Outsider in Amsterdam by Janwillem van de Wetering Page A

previous book-year. He had noted the accountant’s name and address.
    De Gier left. Grijpstra phoned the accountant.
    “Police?” the accountant asked. “Certainly, I am at your disposal.”
    Grijpstra arrived ten minutes later. A beautifully restored house on the fashionable Keizersgracht, shadowed by elm trees, its gable elaborately sculptured and recently whitewashed. The accountant’s secretary smiled and talked to him in a cultured voice. She took him to the oak-paneled inner office.
    “Coffee?” the accountant asked.
    “If you please,” Grijpstra said.
    “Cigar?” the accountant asked.
    “If you please,” Grijpstra said.
    The accountant knew. He had read the morning’s paper.
    “Were you surprised?” Grijpstra asked.
    “Yes,” the accountant said, and pulled a hand through his thick grey curly hair. “Yes, I was surprised. Piet wasn’t the merriest type I knew, and he wasn’t quite run-of-the-mill of course, not very stable I may say, he had his moods. But suicide …?”
    He looked at Grijpstra’s passive face. Grijpstra sucked on the cigar.
    “Or wasn’t it suicide?” the accountant asked.
    Grijpstra shrugged his shoulders.
    “Murder?”
    Grijpstra shrugged again.
    “What can I do for you?”
    Grijpstra sighed.
    “This Society, what exactly was it?”
    “Yes, yes, yes,” the accountant said. “It wasn’t much. Butwe earned some money. The bar was a paying proposition, the restaurant definitely made a profit and the shop was all right. A small but profitable business. You know the sort of thing they sell in these shops. Cent buying, guilder selling. Very good margin. They sold some books and leaflets and statues of Buddha and holy men. And chopsticks, machine-made in Hong Kong, you can buy them by the ton for next to nothing and he was selling them at one ninety-five a pair. Not bad. And the cost of the operation was ridiculously low, of course. That was the main thing, perhaps. There is always a good margin between buying and selling in business but the money goes to costs and you still make a loss. But Piet had found the right way of doing it. He hired idealists only, made them members of the Holy Society and paid them a pittance a week. No social security, no minimum wage. He didn’t even have to put them on the payroll. And if they didn’t like it they could go back to the street, or the youth hostel, or the park. He always found others to replace them.”
    “What was he making?” Grijpstra asked.
    The accountant produced a ledger from a metal filing cabinet.
    “About two thousand guilders a week, I guess. A little more perhaps. He must have pocketed some as it came in.”
    “Did he pay taxes?”
    The accountant looked sly.
    “Not yet. The Society was only three years old. He had copied it from a similar thing in Paris, I believe; I think he worked in Paris for a while. No, he never paid any tax, only purchase tax. Nobody avoids purchase tax unless they sell in the street and run when the coppers arrive.”
    “No tax?” Grijpstra asked. “No company tax? No income tax?”
    The accountant hadn’t changed his expression. The sly look was still there. A professional slyness, a highly educated, very smart fox who had made his lair in a gable house.
    “No tax,” he repeated. “Societies are very special, very vague material. A proper society makes no profit, whatever it makes it spends. It is allowed to form a slight reserve. If it makes a profit there is trouble with the inspection. There would have been trouble here and I have been warning Piet. After all, I am a chartered accountant, not a bookkeeper he could hire anywhere. I have a reputation to lose. I told him to change his Society into a normal commercial company with a balance sheet. I would have worked out his profit on the first three years and he would have paid some tax. I also told him that he could forget about my services if he refused. He might have gone on for years, quietly pocketing the money and improving