"Oh yes, sergeant. Very new. Three months now and I still don't know the country at all. I was born and raised in the capital, a long way from here. But I know Cape Orca because I read the file. And Pete Opdijk died under my supervision so to speak. An accident. The fifth. Schwartz just ran away, but he might have been another if he had stopped to wait."
"Schwartz?"
"Captain Schwartz. The name is not familiar?"
"No."
"Maybe not, suit yourself. Maybe you came in on the Opdijk angle. Opdijk was a Dutchman and Captain Schwartz an American, even though he professed to be a Nazi. The others were Americans too, but their deaths link them to Opdijk, your client."
"Client," de Gier said.
"I'll tell you what I know. You can read the file later. A third and last glass?"
They had the third glass and the sheriff told his story while they drank it.
It wasn't a bad story, de Gier thought, with some good open leads. But his interest was academic, a foreign tale told in a foreign country. He would be no part of it. He would take the commissaris back to Amsterdam and he would see what he would see in the meantime.
Yes, de Gier thought, as the baseboard radiators popped and rattled in the warm room, the snow on the spruce outside glowed a deep red in the gentle touch of the setting sun, and the bourbon seeped through his tall body. It was a good story. Cape Orca.
"What's an orca?" he asked when the sheriff finished and got up to show him the bathroom.
"Orcas are killer whales," the sheriff said. "They are intelligent and skilled animals, as intelligent and skilled as the contract killers in New York. And their only aim is to kill. The orcas hunt in groups, and they comer their prey and rip it apart. They used to come into the bay here, but the Coast Guard fought them and now they're scarce. The bay and the cape are still called after them. They are silent and quick and always deadly. Yes, sergeant, mat's what orcas are, deadly. And mighty hard to catch. Especially when the sheriff doesn't know his way about and the chief deputy is fat and the other two deputies are about as eager as hound dogs raised on bone glue and sawdust. Another drink?"
"Yes," de Gier said. "Please."
4
The Commissaris was awake, but not quite. He struggled to remain in the in-between state of awareness where thoughts are sharp and definite and abstractly pure and can be experienced and enjoyed without the necessity of bothering to translate them into the always-false world of activity. He wriggled his toes and tensed and released the muscles of his hips and back. The padded blanket dropped back and a warm draft drifted over his body. There was no pain, not even the slightest twinge in the nerve ends of his legs, the heart and ever-productive source of his rheumatism. But happiness, by definition, cannot last and he knew that his hand would raise the blanket and his brain would order his body to step into the room, and he dreaded the moment.
The door opened.
"Jan?"
"Yes, Suzanne, I am awake."
"I brought you some coffee and orange juice."
"Good."
"I'll put it down here. When you're ready to come down we can eat. I have some frozen hutspot that can be warmed up quickly."
He shivered. Hutspot, a stew of carrots and potatoes and shredded meat, always reminded him of vomit drying on the cobblestones of an Amsterdam alley.
The little shape padded over the carpet. He heard the tray click as it hit the night table.
"You slept for eight hours, Jan, but you had such a long journey. Why don't you go back to sleep again?"
He sat up. "No. I think I'll start on your husband's papers. You said you had them all together. Would you mind bringing them up?"
She came back with a briefcase filled with different-colored cardboard files, and he opened them and glanced through their contents. He grunted miserably. All so simple and straightforward and Suzanne hadn't even looked at the policies. He totaled the monthly payments the pension funds and insurance policies would render and raised his eyebrows. Suzanne would be able to live in style. He checked the last bank statement and the stubs of a checkbook. A few hundred dollars' balance, but his eyebrows shot up again when he saw the total of Opdijk's savings account. Very nice indeed. No trouble there.
"Suzanne?"
She answered his shout and came into the room again.
"Do you know if the doctor sent you a death certificate? I will need several copies to make the insurance policies pay out."
Suzanne began to cry quietly.
The commissaris cleared his throat. He had forgotten that he should commiserate. "I am sorry, dear, but I do need the certificates."
"Yes, Jan, I understand. I'll get them. They were addressed to me and they're in my cabinet. Just a moment, Jan. Do you need paper and envelopes and stamps too? To write to the insurance companies?"
"Yes, please."
He got up and put on his dressing gown and slippers and winked at himself in the mirror. Suzanne still had her wits about her. She would cry, but she would also get her money. Oh well. He sipped the coffee and rushed out of the room. He spat the coffee into the toilet. Boiled, weak, too much milk. He came back and tried the orange juice. That was fine. Perhaps he could live on orange juice for a few days. If only the house could be sold quickly. He hoped that the furniture could be auctioned. There would also be the car he had seen when they arrived, a sturdy four-wheel-drive vehicle, a station wagon, in good condition but hard to sell he supposed. Everybody around would already have a car. He would have to persuade her to make some sacrifices, but he could always work on her fear of staying. Fear and greed, two powerful urges he might be able to manipulate to everybody's benefit.
She brought the writing materials and he sat down and wrote the letters and licked the stamps. He might be able to post them after dinner if she would let him use her car. He lit a cigar and ambled about the room. A nice room, but the wallpaper was a little elaborate. Suzanne woud have bought it in Holland. A farmer and his wife, in folksy clothes and wooden shoes, doing a jig against the background of a windmill. Good God. He looked away, but the design repeated itself. The jig continued on all the room's walls. The commissaris stared in horror. The farmer and his wife were smiling inanely, a thousand times, many thousands of times. He would have to try to stay away from the walls. But what else was there to look at? The windows. He pulled the shades and sighed with relief as the opaque linen snapped up and rolled itself on a bar.
The view destroyed the jig of the imbecilic couple. He sighed with wonder as he admired the bay below, its ice mirroring the starlight. An icy, immense wasteland of pure beauty, stretching away to a shore covered by a growth of what appeared to be evergreens surrounding an island. The island sloped up to a hill. There were no lights, but a high jetty stuck out into the bay. He looked up just as a moving cloud revealed the half moon, and when his eyes dropped down again the ice of the bay had become a light shade of, of what? Mauve? A very soft blue? The color seemed hard to define. He forgot the question. Why name the color? He stayed in front of the window until his sister called him, and he had time to see the narrow channel in the ice between the island and his side of the shore. The channel would run out to the ocean. He also saw the ridges and domes where ledges and rocks had been frozen over and become raised when the tide went down. He shook his head when he remembered the simple beaches of Holland, a hundred miles of yellow sand protected on one side by monotonous dunes and attacked on the other by steady breakers. He had always liked the Dutch beaches, but this was a different beauty, a distorted beauty almost, dating back to the beginning of the planet, when the first shapes were created out of turmoil.