taste in my mouth. My stomach wouldn't cramp. I wouldn't have to worry about ulcers. My wife wouldn't forget to buy medicine because I wouldn't need to take medicine. I would be happier."
"Yes sir," Grijpstra said.
It was ten A.M., Sunday morning.
"No," the chief inspector said. "This 'yes sir' won't get us anywhere, Grijpstra. I don't see any progress in the case at all. We aren't getting anywhere, Grijpstra. Complications, that's all we get."
"How do you mean, sir?" Grijpstra asked and changed the telephone to his other ear.
"By now we should have sufficient material to start sorting and shifting," the chief inspector said, "but we haven't sorted anything and we have more material. You said that you found another staircase, didn't you?"
"Yes sir," Grijpstra said, "another staircase and another door. The staircase leads to Piet's room. The door is locked but we opened it, the lock was simple. It wasn't rusty. Piet had a key to it and Mrs. Verboom used to have a key. Perhaps other people had or have keys as well."
"Yes," the chief inspector said impatiently, "so anybody could have sneaked up, without the girls in the kitchen seeing him. Or her. Mrs. Verboom could have used her keys."
"She was in Paris, sir."
"So she says. But we have airplanes nowadays. She could have come in the morning and left in the evening. We'll have to check. Find out where she works."
"Yes sir," Grijpstra said and blew cigar smoke into the room. His wife began to cough, got out of the bed and stamped out of the door, slamming it.
"What was that?" the chief inspector asked.
"My wife closed a door."
"It sounded like a shot. Never mind. There is also the old Mrs. Verboom, do you know where she is now?"
"She is in Aerdenhout; the mental home is called Christian Freeminded Sanatorium for Neuroses."
"She is all that?" the chief inspector asked.
Grijpstra sucked on his cigar.
"Not funny, hey?" the chief inspector said and continued hopefully. "Perhaps we'll have an anonymous tip. Anything to give us a hint. A good hint. The commissaris is becoming impatient. He keeps on phoning me. You still think it is murder?"
'There is seventy-five thousand missing, sir," Grijps-tra said.
"Yes," the chief inspector said, "very true. He may have paid someone. But who? I don't know. We'll have to go on, what else can we do? You go and see the corpse's mother in Aerdenhout. She is crazy but crazy people sometimes answer questions. She may speak the truth. Crazy people often do. Go and see her, Grijpstra. Today. Sunday is just the sort of day to visit a mental asylum. Do it today and you can do something else tomorrow. You have to go and see our two drug dealers. Monday is a good day to see drug dealers. They won't have much resistance after the weekend."
Grijpstra put his hand over the mouthpiece and sighed.
"Are you there, Grijpstra?"
"Yes sir," Grijpstra said. "I'll go to the mental home today. Goodbye, sir."
He rang off.