Outsider in Amsterdam Read Online Free

sat at one of the restaurant tables and smoked and looked at each other.
    “Twice in one day,” Grijpstra said.
    “Too often,” said de Gier, “twice too often.”
    “But what do we make of it?” de Gier asked. “Murder or no murder?”
    Grijpstra blew some smoke out of his nostrils; de Gier watched the little hairs wave inside.
    “Could be either of the two,” Grijpstra said, “but it’ll probably be murder. Somebody gave him a nice thump, using his fist, for I saw no possible weapon lying around and the bruisedidn’t seem very serious. Bam, Piet is on the floor, it doesn’t need much to knock a small man over. He is unconscious or dazed. The rope is ready. Rope around the neck. You lift him up with one arm and put him on the stool. Other end of the rope on the hook in the beam. You kick the stool. You leave the room quietly. One minute’s work. Half a minute maybe.”
    “One or two killers?” de Gier asked.
    Grijpstra gave him a fierce look and shook his head.
    “Why two killers? Two men? Two women? One man and one woman? Why make it involved? One killer, not two or three. Killers are very scarce in Amsterdam so why would we suddenly run into a whole bunch of them?”
    “But it isn’t an easy job,” de Gier said carefully. “He had to be carried around, and put on a stool. It may be difficult if you are by yourself.”
    Grijpstra got up. “Come with me, we are going to do a little work.”
    They were busy for several minutes. De Gier stretched out on the floor and relaxed his body. Grijpstra pulled him to his feet, put him on the stool, slipped the noose around his neck.
    They tried several times.
    “You see?” Grijpstra said. “Nothing to it. Your weight is more than Piet’s, you must weigh a little over seventy kilos while he probably weighed ten or twelve kilos less. A very thin little chap. Anyone who isn’t a hungry dwarf could have done it.”
    “Yes,” said de Gier.
    But later he disagreed again.
    “It wasn’t like that,” he said. “Pay attention.”
    “I am paying attention,” Grijpstra said and opened his eyes as wide as they would go.
    “Right,” said de Gier. “This Piet of ours is a morose fellow. He wants to die. Life isn’t what it should be, he thinks. Hecan’t remember ever having given permission for his own birth. And now he finds himself here, in a room in an old ramshackle house in the Haarlemmer Houttuinen, director of a nonsensical society that isn’t going well anyway and gives him nothing but a lot of work and debts. He goes on thinking and works out that he is now over forty years old and that he will soon be an old man who won’t be able to look after himself. And it annoys him that he is a
little
man, and that he always has to look up at people. Here he sits, in his empty room. Everything is stale. His ideas are gone and proved wrong. All he has is his own loneliness. It frightens him. He wants to leave, through the white gate which can be opened with the silver key. And he does have the silver key.”
    “Beg your pardon?” said Grijpstra.
    “Imagery from the East,” said de Gier. “Comes from my reading and it fits the case for this is a Hindist Society. Death is the white gate and everybody has the silver key.”
    “Excuse me,” Grijpstra said. “I wasn’t very good at school and I never read anything. But now I understand. The rope is the silver key.”
    “Don’t excuse yourself,” de Gier said. “You are very clever. And books don’t give any real information. Words, nothing but words. Hollow words. I read that too. The rope is the silver key but if you have the will to stop breathing for longer than two minutes you are also using the silver key.”
    “Fine,” said Grijpstra. “Piet wants to leave. Through the gate. Or into the tunnel, that’s even better imagery. Death must be like a tunnel, I think, a tunnel that leads to the inexpressible. But now what happens? In your story he is still considering.”
    De Gier got up and began to