> It was a tavern, small and cozy, with a few tables, booths
>along one wall and a bar along the back; the other wall was fronted by
>a small stage. The place was nearly empty. As Mathieu entered, the
>only two other customers in the place were leaving: a heavy-bodied,
>gray-haired gent in a battered raincoat and a funny little hat, with
>bushy eyebrows and a merry but rather secretive expression, and a
>taller, younger man with a look of puzzled annoyance, as though he
>knew there was a subtext and would really appreciate being let in on
>it. Mathieu empathized with the younger stranger as he sat down in
>one of the booths and put his head in his hands.

Are these two people (and the fat woman in the blue hat, a couple paragraphs earlier) supposed to be anyone in particular? The descriptions didn't ring any bells, but something about the way the scene is written almost implies a reference to something.

Slarti

>Are these two people (and the fat woman in the blue hat, a couple
>paragraphs earlier) supposed to be anyone in particular? The
>descriptions didn't ring any bells, but something about the way the
>scene is written almost implies a reference to something.

The fat woman in the blue hat, no. She's just a random Amsterdammer. Amsterdamian? Amsterdamite? ... Dutch person.

The two men leaving the pub as Mathieu enters are Inspectors Jurriaan de Cock and Dick Vledder of the Amsterdam police. They're there as a sort of doubled-back reference. See, they're characters from a series of Dutch police procedurals by a man called A.C. Baantjer, who was a police inspector himself as well as an author and on whom de Cock was loosely based.

Baantjer wrote a tongue-in-cheek story in which he and de Cock had a conversation in his office about the differences between them and how tough it is being a fictional detective; it ends with the two of them crossing a bridge and seeming to merge together as they disappear into the fog. The story was the inspiration for An Encounter at Shamrock House, and the bridge-crossing mechanism turned up in that scene in Apotheosis Now.

(U.S. readers, if there are any here, know de Cock as "DeKok" - the U.S. publisher changed his name, presumably because of the off-color implications of the word "cock" in American English.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, Netadmin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

>U.S. readers, if there are any here, know de Cock as "DeKok" ...

Might this be where the latter part of "Adjusted Wolfe-DeKok Intelligence Index" (as featured in UF BPGD entries) comes from? It's a rare enough name in (American) English that I've not run across it before.