The Hollow-Eyed Angel (10 page)

Chapter
9

                                        Amsterdam's chief-constable wasn't ready to sign the document that Grijpstra had brought along and placed on his superior's desk. The CC was talking about playing golf at Crailo and the sudden death of his friend the baron.

Grijpstra's comments had been conversational. "Beautiful course, sir," and "Yes, that was unfortunate, wasn't it?"

The chief-constable smiled.

Grijpstra felt encouraged. He moved the request for funding further across the desk. "Could you please sign this, sir?"

The CC looked away.

Grijpstra sighed. "You are concerned about the possibility of foul play, sir?"

The chief-constable talked at some length. He said that, in spite of what he was doing at his present elevated position, which, as most insiders were aware of, was mostly decorative these days, he was still a cop at heart and therefore curious about human erring. A man had died at the Crailo Golf Club of which the CC was an active member.

Grijpstra's rugged face plied itself into an expression of interest. "You and the baron were friends, sir?"

Friends...friends...the chief-constable said he didn't known about "friends." "Friends are like clouds in the sky, Adjutant. They float around, they disappear, they come back in different shapes, you reach out and they're gone again."

Grijpstra said he liked clouds himself. He often tried to paint them.

"Really?" the CC asked. "I thought you mostly portrayed dead ducks."

"With clouds above them," Grijpstra said. "For contrast, maybe. The dead ducks are upside down in the canals, with bright orange feet which make them sail along." The adjutant's gestures showed how this was done. "And the white clouds bring out the bright orange."

The chief-constable smiled again. He hadn't listened. He was talking in a barely audible voice when he admitted to a personal interest in what he referred to as the "Crailo murder." He had known Hilger van Hopper fairly well, had been following the ups and downs of the baron's life at close quarters. "But it seemed the poor fellow was going mostly down, Adjutant. Which amazed me." The chief-constable spoke with more enthusiasm now. "Hilger was a smart fellow, educated, insightful, one might say. A cynic. You know what a cynic is, Adjutant?"

Grijpstra thought a cynic was one who mocked generally accepted human values.

The CC explained that there was no mockery here, but a sincere disbelief, based on observation. A cynic, he said, has found reasons to believe that all human activity is based on selfishness. "Do you believe that, Adjutant?" The CC's smile was sad. "I rather do so myself."

Grijpstra nodded convincingly while he pushed his documents a little further across the vast emptiness of the desk between them.

"Yes," the chief-constable said. "Hilger, therefore, was out for himself. In a pleasant way. He was a baron, of course."

"A nobleman," Grijpstra said pleasantly. "Noble."

"Noble selfishness," the CC said. He held his long elegant hands back above the polished top of his desk. His fingertips played the scherzo of Chopin's
Klaviersonate Nr.
2 b-moll op. 35.
Grijpstra knew the sonata because he had been made to play it himself, as a boy, after his teachers determined that he had musical talent. Grijpstra had wanted to try Billy Strayhorn compositions. He still did.

"So," the CC said, "here we have a superior sort of chap who has figured out that we are in it for ourselves, and who has the means to indulge himself, and who is all out to make one good time flow into another."

Grijpstra looked surprised. "He did not succeed?"

The CC shook his head. He tried to share a congenial grin with Grijpstra. "No, he just kept losing. But then he was suddenly in the money again, with a loving wife and a handsome lover, and then he managed to suddenly lose his life."

Grijpstra contemplated his ultimate chiefs appearance. Amsterdam's police commander in chief was a decorative man: tall, slim, silver haired, with an aquiline nose. He was reputed to suffer from depression. After his wife died, crashing her airplane into a peat bog, the CC engaged in brief relationships, often with women he knew through his work. The grapevine reported that they all had the same comment: that the CC wasn't part of the activities he engaged in. Although he performed the correct movements, his behavior was mechanical, all while being polite and charming. The CC took his lovers out to plays and concerts, and paid for good dinners. He listened, laughed at jokes and tipped the waiters. "But he is mostly dead," the women reported.

Grijpstra wondered whether he could interact with a man who was mostly dead.

"Baldert's projectile, the golf ball, did miss the baron."

"Maybe that was just part of what caused my friend's loss of life," the CC said. "What if Baldert, after narrowly missing his easy target, and after noticing that the baron was experiencing some sort of attack, stroke or what have you, had called an ambulance?"

"According to the rural lieutenant," Grijpstra said, "it seems your golf companion was dangling from the last strand of the end of his tether."

"A stretched metaphor." The CC laughed. "The commissaris is right, you
are
a card."

Grijpstra apologized. "Wasn't meaning to be funny, sir."

The chief-constable leaned back in his executive's revolving chair. His voice was sad. "Causing death by omission of some activity, an interesting construction, Adjutant. I wrote my thesis on that."

Grijpstra moved the document another millimeter. "Sir?"

The CC's fingers now played the sonata's next movement, the "Marche funebre." To be played, Grijpstra remembered,
"lento-attaaa."

"Missed on purpose?" Grijpstra asked. "But the ball passed close by the victim's head. The baron now realizes that Baldert, whom he considered to be his friend, is trying to kill him. The shock sets off a heart attack. And then Baldert, still as part of the plan, pretends to panic and doesn't call an ambulance until the crowd returns from watching plastic windup ducks?"

The CC's fingertips were moving.

The chief was talking almost inaudibly again: ".. .my wife would still be alive if I had made sure that the old Cessna had been properly checked. I knew that the mechanics at the Air Club were sloppy. But I didn't like her, you see."

Grijpstra stared.

"I didn't like my wife," the chief-constable said. He smiled. He stopped playing the sonata, pulled the form toward him and signed it with a flourish. "There you are," the
CC
said pleasantly. "This will pay for de Gier's airfare and expenses. I am glad that you fellows are concerned about the commissaris's welfare." He looked up. "So how is the old man doing?"

Grijpstra thought that the commissaris was ill.

"He has been ill for years now," the CC said. "He could have been on permanent sick leave since he started using a cane." He looked at his long slender hands, then dropped them under the desk top. "But maybe my respected colleague doesn't like doing nothing."

"What are
you
going to do, sir?" Grijpstra asked. "When you retire?"

The chief-constable smiled. "I will just fade away, Adjutant. I am good at that. I have been practicing for years."

Grijpstra, as he left the room, remembered the commissaris saying that lack of substance makes people float to the top.

"Yessir," the adjutant said. "Thank you." He waved his signed document. "This will get things going."

                                        Detective-Sergeant de Gier, six thousand miles west of his jurisdiction, helicoptered from Kennedy Airport to the Heliport on Manhattan's East Side.

New York impressed him. The spectacular city looked the part of a major power center. Manhattan's unique skyline convinced de Gier that whatever was thought up here would cause ripples all around the planet, for a while anyway. Nothing is forever but what force could wipe out this metropolis of glass and steel? Warfare? Internal strife? One of the modern drug-resistant plagues? He wondered if someday an earthquake would topple those splendid tall buildings.

Would some people be crushed by their own top-heavy creations and the rest flee? He knew about the abandoned cities of Central and South America, where the jungle had reclaimed huge buildings. Not only did the citizens disappear, but there was no memory of what might have happened. Yet there was obviously technology there, knowledge, a high degree of organization, a well-developed infrastructure. Anthropologists had come up with vague theories, in which facts didn't fit.

Would the New York skyscrapers degenerate into crumpled shapes leaning across each other, with skeletons staring out of broken windows? Would vines, mold, lichens and mosses gradually smooth their jumbled lines?

Maybe, de Gier thought, it will all slide into the ocean, to the bottom of the sea, like Atlantis, like Amsterdam. With Amsterdam there is the certainty, in a foreseeable, calculable future, that the sea will flood the city. Ice caps melt and ocean levels rise and dikes cannot be built up forever.

There would be fish again, huge schools, unbothered by hunger at the top of the food chain. De Gier imagined fish swimming through his apartment.

"Quite a place you have here," de Gier told the Trump Air stewardess. He read her the address of a bed and breakfast Antoinette had written down in his notebook. Antoinette and Karel had enjoyed the place. How to get there?

"Horatio Street?" the stewardess asked. De Gier had his map out. She pointed the way. "A little bit complicated. The subway is cheap but I would advise a cab."

He found coordinates for the Cavendish on his map and thought that he might contact the commissaris first. There was plenty of time. It wouldn't do to make things easy. If New York was to be his hunting ground for the next few days he should investigate on foot. A cab was too easy. He told the stewardess he would call on a friend first, proudly reciting the address: Eighty-third and Fifth.

He only carried a leather shoulder bag holding three changes of linen, a CD player, six Miles Davis CDs and a novel by Alvaro Mutis, in the original Spanish. De Gier had been puzzling through the tale during the flight across the Adantic. His Spanish was poor and he hadn't brought a dictionary, so many words had to be guessed at. De Gier, a self-taught linguist, had managed to wade halfway through the first chapter. He had figured out what seemed to be a plot line. A writer of technical brochures on petrochemical subjects travels to Finland. It's cold in Helsinki. The protagonist goes to the harbor from where he can see the domes of St. Petersburg and watches a tramp steamer enter port. But now, to de Gier's delight, he is no longer in forty-degrees-below Finland but in ninety-degrees-above Honduras, where a woman in a bikini runs toward a yacht. In spite of her large feet she is attractive, due to good makeup. Her husband is shooting at seabirds with a .45 automatic, but misses.

"You're Spanish?" the stewardess asked, seeing the book in de Gier's hand. "You don't sound Spanish." She was smiling. The stewardess, like de Gier, was in her forties. De Gier had noticed that older women were now sending signals. De Gier, known at Amsterdam Headquarters as "Mr. B Movie," was tall, wide shouldered, athletic looking. Women liked his thick curly hair and huge cavalry-officer-style swept-up mustache. In potential sexual encounters he had been backing offlately, preferring the company of his cat. He had told Grijpstra, when the adjutant was about to be taken over by the hotel owner and former prostitute Nellie, "Animals have smaller brains but they use them better."

"You dislike women now?"

De Gier gestured ail-inclusively. "I dislike people."

"You're people yourself."

"Anyone," de Gier said. But he didn't see himself so much. Only in the mirror.

"But you often look in mirrors," Grijpstra said. "You're very vain, you know. Combing your hair. Brushing up the old mustache."

De Gier didn't like vain people either.

The stewardess watched her passenger stride off, going west on Sixty-third Street. She liked the cut of his long linen breeches. The leather flight jacket looked good too. The fellow was probably gay, due to meet a clone on Horatio Street. The stewardess wished the pair luck as she picked up Dixie cups in the helicopter's cabin.

It was a nice day. De Gier walked, map in hand, up Fifth Avenue, glancing at Central Park, the grisly scene of Uncle Bert Termeer's demise, but the park looked pleasant. He reached the Cavendish and happened to meet the commissaris in the lobby.

"What?"
the commissaris asked. "Is it
you
De Gier said he had always wanted to visit New York again, that his last visit had been too short, that he had taken a few days off. And as he knew the commissaris was in town too he had thought he might look him up.

"How are you, sir?"

"That last time you were trailing me too," the commissaris said. He took off his round spectacles and furiously blew on the glasses. "Who is paying for this nonsense?"

"Yessir," de Gier said. "Nice day. I walked here from the river. I came in by chopper. Did you use the helicopter too? Beautiful, all those buildings. I have been reading this novel, sir, by a Colombian author, in Spanish. Do you have any idea what
'huevones'
means? I didn't bring a dictionary, you see. It's more fun to guess but sometimes I get lost a bit. The meaning of
huevones
escapes me."

The bellhop was a Latino who looked like a dwarfed Anthony Quinn. Thinking de Gier was a guest, he had come over to carry luggage.
"Huevones,"
the bellhop said, "literally means 'balls,' but what is the context, sir? Could you show me the passage?"

De Gier opened his book and found the relevant sentence.
"Si me Megan a dejar se mueren de hambre,
huevones."

"And the context?" the bellhop asked.

De Gier had figured out that a bikini-clad woman was yelling at men on a boat, sailors who were about to take off without her, and that she wanted to go along, for she was the cook. She was yelling at the men that 'without her they would die of hunger.

"Ah," the bellhop said. "Then
'huevones'
should be taken as 'assholes,' as a derogatory term, sir. Where did you put your luggage?"

"You're not staying here," the commissaris told de Gier.

"I'm not staying here," de Gier told the bellhop.

"Jack of all trades," the bellhop said, pointing at his chest. "Teach Spanish, offer referrals for analysis of dreams." He handed over cards to the commissaris and de Gier. "Ignacio is the name,
a sus ordenes, senores.
Journeys can be arranged. Voodoo is an expensive option."

"Journeys?" de Gier asked.

"A Native American shortcut," the bellhop explained, "to the realm of collective subconscious spirits. We Mexicans are part Indian. But it may be that voodoo will explain your dreams better. My favorite black voodoo lady can guide you through all the netherworlds."

Netherlandic de Gier wanted to be clever. "I've just come from there."

Ignacio saluted. The reception clerk had rung her bell. The bellhop turned and ran.

"My golf blunder," the commissaris told de Gier while they ate in a nearby sushi restaurant, "alarmed you."

He peered at the sergeant. "Katrien thinks I am ill and you and Grijpstra think I am silly." His chopstick pointed between his eyes. "Daft in the head. I now need an attendant."

The chopstick pointed at de Gier's forehead. "Do you know that I attended a hit and run lecture this afternoon and that I couldn't concentrate on skid marks?"

"Well now...," de Gier soothed.

The commissaris spat urchin meat into his napkin. "You like raw fish, Rinus? Yes? That's good." He pushed his plate away. "Could be I'm stressed out. Or depressed maybe. Last puzzle of my career and I feel obliged to solve it. But so far it's all nonsense, and I have this damned flu, and there are all these lectures. Trying to pay attention. For what?
You
tell me." The comrnissaris's faded blue eyes stared through de Gier's head. "Improve my knowledge when I'm just about out?"

De Gier smiled. "Oh, but you will be with the police academy soon, and at Interpol and whatnot," de Gier said. "Policemen everywhere will benefit from your teaching."

"On deadly golf balls," the commissaris said. "Well, I know that much now. No golf in Central Park."

"You've seen the NYPD, sir?"

The commissaris, in between sneezing and coughing, reported on his conversations with Chief O'Neill and Detective-Sergeant Hurrell.

"A noncase," the commissaris concluded, "about to be closed. You type up a report and fax it home. Grijpstra, in due course, informs complainant that Uncle just fell over. Such things happen. Can't be helped." The commissaris felt his throat. "There is folded sandpaper in here, Rinus. It grinds together when I swallow." His next sneeze made his spectacles fall off. De Gier caught them.

"Thank you, Sergeant. Case about to be closed. Even so...," the commissaris shivered, "...I feel we might look further. Try to do a good job. Just for the record. Or for no reason at all. For the hell of it, Sergeant. See the mounted policewoman. Call on Bert Termeer's landlord and neighbor, Charlie. Maybe we will do that tomorrow."

"You don't have a lecture tomorrow, sir?"

The commissaris checked his program. "On trace evidence, in the afternoon." He put the paper away. "Reminds me of the Maggotmaid case, which you should know about, Sergeant. Let me tell you why."

De Gier ate his raw octopus and boiled rice rolls while the commissaris related the story, featuring Detective-Sergeant Hurrell, as told by Chief O'Neill.

"Crawling maggots, eh?" de Gier asked.

The commissaris's teeth chattered.

"I'll take you to the hotel, sir."

The commissaris grimaced courageously. "An early night, a hot bath, try again tomorrow, Sergeant."

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," bellhop Ignacio said. "I thought millionaires like you guys wouldn't use that expression. I thought it was just us. I thought it was because of tomorrowism that guys like us will be hundredaires forever."

Ignacio, out of the Cavendish Hotel uniform, wearing a black silk suit, an open white shirt and high-heeled boots, seemed a different being.

The commissaris tried to smile between coughs. "Ignacio? From the hotel?"

"Happened to see you sitting here at the window," Ignacio said. "I often stop in here. I know one of the cooks. He gives me discount dinners."

"Care to join us?" the commissaris asked approvingly.

Ignacio declined with thanks. He pointed at the sushi. "Don't care for the Cavendish nouvelle cuisine undefinables, do you? Grind up and color, serve with a leaf of purple cabbage at fifty bucks a plate."

"It's all right," the commissaris said.

"Our breakfast is all right," Ignacio said, "but you like to eat that out too, don't you? With Mamere, the naked doggie lady?"

The commissaris looked surprised. "How do you know?"

"Bellhops," Ignacio said solemnly, "know everything." "There is always an explanation," de Gier said.

"For the thinker and the seer." Ignacio looked at the commissaris. "Le Chat Complet is across the street. I saw you there yesterday. I know Mamere. After you left, Mamere said you'd had bad dreams lately. That's why I gave you the voodoo spiel earlier. She thinks you should see her."

The bell hop wished them a pleasant evening, then walked to the sushi bar to talk to the cook.