Blond Baboon by Janwillem Van De Wetering

Author:Janwillem Van De Wetering [Wetering, Janwillem Van De]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 1978-06-29T22:00:00+00:00

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CARDOZO MARCHED ALONG, ARMS SWINGING, UNTIL HE became aware of his own eagerness and dropped back into an exaggerated slouch. He had been out of uniform for some two years now, but he hadn’t yet lost the habit of being on patrol during working hours. He was still checking bicycles for proper lights and would start every time he saw a car going through the red. He also missed the protection of his mate. Policemen on the beat are hardly ever alone, detectives often are. His trained eyes were registering.

The neighborhood wasn’t known for crime but there were still traces. A young man on the other side of the street was moving about hazily. Drugs? Or just tiredness after a long day at grammar school? A badly dressed foreigner, possibly a Turk, a man with a wide brown face and a heavy coal black mustache, seemed interested in a bicycle thrown against a fence. A thief? Or an unskilled laborer on his way to an overcrowded room in a cheap boarding house in the next quarter, which was only a mile from there. Cardozo shrugged, he shouldn’t bother the man, even if he stole a bicycle right in front of his eyes. He was a murder brigade detective, a specialist. But he crossed the street. The Turk had stopped and was bending down to examine the bicycle’s lock. Cardozo’s hand touched the man’s shoulder. He shook his head and pulled back his jacket so that the pistol’s butt shone against his white shirt.

“Police. Move along now.”

The man’s teeth showed in a lopsided grin of fear. “Only looking.”

“Sure. Move along.”

The man stepped aside and began to run. Cardozo noted the man’s shoes, the soles had worn through. The seat of the man’s trousers was patched, badly, with a piece of different cloth. Poverty, a rare occurrence in Amsterdam, but the Turk would be outside the cradle of social security. If he starved he starved, there would be nowhere to go. Cardozo had only been introduced to poverty once, when he was on his way back from France during a holiday and had lost his wallet with his money and train ticket, slipped through a tear in his unlined summer jacket. He had noticed the wallet’s absence in a restaurant, just before he had begun to read the menu, and had wandered out into the street again. Lunchtime without lunch, in Paris where he didn’t know the way and could hardly ask for directions for lack of words. It had taken him all day to walk out of the city and find the expressway, and he had waited for hours at the side of the road as night fell and the traffic’s flow began to show gaps, long black lulls that increased as the night crept on. He had drunk from a tap at a gas station, suspiciously eyed by attendants in crisp uniforms. No coffee, no cigarettes. He had bummed a cigarette from another hitchhiker and smoked it hungrily.

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