The Perfidious Parrot (26 page)

“Ramona was shy,” de Gier said.

“And you?”

“I’m always shy.”

“So? You both managed?” Grijpstra tried not to raise his voice. “What happened?”

De Gier scratched his left buttock. “The usual, I guess.”

“What’s usual,” Grijpstra asked, “about a beautiful black bisexual woman with a bird as a roommate?”

De Gier said that Ramona had been quite usual about the whole thing.

“And you?”

“The same with me.”

What had really impressed him, de Gier reported, was Ramona’s apartment, which he thought to be artistic, a study in yellows, oranges and some reds, cushions, carpets, a couch, a painted table, the furniture dominated by a wall-sized wooden collage. Ramona’s ancestors, she had told de Gier, were West African. Her original tribe had a custom. All members, when
entering adulthood, had to put together decorative arrangements that symbolized their spiritual path and aspirations. The collage then served as an inspiration for daily life. Ramona had chosen stylized bird heads on a sheet of weathered plywood that she found on a beach. The bird heads, that she had sculpted from dried mangrove roots and sun-bleached seashells, formed the outline of a crocodile’s body. “Symbolic,” de Gier said.

“Of sex?” Grijpstra asked.

“No. Of a course of life that she had chosen.” You know what was funny, de Gier asked Grijpstra, the collage had reminded him of the symbolism of Grijpstra’s series of
Dead Duck on Amsterdam Canal
paintings.

“My dead ducks,” Grijpstra said crossly, “are just goddamn dead ducks.”

De Gier said that Ramona said that her bird heads were symbolic of petty ego-aspects becoming part of the universal spirit, and that the crocodile, in West African art, signifies enlightenment. The birds having been eaten by the crocodile, and then, together, becoming the crocodile are “like your ducks slowly dissolving into an Amsterdam canal.” De Gier tried to explain a little further. Grijpstra’s obsession with showing dead ducks could symbolize Grijpstra’s wish to do away with his customary stupidity, greed (of adding to Grijpstra-ness), jealousy, fear (of losing Grijpstra-ness). “We all get tired of our ego-clinging.…” De Gier paused for dramatic effect. “Once we’ve pierced the veils, Ramona’s beautiful African crocodile will swim in your purified Amsterdam canal. You see that? Don’t you?”

“So the sex you two enjoyed was mutually helpful?” Grijpstra asked hopefully.

De Gier said he sincerely hoped so. He folded the newspaper cuttings and the police report and put them in his shirt pocket. There wasn’t much to add. Happenstance, once again, was a factor. The Key West Police didn’t think that the military had posted sharpshooters all over the city and arranged for Mickey’s escape so that they could get at their target. Of course, anyone involved in the raid of the
Sibylle
would have been prepared to kill Mickey before he could betray them, but with the man in jail … who would have supposed that he would escape to rob a supermarket of some tobacco?

“Happenstance,” de Gier said. “The ultimate puppeteer, isn’t that what the commissaris called it?”

“And Mickey presented a nice target,” Grijpstra said. “Wearing one of those orange jail suits, running toward them. All they had to do was point and squeeze the trigger.”

De Gier agreed. A pity in a way. According to Captain Noah, Mickey was a good sort, intelligent, witty, creative. But what can you expect from a drunk? Once alcohol is involved.… De Gier shrugged sadly.

Grijpstra took offense. Was this another message paid for by Caring Mothers? What was so great about the sober life? Ah, the days, one wife having left, the next wife not having arrived yet, that Grijpstra painted in an empty apartment. The nights in cafés where he played billiards, drums, told jokes, drank jenever. A time of insights.

“You could be boring,” de Gier remembered. “Repetitive. Sentimental. Querulous. Hard to put up with.”

“Not to me,” Grijpstra said gruffly.

What the hell? De Gier, admiring the dancing schoolgirls on the Statia beach below, said that since his abstaining, he missed
those days too. He told Grijpstra about possible plans for a life in Key West. Face doom and damnation, cigar in mouth, double bourbon in hand. Recreate The Perfidious Parrot again, play the trumpet, consort with wild women.

Grijpstra shifted moods abruptly. “None of that.” He reminded the wayward dreamer of Sayukta, back home, watering de Gier’s plantation of weeds. He scanned his friend’s cozy future. “A couch, a screen, a four-door Honda.” And as for now, dammit, there was work to do. How were they to find a cargo equalling the lost Sibylle cargo? How could they hijack same? How to sell the loot to a fence? He pointed at the oil tanks ahead, describing the buyer of stolen crude. The fence, Grijpstra surmised, would be a sleazy type.

De Gier said “Sure. A fat guy in a pin stripe suit. Big jowls. Watery blue eyes. Bad disposition. Gets sick a lot.”

The fence could look like the commissaris for all Grijpstra cared. Ever since he and de Gier had kept the drug dealers’s stash, ever since the commissaris had invested the money, all three of them had become bad guys.

De Gier walked about the hotel’s courtyard, arguing excitedly that Grijpstra was taking a petty view of liberty indeed. By holding onto their prize he and Grijpstra had placed themselves beyond good and evil. They were supermen now, working in Nietzsche-esque spheres of freedom. They were Bodhisatvas helping to wake up mankind. Had Grijpstra ever seen Tibetan drawings of free spirits? Often the arhats, gnanis, gurus, etc., wore necklaces of skulls, had mouths filled with fangs, were shown as skeletons moving about fires of ego-destruction. They just looked evil, but were not. He and Grijpstra were out of the
good/evil confusion, but still functioning to assist the slow and stupid.

Grijpstra thought he and de Gier were just being bad. Besides, de Gier shouldn’t think he was clever on the lower level either. This amazing insight, that the
Sibylle
pirates were American soldiers? The commissaris had found out on Aruba, when visiting Sister Meshti’s clinic, who the pirates were. Captain Souza thought he had seen giant black frogs during a delirium. “Frogmen,” Grijpstra said. “U.S. Military types. As soon as I told the commissaris about our sail on the
Berrydore
we put it together. Me and the commissaris. Frogmen—frogs.” He smiled sarcastically. “Simple.…”

De Gier suggested a walk around the island. If Grijpstra, because of weight/age, became exhausted they could rent a car. Statia might be a wasteland ravaged by goats but there had to be something good to see somewhere. Something to tell Nellie about.

“Please,” Grijpstra said, observing the mature schoolgirls cavorting in the ocean below him.

They walked.

“Did the entire island go bust?” Grijpstra asked, pointing at deserted cabins that leaned against each other or had crumbled into themselves. Weeds grew wild in empty rooms, vines covered cars discarded at street corners, changing them into bizarre and dusty flower baskets. Statians walked along in silence.

“Handsome people,” Grijpstra said. “Well dressed too. Where do they get the money?”

Not by working, de Gier thought. This seemed to be a nonworking island. During the two days before the
Rodney
arrived the only people de Gier had seen who were active were children. Adults rocked in chairs on balconies, nodding greetings at passers-by. The island’s religion still seemed active, for de Gier had walked by a church filled with singing voices. There were parties: he saw women in semi-transparent dresses waving fans on a lawn. He noticed a garage where dying cars resisted repairs, a bakery offering one kind of bread, used clothes sold
out of a shack, a government building where silent officials sat quietly behind empty tables. A restaurant was, according to a handwritten note taped to its window, “Closed for Season.” Another shack offered picture postcards of scenes on neighboring islands. De Gier told Grijpstra about a fish market he had discovered, open from 8 to 9
A.M
.

“A lot of fish?” Grijpstra asked.

“Very few fish.”

“So what do they eat here?”

Roadkill, de Gier thought.

Grijpstra tried to ignore the plaintive wail of unmilked goats, skin-and-bone cows breathing hoarsely, donkeys with open wounds, madly scratching dogs, starved cats coughing. De Gier, to cheer Grijpstra up, pointed at curiosities. They passed a cistern built out of huge rocks, dragged up a hill by slaves, later decorated with the sculpted heads of slave masters, chalked a deadly white. A rusted moped, ridden by a boy in a jockey outfit, raced by. Water leaked from casks on an overloaded donkey cart. An otherwise bare field displayed a heap of garbage around a lopsided sign saying NO
LITTER
. A deserted factory had lost its roof.

To divert themselves the sweating detectives discussed clients. “You believe there are evil assholes?” Grijpstra asked.

“Only ignorant assholes,” de Gier answered.

They discussed Ketchup and Karate’s possible future. “So Nasty Nick did manage to hurt them,” Grijpstra said gratefully. “Serves them right. Shooting a rifle near a helpless old man.”

De Gier thought that frightening the commissaris was not altogether such a bad idea. A cure for conceit?

Grijpstra didn’t totally disagree. The chief did, perhaps, tend
to exaggerate his eternal right-ness. It was amazing that hubris didn’t push him over at times. “You know what I mean?”

De Gier knew exactly what Grijpstra meant. They were walking on the beach by then, kicking cans and containers deposited by the surf. The commissaris had a downside. Admiring the man was silly, to follow him could be madness.

They discussed the case in hand. “How did your Special Forces know that Stewart-Wynne was wise to their piracy?” Grijpstra asked.

They knew, de Gier told him, because Stewart-Wynne had asked too many questions on the islands and swaggered about too much on Key West. Sergeant Ramona Symonds questioned the Eggemoggin Hotel chamberboy as to who he had let into the insurance inspector’s room.

The chamberboy had shown Stewart-Wynne’s suite to two big bad men. He broke down when Ramona grilled him. It wasn’t his fault that the big bad men were overwhelming. Military types—short hair/tight jeans/T-shirts/muscles. The one with the mirrored-sunglasses was addressed by the one with the hairy wrists as “Captain.” They found nothing, the chamberboy said, sobbing.

“Nothing to find?” Grijpstra asked.

There was a mini-cassette, sewn into the inside of Stewart-Wynne’s cowboy hat, found by Harry the bicycle cop when he searched the corpse.

“Good,” Grijpstra said. “Proves cops are better than soldiers.”

But de Gier still disliked Harry. “Luck comes to the lucky.”

“You listened to the tape?” Grijpstra asked.

Sure. Fine testimonial material. Drunken dialogues conducted by privateering U.S. military men, all easily recognizable
voices. Voices of black bartenders. Voice of a Swedish prostitute, well known in St. Maarten and Key West. Boastful swashbuckling talk. Played back for de Gier as a reward for his brilliantly staged apprehension of the hit man Mickey.

Grijpstra asked, “Did these clearly recognizable American military voices, that can be checked against voices of suspects in the Key West barracks, mention the killing of the young blond sailor by gunfire?”

Yes. Regrets had been expressed. There had been no need for murder. But what with all the adrenaline going, the activity, the haste—shit happens. Besides, the sailor had gestured in a threatening manner. Maybe the boy had been armed.

Grijpstra frowned sadly, then gazed irritably at his shoes, smeared with St. Eustatius beach tar. “But if the pirates suspected that Stewart-Wynne had managed to collect incriminating material, why didn’t they get rid of him here? In the Antilles?”

De Gier pointed at little boys that had been following them all the way from Old Rum House and were now peeking out from between thorn bushes. Statia was too small. Foreigners were too visible. If they killed each other there would be dozens of witnesses. Besides, the military had to return to their Key West base after successfully completing their exercises in the area.

“You’re perfectly sure of all that?” Grijpstra asked.

De Gier didn’t have to be perfectly sure of anything. To have an idea that surmounted reasonable doubt—that was what was needed now. They weren’t playing cops anymore, they were just in it for the money. No suspects to be dragged to court. No analysis of elements that would add up to grounds for
an arrest. No trouble. Nice work, if you cared to think about it, after all. Plus one million U.S. dollars, the world’s most acceptable currency. De Gier smiled.

Grijpstra looked at the litter, pushed by the surf to the far side of the beach. “Why don’t they clean up here?”

“They don’t do anything here,” de Gier said. “What is it to us? We eat the last fish sprinkled with the last parsley chopped by the last serviceable knife in a bankrupt hotel, we take the last plane home and are happy ever after.”

Grijpstra shook his head. “Right.” He frowned. “It’s the same ocean though. Our home is on it too.”

De Gier tried to keep smiling.

Grijpstra wondered what happened to the remainder of the
Sibylle
’s crew. The young blond sailor got pecked by seagulls. The captain died of loss of his legs. What about the others? The first mate? Engineer? Communications officer? Another sailor? Were they hit on the head and heave-ho’d across a railing?

“The voices on Stewart-Wynne’s tapes mentioned them,” de Gier said. “The surviving crew was needed to get the tanker to the transfer pier. Afterward the crew sailed the tanker back to the ocean, and were picked up by helicopter and dropped off at another island. De Gier thought that island was St. Kitts, formerly British. The
Sibylle
’s crew members were given money enough to buy tickets out and to spare and were happy and thankful.”

“They were threatened too?”