Death of a Hawker Read Online Free PDF Page B

Hague and some minister will tell you to arrest all dissidents. And you will maintain order. You will send blue-uniformed constables armed with rubber truncheons and automatic pistols, helmeted perhaps, and carrying carbines. You'll have proper razzias with armored trucks blocking the street on each side. It's not unlikely you know. Just go outside and have a look at what's happening on the Newmarket Square right now."
    "Who are you blaming?" the commissaris asked, tipping the ash of his cigar into the plastic skull.
    "No one," Louis said quietly. "Not even the Germans, not even the Dutch police who took my grandparents away. Things happen, I told you already. I am not blaming things either, it's just that this idealizing, this reasoning, sickens me. If you want to do your job, if you consider your activity to be a job, do it, but don't ask me to clap my hands when you make your arrest. I don't care either way."
    "It seems you are disproving your own theory," the commissaris said. "You refuse to do as you are told, don't you? You don't want to fit in. You should perhaps be finishing your studies so that you can join society on the right level, but you are working on the street market instead and driving a truck in some faraway country. But you are still doing something, working toward some goal. If you really believe what you say you believe, it seems to me you should be doing nothing at all. You should be drifting, pushed by circumstances of the moment."
    "Exactly," Louis said. "That's what I am doing."
    "No, no. You have some freedom, it seems to me, and you are using it. You are deliberately choosing."
    "I try," Louis said, disarmed by the commissaris' quiet voice. "Perhaps you are right. Perhaps I am free in a way and trying to do something with my freedom. But I am not even very good at trying. I would never have done anything on my own. I was rotting away in a dark room, sleeping until two o'clock in the afternoon every day and hanging about in silly bars at night, when Abe found me. I just tagged on to Abe. It happened to me. He practically took me by the scruff of the neck and dragged me along."
    "Didn't you say that you were making some structure out of beads? You were doing that before you met Abe, weren't you?"
    "Yes, nothing ever came of it. I threw the whole mess into a dustbin one day. I had meant to create something really unusual, a human shape which would move in the wind or the draft. I was trying to make a body out of copper wire and connect the wire with thin plastic threads and string beads on the threads. The body would glitter and show life when it moved, but it wouldn't be moving itself, only acting when forces beyond its power played with it. Unfortunately I am no artist. The idea was good but I only managed to string a lot of beads together and waste a year."
    "Right," Grijpstra said. "So Abe got you out of your mess. He may have got others out of their messes. But now he has been killed. The killer may want to kill other people like Abe."
    "Rubbish."
    "Pardon?"
    "You heard me," Louis said sweetly. "Rubbish. Rot. Abe got killed because some force moved somebody's arm. The force was a haphazard force, like the wind. You can't catch the wind."
    "If there's a draft we can find the crack and block it," the commissaris said.
    "You can jail the instrument," Louis said stubbornly, "but you can't jail the force which activated the instrument. It's beyond you and the effort is silly. Why should I help you waste your time? You can waste it on your own."
    "I see," the commissaris said, and looked at the trees again. There was no wind and the last rays of the sun were reflected in the small oblong mirrors of the young leaves.
    "Do you really? You are an officer, aren't you? You direct the police?"
    "I am a commissaris. * But if your theory is right I am only pretending to direct a shadow play which doesn't exist in reality. You are not original but you probably know you are not. Other people have thought of what