“ ‘Tell my wife I love her!’ were the old man’s last words,” Rooie had informed Harry. She’d not told Harry that the dead urologist had been her oldest and most regular client; she’d genuinely wanted to spare Dr. Bosman’s family the knowledge that their beloved patriarch had died with his long-standing whore. But Harry had figured it out.
There was something about how peaceful Dr. Bosman looked in “Red” Dolores’s blow-job chair—that, and how noticeably upset Rooie had been. In her own way, she’d loved the old urologist.
“How long had he been seeing you?” Harry immediately asked her. Rooie burst into tears.
“He was always so nice to me!” Rooie had cried. “No one was ever as nice to me. Not even you, Harry.”
Harry had helped Rooie work on her story. It was basically the lie she’d first told him, but Harry helped her get the details right. Exactly where on the Bergstraat had Rooie first noticed that the old doctor was “half-staggering,” as she’d put it; exactly how had she got him to come inside her room? And didn’t she have to help him to the chair? And when the dying urologist had asked the prostitute to tell his wife that he loved her, had his voice been strained? Was his breathing restricted? Had he been in any obvious pain ? Surely Dr. Bosman’s wife would want to know.
The widow Bosman had been so grateful to Rooie Dolores that the merciful prostitute had been invited to the old urologist’s memorial service. Everyone in Dr. Bosman’s family had spoken to Rooie of their deep gratitude to her. Over time, the Bosmans had made the prostitute a virtual member of their family. They developed the habit of inviting Rooie to their Christmas and Easter dinners, and to other family gatherings— weddings, anniversaries.
Harry Hoekstra had often reflected that Rooie’s half-truth about Dr. Bosman was probably the best lie he’d ever been associated with. “How was your trip?” Harry would always ask the prostitute, whenever she’d been away. But the rest of the time he asked her: “How are the Bosmans?”
And when Dolores de Ruiter had been murdered in her window room, Harry had notified the Bosmans straightaway; there was no one else he needed to inform. Harry also trusted that the Bosmans would bury her; in fact, Mrs. Bosman organized and paid for the prostitute’s funeral. Quite a sizable representation of the Bosman family was in attendance, together with a scattering of policemen (Harry among them) and a similarly small number of women from The Red Thread. Harry’s ex-girlfriend Natasja Frederiks was there, but by far the most impressive turnout came from Rooie’s other family—namely, the prostitutes, who’d attended in droves. Rooie had been popular among her colleagues.
Dolores de Ruiter had lived a life of half-truths. And what was not the best of her lies—indeed, what Harry thought of as one of the most painful lies he’d ever been associated with—became evident at the funeral. One after another, the prostitutes who’d known Rooie took Harry aside to ask him the same question.
“Where’s the daughter?” Or, looking over the multitude of old Dr. Bosman’s grandchildren, they would ask: “Which one is she? Isn’t the daughter here?”
“Rooie’s daughter is dead,” Harry had to tell them. “In fact, she’s been dead for quite a number of years.” In truth, only Harry knew, the prostitute’s daughter had died before she was born. But that had been Rooie’s well-kept secret.
Harry had first heard of Rooie’s Englishman after the prostitute returned from a ski holiday in Klosters. On Harry’s advice, she’d stayed at the Chesa Grischuna, where she’d met an Englishman named Richard Smalley. Smalley was divorced and spending Christmas with his six-year-old son, a neurasthenic wreck of
a boy whose perpetual nervousness and exhaustion Smalley blamed on the boy’s overprotective mother. Rooie had been touched by the two of them. The boy clung to his father, and he slept so fitfully that it had been impossible for Richard Smalley and Rooie to have sex. They’d managed “some stolen kisses,” as Rooie had told Harry—“and some pretty intense fondling.”
She’d had all she could do to keep Smalley from coming to Amsterdam to see her in the ensuing year. The next Christmas, it was the ex-wife’s turn with the neurasthenic son. Richard Smalley returned to Klosters alone. Over the course of the year, in letters and in phone calls, he’d persuaded Rooie to join him for Christmas at the Chesa—a dangerous precedent, Harry had warned Rooie. (It was the first time she’d spent a second Christmas at the same ski resort.)
She and Smalley had fallen in love, the prostitute informed Harry upon her return to Amsterdam. Richard Smalley wanted to marry her; he wanted Rooie to have his child.
“But does the Englishman know you’re a prostitute?” Harry had asked. It turned out that Rooie had told Richard Smalley she was an ex prostitute; she’d come halfway to the truth, which she hoped would be far enough.
That winter she rented her window room on the Bergstraat to two more girls; with three girls paying her rent for the room, Rooie could almost match what she’d earned as a prostitute. It would at least be enough for her to live on until she married Smalley—and more than enough “supplementary income” after she was married.
But when she married (and moved in with) Smalley, in London, Rooie became an absentee landlady to three window prostitutes in Amsterdam; while Rooie had been careful not to rent to drug addicts, she couldn’t oversee how the girls were treating her old place on the Bergstraat. Harry had tried to keep an eye on the room, but Rooie’s tenants took liberties; soon one of the girls was subletting to a fourth prostitute, and quickly there was a fifth—one of them was a drug addict. Then one of Rooie’s original tenants left; she’d skipped two months’ rent before Rooie even knew she was gone.
Rooie was pregnant when she returned to Amsterdam to assess the condition of her room on the Bergstraat. Some instinct made her hang on to the place, which was barely breaking even—and after a few necessary repairs and some serious cleaning bills, the room was probably costing her money. The Englishman wanted her to sell it. But Rooie found two ex-prostitutes, both of them Dutch, who wanted to get back into the business; by renting exclusively to them, Rooie thought she could meet the maintenance costs. “The hell with trying to make a profit,” she’d told Harry. “I just want to keep the place, in case things don’t work out in England.”
She must have known then, when she was seven months pregnant, that things weren’t going to “work out” with Richard Smalley. She’d eventually gone into labor in London, and it had been a bad birth from the beginning. Despite an emergency C-section, the fetus was stillborn. Rooie never saw her dead daughter. It was then that Smalley had started in with the predictable recriminations. There was something wrong with Rooie, which had caused the stillbirth; and what was wrong with her had something to do with her past life as a prostitute—she must have done too much fucking.
One day, unannounced, Rooie was back in her window on the Bergstraat; that was when Harry learned about the end of Rooie’s marriage, and her stillborn daughter. (By then, of course, Rooie’s English was pretty good.)
The next Christmas, she’d gone again to Klosters and stayed once more at the Chesa Grischuna, but that would be her last holiday in a ski town. Although neither Richard Smalley nor his neurasthenic son was there, some word of who Rooie was must have got around. In unpredictable situations, which she couldn’t foresee, she was aware that she was being treated as an ex-prostitute—not as an ex-wife.
She swore to Harry that she’d overheard someone on a gondola whispering the words “Smalley’s whore.” And in the Chesa—where she ate every evening alone—a small, bald man in a velvet dinner jacket with a flaming-orange ascot had propositioned her. A waiter had brought Rooie a complimentary glass of champagne from the bald man, together with a note in hand-printed English capitals.
HOW MUCH? the note had asked. She’d sent back the champagne.
Shortly after this final visit to Klosters, Rooie had stopped working in her window on weekends. Later still, she stopped working nights, and soon she was leaving her window in midafternoon—in time to pick her daughter up from school. That was what she told everyone.
The other prostitutes on the Bergstraat would occasionally ask to see pictures. Naturally they understood why they’d never seen the alleged daughter in the vicinity of the Bergstraat; most prostitutes kept their work a secret from their younger children.
The prostitute with whom Rooie shared her window room was the most curious, and Rooie had a photograph that she liked to show. The little girl in the photo was about five or six; she was happily seated on Rooie’s lap at what looked like a family dinner party. She was one of Dr. Bosman’s grandchildren, of course; only Harry Hoekstra knew that the photograph had been taken at one of the Bosmans’ Easter dinners.
So that was the prostitute’s daughter, whose absence had never been as noticeable as it was at Rooie’s funeral. At that confused gathering, some of the prostitutes had asked Harry to remind them of the missing daughter’s name; it wasn’t a common name. Did Harry remember what it was?
Of course he did. It was Chesa.
And following Rooie’s funeral, at what amounted to the wake—for old Mrs. Bosman, who was paying, believed in wakes—the name of the dead daughter had been sufficiently repeated among the prostitutes so that the old widow herself approached Harry. (He was awkwardly attempting to dispose of a hard-boiled egg that he didn’t want to eat; the egg had some kind of caviar on it.) “Who’s Chesa ?” old Mrs. Bosman asked.