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his hands.
    ‘I understand. We apologize, of course, and if what you are saying is . . .’
    ‘That is what I am saying,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘To be more precise, the fact is that I have been forced to make an appointment with Schenck, the dentist in Meijkstraat. One of the most expensive dentists in town, unfortunately, but as I am due to leave tomorrow morning I had no choice. I just wanted to make you aware of the circumstances, so that you are not surprised when the invoice arrives.’
    ‘Of course. My father . . .’
    ‘I have no doubt that you will be able to explain it all in a convincing manner to your father, but now you must excuse me – I simply don’t have the time to stand here arguing the toss any longer. You may keep the stone and the filling. As a souvenir and a sort of reminder, I don’t need either of them any longer. Thank you and goodbye.’
    ‘Thank you, thank you,’ stammered the young man. ‘We shall be seeing you again, I hope?’
    ‘I shall think about the possibility,’ said Van Veeteren, stepping out into the sunshine.
    He spent the rest of the afternoon in the inner room of the antiquarian bookshop, working. Answered eleven requests from bookshops and libraries – eight of them negative, three positive. Listed and annotated a collection of maps that Krantze had found in a cellar in the Prague old town (how on earth had he managed to make such a journey and also go down into a cellar, afflicted as he was by rheumatism, sciatica, vascular spasms and chronic bronchitis?). Began sorting out four bags of odds and ends brought in that same morning by the heirs of a recently deceased man, and bought for a song. He allowed the few customers who came into the shop to wander around freely, and the only transaction was the sale of half a dozen old crime novels for rather a good price to a German tourist. At a quarter past five Ulrike rang to ask what time he would be coming home. He told her about the olive stone and the tooth filling, and thought that she found it more amusing than she ought to have done. They agreed to meet at Adenaar’s at about seven – or as soon after that as possible, depending on when he had been allowed to leave the dentist’s chair. Neither of them had any great desire to cook a meal the evening before a journey; and in any case it was by no means certain that he would be able to chew anything so soon after being fitted with new false teeth, Ulrike thought.
    ‘It’s not a matter of new false teeth,’ Van Veeteren pointed out. ‘It’s just a filling.’
    ‘They usually have pretty good soup at Adenaar’s,’ Ulrike reminded him.
    ‘Their beer is usually drinkable,’ said Van Veeteren. ‘I know nothing about their soup.’
    When they had hung up he remained sitting there with his hands clasped behind his head for a while. He suddenly noticed that something warm was stirring inside him, and wondered what on earth that could be. An unobtrusive, barely noticeable emotion, perhaps, but even so . . .
    Happiness?
    The word burst as a result of its own presumptuousness, and soon various other thoughts had occurred to him. No, not happiness, he thought. Good God, no! But it could have been worse. And there were other lives that had been even more of a failure than his.
    Then he started thinking about relativism. About whether other people’s unhappiness actually made his own unhappiness greater or less – whether the world really was constituted in such a penny-pinching and cheese-paring way that this relativism was the only basis on which good and evil could be judged: but then something seemed to be intent on distracting him . . .
    A few fake coughs and a cautious ‘hello’ penetrated his consciousness from the other room. He wondered briefly if he should respond or not. But then he stood up and acknowledged his presence.
    Six months later he was still not sure if that had been the right thing to do.
    The man was in his thirties. Tall and thin, and with a