The Japanese Corpse ac-5 Read online

  A tow truck was maneuvering into the courtyard, with the white BMW dangling from its hook.

  "Quick work," Grijpstra said. "I'll see to it, sir. That truck must have been speeding."

  "A police tow truck is allowed to speed," the commissaris said. "De Gier, have the snapshot of the presumable victim, Mr. Nagai, multiplied and get some detectives to show it around Amsterdam and Utrecht, tonight if possible. It would be nice if we could find out what his companion or companions looked like. Maybe they had a few drinks before they started their trip. There hasn't been much happening lately so you should be able to round up enough men, a dozen perhaps. The case looks nasty enough. Put Cardozo in charge."

  "Grijpstra?"

  "Sir."

  "Get hold of the young lady who came to see you this morning. Miss Andrews. We'll have to see her straightaway. Send a car for her if necessary or go yourself. Bring her to my office when you have her and de Gier can come too when he is ready. And you can contact the State Police. Looks as if we have a murder without a body. The body must have been dumped off the speedway somewhere. Let them investigate both sides. They should be given copies of the snapshot but they probably don't need them. The car is conspicuous; somebody must have seen it parked while the body was dumped or buried. And be very polite; the State Police hate taking orders. Make it a request and sound humble, and if they start trouble about the case being theirs you can connect them with me. I'll be in my office."

  "Yes, sir," Grijpstra said, and grinned. De Gier grinned too.

  "We would be awfully grateful if you could perhaps…" de Gier said. "If it isn't too much trouble of course…"

  Grijpstra added, "But we do have this problem, you see, and it may link up with a serious crime and you fellows are known for your ability to follow up on the slightest clue, and there is this gleaming brand new white BMW which must have monkeyed around near the Amsterdam-Utrecht speedway yesterday, and we thought that you might be able perhaps…"

  The commissaris smiled. "Yes, that's the way to do it. Good luck." He turned and got into the eternally revolving open elevator which was grinding past them. He grabbed the metal tube of the little cage which had just reached their level. The two detectives were ready to help him but he managed on his own. Together they watched the frail old man, close to retirement age and in continuous pain, for his rheumatism never seemed to lose its hold and often lamed his legs so that he had to limp and hold on to the walls and furniture.

  When the cage was out of sight Grijpstra sighed. "Well, on our way. Here is the snapshot. One dead Japanese. All we have to do is find him."

  "He might be wounded," de Gier said.

  "He is dead. The fingerprint man has a bone sliver, he says it came from the head. The bullet must have cracked Nagai's skull and blown it to bits. Why would anyone want to kill a man selling art from the Far East, do you think?"

  "Maybe he was selling something else," de Gier said, "or the killing is connected with a robbery. Miss Andrews said that Nagai often had expensive objects for sale, didn't she? Or the competition got him maybe. Or we've run into a love affair again. But the victim is Japanese, we have stumbled into the Far East, maybe we've got ourselves into something subtle for a change." He poked Grijpstra in the stomach. "A case with a delicate flavor."

  Grijpstra frowned. "Don't look so eager. If it's subtle we could never solve it. It took us a week to figure out who killed that garbage man last month and it turned out to be a simple manslaughter, performed with the help of a sledgehammer."

  De Gier looked sheepish.

  "And you kept on suggesting that his poor wife had done it," Grijpstra said.

  "I heard you say that too."

  "Yes, maybe I did say it, but only once. And the woman did look like a hippopotamus."

  "If she had the strength to do it she must have done it. That's what you said. Some reasoning. Good thing you said it to me and not to the commissaris."

  Grijpstra sighed. "But we did find the man, and without anyone sending us an anonymous note."

  "And without the help of the journalists, wasn't that clever of us?"

  "Yes, very. Well, on our way. I'll see you in the commissaris' office as soon as I can get hold of that young lady. I hope I can get her on the telephone. She should know more than she told us this morning." Grijpstra patted his pocket, looked surprised, and fished out a pistol. "What the hell? I was looking for my cigars."

  "That's my pistol, adjutant," de Gier said pleasantly. "You forgot to return it and made me walk about unarmed. And you've got tobacco grains all over the barrel." He took it out of Grijpstra's hand and blew the tobacco off and polished it with his handkerchief, and checked the mechanism. "And the safety catch isn't on. But there isn't a cartridge in the chamber, I'll say that for you." He slipped it into his shoulder holster.

  "It's got a new screw," Grijpstra said, "and they replaced the left grip-plate. They didn't want to do it but I insisted. You should be grateful."

  "I am grateful. The poor thing is getting old. I wish they would give us some decent arms. This one dates back to 1929, the sergeant in the arms room was telling me the other day. It's an antique. The criminals have fully automatic firearms these days. I read a report that our colleagues caught a drug dealer in Rotterdam who had a machine pistol in his car, the size of our FNs, or a little bigger maybe. Fourteen cartridges in the clip and it could fire them all in four seconds. All you do is squeeze the trigger and hold it."

  "Bah," Grypstra said. "Who wants to fire fourteen bullets in four seconds? I don't want to fire one bullet in one year. Why are you so murderous all of a sudden? Are you getting restless again?" He scowled. "We didn't join the police to become heroes, you know. We are supposed to maintain order. How can you maintain order if you fire fourteen bullets in four seconds? The silly thing will be jumping about in your hand and you will blow the head off the old grandmother across the street, trying to do a little shopping, and another bullet is bound to knock a baby out of a pram." Grijpstra's face had reddened and he was waving his arms. "Why don't you go to Africa? There was a story in the paper last night about mercenaries driving their tanks straight through a village, smashing and burning huts and killing everybody in sight."

  De Gier smiled and patted Grijpstra's cheek. "I only said I wanted a proper weapon," he said soothingly, "not something made out of cast iron fifty years ago and which is likely to blow apart in my hand."

  Grijpstra shook his head as he watched the tall sergeant striding down the long empty corridor. "Our adventurer," he said aloud, "our knight on his eternal quest. Fighting Evil and supporting Good, under the banner of the Goddess of Beauty."

  He coughed and looked about him but he was alone. Goddess of Beauty, he thought. De Gier's girlfriend wasn't so beautiful but she was certainly a remarkable woman. Lithe, and with a lovely head on a slender neck, and very quiet. He thought of his own wife and shook his head again. A pudding of flesh addicted to television and creamcakes, and bad-tempered if she could find the energy, which wasn't so often anymore. She was given to staring at him now, nasty stares out of small bloodshot eyes, sunken into the puffy gleaming blubber which covered her skull. He breathed deeply and forced the thought to go away. He could think of his wife when he was with her, which didn't happen so much now.

  He would think about the Japanese. He remembered the photograph and saw the thin man again, on his cane chair, peering at the camera's eye. A man dealing in art. A man with a sensitive face, a defenseless face. A man interested in reading, with a stack of pocketbooks next to his chair. He had just come off the plane from Tokyo and he had been reading during the flight, but he was still carrying his books, even when he was in the company of Joanne Andrews, his girlfriend whom he hadn't seen for some time. An attractive girl who was in love with him and who drove his car when he wasn't in Amsterdam. A new BMW, an elegant sleek car, now in the police courtyard with blood on the front seat and a fragment of the victim's skull spattered into the upholstery. He would have been shot
from the back seat, maybe while the car was speeding along the highway between Amsterdam and Utrecht. It's a busy highway, Grijpstra thought. A thousand cars a minute, racing along in four lanes. Wouldn't anyone have seen the man slump forward, grabbing his head, oozing blood?

  A Japanese, he thought again. What did he know about Japanese? His memory responded with a number of images. He saw a kamikaze pilot diving at an American aircraft carrier, directing his flimsy machine loaded with explosives straight at the gigantic ship's bridge. No chance to survive the impact. A young man with a white strip of cotton wound round his forehead, his teeth showing in a desperate grimace of fear and joy. Kamikaze, he even knew the origin of the word; he had read it somewhere in a magazine article. A holy storm which had destroyed the Korean fleet intent on landing in Japan and conquering the country. Long ago now. What else did he associate with Japanese? Cruelty, yes. Grijpstra's cousin had survived a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. He had come out as a living toothless skeleton, amazed to find himself alive. Only a small percentage of the original inmates of the camp had survived the brutalities of the guards. Grijpstra's cousin, now a man in his late sixties, a clerk working for the mayor's office, would almost faint if he saw Japanese tourists in the streets of Amsterdam.

  What else? Japanese temple music. He had a record at home showing a pagoda on its cover, the several-storied temple set against a background of artfully pruned pine trees. He often played the record, for it contained some unusual percussion, eerie broken sounds evoked by wooden drums, accentuated by sudden shouts out of priestly throats. He had tried to imitate the sounds on his own set of drums and de Gier had helped him, for de Gier had borrowed the record and shared Grijpstra's fascination. Together they had practiced the shouts and yells, and de Gier had even found an instrument, a wooden cucumber on a tripod, the tone of which matched the temple drums. Unusual music from a faraway religion. Buddhism. The commissaris had once told him that Buddhism rests on two pillars, compassion and equanimity. He shook his head. A pilot killing himself while killing hundreds of others, a guard beating prisoners to death, a temple drum splitting the silence. Did he know any more about Japan? He thought of the airport scene and the two lines of obedient human insects, following their guides waving colored flags. And now one of these human insects was dead, with a big hole in his skull and his body hidden somewhere in the Dutch swamp.

  He began to walk toward his office. He was going to phone the State Police.

  \\ 3 /////

  "I am sorry, miss," the Commissaris SAID. "We have no conclusive proof that Mr. Nagai is dead; the blood and skull splinter may belong to someone else, but it looks bad. I am sorry."

  Joanne Andrews was looking at him, her lips parted, her tongue licking the cracked skin. She was sitting forward in her chair, her body leaning toward the commissaris' desk. De Gier was standing near the window, studying the street traffic and Grijpstra was slumped in an easy chair well away from the girl. He was observing the girl sadly, holding his knees.

  "Yes," the girl said. "It is as I thought. They killed him. I thought they would kill him but he laughed and said they were his friends, that he knew them weU. And even if they wanted to kill him they wouldn't do it here. They would do it in Japan. He was so sure that he convinced me too. But they killed him all the same."

  "Who?" the commissaris asked.

  She shivered and looked at him. The commissaris was leaning on his desk, his small wizened face peered at her understanding^ as if he was sharing her suffering.

  "Who, miss?"

  "They will till me too," the girl said. "They look all right but they are ruthless. Two pudgy little men. They are almost square and they look alike, only the one is bald and has a fat neck. They don't walk but they sway and slither, and they are always smiling and bowing. But they are killers. They have been trained properly. I recognized their type when they came to the restaurant and ordered their meal. They often came to the nightclub where I worked in Kobe, not the same men, but men like them. The nightclub belonged to the yakusa and the men were yakusa. Not the yakusa's mind but the yakusa's hands. Tools."

  "Yakusa?" the commissaris asked.

  "Yes," she said, and nodded gravely. "I am supposed to be afraid of them; all Japanese are, but I am only half Japanese. My father is an American. He was an officer and met my mother during the occupation. I grew up in San Francisco and then they were divorced and my mother went home to Kobe. The checks stopped and she had to work and I worked too. As my English is fluent I was much in demand and the nightclub boss liked me. He was only a small man in the organization, but he was dangerous too. He started as a killer before he was put in charge of the club. I used to be afraid of them but I am not afraid now. I photographed the two pudgy men."

  She looked in her bag and put a photograph on the desk top. De Gier and Grijpstra stood behind the commissaris' chair. Grijpstra cleaned his glasses before he put them on. The three policemen took their time studying the snapshot. They saw two men walking in the street, Grijpstra recognized the street; it was close to the big State Library. He saw the trees in the library's garden. The photograph was blurred but not too badly.

  "I took it from the restaurant window," the girl said. "They didn't know. They had come for lunch and had drunk too much beer."

  The photograph was in color and the men had red faces. They were smiling happily. They were both fairly fat and were dressed in dark suits, the double-breasted jackets spanning their bellies. The hair of the one man was cut short, the other was bald. "Shopkeepers," Grijpstra thought. "Minor officials," de Gier thought. "They look secure, nobody can fire them." "They could be policemen," the commissaris thought, "but they are certainly not detectives for they have no brains. Strongmen. Gangsters, yes, why not?"

  "The yakusa are gangsters, miss?" the commissaris asked.

  "They are like gangsters," the girl said. "I went back to America once, on a holiday, and I met some gangsters, but the Americans are different from the Japanese."

  "In what way are they different?"

  "In America the gangsters compete. They fight each other. They wouldn't do that in Japan. And in America the gangsters specialize in crime; the yakusa are in everything. They are in art too; they will sponsor art shows, they will build sports halls, they will even support the government and the police. It's possible to be a religious man and a yakusa. If Japan has a heaven there will be yakusa in it. The doorman will be a yakusa." She tried to smile.

  The commissaris looked up from the photograph. "How old are you, miss?"

  "I was born in 1946."

  "A gangster guarding the gate of heaven," the commissaris said softly. De Gier laughed and the commissaris turned his head. "You think a gangster will guard the gate of heaven, de Gier?"

  "Yes, sir," de Gier said, and straightened up. He was holding an imagined Tommy gun and his strong curved nose pointed straight ahead. "One on each side of the great gate. Gangsters are dedicated men, reliable, obedient. They have their uses."

  "Well," the commissaris said. "I don't know. You have read more about them than I have, I think. We don't really have any gangsters in Holland. It's an interesting thought."

  Grijpstra had become restless. He was clearing his throat and moving about the desk.

  "Yes, Grijpstra?"

  Grijpstra looked relieved. "With this photograph the job should be easy, sir."

  "If they are still in the country," the commissaris said, and pressed a buzzer. A constable came in and was given the snapshot and told to take it to the photographers' room for multiplication.

  "Yes," the commissaris said. "We'll know soon what hotel they stayed in, and what names they gave. They may have used false passports. If we don't catch them here the Japanese police can catch them. We'll have to make contact with their ambassador in The Hague through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It's all routine. Tell me, miss, why did these men associate with Mr. Nagai?"

  The girl was trying to light a cigarette but her hand wasn't steady. De Gier
struck a match for her from a box on the commissaris' desk.

  "I can give you some information," the girl said, "but I would like to go on living. I have my mother to support and my sister's son is in college; I send him money every month. If I stay here I won't live long. I shouldn't have taken that photograph, the yakusa will not like it, and they usually do something nasty when they are displeased. I will have to be careful."

  "You have an American passport?"

  The girl nodded.

  "What would you like to do?"

  "I would like to go to America, but first I would like to hide somewhere, for a few weeks, while I think of what I want to do. If I go to America nobody must know where I am. I'll have to think of the right place. I may have to change my name."

  "A cover," the commissaris said. "I am sure it can be arranged. We are friendly with the American embassy and they have a room somewhere with a CIA man in it. I know the man. He can do things very quickly. We are not so quick, but you are an American, and it will be easy for him to help you."

  "Can I stay somewhere for a few weeks?"

  "I have a niece in the country," the commissaris said. "She has lived in the Far East and she is lonely. You could remind her of more fortunate times. Shall I phone her?"

  The commissaris phoned; the conversation didn't take long.

  "You are welcome," he said, "today if you like. De Gier can drive you to a railway station and make sure nobody follows you. We'll do it properly."

  He looked at the girl and smiled. "Some coffee perhaps?"

  "Please."

  De Gier poured the coffee, and the three men and the girl busied themselves with the sugar bowl and the cream pitcher.

  "Yes," Miss Andrews said. "I will tell you. I think I can trust you." She looked at the commissaris over her cup. He inclined his head and his long yellowish teeth showed in a hesitant smile. The commissaris looked neat. His thin hair was meticulously combed into two exact halves and the knot of his narrow tie was perfect. A thin golden chain decorated his waistcoat.