The Hollow-Eyed Angel

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  Bieber frowned.

  "Not so so-called?"

  "Not the exercises," Bieber said.

  "And those were?"

  Bieber became hesitant. "I told you. Termeer would wander about the city, evenings and weekends, searching for the right moments, the right locations."

  "To do this bone diving?" Cardozo asked.

  Bieber's eyes were half closed, his arms moved slowly, as he seemed to enter a trance.

  "Mr. Bieber, you okay?"

  Grijpstra held up a hand, to silence Cardozo.

  "Termeer played good trumpet," Bieber said after a while. "He would set himself up facing a terrace filled with people. He would have his dog on one side and the monkey on the other. The monkey would be dressed up in a robe and a hat. Then Termeer would play his trumpet. Some fine jazz phrasing. Like Louis Armstrong; maybe 'St. Louis Blues,' maybe 'Basin Street Blues,' that sort of thing."

  "That's nice," Cardozo said.

  Bieber nodded. "A fine sense of the dramatic. And then, once he had the public's attention he might talk for a while, asking them how they were doing, making a few odd remarks, disconnected. The monkey would go around, grimacing and jabbering. People might offer him money and the little beast would bow and back off. No money for the monkey. The dog would bark commas and question marks, a semicolon here and there. After that Termeer usually played his trumpet again.

  "This was long ago, mind you. Cops still wore brass helmets and little sabers. A cop would come up and ask Bieber for his license, and then..."

  Bieber laughed. "Haha, the dog would be standing behind the cop, and the monkey would sit on Termeer's shoulder with his hands behind his ears and tongue out, chattering, infuriating the copper, and then Termeer would push—"

  Bieber clapped his hands. "The cop would fall over backward, the dog would run off, Bieber and the monkey would step into a passing tram car—they still had running boards in those days—the dog would be waiting at the next stop and everyone would go home." Bieber looked triumphant. "And be happy. The public too. You should have been there."

  Grijpstra and Cardozo thanked Mr. Bieber. They were about to walk away.

  Grijpstra turned. "Last question, Mr. Bieber," Grijpstra said. "There is a nephew, Jo Termeer, partly raised by Bert Termeer. Did you get to know the nephew?"

  Bieber vaguely recalled a boy coming to Old Man's Gate, calling Bert "uncle." Not too often.

  The boy seemed shy.

  "There was a good relationship between uncle and nephew?"

  "Sure," Bieber said. "Yes, I think so. Why not?"

  Chapter 16

  De Gier, after a tour of the Village and dinner at a Chinese fast-food place, was taken to Maggie's apartment on Twelfth Street. Maggie apologized for the apartment's appearance. She knew it was dreary but it belonged to her roommate and nobody liked housework.

  "We do clean occasionally though."

  "You eat here?" de Gier asked.

  "Hardly ever. In the morning maybe. I put a frozen waffle in the toaster." She patted her flat stomach. "Today I binged. That means dieting for a week."

  She switched on the TV, told him to sit on a beige plastic couch with factory-embroidered pink cushions in each corner, handed over a large remote control and went off to shower and change. A newscaster appeared, adjusted his cuffs, bowed and dramatically recited headlines. They all sounded bad. De Gier pressed the remote's mute button. The first clip was war: He watched hungry-looking soldiers in summer uniforms getting shot at in a winter landscape. A beautiful woman in an ofF-the-shoulder dress danced about a cruise ship where fat men laughed as impeccable waiters heaped more food on their plates. The newscaster reappeared to smile briefly. Old folks in a home were beaten by their attendants. A hidden camera showed the pictures in black and white. The black-and-white old people screamed soundlessly as leering attendants forced them to sign papers. The newscaster nodded. A beautiful woman ate breakfast cereal on a terrace overlooking a lake. She closed her eyes and showed the tip of her tongue after daintily chewing her crispy breakfast. The newscaster smiled, then faded as the screen was filled by a burning bus under palm trees, then by mangled bodies of children at the side of the road. The newscaster came back. De Gier read his lips. "More news in a moment." A compact car looking like any other compact, but clean and polished, was driven by a beautiful woman in an evening gown and gloves up to her elbows. The woman pursed her lips as if waiting for a kiss while she made her vehicle accelerate effortlessly in an empty city street. More newscaster's smiles before a two-story house slid down a hill's steep slope towards cars buried up to their roofs in mud.

  De Gier pressed the remote's power button.

  He stretched out on the couch and tried to rest his eyes by looking at a bouquet of silk roses in a bright green vase on a mirrored coffee table, then turned on his back so that he could look at the ceiling.

  Maggie woke him up. "You snore."

  It was two hours later.

  De Gier sat up and apologized. "Why didn't you wake me?"

  "You probably have jet lag. I thought you needed rest but you were making such a racket. Were you choking on your mustache?"

  She had made gin and tonics decorated with slices of orange.

  They toasted each other.

  De Gier told her the snoring might be due to a recent operation. His nose had been damaged during an arrest some years ago and hadn't healed well. A surgeon broke it again to open up the left nostril. Both nostrils were sometimes blocked now. He 'would have to go back. Maybe have another operation.

  She was interested. "When did this happen?"

  He tried to remember. "Two months ago?"

  "You don't know exactly?" She looked concerned.

  De Gier laughed.

  She stirred her gin and tonic. "What's so funny?"

  "Nothing," de Gier said. "But before an operation a hospital will check a patient's blood. If there is AIDS it will inform the patient."

  "So you were clean," Maggie said.

  He wasn't sure. The AIDS virus takes sixty days to become visible in testing.

  "And you had been active within the sixty days before your nose job?"

  He had been active.

  Maggie sighed. "So have I."

  She stood looking down at him. "My guy is married. A safe and solid kind of a guy. His wife has lymph cancer. He can't divorce her."

  "Ah," de Gier said.

  "So you were active with what kind of person?"

  "With a prostitute," de Gier said. "Kind of high class.

  The type that is careful."

  Maggie said prostitution was illegal. She knew cops who protected prostitutes, so they got free service.

  De Gier said prostitution was legal in Holland. He had paid. Maggie liked that. Nobody likes to give free service. "Am I right?"

  "You are right," de Gier said.

  "You sure you paid?"

  He nodded. "Top guilder."

  "You do that often?"

  De Gier said he did not. Once during three months. He was getting older.

  "And you don't have girlfriends?"

  He shook his head. "They always want to get married."

  "Yes," Maggie said. "We can't always ride tall horses." She poured more gin, pushed The Road Warrior into her VCR and sat down next to de Gier on the beige plastic couch.

  During the movie, which he liked, he was aware of her body in the semitransparent robe. She had untied her ponytail. He thought she looked very inviting and attractive.

  She stopped the movie when de Gier said he'd like to see the man in longjohns fly his machine again, "or whatever it was, the thing with the blade." He also had to go to the bathroom. "Take a shower," Maggie said. "Wrap yourself in a towel afterward. I put out a huge one. You can shave too if you like. There is gear next to the washstand; there's nice aftershave, too."

  "I could see you as Road Warrior," Maggie said when he came back, "in leather, and with that riot gun pistol, and the boots, driving hot rods across endles
s deserts. The lonely hero to be comforted by the lady in white."

  She had refilled their glasses. They both began to slur their words while commenting on the movie's final and spectacular battle between odd-looking automobiles. Maggie was sad when the lady in white, who manipulated a flame thrower from the top of a tank truck driven by Mel Gibson, was killed by an arrow.

  "If that was me, we couldn't do it."

  The movie ended. Maggie led de Gier to her bedroom. His towel slipped off. Her robe slipped off too.

  "Don't we look nice?" Maggie whispered.

  He thought they might have just one more drink.

  When she came back with the refilled glasses he asked whether she had seen a Road Warrior look-alike in the park the day that Bert Termeer got killed.

  "I sure did," Maggie said. "It should have been you."

  "How many?"

  "Just one." She laughed. "Should have been two and you would have been the other and you would have done something bad and I would have arrested you and dragged you along behind me."

  De Gier made himself smile at that S&M scene. "Did you see him from close by?"

  "No." She leaned over to kiss his cheek and sniffed the aftershave. "My favorite. Herbal. You like herbal?"

  De Gier didn't. "Sure."

  "I was on my horse," Maggie said. "I had to be everywhere. There were all these kids. Falling in the pond. Trying to prick holes in the balloons of the dinosaur. There was that loud tuba thumping that makes Jagger prance and rear."

  They sat on the double bed, sipping their gins, admiring each other's bodies. She complimented him on his wide chest. He complimented her on her beautiful bosom.

  They put their drinks down and lay back, just to relax for a moment, before getting "serious," Maggie said.

  He went back to the bathroom, where he had left his clothes.

  "You brought a condom?" Maggie asked. "How thoughtful." She frowned. "Always ready, eh?" Her smile came back. "Shall I put it on?" She touched him and laughed at the prompt reaction. "Instant hydraulics!"

  "Powerful." She played some more, too roughly. The condom broke. "You think it is all right?" she asked. "I am wearing something."

  He thought it might be all right. He didn't sound sure.

  Her hand slipped away. They lay back again, not touching.

  His eyelids dropped. He was snoring again, and she turned him on his side and made her breasts caress his shoulder so that he would wake up, which he did, but then she dozed off herself.

  The palms of his hands rubbed her breasts lightly. What beautiful duplicity. How generous of nature to multiply such a perfectly firm and smooth living shape. He lifted his hands, then touched one breast, then the other. "Two," de Gier murmured dreamily, then he frowned, thinking about being the second Road Warrior, being dragged to Twelfth Street by a horse.

  Good twos, bad twos.

  Two Road Warriors in Central Park.

  Chapter 17

  De Gier, breakfasting late with a somewhat rested commissaris at the Cavendish the next day, was handed Grijpstra's and Cardozo's faxed report on the visit to Old Man's Gate. The document had been delivered by the bellhop Ignacio to the commissaris's suite together with his morning coffee and his spare glasses, brought over by a courier at considerable expense.

  The commissaris couldn't see well, as the spare glasses had been manufactured ten years ago according to a much weaker prescription.

  He complained about have bad dreams again. "About a streetcar driver."

  "What did he do, sir?"

  "It was a she."

  "What did she do?"

  "I think she wanted me to deliver something." The commissaris took off his useless glasses and stared hopelessly at de Gier. "All legs, no eyes." He waved. "Never mind. Read that report, Sergeant. Let's catch up with the homefront."

  De Gier read aloud while the commissaris cut kiwis and arranged the slices on his yogurt.

  "More juice?" the commissaris asked. "Try grapefruit this time. Another aspirin? Feeling better?"

  De Gier felt worse but he was forcing himself to pay attention. "What do you think, sir?"

  The commissaris was done thinking. De Gier was in charge. The commissaris had another lecture that day, on homemade lethal weapons. Chief O'Neill would pick him up in an hour. He was still interested in the Termeer case, of course. He was more than willing to hear about de Gier's progress.

  De Gier suggested that, on the strength of the report from Amsterdam, Jo Termeer might be a suspect.

  The commissaris, while buttering a crisp white bun, investigated his choice of cheeses. "You see possibilities that weren't available to us before?"

  De Gier argued that Bert Termeer—according to Bieber and to Sara Lakmaker, who had only met Termeer briefly, and to Antonio, partner of de Gier's Horatio Street landlord, Freddie—was a charismatic figure, a latter-day prophet. Prophets, by definition, spend their time and energy trying to share uncommon and beneficial insights. They may use odd methods.

  "Tell me about Antonio," the commissaris said.

  De Gier reported. "He sails model boats in Central Park, sir. He has seen old Termeer stand still and jump about. 'The prophet' impressed him. There has even been some interchange. Antonio is New Age. He likes to be told what to do by Higher Spirits, then 'he grows and he shares."'

  "You're being facetious? Aren't you always looking for teachers yourself?"

  De Gier drank more juice.

  "Good," the commissaris said. "Let me have your thoughts. What else does Grijpstra's report tell you?"

  So far so good, de Gier argued, but Bert Termeer could, according to Bieber, be someone who had an unhealthy interest in little kids, a pedophile.

  "Because the man sold pictures of Greek child wrestlers and homely bathroom scenes? Shouldn't we take note that Grijpstra checked for a record?"

  Grijpstra had found no record but that didn't keep de Gier from defending his proposition. Old Termeer lived alone, and the connection with landlady and travel companion Carolien seemed like an early LAT—living apart together—relationship, so popular nowadays, preferred by couples who share abstract, but no carnal, interests. Jo Termeer had described Carolien as an attractive woman who liked to prance about in French underwear, was intelligent, a good travel companion, with a sense of humor. Bert Termeer still wasn't sharing his nights with her.

  "Are you a pedophile?" the commissaris asked.

  De Gier saw the point. Just living alone didn't necessarily indicate a sexual aberration. "But Bert Termeer did sell pedophilic literature, sir. And he did not live alone.

  There was the little live-in helpless nephew."

  The commissaris nodded.

  What Bert Termeer really liked was sexual play with little kids, de Gier proposed.

  Not being checked by objections, de Gier now suggested uncle had abused nephew. He also suggested revenge, more than thirty years later. Jo Termeer falls into uncle's hands at age eight; nephew rips uncle to pieces after nephew turns forty.

  "Raccoons did the ripping, Sergeant."

  Yes, de Gier said, recalling the horrifying photograph of Termeer's remains.

  "And then this murdering nephew bothers me?" the commissaris said. "And his former teacher Grijpstra? He alerts his own superiors, skilled criminal investigators?" The commissaris remembered sending his assistants to Crailo Golf Club. "Well, fairly skilled, in my case anyway...."

  De Gier also remembered the golf expedition. He mentioned Baldert bothering the Crailo Rijkspohtie lieutenant, and later Grijpstra and himself De Gier evoked an image of Baldert pathetically offering his wrists, begging for handcuffs.

  The commissaris was rearranging his kiwi slices. "You see an analogy?"

  Possibly. Both Baldert and young Termeer, de Gier now argued, were appalled at their own misdeeds, craved punishment, but had been too clever for their own good.

  The commissaris nodded. So much for motive.

  "The nephew has reasons to murder the uncle. You have though
t about opportunity, have you?"

  Was Jo Termeer in Central Park when his uncle died? Something for Grijpstra to check, de Gier said as he made a note on his napkin. He excused himself and walked over to the buffet to hunt for more juices. He selected apple and cranberry this time, carried back two tall glasses. He also found some yogurt.

  The commissaris commiserated when de Gier could not eat the yogurt. "Poor fellow. What did you do last night, Rinus?"

  De Gier looked pained. "What didn't I do last night?"

  "With the police lady?"

  "Not with the police lady, sir."

  "But you were with her all night, weren't you?"

  De Gier's mouth, in spite of all the healthy liquids he kept imbibing, stayed dry. He smacked his parched lips. "Yessir, I was. We tried, but then we didn't." He stared at his juice. "We fell asleep."

  "And this morning?" the commissaris asked.

  "She had left, sir."

  "No note?"

  "A pot of coffee."

  "Stale?"

  "Well yes," de Gier said, "she had to go work. I slept in."

  "Dear me," the commissaris said.

  The commissaris was glad, he told de Gier, that he had spent his virile years in a different, more fearless, period. "The years of breasts and penises," the commissaris whispered pleasurably, as he closed his eyes, enjoying numerous visions.

  "You're feeling better, sir?" de Gier asked unhappily.

  The commissaris apologized.

  De Gier busied himself sipping alternate juices.

  "U.S. immigration stamps all foreign passports," the commissaris said briskly. "Your suspect told me he had been here twice, once as a member of a guided tour group, once to investigate the alleged murder. If there are more stamps he will have to explain them. What makes you think that Jo was here in New York when old Termeer was killed?"

  De Gier hesitated. Then he mentioned Road Warrior, a movie character. According to policewoman Maggie, a Road Warrior look-alike participated in the Central Park contest the Sunday Bert Termeer died.

  "I'm not familiar with the character, Sergeant."