“Then her husband died, about a year ago,” the bookseller said.
So Ruth Cole was a widow, Sergeant Hoekstra supposed. He studied the author photo. Yes, she looked more like a widow than she looked married. There was something sad in one of her eyes, or else it was some kind of flaw. She stared warily at the camera, as if her anxiety were an even more permanent part of her than her grief.
And to think that Ruth Cole’s previous novel was about a widow— and now she is one! Sergeant Hoekstra thought.
The trouble with author photos, Harry mused, was that they were always so posed. And the authors never seemed to know what to do with their hands. There were a lot of clasped hands and folded arms and hands in pockets; there were hands on chins and hands in the hair. They should just keep their hands by their sides or in their laps, Harry believed.
The other problem with author photos was that they were often composed of no more than heads and shoulders. Harry wanted to see what the writers’ bodies looked like. In Ruth’s case, you couldn’t even see her breasts.
On his days off, Harry often left the Athenaeum and sat reading in one of the cafés on the Spui, but he felt inclined to read Ruth Cole at home.
What could be better? A new Ruth Cole novel and two days off !
When he got to the part of the story about an older woman with a younger man, he was disappointed. Harry was almost fifty-eight; he didn’t want to read about a woman in her thirties with a younger man. Nevertheless, Harry was intrigued by the Amsterdam setting. And when he got to the part about the younger man persuading the older woman to pay a prostitute to watch her with a customer . . . aha, one can imagine Sergeant Hoekstra’s surprise. “It was a room all in red, which the stained-glass lamp shade made redder,” Ruth Cole had written. Harry knew the room she had in mind.
“I was so nervous that I wasn’t of much use,” Ruth Cole wrote. “I couldn’t even help the prostitute turn the shoes toes-out. I picked up only one of the shoes, and I promptly dropped it. The prostitute scolded me for being such a nuisance to her. She told me to hide myself behind the curtain; then she lined up the rest of the shoes, on either side of my own. I suppose my own shoes must have been moving a little, because I was trembling.”
Harry could imagine her trembling, all right. He marked the place in the novel where he stopped reading; he would finish the book tomorrow. It was already late at night, but what did it matter? He had the whole next day off.
Sergeant Hoekstra rode his bicycle from the west of Amsterdam to deWallen in record time. He’d paused only to take a pair of scissors and remove Ruth Cole’s photo from the book jacket; there was no reason for anyone else to know who his witness was.
He found the two fat women from Ghana first. When he showed them the picture, Harry had to remind them of the mystery woman from the United States who’d paused on the Stoofsteeg and asked them where they were from.
“That was a long time ago, Harry,” one of the women said.
“Five years,” he said. “Is it her?”
The prostitutes from Ghana stared at the photograph. “You can’t see her breasts,” one of them said.
“Yeah, she had nice breasts,” the other one said.
“Is it her?” Harry asked them again.
“It’s been five years, Harry!” the first one said.
“Yeah, it’s been too long,” the other one said.
Harry next found the young, heavyset Thai prostitute on the Barndesteeg. The older one, the sadist, was asleep, but Harry had more trust in the younger prostitute’s judgment, anyway.
“Is it her?” he asked again.
“It could be,” the Thai slowly said. “I remember the boy better.”
Two younger policemen, in uniform, were on the Gordijnensteeg, breaking up a brawl outside one of the Ecuadorans’ window rooms. There was always a lot of fighting where the Ecuadoran transvestites were. In another year, they would all be deported. (They’d been deported from France a few years before.)
The young cops seemed surprised to see Sergeant Hoekstra; they knew he had the night off. But Harry told them he had a little business to attend to with the man with the rock-hard breasts the size of baseballs. The Ecuadoran transvestite sighed deeply when he looked at Ruth Cole’s picture.
“It’s a pity you can’t see her breasts—she had nice ones,” he told Harry.
“Then it’s her—you’re sure?” Harry asked him.
“She looks older,” the prostitute said with disappointment.
She is older, Harry knew. And she’d had a baby, and her husband had died; there was a lot to account for why Ruth Cole looked older.
Harry couldn’t find the Jamaican prostitute who’d led Ruth by her arm out of the Slapersteeg; she was the one who’d said that Harry’s witness had a strong right arm for such a small woman. Is she some kind of athlete ? Harry was thinking.
The Jamaican prostitute was sometimes missing for a week or more at a time. She must have had some other life that was giving her trouble, maybe in Jamaica. But it didn’t matter—Harry didn’t need to see her.