As for the Dominicans, the Colombians, the Brazilians, and the Thais,
most of these young women knew what they were coming to Amsterdam for; they understood what they were going to do . But the young women from Eastern Europe often were under the impression that they were going to be waitresses in respectable restaurants. They had been students and shop girls and housewives before they’d accepted these misleading job offers in the West.
Among these newcomers to Amsterdam, the window prostitutes were the best off. But now the girls in the windows were being undersold by the girls on the streets; everyone was more desperate for work. The prostitutes whom Harry had known the longest were either retiring or threatening to retire—not that prostitutes didn’t often threaten to retire. It was a business of what Harry called “short-term thinking.” The hookers were always telling him that they were stopping “next month” or “next year”—or else one of the women would say, “I’m taking next winter off, anyway.”
And now, more than ever, many prostitutes had admitted to Harry that they’d had what they called a moment of doubt; this meant that they’d let in the wrong man.
There were simply more wrong men than there used to be.
Sergeant Hoekstra remembered one Russian girl who’d accepted a socalled waitressing job at the Cabaret Antoine. The Cabaret Antoine was no restaurant. It was a brothel, and the brothel owner had immediately seized the Russian girl’s passport. She was told that even if a customer didn’t want to use a condom, she couldn’t refuse to have sex with him—unless she wanted to find herself out on the street. Her passport had been phony, anyway, and she soon found a seemingly sympathetic client, an older man, who procured another phony passport for her. But by then her name had been changed—in the brothel, they’d reduced her name to Vratna because her real name was too difficult to pronounce—and her first two months of “salary” were withheld because her so-called debts to the brothel had to be deducted from her earnings. The alleged “debts” were described to her as agency fees, taxes, food, and rent.
Shortly before the brothel was raided by the police, Vratna accepted a loan from her sympathetic client. The older man paid her share of the rent for a window room, which she used with two other girls from Eastern Europe, and so she became a window prostitute. As for the “loan,” which Vratna could never repay, her seeming sympathizer became her most privileged client; he visited her often. Naturally she charged him no fee; in fact, he’d become her pimp without her knowing it. Soon she was paying him half her earnings from her other clients. As Sergeant Hoekstra later thought of him, he was her not-so-sympathetic client.
He was a retired executive named Paul de Vries, who’d taken up pimping for these illegal Eastern European girls as a kind of sport and pastime. It was no more than an amusing game for him: to fuck young girls, at first for a price but later for free. Eventually, of course, they would be paying him —and he would still be fucking them!
One Christmas morning—one of only a few recent Christmases that Harry had not taken off—Harry had ridden his bicycle through the new snow in de Wallen; he had wanted to see if any of the prostitutes were working. He’d had an idea, not unlike Ruth Cole’s, that in the new snow of a Christmas morning even the red-light district might look pristine. But Harry had been, uncharacteristically, more sentimental than that: for those few girls who might be working in their window rooms on Christmas morning, Harry had bought some simple presents. Nothing fancy or expensive, just some chocolates and a fruitcake and not more than half a dozen Christmas-tree ornaments.
Harry knew that Vratna was religious, or at least she’d told him that she was, and for her—just in case she was working—he’d bought a present of slightly more value. Still, he’d paid only ten guilders for it in a secondhand jewelry shop; it was a cross of Lorraine, which the salesgirl had told him was especially popular with young people of unconventional tastes. (It was a cross with two crosspieces, the upper shorter than the lower.)
It had been snowing hard, and there were almost no visible footprints in de Wallen; some tracks surrounded the one-man urinal by the old church, but in the untracked snow on Vratna’s small street, the Oudekennissteeg, there were no footprints at all. And Harry had been relieved to see that Vratna wasn’t working; her window was dark, her curtain closed, the red light off. He was about to ride on, with his rucksack of humbly inspired Christmas presents, when he noticed that the door to Vratna’s window room was not properly closed. Some snow had drifted inside, and the snow made it difficult for Harry to close the door.
He’d not meant to look into her room, but he needed to open the door wider before he could close it. He was scuffing the snow off the threshold with his foot—it was not the best weather for his running shoes—when he saw the young woman hanging from the ceiling-light fixture. With the door to the street open, the wind rushed in and caused her hanging body to sway. Harry stepped inside and closed the door against the blowing snow.
She’d hanged herself that morning, probably a little after the first light of day. She was twenty-three. She was dressed in her old clothes—what she’d worn to the West for her new waitressing job. Because she was not dressed (which is to say, un dressed) as a prostitute, Harry hadn’t at first recognized her. Vratna had put on all her jewelry, too—what there was of it. It would have been superfluous for Harry to have given the girl another cross. There were a half-dozen crosses around her neck; there were nearly as many crucifixes, too.
Harry didn’t touch her, or anything in her room. He merely noted that, from the chafe marks at her throat—not to mention the damage to the ceiling plaster—she must not have suffocated right away. She had thrashed for a while. A musician rented the apartment above Vratna’s window room. Normally he might have heard the hanging girl—at least the falling plaster and the presumed grinding of the ceiling-light fixture—but the musician went away every Christmas. Harry usually went away for Christmas, too.
On his way to the police station to report the suicide—for he already knew it was not a murder—he’d looked back at the Oudekennissteeg only once. In the new-fallen snow, the tire marks from his bicycle were the sole evidence of life on the tiny street.
Opposite the old church, there was only one woman working as a window prostitute that Christmas morning; she was one of the fat black women from Ghana, and Harry paused to give her all his presents. She was happy to have the chocolates and the fruitcake, but she told him she had no use for the Christmas-tree ornaments.
As for the cross of Lorraine, Harry had kept it for a while. He even bought a chain for it, although the chain cost him more than the cross had. Then he’d given the cross and the chain to a girlfriend of the moment, but he made the mistake of telling the girlfriend the whole story. It was one of those things he was always misjudging about women. He’d thought she would take the cross and the story as a compliment. After all, he’d been genuinely fond of the Russian girl; this particular cross of Lorraine had some sentimental value for him. But no woman likes to hear how cheap a piece of jewelry was, or that it was purchased for another woman—not to mention for an illegal alien, a Russian whore who’d hanged herself in her place of business.
The girlfriend of that moment had given Harry back his gift; it was of no sentimental value to her . At the moment Harry didn’t have a girlfriend, nor did he imagine that he would ever be inclined to bestow his cross of Lorraine on another woman—even if there were another woman.
Harry Hoekstra had never suffered from a shortage of girlfriends. The problem, if it was a problem, was that he always had this or that girl for only a moment. He was not a libertine. He never cheated on his girls—he had them only one at a time. But whether they left him or he left them, they didn’t last.
Now, stalling at the task of cleaning out his desk, Sergeant Hoekstra—at fifty-seven and fully intending to retire later in the fall, when he would be fifty-eight—wondered if he would always be “ unattached.” Surely his attitude toward women, and theirs toward him, was at least partially job-related. And at least part of the reason why Harry had opted for an early retirement was that he wanted to see if his assumption was true.
He’d been eighteen when he’d first gone to work as a cop on the street; at fifty-eight, he would have put in forty years of service. Naturally Sergeant Hoekstra would be given a slightly smaller pension than if he waited until the standard retirement age of sixty-one, but as an unmarried man with no children, he wasn’t in need of a bigger pension. And the men in Harry’s family had all died fairly young.
While Harry was in excellent health, he was taking no chances on his genetic predisposition. He wanted to travel; he also wanted to try living in the country. Although he’d read a lot of travel books, he’d taken few trips. And although Harry liked travel books, he liked novels still more.
Looking at his desk, which he was loath to open, Sergeant Hoekstra thought: It’s about time for a new novel by Ruth Cole, isn’t it? It must have been five years since he’d read Not for Children . How long did it take her to write a novel, anyway?
Harry had read all of Ruth’s novels in English, for Harry’s English was quite good. And in the streets of the red-light district, in “the little walls,” English was increasingly becoming the language of the prostitutes and their customers— bad English was the new language of de Wallen . (Bad English, Harry thought, would be the language of the next world.) And as a man whose next life was about to begin at fifty-eight, Sergeant Hoekstra, a soon-to-be-retired civil servant, wanted his English to be good.
The Reader
Sergeant Hoekstra’s women usually complained about his indifference to shaving; that he was clearly not vain may have attracted the women in the first place, but eventually they took his lack of attention to his face as a sign that he was indifferent to them . When the stubble on his face began to resemble a beard, he shaved; Harry didn’t like beards. Sometimes he would shave every other day, sometimes only once a week; other times he would get up in the night and shave, so that the woman he was with would wake
up to a different-looking man in the morning.
Harry exhibited a similar indifference toward his clothes. Harry’s job was walking. He wore sturdy, comfortable running shoes; jeans were the only pants of necessity. He had short, bandy legs, a flat stomach, and the nonexistent bum of a young boy. From the waist down, he was built a lot like Ted Cole—compact, all function—but his upper body was more developed. He went to a gym every day—he had the well-rounded chest of a weight lifter—but because he generally wore long-sleeved, loose-fitting shirts, the casual observer never knew how muscular he was.
These shirts were the only colorful part of his wardrobe; most of his women commented that they were too colorful, or at least too busy. He liked shirts “with a lot going on,” he used to say. They were the kind of shirts you could never wear with a tie, but Harry almost never wore a tie, anyway.
He rarely wore his police uniform, either. He was as familiar to everyone in de Wallen as the most flamboyant and long-in-residence of the window prostitutes were; he walked the district for at least two or three hours every working day or night.