But the lovestruck boy had come to her with his own expectations. He’d brought some marijuana, too. Did Wim actually think he was going to seduce her by getting her stoned first? Naturally she got him stoned instead. Then it was easy to get him laughing.
“You have a funny language,” she began. “Say something in Dutch to me, anything at all.”
Whenever he spoke, she tried to repeat what he said—it was as simple as that. He found her pronunciation hysterical.
“How do you say, ‘The dog ate this’?” she asked. She made up a number of sentences before she slipped in one she truly wanted. “ ‘He is a bald, smooth-faced man with an egg-shaped head and a nondescript body—not very big.’ I’ll bet you can’t say that fast,” she told him. Then she asked him to write it out so that she could try saying it herself.
“How do you say, ‘He doesn’t have sex’?” Ruth asked the boy. “You know, like you,” she added. Wim was so stoned that he even laughed at that. But he told her. And he wrote out whatever she asked him to. She kept telling him to spell the words clearly.
He still thought he was going to have sex with her later on. But, for the time being, Ruth was getting what she wanted. When she went into the bathroom to pee, she looked in her purse for her lip gloss and found the tube of Polaroid print coater, which she’d apparently taken from the floor of Rooie’s room by mistake. In the dim light of the prostitute’s room, Ruth had thought it had fallen out of her purse, but it was something that had fallen out of the murderer’s briefcase. It had his fingerprints on it, and hers. But what would hers matter? Because it was the only real evidence from Rooie’s room, the tube of print coater had to be given to the police. Ruth came out of the bathroom and coaxed Wim through another joint, which she only pretended to inhale. “ ‘The murderer dropped this,’ ” she told him then. “Say that. Write it out, too.”
What saved her from having to have sex with him, or having to allow him to masturbate beside her again, was that Allan called. Wim could tell that Allan was somebody important.
“I miss you more than I ever have,” Ruth told Allan, truthfully. “I should have made love to you before I left. I want to make love to you as soon as I’m back—I’m coming back the day after tomorrow, you know. You’re still meeting me at the airport, aren’t you?”
Even stoned, Wim got the message. The boy looked around the hotel room as if he’d misplaced half his life in it. Ruth was still talking to Allan when Wim left. He could have made a scene, but he wasn’t a bad boy—just an ordinary one. The only peevish gesture he made in leaving was to take a condom out of his pocket; he dropped it beside Ruth where she sat on the bed, still talking to Allan. It was one of those special condoms that come in flavors—this one claimed to be bananaflavored. Ruth would bring the condom to Allan. A little present from the red-light district, she would tell him. (She already knew she wouldn’t tell him about Wim, or Rooie.)
The novelist sat up transcribing what Wim had written into an orderly message, in her own handwriting—her own printing, to be exact. She carved every letter of the foreign language with the utmost care; she didn’t want to make any mistakes. The police would doubtless conclude that there’d been a witness to Rooie’s murder, but Ruth didn’t want them to know that the witness wasn’t Dutch. This way the police might presume that the witness was another prostitute—possibly one of Rooie’s neighbors on the Bergstraat.
Ruth had a plain manila envelope, manuscript-size, which Maarten had given her with her itinerary. She put her notes for the police in this envelope, together with the tube of Polaroid print coater. When she handled the tube, she touched it only by the ends, holding it between her thumb and index finger; she knew she’d touched the body of the tube when she’d picked it up off Rooie’s rug, but she hoped she hadn’t marred the killer’s fingerprints.
She hadn’t the name of a policeman, but she assumed she could safely address the envelope to the police station at 48 Warmoesstraat. First thing in the morning, before she wrote anything on the envelope, she went downstairs to the lobby of the hotel and got the correct postage from the concierge. Then she went out looking for the morning newspapers.
It was the front-page story in at least two Amsterdam papers. She bought the newspaper that had a picture under the headline. It was a photo of the Bergstraat at night, not very clear. A police barrier had enclosed the sidewalk immediately in front of Rooie’s door. Behind the barrier, someone who looked like a plainclothes cop was talking to two women who looked like prostitutes.
Ruth recognized the cop. He was the compact, powerful-looking man in the dirty running shoes and the baseball-type warm-up jacket. In the picture, he appeared to be clean-shaven, but Ruth had no doubt that it was the same man who’d followed her for a while in de Wallen; clearly both the Bergstraat and the red-light district were his beat.
The headline read: MOORD IN DE BERGSTRAAT
Ruth didn’t need to know Dutch to figure that out. While there was no mention of “Rooie”—the prostitute’s nickname—the article did mention that the murder victim was one Dolores de Ruiter, age fortyeight. The only other name mentioned in the article—it was also in the caption of the photograph—was the policeman’s, Harry Hoekstra, and he was referred to by two different titles. In one place he was a wijkagent , in another a hoofdagent . Ruth determined that she wouldn’t mail her envelope until she’d had time to ask Maarten and Sylvia about the newspaper story.
She brought the article in her purse to dinner; it would be her last dinner with them before leaving Amsterdam, and Ruth had rehearsed how she would casually bring up the story of the murdered prostitute: “Is this a story about what I think it is? I’ve actually walked on this street.”
But she didn’t have to bring it up. Maarten had already spotted the story and clipped it from the paper. “Have you seen this? Do you know what it is?” When Ruth pretended ignorance, Maarten and Sylvia told her all the details.
Ruth had already assumed that the body would be discovered by the younger prostitute who used Rooie’s room at night—the girl she’d seen in the window in the leather halter top. The only surprise in the article was that there was no mention of Rooie’s daughter.
“What’s a wijkagent ?” Ruth asked Maarten.
“The cop on the beat, the district’s officer,” he told her.
“Then what’s a hoofdagent ?”
“That’s his rank,” Maarten replied. “He’s a senior police officer— not quite what you call a sergeant.”
Ruth Cole left Amsterdam for New York on a late-mornin
g flight the following day, having had the taxi take her to the nearest post office en route to the airport. At the post office, she mailed the envelope to Harry Hoekstra, who was almost a sergeant in the Amsterdam police force—District 2. It might have surprised Ruth to know the motto of the 2nd District, which was inscribed in Latin on the police officers’ key rings.
ERRARE
HUMANUM
EST
To err is human, Ruth Cole knew. Her message, together with the Polaroid print coater, would tell Harry Hoekstra much more than Ruth had meant to say. The message, in carefully printed Dutch, was as follows:
1. De moordenaar liet dit vallen.