and five minutes later-or perhaps he was, for a cop serves the community twenty-four hours a day, and Doeke was therefore equipped with his gun and identification, although he wasn't dressed in uniform. He wore a leather windbreaker and tight jeans. The pistol was hidden under his armpit. The plastic ID, adorned diagonally with the red, white, and blue of the Dutch flag, stating clearly that the bearer was official, hid in the breast pocket of the windbreaker. His ever-ready social conscience hid in a haze of Frisian jenever, a herbal variety of Dutch gin, the vaporous remnants of a fair number of drinks poured till half an hour ago in Jelle Troelstra's bar. Troelstra was Doeke's guardian and the owner of a brown hole-in-the-wall at the Old Side Alley. Whenever Doeke was stricken by homesickness, he visited Jelle.

"Jun," Jelle would say then, meaning "evening" in Frisian and nothing at all in Dutch. After that they would converse in their very own lingo, a remedy against the pains of having to live elsewhere. Jelle was the listener, sharing Doeke's lament in silence. Doeke would complain, about Amsterdam's vicious vice, about the coarseness of its public women and the violent greed of the quarter's black pimps. While Jelle listened he made the earthenware jar ofjenever gurgle: first and last glass on the Ms. At times Jelle, the comforting provider of liquid solace, sweated, for he still suffered from swamp fever; and sometimes he would rub his thigh where an old gunshot wound hurt him. He had contracted the fever in the tropical hell of New Guinea, and the shot was fired by a mounted Cossack. Both Jelle and Doeke were martial Frisians, but Jelle no longer discussed his violent quest, for he had fought on the wrong side-which was the right side a long time ago, as he had honestly believed during those far-gone days. He had been a sergeant in the Netherlands SS Legion during World War II, and had defended the flanks of a German transport against irregular Russian troops, galloping on the snow.