The Hollow-Eyed Angel Read online

  "Right, eh, Termeer. So, this Peter who you mentioned just now. You live together. For some time, I presume?"

  "Twelve years." Termeer straightened his back proudly.

  The commissaris observed that complainant also, apart from being handsome, looked neat. He quickly noted Jo's bleached linen pants, tan tweed sports coat, cream cotton shirt, silk necktie with a batik design. His boots were suede, recently steelbrushed to straighten the little hairs.

  "Will there be a considerable inheritance?" the commissaris asked. "Uncle Bert owned a mail-order business?"

  Termeer shrugged his right shoulder disdainfully. "Money, but who needs it? I'm doing okay."

  "Tell me about your uncle's business."

  "He sold books," Termeer said. "Via a catalogue. Spiritual books mostly. Used. He bought the product in secondhand stores, catalogued it in his mail-order publication and sent it out widely."

  "A good business?" the commissaris asked.

  Termeer held his head to the side. "A sizable list, and he sold at about three times cost, but he also had expenses." Termeer's head dipped. "Bad debts maybe. Dud checks."

  The commissaris thought of his dead brother, Therus. Therus operated a mail-order business once, distributing a catalogue of automotive products and gadgets. A profitable line. Brother Therus died in his early sixties, in gridlocked traffic near the fashionable suburb of Laren, hooting and hollering, in his new silver-gray Mercedes Sport, behind a shaking fist. Therus had spent his profits on Swiss mountaintops, with young escorts.

  "Your uncle was profit-motivated?"

  Jo Termeer didn't think so.

  "Uncle Bert was childless?"

  "Never married," said Termeer.

  "Gay?"

  "Uncle used to be friendly with his landlady, Caro-lien, when he lived in Amsterdam."

  "And he rented space in a New York building?"

  "On Watts Street," Termeer said. "That's in Tribeca, in Manhattan, near the river. Used to be a warehouse, where women filled jars with Russian caviar. Charlie lived on top, Uncle had the basement and the first two stories. Huge spaces, huge. The basement is where the books are kept."

  Charlie, Jo said, sometimes helped out in the book business, updating the computer, packing up orders. The Watts Street building looked dilapidated on the outside and the elevators resembled the big predator's cages in the zoo, but inside, in the living and work areas, everything was kept up nicely.

  "You visited your uncle in New York City?"

  "I went on a tour once," Termeer said. "A supervised outing, like the Japanese here in Amsterdam: guide up front, guide in the back and everybody waves colored plastic tulips. Hard to get lost that way. We saw bridges and museums. There was a day off and I called on Uncle Bert. And just now I went again, because he was dead." Termeer nodded and sighed. He said the word in his own English. "Det."

  The commissaris flicked the lid off the Verkade assorted cookie tin. The tin had been rifled by Grijpstra and his assistant, Detective-Sergeant de Gier. The mocha-glazed biscuits and sugared ladyfingers, his favorites, were gone.

  He offered the tin. "A nonpareil?"

  Termeer thanked him and took the offered cookie.

  "Grijpstra arranged this meeting," the commissaris said. "Do you know the adjutant well?"

  "Everybody in the Reserve knows the adjutant well," Termeer said. "Master Steelbrush taught me at police school. How to write reports. What crimes are arrestable. He's a good teacher, funny but firm, won't accept slackness. And idealistic." Termeer looked serious, possibly moved. "He taught us to respect the civilians as well as how to serve the suckers."

  "You're quoting Grijpstra?"

  "The civilian suckers tend to get themselves in trouble," Termeer said in a fair imitation of the adjutant's gruff voice. "They hire us to get themselves out of that trouble."

  Yes, the commissaris thought. What about Grijpstra himself? Father of too many children, now mostly on welfare. Husband of estranged wife. Presendy engaged to a former prostitute with considerable ambition.

  The commissaris coughed. To business. This Termeer seemed to be a decent fellow, responsible, not without a sense of humor.

  Appearances are deceptive.

  Time to inquire into his background.

  Be a little more familiar now. "Tell me, dear boy..."

  Replying to the commissaris's questions complainant claimed to have been born in Squire-Hugo-Town, deep in the provinces. Son of small farmers, but not for long, for Jo's mother had left on the rear of a powerful motorcycle, a new BMW 1000 cc Twin, driven by a German she'd met during the World War II occupation. Jo's tone of voice implied, the commissaris felt, three serious charges. First, adultery, for Jo's parents were married during the war. The German being the enemy added treason. Jo, born well after war's end, couldn't be the German's son, but his mother's leaving constituted the abandonment of a small child.

  Whoring and national-interest-betraying mother abandoned child to the care of an overworked husband. Jo's father went bankrupt. Then he hung himself in his barn, above his tubercular cows.

  A country tragedy with not too bad an ending for the blond orphan...

  ("Your age at the time, Jo?")

  ("Eight, commissaris.")

  ...who was adopted by Uncle Bert in Amsterdam. Uncle Bert was then a street vendor at the book market at Old Man's Gate in the inner city. Uncle took good care of nephew, who graduated from high school and became a hairdresser. Then, when Jo was doing well, uncle emigrated to the USA.

  "Any particular reason?"

  Jo shrugged. Uncle was restless. Holland is a small country. He had specialized in English-language books on spiritual subjects. The American mail-order market was huge. He had always been American-oriented. There had been maps of America on the walls of the Amsterdam apartment. Uncle had done some traveling in America and had lived in Bangor, Maine, and in Boston. He preferred New York, where he had been living for some five years now, maybe.

  "Quite a leap from the Old Man's Gate," the commissaris said.

  "Yes, commissaris, an adventurous man, my uncle."

  "Did Carolien join him?"

  "She didn't want to," Termeer said. "She was ten years older than Uncle. Carolien looked young for her age and Uncle Bert old, but the difference was increasing. Besides, she had become ill."

  "Is she still alive?"

  Termeer shook his head. "It was MS, multiple sclerosis. She was becoming paralyzed. Her eyesight was going. I called on her at times, in a home at the Leyden Canal."

  "A pitiful situation?"

  "Not at all." Termeer seemed more relaxed now, talking easily. When Jo was still a little kid, Aunt Carolien would come to fetch Uncle, tease him on the stairs with her French lace underwear and high boots. She would wear a hat decorated with bird of paradise feathers. A most unusual woman.

  "Not a, eh...?"

  "For money?" Termeer asked. He didn't think so. He had seen Aunt Carolien with the milkman, and under a mailman who was pulling back before pushing in, but those were surely chance couplings, engaged in for sport. Aunt Carolien owned the tall gable house and lived on her rents. She also had investments.

  "The home where she stayed while crippled was paid for by Uncle?"

  No, there was no need. She was a self-supporting woman, self-ended too, without the now so acceptable euthanasia agreement with the city doctors: comfortably in her bath, after several double and cold jenevers, a plastic bag tucked over her head.

  Jo Termeer smiled.

  The commissaris waited.

  "Aunt Carolien," Termeer said. "I really liked her."

  Termeer told the commissaris that the two, uncle and landlady, would travel together. He was taken along a few times. Once the three of them were in Paris, in a flea market, searching for old books. Uncle Bert saw an antique wheelchair but the merchant was an arrogant fellow, like so many Frenchmen, unwilling to deal with foreigners who maltreated his language. Later that afternoon they passed the wheelchair again. Ca
rolien said, "I will be needing that soon." A premonition. The street merchant wasn't paying attention. Off went Aunt Caro-lien in the wheelchair, sagging to one side, drooling, spastic, her cheeks trembling, Uncle pushing the bizarre contraption, which was beautifully upholstered with fancy art needlework. One two three, gone!

  "You too?"

  Termeer grinned. "My job was to distract the merchant, pretend I was shoplifting, get myself caught and patted down. But there was nothing on me."

  The commissaris nodded as he visualized the scene.

  Termeer laughed. "I'll never forget it."

  The commissaris inserted a new tape into his recorder while, hand raised, he mimed a request for silence.

  "Right. What would be your age now?"

  Jo Termeer had just turned forty.

  A forty-year-old young fellow, the commissaris thought. Crewcut, well dressed, athletic, well mannered, well spoken.

  "How long has Uncle lived in America?"

  Uncle Bert had spent over twenty years abroad and Aunt Carolien had died four years ago.

  The commissaris switched off the recorder. He promised to make inquiries, via Interpol and other more direct connections.

  "You won't be going to New York yourself?" Termeer asked.

  The commissaris excused himself. He was sorry but New York, surely his colleague would understand, was outside the jurisdiction of the Amsterdam Municipal Police. Besides, he was about to be retired.

  "But..."

  No, the commissaris was certainly not going to America. It wasn't that he didn't want to assist a colleague. The commissaris would see what he could do for the voluntary Reserve Constable-First-Class Johan Termeer, but he was not to indulge in exaggerated expectations.

  The commissaris, thinking that his performance had been impeccable, now intended to go and sit behind his imposing desk, each leg of which was sculptured in the image of a growling seated lion. He got up with some effort, dragging his painful leg.

  Termeer got up opposite the commissaris and kept getting up. Termeer, standing, was at least a foot taller than his superior, and looked down on him from that height.

  A formidable opponent, the commissaris thought, peering up anxiously and to the sides, for Termeer had very wide shoulders indeed. Amazing that he hadn't noticed before how formidable his visitor was.

  A matter of attitude? Superior and inferior had faced each other just like this, dwarf versus giant, after Termeer had been marched in by Adjutant Grijpstra, but then the commissaris was convinced of his own value: a staff officer in an imposingly furnished room. Did a perception of discrepancy in height increase with an intensification of feelings of guilt?

  Termeer was still talking, in a more pronounced bass voice, which was not at all servile. "Yes, sorry I bothered you, right? Commissaris, I must have been thinking that all my years of free labor for the police department warranted, perhaps..."

  The commissaris heard himself apologizing again.

  Termeer bent over him. "You do visit the States sometimes, don't you? Adjutant Grijpstra said so. That you used to have a sister living there, and friends and so forth. That you were connected."

  The commissaris's secretary, Antoinette, came in to gather cups and plates and "took the liberty" (in her own words, as it turned out that she personally knew complainant) "of interfering a little."

  "You don't mind, do you, sir?"

  The commissaris looked about distractedly, hoping this would be over soon. He tried to admire the still-glowing carpet, the portraits of chief-constables of long ago, the flaming geranium blossoms on his wide windowsills.

  Her husband, Karel, Antoinette said, had helped to refurbish Jo and Peter's hair-care salon in Outfield.

  A coincidence.

  "You're with the Reserve, aren't you?" Antoinette asked Jo Termeer. She looked at the commissaris. "Another part-time cop serving the community without pay." She turned to Termeer again, with the intimacy caused by bonding while you are helping friends to lay a wall-to-wall carpet in an elegant place of business.

  "Didn't you help to arrest that Yugoslav fellow?" Antoinette asked Termeer. "That wild man who shot a regular cop in the drug bust at Warmoes Street?"

  "Small world," the commissaris said.

  "That cop never healed properly," Antoinette said. "His right arm hangs down, but without Jo Termeer here he would be dead."

  Jo told Antoinette that his uncle had been murdered in Central Park, New York. Quite some distance. Hard to reach, especially when your English is not good. Quite a problem.

  "Got mugged?" Antoinette asked.

  Jo gave her the highlights.

  "The poor old man," Antoinette said. "And you're looking into this, sir?"

  The commissaris didn't think so.

  "There is an invitation in the mail, sir." Antoinette held up a large manila envelope. "A police congress in New York." Antoinette flicked specks of dust off the commissaris's right sleeve. "Beautiful out there, you know. Karel and I went last year. We saw all the Warhols and the aircraft carrier parked on the river. Karel says it is a work of art in a way. That horror and violence are art, too." Antoinette unfolded a leaflet that she had pulled from the envelope. "Your congress is about horror too, about violence today. Will you just look at this cover photo? A dead girl with spittle on her lips?" Antoinette closed her eyes. "Yech."

  She opened them again, to smile at Termeer.

  "Isn't he lucky, hey? That chief of mine. A free week in New York, and I get my taxes deducted from my paycheck. The High and the Mighty."

  The commissaris looked surprised.

  Antoinette beamed. Now that the commissaris was going to retire anyway and she was going to miss him dearly, the distance between them had lessened. She pushed a little against him and looked down on his balding head. "New York. Some city. And the mugging isn't so bad if you keep alert. Everything is so cheap there, and the food is different everywhere, and everything is different, and all those other kinds of people." Antoinette's eyes grew bigger. "And those buildings, all that glass!"

  All parties were quiet.

  "So, if you were going anyway," Termeer said.

  The commissaris frowned. "I weren't."

  * The ranks of the Amsterdam Police are constable, constable-first-class, sergeant, adjutant, inspector, chief-inspector, commissaris and chief-constable.

  Chapter 2

  "He were," Detective-Sergeant de Gier said two days later. De Gier had Detective-Adjutant Grijpstra to tea at his apartment because Grijpstra had walked out on his girlfriend that evening.

  "Oh yes, oh yes, oh YES?" Grijpstra had asked, stomping down the stairs at Nellie's.

  Nellie kept a hotel at the Straight Tree Ditch. A water pipe had broken that day and food had burned. Reciprocal irritation prevented sexual togetherness from reaching the level of love.

  "But it did," Grijpstra said.

  "Maybe for you," Nellie said and tried to explain the idea "together" but Grijpstra heard only criticism.

  He was tired, after several hours of questioning a junkie charged with breaking and entering. The junkie kept falling asleep and couldn't quite remember where he had worked, the nature of the loot and where or to whom he had sold it.

  "Or maybe not," the junkie said after every statement, not so much because he wanted to obstruct the course of justice but because he wanted, philosophically, to indicate relativity and the chaotic nature of All and Everything.

  "But what do you know?" the junkie asked Grijpstra. "Eh? You loutish moron. You should try the drug yourself, man, then you'll be on God's steps. Won't have to try to figure out what's what anymore. Won't bother free souls like me."

  Grijpstra extracted croquettes from a vending machine in Leyden Street. He could have gone to his own place, a neat upstairs apartment on the Linenmakers Canal vacated some years ago by his family. He had, in order not to be reminded of her, urged his wife to take most of the furnishings. He had never redone the large rooms. The idea at the time was that "an intellige
nt man really needs little." Now it often seemed as if the empty space had no need of Grijpstra. "Pure emptiness illuminated by the glow of the void," chanted poet Grijpstra when She and the Noisy Ones got the hell out. That day the sun was shining.

  Appearances change. He now saw the empty apartment as an extension of Holland's overall overcast climate. "Drafty absence of necessities partly illuminated by a dangling bare bulb," composed poet Grijpstra.

  A Turk listened in. The Turk was a dismal import, once welcomed by the Dutch to perform tedious hard labor. Automation made the Turk superfluous. He was on the dole now, for his residential permit was permanent. The Turk was a thin man in a threadbare coat waiting, like Grijpstra, for a streetcar to splash along. The Turk raised wispy eyebrows. "You speak, friend?"

  "Inspired," Grijpstra said, "by that empty space I call home, I am composing a poem."

  He repeated his line. "Drafty absence..."

  The Turk smiled. "You subtle soul."

  Grijpstra acknowledged the compliment by sneezing.

  The Turk wished him gesundheit.

  It rained harder. Grijpstra shuffled backward into the protection of the tramway shelter. The Turk imitated the big man's movements. Raindrops jumped back from the tarmac and lashed the two men against their ankles.

  "Home," Grijpstra said, "empty, quiet."

  The Turk knew the words but had forgotten their meaning. "Two wives," the Turk said, "two TVs. Five kids moving between loud screens forever. Upstairs neighbors fight on bare boards."

  "You speak good Dutch," Grijpstra said.

  "Not all that difficult," the Turk said peevishly. "Not too many 'words, no grammar to speak of."

  Grijpstra liked that. He passed the Turk a croquette from his paper bag.

  "Pig?" the Turk asked suspiciously.

  "Calf," Grijpstra said generously.

  The Turk said that he had been known to eat pig. Not by mistake either. The Turk was against religious rules that bully. The Turk would consume, Allah be praised, whatever he liked, but if he did eat pig it would be nice to be aware of his sinning. His eye caught the flash of a car's brake lights. The Turk swallowed, smiled, straightened his back, recited: "At alien streetcar stop in slashing darkness my soul glows sudden red, lit up by sin."