A Widow for One Year (62 page)

Even stoned, Wim got the message. The boy looked around the hotel room as if he’d misplaced half his life in it. Ruth was still talking to Allan when Wim left. He could have made a scene, but he wasn’t a bad boy—just an ordinary one. The only peevish gesture he made in leaving was to take a condom out of his pocket; he dropped it beside Ruth where she sat on the bed, still talking to Allan. It was one of those special condoms that come in flavors—this one claimed to be bananaflavored. Ruth would bring the condom to Allan. A little present from the red-light district, she would tell him. (She already knew she wouldn’t tell him about Wim,
or
Rooie.)

The novelist sat up transcribing what Wim had written into an orderly message, in her own handwriting—her own
printing,
to be exact. She carved every letter of the foreign language with the utmost care; she didn’t want to make any mistakes. The police would doubtless conclude that there’d been a witness to Rooie’s murder, but Ruth didn’t want them to know that the witness wasn’t Dutch. This way the police might presume that the witness was another prostitute—possibly one of Rooie’s neighbors on the Bergstraat.

Ruth had a plain manila envelope, manuscript-size, which Maarten had given her with her itinerary. She put her notes for the police in this envelope, together with the tube of Polaroid print coater. When she handled the tube, she touched it only by the ends, holding it between her thumb and index finger; she knew she’d touched the body of the tube when she’d picked it up off Rooie’s rug, but she hoped she hadn’t marred the killer’s fingerprints.

She hadn’t the name of a policeman, but she assumed she could safely address the envelope to the police station at 48 Warmoesstraat. First thing in the morning, before she wrote anything on the envelope, she went downstairs to the lobby of the hotel and got the correct postage from the concierge. Then she went out looking for the morning newspapers.

It was the front-page story in at least two Amsterdam papers. She bought the newspaper that had a picture under the headline. It was a photo of the Bergstraat at night, not very clear. A police barrier had enclosed the sidewalk immediately in front of Rooie’s door. Behind the barrier, someone who looked like a plainclothes cop was talking to two women who looked like prostitutes.

Ruth recognized the cop. He was the compact, powerful-looking man in the dirty running shoes and the baseball-type warm-up jacket. In the picture, he appeared to be clean-shaven, but Ruth had no doubt that it was the same man who’d followed her for a while in
de Wallen;
clearly both the Bergstraat and the red-light district were his beat.

The headline read:
MOORD IN DE BERGSTRAAT

Ruth didn’t need to know Dutch to figure that out. While there was no mention of “Rooie”—the prostitute’s nickname—the article did mention that the murder victim was one Dolores de Ruiter, age fortyeight. The only other name mentioned in the article—it was also in the caption of the photograph—was the policeman’s, Harry Hoekstra, and he was referred to by two different titles. In one place he was a
wijkagent
, in another a
hoofdagent
. Ruth determined that she wouldn’t mail her envelope until she’d had time to ask Maarten and Sylvia about the newspaper story.

She brought the article in her purse to dinner; it would be her last dinner with them before leaving Amsterdam, and Ruth had rehearsed how she would casually bring up the story of the murdered prostitute: “Is this a story about what I think it is? I’ve actually walked on this street.”

But she didn’t have to bring it up. Maarten had already spotted the story and clipped it from the paper. “Have you seen this? Do you know what it is?” When Ruth pretended ignorance, Maarten and Sylvia told her all the details.

Ruth had already assumed that the body would be discovered by the younger prostitute who used Rooie’s room at night—the girl she’d seen in the window in the leather halter top. The only surprise in the article was that there was no mention of Rooie’s daughter.

“What’s a
wijkagent
?” Ruth asked Maarten.

“The cop on the beat, the district’s officer,” he told her.

“Then what’s a
hoofdagent
?”

“That’s his rank,” Maarten replied. “He’s a senior police officer— not quite what you call a sergeant.”

Ruth Cole left Amsterdam for New York on a late-morning flight the following day, having had the taxi take her to the nearest post office en route to the airport. At the post office, she mailed the envelope to Harry Hoekstra, who was almost a sergeant in the Amsterdam police force—District 2. It might have surprised Ruth to know the motto of the 2nd District, which was inscribed in Latin on the police officers’ key rings.

ERRARE
HUMANUM
EST

To err
is
human, Ruth Cole knew. Her message, together with the Polaroid print coater, would tell Harry Hoekstra much more than Ruth had meant to say. The message, in carefully printed Dutch, was as follows:

1.
De moordenaar liet dit vallen
.
[The murderer dropped this.]

2.
Hij is kaal, met een glad gezicht, een eivormig hoofd en een onopvallend lichaam—niet erg groot
.
[He is a bald, smooth-faced man with an egg-shaped head and a nondescript body—not very big.]

3.
Hij spreekt Engels met, denk ik, een Duits accent
.
[He speaks English with, I think, a German accent.]

4.
Hij heeft geen seks. Hij neemt één foto van het lichaam nadat hij het lichaam heeft neergelegd.
[He doesn’t have sex. He takes one photograph of the body after he has posed the body.]

5.
Hij loenst, zijn ogen bijna helemaal dichtgeknepen
.
Hij ziet eruit als een mol. Hij piept als hij ademhaalt. Astma misschien
. . .
[He has squinty eyes, almost totally closed. He looks like a mole. He wheezes. Asthma, maybe . . .]

6.
Hij werkt voor SAS
.
De Scandinavische luchtvaartmaatschappij? Hij heeft iets te maken met beveiliging
.
[He works for SAS. The Scandinavian airline? He has something to do with security.]

That, together with the Polaroid print coater, was Ruth’s complete eyewitness account. It might have worried her, a week or so later, to hear Harry Hoekstra’s comment to a colleague in the Warmoesstraat police station.

Harry was not a detective; more than a half-dozen detectives were already looking for Rooie’s murderer. Harry Hoekstra was just a street cop, but the red-light district and the area of the Bergstraat had been Harry’s beat for more than thirty years. No one in
de Wallen
knew the prostitutes and their world better than he did. Besides, the eyewitness account had been addressed to Harry. It had at first seemed safe to assume that the witness was someone who
knew
Harry—most likely a prostitute.

Harry Hoekstra, however, never
assumed
. Harry had his own way of doing things. The detectives had made the murderer their job; they’d left the lesser matter of the witness to Harry. When asked if he was making any progress with his investigations concerning the prostitute’s murder—was he any closer to finding the killer?—almost-a-sergeant Hoekstra replied: “The killer isn’t my job. I’m looking for the
witness
.”

Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus

If you’re a writer, the problem is that, when you try to call a halt to thinking about your novel-in-progress, your imagination still keeps going; you can’t shut it off.

Thus Ruth Cole sat on the plane from Amsterdam to New York, composing opening sentences in spite of herself. “I suppose I owe at least a word of thanks to my last bad boyfriend.” Or: “His awfulness notwithstanding, I am grateful to my last bad boyfriend.” And so on, as the pilot made some mention of the Irish coast.

She would have liked to linger over the land a little longer. With nothing but the Atlantic beneath her, Ruth discovered that if she stopped thinking about her new book, even for a minute, her imagination plunged her into more inhospitable territory—namely, what would happen to Rooie’s daughter? The now-motherless girl might be as young as seven or eight, or as old as Wim, or older—but not if Rooie had still been picking her up after school!

Who would take care of her now? The prostitute’s daughter . . . the very idea occupied the novelist’s imagination like the title of a novel she wished she’d written.

To stop herself from obsessing any further, Ruth looked through her carry-on bag for something to read. She’d forgotten about the books that had traveled with her from New York to Sagaponack, and then to Europe. She’d read enough (for the time being) of
The Life of Graham Greene
—and, under the circumstances, she couldn’t bear to reread Eddie O’Hare’s
Sixty Times
. (The masturbation scenes alone would have pushed her over the edge.) Instead, Ruth again began the Canadian crime novel that Eddie had given her. After all, hadn’t Eddie told her that the book was “good airplane reading”?

Ruth resigned herself to the irony of reading a murder mystery; but, at the moment, Ruth would have read
anything
to escape her own imagination.

Once more Ruth was irritated by the purposeful obscurity of the author photo; that the unknown author’s name was a nom de plume also irked her. The author’s pen name was Alice Somerset, which meant nothing to Ruth. However, if Ted Cole had seen that name on a book jacket, he would have looked at the book—and especially at the author photo, as obscure as it was—very closely.

Marion’s maiden name was Somerset, and Alice was Marion’s mother’s name. Mrs. Somerset had opposed the marriage of her daughter to Ted Cole. Marion had always regretted her estrangement from her mother, but there had been no way to put an end to it. And then, before the deaths of Thomas and Timothy, her mother had died; Marion’s father died shortly thereafter, also before the deaths of Marion’s beloved boys.

On the back flap of the book jacket, all it said about the author was that she’d emigrated to Canada from the United States in the late fifties; and that, during the time of the Vietnam War, she’d served as a counselor to young American men who were coming to Canada to evade the draft. “While she would hardly claim it as her first book,” the back flap said about the author, “Ms. Somerset is rumored to have made her own contribution to the invaluable
Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada
.”

The whole thing put Ruth off: the coy back flap, the sneaky author photo, the precious nom de plume—not to mention the title.
Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus
sounded to Ruth like the title of a country-western song she would never want to hear.

She couldn’t have known that the Flying Food Circus had been a popular restaurant in Toronto in the late seventies, or that her mother had worked as a waitress there; in fact, it had been something of a triumph for Marion, who was then a woman in her late fifties, to be the only waitress in the restaurant who wasn’t a
young
woman. (Marion’s figure had still been that good.)

Nor could Ruth have known that her mother’s first novel, which had not been published in the United States, had been modestly successful in Canada.
Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus
had been published in England, too; it, and two subsequent novels by Alice Somerset, had also enjoyed several
very
successful publications in foreign languages. (The German and the French translations, especially—Marion had sold many more copies of her novels in German and in French than she’d sold in English.)

But Ruth would need to read to the end of Chapter One of
Followed Home from the Flying Food Circus
before she realized that Alice Somerset was the nom de plume for Marion Cole, her modestly successful mother.

Chapter One

A salesgirl who was also a waitress had been found dead in her apartment on Jarvis, south of Gerrard. It was an apartment within her means, but only because she had shared it with two other salesgirls. The three of them sold bras at Eaton’s.

For the dead girl, the department-store position had been a step up. She’d formerly sold lingerie in a shop called the Bra Bar. She used to say that the Bra Bar was so far out Avenue Road that it was halfway to the zoo, which was an exaggeration. She once joked to her roommates that the customers at the Bra Bar were more often from the zoo than from Toronto, which of course was an exaggeration, too.

Her roommates said that the dead girl had had a great sense of humor. She’d moonlighted as a waitress, her roommates reported, because she used to say that you didn’t meet many guys while you were selling bras. For five years she’d worked nights at the Flying Food Circus, where she’d been hired—like the other women who worked there—because she looked good in a T-shirt.

The waitresses’ T-shirts at the Flying Food Circus were tight and low-cut, with a hamburger in the bottommost part of the décolletage. The hamburger had wings, which were spread over the waitresses’ breasts. When her roommates found her body, that was all the dead young woman was wearing: the tight, low-cut T-shirt with the flying hamburger covering her breasts. Moreover, the T-shirt had been put on her after she’d been murdered. There were fourteen stab wounds in the dead girl’s chest, but not one hole in the flying-hamburger T-shirt.

Neither of the victim’s roommates believed that the murdered salesgirl had been “seeing anyone” at the time. But the apartment had not been broken into—the young woman had let someone in. She’d offered whoever it was a glass of wine, too. There were two full glasses of wine on the kitchen table—no lip marks on either glass, and the only fingerprints on both glasses were hers. There was no fabric of any kind in any of the stab wounds—in other words, she’d been naked when she was stabbed. Either she’d let someone into the apartment when she was naked, in which case it must have been someone she’d known rather well, or she’d been talked out of her clothes without an apparent struggle—possibly at knifepoint. If she’d been raped, it was without her offering any detectable resistance—probably at knifepoint, too—or else she’d had sex willingly, which seemed less likely. In either case, she had had sex shortly before she was killed.