The Perfidious Parrot by Janwillem van de Wetering Page A

again. “Cardozo?”
    “Sir?” Cardozo asked.
    “Your name is familiar.”
    “It is?”
    The skipper snapped his fingers. “St. Eustatius cemetery, that’s where I saw that name. Your ancestors made good deals on that island. Jewish Amsterdam merchants with Portuguese names because that’s where they came from. Inquisition time. Remember?”
    “No, Skipper Peter.”
    “So
now
you know.” Ambagt Senior dabbed his swollen nose with the tip of a blood stained handkerchief. “St. Eustatius, The Golden Rock.” The skipper looked over Cardozo’s head. “The golden past, alas.” He looked at Grijpstra. “One million smackaroos for you and your partner, ten percent up front, balance to be collected when you recover the
Sibylle
loss.” His cane fell while he bent his cadaverous body toward Grijpstra. “Is that a deal, Lucky Fatso?”
    Cardozo picked up the cane and gave it to Skipper Ambagt.
    He wasn’t thanked.
    Grijpstra said “No.”
    The sloop, wind pushing, sailors pulling strongly, crossed the IJ river on the return trip to Dry Dock Point. Grijpstra enjoyed the sea breeze. Cardozo looked nervous. “You know,” Cardozo said, “Ketchup and Karate planned the attack on de Gier.”
    “Hur-rah,” Grijpstra chanted along with the rowing sailors.
    “To put some pressure behind Ambagt & Son’s proposition,” Cardozo said nervously.
    “How-de-do,” sang Grijpstra along with the rowing sailors.
    “Because de Gier refused to accept that job.”
    “Hur-rah.”
    “And now you are the one who refuses.”
    “How-de-do.”
    “You know you are the endangered party now?”
    “Hur-rah.”
    “And so am I,” Cardozo said. “Because I am with you.”
    “Please,” Grijpstra said.
    “I think we are about to be pushed overboard and drowned,” Cardozo said.
    “Please,” Grijpstra said. “My dear fellow. We are in a sloop owned and operated by Ambagt & Son. Nothing could be safer.”
    “Operated by Ambagt & Company employees,” Cardozo said. “Not by Ambagts.”
    Grijpstra had to laugh. “So who could possibly push us over?”
    “That police boat,” Cardozo said. He pointed. Behind a foaming bow wave a harbor patrol boat approached at full speed. Blue lights sparked above the cabin. A siren wailed. The boatswain in charge of the sloop looked up in fear. He pushed his rudder. The patrol boat, alongside now, didn’t have enough space to turn. The sloop’s portside oars splintered against the steel side of the patrol boat. Sailors, boatswain and passengers raced to starboard. The sloop capsized. “Didn’t I say so?” Cardozo shouted shrilly.

7
R IFLE F IRE I N A N ATURE R ESERVE
    “I keep telling you,” Katrien said to the commissaris during breakfast, while beheading her egg, “and you just sit there smiling like a retard. Is this Alzheimer’s now?” She looked worried. “Yoohoo? Jan?”
    “Who are you?” the commissaris asked. “Do I know you?”
    Katrien got angry. De Gier was spending his second day in the hospital and Grijpstra, according to Nellie, kept kneeling in his bathroom while filling up the toilet bowl with slime imbibed at the bottom of the river IJ. Inspector Cardozo had found out that the water police who had run the sloop down were intimate friends of Ketchup and Karate. Nothing but trouble everywhere and the commissaris was putting too much cream into his coffee. All this was bad.
    “Cholesterol,” Katrien said. “Think of your waistline.”
    “What waistline?” the commissaris asked. “And what do I have to do with de Gier and Grijpstra?”
    “More than with me,” Katrien said, “and K&K knew that.”Grijpstra and de Gier were dear boys, she would admit that, and not inexperienced, not really dumb, quite capable of solving simple problems but the minute a situation became slightly complicated there they were at the commissaris’s door, begging for their master’s guidance. “Without you there would be no Detection G&G Incorporated.”
    “I told you a million