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 Munster as he eased himself into Rooth’s old Citroen. 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 Munster, 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 Oosterbrugge 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 Munster.
“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 Munster.
“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 2 9
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. Munster 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 Munster; 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 chil-
dren; 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 Munster. “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 Munster.
Meusse was not yet finished with today’s quota of dead bodies, and rather than interrupt him, Munster and Rooth decided to wait for him in his office.
He turned up twenty minutes late, and Munster could see that he’d had a rough day. His thin, birdlike body seemed skin-nier 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 Munster 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 labora-tories-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.
Meusse led the way, hands in pockets and shoulders
hunched, and it wasn’t until he had a double gin and a beer chaser on the table in front of him that he seemed up to discussing his findings. Both Munster and Rooth had been through this many times before and knew there was no point in trying to speed him up-or in interrupting him once he’d got going, come to that. He would answer any questions when he’d said what he had to say; it was as simple as that.
“Well, gentlemen,” he began. “I note that Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is conspicuous by his absence on this occasion.
Can’t say I’m surprised. This body you’ve come across is a pretty nasty object. If a mere pathologist might be allowed to express a wish, it would be that you would make an effort to dig them out a bit sooner in future. We are not exactly inspired by dead bodies that have been rotting away for an age. . Three months, four at most, that’s where the limit ought to be set. The fact is that one of my assistants couldn’t cope and let me down this afternoon. Hmm.”
“How old is this one, then?” asked Rooth, trying to put his oar in while Meusse was busy exploring the depths of his beer glass.
“As I said,” he went on, “it’s an unusually unsavory body.”
Unsavory? Munster thought, and recalled how Meusse had once told him how his life had been changed and made more miserable by his less-than-uplifting profession. How he had been impotent by the age of thirty, how his wife had left him when he was thirty-five, how he’d turned vegetarian at forty, and how he’d more or less stopped eating solid food by the time he was fifty. . His own body and its functions had become more and more repulsive as the years went by. Something he could only feel disgust and aversion for, he had confessed to Munster and Van Veeteren one afternoon when, for whatever reason, the drinks had become more numerous than usual.