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

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.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, Netadmin
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