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respectable? But he was contented, and knew it. His job was – compared to what had gone before – something of a sinecure. Still, he was not on the shelf yet; he was commissaire in charge of the criminal brigade, responsible for a town of some fifty thousand people and the countryside within a radius of twenty-five kilometres. And the town was agreeable, much of it sixteenth-and seventeenth-century buildings, with too much dignity to fall into the merely picturesque. This historic centre whose driving force was (as it had been for four hundred years) the university was blessedly freed of cars by the canals and humpbacked bridges, and the industry – a light, clean industry not over given to stinks or loud clangs – was grouped at a respectful distance. Paint, printing, shirts-and-blouses – a well-behaved industry!
    Three months in hospital, as good as paralysed from the waist down. Three months remedial exercises. Six months convalescent leave – they had treated him very generously. But after a year Amsterdam had moved past him. He no longer had his ears andfingertips tuned to the pulse of things – he no longer spoke the new argot or recognized the new catchwords. It seemed a small thing, but to him it was more radical, more definite, than the notes after his last medical stating that he did not, and now never would, meet the physical standards exacted of the Amsterdam police. A lot he had ever cared about things written on his dossier!
    But the authorities for provincial Holland were more accommodating, and the notes on the dossier of a moral kind – that was wrongly put, he told himself; let us say less physiological – had been glossed over, as it were, out of sympathy for the stick he would now always need to walk with. He had been given promotion to the grade of commissaire, the command of a brigade, the perks that went with it – and that was not negligible!
    In Amsterdam no mere police officer got a house – a whole house – in the centre of the town. And it was a nice house, in the old style, tall, narrow, gabled, with a tiny back garden. Arlette was delighted with it. And with this went the ‘standing’ – as ‘The Commissaris’ he was something in the upper crust of the bourgeoisie, equal to, say, a full professor at the university. He would get his name in the local paper for subscribing twenty-five florins to a charitable cause – grieving heaven, there were an awful lot of charitable causes, and woe betide him if he did not contribute to all of them.
    His eccentricities, moreover, were here put down to wounds received in the course of duty, and to being an Amsterdammer. When he entertained municipal importances, they made, perhaps, faces at the food they got and the pictures on the walls, but they also made allowances. He was fortified by his status, and the notion that at forty-five he could be considered to have mellowed a bit, and he survived …
    He no longer ran about – he sat behind a desk like a minister. Come to that, he no longer made jokes about town councillors, he was no longer rude to lawyers and doctors, he no longer sang songs. The slow, dramatic limp on the rubber-tipped, silver-mounted, impressively polished walking-stick helped him very much, and he found this a good joke.… Nobody forgot he had been wounded – it was a most useful stage property and he refused to be separated from it an instant, though he could walk quite well, when not too fatigued, without. Better than being compulsory-retirement material, for a man with a boy in the first yearat the university and another in the last year at the lyceum!
    The new standing showed itself in subtle ways. It was a shortish walk to his office – five minutes even for him. He accomplished this four times a day, not dressed in the tweed jackets and shapeless trousers of Amsterdam, but in a well cut, countrified – almost horsy – suit of West of