Janwillem De Wetering - The Hollow-Eyed Angel

"I like America," the commissaris said.

O'Neill grumbled. "So do I. This is the place. I want to drive cross-country again, or hang out in the Keys. I used to work summers there, crew on sailboats. Or go to Hawaii again, hard to be unhappy in Hawaii, right? They've got it all there." He gestured. "We've got it all everywhere, and if it ain't, UPS will deliver it tomorrow morning. Coast to coast. And anywhere in between."

"And the UPS driver will speak English," the commissaris said. "And the currency will be dollars."

"Efficiency, right?" O'Neill laughed. "I've been to Europe and you have to change language every two hours, but you can't, so you're in trouble. And the backdrops seem so small there." He gestured toward the World Trade Center's twin towers. "Big stuff here." He raised an eyebrow at the commissaris. "You've traveled around in this country?"

The commissaris had been to Maine once. He talked about coves, bays, hills that looked like mountains to a Dutchman. "Few people around. Amazing wildlife. Holland now imports its wildlife from Poland and then has to buy more because it starves or gets poached. Ravens, wild boars, deer-it's hard to share a square mile with nine hundred Dutchmen."

"Lots of lobsters in Maine." O'Neill was frowning again. "But you freeze your ass off in winter." He touched the commissaris's bare wrist. "Know what some jokers did with frozen Henriette? Stuck her in a fifty-five-gallon trash can, upside down. You've seen the signs?

DON'T LITTER."

The commissaris had seen the signs.

"Those jokers tried to burn the corpse too, but they ran out of lighter fuel."

The commissaris mumbled disapproval.

"Hurrell caught them," O'Neill said. "A neat piece of detection. Lot of work. This happened early in the morning, when there are only bakers around, paperboys, cheap whores, maybe some sleepless old person looking out of a window."

"He found witnesses like that?" The commissaris sounded surprised.

O'Neill nodded. "Sure did. Hurrell's name isn't in the report because he couldn't take the credit. The defense would claim that he, as the kid's father, was biased."

"Suspects convicted?"

"Yeah," O'Neill said. "The D.A. charged the jokers with intentional and unlawful mutilation of a corpse. That's a felony. One to three years in the clinker."

"And now Sergeant Hurrell won't pay attention to the death of Bert Termeer," the commissaris said, "because he sees Maggotmaid as Henriette, his own child."

"He'll get Trevor," O'Neill said. "You saw what is going on in Central Park, right under your window. Central Park is Hurrell's turf. He'll work the park, get the right statements and hit Trevor with a heavy drug charge."

The commissaris could think of other charges. He tried to translate them from the Netherlandic Penal Code. "Attempted manslaughter – Trevor pushed Maggotmaid through a glass door, causing death by negligence twice, first by administering an overdose of a controlled substance, second by locking, and leaving, a body in the hot and unventilated trunk of a parked car."

O'Neill concentrated on his driving.

"What do you think, Chief?"

O'Neill growled. "None of that will stick." He sighed. "Hurrell is using the right tactics. He pretends he's finished with Trevor, lulling him to sleep, so to speak. He wants to catch Trevor carrying at least a kilo."

O'Neill parked the car. They got out and began to walk. "But you have no case anyway. Bert Termeer died of disease, and maybe exposure." He grinned at the commissaris. "There is no doubt in my mind that the Termeer death was from natural causes. I want to close the case."

The commissaris agreed. He had studied the reports the previous night, seen the photographs. Now he had an expert opinion as formulated by an experienced colleague. The commissaris was about to tell Chief O'Neill that he agreed that Termeer's death was due to an unfortunate combination of circumstances beyond the control of any human agency.

It was just a coincidence, he told himself, that a touring bus appeared. The bus displayed a big number 2 up front. The driver was a blond young woman with heavily made-up eyes. She stopped her huge vehicle soundlessly so that the little old gentleman, walking with some difficulty and the help of a gold-tipped cane, could cross the street at his ease. The commissaris raised his cane in thanks.

The driver waved.

"Strange-looking woman," O'Neill said, walking next to the commissaris. "Macabre makeup. Did you see those eyes?"

Amsterdam's chief-constable wasn't ready to sign the document that Grijpstra had brought along and placed on his superior's desk. The CC was talking about playing golf at Crailo and the sudden death of his friend the baron.

Grijpstra's comments had been conversational. "Beautiful course, sir," and "Yes, that was unfortunate, wasn't it?"

The chief-constable smiled.

Grijpstra felt encouraged. He moved the request for funding further across the desk. "Could you please sign this, sir?"

The CC looked away.

Grijpstra sighed. "You are concerned about the possibility of foul play, sir?"

The chief-constable talked at some length. He said that, in spite of what he was doing at his present elevated position, which, as most insiders were aware of, was mostly decorative these days, he was still a cop at heart and therefore curious about human erring. A man had died at the Crailo Golf Club of which the CC was an active member.

Grijpstra's rugged face plied itself into an expression of interest. "You and the baron were friends, sir?"

Friends…friends…the chief-constable said he didn't known about "friends." "Friends are like clouds in the sky, Adjutant. They float around, they disappear, they come back in different shapes, you reach out and they're gone again."

Grijpstra said he liked clouds himself. He often tried to paint them.

"Really?" the CC asked. "I thought you mostly portrayed dead ducks."

"With clouds above them," Grijpstra said. "For contrast, maybe. The dead ducks are upside down in the canals, with bright orange feet which make them sail along." The adjutant's gestures showed how this was done. "And the white clouds bring out the bright orange."

The chief-constable smiled again. He hadn't listened. He was talking in a barely audible voice when he admitted to a personal interest in what he referred to as the "Crailo murder." He had known Hilger van Hopper fairly well, had been following the ups and downs of the baron's life at close quarters. "But it seemed the poor fellow was going mostly down, Adjutant. Which amazed me." The chief-constable spoke with more enthusiasm now. "Hilger was a smart fellow, educated, insightful, one might say. A cynic. You know what a cynic is, Adjutant?"

Grijpstra thought a cynic was one who mocked generally accepted human values.

The CC explained that there was no mockery here, but a sincere disbelief, based on observation. A cynic, he said, has found reasons to believe that all human activity is based on selfishness. "Do you believe that, Adjutant?" The CC's smile was sad. "I rather do so myself."

Grijpstra nodded convincingly while he pushed his documents a little further across the vast emptiness of the desk between them.

"Yes," the chief-constable said. "Hilger, therefore, was out for himself. In a pleasant way. He was a baron, of course."

"A nobleman," Grijpstra said pleasantly. "Noble."

"Noble selfishness," the CC said. He held his long elegant hands back above the polished top of his desk. His fingertips played the scherzo of Chopin's Klaviersonate Nr. 2 b-moll op. 35. Grijpstra knew the sonata because he had been made to play it himself, as a boy, after his teachers determined that he had musical talent. Grijpstra had wanted to try Billy Strayhorn compositions. He still did.