The Perfidious Parrot Read Online Free PDF

rank and file of ex-colleagues, have swung down too far … as they call it …”
    “… so,” continued Karate, equally softly and articulately, “if suddenly a suspect client appears in their make-belief office, a fink in his forties who doesn’t want to tell who sent him, then …”
    “… we have to be the senders,” Ketchup said.
    “Bah,” said Grijpstra, who, missing his ball, almost tore the billiard table’s cloth. The lady behind the bar leaned in Grijpstra’s direction while looking at him through the glass that she had just polished. She had large, now almost completely visible, perfectly shaped breasts. The glass framed and enlarged her staring eye.
    Grijpstra, hit by the stare, stepped back. “Sorry, darling.”
    “Maybe you better sit down,” de Gier said, pulling up a chair.
    “You are real good at anything you deign to put your handto,” Karate said Grijpstra. “Including billiards. Do you know that I truly admire you?”
    “If,” Ketchup said, “you hadn’t commanded us while you were still serving the public, Karate and I would have reached abject depths. You were our example. You have no idea how much we miss you. Except for Inspector Cardozo, all our present superiors are total assholes.”
    “I,” Karate said, “would call them brown paper bags filled with foul farts.”
    “You know what makes this worse,” Grijpstra said, flattered and annoyed, “is that Carl Ambagt does indeed resemble Tin Tin. I refused to see that. Nellie and I have the Tin Tin comics complete.”
    “How come you chose us?” de Gier asked. “The
Yellow Pages
are filled with detectives.”
    “Not with those who can do big things,” Karate told Grijpstra. “Only you can do that. And de Gier is so gutsy.”
    “The sergeant speaks big languages and pulls big punches,” Ketchup said.
    “But de Gier is a little too quick on the uptake,” Karate told Grijpstra, “while you, on the other hand, are nicely heavy, slow, old-fashioned, drag your feet splendidly.”
    “But you’re insistent,” Ketchup said.
    “Reasonable and solid,” Karate said.
    “You know how to push ahead,” Ketchup said.
    “And when,” Karate said.
    “An expert.”
    “And the commissaris backs you both.”
    “A pirated pumped-dry supertanker is too big for us.”
    “Me and Ketchup have neither fore- nor hindsight,” Karate said, “we’re only good in action.”
    “And we don’t mind helping out,” Ketchup said.
    “You say something, Rinus,” Grijpstra said.
    De Gier, watching the barlady’s breasts and listening, simultaneously, to Louis Armstrong’s version of “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” asked “What?”
    “Ketchup said we wouldn’t mind stepping in if required,” Karate said.
    “You know,” de Gier told Ketchup and Karate, “sometimes, while in my hammock among the weeds, I think about you two. I see you then as devilish henchmen, figures out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, disgusting worms with broken eggs for heads that ghostlike ants crawl from, black-winged bats rising from a smoking chimney, turds gone bad in a transparent pot being filled by a shackled boorish retard.”
    “No kidding?” Karate asked.
    “I thought we were just us.” Ketchup blushed. “You’re serious, sergeant? We’re creatures shaped by a genius like Bosch?”
    The lady brought drinks, beer for the corrupt constables, sodas for the retired detectives. She also brought cigars. Ketchup and Karate lit up, nonsmokers de Gier and Grijpstra, after some hesitation, lit up too. Everybody’s eyes slid along the lady’s cleavage. The lady, smiling dreamily, took her time biting off cigar ends with perfect teeth, striking long matches, offering flames, blowing out flames. The cleavage stayed poised. Grijpstra wondered how that could be for a cleavage is nothing, empty space, it does not exist. How can emptiness be poised?
    “You’re getting a cut,” de Gier said to the constables after the lady had moved