The shop assistant tried to smile again, but it wouldn’t come. He glanced several times at the display window and the door, as if hoping that a rather more normal customer might turn up and relieve the somewhat tense atmosphere inside the shop. But no such saviour appeared, and so he put his hands into the pockets of his white smock and tried to appear rather more self-assured.
‘Of course. You are Chief Inspector Van Veeteren. What are you getting at?’
‘What am I getting at?’ enquired Van Veeteren. ‘Let me inform you. I want to go to Rome, and I’ll be damned if I don’t make sure I get there. Tomorrow morning, to be more precise, when I have a flight booked from Sechshafen. However, I must say that I had hoped to make that journey in the best possible condition — namely with all my teeth present and correct.’
‘Your teeth?’
‘My teeth, yes. Incidentally, it is true that my name is Van Veeteren: but when it comes to my occupation, allow me to inform you that I ceased to be a member of the police force three years ago.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said the youth apologetically. ‘But they say you get dragged back in from time to time.’
Get dragged back in? Van Veeteren thought, losing his concentration for a moment. Do they say I get dragged back in? What the hell. .?
He thought quickly about the four years that had passed since he handed in his resignation to Hiller — but the chief of police changed the request on his own initiative to a sort of permanent leave, an arrangement for which there was no precedent in the rulebook. Was the situation really as the callow youth had described it? That he got dragged back in now and then? That he had difficulty in staying away?
Three or four times, he decided. Maybe five or six, it depended on how you counted.
But no more often than that. Once or twice a year. Not much to speak about, in fact, and he had never been the one to take the initiative. Apart from just once, perhaps. It had usually been Münster or Reinhart who had proposed something over a beer at Adenaar’s or Kraus’s place. Asked a tricky little question or requested some advice, as they and their colleagues were getting nowhere in a particular case.
Asked for help, in fact: yes, that’s the way it was. Sometimes he had declined to be of assistance, sometimes he had been interested. But dragged back in? No, that was going too far. Definitely an exaggeration: he hadn’t been involved in any police work in the real meaning of the term since he had become an antiquarian book dealer. In that respect his conscience was as clear and pure white as both innocence and arsenic.
He glared at the shop assistant, who was shuffling his feet and seemed to be having difficulty in remaining silent. Van Veeteren himself had never found it difficult to remain silent. On the contrary, he and silence were old mates, and sometimes he found it advantageous to use silence as a weapon.
‘Rubbish,’ he said in the end. ‘I work with old books at Krantze’s antiquarian bookshop. Full stop. But the point has nothing to do with my personal circumstances, but with this olive stone.’
‘I see,’ said the shop assistant.
‘And this filling.’
‘And so?’
‘You acknowledge that you know me?’
‘Er, yes. . Of course.’
‘Do you also acknowledge that you sold me a sandwich this morning?’
The shop assistant took a deep breath, as if to build up some strength.
‘As I have done every morning for the past year or so, yes.’
‘Not every morning,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘Not by any means. Let’s say three or four times a week. And nowhere near a year either, as I used to shop at Semmelmann’s until January when they closed down. I very much doubt if I would ever have had a problem like this in that shop, incidentally.’
The young man nodded submissively and hesitated.
‘But what the hell. . What is the point you are making?’ he managed to force himself to ask as the blush began to make its way up from under his shirt collar.
‘The content of the sandwich, of course,’ said Van Veeteren.
‘The content?’
‘Precisely. According to what you said and in accordance with what I expected, you sold me this morning a lunchtime sandwich with a filling of mozzarella cheese — made from buffalo milk, of course — cucumber, sun-dried tomatoes, fresh basil, onion, radicchio and stoneless Greek olives.’
The blush on the assistant’s face blossomed forth like a sunrise.
‘I repeat: stoneless olives!’
With a restrained gesture Van Veeteren pointed out to the youth the small objects on the counter. The young man cleared his throat and clasped his hands.
‘I understand. We apologize, of course, and if what you are saying is. .’
‘That is what I am saying,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘To be more precise, the fact is that I have been forced to make an appointment with Schenck, the dentist in Meijkstraat. One of the most expensive dentists in town, unfortunately, but as I am due to leave tomorrow morning I had no choice. I just wanted to make you aware of the circumstances, so that you are not surprised when the invoice arrives.’
‘Of course. My father. .’
‘I have no doubt that you will be able to explain it all in a convincing manner to your father, but now you must excuse me — I simply don’t have the time to stand here arguing the toss any longer. You may keep the stone and the filling. As a souvenir and a sort of reminder, I don’t need either of them any longer. Thank you and goodbye.’
‘Thank you, thank you,’ stammered the young man. ‘We shall be seeing you again, I hope?’
‘I shall think about the possibility,’ said Van Veeteren, stepping out into the sunshine.
He spent the rest of the afternoon in the inner room of the antiquarian bookshop, working. Answered eleven requests from bookshops and libraries — eight of them negative, three positive. Listed and annotated a collection of maps that Krantze had found in a cellar in the Prague old town (how on earth had he managed to make such a journey and also go down into a cellar, afflicted as he was by rheumatism, sciatica, vascular spasms and chronic bronchitis?). Began sorting out four bags of odds and ends brought in that same morning by the heirs of a recently deceased man, and bought for a song. He allowed the few customers who came into the shop to wander around freely, and the only transaction was the sale of half a dozen old crime novels for rather a good price to a German tourist. At a quarter past five Ulrike rang to ask what time he would be coming home. He told her about the olive stone and the tooth filling, and thought that she found it more amusing than she ought to have done. They agreed to meet at Adenaar’s at about seven — or as soon after that as possible, depending on when he had been allowed to leave the dentist’s chair. Neither of them had any great desire to cook a meal the evening before a journey; and in any case it was by no means certain that he would be able to chew anything so soon after being fitted with new false teeth, Ulrike thought.
‘It’s not a matter of new false teeth,’ Van Veeteren pointed out. ‘It’s just a filling.’
‘They usually have pretty good soup at Adenaar’s,’ Ulrike reminded him.
‘Their beer is usually drinkable,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘I know nothing about their soup.’
When they had hung up he remained sitting there with his hands clasped behind his head for a while. He suddenly noticed that something warm was stirring inside him, and wondered what on earth that could be. An unobtrusive, barely noticeable emotion, perhaps, but even so. .
Happiness?
The word burst as a result of its own presumptuousness, and soon various other thoughts had occurred to him. No, not happiness, he thought. Good God, no! But it could have been worse. And there were other lives that had been even more of a failure than his.