"Irasshai," the girl said when he bent down to walk under the cloth that partly hid the restaurant entrance.
"Pardon?" Grijpstra asked.
"Welcome," the girl said. She was Japanese, a tiny smiling figure in a kimono beckoning him to come farther. "Do you have a reservation?"
"I phoned," he said. "Grijpstra is the name. I was told that there wouldn't be a table but you would hold a seat at the bar for me."
"Please," the girl said, and gestured toward the back of the restaurant. He gave her the note and she looked at the small scribbled cursory script. Her hand shot up and covered her mouth. The slanting eyes widened.
"Miss Andrews," Grypstra said. "Joanne Andrews, she came to see me and gave me this note. I was to give it to you." He fished out his wallet and showed her his identification.
"Police," the girl said. She had regained her original smile. "Please come in, sir. I will tell the manager you are here; there is some very nice food tonight, have you eaten Japanese food before?"
"No," Grijpstra said, "but I would like to." He looked about him while the girl welcomed another customer. She was very small, the white kimono was wrapped around the slim tiny body, a wide cotton sash kept the exotic dress in place. He noted the flower design on the kimono and spent a few seconds looking at the girl. The garment didn't accentuate her breasts but he saw the tight lines of her bottom, and the delicate bare neck. His hand came up and played with his mustache while he tried to keep his eyes serious. His sudden conclusion was amusing him. A different approach, he was saying to himself, but it's the same thing in the end. We look at legs and breasts, they look at necks and bottoms.
The girl had turned round and Grijpstra dropped his hand. His face had assumed his usual fatherly look, reserved for contact with young ladies. "This way please," she said, and walked ahead. She didn't really walk but shuffled, the feet pointing inward, small feet in white socks with the big toe apart, resting on high sandals.
He sat at the bar and studied the menu but gave up. The words were too foreign and although the menu tried to explain, in Dutch and English, what the various dishes were supposed to be he still felt lost. The dishes sounded like children's rhymes. He put the menu down again and looked around. The top of the bar was a thick slab of butcherboard and he caressed the soft shining wood. The bar would be oiled almost daily he thought, with linseed oil probably. He had made a tabletop for his wife's kitchen once, using wood of the same quality; it had been very expensive. He had thought his wife would appreciate working on the smooth surface, but she hadn't noticed the subtle coloring and velvet touch and had slopped food on it and burned rings with hot pots and pans.
His eyes swept around. He saw a young man, immaculate in a white jacket that left a wide V-line of bare chest, working with vegetables on a table behind the bar. He was cutting the stalks of spring onions so fast that the knife had become a blur. On a dish an array of fresh vegetables had been arranged, the different greens accentuating the sudden red explosion of a tomato. Another young man was cutting a raw fish, wrapping the pieces in cold sticky rice and placing them on a large plate. Grijpstra's mouth watered. He liked to eat raw herring off the street stalls in the center of the city, but this fish looked better than a herring. What was it? Cod? Pollock? Mackerel? He swallowed and kept looking, but remembered that he was supposed to investigate and forced himself to take in his surroudings. A high ceiling, made of narrow thin boards held together by slats of almost the same color. The two shades were in harmony but only just. If the slats had been a little darker the effect would have been spoiled. He nodded to himself. They push it as far as they can, he said, almost aloud, as far as they can. He remembered the shuffling gait of the girl. If she had bent her feet a little more she would have looked grotesque, like the pigeons that dominate the surface of most of the pavements of Amsterdam's squares. But she knew how far she could go.
Yet, in the war the Japanese had pushed it too far. So they were capable of overdoing it. Capable of killing a fellow countryman in a car on the highway. Squeezing the trigger of some automatic weapon at a few feet from the victim's head, maybe no more than one foot. They might even have pushed the muzzle against the unfortunate man's head. He saw the flash of the old movie again, the wicked Japanese criminal, sitting behind a large desk, pressing his thin fingers together and glinting through his spectacles while he ordered one of his henchman to dispose of an enemy. Maybe the Japanese were also very obedient and therefore dangerous. Dutch criminals argue with their bosses and shout and use rough language and refuse to do as they are told, so Dutch crime is not too violent, and certainly not sinister, not very often anyway.
The girl was at his side. "Please follow me," she said in an odd mixture of Dutch and English. "The manager and his wife expect you in the special room upstairs." Grijpstra frowned. His English wasn't too good, although he had sweated on the language for his police examination. He knew enough words but he had difficulty in combining them into proper sentences and he knew his accent was so heavy that foreigners found it hard to understand him. With Japanese it might be even worse. The commissaris should have sent de Gier, whose English was fairly fluent, for de Gier had spent some time in London, and had once gone as far as Cornwall, where he assisted the British police in arresting a Dutchman who had been spending a few hundred thousand guilders in stolen checks and securities. Grijpstra grunted. The commissaris often directed his men to get into situations to which they weren't fitted. The old man did it on purpose.
Grijpstra got up and followed the girl. He thought of a theory that a criminologist had elaborated once, during an evening's lecture for police officers. Man is incapable of doing things on purpose, the tall cadaverous-looking expert had stated, smiling at his audience as if he were begging their pardon. Things happen, that's all, and man tries, frantically, to adjust to whatever is happening to him. Grijpstra had agreed that night, but he had modified his agreement later. Some men can create a situation, do things on purpose, deliberately plan a course of events. The commissaris could do it; he didn't always do it, but he could push the line of cause and effect and force it into another direction. And although such an activity was admirable and curious, it wasn't always pleasant. It twisted other men, especially the men who were working with the commissaris. Maybe it improved them.
Grijpstra sighed. He didn't particularly want to improve. Still, he refused a transfer to a much easier job. He could have been assisting the officers responsible for police vehicles and garages now. A nine-to-five job with good holidays that couldn't be upset, for vehicles break down with a monotonous rhythm and their behavior can be caught in rules. Crime is a jumpy affair, here today, nowhere next week, and then continuous for several weeks with all sorts of sudden twists. He hadn't taken the easy job. Too weak, he thought, too weak to get out of the groove. Too weak to ask for a divorce too. He badly wanted a divorce and the chance of moving into a quiet room somewhere, a room without a screaming TV and a fat woman padding about on large swollen feet. But he still had small children, and he felt he had to stay with them. For another ten years perhaps. Ten long aggravating years that would make him deaf and give him ulcers. He shuddered.
The special room was even better than the quiet elegant restaurant downstairs. The girl had knelt down and was unlacing his boots. Grijpstra stood on one leg, holding on to a post that was a bare tree, stripped of its bark. There was another post like that in the room, flanking an opening in the wall, like an open cupboard. Its back wall was white and a scroll had been hung that dominated the bit of empty space. A single flower in a narrow vase decorated the lower part of the niche. Grijpstra looked at the scroll, six Chinese characters, the first three identical.