“Worried? Me?”
He tried to laugh, but even he could hear that it sounded more like a dying dog. He had some experience of dying dogs.
“That’s all right, then,” she said cheerfully. “I can assure you that Dr. Moewenroedhe is one of our most skillful surgeons, and it’s not all that complicated an operation after all.”
No, but it’s my stomach, Van Veeteren thought. And my intestine. I’ve had it for a long time and I’ve grown quite fond of it.
“You’re welcome to call and ask questions if you like,” she added. “We’re here to help.”
“Thank you very much,” he said with a sigh. “OK, I’ll probably call you beforehand, in any case. Good-bye very much.”
“We look forward to seeing you, Mr. Van Veeteren.”
He stood for a few seconds with the letter in his hand. Then he tore it into four pieces and threw it into the wastepaper basket.
Less than an hour later he had eaten two bratwurst sausages with potato salad on his balcony. Drunk a glass of dark beer with it and started to wonder if he ought to go to the corner shop and buy a pack of cigarettes. He had run out of toothpicks and it was a pleasant evening.
I’m going to die, in any case, he thought.
He heard the clock striking six in Keymer. In his bedside cupboard he had two half-read novels tucked away, but he accepted that they would have to remain half read for some time yet. He wasn’t sufficiently at peace with himself. On the contrary, restlessness was lurking inside him, sharpening its claws, and of course there was no mystery about why.
No secret at all. The air was mild; he could feel that. A gentle, warm breeze wafted over the balcony rail, the sun was a red disc over the brewery roof on the other side of Kloisterlaan. Small birds were twittering away in the lilac bushes behind the cycle shed.
Here I am, he thought. The notorious chief inspector Van Veeteren. A fifty-seven-year-old, 195-pound cop with cancer of the large intestine. Two weeks from now I shall lie down on the operating table of my own free will and allow some totally inexperienced butcher’s apprentice to cut out four inches of my body. Hell.
He could feel a vague turmoil in the lower part of his stomach, but that was always the same after eating nowadays. No pain as such. Just this little irritation. Something to be grateful for, of course. It was true that bratwurst was not on the diet sheet he’d been presented with when they did the tests in February, but what the hell? The main thing was to last until the day of the operation with his mind still working. If all turned out well, then it might be time to consider a new lifestyle. Healthy living and all that.
There’s a time for everything.
He cleared the table. Went to the kitchen and piled the dirty dishes in the sink. Continued into the living room and sorted absentmindedly through his collection of CDs and tapes.
Four inches of my body, he thought, and then was struck by the photographs he’d seen that morning.
The headless man out at Behren.
Missing a head, two hands and two feet.
Could have been worse, he thought.
Between fifty and sixty, Meusse had judged.
That matched. Perhaps the two of them were the same age, in fact? Fifty-seven. Why not?
It could have been much worse.
Ten minutes later he was in his car with a Monteverdi choral piece rattling the loudspeakers. Another hour and a half before it got dark. He had plenty of time.
He only wanted to take a look, that’s all. He didn’t have anything else to do…
There’s a time for everything, as he’d already established.
5
“How’s the love life going?” asked Münster as he eased himself into Rooth’s old Citroën. They ought to talk about something that had nothing to do with work, after all.
“Not very well,” said Rooth. “I sometimes wish they could give you an injection that would cure you of any urges once and for all.”
“Oh dear,” said Münster, wishing he’d never broached the subject.
“There’s something odd about women,” said Rooth. “The ones I meet, at least. I took a lady out last week—a red-headed broad from Oosterbrügge who was attending some nursing course or other here in Maardam. We went to the movies and saw Kraus, and then when I invited her up to my place for a glass of port wine and a bite of cheese, do you know what she said?”
“No idea,” said Münster.
“That she had to get back home to the boyfriend. He’d come to visit her and was waiting for her at the hostel she was staying at. Or so she said.”
“Hard cheese,” said Münster.
“A real cock-up,” said Rooth. “No, I think I’m getting too old to go running after women. Maybe I ought to try putting an ad in the newspapers instead. Kurmann in Missing Persons has found himself a very nice bit of stuff that way…. But you have to have the luck of the devil, of course.”
He concentrated on overtaking a blue removal van before finding himself nose to nose with a No. 12 streetcar. Münster closed his eyes, and on opening them again was able to establish that they had made it.
“What about you?” asked Rooth. “Still no snags with the most beautiful policeman’s wife in the world?”
“Pure paradise,” said Münster; and when he came to think about it, that wasn’t so far from the truth. But Synn was Synn. The only thing that worried him now and again was what a woman like her could see in him—a badly paid detective ten years older than she was, who worked so hard that he hardly ever had time for her or the children. It was easy to convince himself that he had something more than he deserved. That sooner or later he would be punished for it.
But why worry? He was happily married, had two children; perhaps he should just be grateful and accept whatever came his way, for once. In any case, that was not something he had any desire to discuss with Detective Inspector Rooth.
“You should get rid of that beard,” he said instead. “If I were a woman, I’d run a mile from that fuzz.”
Rooth ran his hand over his chin and examined his face in the rearview mirror.
“I don’t know, damn it all,” he said. “Doesn’t look all that bad, I reckon. I’m not sure you understand the way women think.”
“OK,” said Münster. “You do what you like. How are we going to deal with Meusse?”
“I suppose we’d better buy him a drink, as usual,” said Rooth as he pulled up outside the forensic clinic. “Or what do you say?”
“Yep, no doubt that will be the simplest way,” said Münster.
Meusse was not yet finished with today’s quota of dead bodies, and rather than interrupt him, Münster and Rooth decided to wait for him in his office.
He turned up twenty minutes late, and Münster could see that he’d had a rough day. His thin, birdlike body seemed skinnier than ever, his face was ashen and behind his thick glasses his eyes seemed to have sunk deep into their sockets—after having seen enough, and no doubt more than enough, of the evil and perversity this world has to offer, one could safely assume. As far as Münster was concerned, looking at the butchered body for five seconds would have been enough, or ten seconds examining the photographs. He guessed that the forensic specialist must have been poking around in the rotten flesh for at least ten or twelve hours.
Meusse nodded a greeting without saying a word and hung his stained white coat on a hook next to the door. Washed his hands and wriggled his way into the jacket that had been lying on his desk. Stroked his completely bald head a few times and sighed.
“Well, what can I do for you gentlemen?”
“Maybe we’d find it a bit easier to talk over a glass of something tasty in the bar?” Rooth suggested.
The Fix bar was just over the road from the forensic laboratories—if you left by the back door, that is, and there seemed to be no reason to take any other exit but the usual one today either.