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"No. Regretfully, not an accident. If it had been an accident, it would have
been a matter for the municipal police rather than for me. So therefore this
inquiry, for which we ask your cooperation."
I said, to put him in his place, "Our time is pretty valuable to be spent in
this sort of thing."
He was not puttable. "Your life is even more valuable."
"Oh, come on! One of the soldiers in the parade was doing his twirling act,
and he had a round in his gun and it went off."
"Mijnheer Broadhead," he said, "first, no soldier had a round in his gun; the
guns are without firing pins in any case. Second, the soldiers are not even
soldiers; they are college students hired to dress up for parades, just like
the guards at Buckinghain Palace. Third, the shot did not come from the
parade."
"How do you know?"
"Because the gun has been found." He looked very angry. "In a police locker!
This is quite embarrassing to me, Mijnheer, as you can imagine. There were
many extra policemen for the parade, and they used a portable dressing-room
van. The 'policeman' who fired the weapon was a stranger to others in the
unit, but then they were drawn from many detachments. Come to clean up after
the parade, he dressed quickly and left, with his locker open. There was
nothing in it but the uniform- stolen, I suppose--and the gun, and a picture
of you. Not of Mevrouw. Of you."
He sat back and waited. The sweet boy's face was peaceful.
I was not. It takes a minute to sink in, the announcement that somebody has
the fixed intention of killing you. It was scary. Not just being killed;
that's scary by definition, and I can testify to how scared I can get when it
looks like death is near, out of unforgotten and even repeated experience. But
murder is worse than ordinary death. I said, "You know how that makes me feel?
Guilty! I mean, I must have done something that really made somebody hate me."
"Exactly so, Mijnheer Broadhead. What do you suppose it could have been?"
"I have no idea. If you find the man, I suppose you can find the reason. That
shouldn't be too hard-there must be fingerprints or something? I
saw news cameras, perhaps there's even a picture of him on somebody's ifim-"
He sighed. "Mijnheer, please do not tell me how to conduct police routine. All
those things are of course being followed up, plus depth interviews with
everyone who might have seen the man, plus sweat analysis of the clothes, plus
all other means of identification. I am assuming this man was a professional,
and therefore those means will not succeed. So we approach it from the other
direction. Who are your enemies, and what are you doing in Rotterdam?"
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"I don't think I have any enemies. Business rivals, maybe, but they don't
assassinate people."
He waited patiently, so I added, "As to what I'm doing in Rotterdam, I think
that's quite well known. My business interests include some share in the
exploitation of some Heechee artifacts."
"This is known," he said, not quite so patient.
I shrugged. "So I am a party in a suit at the International Palace of
Justice."
The commissaris opened one of his desk drawers, peered inside, and slammed it
again moodily. "Mijnheer Broadhead," he said, "you have had many meetings here
in Rotterdam not connected with this suit, but instead with the question of
terrorism. You wish it stopped."
"We all want that," I said, but the feeling in my belly was not just my
degenerating pipes. I had thought I was being very secretive.
"We all want it, but you are doing something about it, Mijnheer. Therefore I
believe you now do have enemies. The enemies of us all. The terrorists." He
stood up and offered us the door. "So while you are in my jurisdiction I will
see that you have police protection. After that, I can only urge caution, for
I believe you are in danger from them."
"Everybody is," I said.
"Everybody is at random, yes. But you are now a particular case."
Our hotel had been built in the palmy days, for big-spending tourists and the
jet-set rich. The best suites were decorated for their tastes. Not always for
ours. Neither Essie nor I was into straw mats and wood-block pillows, but the
management moved all that out and moved in the right kind of bed. Round and
huge. I was looking forward to getting a lot of use out of it. Not so much use
out of the lobby, which was a kind of architecture I hated: cantilevered
walkways, more fountains than Versailles, so many mirrors that when you looked
up you thought you were in outer space. Through the good offices of the
commissaris, or anyway of the young cop he sent to escort us home, we were
spared that. We were whisked through a service entrance, up a padded elevator
that smelled of room- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]