The Perfidious Parrot Read Free

luxurious living quarters for Mr. & Mrs. Grijpstra on the next two floors and had de Gier—back from New Guinea and a sojourn in Maine in the USA—strip and refurbish the loft as an indoor garden cum camping ground.
    “Things change,” the commissaris said at the housewarming party that he and his wife, Katrien, attended. “Fortune cookies and street gurus speak the truth.” He also quoted an obscure Dutch medieval poet who had versified on the theme that things are not what they appear to be. “Nothing but change is constant.”
    Apart from the treasure-finders themselves, only the commissaris knew where all the money came from. Three Surinam-based drug dealers knew too, but they were found dead in Paramaribo, their hometown on the South American coast.
    “But Henkieluvvie,” Nellie said. “Where did you get it?”
    Grijpstra claimed that her building’s expensive restoration had been paid for from his savings plus a bank loan to be repaid from the future income of Detection G&G Inc. “Everything just dandy and hup ho,” Grijpstra said. De Gier confirmed that statement. The commissaris nodded affirmation. Nothing to worry about. Nellie was not to worry her beautiful blonde head.
    “Sure,” Nellie said, preferring the present lucrative arrangement to giggling with and being bruised by paying and often out-of-control clients. Pacific Rim business gents, she had been specializing lately. Her selection paid better, but often played rough.
    No more being a long-legged playpen dolly, Nellie thought.
    No more following patrol car-radio orders when you areready for a smoked eel sandwich and whipped-cream coffee, Grijpstra thought.
    No more administering, correcting and enforcing, de Gier thought.
    “Released from the straightjacket,” the commissaris said. He used his grandfather’s smile. “And how are you going to get through the days, Henk and Rinus? No more ‘sir’ing me. I am Jan.”
    “Doing nothing, sir,” Grijpstra said, citing his laziness.
    De Gier agreed, citing his philosophical search for meaning that would require meditation. He even explained: “To see where I get to when I care nothing about nothing.”
    The commissaris deemed the plan to be good but advised his former assistants to find some occupation. His wife agreed. “Emptiness filled with wealth creates camel-sized vermin,” Katrien said, quoting an ancient Dutch proverb. She claimed to know what she was talking about. Having inherited money that her husband helped her invest, Katrien—weighed down by wealth she had no use for—had needed therapy. “Stay busy,” Katrien said. “Do something you like doing.”
    “If you can’t make it, fake it,” the commissaris said. “Start a business, hang out a shingle.”
    Thus the birth of Detection G&G Inc.
    Some jobs turned up. There was an insurance investigation, referred by a former police colleague, the recently promoted Simon Cardozo. There was a missing girl tourist to be located. Also a pension for the widow of a hashish dealer to be arranged with the dealers’s association. Three cases in one year. Minimal income, maximal spare time. Grijpstra painted dead ducks; de Gier carefully pried attractive looking weeds from between theinner city’s cobblestones and grew them in artful planters he created from plywood found floating in canals. He arranged his wildflower and herbal garden in Nellie’s loft. He looked up the weeds in a picture book he found at an Old Man’s Gate stall. He lay about in a hammock amidst his plantation of bladder-wort, crimson clover and marsh bellflower, thought about clever Zen sayings and read Nietzsche in German.
    “What are you
doing
?” Grijpstra asked at times, when, fleeing Nellie’s TV, he found de Gier staring at the floor, from above twisted legs, or bent over books.
    De Gier liked to answer with oriental silence or Nietzsche-quotes in German.
    “What do your exercises or books deal with?” Grijpstra asked once. “With nothing, okay? With