Outsider in Amsterdam by Janwillem van de Wetering Read Free Book Online

asleep either. He was applying a trick, a recipe he had discovered as a boy. Stretched flat on his back with his toes pressed against the iron bars of the old hospital bed that he had picked up at an auction some years before, he was maintaining, with some effort a state of semiconsciousness. He was, in fact, directing a dream. His body tingled, not the unpleasant tingle of cold hands after coming into a warm room, but an exciting all over tingle that made his entire body glow. He was very close to being free, free from his daily routine, his responsibility, his planet bound existence. Inside his tingling body his mind was at liberty to move, wherever he wanted it to go.
    And, being a shrewd man, he was using his liberty for an immediate purpose. He made his mind go back to the room of the dangling corpse. He saw the Papuan again, and the old skeleton-woman, the restaurant and the guests, the kitchen and the girls. He didn’t try to achieve anything, he merely tried to force his mind to go back into the day before and he was reasonably successful until Oliver jumped on his stomach and cut the thin film that separated de Gier from reality.
    He woke up and, reluctantly, looked at his watch. Five minutes past eight.
    “Yes,” he said to Oliver and put the Siamese cat on the floor where it began to grumble and whine.
    “Wait,” he said and walked to the small bathroom, looking at his plants in passing.
    If it is true that a house is a projection of the occupant’s spirit then de Gier’s spirit was not quite ordinary. He had furnished the little two-room apartment with a bed, plants, and bookshelves. No table, no chairs, no TV. A detachable shelf, screwed to the wall above the bed, served as a table if he wanted to write, which wasn’t often. He ate in the kitchen, not much larger than an old-fashioned cupboard.
    “Mmm,” he said, stopping near the geranium, which had started as a seed no more than a few weeks ago. “Mmm,” he said again when he admired his creeper, hanging down from a bookshelf.
    “She grows,” he remarked to Oliver, who wasn’t interested, and began to splash cold water all over his chest and arms and poured hot water and lathered his face.
    Oliver continued to grumble.
    “We’ll have breakfast together,” de Gier said. “Go to the balcony and irritate the birds while I finish shaving.”
    He moved the protesting cat with his foot and opened the balcony door. A seagull swooped low, expecting to be fed, and Oliver chattered with fury.
    A few minutes later the cat and the detective ate, chopped heart and scrambled eggs. Then they drank, water and coffee. Then de Gier went out to catch his bus, an hour late, and the cat stretched into the still warm blankets of the unmade bed, imitating his master’s trick of being asleep without dozing off altogether.
    “You are late,” said Grijpstra.
    De Gier smiled, remembering the pretty dark-haired girl he had been sitting next to in the bus.
    “I am often late,” he said.
    “That’s true,” Grijpstra agreed. “Here, read this, the doctor’s report.”
    They were in their large grey room of Headquarters. Grijpstra relaxed into a plastic chair and watched his colleague reading. Grijpstra smiled. He was content. His wife had been asleep when he came home at 2:30 in the morning. She was still asleep when he left. He had breakfasted by himself, helping himself to more toast and more eggs without any contradiction or argument. And, alone in the detectives’ room, he had watered the rubber plant and played drums on the set that, in a so far unexplained manner, had arrived in his and de Gier’s office about a year earlier. Found perhaps, or confiscated. Put there for a purpose that had been conveniently forgotten. Grijpstra had wanted to be a drummer when he was still a young man with a sense of adventure, and he had some talent. He often came early, to hit the three drums and clash the cymbals. Very softly of course, which, in drumming, is the finer