The Hollow-Eyed Angel ac-13

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  Teddy had also seen boys enter by Termeer's separate entrance and had tried to warn them off, but the boys had to finance their habits. Charlie finally learned why Kali whined and growled when Termeer was entertaining company in his part of the building.

  Charlie told the detectives that, after having listened to Teddy, he had checked Termeer's premises, using his duplicate keys.

  "We heard that you sometimes helped Termeer with his holy book mail-order business," the commissaris said. "But you say you had no idea of what was going on in the basement?"

  Charlie said that he hadn't spent much time with Termeer in the last few years, that his fantasy of working with a kindred spirit had come to an end long ago. Termeer, although maybe able to perceive further than most, had turned out to be dour, twisted into himself, hardly civil most of the time, moody, even boring.

  "You were unaware of Termeer's dark side?"

  Charlie had no idea until he lunched with Teddy at New Noodletown in the Bowery.

  "Recendy?"

  "Yes."

  "How long before Termeer died?"

  Charlie calculated. "A week? Ten days?"

  "You confronted your tenant?"

  Charlie had been considering a confrontation, but then there was no need.

  "Where were you when Termeer died?"

  Charlie said that he might have been in the park, or else on his way home. The park had been too busy that day.

  "Did you see Termeer in the park that Sunday morning?"

  "Yes."

  "Did you talk to him?"

  "No."

  "Why did you inquire about Termeer at the Central Park Precinct the next day?"

  Because, Charlie said, Kali had been restless all night, pacing and whining. Charlie himself also had a bad feeling. He had let himself into Termeer's part of the building early the next morning. There was no one there, which was unusual because Termeer enjoyed his water bed and liked to sleep late.

  "Why," asked de Gier, "did you tell us Termeer's death had to happen?"

  Charlie sighed. "Because he couldn't allow his personality to corrupt itself further."

  "He didn't kill himself, did he?"

  "No."

  "He was killed?"

  "Yes."

  "Did you kill him?"

  "No." Charlie smiled. "No, I didn't. I wouldn't kill anyone. I will not defend the world by using violence. I prefer escaping."

  "Really?" the commissaris asked. "You don't say. What if you couldn't escape any further? You would jump, would you?"

  Charlie smiled. "But of course."

  "And you wouldn't take anyone with you? A few bad guys? To feel better?"

  "Nah," Charlie said. He shrugged. "Fuck the bad guys."

  De Gier was still pursuing his original line of reasoning. "Why didn't you kill Bert Termeer? There was your immense disappointment in a man you had sponsored, there was fury, there was opportunity, you're a very intelligent man, Mr. Perrin, you could have come up with some excellent plan, you…"

  Charlie said he had been thinking of calling the cops, of showing them Termeer's basement.

  "What if the cops took no action?"

  But they would have, Charlie said.

  Charlie's fatal attack on his tenant, the commissaris thought in the Cavendish bathtub, would have been planned carefully.

  Charlie knew Termeer would be freezing and frolicking in the park that Sunday morning. Charlie would know about Termeer's bad heart. A performing Termeer would be vulnerable. All Charlie had to do was hover about, wait for the crowd to focus its attention elsewhere, grab Termeer, drag him into the bushes, yell accusations in his face, shake Termeer violently, terrify him until he suffered a heart attack.

  There were the dentures, found at some distance from Termeer's corpse. The dentures flew out of Termeer's mouth as he was crying, begging for forgiveness…

  Good luck comes to those who are lucky, the commissaris thought, letting more hot water into his tub by twisting the faucet with an extended toe. There was Maggie's big chestnut horse kicking Termeer as an unexpected preliminary.

  Now came the theory's weak part.

  The commissaris agreed with de Gier that Charlie could be excused for wanting to punish a child pornographer posing as a prophet. Shaking and slapping? Okay. Castrating a former friend?

  And again, the commissaris thought, good luck comes to those who are lucky. The corpse was robbed by a derelict, then partly eaten by animals.

  No witnesses, wounds, clothes, prints, traces.

  "Let it go, sir," de Gier had said during the return trip on the subway. "We have no jurisdiction. The local police are hung up on another theory. All the evidence is long gone. Our suspect is intelligent, unwilling to confess, sympathetic. The victim was mad and bad."

  "And dead anyway."

  The commissaris couldn't see himself bothering Paulie Potock, one of the few Jewish children to survive the Nazi atrocities in Poland. After the basement revelation, back in Charlie's artistically pleasing environment, the commissaris had inquired into Charlie's painful past and the source of his present comforts.

  Charlie talked easily, breaking out the cookies again. "Japanese," Charlie said. "Advanced food. There is a nice store in SoHo. Seaweed is the future."

  "How did you get out of Poland, sir?"

  The detectives saw Paulie, together with forty-eight other Jewish Polish little kids, guarded by two SS men, march, with a few surviving mothers, to Nowogrodziec Railway Station.

  March 1945: The Russian Third Army was close. The Nazis were emptying out all death camps. A train waited. Boxcars closed off with barbed wire were to take the Jews to Germany to be killed, but Soviet war planes dived and set the train on fire.

  It had been snowing heavily. The children and the mothers marched in singe file. Paulie was trying not to drag his bad leg. The mother up front sang out: "One, two, three."

  In order to obey the guards but to delay reaching the platform, where, because of the train not taking them to Germany, all prisoners would surely be shot, the column moved forward on "one" and "two" but stepped back on "three."

  The SS men, older soldiers, tired too, stumbled along.

  The German forces had long since run out of motor fuel.

  The SS men disappeared into the woods when they heard a rumble of powerful engines.

  The column stopped when black spots appeared on the eastern snow-covered plain.

  The spots were little tanks that grew in size as they came nearer.

  The huge tanks stopped close to the standing column. From the tank turrets jumped older kids, Russian tank soldiers.

  The Jewish Polish kids were in the eight-to-nine-year-old age group and the Russian soldier kids were in the fourteen-to-fifteen-year-old age group.

  March 1945: The Russian army had lost ten million young and middle-aged male and female soldiers. Old folks manufactured deadly equipment to be handled by kids.

  Once liberated, Paulie, without relatives but knowing by now how to take care of himself, lived here and there, and finally moved to America. He worked in a bank. He received money from the new Germany government, Wiedergutmachungs Funding, "money to make good," a fairly large amount that he invested profitably. He also went crazy. He was institutionalized for depression. A Chinese-American psychiatric nurse suggested the patient should write a list of things he liked, and brought him a new pencil and a sheet of white paper, which Paulie destroyed.

  Every day the nurse brought fresh paper and another new pencil, which Paulie tore up and broke, until, one pleasant morning, there was a sparrow on his windowsill. Charlie watched the sparrow, then wrote his list of Nice Things to Do. Watching seals off the Maine Coast would be nice. Having a dog would be nice. Starting his own growth fund would be nice. Owning lots of private space would be nice. Arranging temporarily owned objects would be nice. Laying an assorted hardwood floor- changing his name-working out in Central Park-would be nice. It would be nice to speculate as to what would happen (Charl
ie had read some Nietzsche by then, and tried to follow existentialism) to his state of mind if he removed the concept of selfishness from cynicism.

  The commissaris wanted to leave but de Gier, who had been guided to and from the bathroom by Kali, asked how Charlie had found a seeing-eye dog.

  It was the other way around, Charlie said.

  The dog had approached him when he was working out in Central Park. The dog was scooting along on her bottom, trying to get the path's gravel to scratch her infected and blocked anal glands.

  The dog was an Alsatian; in the death camps the SS had used Alsatians to terrorize the inmates.

  Charlie walked away but the dog ran after him, sat on the path and offered her paw.

  Charlie took the dog to an animal clinic. A vet squeezed the almost bursting glands empty and prescribed medication. Charlie bought a bag of food and emptied it out in the street. The dog ate everything and barked her thanks.

  On the way home Kali-he had named her by then-didn't allow Charlie to cross a street against a red light. She pushed his leg when the end of a sidewalk came close, or when roller skaters got near.

  Charlie visited the Lighthouse, the society for the blind, which promised to make inquiries about a lost seeing-eye dog. He was called a week later. A woman, who wouldn't give her name, said her blind husband had died and that she had abandoned his dog in Central Park. "You keep her. I never liked her."

  The woman hung up.

  Chapter 23

  The commissaris, dozing off in his bathtub, faced the long-legged tram driver. De Gier, musing in the Metropolitan Museum, faced a Papuan demon sculpture.

  Both detectives, at about the same time, felt a wave of serious and multiple misgivings. The wave wiped out their conclusion that Charles G. Perrin could be controlled by evil. He could not. Therefore he could not commit evil either. Charlie castrate Bert? Never.

  The commissaris, wide awake now, clambered out of his bathtub, dried himself and dressed quickly.

  De Gier left the Metropolitan Museum and walked to the nearby Cavendish.

  The commissaris planned to face the hollow-eyed tram driver directly, to pull the phantom out of her hazy dreamscapes.

  The commissaris and de Gier met in the Cavendish's lobby, where they were greeted by Ignacio. "A sus ordenes, sefiores."

  The detectives found comfortable armchairs.

  "Charlie is a good guy," de Gier said. "Don't you think so, sir? That dog, the way he treated that dog, and even better, the way the dog treated Charlie. I should have seen that."

  "Yes," the commissaris said.

  "Also the general atmosphere of Charlie's part of number two Watts Street," de Gier said. "I felt happy there."

  The commissaris had felt happy too.

  "And," de Gier said, "there was the tea ceremony, and all that hoo-ha about the elevator-that was nice, didn't you think so? Moving about in an exhibition that moves? And the empty wall with the invisible incomprehensible Sanskrit "

  "Arabic," the commissaris said.

  "Arabic," de Gier said, "and the way he had fitted that hardwood floor together, that was beautiful. I thought, you can look at those patterns when you feel bad and it will be better. And that one, two forward in Poland and three backward "

  The commissaris agreed.

  "So he didn't do it," de Gier said.

  The commissaris thought that might be a possibility, but he wanted to know why the hollow-eyed angel wouldn't leave him in peace, and now he meant to see the voodoo lady.

  Ignacio was asked to telephone Mamere. He came back to say that Mamere was home and expected to see the commissaris within the hour.

  "A hundred bucks," Ignacio said. "Bad dreams don't come cheap."

  De Gier checked his map. Ignacio helped him locate Brooklyn, Flatbush and Nostrand Avenue beyond Flat-bush and told him where to catch the Number Five train.

  The detectives sat quietly in the subway.

  The Nostrand Avenue block where Mamere lived consisted of three-story buildings, with stores on the ground level, some separated by small alleys.

  Mamere's was one of the better buildings.

  De Gier waited in a coffee shop while the commissaris rang the buzzer and then hobbled up the steps.

  Mamere, after pulling the blinds of her small sitting room and diffusing the light to please the spirits, sat in a large yellow reclining armchair and the commissaris sat in a large orange reclining armchair. Mamere's dog, which she told him was the grandson of the dog in the painting at Le Chat Complet, lolled a long red tongue out of its furry black face.

  "Les dollars Mamere asked.

  He handed them over: two twenties, one ten, one fifty.

  "Merci. You relax now, don't care about nothing."

  Nothing would please the commissaris more. He semi-dozed while Mamere hummed, then sang a fairly long song. African West Coast, the commissaris thought, although he hadn't been there. Toward the end of the song the commissaris lost his mind, although his mind never left the room, for he saw it float around Mamere's potted plants and the budgie birds in their multistoried bamboo cage, waft through the eyes of an alligator skull on a sideboard, then whirl about in the smoke of smouldering herb leaves.

  He really liked being mindless.

  Mindless, he saw Road Warrior drag a white-bearded man into some bushes. It didn't matter that the commissaris hadn't seen the movie and that he had never met Bert Termeer. There they were, Road Warrior screaming abuse, Bert Termeer whining for mercy.

  Road Warrior shook the old man like a dog shakes a squirrel. Termeer lost his dentures. The commissaris saw Road Warrior bend over the helpless body of his enemy, saw a sharp blade flash and blood spout. He saw Road Warrior emerge from flowering azalea bushes, a zombie from the grave, moving one foot, the other foot, one foot, the other foot.

  He didn't see the hollow-eyed long-legged beautiful blond angel. He asked Mamere about the angel when she let him out. "Someone you know?" Mamere asked. "More dollars sometime soon?"

  "The angel drives a tram, Mamere."

  "You can't trust angels," Mamere said.

  "I saw Road Warrior and he wasn't Charlie," the commissaris said, "as I knew all along, and didn't want to know all along. I was sorry for the fellow, and I was flattered, of course. Coming to me, the Grand Old Man of Crime Detection. What did I see coming? What did you see coming? Did you see the uncle-loving nephew, fellow cop, fearless street fighter, Grijpstra's star student?" He glared at de Gier. "The truth, Rinus, stares me in the face, and my mind rushes off to look for lies. How many times has this happened?"

  He sat next to de Gier in the coffee shop, sipping weak coffee and eating a donut as if that is what you do after having lost your mind for a while, then, alas, regained it. You sit in a coffee shop, between big black men on small stools, and you ask for more weak coffee and another donut.

  "You know what you get when you eat a donut?" a man wearing a baseball cap the wrong way around told another. "You get a zero with the ring removed."

  While riding the Number Five train back to Manhattan, de Gier wrote to the commissaris's dictation. De Gier got off at Fourteenth Street to make his dinner engagement with Maggie and the commissaris got off at Eighty-sixth Street to fax his notes home.

  Chapter 24

  "Now what?" Grijpstra asked, reading the commissaris's latest fax. "How many fourths of June do we have here, eh?"

  He put the paper down, staring at it furiously, then brightening up. "Cardozo!"

  Cardozo grunted.

  Grijpstra's smile widened. "Let me tell you how you do this. You really disliked that Eugene character, didn't you?" Grijpstra beamed at Cardozo, slumped behind de Gier's desk. Grijpstra suddenly scowled again. "You did dislike him." Grijpstra thumped the desk. "Am I right?"

  Cardozo opened long-lashed eyes. "I dislike all assholes."

  Grijpstra nodded. "Good, good, good. Tell you what you do. You go and find this asshole Eugene, and you meet him somewhere…lemmesee, lemmesee, what's a goo
d place for two assholes to meet…?" Grijpstra looked out of the window, into the cruel yellow eyes of a sea gull flying by. "How about Vondel Park?"

  Cardozo stared. "Meet to do what?"

  "You extract information."

  Cardozo grunted.

  "Information as to Jo Termeer's whereabouts on June Fourth this year."

  Cardozo straightened up. "We've already done that, remember. You asked Peter?"

  "Phone Peter now," Grijpstra said. "Peter will know where to locate Eugene. Phone Eugene and tell him you want to meet him in Vondel Park. Today. At sunset."

  "You want ME to tell YOU about my good friend Jo Termeer?" Eugene asked. "A storm trooper interviews a FAIRY? Are you going to BEAT me?"

  Cardozo and Eugene strolled along Vondel Park's main path. Evening fell.

  Cardozo fell too, because Eugene had hooked his foot behind Cardozo's leg and put his hand against Cardozo's chest. Eugene's leg pulled, Eugene's hand pushed.

  Cardozo fell, head over heels. Cardozo stood.

  Eugene and Cardozo laughed. They were two karate students exercising in Amterdam's most beautiful park, between ponds where exotic ducks floated about slowly, giant carp patroled leisurely and cranes stood on one leg under ornamental shade trees.

  Eugene, being the winner, shook hands with Cardozo, who was the loser.

  Eugene's hand squeezed painfully. Cardozo's thumb pressed the back of Eugene's hand. Cardozo moved his other hand under Eugene's elbow. Cardozo pushed Eugene's elbow up and Eugene's hand down.

  Eugene yelled and sobbed.

  "Swan-wrist hold," Cardozo said. "I could have broken your arm. You want that? You don't want that." Cardozo smiled. "Now tell me everything about Jo Termeer."

  Cardozo fell again, because Eugene had hooked his foot behind Cardozo's leg again and put his hand again Cardozo's chest again. Leg pulled, hand pushed.

  This time the falling Cardozo pulled Eugene's arm while he kicked Eugene's knee. Cardozo jumped up again, Eugene groveled in the gravel.

  "Baboon's knee," Cardozo said.

  "Don't you two lads have anything better to do?" asked an elderly lady. She helped Eugene up. "You two go and study Rudolf Steiner."