The middle drawer of Sergeant Hoekstra’s desk heartened him; there was nothing in it that he needed to throw away. There were a dozen old pens and a few keys that Harry didn’t recognize, but his replacement might derive some satisfying curiosity from speculating what the keys were for . There was also a combination bottle opener and corkscrew— even in a police station, one could never have enough of those —and there was a teaspoon (not too clean, but one could always clean it). You never knew when you might get sick and need a teaspoon to take your medicine, Harry thought.
He was about to close the drawer, leaving the contents undisturbed, when an item of even more remarkable usefulness caught his eye. It was the broken handle to the desk’s bottommost drawer, and no one but Harry knew what a truly useful little tool it was. It fit perfectly between the treads of Harry’s running shoes; he used it to scrape the dogshit off his soles, if and when he stepped in any. However, Harry’s replacement would not necessarily realize the broken handle’s value.
Using one of the pens, Harry wrote a note, which he put in the middle drawer before closing it. DON’T FIX BOTTOMMOST DRAWER, BUT SAVE BROKEN HANDLE. EXCELLENT FOR GETTING DOGSHIT OFF SHOES. HARRY HOEKSTRA.
Thus encouraged, Harry took the three side drawers of the desk in order, starting at the top. In the first of them was a speech he’d written but had never delivered to the members of The Red Thread organization. It concerned the matter of underage prostitutes. Harry had reluctantly assented to the position taken by the prostitutes’ organization that the legal age for prostitutes be lowered from eighteen to sixteen.
“No one likes the idea of minors working in prostitution,” Harry’s speech had begun, “but I like less the idea of minors working in dangerous places. Minors are going to be prostitutes, anyway. Many brothel owners won’t care if their prostitutes are only sixteen-year-olds. What’s important is that the sixteen-year-olds can make use of the same social services and health-care facilities that the older prostitutes use, without being afraid that they will be turned over to the police.”
It was not cowardice that had prevented Harry from giving his speech; Harry had contradicted the “official” police position before. It was that he hated the whole idea of allowing sixteen-year-olds to be prostitutes only because you couldn’t stop them from being prostitutes. On the issue of accepting the real world and making an educated guess about how to make it marginally safer, even a social realist like Harry Hoekstra would have admitted that certain subjects depressed him.
He had not given the speech because, in the long run, it would have been of no practical help to the underage prostitutes—just as the Thursday-afternoon meetings for first-time prostitutes were of no practical help to the vast majority of them . They didn’t or wouldn’t attend the meetings; in all likelihood, they didn’t know that the meetings existed —or if they had known, they wouldn’t have cared.
But perhaps the speech would be of some practical use to the next cop who sat at his desk, Harry thought, and so he left the speech where it was.
In regard to the middle of the three side drawers, Harry was at first alarmed to see that it was empty. He stared into the drawer with the dismay of a man who’d been robbed in a police station; then he recalled that the drawer had been empty for as long as he could remember. The desk itself was a testimony to how little Sergeant Hoekstra had used it! In truth, the alleged “task” of cleaning it out was entirely focused on the unfinished business that—for five years now—Harry had faithfully kept in the bottommost drawer. In his view, it was the only police business that stood between him and his retirement.
Since the handle to the bottommost drawer had broken off and become Harry’s tool of choice for removing dogshit from his shoes, he now had to pry the drawer open with his pocketknife. The file on the witness to the murder of Rooie Dolores was disappointingly thin, which belied how often and how closely Sergeant Hoekstra had read and reread it.
Harry appreciated a complicated plot, but he had a stodgy preference for chronological stories. It was ass-backward storytelling to find the murderer before you found the witness. In a proper story, you found the witness first.
Ruth Cole had more than a policeman searching for her. She had an old-fashioned reader on her case.
The Prostitute’s Daughter
Rooie had started as a window prostitute in de Wallen during Harry’s first year as a street cop in the red-light district. She was five years younger than he was, although he’d suspected her of lying about her age. In her first window room, on the Oudekennissteeg—the same small street where Vratna would later hang herself—Dolores de Ruiter had looked younger than eighteen. But that was how old she was. She’d been telling the truth. Harry Hoekstra had been twenty-three.
In Harry’s opinion, “Red” Dolores had generally not told the truth, or she’d told mostly half-truths.
On her busiest days, Rooie had worked in her window room for ten or twelve hours straight, during which time she’d accommodated as many as fifteen clients. She made enough money to buy a ground-floor room on the Bergstraat, which she rented part-time to another prostitute. By then she’d lightened her workload to only three days a week, five hours a day, and she could still afford two vacations a year. She usually spent Christmas at some ski resort in the Alps, and every April
or May she went somewhere warm. She’d once been in Rome for Easter. She’d been to Florence, too—and to Spain, and Portugal, and the south of France.
Rooie had a habit of asking Harry Hoekstra where she should go. After all, he’d read those countless travel books. Although Harry had never been to any of the places Rooie wanted to go, he’d researched all the hotels; Harry knew that Rooie preferred to stay in “moderately expensive” surroundings. He also knew that, while her warm-weather holidays were important to her, Rooie took greater pleasure from the ski resorts at Christmastime; and even though she would take a few private ski lessons every winter, she never got beyond the beginner level. When she’d finished with the lessons, she would ski only half-days by herself—and only until she met someone. Rooie always met someone.
She’d told Harry it was fun to meet men who didn’t know she was a prostitute. Occasionally they were well-off young men who skied hard and partied harder; more often they were quiet, even somber men who were no better than intermediate skiers. Her particular fondness was for divorced fathers who got to spend only every other Christmas with their children. (Generally speaking, the fathers with sons were easier to seduce than the fathers with daughters.)
It always gave Rooie a pang to see a man and a child in a restaurant together. They were often not talking, or their conversation was awkward—usually about the skiing or the food. She could detect in the fathers’ faces a kind of loneliness that was different from but similar to the loneliness in the faces of her colleagues on the Bergstraat.
And a romance with a father who was traveling with his child was always delicate and secretive. For someone who didn’t have many real romances in her life, Rooie believed that delicacy and secrecy were enhancing to sexual tension; also, there was nothing quite like the carefulness required when one had to take into consideration the feelings of a child.
“Aren’t you afraid that these guys will want to come see you in Amsterdam?” Harry had asked. (She’d been to Zermatt that year.) But only once had someone insisted on coming to Amsterdam. Usually she’d managed to discourage it.
“What do you tell them you do ?” Harry had asked her another time. (Rooie had just returned from Pontresina, where she’d met a man who was staying with his son at Badrutt’s Palace in St. Moritz.)
“Red” Dolores always told the fathers a comfortable half-truth. “I make a modestly good living from prostitution,” Rooie would begin, watching the shock settle in. “Oh, I don’t mean I’m a prostitute!” she then would say. “I’m just an impractical landlady who rents to prostitutes. . . .”
If pressed, she would elaborate on the lie. Her father, a urologist, had died; she’d converted his office to a prostitute’s window room. Renting to prostitutes, though less profitable, was “more colorful” than renting office space to doctors.
She loved to tell Harry Hoekstra the stories she’d made up. If Harry had been, at best, a vicarious traveler, he had also vicariously enjoyed Rooie’s little romances. And he knew why there was a urologist in Rooie’s story.
An actual urologist had been Rooie’s constant admirer, and her most regular client, well into his eighties—before dropping dead in the prostitute’s room on the Bergstraat one Sunday afternoon. He’d been such an unfailing sweetheart that he often forgot to have the sex he’d paid for. Rooie had been very fond of the dear old man, Dr. Bosman, who swore to her that he loved his wife, his children, and his innumerable grandchildren—the family photos of whom he showed to Rooie with unflagging pride.
The day he died, he sat fully clothed in the blow-job chair, complaining that he’d eaten too much for lunch—even for a Sunday. He asked Rooie to fix him a bicarbonate of soda, for which he confessed to having an even greater need (at the moment) than he had for what he called her “inestimable physical affections.”
Rooie was forever grateful that her back was turned to him when he expired in the chair. After she’d fixed the sodium bicarbonate, she turned to face him, but old Dr. Bosman was dead.
Rooie’s penchant for half-truths had betrayed her then. She’d called Harry Hoekstra and told him that an old man was dead in her window room, but that at least she’d saved him from dying in the street. She’d seen him looking decidedly unwell, half-staggering on the Bergstraat, and she’d brought him into her room and sat him down in a comfortable chair, where he’d begged her for a bicarbonate of soda.