The Japanese Corpse

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  The commissaris laughed. "That's nice. So what else do you like?"

  De Gier got up and opened the sliding doors leading to the balcony. "The moss gardens," he said. "They are everywhere. Not in town, unfortunately; pollution will kill anything in the center of town, but here we are a long way from the city proper. Each house has a little garden and most of the gardens have moss. I have seen them working on the moss patches. Square inch by square inch. All sorts of weeds grow into them, and the moss has to be raked and combed and kept moist, but the result is magnificent. I should have had moss on my balcony in Amsterdam."

  The commissaris had got up and was standing next to the sergeant. The inn's garden flowed in low miniature hills and banks, surrounding a pond. A few bushes were planted behind the hills, creating the impression of a forest, and all of the ground was covered with thick mosses, glowing softly in the light of a single lantern, a weak electric bulb set in a hollow stone pillar. Each side of the pillar had an open oval, and the pillar had a small roof, also covered with moss.

  "There are at least ten varieties of moss in this garden," the sergeant said. "The innkeeper gets up early every morning to pull the weeds out. Sometimes his son helps him. I don't think it is work to them, it's more like a discipline which rests the mind. That's what Dorin said."

  "Beautiful. What else did you notice?"

  The sergeant emptied the second jug into their cups and they both went back to the balcony doors and looked at the garden again. "I feel a little uncomfortable at times, sir. I am too tall. When I walk in the street my head floats on top of the crowd, like a conspicuous bird sitting on the surface of a lake. With a Western body it is impossible to fit in here. I have been wishing I were a Japanese. People smile and snigger and little children nudge each other and start shouting HELLO HELLO when they see me. Endlessly. It's the only English word they know, I think. After a while you feel like shooting them."

  "Shooting," the commissaris said, and adjusted the cloth strip which held his kimono in place, a gray kimono supplied by the inn. He had found it in the bathroom. "You have a gun, sergeant?"

  "Yes, sir." De Gier took a pistol from a holster which had been hidden under his kimono. "I didn't bring my own. It's in the arms room in Amsterdam. This pistol was given to me by Dorin. I have another one for you. It's German, a Walther. I don't think the Japanese manufacture firearms nowadays. We practiced with it two days ago on a beach, shooting at bottles. Very accurate and light. I got better results than at the range in Headquarters, and at double the distance." He rummaged about in the cupboard and came back. "Here, try it on, sir. It's small enough not to make a bulge. Dorin carries an enormous revolver, you must have noticed it too, it attracts attention, but he says it is his commando gun and that he can't live without it."

  The commissaris got his belt and strapped it over his kimono.

  "Good," de Gier said. "We are armed. Welcome to the yakusa. We can pick off six each and I have some spare clips. If they stand quietly and forget to defend themselves we can have a massacre. By the way, sir, about this attempted manslaughter of mine, I was thinking it would be better if I resigned from the force once we are back in Amsterdam. I don't seem to have the right reactions anymore, and the worst is that I don't care much. I suppose I should feel guilty about those three young men in the hospital, but I don't. They can live or die, it's all the same to me now, but when I went for them I meant to kill them."

  "Never mind," the commissaris said, "and don't resign. We can talk about it afterward but perhaps it won't be necessary. Let's do the job on hand and forget to worry about our motivations for a while."

  "So you don't mind much, sir?"

  "Not now," the commissaris said. "Let's get some sleep, sergeant."

  De Gier dropped his kimono, pulled his bedding out of the cupboard and fell down, pulling the padded blanket over his body. He had switched off the light as he fell down.

  The commissaris grinned in the dark. A free man, he thought, shocked out of having to carry the weight of his own identity. He had felt the sergeant's freedom the moment de Gier had come running out of the inn to open the door of Dorin's car and to shake the commissaris' hand. But it's dangerous to be free, to stop caring. The commissaris remembered one of his subordinates in the underground army squad during the war years. The man had been frightened, nervous, overcautious until the Germans caught his young wife and tortured and kiUed her. After the loss, which set him free, the man had changed. His colleagues called him the demon of death. He volunteered to do the impossible again and again and never failed to come back. His specialty had become to catch the most malicious ghouls the Germans employed, the Gestapo detectives and bring them in, squeeze them for information and kill them, usually by a shot in the neck after he had casually asked the prisoner to look at something.

  The man was still alive. He had started his own business, a textile agency which he handled in the same detached manner in which he had once treated the war game. The commissaris still met him occasionally and sometimes went to the man's luxury apartment, where he lived alone, sharing his evenings with a pet raven who liked to rip expensive wallpaper into ribbons.

  "It's all in our mind," de Gier was saying in the dark room, as if he had been following the commissaris' thoughts.

  "Pardon?"

  "It's all in our mind," de Gier repeated. "The innkeeper said that when I complimented him on his moss garden. Japanese wisdom. Maybe this adventure of ours, the yakusa and the stolen art and the drugs, is also in our own mind. Did Dorin tell you about the trap he is setting up in Kyoto?"

  "A little, but tell me."

  "He has a contact with Daidharmaji. 'Ji' means 'temple.' Daidharma is the name of the temple. 'Dai' means 'great,' I have forgotten what 'dharma' means. Something like 'insight,' I suppose, all the temples have names like that. This Daidharmaji is not one temple, but a great complex. It has a monastery and a master and high priests and an enormous compound and gardens and so on. It employs a lot of priests and monks. It is famous for its art collections, but the yakusa have never been able to get at them, for the temples are well run and Daidharmaji is a very religious place. The priests either don't care about money or they are kept in check by their superiors and discipline.

  "Dorin has friends there, and he has talked to the high priest who administrates the temple. The high priest has ordered one of his men to start running about in town and to drink and chase the whores. This man has been going to a bar called the Golden Dragon, it's the Kyoto headquarters of the yakusa. He went in civilian clothes, of course, not in his priestly robes, but he made it obvious that he was a corrupted priest, and the yakusa caught on and pushed some nice women his way and asked him to try his luck at gambling. He won a bit and then he started losing, but they didn't press him for payment, until yesterday. They have got him now, he owes a few thousand dollars. So now he has to bring them a few scrolls from the temple he is supposed to be in charge of. There are many small temples in the Daidharmaji compound, and each is run by a priest, and each has its own art collection which is shown to the public once a year."

  "That's very good," the commissaris said. "So is he going to deliver? This priest?"

  "No," de Gier said. "That's the clever part of it. The priest said he would deliver, but then he changed his mind. He told the yakusa that he has some very famous scroll paintings, but that he has another buyer who may pay a lot more than they will. He told them he would pay his debt in a few days' time."

  "And we are the buyers?"

  "Yes, sir. We'll go to Kyoto and check into an inn close to Daidharmaji. The priest will come and visit us and we'll buy his wares. Then he'll pay the yakusa. Everybody will be polite and the yakusa will take the money, but they will be annoyed and start following the priest to see where he takes his merchandise. Dorin has arranged that other priests and monks will come to see us too. We'll set up a regular racket, and all the time we will be in Kyoto which is a holy city and where the yakusa can't throw their weight abo
ut. Kyoto has a pleasure quarter, a red light district lined with willow trees, and it is run by the yakusa, but they never get really tough. They are Japanese too and maybe they are restrained by the atmosphere, or perhaps they are concerned about crime in Kyoto being written up in the national newspapers and attracting too much attention to them. So they'll have to sit back and gnash their teeth."

  "I see," the commissaris said slowly. "Until they get so irritated that they'll do something. We'll draw them out and force them to show their face."

  "Dorin had some trouble getting Daidharmaji to cooperate. Their art is the best in Japan. A lot of it is Chinese, a thousand years old. If it is lost or damaged it would be a calamity. Dorin only got his way because the monastery's master, the Zen master—it's a Zen Buddhist temple, I am told—told the high priest in charge of routine and discipline to go ahead. The Zen master said all that art is a lot of junk anyway and nobody should care if it gets lost. He said, in fact, that he didn't mind the yakusa stealing and selling it. That way it gets around and people can see it; in Daidharmaji it is kept in vaults."

  The commissaris chuckled. "He must be a nice fellow, this master. Isn't he a high priest? I would think that a master would be the highest authority."

  "I suppose he is," de Gier said, "but he doesn't run the place. He is only concerned with training the monks, but what he does I don't know. Dorin said that the monks spend most of their time sitting still in a big hall. Maybe the master sits with them."

  "But he is consulted on important decisions," the commissaris said, "like our chief constable. Maybe we are a religious organization too, sergeant. The laws we defend were religious once, in origin anyway."

  De Gier propped his head on his arm and looked at the huddled shape across the room. The commissaris had begun to snore gently. The sergeant was falling asleep too. He saw Esther's face and felt the movement of his cat, curling up between his feet.

  His arm began to hurt and he woke up again. Maybe I'll resign anyway when he gets back to Amsterdam, he thought. I'll have to deliver the old man safe and sound and then I'll see. I'll see, he thought again. Another dream started. He was in a forest, walking down a fairly wide path, and Oliver was walking ahead of him, his long black-tipped silver tail flicking nervously. They were walking on a thick carpet of fir needles. It had to be late in the day for the sunrays were low, cutting through the open spaces left in between tree trunks. There was light at the end of the path and Oliver began to run. De Gier turned over and the dream stopped.

  \\ 10 /////

  "YOU MEAN, TURN OUT THE UGHTS AFTER I HAVE given them a Japanese newspaper, tell the guard to forget to serve them tea, get somebody to fix the baseboard heaters so that they work at top capacity while the outside temperature is eighty in the shade, that sort of thing?"

  Grypstra was asking his complicated question pleasantly while he leaned his bulk against the white wall of the inspector's office. He had refused the chair which had been offered and was making a mess with his cigar ash, allowing it to drop on the spotless floor and spreading it with the sole of his right shoe. The inspector was aware of the nature of the adjutant's thoughts. His left eyelid was twitching and his thin fingers, which reminded Grijpstra of the claws of a chameleon, were clutching at various objects on his smooth desk top.

  "Well," the inspector said, "it's not my business. I was only making a few suggestions, helpful suggestions, you know. I know you are dealing with the case. But..."

  "Yes?" There was a slight threat in Grijpstra's heavy whisper.

  "Damn it, man," the inspector said, and his voice shot up. "Can't you accept suggestions? This sort of thing is my specialty. I graduated in it. At the academy I never missed a lecture on crime detection and they sent me to London for a year to study CID methods over there. Surely it is no torture to make a prisoner uncomfortable? I am not telling you to pull the fingernails out of these Japanese gangsters' hands, am I? And if I did I am sure they would understand, and not only understand, they would accept. And they would talk. Every man has his breaking point, even professional toughs. I saw those men, they are killers. They would torture you, without any hesitation, provided someone ordered them to do it. This whole situation is ridiculous, we are pampering them. They are in Amstelveen jail, the most comfortable jail in the country. They have a large cell, well aired, lots of light. They get their meals sent in, delicacies from a superexpensive Japanese restaurant, and we are paying the bill, or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is taking care of it. Preposterous, don't you think?"

  "I am not thinking," Grijpstra said.

  The inspector shoved his chair back with such force that it hit the wall and fell over. "Listen, adjutant," he said in a cold voice, "don't play your game with me. I am an officer, commissioned by the queen, and you are not. Don't forget that small point. If I pull a few strings your life will change, you may find that you will be ordered to do different work. There is a vacancy in the Aliens Administration Department. You could be sitting behind a dirty desk in a stuffy room and there will be Arabs pushing documents at you, full of scribbles and rubber stamps, a hundred Arabs a day, three hundred days a year. Your fingertips will be worn down from finding index cards in battered tin boxes. You'll be sick from the smell of garlic, and sweat, and human dirt. And when you go home each day you will know that you have achieved nothing. The Military Police will fly illegal immigrants back to their countries, but they will be back in a matter of weeks, or days even, and they'll be in your office again, pretending that they don't speak Dutch and arguing and touching you with their grimy hands, pulling your sleeves, patting your cheeks, begging and shrieking.

  Grijpstra was staring out of the window; the muscles attached to his jaws were working.

  "Are you listening, adjutant?"

  "Yes, sir. But we aren't dealing with Arabs now, we are dealing with Japanese. Mr. Takemoio and Mr. Nakamura. I agree with you that they may very well be gangsters. I have seen them at least twenty times, and they behave in an unusually cool manner, considering their circumstances and the charges against them. I agree they are tough and dangerous. But we have almost nothing on them. You have read the reports. We can forget the statements made by witnesses. We don't really have witnesses. First they recognized the suspects' faces, then they didn't. The public prosecutor is laughing about the case, and we are only allowed to hold the suspects because of special requests made by persons in high places. As matters stand now, I can't be sure that our suspects did indeed kill Mr. Nagai."

  The inspector sat down again. He seemed to be in control of his temper, but the eyelid was still twitching.

  "Right. But soon the case will change. Nagai's body was buried near the speedway between Amsterdam and Utrecht. We'll find the grave. I spoke to the State Police this morning and they are making an intensive search. The speedway is fifty kilometers long, but we know that the car was washed near a pond, we know where the pond is and we may assume that the body was buried close to there. The State Police are concentrating their search in that area. I think they have a hundred men on the job, plus all the men the nearby villages and towns can spare. They'll find the grave and they'll find the body. As soon as you have the body you should confront your suspects with it. The body will have decomposed a little by now and will look properly gruesome. Rub their faces in it if necessary. The fact that the commissaris is in Japan doesn't mean we can sit back here and wait."

  He contracted his eyes and stared at the adjutant's face.

  Grijpstra had been looking out of the window again. There were a lot of sea gulls on the roof opposite. He had counted them. Thirty-seven sea gulls, all bloated from food throw-outs floating in the canal.

  "Yes sir," Grijpstra said, "and now if you'll excuse me I'll go. I'd like to hear what the drug-brigade detectives have found out. They have been working on the restaurant angle. I was told that a Dutch seaman, a first mate, I believe, has been asked to come to their office to answer some questions. The man's ship has just come in from Hong Kong, an
d the detectives have found eight kilos of heroin in the old city. There is proof that the heroin came out of this man's ship and there are strong indications that he has handled it. The suspect doesn't like Japanese food, but he has been seen in the restaurant twice in the last few days."

  "I know," the inspector said. "Your colleagues have been very active." He stressed the word "colleagues." Grijpstra nodded and left the room, closing the door quietly. His teeth showed when he walked back to his office but he wasn't smiling.

  \\ 11 /////

  THE TOKAIDO EXPRESS WAS RACING ALONG NOISE-lessly on its endless gleaming twin tracks, and loudspeakers in all carriages were respectfully informing the honorable passengers that Mount Fuji, Japan's highest and holiest mountain, would soon appear and could be viewed through the windows on the right. The message was repeated in English, and the commissaris looked up at the little box above the sliding door, as if he were amazed that it could say something understandable. He was getting used to the all-encompassing riddle around him; the signs written in three different scripts, all of them meaningless; the language in which he couldn't recognize a single word; the utter foreignness of the farmhouses and temples, set in the lush green fields or built on hilltops; the outlandishness of the farmworkers wearing vast straw hats and coats made of dry leaves or stalks, and who sheltered under oilcloth parasols, decorated with huge diagrams. He had never been in the Far East before and felt himself wholly unprepared for the jumble of new images which were forced on his brain, asking for explanation and translation. But he had passed the first stage of bewilderment, and his mind now seemed ready to accept the strangeness and even to rest in it, as a show put up for his entertainment and imagination. He was no longer intent on trying to understand, but was allowing his mind to receive the impressions and to enjoy the colors and shapes and sounds. And now the loudspeaker had said something he could understand without bothering to translate: Mount Fuji.