A Widow for One Year (70 page)

Harry Hoekstra had often reflected that Rooie’s half-truth about Dr. Bosman was probably the best lie he’d ever been associated with. “How was your trip?” Harry would always ask the prostitute, whenever she’d been away. But the rest of the time he asked her: “How are the Bosmans?”

And when Dolores de Ruiter had been murdered in her window room, Harry had notified the Bosmans straightaway; there was no one else he needed to inform. Harry also trusted that the Bosmans would bury her; in fact, Mrs. Bosman organized and paid for the prostitute’s funeral. Quite a sizable representation of the Bosman family was in attendance, together with a scattering of policemen (Harry among them) and a similarly small number of women from The Red Thread. Harry’s ex-girlfriend Natasja Frederiks was there, but by far the most impressive turnout came from Rooie’s
other
family—namely, the prostitutes, who’d attended in droves. Rooie had been popular among her colleagues.

Dolores de Ruiter had lived a life of half-truths. And what was
not
the best of her lies—indeed, what Harry thought of as one of the most painful lies he’d ever been associated with—became evident at the funeral. One after another, the prostitutes who’d known Rooie took Harry aside to ask him the same question.

“Where’s the daughter?” Or, looking over the multitude of old Dr. Bosman’s grandchildren, they would ask: “Which one is she? Isn’t the daughter here?”

“Rooie’s daughter is dead,” Harry had to tell them. “In fact, she’s been dead for quite a number of years.” In
truth,
only Harry knew, the prostitute’s daughter had died before she was born. But that had been Rooie’s well-kept secret.

Harry had first heard of Rooie’s Englishman after the prostitute returned from a ski holiday in Klosters. On Harry’s advice, she’d stayed at the Chesa Grischuna, where she’d met an Englishman named Richard Smalley. Smalley was divorced and spending Christmas with his six-year-old son, a neurasthenic wreck of a boy whose perpetual nervousness and exhaustion Smalley blamed on the boy’s overprotective mother. Rooie had been touched by the two of them. The boy clung to his father, and he slept so fitfully that it had been impossible for Richard Smalley and Rooie to have sex. They’d managed “some stolen kisses,” as Rooie had told Harry—“and some pretty intense fondling.”

She’d had all she could do to keep Smalley from coming to Amsterdam to see her in the ensuing year. The next Christmas, it was the ex-wife’s turn with the neurasthenic son. Richard Smalley returned to Klosters alone. Over the course of the year, in letters and in phone calls, he’d persuaded Rooie to join him for Christmas at the Chesa—a dangerous precedent, Harry had warned Rooie. (It was the first time she’d spent a second Christmas at the same ski resort.)

She and Smalley had fallen in love, the prostitute informed Harry upon her return to Amsterdam. Richard Smalley wanted to marry her; he wanted Rooie to have his child.

“But does the Englishman know you’re a prostitute?” Harry had asked. It turned out that Rooie had told Richard Smalley she was an
ex
prostitute; she’d come halfway to the truth, which she hoped would be far enough.

That winter she rented her window room on the Bergstraat to two more girls; with three girls paying her rent for the room, Rooie could almost match what she’d earned as a prostitute. It would at least be enough for her to live on until she married Smalley—and more than enough “supplementary income” after she was married.

But when she married (and moved in with) Smalley, in London, Rooie became an absentee landlady to three window prostitutes in Amsterdam; while Rooie had been careful not to rent to drug addicts, she couldn’t oversee how the girls were treating her old place on the Bergstraat. Harry had tried to keep an eye on the room, but Rooie’s tenants took liberties; soon one of the girls was subletting to a fourth prostitute, and quickly there was a fifth—one of them was a drug addict. Then one of Rooie’s original tenants left; she’d skipped two months’ rent before Rooie even knew she was gone.

Rooie was pregnant when she returned to Amsterdam to assess the condition of her room on the Bergstraat. Some instinct made her hang on to the place, which was barely breaking even—and after a few necessary repairs and some serious cleaning bills, the room was probably costing her money. The Englishman wanted her to sell it. But Rooie found two ex-prostitutes, both of them Dutch, who wanted to get back into the business; by renting exclusively to them, Rooie thought she could meet the maintenance costs. “The hell with trying to make a profit,” she’d told Harry. “I just want to keep the place, in case things don’t work out in England.”

She must have known then, when she was seven months pregnant, that things weren’t going to “work out” with Richard Smalley. She’d eventually gone into labor in London, and it had been a bad birth from the beginning. Despite an emergency C-section, the fetus was stillborn. Rooie never saw her dead daughter. It was then that Smalley had started in with the predictable recriminations. There was something wrong with Rooie, which had caused the stillbirth; and
what
was wrong with her had something to do with her past life as a prostitute—she must have done too much fucking.

One day, unannounced, Rooie was back in her window on the Bergstraat; that was when Harry learned about the end of Rooie’s marriage, and her stillborn daughter. (By then, of course, Rooie’s English was pretty good.)

The next Christmas, she’d gone again to Klosters and stayed once more at the Chesa Grischuna, but that would be her last holiday in a ski town. Although neither Richard Smalley nor his neurasthenic son was there, some word of who Rooie was must have got around. In unpredictable situations, which she couldn’t foresee, she was aware that she was being treated as an ex-prostitute—not as an ex-wife.

She swore to Harry that she’d overheard someone on a gondola whispering the words “Smalley’s whore.” And in the Chesa—where she ate every evening alone—a small, bald man in a velvet dinner jacket with a flaming-orange ascot had propositioned her. A waiter had brought Rooie a complimentary glass of champagne from the bald man, together with a note in hand-printed English capitals.

HOW MUCH?
the note had asked. She’d sent back the champagne.

Shortly after this final visit to Klosters, Rooie had stopped working in her window on weekends. Later still, she stopped working nights, and soon she was leaving her window in midafternoon—in time to pick her daughter up from school. That was what she told everyone.

The other prostitutes on the Bergstraat would occasionally ask to see pictures. Naturally they understood why they’d never seen the alleged daughter in the vicinity of the Bergstraat; most prostitutes kept their work a secret from their younger children.

The prostitute with whom Rooie shared her window room was the most curious, and Rooie had a photograph that she liked to show. The little girl in the photo was about five or six; she was happily seated on Rooie’s lap at what looked like a family dinner party. She was one of Dr. Bosman’s grandchildren, of course; only Harry Hoekstra knew that the photograph had been taken at one of the Bosmans’ Easter dinners.

So
that
was the prostitute’s daughter, whose absence had never been as noticeable as it was at Rooie’s funeral. At that confused gathering, some of the prostitutes had asked Harry to remind them of the missing daughter’s name; it wasn’t a common name. Did Harry remember what it was?

Of course he did. It was Chesa.

And following Rooie’s funeral, at what amounted to the wake—for old Mrs. Bosman, who was paying, believed in wakes—the name of the dead daughter had been sufficiently repeated among the prostitutes so that the old widow herself approached Harry. (He was awkwardly attempting to dispose of a hard-boiled egg that he didn’t want to eat; the egg had some kind of caviar on it.) “Who’s
Chesa
?” old Mrs. Bosman asked.

Harry then told her the whole story. The story moved Mrs. Bosman to tears, but the old lady was no fool. “Of course I knew that my dear husband was visiting the prostitute,” she confided to Harry. “But the way I see it, she did me a kindness—and she
did
keep him from dying in the street!”

Only a few years before her murder, Rooie Dolores had reduced her annual vacations to one warm-weather holiday in April or May. She’d spent her last Christmases with the Bosmans; there were so many grandchildren that Rooie had a lot of presents to buy. “It’s still cheaper than going skiing,” she’d told Harry. And one dark winter—it was the winter before she was killed—Rooie had asked Harry to join her on her warm-weather holiday on a fifty-fifty basis.

“You’re the one with the travel books,” she’d teased him. “
You
pick the place and I’ll go with you.” Whatever had been the charm of those divorced fathers, taking perpetual vacations with their subdued children, it had finally worn thin with her.

Harry had
imagined
taking a trip with Rooie for a long time, yet her invitation both surprised and embarrassed him. The first place he’d thought of being with her was Paris. (Imagine being in Paris with a prostitute!)

Harry had started writing in the margins of his travel books, and underlining key sentences about the appropriate hotels. One of the first hotels Harry considered staying in was the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, the same hotel where Ted had taken the photograph of Marion with Thomas’s and Timothy’s
feet
. But the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire was not as highly recommended as the Hôtel de l’Abbaye or the Duc de Saint-Simon. Harry had decided that he wanted to stay somewhere in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, but he believed that the choice of their hotel should be left to Rooie.

Harry brought his Paris guidebooks, replete with his underlinings and marginalia, to Rooie’s room on the Bergstraat. He’d had to linger in the street until she finished with a customer.

“Oh, Harry!” she’d cried. “You want to take an old whore to
Paris
? April in Paris!”

Neither of them had ever been to Paris. It would never have worked out. Harry could imagine Rooie liking Notre-Dame and the Tuileries, and the antique shops that he’d only read about; he could see her happily on his arm in the gardens of the Luxembourg. But he couldn’t quite picture her at the Louvre. After all, she lived in Amsterdam and she’d not once been to the Rijksmuseum! How could Harry have taken her to Paris?

“Actually, I don’t think I can get away,” he hedged. “April gets busy in
de Wallen
.”

“Then we’ll go in March,” Rooie told him. “We’ll go in
May
! What’s it matter?”

“I don’t think I can really do it, Rooie,” Harry had admitted to her.

Prostitutes are familiar enough with rejection; they handle it pretty well.

After he’d got the call that Rooie had been murdered, Harry looked around her room on the Bergstraat for the guidebooks, which Rooie hadn’t returned. They were stacked on the narrow reading table in the WC.

He also noted that the murderer had bitten Rooie, and that the way her body had been carelessly pushed off the bed made it seem there had been nothing ritualistic about the killing. She’d most likely been strangled, but there were no thumbprint or fingerprint bruises at her throat; this pointed to her being choked with a forearm, the
hoofdagent
had thought.

That was when he saw the wardrobe closet with the shoes pointed toes-out; a pair of them had been kicked out of alignment with the others, and there was a space in the middle of the row where another pair of shoes would have fit.

Shit! There was a
witness
! Harry had known then. He knew that Rooie had been one of the few prostitutes who went out of her way to do a kindness for the first-timers. He also knew the way she did it: she let the first-timers watch her with a customer, just to see how it was done. She’d hidden a lot of girls in her wardrobe closet. Harry had heard about Rooie’s method at one of the meetings for first-time prostitutes at The Red Thread. But Rooie hadn’t gone to those meetings for quite some time; Harry wasn’t even sure if The Red Thread still
held
meetings for first-time prostitutes.

In the open doorway to Rooie’s window room, the sniveling girl who’d found Rooie’s body sat sobbing. Her name was Anneke Smeets. She was a recovered heroin addict—at least she’d convinced Rooie that she was recovered. Anneke Smeets was not dressed for working in the window; usually she wore a leather halter top, which Harry had seen hanging in the closet.

But in the doorway Anneke looked plain and disheveled. She wore a baggy black sweater with stretched-out elbows and jeans that were ripped in both knees. She had no makeup on, not even lipstick, and her hair was dirty and stiff. The only suggested wildness, amid everything that was plain about her, was that Anneke Smeets had a tattoo of a lightning bolt (albeit a small one) on the inside of her right wrist.

“It appears that someone might have been
watching
from the wardrobe closet,” Harry began.

Still sobbing, the girl nodded her head. “It looks like it,” she agreed.

“Was she helping out a first-timer?” Harry asked Anneke.

“Nobody I knew!” said the sobbing girl.

And so Harry Hoekstra suspected—even before Ruth Cole’s eyewitness account arrived at the Warmoesstraat station—that there’d been a witness.

“Oh, God!” Anneke suddenly cried. “Nobody picked her daughter up from school! Who’s going to tell her daughter?”

“Somebody already picked her up,” Harry lied. “Somebody already told the daughter.”

But he told the truth, a few days later, when his best friend among the detectives, Nico Jansen, wanted a word with Harry—in private. Harry knew what the “word” would be about.

There were the Paris guidebooks on Jansen’s desk. Harry Hoekstra wrote his name in all his books. Nico Jansen opened one of the travel books to the part about the Hôtel Duc de Saint-Simon. Harry had written in the margin:
The heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, a great location.

“Isn’t that your handwriting, Harry?” Jansen asked him.