Outsider in Amsterdam (4 page)

Van Meteren gazed at them. “You are asking a lot of questions at the same time. Where shall I start?”

“Wherever you like,” Grijpstra said. De Gier nodded contentedly. Grijpstra was using their usual tactics. De Gier usually asked the unpleasant questions and Grijpstra acted “father,” the kind force in the background. Sometimes they changed roles. Sometimes they left the room and only one of them would return, to be replaced by the other. They would do
anything to make the suspect talk. The suspect had to talk, that was the main thing, and they could sort out the information as it came. And their tactics usually worked. The suspects talked, far more than they intended to. And very often they confessed, or served as witnesses. And then they would sign their statements and the officers could go home, tired and content.

But de Gier’s contentment was short-lived. Van Meteren wasn’t the usual suspect. And he didn’t say anything. De Gier observed his opponent. A weird figure, even in the inner city of Amsterdam. Small, dark and pleasant. Dark blue trousers and a clean close-fitting shirt with vertical stripes so that van Meteren looked a little taller than he was. Self-possessed. Conscious even. “Do conscious people exist?” De Gier asked himself. People who know what they are doing and who are aware of the situation they are in?

Grijpstra observed too. He saw a man of some forty years old, small and graceful. He had also classified the suspect as a Papuan. Grijpstra had fought in the former Dutch Indies and remembered the faces of a couple of professional soldiers who had joined his unit for an attack in difficult mountainous terrain. Papuans, very unusual types, contrasting with the much lighter-skinned soldiers from Ambon who had made up the bulk of Grijpstra’s men. The Papuans revered a colored photograph of the queen, pinned up in their tent. Very courageous they were, but he never got to know them well. They were dead within a few days. They had volunteered for a sniping patrol and the Javanese got them after a fight of a few hours. Two Papuans who had killed nearly fifty enemies with their tommy guns. The Javanese had caught one Papuan alive, they had “tjingtjanged” him, cut him up with their razorsharp “krisses,” starting at the feet.

“Your father came from Holland?” Grijpstra asked.

“My grandfather,” van Meteren said. “My grandmother was
a Papuan, a chief’s daughter. My grandfather worked for the government, he was only a petty official, but a petty official is very powerful in New Guinea. My mother is also a pure Papuan, she is still alive and lives in Hollandia. I arrived here eight years ago. I had to choose in nineteen sixty-five whether I wanted to be an Indonesian or Dutch. I chose to be Dutch and had to run for my life.”

“And what do you do for a living?”

“I am on the force,” van Meteren said, and laughed when he saw surprise glide over the faces of his investigators. He had a nice laugh, showing strong, even, very white teeth under the small pointed mustache and the flat wide nose.

“Don’t let it upset you,” he said. “I won’t arrest you. I am a traffic warden. All I can do is give you a ticket for parking your car on the sidewalk and you won’t have to pay the fine anyway.”

“Traffic warden?” Grijpstra asked.

Van Meteren nodded. “I joined the department five years ago. In New Guinea I was a real policeman, constable first class because I could read and write and my name was Dutch. I commanded thirty men. Constable first class is a high rank even there. But when I came out here they told me I was too old for active duty. I was thirty years old. They gave me a job as a clerk in one of their bureaus in The Hague. I kept on asking to be allowed to join the force and eventually they made me a traffic warden and assigned me to street duty. I have two stripes now and I am armed with a rubber truncheon. Every six months I apply for a transfer to the real police but they keep on finding reasons to refuse me.”

“A traffic warden is a real policeman too,” Grijpstra said.

Van Meteren shrugged his shoulders and looked at the wall.

“What exactly was your job in the New Guinea police?” de Gier asked.

“Field duty. During the last few years I served with the Birdhead Corps, in the South West. We watched the coast
and caught Indonesian commandos and paratroopers sneaking in by boat or being dropped. We caught hundreds of them.”

De Gier looked at the large linen map of New Guinea that had been pinned on the wall. The map looked worn and had broken on the folds. There were two other maps on the wall, a map of Holland and another of the IJsselmeer, Holland’s small inland sea, now transformed into a large lake by the thirty-five kilometer dyke that stops the rollers of the North Sea. “Could I see your traffic warden’s identification?”

The little document looked very neat. Van Meteren showed his New Guinea identification as well, yellow at the corners and spotted by sweat, its plastic cover torn right through.

Both Grijpstra and de Gier studied the documents carefully. A Dutch constable first class from the other side of the world. A memento of the past. They looked at the imprint of the rubber stamp and the signature of an inspector-general. They spent some time on the photograph. Van Meteren was shown in uniform, the metal strips had glinted in the light of the photographer’s flashbulb. A strong young face, proud of his rank and his responsibility and of his Corps, the Corps State Police of Dutch New Guinea, part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

“Well, colleague,” Grijpstra said, “and what do you think? Did anyone help Piet when he was being hanged?”

Van Meteren’s eyes were sad when he replied.

“It is possible. He may have fallen. I studied the room and I have thought about what I saw but it is always dangerous to come to a conclusion. Piet may have knocked his head against something. And there may have been a fight, it wouldn’t be unlikely because he had a very short temper. His state of mind wasn’t good, not lately anyway. His wife and child have left him and refuse to return. He has been depressed and he did mention the possibility of suicide. Man is free and has the right to take his own life, I have heard him say it at least three times. He knew he wasn’t very well liked but he couldn’t make himself likable.
Perhaps someone came to see him, perhaps there was an argument, perhaps someone hit him and perhaps Piet was so upset that he hanged himself after whoever it was left him.”

“Who would have argued with him?” de Gier asked.

“You?”

“No,” van Meteren said. “I don’t argue with anyone. Whenever Piet had one of his moods I avoided him. This is a very big house; there is always another room.”

“Were you friendly with Piet?”

“Yes, but I wasn’t his friend. I don’t believe in friendship. Friendship is a feeling of the moment. Moments pass. I have neither friends nor enemies. The people around me are the people around me, I accept them.”

“What are you doing in this house?” de Gier asked.

Van Meteren laughed. “Nothing. I live here. Piet invited me in. I was living in a small room in a boarding house. A cheap place although the rent was high. In a narrow street on the fourth floor, very little light and you can breathe the fumes of the street. The nearest tree was a mile away. I spent most of my free time walking around and had my meals at Chinese restaurants, as often as I could afford to. If I couldn’t eat in a restaurant I would have a sandwich in a park. This place has a restaurant and I tried to have a meal here but they wanted me to become a member. I had to go to Piet’s office and pay him twenty-five guilders and fill in a form. That’s how we met. He seemed to like me straightaway and offered me a room, two hundred guilders a month including as many meals as I wanted.”

“That’s very cheap,” de Gier said.

“Very,” van Meteren agreed. “But he may have had a reason. Perhaps he wanted a policeman in the house. I am not on the regular force but I do have a uniform and I am properly trained. There’s a bar in the place, clients may be difficult at times.”

“Did he ever make use of your services?”

“Once or twice,” van Meteren said. “I have taken guests into the streets but I didn’t hurt anybody. The grips we were taught are either defensive or merely meant to transport a suspect without causing him any undue pain.”

Grijpstra smiled, he remembered the textbook phrase.

“Was Piet a homosexual?” de Gier asked.

It was van Meteren’s turn to smile.

“You are a real policeman,” he said. “But perhaps you are wrong this time. I have thought of it for he often visited me in my room, he was interested in my collection of stones and shells and wanted me to tell him stories about New Guinea. He wanted to know what Papuans eat and what our religion is and whether we used any herbs or drugs and if we danced. But he never bothered me. Whenever he felt that I wanted to be alone he would leave at once. No, Piet liked women even if they caused him trouble.”

“Did they?” de Gier asked.

“Always. He wanted to own them, to dominate them.”

“I thought women liked to be dominated,” de Gier said.

“Yes. But not by Piet. He had little charm and tried to make them ridiculous, especially when he had an audience. So the women became bitter and attacked him and hurt him in his pride. He had a lot of pride. And in the end they would leave him.”

“You don’t make him sound a very nice person,” de Gier said.

Van Meteren shook his head. “No, no. He wasn’t all that bad. He meant well.”

“No friend, no enemy,” de Gier said.

“Yes,” van Meteren said. “I try to be detached, to keep my distance. People are the way they are; it’s hard to try to change them.”

“And that’s the reason you drink tea,” Grijpstra said.

Van Meteren thought for a while. “I do other things as well.”

* * *

“We are getting nowhere,” Grijpstra thought, and asked for more tea. Van Meteren filled his cup. Grijpstra took a sip, breathed deeply and immersed himself again in the opaque, sticky substance of an unexplained death of an Amsterdam citizen.

“And this Hindist business, what does it mean?”

Van Meteren felt through his pockets and found a pack of cigarettes. It contained one cigarette only. He offered it to Grijpstra.

Grijpstra shook his head. “It is your last.”

“Never mind,” van Meteren said. “I have some more somewhere, and if not I can get some downstairs in the shop, I have a key.”

“Hindism,” de Gier said.

“Yes,” van Meteren said. “Hindism. I have been curious too, but I have never quite understood what Piet meant by it. Something between Hinduism and Buddhism perhaps. Piet’s own homemade religion. It’s quite intricate and bound up with right eating and tea and meditation. The room next door is a temple. There are cushions on the floor and twice a week people sit still on it for an hour or so. Piet is, or was, the priest and had his own special cushion, richly embroidered. He sat closest to the altar. Perhaps he really thought of himself as a prophet, a teacher who had something to show to the new people, the young offbeat types of today. But he was losing interest and he was running short of disciples. Hardly anyone showed up for the meditations and he had to put up with a lot of criticism from the people who work here. Nobody stayed long. The ones you have met, the girls and Johan, and Eduard, whom you’ll probably meet later, are all newcomers, they haven’t been here for longer than six months at the most and I think they only stay because they can’t think of another place they want to go. They’ll leave as soon as something turns up. Piet wanted to create an oasis of peace, a quiet place where people can get
strength and where they can forget politics and money-making. Find their souls, their real selves. He had invented a special routine, the whole house has been redesigned for that purpose. The bar is an entry; people go easily into a bar. But finally they’ll end up in the meditation temple, at least that was the general idea. The barkeeper would have to listen to the guests and direct them, tactfully and gradually, to the higher regions, the restaurant with its clean food and pure fruit and vegetable juices, and the temple with its spiritual air. And Piet would be the divinity in the background, working through others and guiding them without showing himself much. Perhaps he really thought that way in the beginning but he must have lost faith and found himself weak. The arguments must have hurt him and his own lack of strength. I have listened to a long lecture he delivered once; the subject was that one should never eat meat. But afterward he sneaked out and I saw him buying some hot sausages off the street stall around the corner.”

“Ha!” de Gier said. “But surely he couldn’t have been that much of a failure. This place looks reasonably successful. It is clean for one thing and the restaurant was almost full. He must have been making some money and some people must have admired him one way or another.”

“Sure,” van Meteren said, “and the atmosphere here is quite pleasant. I have always been reasonably happy here and it would be a pity if it’s all over and done with now. And Piet’s ideas were all right, but he wasn’t the right man to put them into effect. Perhaps if he had admitted that he was a beginner himself and had lost some of his pride. He wanted to be a great master and it must have been a shock to him when people belittled him. His own wife called him a lesser nitwit when she left, the others called him other things. He has been walked over a lot lately …” He didn’t finish his sentence.

“Who else lives here?” Grijpstra asked.

Van Meteren counted them off on his fingers. “His mother,
eighty-three years old, second door on the right from here, not altogether sound in mind.”

“Old age?” asked Grijpstra.

“No, not just old age. A bit mad I would say. Then there is me, you know me. On the next floor there is Thérèse, the girl with the pigtails. Annetje, the other girl, sleeps in the servant quarters, on the other side of the courtyard. She shares her room with Johan. Eduard lives in the little cabin at the end of the garden. He had his day off today but he may have been here this afternoon, you’ll have to ask him. Johan has been working; he had the shop today and has been barman during the evening.”

Someone knocked at the door. Van Meteren called “Yes” but nothing happened. He got up and opened the door and the detectives saw a very old lady, tall and angular, dressed in a gown set off with lace, a thick woollen scarf hung over her shoulders. Two glinting sharp eyes stared at them. The aggressive nose reminded de Gier of a sparrow hawk’s beak.