Free The Corpse on the Dike by Janwillem van de Wetering Page B

believe me. Very sorry. A horrible thing. But you were tearing about the flat all the time and hanging on the curtains and yelling and yowling. I couldn’t have kept you like that. Maybe I should never have bought you. Maybe you would have gone to people with a garden and trees and other cats, and birds to chase.”
    De Gier began to undress. “I’ll take a shower, get the smell off my body. Petrol, bah. Petrol and sweat and car fumes and the fumes of Ursula and the stink of that child. Horrible child. Are you angry, Oliver, that you don’t know about orgasms?” The cat rolled over on his back and squeaked.
    “Can’t you make a normal cat’s noise? Or are you too extraordinary? Because you are Siamese? Because your grandfather came from the Far East? Go on, make a normal noise.” Oliver squeaked again.
    “Don’t then. I’ll have a shower; come with me and talk to me.” The cat sat on the threshold and looked at de Gier standing under the shower. The hot water was hitting him in the neck and he was singing to himself. A song about Ursula and Ursula’s beauty.
    What would have happened, de Gier thought, if I had brought her home? Oliver would have murdered that horrible child for sure, but suppose the child hadn’t come? Would she have stripped and raped me? Or would she have sunk on the bed and looked at me languorously? Shall I try it sometime? He imagined and got excited. The excitement annoyed him and he twisted the shower’s dial so that the water suddenly changed into a whip of ice. He jumped out of reach of the whip but went back to it and shouted and jumped up and down. He twisted the tap and began to rub himself dry.
    The cat snuggled next to him on the bed. There were thirty minutes to go; he set the alarm and fell asleep at once.

5
    “S O YOU ARE THE C AT WITH B OOTS O N ,” THE COMMISSARIS said. “We’ve heard a little about you. Just die way you dress and that you used to visit Tom Wernekink.”
    “Evelien Dapper told you, I suppose,” the Cat said, “the girl who lives next door to Tom. I have spoken to her but I don’t know her really.”
    The Cat was in the commissaris’ office at Headquarters, sitting in the chair reserved for important visitors. Although Headquarters of the Amsterdam Municipal Police was a fairly modern building, the commissaris had managed to create a seventeenth-century atmosphere in the large high-ceilinged room. The antique furniture was his private property but the large Golden Age portraits decorating the walls belonged to the police. He had offered his visitor a cigar and the two men were puffing away, facing each other, with de Gier at a respectable distance, slouched in a chair in the corner, smoking a self-made cigarette. The Cat had arrived on time. He turned toward de Gier. “I hope Ursula didn’t cause you any undue trouble? She is a strange woman. She could have driven the car herself; she has a license.”
    “I wasn’t familiar with the car,” de Gier said, “and the child didn’t help much.”
    “The child!” the Cat said and laughed. “I gave him a clout on the ear and he was all right after that.”
    “Good.”
    “What’s all this?” the commissaris asked.
    “My cat is being serviced,” the Cat said, “and I asked Ursula, my girlfriend, to pick me up in town where I had some business to take care of. Your sergeant came to find me, and Ursula made him drive the car.”
    “And the child?”
    “Not mine. Some nasty brat who lives on the dike. His parents don’t look after him and he is always in the street. If he sees anyone he usually tries to go with them.”
    “Isn’t he a nice child?”
    “No,” the Cat exclaimed, “he is a proper bastard with the brain of a full-grown genius. He learns a lot in the street. He’s four years old now but I think he knows more than most children of fourteen. And the damned thing is that he is destructive. He breaks windows and takes hubcaps off cars and throws them into the river; he trips