“Bit of a breeze,” Detective-adjutant Grupstra* said

Detective-Sergeant de Gier agreed with him but he didn’t say so. He didn’t have to. Hie pale gray Volkswagen he was trying to steer through the wide, empty thorough-fare of Spui in the center of Amsterdam had just been pushed onto the sidewalk and had stopped, thanks to his timely braking, at about an inch from a lamppost. The engine was still running and he reversed the car, bumping hard on the uneven pavement. The gale, which had started as a deadly suck of cold air, touching the frightened faces of the capital’s citizens around lunchtime, had grown to such strength that it could be called a hurricane. It had forced the inhabitants of Holland’s flat, below-sea-level coast to go home early, to watch the worrisome weather from behind the plate glass of apartments or the dainty windows of narrow gable houses. They listened to radios and watched TV and noted die State Weather Bureau’s forecasts that grew a little more serious as the minutes ticked by. They knew mat the authorities had been taken by surprise but that the emergency was being dealt with, and mat the dikes were manned, and that heavy earthmoving machinery was on its way to the danger areas, where high seas were threatening man-made defenses and strengthening their attack methodically, repeating their onslaught every half-minute, raising roaring, foam-topped water mountains in deadly rushes, whipped by shrieking blasts of furious air.

But Sergeant de Gier wasn’t concerned with the overall danger of the calamity. He was only trying to do his duty, which, right now, consisted of keeping the Volkswagen moving. He was on normal patrol duty in the city, together with his immediate superior, the large adjutant who was peacefully smoking a small cigar while he held on to the car’s roof and commented on the weather.