The Japanese Corpse ac-5

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  "Hey," de Gier said. Grijpstra slept on. De Gier tiptoed to the drum set and picked up a stick.

  "Yes?" Grijpstra asked when the stick had hit the cymbal and the room was filled with the disc's ear-splitting brass clang. "What is it, sergeant? Something urgent?"

  "No. Just that I have been working while you were snoozing away here. Why don't you work? The city pays you a salary, doesn't it?"

  "Does it?" Grijpstra asked. "I thought it was a wage, a small wage. I was talking to a garbage collector the other day; he earns as much as I do."

  "There are no garbage collectors anymore," de Gier said, trying to coax fire out of his old-fashioned battered lighter. "There are only sanitation engineers nowadays. And their jobs are similar to ours. They keep the place clean."

  "Clean," Grijpstra said, and replaced the drumstick which de Gier had left on his desk. "Have you looked at the canals lately? There is so much rubbish floating around that the ducks have to peck a hole before they can settle down. And it is the same with crime. The chief inspector of the old city was telling me that they had thirty-two armed robberies during the weekend, right in the street."

  De Gier shrugged.

  "You don't believe it? I have the reports here somewhere, in the Telex file. You haven't been reading the file, have you? You should, it is part of your duty."

  "Yes, yes, but they exaggerate, you know. A drunk swaggers up to somebody in the street and says 'Your life or your money.' The drunk is seventy years old, he limps and he can't stand up properly. Our citizen shits himself, gives the drunk his pocketbook with a tenguilder note in it and runs to the police station. Armed robbery, right in the street. The drunk may have had a pocketknife in his hand, clasped most probably."

  "Yes. What's the time?"

  "On your watch," de Gier said. "Lift your wrist and look at it; you are awake now."

  Grijpstra looked at his watch. Five o'clock. He got up and walked to the door. "What about our pretty lady?" he asked as he opened the door.

  "I am taking her to the station in a minute. Cardozo is there already. I introduced her to him so he knows who he is supposed to protect. The commissaris is being very thorough about the case. Do you think these yakusa or whatever they call themselves will try to have a go at her?"

  "I don't think," Grijpstra said. "Officers think. I am going home to change and shave and later I will go to the Japanese restaurant. You are supposed to chase those two jokers tonight, aren't you?"

  De Gier nodded.

  "Let me know if something happens. You can reach me at the restaurant, I wrote the number down for you. Here you are. Maybe I can join you."

  The temperature had dropped to a comfortable level and Grijpstra was smiling to himself as he crossed Leidse Square aiming straight for the huge silhouette of a gigantic plane tree towering gently at the edge of the square, its foliage creating a roof of peace next to the growling traffic of cars and buses taking people to restaurants and cinemas. It was almost seven o'clock when Grijpstra reached the protection of the tree, and he stopped to look around, glancing at the cubist concrete sculpture which the city fathers had placed under the tree some thirty years ago and which was showing an interesting growth of moss and lichen. An elderly man was sitting on the sculpture, dangling his legs. Grijpstra stared at the man who nodded and grinned. Grijpstra nodded in response. He had recognized the old fellow, a petty thief and burglar, in and out of jail for many years, but that was long ago now.

  "All right?" he asked, and the man dropped down and ambled toward him.

  "Yes, adjutant, all right now. How are you?"

  "Busy," Grijpstra said, "and I don't want to be busy; it's a beautiful evening. How have you been keeping?"

  "I am too old for the game now," the man said, and offered a cigarette. Grijpstra took it and the man struck a match, holding the box carefully as if it might explode. Grijpstra inhaled and did his best not to make a face. It was a menthol cigarette. A polar bear fart, Grijpstra thought, holding the cigarette away from his mouth.

  "I am fine really," the man said. "They give me welfare now and I have a sort of job too. Cousin of mine is a parking attendant at the museum, but he drinks a bit and he doesn't like to work too much, so I replace him every now and then."

  "Good tips?" Grijpstra said, forgetting himself and taking another draw on the cigarette. This time he made a face.

  "Yes, good tips, especially when I wash their cars."

  "That's hard work." Grijpstra said, and smiled sympathetically.

  "Burglarizing was harder," the man said, "especially setting up for it. I would spend hours and then I would still forget something or other and have to go back again. Washing cars is easier; all you need is water and a cloth, and a brush. I have some fine brushes."

  "Good," Grijpstra said. There wasn't much more to say, and they shook hands and Grijpstra strolled on.

  The Japanese restaurant was only a few blocks away and he followed the canal, keeping close to the water side. He was thinking about old movies, movies he had seen before the war. There had been Japanese in those movies, wicked silent men who lived in quiet luxury, pulling strings that made other men act and suffer. He was trying to remember what sort of evil those bad yellow men had gone in for. Opium, he supposed. Blackmail perhaps. He couldn't remember. He saw a vague picture of a small man sitting in a large chair, his face partly hidden by cigarette smoke. When the police came he dropped through a hidden trapdoor and there had been a chase through sewers. The man was shot at the end of the chase and he died. Had he smiled when he died? A leering evil smile?

  Grijpstra threw the menthol cigarette away and stopped to look at a gull, grazing the canal's surface, and grinned. It would be funny if he should walk into a situation like that now. But things had changed and trapdoors were no longer in fashion and he very much doubted if the sewers were wide enough to allow for a chase. But there was still evil, he reassured himself. Mr. Nagai, the shy intellectual sitting in a cane chair with a stack of pocketbooks near his feet, had undoubtedly been shot, and heroin was moving through the city, heading east to the American garrisons in Germany, corrupting young men into the vague stupor that leads to hell. He knew that the drugs department estimated that they were catching a tenth part of the traffic. Maybe they couid raise the percentage a little now. A bit of luck, he thought, and shrugged, pushing himself into motion again. A little bit of luck that might peter out again if they weren't careful. The wicked men called themselves yakusa, and he had floundered into their maze. He thought of de Gier, who would be checking hotel registers now and of the commissaris who would be on his way to The Hague to see the ambassador and of the State Police cars trying to find tracks of the white BMW. Somebody would have to come up with something and they would go from there.

  He stopped again and looked at the gable of a narrow house. He was in a side street, a one-way street with hardly any traffic, and the sounds of a clavichord came flooding out of a first floor window. Bach, a prelude. He was familiar with the piece. De Gier had the record; he remembered listening to it some months ago in de Gier's small apartment in the suburbs. But this was no record. The musician had to be a professional and the sad exact melody came through beautifully. A few notes stumbled and were repeated. Very nice, Grijpstra said aloud. A very nice evening altogether. His wife hadn't been home and he had been able to shave in peace. His favorite shirt had been on the shelf. He had drunk coffee and looked at the fuchsia flowering in the living room. He had been worrying about the fuchsia lately, but it was doing very well now. It had been pleasant under the plane tree in the square. The music stopped, Grijpstra waited. It began again. Bach's Italian Concerto, very fast but still exact. The notes were so close that they touched, but each note had its own identity and roundness.

  Lovely, Grijpstra said, and looked down the street. He saw the Japanese restaurant, marked by a sign hanging under an awning. The sign was a single character, brushed on a white background. He began to walk toward it, feeling for the note that was c
rumpled in the side pocket of his jacket. He could feel his pistol through the lining of his pocket and the image of the wicked character in the old movie flashed through his mind again.

  "Irasshai," the girl said when he bent down to walk under the cloth that partly hid the restaurant entrance.

  "Pardon?" Grijpstra asked.

  "Welcome," the girl said. She was Japanese, a tiny smiling figure in a kimono beckoning him to come farther. "Do you have a reservation?"

  "I phoned," he said. "Grijpstra is the name. I was told that there wouldn't be a table but you would hold a seat at the bar for me."

  "Please," the girl said, and gestured toward the back of the restaurant. He gave her the note and she looked at the small scribbled cursory script. Her hand shot up and covered her mouth. The slanting eyes widened.

  "Miss Andrews," Grypstra said. "Joanne Andrews, she came to see me and gave me this note. I was to give it to you." He fished out his wallet and showed her his identification.

  "Police," the girl said. She had regained her original smile. "Please come in, sir. I will tell the manager you are here; there is some very nice food tonight, have you eaten Japanese food before?"

  "No," Grijpstra said, "but I would like to." He looked about him while the girl welcomed another customer. She was very small, the white kimono was wrapped around the slim tiny body, a wide cotton sash kept the exotic dress in place. He noted the flower design on the kimono and spent a few seconds looking at the girl. The garment didn't accentuate her breasts but he saw the tight lines of her bottom, and the delicate bare neck. His hand came up and played with his mustache while he tried to keep his eyes serious. His sudden conclusion was amusing him. A different approach, he was saying to himself, but it's the same thing in the end. We look at legs and breasts, they look at necks and bottoms.

  The girl had turned round and Grijpstra dropped his hand. His face had assumed his usual fatherly look, reserved for contact with young ladies. "This way please," she said, and walked ahead. She didn't really walk but shuffled, the feet pointing inward, small feet in white socks with the big toe apart, resting on high sandals.

  He sat at the bar and studied the menu but gave up. The words were too foreign and although the menu tried to explain, in Dutch and English, what the various dishes were supposed to be he still felt lost. The dishes sounded like children's rhymes. He put the menu down again and looked around. The top of the bar was a thick slab of butcherboard and he caressed the soft shining wood. The bar would be oiled almost daily he thought, with linseed oil probably. He had made a tabletop for his wife's kitchen once, using wood of the same quality; it had been very expensive. He had thought his wife would appreciate working on the smooth surface, but she hadn't noticed the subtle coloring and velvet touch and had slopped food on it and burned rings with hot pots and pans.

  His eyes swept around. He saw a young man, immaculate in a white jacket that left a wide V-line of bare chest, working with vegetables on a table behind the bar. He was cutting the stalks of spring onions so fast that the knife had become a blur. On a dish an array of fresh vegetables had been arranged, the different greens accentuating the sudden red explosion of a tomato. Another young man was cutting a raw fish, wrapping the pieces in cold sticky rice and placing them on a large plate. Grijpstra's mouth watered. He liked to eat raw herring off the street stalls in the center of the city, but this fish looked better than a herring. What was it? Cod? Pollock? Mackerel? He swallowed and kept looking, but remembered that he was supposed to investigate and forced himself to take in his surroudings. A high ceiling, made of narrow thin boards held together by slats of almost the same color. The two shades were in harmony but only just. If the slats had been a little darker the effect would have been spoiled. He nodded to himself. They push it as far as they can, he said, almost aloud, as far as they can. He remembered the shuffling gait of the girl. If she had bent her feet a little more she would have looked grotesque, like the pigeons that dominate the surface of most of the pavements of Amsterdam's squares. But she knew how far she could go.

  Yet, in the war the Japanese had pushed it too far. So they were capable of overdoing it. Capable of killing a fellow countryman in a car on the highway. Squeezing the trigger of some automatic weapon at a few feet from the victim's head, maybe no more than one foot. They might even have pushed the muzzle against the unfortunate man's head. He saw the flash of the old movie again, the wicked Japanese criminal, sitting behind a large desk, pressing his thin fingers together and glinting through his spectacles while he ordered one of his henchman to dispose of an enemy. Maybe the Japanese were also very obedient and therefore dangerous. Dutch criminals argue with their bosses and shout and use rough language and refuse to do as they are told, so Dutch crime is not too violent, and certainly not sinister, not very often anyway.

  The girl was at his side. "Please follow me," she said in an odd mixture of Dutch and English. "The manager and his wife expect you in the special room upstairs." Grijpstra frowned. His English wasn't too good, although he had sweated on the language for his police examination. He knew enough words but he had difficulty in combining them into proper sentences and he knew his accent was so heavy that foreigners found it hard to understand him. With Japanese it might be even worse. The commissaris should have sent de Gier, whose English was fairly fluent, for de Gier had spent some time in London, and had once gone as far as Cornwall, where he assisted the British police in arresting a Dutchman who had been spending a few hundred thousand guilders in stolen checks and securities. Grijpstra grunted. The commissaris often directed his men to get into situations to which they weren't fitted. The old man did it on purpose.

  Grijpstra got up and followed the girl. He thought of a theory that a criminologist had elaborated once, during an evening's lecture for police officers. Man is incapable of doing things on purpose, the tall cadaverous-looking expert had stated, smiling at his audience as if he were begging their pardon. Things happen, that's all, and man tries, frantically, to adjust to whatever is happening to him. Grijpstra had agreed that night, but he had modified his agreement later. Some men can create a situation, do things on purpose, deliberately plan a course of events. The commissaris could do it; he didn't always do it, but he could push the line of cause and effect and force it into another direction. And although such an activity was admirable and curious, it wasn't always pleasant. It twisted other men, especially the men who were working with the commissaris. Maybe it improved them.

  Grijpstra sighed. He didn't particularly want to improve. Still, he refused a transfer to a much easier job. He could have been assisting the officers responsible for police vehicles and garages now. A nine-to-five job with good holidays that couldn't be upset, for vehicles break down with a monotonous rhythm and their behavior can be caught in rules. Crime is a jumpy affair, here today, nowhere next week, and then continuous for several weeks with all sorts of sudden twists. He hadn't taken the easy job. Too weak, he thought, too weak to get out of the groove. Too weak to ask for a divorce too. He badly wanted a divorce and the chance of moving into a quiet room somewhere, a room without a screaming TV and a fat woman padding about on large swollen feet. But he still had small children, and he felt he had to stay with them. For another ten years perhaps. Ten long aggravating years that would make him deaf and give him ulcers. He shuddered.

  The special room was even better than the quiet elegant restaurant downstairs. The girl had knelt down and was unlacing his boots. Grijpstra stood on one leg, holding on to a post that was a bare tree, stripped of its bark. There was another post like that in the room, flanking an opening in the wall, like an open cupboard. Its back wall was white and a scroll had been hung that dominated the bit of empty space. A single flower in a narrow vase decorated the lower part of the niche. Grijpstra looked at the scroll, six Chinese characters, the first three identical.

  "Do you like the scroll?" a soft voice asked. He looked down into a smiling face. A Japanese woman, some forty years old, the smile broug
ht out her buck teeth, filled with an abundance of gold. She spoke English as he had expected. This woman was also dressed in a kimono, but the color was more sedate than its counterpart in the restaurant. The cold politeness of the smile softened somewhat when she noticed Grijpstra's discomfort. There was a small hole in his left sock and a toe peeped through; he was trying to hide it with his other foot.

  "Sit down, please," the lady said, pointing at a low table. There were three cushions on the floor, which was made of thick mats, each mat six-by-two feet and bordered with a strip of printed cotton showing a simple flower motive. "Tatamis," she said. "We imported the mats from my country, like everything else in this room. In the restaurant we worked with local materials but here everything is true Japanese."

  There was a quiet pride in her voice and Grijpstra was impressed. "Very beautiful," he said and she smiled again, the smile still softening.

  He lowered himself till his knees came to rest on the cushion. He felt the mat under the cushion, it was springy. "Nice and bouncy," he said.

  She nodded. "In my country everybody lives on these mats, they are the right size for sleeping, see?" She pointed at the mat next to Grijpstra's cushion and when she saw that he didn't understand, quickly dropped to the floor and stretched out, folding her hands under her head and closing her eyes. She made a snoring sound and Grijpstra laughed.

  She got up and her eyes twinkled. "My husband is in the kitchen," she said, and made a gesture at the girl who had come in holding a tray with two beer bottles and glasses. The girl knelt in one smooth movement and put the tray on the table. She raised herself again and left the room, kneeling at the door, sliding it open, and shuffling quickly through it.

  Grijpstra had watched the girl and turned to his hostess. "They always go through doors like that?" he asked.

  "It is the custom, but modern Japanese girls often forget to do it now," she said, and opened a bottle, pouring the beer carefully into his glass. He did the same for her and they held the glasses up and drank.