The Hollow-Eyed Angel

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  The commissaris handed over his card. De Gier said his name. Charlie read the commissaris's last name easily, without any accent.

  Charlie smiled. "Step right up."

  "You speak Dutch?" the commissaris asked, surprised at Charlie's faultless pronunciation of the many consonants in his long name.

  "I lived in Aachen for a while," Charlie said, "just over the border. I sometimes went across and so I learned how to pronounce the sounds on your side."

  "You speak many languages?" de Gier asked.

  "Anyone," Charlie said, "who has to try to grow up the way I did better learn languages, my friend. Mine are, in chronological order, Yiddish, Polish, German, French and, last but not least, English. English"—Charlie smiled— "is easy to pick up, impossible to master." He beckoned his guests into a clean and empty red-brick hallway. "Always good to be fluent in communication when you're passing through hostile lands."

  "Is Perrin a Polish name?" the commissaris asked.

  "I was once called by another name, long ago, before World War II," Charlie said, "but there was too much blood on it. After I finally reached America I chose my own label. 'Charles' refers to my favorite author, Charles Willeford, a cheerful nihilist. 'Gilbert' is in homage to a schoolteacher I loved prematurely. 'Perrin' is a town in Maine I dream about when the wind goes the wrong way and Watts Street stinks. I sometimes go to Perrin to listen to loons."

  "Loons sometimes chant with coyotes," the commissaris said. "Listening to the chant makes one replace wornout ideas."

  Charlie laughed. "Exactly." He looked into the commissaris's eyes. "That's exactly right. You have obviously been there."

  They followed Charlie, whose bad leg slowed him I 222 1 down somewhat, into an old-fashioned industrial elevator. The cage-like cubicle was furnished like a room. The detectives sat on straight-back chairs while Charlie manipulated two long handles. On a card table a long-stemmed rose drooped gracefully from a slim vase. An Oriental carpet covered the floor.

  "Why not?" Charlie asked. "Nobody likes cages. This lift has been everything. I like to go to auctions or find things in the street, use them, replace them. Last month this was a cabinet for albums of West African colonial stamps that I sold the other day." He waved. "A nonprofit hobby. I liked being able to live with those stamps, for a while. Wonderful colors. Nice little pictures. A chance to experience those colonial times. The lift also exhibited photos of Laurel and Hardy. I collected those for years, then gave them to a museum. Before that I tried to recreate a Maori temple with painted bamboo and a rattan floor. Before that, let me see...right, the complete works of Rene Daumal. Here, on that table." He faced his guests. "Rene Daumal? The name is familiar? No? It is not?"

  The elevator stopped but Charlie didn't open the accordion door yet. "Daumal appeared as a French essayist and poet who wouldn't stay with us. Thirty-six years old in 1943." Charlie clicked his fingers. "Daumal's complete denial cheered me up completely. You really haven't read him?"

  He looked at the commissaris. "A Night of Serious Drinking, or La Grande Beuverie? No?"

  He looked at de Gier. "Mount Analogue? Unfinished. Because Daumal died halfway through the last, but not least, chapter. Of tuberculosis, like the parents of Wille-ford. Such a useful disease. Suddenly sets us up on our own. No?"

  De Gier brought out his notebook and wrote down the poet's name and the titles.

  "You're interested," Charlie said, sliding open the elevator's door soundlessly. Apparently it was well oiled.

  The commissaris said that de Gier understood French and was always looking for nothing, "...and as you said that Daumal denies.

  Charlie concentrated on de Gier. "You know what I liked that Daumal said? No? Then I will tell you."

  He help up a hand until he was sure he had de Gier's attention. "This is beautiful I think. Je vais,' Daumal said, 'vers un avenir qui n'existe pas, laissant derriere moi a chaque instant un nouve.au cadavre.' Would you translate that?"

  De Gier asked Charlie to repeat the phrase.

  Charlie obliged.

  "I go," de Gier translated, "toward a future that doesn't exist, leaving behind me, at every instant, a new corpse."

  "Beautiful," Charlie said. He pointed at the elevator decorated as a Victoria boudoir. "I had all eight of Daumal's published books there. In various editions. I don't have them now. I only kept he Mont Analogue, the one Daumal didn't finish."

  The commissaris looked back at the elevator. "This is the way it's going to stay?"

  "Is anything going to stay the way it is, ever?" Charlie asked.

  "Your next project?"

  "I have shelves holding up human skulls in mind," Charlie said. "I found some on Canal Street. Party stuff for Halloween, but good strong plastic. I knocked holes in them, tied them together and hung them in the river. I'll take them out in a month. Then I'll line them up on the shelves, out of order, some upside down, some on their sides. Make it look like Guatemala. Have a tape recorder play a Charlie Haden ballad whenever the elevator is activated." He peered into de Gier's face. "You like Charlie Haden?"

  De Gier did.

  "What does he play?"

  "Charlie Haden plays double bass, sir."

  Charlie held de Gier lovingly by the shoulders. "You're not applying for discipleship, are you? I don't teach, you know." He kept smiling and winking. "Just kidding, just kidding. Maybe I won't do the skulls at all, let them rot in the river." He looked cheerful. "What do you think of my other idea? A display of plywood dolls, flat like regular people, no depth to those dolls, have a piece of string dangling between their legs, yank the string and we're all waving and smiling."

  The commissaris, still looking back at the elevator, discovered a framed colored-in photograph of a red-haired woman with green eyes and milky skin hung from a metal bar.

  "Carolien," Charlie said. "Bert's girlfriend. Now that Bert is dead I thought I would put that up, Bert's better side...."

  The commissaris stepped back into the elevator to study the picture.

  "It isn't really Carolien," Charlie said. "I found it in a junkyard the day I identified Bert's remains at the morgue. But she does look what Bert told me she looked like. I thought maybe he loved her."

  Charlie led the way to his quarters through another empty hallway lined with scrubbed red bricks. "I live here, top story. Bert had the rest of the building. I may rent his part out, or donate it as a shelter."

  "I heard," de Gier said, "you helped him with his mail orders. The book business. You don't plan to pursue that?"

  Charlie shrugged. "Nah."

  A dog was waiting in Charlie's open doorway.

  "Hi, Kali," de Gier said.

  The German shepherd, wagging her bushy tail slowly, offered the commissaris a paw and barked twice, solemnly and clearly. It greeted de Gier likewise. The dog pulled her paw back and walked ahead of the detectives, looking back to make sure they followed.

  Charlie explained that his home used to be a factory loft, that he'd renovated. He had put in the hardwood floor himself, using remnants sold off by a nearby lumberyard. The plastered walls were filled in some, then whitewashed. The solid mahogany roof beams were cleaned up with steel wool before varnishing, so that the gleaming old wood contrasted nicely with the heavy pine boards supported by the beams.

  Several large easy chairs, a couch and a round dining table with unmatched chairs took their positions as museum objects representing disparate styles. A kitchen stove, two refrigerators and a washer and dryer, together with cupboards and open shelves, all dissimilar but sprayed the same off-white color, were lined up along the vast room's back wall. All furniture and appliances were clean and seemed to be in working order.

  "Found it all," Charlie said. "All you need in Tribeca is a handcart and some free time. I found the handcart too."

  The bedroom was an open garret at the end of the room, reachable via a metal circular staircase. An old-fashioned iron bathtub stood on a platform built out of heavy packing cases. A readin
g lamp was bent over the tub. A TV and VCR combination was set up to provide easy viewing for the bather.

  "Entertainment corner," Charlie said.

  The commissaris, accompanied by Kali, walked through the room—hall, rather. "You like empty walls?"

  "Walls of the soul," Charlie said.

  "Beg pardon?"

  "Better to keep them empty."

  The commissaris looked puzzled.

  "But emptiness can be frightening," Charlie said. "The restless eye, you know. Always wants something to glance at." He looked at de Gier. "Do you read Sanskrit?"

  De Gier did not.

  "Neither do I," Charlie said. "Maybe I should cover the walls with Arabic script, that's quite artistic, all those scribbles and loops. Sanskrit is more odd, though."

  The commissaris looked bewildered.

  "Arabic," Charlie said. "Texts from the Koran. I know little about Islam, the less the better. Writing in unreadable hieroglyphs is Termeer's idea, by the way."

  "Ah."

  "Yes," Charlie said. "It wouldn't be difficult. I photocopy some good-looking Arabic texts up at Columbia University, or the Asia Society maybe, enlarge them, then imitate the writing by hand all over that empty wall." He waved widely. "Real big. I have the space there."

  "That will inspire you?" de Gier asked.

  "A faded purple shade on that broken white," Charlie said. "What was that? Inspire? Sure. I should think so."

  "But Sanskrit texts would inspire you too?"

  "As long as I can't read them," Charlie said. "Otherwise I would get caught up in surface meaning." He looked at the commissaris worriedly. "You know what I mean?"

  The commissaris scratched Kali between her furry ears. She growled, not unkindly, them pushed him gently into one of the easy chairs. "And then you will whitewash those inspiring, but, to you, in the first instance anyway, incomprehensible, texts away again?"

  Charlie watched his empty wall pensively. "Yes, after a while. Could be years, in fact, but I wouldn't keep them there forever. They would get old."

  "You might even learn to read them." The com-missaris laughed. "That's de Gier's problem too. How are you doing with your Spanish text, Rinus?"

  De Gier had read his Alvaro Mutis novel in the subway that morning, without understanding much of what the writer was saying. Losing out on meaning he had been able to appreciate the poetry of Mutis's balanced and musical phrasing. "But when I looked at the pages again I did gain some meaning."

  "Right." Charlie nodded. "I probably would top, looking at my Sanskrit texts from the bathtub. I'd get curious, go back to the library, do some studying. Reflecting." He shook his head sadly. "As I said, get caught up in their kind of, what's the word, comrnonsensical side?"

  "Then what?" the commissaris asked.

  De Gier looked too. "Paint it over. Books get lost. Walls get covered."

  Charlie looked dreamily at his enormous blank wall.

  "Would you leave the wall empty again?" the commissaris asked.

  "I should," Charlie said, "but I think I'll draw future life forms." He took a sketchbook from a shelf. The pages were covered with drawings of beetles. Some insects were complete, others dissected with erect lower bodies—ready to copulate—long, gracefully bent antennae, multiple eyes, jaws with extending feelers, segments of wings.

  "The future," Charlie said. "If I sit in the bath over there and watch the news then I know, like you know, like everybody knows, that we're coming to some endings."

  "We humans," the commissaris said.

  "We humans, sir. Can't handle our unlimited multiplication combined with destructive technology." Charlie shrugged. "No big deal." Charlie smiled. "There's always something else to follow."

  Charlie predicted that a next evolution might be beetle-based. "Beetle-beings might do well for a while, until it all happens again: Intelligence improves, egotism remains, science doubles the life span so the population explodes, the beede race self-destructs, like the human race before it."

  "There could be changes," de Gier objected.

  Charlie's theorizing changed direction. "What if it goes differendy the next time?" he agreed. "What if beetle-beings get it together, learn to live in harmony? Does chaos tolerate contentments? Wouldn't another meteor hit the Beetle sapiens planet, wipe them out like the dinosaurs?"

  "Ah," the commissaris said, not unhappily.

  "You believe in an end to humanity, sir?"

  The commissaris would not refuse to believe in lots of little endings to lots of little things, like humanity, for instance.

  "Soon?"

  There were some signs, weren't there?

  Charlie was surprised. "You're not an optimist, sir? So what do you bet on? We stupidly kill each other or a meteor does it for us?"

  The commissaris thought either way would be just fine, but as Charlie said just now: There's always something else to follow. Personally, he was thinking more of jellyfishlike creatures as a form of future consciousness. Considering the given fact of ice caps melting, oceans growing, lands diminishing, one might predict evolved aquatic beings.

  "Looking like jellyfish?"

  "Mind if I get up?" the commissaris asked the dog.

  Kali stepped back.

  "Why," the commissaris asked as he walked about in Charlie's gigantic space, being careful with the tip of his cane so as not to scratch the hardwood flooring, "why would future life forms develop along lines easily imaginable by our kind of minds? We think of insectlike creatures because insects, like us, have faces, eyes, arms, legs. The future creature may not need any of those."

  Charlie sat on the side of his bathtub. "No?" He nodded. "I see. Yes. Perhaps."

  "Surely," the commissaris said. "The jellyfish, think of it. A semifluid transparent dome. It doesn't walk, it waves. It doesn't see, it feels with tentacles. Essentially different. It functions beautifully. Why should it be like us?"

  "Mhree," Charlie said thoughtfully. "Yes. Eerhtn."

  "Pardon?"

  "That's what Bert used to say," Charlie said. "That reality extends well beyond imagination. The weirder, the more real."

  "The future could be something else entirely," the commissaris said. "Not only beyond our imagination, also beyond our memory. Our memory wouldn't be there, you see. It would have wafted away, along with ourselves."

  Charlie wasn't listening. He bent toward the commissaris, arms stretched, palms up, as if to accept some worthy present. "And these jellyfishlike creatures? How would they go about perpetuating themselves?"

  The commissaris was at the other side of Charlie's vast space and had to shout to bridge the distance. "Jellyfish can multiply like plants if they want," the commissaris shouted. "The creatures grow like fruits on a tree-like structure, but they also have sexual organs, which can be joined while swimming free. The future, like the present and past, will be exciting."

  "Bert," Charlie shouted, "wanted you to go beyond all three of those stages."

  "Bert had his penis ripped off," the commissaris shouted. "Do you know why?"

  Chapter 20

  Adjutant Grijpstra received de Gier's fax, transmitted after breakfast at the Cavendish, at 5:00 P.M., just as the adjutant was ready to go home to his empty apartment. He beeped Cardozo.

  Cardozo, who, together with a fearful Turkish/ Dutch interpreter, was listening to a taped shouting match between leaders of rival protection rackets operating in Amsterdam's Old West section, the new Turkish quarter— a cacophony of exotic swearing that provided no information—was glad to come over.

  "More bullshit from our roving Sergeant Bogus," Grijpstra said. "What do you make of this?" He read de Gier's faxed questions: Where was Jo Termeer on June fourth? What is Jo Termeer's interest in The Road Warrior movie?

  Cardozo didn't feel like trying to interview Jo Termeer again, not even with Grijpstra's hairy hands dangling above his curls. He suggested seeing the movie. "Might give us ideas. We can see Jo later."

  Cardozo was ordered to go rent the
movie. He bicycled about and checked with three different video-rental stores. The Road Warrior happened not to be in stock. He bicycled back to headquarters, quiet now but for Grijpstra's drumming.

  "Right," Grijpstra said, putting his sticks down. "If Jo Termeer has some special interest in the movie he is likely to own it. Go find him, go find the movie. Call me. We will all watch it together."

  Jo Termeer could not be found, either at his place of work, the hair-care salon in the fashionable suburb of Outfield, or at his luxury apartment, above the hair-care salon.

  "Who did you talk to?" Grijpstra asked.

  "To his partner," Cardozo said. "A certain Peter."

  Grijpstra crushed the paper cup he had just filled with coffee from the machine in the corridor outside his office. He hadn't drunk the coffee yet. He walked about his office watching his steaming thighs.

  Cardozo brought a towel.

  "You're smiling," Grijpstra said. "Don't smile. Peter? That would be Termeer's lover, yes? Where is the printout of the original complaint? The hullabaloo that got all this started."

  Cardozo and Grijpstra read the report together. '"Nature person,'" Grijpstra said. "That's what Termeer called Peter. 'Nature person Peter.' Black guy. De Gier liked him. Let's go see Peter, Simon."

  It was the era during which Amsterdam was beginning to tackle its traffic problem. In order to discourage vehicles from using the congested quaysides, parking-meter rates had been tripled. Offending cars were towed quickly or immobilized with steel clamps, removable upon payment of a large fine in cash. Police vehicles, unless marked as such, were no longer exempt; detectives were beginning to use public transport.

  It was raining and the bus was first late, then slow. Grijpstra hummed a song at the bus stop and napped while the bus heaved its way through traffic.

  "Food first," Grijpstra said, seeing an elegant bistro next to the hair salon "Jo and Peter."