The G File Read Online Free Page B

he could allow himself a couple of beers with his lunch – always assuming he had any lunch – after enduring these blue-grey hours keeping an eye on his suspect. It would be as boring as meditations in a Buddhist monastery. A good friend of Verlangen’s had gone off on one of those jaunts a few years ago. Tibet or Nepal, or some such bloody place . . .
    Hennan was also more or less invisible. He had appeared once more in the window, but that was all. Stood motionless for a few seconds, staring up at the clouds as if he were thinking hard about something. Or perhaps just suffered a minor stroke. Then he had turned away and vanished from Verlangen’s horizon.
    His prey. The object of his surveillance. The reason why Verlangen was sitting around here in his worn-out Japanese oven of a car frittering away his worn-out life for three hundred guilders a day. Carpe diem, my arse.
    He returned to thinking about Hennan. The impressions he had registered of him – not very many, to be sure – during the preliminary investigation into his crimes a dozen years ago.
    The actual process had been quite painless. Once a few underlings had been pressurized into starting talking, the proof of Jaan G. Hennan’s misdeeds had been overwhelming. Over a number of years he had bought and sold cannabis, heroin and amphetamines via couriers, built up an efficient network and had probably tucked away a million or two – especially in view of the fact that he seemed not to have been a drug user himself.
    Not an especially remarkable story, in other words, but it was mainly thanks to the assiduous efforts of Verlangen and his colleague Müller that the case had been successfully concluded. That G had got what he deserved – two years and six months – and that as a result it was presumably highly unlikely that they – G and Verlangen – would ever exchange birthday or Christmas cards. Not even if they lived for another five hundred years.
    He recalled Hennan’s ice-cold, almost personal contempt during the interrogations. His unreasonable refusal to ascribe any kind of moral aspects to his dirty work. ‘There’s no space inside G for morals,’ Müller had once suggested, and there was something in that. His self-confidence – and the desire for revenge that occasionally flared up in his dark, somewhat oscillating gaze – had been such that one simply could not sweep it aside.
    And his comments. Like some forgotten B-film from the forties: ‘I’ll be back one of these days. You’d better look out then, you damned cretins!’
    Or: ‘Don’t think I’ll forget you. You think you have won something, but this is only the beginning of a defeat for you. Believe you me, you bloody lackeys, clear off now and leave me in peace!’
    Self-assured? Huh, that was not nearly a strong enough term for it. Thinking back now, Verlangen couldn’t recall anybody or anything more stubborn and egotistic during all the years he had served in the police force. Fourteen of them. There was something genuinely threatening about Jaan G. Hennan, wasn’t that the top and bottom of it? A sort of slowly smouldering hatred that simply could not be shrugged off. A bone-chilling promise of reprisals and retribution. Obviously, threats of various kinds were bread and butter as far as police officers were concerned; but in Hennan’s case they had seemed unusually real. Nothing less than a form of evil. If Hennan had been an illness rather than a person, he would have been a cancer, Verlangen thought: no doubt about it.
    A malignant tumour in the brain.
    He shook his head and sat up straight. He could feel pains coming on at the bottom of his spine, and decided that a short walk was called for. Just a little stroll to the square and back: that was no more than fifty metres or so, and he could do that without even letting his prey out of his sight.
    In any case, if Hennan was really interested in shaking him off his trail, it would be the easiest thing in the world.