Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 34, No. 13 & 14, Winter 1989

“I’m getting to be an old man, with old complaints,” he said with a laugh. “Would you believe it? I had a letter today from my mother, who is in Soerabaya. She worries and she scolds me — she thinks I am a boy still, a boy who does not take care of himself. She is very old now. I suppose I will always seem like a child to her. Well, come, let us examine this painting.”

I moved to his side.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?”

I nodded. It was very nice. An ordinary, pleasant landscape, sentimental in the way of the past century, and somehow very attractive. A quiet scene — blue sky, broken clouds above a broad valley, and in the foreground a wide-branched oak and a cow placidly cropping grass.

“Behold the cow,” said Gerrit Till. “I cannot look at her without wanting to sleep. All summer afternoon is in that cow.”

I agreed, laughing. “It’s very well done.”

“You realize that there is a little patch in the corner. Max knows about this, of course.”

“He told me you had had to do some work on it.”

“Can you smell it? Poof!” He wrinkled his nose. “You do not mind the smell of turpentine?”

“No, I don’t mind it.”

“It should vanish soon enough.”

He then disappeared himself through the door at the rear, returning with paper and string, and proceeded to wrap the painting neatly. “Voilà!” he said. “She is ready to travel.”

I was leaving when I remembered the money. He hadn’t mentioned it. I dug it out of my pocket — a packet of American bills of mixed denominations — and handed it to him.

He took it, smiling.

I said, “It doesn’t seem enough.”

“That’s true. It’s worth a little more. Max, of course, will get more. But I owe Max some favors. This is fine. I am satisfied.”

I drove back to Amsterdam. The weather hadn’t improved, but my spirits were considerably higher. Why not, I thought, have dinner with Piet Bonta? There was no reason to conceal the fact that I was in Amsterdam. Everything was on the up-and-up.

Piet, as I mentioned earlier, is head of the plant that reprocesses most of the equipment I buy and sell. We met at seven at a place run by Pauli BenBroek on the Reguliergraat — nothing fancy, but you get good food there, and plenty of it. We talked for a while about this and that. Maia and the kids were fine, the problems were almost solved with the last shipment of battery chargers I had shipped over — an ordinary conversation. And then Piet, shaking the sauce bottle over his rice, said that he didn’t know what the world was coming to. “You would think,” he said, “that at least outside the city you would be safe in your own home. But now I don’t know. Did you hear the radio?”

“I haven’t had it on. What happened?”

“Some fellow was shot to death this afternoon right in his own home. A harmless old man, it sounds like. Perhaps not old — I don’t remember.”

“It’s terrible, all right. Sounds like New York. Was it a robbery? You know,” I said, waving a fork at him, pontificating my way through — had I known it — my last carefree moment, “the way to cut down on this sort of thing is to get rid of the fences. As I understand it, you can place your order for your favorite brand of TV or a yellow Toyota and they’ll pick it up for you in twenty-four hours.”

“This wasn’t a TV,” said Piet. “They think a picture was stolen.” I put my fork down. “A painting?”

“Yes. I think they said it was an oil painting. This fellow’s body was found by a woman who comes late in the afternoon to cook his dinner and tidy up. It seems he was an art dealer. She had seen him working on a painting — touching up the frame, she thinks, or putting varnish on. Is that possible?”

“Yes.”

“Well, whatever it was, she noticed him working on it yesterday afternoon. Nothing of great value, she says — a picture with a cow in it, ordinary stuff. But this woman says that today it’s not there.”

“Maybe he sold it.”

“That could be. Or maybe some hoodlums who broke in looking for a color TV took the painting instead. God knows! In any case, the fellow was shot and he’s dead. It’s a terrible world when you’re not safe in your own house.”

“Where did this happen?”

“It was out along one of those roads in the direction of Ihmuiden. I’ll tell you the truth, I never cared for the area myself. It’s desolate. But people live there. There’s no accounting for tastes.”

I pushed my plate away.

“You’re not hungry?”

I shook my head. “I had a late lunch.”

“Oh.”

“Did the radio say anything else?”

“About the killing? Oh yes, it was full of it. Let’s see. An old lady who lives down the road, closer in to the city, told the police she saw a little blue car going down the road in the afternoon. She thinks it must have come from the dead man’s house since no one lives beyond. A blue station wagon. Don’t ask me how she saw it. Maybe she has a telescope. Wonderful witnesses, old men and women. They sit all day in their parlor windows and witness.” He made a wry face; the clear blue eyes caught mine for a moment with a look of amusement. “That’s how we’ll end our days, old friend. Witnesses.”

“I wonder—”

“Yes?”