Outsider in Amsterdam (7 page)

“No tax?” Grijpstra asked. “No company tax? No income tax?”

The accountant hadn’t changed his expression. The sly look was still there. A professional slyness, a highly educated, very smart fox who had made his lair in a gable house.

“No tax,” he repeated. “Societies are very special, very vague material. A proper society makes no profit, whatever it makes it spends. It is allowed to form a slight reserve. If it makes a profit there is trouble with the inspection. There would have been trouble here and I have been warning Piet. After all, I am a chartered accountant, not a bookkeeper he could hire anywhere. I have a reputation to lose. I told him to change his Society into a normal commercial company with a balance sheet. I would have worked out his profit on the first three years and he would have paid some tax. I also told him that he could forget about my services if he refused. He might have gone on for years, quietly pocketing the money and improving his position. The inspection isn’t very quick. But they would have caught him in the end and fined him right into bankruptcy.”

Grijpstra looked up.

“You said ‘we’ just now. If I remember correctly you said ‘but we earned some money.’ Do you mean that you had a share in the business?”

The accountant laughed. “I see I am dealing with the police. No, no. Nobody is allowed to have a material interest in a society. But an accountant always identifies with his client and talks about ‘we’ and ‘ours.’ You can compare it to a mother who tells her small child ‘now
we
are going to do a little whiddle’ but the mother doesn’t whiddle, the child whiddles.”

Grijpstra grinned and told himself that he should remember to repeat the explanation to de Gier.

“So if Piet had continued on the way he was going he would have been in trouble?”

The accountant made his fingertips touch and looked at his interrogator from above, using his high seat and tall body to advantage.

“Perhaps. The inspection is busy, and very slow. Their servants are officials, nine-to-five men, moderately dedicated. With luck Piet could have gone on for years and years and even
if the inspection had become suspicious, well, there would have been time. He could have sold out and run for it. He might have made a small fortune and retired on an island somewhere. There are a lot of islands in the world.”

“Piet was the only director?” Grijpstra asked.

“Yes. He asked me to join him but I refused. The Society’s foundation was too rotten for me. His wife used to be a director but she never knew what went on. She left him anyway, you know that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Grijpstra said, “and what did he do with the money?”

“Let’s see,” the accountant said and leafed through the ledger. “Here. The money wasn’t spent. He invested some in the house, repairs and so on, improving its value considerably. There is a nice car in the Society, which Piet used, and he bought a small house in the South, in the country somewhere. A good buy, its present value should be three times what he paid for it. His own official income was six hundred guilders a month, plus free board and lodging. He paid income tax on the six hundred, which is next to nothing.”

Grijpstra looked at the ceiling. The accountant waited patiently.

“So everything in the house, the stereo equipment, furniture, statues, inventory, stocks, were the Society’s property?”

“Yes.”

“And Piet could sell whatever he wanted to sell and pocket the money?”

“Yes,” the accountant said. “In fact he
was
the Society. A difficult case, even for the inspection. If they had found out what he was doing they would have forced him to change it into a commercial company.”

“To get a grip on him?”

“Exactly,” said the accountant. “But what are you hinting at?”

Grijpstra smiled his special noncommittal smile and managed to put some human warmth in it.

“I don’t quite know myself,” he said. “I am gathering information, that’s all. Who would benefit from Piet’s death?”

“His wife,” the accountant said, “but she ran away. To Paris I think; I seem to remember that Piet told me but I am not sure. If she is in Paris she couldn’t have murdered him there. In any case, I know her and she is not the killing type. She is a rather lovely but very vague woman. She wouldn’t hang anyone. And her little daughter is a toddler.”

“Do you see any reason for suicide?” Grijpstra asked.

The accountant sucked pensively on his cigar and began to cough. Suddenly he looked ferocious and the soggy cigar stub was killed with savage power.

“Bah. These cigars aren’t what they are cracked up to be. Wet bags full of nicotine. Yagh.”

Grijpstra waited patiently for the evil mood to pass.

“ ‘Suicide,’ you said. I am no psychologist,” the accountant said.

“I am asking you all the same,” Grijpstra said pleasantly.

“I am an accountant. As an accountant I would say there might be a reason. I think I convinced Piet that his Society would have to disappear. He identified with the Society. Its death might mean his own death. And I think that the thought of having to pay a lot of money to the government upset him considerably. He might have had to pay as much as fifty thousand guilders, an amount he didn’t have.”

“Not in cash,” Grijpstra said.

“Yes,” the accountant agreed. “It wasn’t all that bad. He could have raised the money on his property. I could have managed the mortgage for him, at a price of course. Mortgages are expensive these days.”

“So he was upset,” Grijpstra said. “He would have had to go to a lot of trouble to raise money to pay to the government.”

The accountant put his fingertips together again and donned a pensive look.

“And there you may have your reason,” he said suavely. “The government is the establishment and Piet fought the establishment. His Society was against the establishment. And now it looked like the enemy was winning.”

“Aha,” Grijpstra said. “And if his enemy would force him to change the Society into a commercial company he would have had to hire real staff and pay them real wages. It might have been the end of his small but profitable business.”

“Quite,” the accountant said.

Grijpstra studied the accountant, a tall wide-shouldered man, aged somewhere between fifty and sixty. A beautifully chiseled head. A chartered accountant, a man of standing comparable to a surgeon, a bank director, an important merchant. An expensive office, an expensive image. Even an expensive name. Joachim de Kater. A “kater” is a tomcat. The tomcat watches how the others run to and fro with sweaty brows, and every now and then the tomcat puts out his paw and flicks his nails and the others pay. A chartered accountant is a man trusted by the establishment. Whatever he says is believed and the tax inspectors talk to him as equal to equal. Grijpstra shuddered. Grijpstra is Dutch too and he feared the tax inspectors as the Calvinists had once feared the Spanish inquisition.

“Thank you,” he said. “I won’t take any more of your time.”

“It was a pleasure to be of use,” de Kater said, and stretched to his full length. His handclasp was firm and pleasant. His smile glinted in the dark room. Grijpstra studied the smile for a moment. Expensive teeth. Eight thousand guilders perhaps? Or ten thousand? The false teeth looked very natural, each individual tooth a work of art, and the back teeth all of solid gold.

Grijpstra walked past the water of the canal, in deep contemplation. Fifty thousand guilders, payable in one go perhaps, but perhaps not. The tax people always appear to be reasonable.
They don’t like to slaughter the goose who lays the golden eggs. They might have been prepared to wait a bit. Perhaps he should go to see them.

But on the other hand … Perhaps Piet panicked. He might have been petrified with fear, fear of the possibility of losing his easy trick to make money. And fear might have forced his head into the homemade noose.

Would it?

Grijpstra thought of the small head with the abundant dark red hair and the beautiful full mustache. The small head with the large bump on its temple. He saw the little corpse again, the naked feet and the neat little toes, pointed at the wooden floor.

D
E
G
IER WALKED
past the merchants’ mansions on the Prinsengracht using the long strides that, he believed, prevent the common policeman’s complaint of flat feet. His mind was clouded by anger. He was angry with everyone in general and with Grijpstra in particular. De Gier didn’t want to walk, he wanted to drive. But the police are stingy, and Grijpstra didn’t like to be an exception. Why use a car if there is no immediate necessity?

But it was a nice day and de Gier’s anger evaporated. The image of a terrible, silly and stupid Grijpstra slid from his mind. Grijpstra had been punished anyway. He, de Gier, was walking, wasting the state’s time. He could have taken a streetcar. De Gier had gone further than Grijpstra had intended him to go. He was even saving the state the price of a tram ticket.

De Gier smiled. He had analyzed his own thoughts. He now faced the conclusion with courage. He was a petty little man himself. De Gier always tried to analyze his own thoughts, trying to find the real motivation of his actions. And always he had to conclude that he, de Gier, was a petty little man. But the conclusion didn’t discourage him. He shared his pettiness with all of humanity. He didn’t have a very high opinion of humanity. He had, once, when they were drinking together, told Grijpstra about his line of thought and Grijpstra had nodded his heavy head. It had been one of the rare evenings when Grijpstra had
been prepared to talk. Unwilling to meet his family, and after a long day, he had accepted de Gier’s invitation to have a meal at one of the cheap Chinese restaurants and afterward they had found themselves in a small bar of the Zeedijk, the long spine of the prostitution quarter. The owner of the bar had recognized them as plainclothes policemen and had filled and refilled their glasses, quietly and with a hurt smile on his cadaverous face. Grijpstra had done more than agree. He had finished his glass of jenever with one tremendous sip and raised a finger.

“You can,” Grijpstra had said, “divide humanity into a few groups.”

“Yes?” de Gier had asked with his softest and most melodious voice. He had been almost breathless with anticipation. Grijpstra would talk!

“Yes,” Grijpstra said. “Listen. First of all we have the big bounders. You know them as well as I do. Chaps with red heads and fat necks who drive large American cars and who smoke cigars. Their coats are lined with real fur. There are pimp-bounders and banker-bounders, but in essence they are all the same. The bounders have understood. They know what people want. People want to be manipulated and the bounders manipulate. They find out, or rather, they pay others to find out (bounders are surrounded by very intelligent slaves) what people want to have and then they buy it cheaply and sell it for the most ridiculous amounts you and I can imagine. The principle works for goods as well as services. Bounders always make money. They never join a queue and they often go on holiday. The own big yachts on the Usselmeer and villas in Spain. Their mistresses are kept in the best apartments of the Beethoven Street. They never have any problems and they never make any problems. Whatever crops up is taken care of quickly or rather, as I have already indicated, is taken care of for them. They pay very little tax. They are the first group.”

De Gier listened with all the concentration he could muster. The man behind the bar refilled their glasses.

“The second group,” Grijpstra continued, slurring his words slightly, “is the biggest group. This is the group of the idiots. You can, if you like, subdivide this group into a fairly large number of subgroups, but why should you?”

De Gier shook his head energetically, he didn’t want to subdivide.

“Very well,” Grijpstra said. “If they are idiots anyway why should you? There is this type of idiot and that type of idiot but their skins are always grey, they have a variety of illnesses, they stand in queues, they take a holiday once a year, they drive small secondhand cars that break down continuously and they buy the expensive rubbish the bounders sell to them, and they pay a lot of tax of course. It is taken off their pay so that they won’t notice much. They do as they are told, not just what the boss tells them to do but also what advertising tells them to do, and the TV, and the newspaper, and anybody who has a loud voice and a few simple words. They’ll even get into a cattle truck to be taken to a concentration camp, and when the camps go out of fashion, to Yugoslavia or a Greek island, on a charter plane. They visit dirty whores and drink jenever made in a chemical factory. Your health!”

He raised his glass unsteadily, spilling a little jenever.

“Your health!” de Gier said and raised his glass obediently.

“They do whatever the bounder wants,” Grijpstra continued. “And when they have celebrated their sixty-fifth birthday, they shake hands and go away and you’ll never see them again but it doesn’t matter for they reproduce faster than they disappear. They are fond of rubber stamps and forms and name plates on the door, with an indication of their rank or degree. They like medals and titles and privileges. But they never have any rights, only duties. The duty to save and to buy and never mind what they do, the bounders will make money. It matters little what type of political
system you apply to them, they will stay idiots, and when the bounder drives past they shout Hurray. Keeping time and arranged in rows. Hurray hurray hurray!”

Grijpstra had shouted loudly and the other guests joined the cheering.

“You see,” Grijpstra said, “just as I have been telling you. But we still have the third group. It’s a very small group. Do you know who I mean?”

“No,” de Gier said, “but please tell me.”

“The small third group,” Grijpstra said, “is the group of the well-meaning. The gentlemen. The idealists. They have good ideas and they are often very intelligent. They don’t push and they never do anything out of turn and they give the impression that they don’t manipulate and that no one manipulates them.”