“ ‘It was a room all in red, which the stained-glass lamp shade made redder,’ ” Harry quoted to her, from her new novel. “ ‘I was so nervous that I wasn’t of much use,’ ” he continued. “ ‘I couldn’t even help the prostitute turn the shoes toes-out. I picked up only one of the shoes, and I promptly dropped it.’ ”
“Okay, okay,” Ruth said.
“Your fingerprints were on only one of Rooie’s shoes,” Harry added.
They were back at the hotel when Ruth asked him: “ Now what are you going to do with me?”
Harry looked surprised. “I don’t have a plan,” he admitted.
In the lobby, Ruth easily spotted the journalist who would conduct her last interview in Amsterdam. After that she had a free afternoon; she was going to take Graham to the zoo. She’d made a tentative date to have an early dinner with Maarten and Sylvia before leaving for Paris in the morning.
“Do you like the zoo?” Ruth asked Harry. “Have you ever been to Paris?”
In Paris, Harry chose the Hôtel Duc de Saint-Simon; he had read too much about it not to stay there. And he’d once imagined being there with Rooie, which he confessed to Ruth. Harry found that he could tell Ruth everything—even that he’d bought the cross of Lorraine (which he’d given her) for very little money, and that he’d originally bought it for a prostitute who hanged herself. Ruth told him that she loved the cross all the more because of the story. (She would wear the cross every day and night they were in Paris.)
Their last night in Amsterdam, Harry had shown her his apartment in the west of the city. Ruth was amazed at how many books he had, and that he liked to cook, and shop for food, and build a fire in his bedroom at night—even when it was warm enough to sleep with the window open.
They lay in bed together with the firelight flickering on the bookshelves. The outside air stirred the curtain; the breeze was both mild and cool. Harry asked about her bigger, stronger right arm, and she told him everything about her history with the sport of squash, which included her penchant for bad boyfriends—the story of Scott Saunders; the story of what kind of man her father was, and how he died.
Harry showed her his Dutch edition of De muis achter het behang . The Mouse Crawling Between the Walls had been his favorite book as a child— before his English was good enough to permit him to read almost every author who wasn’t Dutch in English. He’d read A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound in Dutch, too. In bed, Harry read the Dutch translation aloud to her, and she recited it in English for him—from memory. (Ruth knew everything about the moleman by heart.)
When Ruth told Harry the story of her mother and Eddie O’Hare, it didn’t surprise her that Harry had read all the Margaret McDermid mysteries—she’d assumed that crime fiction was the only fiction that cops ever read—but it astonished her that Harry had read everything by Eddie O’Hare, too.
“You’ve read my whole family!” Ruth told him.
“Is everyone you know a writer ?” Harry asked her.
That night, in the west of Amsterdam, she fell asleep with her head on Harry’s chest—all the while remembering how he’d played so naturally with Graham at the zoo. First they’d imitated the expressions of the animals, and the sounds the birds made; then they’d described what was different about each creature’s smell. But even with her head on Harry’s chest, Ruth woke up when it was still dark; she wanted to be back in her own bed before Graham woke up in Amanda’s room.
In Paris, it was not a long walk from Harry’s hotel on the rue de Saint-Simon to where Ruth was officially staying—at the Lutetia on the boulevard Raspail. In the courtyard of the Duc de Saint-Simon, someone turned on a garden hose early every morning; the sound of the water woke her and Harry. They would quietly get dressed, and Harry would walk with her to her hotel.
While Ruth was interviewed nonstop in the lobby of the Lutetia, Harry would walk Graham to the playground in the Luxembourg gardens, giving Amanda the mornings off—to shop, or to explore on her own; to go to the Louvre, which she did twice, or the Tuileries or Notre-Dame or the Eiffel Tower. After all, the justification for Amanda missing two weeks of school was that accompanying Ruth Cole on a book tour would be educational. (As for what Amanda thought of Ruth staying out all night, Ruth hoped that this was also “educational.”)
Not only did Ruth find her French interviewers very agreeable, in part because they’d all read all her books—and in part because the French journalists didn’t think it strange (or unnatural or bizarre) that Ruth Cole’s main character was a woman who’d been persuaded to watch a prostitute with her customer—but Ruth also felt that Graham had never been in safer hands than when he was with Harry. (Graham’s only complaint about Harry was that, if Harry was a policeman, where was his gun?)
It was a warm, damp evening when Ruth and Harry passed by the red awning and the white stone façade of the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire. There was no one in the tiny café-bar; and on the plaque outside, beside the wrought-iron lamp, the short list of the famous guests who’d stayed in the hotel did not make mention of Ted Cole’s name.
“What do you want to do, now that you’re retired?” Ruth asked the former Sergeant Hoekstra.
“I’d like to marry a rich woman,” Harry said.
“Am I rich enough?” Ruth asked him. “Isn’t this better than being in Paris with a prostitute?”
In Which Eddie and Hannah Fail to Reach an Agreement
By the time his KLM flight arrived in Boston, the former Sergeant Hoekstra was looking forward to putting a little distance between himself and the ocean. He’d lived his whole life in a country that was below sea level; Harry thought that the mountains of Vermont might be a welcome change.
It had been only a week since Harry and Ruth had parted company in Paris. As a best-selling author, Ruth could afford the dozen or more transatlantic phone calls that she’d made to Harry; yet, given the length of their conversations, it was already an expensive relationship—even for Ruth. For Harry, although he’d not made more than a half-dozen calls from the Netherlands to Vermont, a long-distance relationship that required this much dialogue would soon bankrupt him; at the very least, he feared his retirement would be short-lived. Thus, even before Harry arrived in Boston, he’d already proposed to Ruth—in his anticlimactic fashion. It was Harry’s first proposal of marriage; he had no experience with it.
“I suppose we should get married,” he’d told her, “before I’m completely broke.”
“Okay—if you really mean it,” Ruth had replied. “Just don’t sell your apartment, in case it doesn’t work out.”
Harry had thought this was a sensible idea. He could always rent his apartment to a fellow policeman; especially from an absentee landlord’s perspective, the former Sergeant Hoekstra believed that cops would be more reliable than most other tenants.
In Boston, Harry had to pass through U.S. Customs; not seeing Ruth for a week, and now this rite of passage in a foreign country, gave him his first twinge of doubt. Not even young lovers got married in the giddy aftermath of fucking their brains out for only four or five days, and then missing each other for only a week! And if he was having doubts, what was Ruth feeling?