A Widow for One Year (67 page)

And on those nights when she lay curled on the nursery floor, listening to her child breathe, Ruth Cole would be thankful for her good luck. Rooie’s murderer, who had clearly heard the sound of someone trying not to make a sound, had not found her. Ruth often thought of him. She not only wondered who he was, and if he had a habit of killing prostitutes; she wondered if he’d read her novel—for she’d seen him take Rooie’s copy of
Not for Children
. Maybe he’d only wanted the book as a place to keep his Polaroid picture of Rooie safe from harm.

On those nights, curled on the rug beside Graham’s crib (later, his bed), Ruth surveyed the dimly lit nursery in the glow of the feeble night-light. She saw the familiar part in the window curtain; through the narrow slit, a black streak of night sky was visible—sometimes starry, sometimes not.

Usually it was a catch in Graham’s breathing that would make Ruth get up off the floor and look closely at her sleeping son. Then she would peek through the part in the curtain to see if the moleman was where she half-expected him to be: curled asleep on the window ledge with some of the pink tentacles of his star-shaped nose pressed against the glass.

The moleman was never there, of course; yet Ruth would sometimes wake with a start, because she was sure she’d heard him wheeze. (It was only Graham, who’d made a curious sigh in his sleep.)

Then Ruth would fall back to sleep—often wondering why her mother hadn’t made an appearance, now that her father was dead. Didn’t she want to see the baby? Ruth would wonder. Not to mention
me
!

It made her so angry that she tried to stop wondering.

And because Ruth was often alone with Graham in the Sagaponack house—at least on those nights when Allan was staying in the city— there were times when the house made peculiar sounds. There was the mouse-crawling-between-the-walls sort of sound, and the sound-like-someone-trying-not-to-make-a-sound sort of sound, and the whole range of sounds between those sounds—the opening-of-the-door-in-the-floor sort of sound, and the absence of sound that the moleman made when he held his breath.

He was out there, somewhere, Ruth knew; he was still waiting for her. In the moleman’s eyes, she was still a little girl. Trying to sleep, Ruth could see the moleman’s small, vestigial eyes—the furry dents in his furry face.

As for Ruth’s new novel, it was waiting for her, too. One day she wouldn’t be a new mother, and she would write again. So far, she’d written only about a hundred pages of
My Last Bad Boyfriend
. She hadn’t yet come to the scene when the boyfriend persuades the woman writer to pay a prostitute to watch her with a customer—Ruth was still working up to it. That scene was waiting for her, too.

III

FALL
1995

The Civil Servant

Sergeant Harry Hoekstra, formerly
hoofdagent
or almost-a-sergeant Hoekstra, was avoiding the task of cleaning out his desk. His office, on the second floor of the District 2 police station, overlooked the Warmoesstraat. Harry, while he did nothing about his desk (which had never been cleaned out before), distracted himself by regarding the changes in the street—for the Warmoesstraat, like the rest of the redlight district, had undergone some changes. As a street cop who was now looking forward to an early retirement, Sergeant Hoekstra knew that very little had ever escaped his attention.

Opposite the station, there’d once been a flower shop, the Jemi, but the shop had moved to the corner of the Enge Kerksteeg. Still within Harry’s view was a place called La Paella, and an Argentinean restaurant called Tango, but the Jemi flower shop had been replaced by Sanny’s Bar. Were Harry as prescient as many of his colleagues thought he was, he might have seen sufficiently into the future to know that, within a year of his retirement, Sanny’s Bar would itself be replaced by the unfortunately named café Pimpelmée. But even the powers of a good policeman do not extend into the future with such specific detail. Like many men who choose to retire early, Harry Hoekstra believed that most of the changes in his neighborhood of business were not changes for the better.

It was in ’66 when the hashish had first come to Amsterdam in noticeably larger amounts. In the seventies, the heroin came; first with the Chinese, but by the end of the Vietnam War, the Chinese had lost the heroin market to the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia. Many of the addicted prostitutes were couriers for the heroin.

Nowadays, more than sixty percent of the addicts were known to the health department—and there were Dutch police officers stationed in Bangkok. But more than
seventy
percent of the prostitutes in the redlight district were illegal aliens; basically, there was no keeping track of the “illegals.”

As for the cocaine, it had come from Colombia via Suriname in small planes. The Surinamese brought it to the Netherlands in the late sixties and early seventies. The Surinamese prostitutes had not been that much of a problem, and their pimps had caused only a little trouble; the problem had been the cocaine. Now the Colombians themselves brought it, but the Colombian prostitutes were not a problem, either, and their pimps made even less trouble than the Surinamese pimps.

In his more than thirty-nine years of service on the Amsterdam police force, thirty-five of which he’d spent in
de Wallen,
Harry Hoekstra had only once had a gun pointed at him. It was Max Perk, a Surinamese pimp, who’d pointed the gun at Harry, which had prompted Harry to show Max
his
gun. Had there been a shootout of the quick-draw variety, Harry would have lost—Max had drawn his gun first. But the display of weapons was more in the nature of a show of force, which Harry had won. Harry’s gun was a Walther nine-millimeter.

“It’s made in Austria,” Harry had explained to the pimp from Suriname. “The Austrians really know their guns. This will blow a bigger hole in you than yours will blow in me, and mine will blow more holes in you in a hurry.” Whether this was true or not, Max Perk had put down his gun.

Yet, notwithstanding Sergeant Hoekstra’s
personal
experiences with the Surinamese, he believed that the days ahead were fairly certain to be worse. Criminal organizations were bringing young women from the former Soviet bloc into Western Europe;
thousands
of women from Eastern Europe were now working involuntarily in the red-light districts of Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt, Zurich, Paris, and other Western European cities. The owners of nightclubs, striptease joints, peep shows, and brothels commonly traded these young women for a fee.

As for the Dominicans, the Colombians, the Brazilians, and the Thais, most of these young women knew what they were coming to Amsterdam
for;
they understood what they were going to
do
. But the young women from Eastern Europe often were under the impression that they were going to be waitresses in respectable restaurants. They had been students and shop girls and housewives before they’d accepted these misleading job offers in the West.

Among these newcomers to Amsterdam, the window prostitutes were the best off. But now the girls in the windows were being undersold by the girls on the streets; everyone was more desperate for work. The prostitutes whom Harry had known the longest were either retiring or threatening to retire—not that prostitutes didn’t often threaten to retire. It was a business of what Harry called “short-term thinking.” The hookers were always telling him that they were stopping “next month” or “next year”—or else one of the women would say, “I’m taking next
winter
off, anyway.”

And now, more than ever, many prostitutes had admitted to Harry that they’d had what they called a moment of doubt; this meant that they’d let in the wrong man.

There were simply more wrong men than there used to be.

Sergeant Hoekstra remembered one Russian girl who’d accepted a socalled waitressing job at the Cabaret Antoine. The Cabaret Antoine was no restaurant. It was a brothel, and the brothel owner had immediately seized the Russian girl’s passport. She was told that even if a customer didn’t want to use a condom, she couldn’t refuse to have sex with him—unless she wanted to find herself out on the street. Her passport had been phony, anyway, and she soon found a seemingly sympathetic client, an older man, who procured another phony passport for her. But by then her name had been changed—in the brothel, they’d reduced her name to Vratna because her real name was too difficult to pronounce—and her first two months of “salary” were withheld because her so-called debts to the brothel had to be deducted from her earnings. The alleged “debts” were described to her as agency fees, taxes, food, and rent.

Shortly before the brothel was raided by the police, Vratna accepted a loan from her sympathetic client. The older man paid her share of the rent for a window room, which she used with two other girls from Eastern Europe, and so she became a window prostitute. As for the “loan,” which Vratna could never repay, her seeming sympathizer became her most privileged client; he visited her often. Naturally she charged him no fee; in fact, he’d become her pimp without her knowing it. Soon she was paying him half her earnings from her other clients. As Sergeant Hoekstra later thought of him, he was her not-so-sympathetic client.

He was a retired executive named Paul de Vries, who’d taken up pimping for these illegal Eastern European girls as a kind of sport and pastime. It was no more than an amusing game for him: to fuck young girls, at first for a price but later for free. Eventually, of course, they would be paying
him
—and he would
still
be fucking them!

One Christmas morning—one of only a few recent Christmases that Harry had
not
taken off—Harry had ridden his bicycle through the new snow in
de Wallen;
he had wanted to see if any of the prostitutes were working. He’d had an idea, not unlike Ruth Cole’s, that in the new snow of a Christmas morning even the red-light district might look pristine. But Harry had been, uncharacteristically, more sentimental than that: for those few girls who might be working in their window rooms on Christmas morning, Harry had bought some simple presents. Nothing fancy or expensive, just some chocolates and a fruitcake and not more than half a dozen Christmas-tree ornaments.

Harry knew that Vratna was religious, or at least she’d told him that she was, and for her—just in case she was working—he’d bought a present of slightly more value. Still, he’d paid only ten guilders for it in a secondhand jewelry shop; it was a cross of Lorraine, which the salesgirl had told him was especially popular with young people of unconventional tastes. (It was a cross with two crosspieces, the upper shorter than the lower.)

It had been snowing hard, and there were almost no visible footprints in
de Wallen;
some tracks surrounded the one-man urinal by the old church, but in the untracked snow on Vratna’s small street, the Oudekennissteeg, there were no footprints at all. And Harry had been relieved to see that Vratna
wasn’t
working; her window was dark, her curtain closed, the red light off. He was about to ride on, with his rucksack of humbly inspired Christmas presents, when he noticed that the door to Vratna’s window room was not properly closed. Some snow had drifted inside, and the snow made it difficult for Harry to close the door.

He’d not meant to look into her room, but he needed to open the door wider before he could close it. He was scuffing the snow off the threshold with his foot—it was not the best weather for his running shoes—when he saw the young woman hanging from the ceiling-light fixture. With the door to the street open, the wind rushed in and caused her hanging body to sway. Harry stepped inside and closed the door against the blowing snow.

She’d hanged herself that morning, probably a little after the first light of day. She was twenty-three. She was dressed in her old clothes—what she’d worn to the West for her new waitressing job. Because she was not dressed (which is to say,
un
dressed) as a prostitute, Harry hadn’t at first recognized her. Vratna had put on all her jewelry, too—what there was of it. It would have been superfluous for Harry to have given the girl another cross. There were a half-dozen crosses around her neck; there were nearly as many crucifixes, too.

Harry didn’t touch her, or anything in her room. He merely noted that, from the chafe marks at her throat—not to mention the damage to the ceiling plaster—she must not have suffocated right away. She had thrashed for a while. A musician rented the apartment above Vratna’s window room. Normally he might have heard the hanging girl—at least the falling plaster and the presumed grinding of the ceiling-light fixture—but the musician went away every Christmas. Harry usually went away for Christmas, too.

On his way to the police station to report the suicide—for he already knew it was not a murder—he’d looked back at the Oudekennissteeg only once. In the new-fallen snow, the tire marks from his bicycle were the sole evidence of life on the tiny street.

Opposite the old church, there was only one woman working as a window prostitute that Christmas morning; she was one of the fat black women from Ghana, and Harry paused to give her all his presents. She was happy to have the chocolates and the fruitcake, but she told him she had no use for the Christmas-tree ornaments.

As for the cross of Lorraine, Harry had kept it for a while. He even bought a chain for it, although the chain cost him more than the cross had. Then he’d given the cross and the chain to a girlfriend of the moment, but he made the mistake of telling the girlfriend the whole story. It was one of those things he was always misjudging about women. He’d thought she would take the cross
and
the story as a compliment. After all, he’d been genuinely fond of the Russian girl; this particular cross of Lorraine had some sentimental value for him. But no woman likes to hear how
cheap
a piece of jewelry was,
or
that it was purchased for another woman—not to mention for an illegal alien, a Russian whore who’d hanged herself in her place of business.