Read Online These Are the Names by Tommy Wieringa - Free Book Online Page B

that.’
    â€˜What about a day off?’
    In unison: ‘He’d never forgive us for that!’
    There were variations on the theme, but that’s what it always boiled down to.
    When Beg realised that he was quietly singing to himself the song about Rebekka and the roses, he clenched his teeth and turned on the car radio. Why had his mother taught him a Jewish song? He couldn’t ask her anymore. The song was so much a part of the obvious in his life that only now, at the age of fifty-three, did he ask himself how it had ended up among his belongings. He had an older sister who might know, but they’d lost contact a long time ago. She, too, had once belonged to the obvious things in his life — until one day they’d had an argument that was never laid aside, and the many years that had slipped in between had rendered the silence permanent.
    Far out in front of him was a truck. Beg looked at the speedometer. He was driving at a hundred and ten himself, and wasn’t getting any closer.
    Dilemma.
    It annoyed him that he wasn’t catching up. This whole worn-out service-car thing annoyed him. And it annoyed him, too that, when it came to his service car, he was such a moralist.
    He pressed the pedal to the floor. Gradually, he came up alongside.
    The truck driver was not only going too fast, he also kept swerving across the white lines.
    Beg slapped the rotating light onto the roof and manoeuvred the truck onto the shoulder of the road. Sighing and peeping, it came to a halt behind him. There was a moment of silence, some intentional shilly-shallying — Beg liked to drag that out a little. As though you held sway over time itself.
    He climbed out, all his movements equally deliberate. Once he was standing beside the car, he stuck his billy club into his belt. The truck’s engine was idling. He looked up the side of the cab, and the driver rolled down the window. Beg gestured to him to climb down.
    â€˜You’re allowed to go a hundred and thirty here,’ the man said.
    â€˜Get out, please.’
    The door swung open, and the man climbed down, grumbling. ‘A hundred and thirty, I swear.’
    Beg shook his head. He pointed back down the road. ‘You went through an eighty-kilometre zone back there.’
    â€˜You moved the signs yourself …’
    â€˜While driving, you repeatedly swerved from lane to lane. Have you been drinking?’
    â€˜No, man, I don’t even drink. Could I see your I.D.?’
    He was a man of around thirty, wearing jeans, sneakers. The new generation: healthy, haughty, with an almost palpable contempt for authority. They didn’t know how things had been. They had never lacked for a thing; they’d had their bread buttered on both sides.
    Beg’s badge gleamed in the light from the open cab.
    â€˜What’s up with you guys?’ the driver said. ‘What do you think you’re doing? You guys are fucking up everything, really.’
    He turned around and placed a foot on the first step up to the cab.
    â€˜Don’t do that,’ Beg said.
    The man looked over his shoulder. ‘Gotta get my papers.’
    â€˜You’re holding them in your hand.’
    â€˜Other papers.’ He took another step, and was off the ground now.
    Beg felt the hairs on his neck bristle. He rested his hand on the billy club. ‘Get down here.’
    The driver stepped back onto the ground. ‘You’re the third one today. The third. Do you understand what that means, the third? A syndicate, that’s what you guys are. Organised crime. Could I see your hands?’
    Beg was thrown off balance by the question. What was wrong with his hands?
    â€˜Your hands,’ the man asked again. His tone was conciliatory; the vortex of rage seemed to have subsided. There was something compelling about him, something that — if he weren’t a citizen who’d committed a moving violation, and Beg not an officer in the