Hard Rain (3 page)

"Did Willem graduate cum laude too?"

"No," the commissaris said, "but he became an attorney, and in due course replaced his father as president and main shareholder of the Banque du Credit. He set up that Society for Help Abroad, which exploits illegal gambling clubs and drug joints for the young."

"And keeps the profits," the commissaris's wife said. "I read that long magazine article to you about the Society. The gambling clubs are brothels, too. The journalist said he could prove that. Why don't you close the Society down?"

The commissaris grabbed the bags. "I can't. Willem operates in a hole in the law. Nonprofit societies are protected. It's not my department, either. His bank is bad, too, and again outside my reach."

"Fleur has a half-brother," his wife said. "Bart. We met Bart once. Baron Bart de la Faille. Maybe he has shares too."

"All I remember is a little boy," the commissaris said, "a spoiled little brat, a late child by old de la Faille's second wife. She died of cancer. Watch the luggage, please, I'll go and find a cart."

"And young IJsbreker must have had some shares," his wife said when he came back, "and he's dead." She walked ahead of her cart-pushing husband and called a cab. "Through the park, please," the commissaris told the driver.

"Could you drive slowly?" the commissaris's wife asked. "We always enjoy the park so much, especially in the spring."

"Turtle will be waiting for you in the garden," she said as she leaned into her husband's arm. "Look at the tall poplars, Jan, and the fresh leaves on the maples." The commissaris didn't answer. "Jan? Don't think of bad Willem. You're a good man with an excellent reputation. Everybody thinks highly of you. The children are doing well. I love you. Please enjoy the park."

"Yes," the commissaris said. "Nice."

"You won, Jan."

"Yes." His small hand tapped her shoulder.

"So enjoy."

A heron sailed majestically across the road. "Yes," the commissaris said. "I do." He leaned over and kissed his wife's cheek.

*
The ranks of the Dutch Municipal Police are. in descending order, chief constable, commissaris, chief inspector, inspector, adjutant, sergeant, constable first class, constable.

\\\\\ 3 /////

"M
ORNING," SERGEANT DE GIER SAID CHEERFULLY. He was a tall, wide-shouldered man, sprawled behind a dented metal desk in the far corner of a gray room. "Had a good holiday?"

The heavyset adjutant, looking even more portly in his three-piece dark blue suit, bought a size too large to accommodate his not-too-well-distributed bulk, lumbered on.

"Hello?" de Gier asked. "Remember me? Your assistant of the last ten years or more?"

"Bah," Adjutant Grijpstra said. He turned, walked back to the door, and pushed the latch shut. He walked over to de Gier's desk and turned on his heel.

"No," de Gier said. "Please. The last time that door was replaced, I had to pay half the cost. No, Adjutant."

"Ha!" Adjutant Grijpstra shouted. His hand slid under his jacket and was back at once. A silver line linked his hand and the door. A stiletto trembled in the door's plywood.

"One day you'll be sorry," de Gier said. "Your knife's point penetrates the wood by three inches. Someone might get seriously hurt."

Someone was rattling the door's handle.

"Just a minute," Grijpstra shouted. He walked back to the door and pulled back the latch.

A young man, dressed in a rumpled corduroy suit, his small face topped by unruly wavy hair, stumbled into the room, holding his chest with both hands. He moaned and doubled up before his legs gave way.

"See?" de Gier said. "In Cardozo's case there's no big loss—he can easily be replaced—but you might hit Jane, the loveliest member of our force, or Miss Antoinette, the commissaris's new secretary. I haven't had time to convince her yet."

"Stop spoiling my practice," Grijpstra said, dropping his weight heavily into a swivel chair. "Besides, I usually aim high."

"Convince Miss Antoinette of what?" Cardozo asked, picking himself up.

"Of my harmlessness," Sergeant de Gier said, smiling. "She thinks I want a permanent relationship, but I'll never interfere with her freedom, of course. All I'm hoping for is just a few hours of shared warmth."

"After she pays for the meal," Grijpstra rumbled. "No."

"No what?" de Gier asked. "If I pay for the meal I have a hold on her. She'll feel she owes me. I don't mind owing her. I'm prepared to be as humble as she likes a man to be."

"No, I didn't have a good holiday," Grijpstra said. "Campgrounds are too noisy, and we were washed out in the end. Nellie lost her tent. First it was pressed down by all the water and then it blew away. Best thing that happened. I went home and rested for a week."

"Did you take Nellie to your house?" Cardozo asked.

"Of course not," Grijpstra said.

"Really," de Gier said, stretching. As his arms reached up, the butt of his oversize pistol was visible under his stylish jacket. "You mean Nellie still doesn't know your wife is gone? Why are you keeping up that farce?"

"Suppose my wife comes back?" Grijpstra asked. "Two women in my small, comfortable, empty, whitewashed home?"

"I thought your divorce went through," Cardozo said from behind the wobbly little table that served him as a desk.

"She might just come back," Grijpstra said. "You never know. And if I took Nellie home for a week, she might just stay. Nellie has her own hotel. My wife lives in a huge villa with her sister in the country. I don't move in with them, do I?" He frowned furiously. "And what is it to you?"

"Why do you feel threatened, Adjutant?" De Gier asked. "Your wife left you because she doesn't like you. Nellie loves her freedom above all. All women do, these days. Why couldn't you extend a normal courtesy to a fellow human being, regardless of sex? A lonely woman who just lost her tent and who has only one week of her hard-earned holiday left before she has to return to the daily grind of running an overcrowded hotel singlehanded?"

Grijpstra rummaged in the drawer of his desk. He found a cigar, bit off the tip, and spat it into the waste-paper basket. "So what else is new? You two been busy? Any business? Can we get out of my private life?"

Cardozo watched the adjutant's slender knife. "You're getting better, Adjutant—you're hitting the door now."

"I hit what I intend to hit," Grijpstra said.

"How come you never tell us beforehand what you're aiming at?" Cardozo asked.

"Ah," Grijpstra said. "Answer that yourself." He turned his chair around. "Sergeant, report."

"Dead banker," de Gier said. "Suicide. I saw a report signed by Halba and Adjutant Guldemeester. Being up north, I wasn't in on that. Three dead junkies, overdosed on pure heroin in a houseboat at the Binnenkant. Guldemeester checked that out, too. A German terrorist got shot. Big trouble at Headquarters here, but that's internal politics, of course. You don't care for politics, do you now?"

"No," Grijpstra said. "Anyone have the file with the daily reports?"

De Gier got up and presented the adjutant with a sheaf of dog-eared pink paper held by a transparent plastic cover. "It's all in here."

Grijpstra leafed through the file. "The dead banker lived at the Binnenkant? The junkies' boat was berthed in the Binnenkant canal?"

"Yes, I saw that." De Gier crossed his long legs on his desk. "Same location. The houseboat happens to be just opposite the banker's home. I asked Adjutant Guldemeester, but he claims the two incidents are unrelated."

"What's with politics?" Cardozo asked. "I care. Any interesting gossip?"

De Gier leaned back as far as his creaky chair allowed. "A carton of weaponry was lifted from the ballistics room. Our two pathologists are at war with each other. It seems that half the charwomen keeping this place clean are illegal aliens. Coins have been filched from the coffee machines. Several attractive female prisoners have a way of being taken out of their cells at night by unspecified personnel."

Grijpstra looked up from the file. "That isn't gossip, that's fact."

"The gossip is that changes for the better are now due, Adjutant." De Gier's large brown eyes twinkled. "Some colleagues are saying so. There's leakage to the press. Journalists are writing up our mess. There was a lengthy editorial in Saturday's paper that wondered why so few crimes are solved and why highly placed officers keep being issued with new expensive cars. It also mentioned the new chief constable and his apparent failure to deal with ineptitude and gross corruption."

"The chief constable just sits around," Cardozo said. "Chief Inspector Halba sneaks around. Adjutant Guldemeester helps him sneak."

"Four corpses." Grijpstra closed the file and shook it. "So that houseboat where the junkies died is opposite the house where the banker lived? Did you see the other complaint referring to the Binnenkant?"

"The helpless old lady?" de Gier asked. "Saying some musicians are drumming her out of her home? I've seen that complaint before. Doesn't she live at number 20?"

Grijpstra pushed himself free of his chair and walked over to the opposite wall. His stubby finger prodded at the city's map. "Number 20 should be just behind the houseboat where the junkies died. Old ladies don't sleep well, they like sitting at their windows late at night. The night the banker died was the night the big thunderstorm broke. Maybe the old lady watched the spectacle from her apartment. The report says she lives upstairs and the musicians make their racket in the lower part of the house. If she lives upstairs, she can look over the houseboat and see the banker's house across the water. Maybe she noticed something unusual. She could even have heard the shot. The corpse was found near a front window."

"Near an open front window," de Gier said. "The hapless banker could have been watching the bad weather, too. All that thunder reminded him of gunfire. He looked for his gun."

"For his Walther PPK pistol, according to the report," Cardozo said. "Expensive. An appropriate weapon for an influential man to have around."

"An illegal weapon," Grijpstra said. He walked back to his desk. He picked up the file and pointed it accusingly at de Gier. "And the junkies just happened to die on their boat across the street? The very same night?"

"You know, Adjutant," de Gier said gently, "this is not our case. Besides, it's closed."

Grijpstra dropped the file and pounded it softly with both fists. "The report is too brief. Is the commissaris back yet?"

"You wouldn't suggest," de Gier said, "that a case closed by colleagues should be reopened, would you now?"

Cardozo brought out his notebook. "It's the junkies that get me. Do you know that I had a junkie visit me here? An American who said he lived in a houseboat on the Binnenkant? His name was Jimmy. One of the dead is called James T. Floyd in the report. Isn't 'Jimmy' short for 'James'?"

"Ask de Gier," Grijpstra said. "Our intellectual sergeant knows all about everything. He even reads French literature."

"Sergeant?" Cardozo asked.

De Gier nodded.

Cardozo checked his notes. "Jimmy called here a month ago. Pity the file doesn't give physical descriptions." He reached for his telephone and dialed. "Mr. Jacobs? How're you doing? You're not? I'm sorry. Is that right? You don't want to be doing? That's okay, then. Listen, a question, Mr. Jacobs. You have a dead young man there, an American, James T. Floyd of Berkeley, California, it should say so on the tag on his toe. I want to know what he looks like. Sure, I'll wait." Cardozo held his hand over the phone's mouthpiece. "Yagh! I can hear Jacobs pull the metal box out of the fridge." He dropped his hand off the receiver. "Tall? Long blond hair? Missing front teeth? Thank you, Mr. Jacobs, that's what I wanted to hear." Cardozo replaced the phone.

"You're acquainted with the deceased," Grijpstra said. "That's nice."

Cardozo grimaced sadly. "Yes, Jimmy came to tell me about some planned murder. That's what I like about specialization. We're the Murder Brigade, so if a visitor says 'murder,' he's sent to us. Pity I didn't believe him at the time."

Grijpstra pounded his desk with more force. "Dead junkies on a boat. Dead banker in a house across from the boat. Dead junkie, when still alive, comes here to gab about murder. Adjutant Guldemeester says there's no connection. Chief Inspector Halba diagnoses one case as suicide and the other as an overdose. Bah!"

"Constable?" de Gier said. "Why didn't we get to hear about Jimmy?"

"I forgot," Cardozo said. "We were working on the Frisian case. Lots of odd birds drop in here from time to time. Odd crazy birds. We chase them away. You're lucky I made a note. He was in here two minutes before he fell off his chair. Wanted heroin in exchange for information."

"But subject mentioned murder. Did he mention anything else?"

Cardozo shrugged. "A murder that was planned. He would tell me all about it in exchange for junk. The informer was ill. A scarecrow, a sight. If this Jimmy turns out to be the dead James T. Floyd, I won't be surprised."

"What happened after the subject fell off his chair?" Grijpstra asked.

"I picked him up," Cardozo said, "walked him down the stairs, and pushed him into the street. Standard instructions. Sick junkies aren't taken to hospitals anymore, since treatment is usually refused by the medical staff. Waste of time and trouble."

"He must have said something more," de Gier said. "A lot of words fit into two minutes."

Cardozo read from his notes. "Subject claims to study Chinese literature at the University of California in Berkeley. He had taken a year off to visit magical Amsterdam."

De Gier gestured enthusiastically. "We could check, you know. There are enough details. I could send a teletype message to all stations. Most junkies are known to some cop or other. Jimmy probably dealt junk, too. The Alien Department might know of him as well. You think he really was a student, Cardozo?"

"Maybe," Cardozo said. "Subject must be intelligent, for he spoke passably good Dutch, learned within a year. He could have been well off once, a refined-looking wreck."

"Missing teeth," de Gier said. "A fight?"