For a jacket, he preferred windbreakers or something water-repellent—always in dark, solid colors. He had an old leather jacket that was lined with wool flannel for the cold weather, but all his jackets, like his shirts, were loose-fitting. He didn’t want his Walther ninemillimeter, which he carried in a shoulder holster, to make a visible lump. Only if it was raining hard would he wear a baseball cap; he didn’t like hats, and he never wore gloves. One of Harry’s ex-girlfriends had described his mode of dress as “basic thug.”
His hair was dark brown but turning gray, and Harry was as indifferent to it as he was to shaving. He had it cut too short; then he let it grow too long.
As for his police uniform, Harry had worn it much more frequently in his first four years, when he’d served in the west of Amsterdam. He still had his apartment there, not because he was too lazy to move but because he liked the luxury of having two functioning fireplaces—one in his bedroom. His chief indulgences were firewood and books; Harry loved reading by a fire, and he owned so many books that it would have been a chore for him to move anywhere . Besides, he liked bicycling to work and home again; he believed in putting some distance between himself and de Wallen . As familiar as he was with the red-light district, and as recognizable a figure as he was in its crowded streets—for de Wallen was his real office, “the little walls” were the well-known drawers of his real desk—Harry Hoekstra was a loner.
What Harry’s women also complained about was how much he remained apart . He would rather read a book than listen. And regarding talk: Harry would rather build a fire and go to bed and watch the light flickering on the walls and on the ceiling. He also liked to read in bed.
Harry wondered if only his women were jealous of books. It was their principal preposterousness, he believed. How could they be jealous of books ? He found this all the more preposterous in the cases of those women he’d met in bookstores. Harry had met a lot of women in bookstores; others, although fewer lately, he’d met in his gym.
Harry’s gym was the one on the Rokin where Ruth Cole’s publisher, Maarten Schouten, had taken her. At fifty-seven, Sergeant Hoekstra was a little old for most of the women who went there. (Young women in their twenties telling him that he was in terrific shape “for a guy his age” would never be the high point of his day.) But he’d recently dated one of the women who worked at the gym, an aerobics instructor. Harry hated aerobics; he was strictly a weight lifter. In a day, Sergeant Hoekstra walked more than most people walked in a week—or in a month. And he rode his bicycle everywhere. What did he need aerobics for?
The instructor had been an attractive woman in her late thirties, but she was given to missionary zeal; her failure to convert Harry to her exercise of choice had hurt her feelings, and no one in Harry’s recent memory had so resented his reading. The aerobics instructor had not been a reader, and—like all of Harry’s women—she’d refused to believe that Harry had never had sex with a prostitute. Surely he’d at least been tempted.
He was “tempted” all the time—although, with each passing year, the temptation grew less. In his almost forty years as a cop, he’d been “tempted” to kill a couple of people, too. But Sergeant Hoekstra hadn’t killed anybody, and he hadn’t had sex with a prostitute.
Yet there was no question that Harry’s girlfriends were uniformly uneasy about his relationships with those women in the windows— and, in ever-increasing numbers, on the streets. He was a man of the streets, Harry was, which may have immeasurably contributed to his fondness for books and fireplaces; that he’d been a man of the streets for almost forty years definitely contributed to his desire to try living in the country. Harry Hoekstra had had it with cities—with any city.
Only one of his girlfriends had liked to read as much as Harry did, but she read the wrong books; among the women Harry had slept with, she was also the closest to being a prostitute. She was a lawyer who did volunteer work for a prostitutes’ organization, a liberal feminist who’d told Harry that she “identified” with prostitutes.
The organization for prostitutes’ rights was called De Rode Draad (The Red Thread); at the time Harry met the lawyer, The Red Thread enjoyed an uneasy alliance with the police. After all, both the police and The Red Thread were concerned for the prostitutes’ safety. Harry always thought that it should have been a more successful alliance than it was.
But, from the beginning, the board members of The Red Thread had rubbed him the wrong way: in addition to the more militant prostitutes and ex-prostitutes, there were those women (like his lawyer friend) who’d struck him as impractical feminists—concerned mainly with making the organization an emancipation movement for prostitutes. Harry had believed, from the beginning, that The Red Thread should be less concerned with manifestos and more concerned with protecting the prostitutes from the dangers of their profession. Yet he’d preferred the prostitutes and the feminists to the other members of the board—the labor-union types, and what Harry called the “how-to-get-subsidized people.”
The lawyer’s name was Natasja Frederiks. Two thirds of the women who worked for The Red Thread were prostitutes or ex-prostitutes; at their meetings, the nonprostitutes (like Natasja) were not allowed to speak. The Red Thread paid only two and a half salaries to four people; everyone else involved there was a volunteer. Harry had been a volunteer, too.
In the late eighties, there’d been more interaction between the police and The Red Thread than there was now. For one thing, the organization had failed to attract the foreign prostitutes—not to mention the “illegals”—and there were hardly any Dutch prostitutes left in the windows or on the streets.
Natasja Frederiks wasn’t doing volunteer work for The Red Thread anymore; she’d become disillusioned, too. (Natasja now called herself an “ex-idealist.”) She and Harry had first met at a regular Thursday-afternoon meeting for first-time prostitutes. Harry thought these meetings were a good idea.
He sat in the back of the room and never spoke unless asked a direct question; he was introduced to the first-time prostitutes as “one of the more sympathetic members of the police force,” and the new girls were encouraged to talk with him after the usual business of the meeting was over. As for the “usual business,” there was often an older prostitute who told the first-timers what to be careful of. One of the old-timers was Dolores de Ruiter, or “Red” Dolores, as Harry and everyone in the redlight district knew her. Rooie Dolores had been a hooker in de Wallen, and later on the Bergstraat, a lot longer than Natasja Frederiks had been a lawyer.
What Rooie always told the new girls was to make sure the customer had a hard-on. She wasn’t kidding. “If the guy’s in the room with you— I mean the second he puts his foot in the door—he should have an erection.” If he didn’t, Rooie warned the new girls, maybe he hadn’t come for sex. “And never shut your eyes,” Rooie always admonished the new girls. “Some guys like you to shut your eyes. Just don’
t .”
There’d been nothing unpleasant or even disappointing in his sexual relationship with Natasja Frederiks, but what Harry most vividly remembered was how they had argued about books. Natasja had been born to argue, and Harry didn’t like to argue; but he enjoyed having a girlfriend who read as much as he did, even if she read the wrong books. Natasja read nonfiction of the change-the-world variety; she read tracts . They were mostly books of leftist-leaning wishful thinking—Harry didn’t believe that the world (or human nature) could be changed. Harry’s job was to understand and accept the existing world; maybe he made the world a little safer, he liked to think.
He read novels because he found in them the best descriptions of human nature. The novelists Harry favored never suggested that even the worst human behavior was alterable. They might morally disapprove of this or that character, but novelists were not world-changers; they were just storytellers with better-than-average stories to tell, and the good ones told stories about believable characters. The novels Harry loved were complexly interwoven stories about real people.
He didn’t enjoy detective novels or so-called thrillers. (Either he figured out the plot too soon or the characters were implausible.) He would never have marched into a bookstore demanding to be shown the classics or the newest literary fiction, but he ended up reading more “classics” and more “literary” novels than any other kind— although they were all novels of a fairly conventional narrative structure.
Harry didn’t object to a book being funny, but if the writer was only comic (or merely satirical), Harry felt let down. He liked social realism, but not if the writer was without any imagination—not if the story wasn’t enough of a story to keep him guessing about what was going to happen next. (A novel about a divorced woman who spends a weekend at a resort hotel, where she sees a man she imagines having an affair with—but she doesn’t; she just goes home again—was not enough of a novel to satisfy Sergeant Hoekstra.)
Natasja Frederiks said that Harry’s taste in novels was “escapist,” but Harry adamantly believed it was Natasja who was escaping the world with her idiotic nonfiction of idle wishfulness about how to change it!
Among contemporary novelists, Sergeant Hoekstra’s favorite was Ruth Cole. Natasja and Harry had argued about Ruth Cole more than about any other author. The lawyer who’d volunteered her services to The Red Thread because she said she “identified” with prostitutes asserted that Ruth Cole’s stories were “too bizarre”; the lawyer who was a champion of rights for prostitutes, but who was not allowed to speak at any of the organization’s meetings, claimed that the plots of Ruth Cole’s novels were “too unlikely.” What’s more, Natasja didn’t like plot. The real world (which she so fervently sought to change) was without a discernible plot of its own, Natasja said.
Natasja, who (like Harry) would one day quit volunteering for The Red Thread because the prostitutes’ organization represented fewer than a twentieth of the active prostitutes in the city of Amsterdam, accused Ruth Cole of being “too unrealistic” for her tastes. (At the time both Harry and Natasja would quit their volunteer work for The Red Thread, the Thursday-afternoon meetings for first-time prostitutes drew less than five percent of the first-time prostitutes working in de Wallen .)
“Ruth Cole is more realistic than you are,” Harry had told Natasja.
They’d broken up because Natasja said Harry lacked ambition. He didn’t even want to be a detective—he was content to be “just” a cop on the beat. It was true that Harry needed to be on the streets. If he wasn’t out there walking, in his real office, he didn’t feel like a policeman at all.
On the same floor where Harry’s official office was, the detectives had their own office; it was full of computers, at which they spent too much time. Harry’s best friend among the detectives was Nico Jansen. Nico liked to tease Harry that the last murder of a prostitute in Amsterdam, which was the murder of Dolores de Ruiter in her window room on the Bergstraat, had been solved by his computer in the detectives’ computer room, but Harry knew better.
Harry knew it was the mystery witness who’d really solved the prostitute’s murder; it had been Harry’s analysis of the eyewitness account, which, after all, had been addressed to him, that had eventually told Nico Jansen what to look for in his overpraised computer.
But theirs was a friendly argument. The case was solved—that was the main thing, Nico said. However, it was the witness who still interested Harry, and he didn’t like it that his witness had slipped away. It was all the more maddening to him because he was absolutely certain that he’d seen her—he’d actually seen her—and she’d still got away!