The Hollow-Eyed Angel ac-13

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  "But why do you feel uneasy, sir?" Grijpstra asked. "We have hard facts here. Subject habitually overexerts himself, even after open-heart surgery, a bypass and so forth. The surgery is a fact." Grijpstra waved a document at the phone. "You faxed me the autopsy, remember? The New York coroner saw the marks. Here, right here, on official stationery…"

  "Yes," the commissaris said soothingly. "I know…"

  "So," Grijpstra said, "we have an old man who frolics in parks, which means that he runs and dances about like a madman, for God's sake. During one of these fits subject frightens a horse and is touched by its hoof. It says so, right here, sir." Grijpstra waved his own report. "…Termeer now staggers about. Passersby, reliable witnesses interviewed by de Gier and me, well-educated society folks, set him down on a park bench. Subject now seemingly recovers and is left by the Good Samaritans. However, Termeer obviously has a relapse, for his dead body is found under azalea bushes, well off the path, the next morning. So? So the old boy staggers into nearby azalea bushes, collapses, dies. What else could possibly have happened? There was nobody about by then. The entire park's population was watching events. Cause of death? Heart attack. The coroner says so."

  There was some silence.

  "Sir?" Grijpstra asked.

  "Not all that much left for the coroner to investigate," the commissaris said. "I faxed you photographs of the corpse, Adjutant. Bits and pieces here and there. Upper parts of the thighs and the lower part of the torso are missing."

  "Most of the chest was there," Grijpstra said. "The heart is in the chest. Coroner mentions a heart attack as cause of death. Isn't that all we need to know, sir?"

  "Yes."

  "They really have raccoons in that park, sir?"

  They discussed raccoons. Grijpstra said that the raccoons released by a fur farm in Germany that Hermann Goring owned, but gave up on because of better profits in the Nazi business, had now spread into both Poland and Holland. "Maybe soon they'll arrive in our very own Vondel Park," Grijpstra said morosely. "They look cute, with those little masks on, but they're devils, sir. Raccoons get in your garbage and when you want to send them on their way they'll charge you in your own kitchen."

  "Devilish denizens of the future," the commissaris said, not uncheerfully. "They won't create as much horror and terror as our species, that's for certain."

  The commissaris, after cradling the phone, mused for a few moments. Was there anything in his and Grijpstra's discussion that might fit in with the persistent nightmare of the tram-driving hollow-eyed woman? Some hint that would relieve his anxiety? Hunches, parts of thoughts, even entire logical and acceptable conclusions seemed to float just under his level of consciousness.

  Lying back on the springy mattress of his huge four-poster bed, the commissaris tried to concentrate. Why was he thinking that he should pay attention to something that wasn't anywhere anymore?

  He drifted off into sleep again. The dream immediately produced the tram-driving Angel of Death. This time there was also chanting.

  The chanting was performed by the commissaris's neighbors on Queen's Avenue, Amsterdam. The woman was Chinese, a successful artist; the man, a well-known Dutch Orientalist. The couple was Buddhist. The professor and his wife sang sutras every morning in their temple room, which was next to the commissaris's bedroom. Listening to the exotic songs had become a daily pleasure. He especially liked the "Makahanya Paramita," a term that has to do, he learned, with obtaining "Penetrating Insight." While having a Chinese fried lobster dinner with the neighbors one enjoyable evening, he was told by Suhon, the Chinese lady, that she and her learned husband opened their early-morning routine by chanting the Heart Sutra, which she called the most basic Buddhist text ever formulated. She translated a few paragraphs-the sutra was fairly brief-while she hit a small wooden hand drum to provide proper punctuation.

  The lines that the commissaris remembered, when he had to wake up to go to the bathroom, were part of a dialogue between Avalokitasavara, a bodhisattva, who returns from his meditations in high realms, and Sariputra, a less-developed Buddha-spirit.

  As the sutra is outlined further the bodhisattva dominates the stage. Avalokitasavara wants to share with his pupil his basic discovery:

  Sariputra, form is not other than emptiness and emptiness is not other than form form is precisely emptiness and emptiness precisely form

  Beautiful, the commissaris thought. So now what? So now not what? He liked the idea of emptiness. If something isn't there, one doesn't have to worry about maintaining or protecting it. The two spirits were active on higher levels, however. The commissaris, from his lowly position as an incarnate human, could only see the empty aspects of his case, the loopholes. How to turn them around and give the bits of void form?

  "Imagine the missing piece," the commissaris told his mirror image in the bathroom, "right here. On your lower level."

  Chapter 14

  "Mounted Maggie," as the desk sergeant called her, was late coming from duty. As she strode into the precinct's front room she seemed pleasantly surprised to see de Gier. "Are you the foreign policeman?"

  De Gier shared her feelings. Maggie •was a good-also intelligent-looking woman. He explained his presence. She looked less pleased. "The old freeze and frolic man. I called him Fritz. Fritz won't go away, will he? Did you see those terrible photos?" She shook her head in disgust. "The Urban Rangers say raccoons are a plague now. Never see them myself; the varmints mostly move at night. We should hunt them with hounds and flashlights like they do in the country."

  Maggie's ponytail bobbed as she walked next to him. "And you came all the way from Amsterdam? What is so special about the old man?"

  De Gier suggested lunch but Maggie was still in uniform and wanted to go home and change. Home was on West Twelfth Street, where she shared an apartment with another female "mountie." She asked questions as he walked her to her car, a battered enclosed jeep parked behind the building on the Eighty-fifth Street transverse. So he was only staying a few days. So he knew no one but his superior at the Cavendish Hotel ("But that's a thousand bucks a day. Is your chief connected?"). So he wasn't married-did he have a boyfriend? No? Did he like sports? Judo? Really? And where was he staying?

  Their addresses were close. She dropped him off at Fourteenth Street and Eight Avenue. She touched his arm as he got out of the jeep. "You like Italian food? Can you find your way around? Want to meet me in SoHo? Prince and Sullivan Streets, in an hour?"

  He walked over to the restaurant, worrying. The carefree days were over, he didn't feel at ease with attractive women who signaled welcome. Did she think Europeans were exciting lovers? He should have told her he was married. She probably expected him to perform. Keep it up for some record period. Do weird stuff like sucking toes while she played French harmonica music on a CD.

  De Gier felt sleepy. He had a vision of his quiet Horatio Street rooms. He could open the windows there and listen to birds singing. Have tea. Play Miles Davis through his earphones. Take a nap.

  Walking down Greenwich Avenue he was stared at by men in black leather, in safari suits, in riding breeches and oversize linen shirts, in bib overalls and back-to-front caps. De Gier stopped consulting his street map to avoid offers to show him the way "to wherever you may be going, Mistah Macho. You're from out of town?"

  "No, thank you," de Gier told a bodybuilder in a straw hat, an Indonesian sepia-colored vest and short shorts. "I think I know where I am going."

  Maggie, looking gorgeous, he thought, sedately sexy in a close-fitting flowerprinted dress, was waiting in the restaurant. The restaurant was decorated with posters advertising Fellini films and tall plants with large leaves. The furniture was heavy pine, varnished. Rustic looking. The waiters wore aprons and bow ties and seemed to like walking with one hand behind their backs. While he checked twenty-dollar specials on the blackboard Maggie told him she felt awkward about Termeer: "I could have done better."

  When she saw he was having trouble understanding the menu s
he translated the names of some of the fancier spaghetti sauces. "My ex-husband is an Italian cook. Our schedules were always wrong, we hardly ever saw each other. It's easy to drift apart in this town."

  Any kids?

  No kids.

  Was de Gier ever married?

  No.

  Any particular reason?

  Because of the things, de Gier explained while they shared the antipasto. It wasn't just marriage, it was that marriage comes with the need to collect things, and the need to worry about losing things. Things weigh heavily. There is monthly interest. There is anxiety.

  "You can't handle marriage?"

  De Gier couldn't handle marriage.

  Maggie looked up from her black olives. "You don't want kids?"

  "In Holland?" de Gier asked. "What if they don't want to be stacked on top of each other? Where am I going to put them? In a hole in a dike? What if they don't want to stay stacked? I don't want to myself."

  "Where do you want to go?"

  To Papua New Guinea, to the furthest place. She wouldn't know where that was.

  "North of Australia," Maggie said. "My sister sails in that area, to Milne Bay out of Brisbane. Her husband owns a schooner. They take tourists for big dough. There are pirate cannibals there, Papuans in canoes, with razor-sharp paddles."

  That's where de Gier wanted to go.

  "To have room for your kids?"

  Just a dog maybe. De Gier hadn't owned a dog yet. He would like to try that.

  "They eat dogs there," Maggie said. "It said so in Kathleen's last letter. The cannibals keep dogs for food. There is no refrigeration, so if the family wants meat for dinner Pa picks up a stick and chases Fido. But they don't eat their kids. You would get to keep them."

  He didn't want to keep them.

  "But you look fine," Maggie said. "You look smart too. You might improve the gene pool."

  He muttered, as he raised his tumbler filled with the house wine, dry white California, "Fok the gene pool."

  She laughed. "You have a cute accent. It's okay. I don't want kids either. I thought I did but kids keep killing each other at school now. So are you an egotist? Incapable of sharing?"

  De Gier said that he did like his cat, now being taken care of by friends.

  "So you have friends? You socialize?"

  De Gier looked horrified. "You mean do I visit with people?"

  "You don't do that?"

  "To do what?"

  "You're not gay?"

  De Gier shook his head. "I keep busy."

  "You're a ladies' man?" She smiled. "You cruise the singles bars?" She smiled again. "But you wouldn't have to, would you? You don't want them to fall in love with you, to jump at you from their high horses."

  Jesus, de Gier thought. Anybody up there. Please.

  Maggie was shaking her head. "There is old age, you know, and loneliness."

  He waved defensively. "I know. We are programmed to be gregarious."

  "You know why I became a mountie?" Maggie asked. "To stay away from what is happening now. To look down on things. I was a street cop first. I did everything-cars, a motorcycle even-and I always managed to find old people in their little apartments, always alone, always dying or dead or just disgusting. The linoleum is always cracked and sometimes the walls move because of the roaches crawling on roaches and there are the smells, rusted-through refrigerators filled with yechch"-she gestured-"rats rattling in useless dishwashers…"

  He knew. It was the same in Amsterdam but there they're short on dishwashers. Not on rats. He had seen rats jump to get at the dead canary in the cage.

  All the gruesome details.

  De Gier's sensitive large brown eyes looked into Maggie's sensitive slanting green eyes.

  "So?" Maggie asked.

  He grinned. "So what. There's always death at the end. Death never seems to be pleasant. Birth isn't fun either, but there is the quest in between."

  He became flirtatious for a moment. "There is the beautiful company."

  Maggie said thank you. "You look okay too. Is that mustache real?"

  He brought up Termeer again over mochacinos topped with whipped cream.

  "I thought I was done with rinding dead old people, that Jagger would lift me out of the misery. He's a nice tall horse." Maggie smiled. He noticed her lips, the sort of lips that could advertise lipstick. "Jagger didn't help at all. On the contrary. Jagger almost hurt Fritz. Jagger, being such a large horse, is usually calm but Fritz was standing still again, looking like Mercury…"

  "Mercury?" de Gier asked.

  She nodded. "The Roman god. The messenger pose. There's a statue of Mercury on top of one of the buildings way downtown, I don't remember where. A nude guy with one leg up, one arm forward, one arm backward, head raised, winged hat?"

  De Gier had slipped into his sympathetic questioning mode. "Yes, the pose must be tiring."

  "Your old codger was able to hold it pretty well." Maggie grimaced. "Fritz had Jagger fooled. I think animals have trouble seeing objects that don't move. So suddenly Fritz started running about like some hyped-up toddler. You can't really blame Jagger. Why did Fritz have to spoil such a nice Sunday? We were all having fun." She stared through de Gier, transported back to Central Park that sunny morning. She told him about the wonderful balloon structure, the huge dinosaur, moving every which way in the breeze, making all the kids scream when the big head dipped toward them, and there were the Park Stompers with their Dixieland tunes and old blues, and the movie-character look-alikes on their way to the contest, and suddenly there is horror. Up pops Fritz.

  De Gier looked sympathetic.

  "Jagger's hoof just grazed him," Maggie said. "I dismounted to check whether he was okay. He kept saying he was fine, not to bother."

  Maggie frowned. "I apologized, I even offered to get an ambulance. That's a big no-no, you know, a police horse damaging a civilian. I was prepared to call the precinct on my radio, get someone higher up to check out the scene." She shook her head again. "But Fritz said he was fine."

  "No nausea, no shock, nothing?"

  Maggie's ponytail swung both ways. "He said he was just fine."

  "Then what happened?"

  Maggie remembered an old tourist couple, with the same accent as de Gier's, harassing her. She had ridden off but the couple called her back. Fritz was sitting on a bench by that time. He looked a bit tired. She didn't feel like talking to him again and had ordered the couple "on their way."

  "That's where I went wrong," Maggie said. "Fritz wasn't okay." Maggie's ponytail bobbed about again. "The investigation at the precinct exonerated me, but I don't feel good about not going back."

  De Gier asked about the seeing-eye dog called Kali.

  Maggie thought she had seen the dog that Sunday, possibly with a man called Charlie. An older man, muscular, who worked out in the playgrounds. "He drags one leg, but not too badly. He should use a cane."

  Maggie didn't know whether Fritz and Charlie knew each other.

  She might have seen the dog with Fritz, she couldn't remember. Kali often roamed around by herself, which was prohibited. Dogs were supposed to be on a leash. She had talked to Charlie about that but you know what they're like. "Yes, ma'am…fuck you, ma'am."

  Would Charlie say that?

  No, he would think that.

  Yes, Maggie said now, she was fairly sure she had seen Charlie and the dog on the day Fritz was grazed by the hoof of her horse, Jagger.

  After the meal-she insisted on separate checks- they walked about. The weather was pleasant. She walked him along Prince and Spring Streets to look at windows displaying art. They had fancy coffees in a West Broadway cafe. By five o'clock she took him to a videotape rental store.

  "Are you free tonight?"

  He used the store's phone to reach the Cavendish. The commissaris was lying down after attending his lecture. "You're still with the mounted lady, Sergeant?"

  "I can come back," de Gier said hopefully. "Didn't you want to check out Tribeca
tonight, where Termeer used to live?"

  The commissaris had managed to reach Charlie, after getting a telephone number from Chief O'Neill. "Tomorrow evening, Sergeant. You have tonight off. Enjoy yourself. Keep that lady talking. We might learn something more."

  "Are you feeling all right, sir?"

  The commissaris felt somewhat better. He would just rest. Try to get his temperature down. The bellhop Ignacio had lent him a book by a Mexican crime writer, "No Happy Ending, by Ignacio Paco Taibo II. A relevant title, Sergeant."

  "A Mexican writing in English?"

  The commissaris picked up the paperback. "Translated. It's good. The Mexican background makes it even more interesting. Well written too. Would you like to read it in Spanish? Ignacio says there is a Spanish bookstore here. Maybe he should get you a copy."

  De Gier sounded tired. "I don't read mysteries."

  "Snob." The commissaris raised a correcting finger. "You're missing out on exercises in morality, the tension between libido and superego, the search for essential values-if any, of course-comparisons in relativity, the different, often conflicting, mores of sociologically separated groups, psychological insights, animal studies and tribal customs, the concept of the police as a uniformed mafia, the use of magic in crime…"

  "Taibo brings up all that?"

  The commissaris patted the book. "Some, Sergeant. Some Quite a bit in fact. There is some connection to our case there, I think, but I haven't finished the novel."

  "No Happy Ending? You think our case is not going to end well, sir?"

  The commissaris coughed.

  "But if you have a fever," de Gier said, "maybe I should come over."

  "Just a touch," the commissaris said. "You enjoy yourself. You can come over for breakfast."

  "Yes," de Gier said unhappily.

  He hung up. "I am free."

  "Good." Maggie grinned. "Want to see a movie? My roommate won't be in tonight, she is staying over with her mom in Brooklyn."

  Maggie's favorite star was Mel Gibson. She and de Gier checked through the store's stock together. She recommended The Year of Living Dangerously, and de Gier said he would like to see that but then he picked up The Road Warrior and read the cover. Bizarre-Action-The Australian Outback-Surrealistic.