“Am I under arrest?” Ruth whispered to Harry.
“Of course not!” Harry told her. “We’re just taking a little walk.”
It was a fast walk—Ruth was no longer cold. Harry was the first man she’d ever been with who walked faster than she did; she almost had to jog to keep up with him. When they turned onto the Warmoesstraat, a man in the doorway of the police station called after Harry—Harry and the man soon were shouting back and forth to each other in Dutch. Ruth had no idea if they were talking about her or not. She guessed not, because Harry never so much as slowed his pace during the short conversation.
The man in the doorway of the police station was Harry’s old friend Nico Jansen.
“Hey, Harry!” Jansen had called. “Is this how you’re going to spend your retirement, walking around with your girlfriend in your old place of business?”
“She’s not my girlfriend, Nico,” Harry had called back. “She’s my witness !”
“Holy shit—you found her!” Nico had shouted. “What are you going to do with her?”
“Maybe marry her,” Harry had replied.
Harry held her hand across the Damrak, and Ruth took his arm again when they crossed the canal over the Singel. They weren’t far from the Bergstraat when she got up the nerve to say something to him.
“You missed one,” Ruth told Harry. “There was another woman I talked to—I mean, back in the district.”
“Yes, I know—on the Slapersteeg,” Harry said. “She was a Jamaican. But she got into some trouble. She’s gone back to Jamaica.”
“Oh,” Ruth replied.
On the Bergstraat, the curtain was drawn across the window to Rooie’s room; although it was only midmorning, Anneke Smeets was with a customer. Harry and Ruth waited on the street.
“How did you cut your finger?” Harry asked her. “Was it on some glass?”
Ruth started to tell him the story, then interrupted herself. “But the scar is so small! How did you see it?” He explained that the scar showed up very clearly on a fingerprint, and that—in addition to the Polaroid print coater—she’d touched one of Rooie’s shoes, and the doorknob, and a water bottle in the gym.
“Oh,” Ruth said. As she went on with the story of how she’d cut herself—“It was the summer when I was four”—she showed him her right index finger with the tiny scar. In order to see it, he had to hold her hand steady in both his hands—she was trembling.
Harry Hoekstra had small, square fingers; he wore no rings. There was almost no hair on the backs of his smooth, muscular hands.
“You’re not going to arrest me?” Ruth asked again.
“Of course not!” Harry told her. “I just wanted to congratulate you. You were a very good witness.”
“I could have saved her if I’d done something,” Ruth said, “but I was too afraid to move. I might have made a run for it, or I could have tried hitting him—with the standing lamp, maybe. But I did nothing. I was too afraid to move—I couldn’t move, ” she repeated.
“You’re lucky you didn’t move,” Harry told her. “He would have killed you both—at least he would have tried to. He was a murderer— he killed eight prostitutes. He didn’t kill all of
them as easily as he killed Rooie, either. And if he’d killed you, we wouldn’t have had a witness.”
“I don’t know,” Ruth said.
“ I know,” Harry told her. “You did the right thing. You stayed alive. You were a witness. Besides, he almost heard you—he said there was a moment when he heard something . You must have moved a little.”
It made the hairs on the backs of Ruth’s arms stand up to remember how the moleman had thought he’d heard her—he had heard her!
“You talked to him?” Ruth asked quietly.
“Just before he died, yes,” Harry said. “Believe me. It’s a good thing you were afraid.”
The door to Rooie’s room opened, and an ashamed-looking man glanced furtively at them before he entered the street. It took Anneke Smeets a few more minutes to pull herself together. Harry and Ruth waited until she’d positioned herself in her window. As soon as she saw them, Anneke opened her door.
“My witness is feeling guilty,” Harry explained to Anneke in Dutch. “She thinks she might have saved Rooie, if she hadn’t been too afraid to leave the closet.”
“The only way your witness could have saved Rooie was to be her customer, ” Anneke replied, also in Dutch. “I mean, she should have been the customer instead of the customer Rooie chose.”