Janwillem De Wetering - The Hollow-Eyed Angel

"So," the CC said, "here we have a superior sort of chap who has figured out that we are in it for ourselves, and who has the means to indulge himself, and who is all out to make one good time flow into another."

Grijpstra looked surprised. "He did not succeed?"

The CC shook his head. He tried to share a congenial grin with Grijpstra. "No, he just kept losing. But then he was suddenly in the money again, with a loving wife and a handsome lover, and then he managed to suddenly lose his life."

Grijpstra contemplated his ultimate chiefs appearance. Amsterdam's police commander in chief was a decorative man: tall, slim, silver haired, with an aquiline nose. He was reputed to suffer from depression. After his wife died, crashing her airplane into a peat bog, the CC engaged in brief relationships, often with women he knew through his work. The grapevine reported that they all had the same comment: that the CC wasn't part of the activities he engaged in. Although he performed the correct movements, his behavior was mechanical, all while being polite and charming. The CC took his lovers out to plays and concerts, and paid for good dinners. He listened, laughed at jokes and tipped the waiters. "But he is mostly dead," the women reported.

Grijpstra wondered whether he could interact with a man who was mostly dead.

"Baldert's projectile, the golf ball, did miss the baron."

"Maybe that was just part of what caused my friend's loss of life," the CC said. "What if Baldert, after narrowly missing his easy target, and after noticing that the baron was experiencing some sort of attack, stroke or what have you, had called an ambulance?"

"According to the rural lieutenant," Grijpstra said, "it seems your golf companion was dangling from the last strand of the end of his tether."

"A stretched metaphor." The CC laughed. "The commissaris is right, you are a card."

Grijpstra apologized. "Wasn't meaning to be funny, sir."

The chief-constable leaned back in his executive's revolving chair. His voice was sad. "Causing death by omission of some activity, an interesting construction, Adjutant. I wrote my thesis on that."

Grijpstra moved the document another millimeter. "Sir?"

The CC's fingers now played the sonata's next movement, the "Marche funebre." To be played, Grijpstra remembered, "lento-attaaa."

"Missed on purpose?" Grijpstra asked. "But the ball passed close by the victim's head. The baron now realizes that Baldert, whom he considered to be his friend, is trying to kill him. The shock sets off a heart attack. And then Baldert, still as part of the plan, pretends to panic and doesn't call an ambulance until the crowd returns from watching plastic windup ducks?"

The CC's fingertips were moving.

The chief was talking almost inaudibly again: "… my wife would still be alive if I had made sure that the old Cessna had been properly checked. I knew that the mechanics at the Air Club were sloppy. But I didn't like her, you see."

Grijpstra stared.

"I didn't like my wife," the chief-constable said. He smiled. He stopped playing the sonata, pulled the form toward him and signed it with a flourish. "There you are," the CC said pleasantly. "This will pay for de Gier's airfare and expenses. I am glad that you fellows are concerned about the commissaris's welfare." He looked up. "So how is the old man doing?"

Grijpstra thought that the commissaris was ill.

"He has been ill for years now," the CC said. "He could have been on permanent sick leave since he started using a cane." He looked at his long slender hands, then dropped them under the desk top. "But maybe my respected colleague doesn't like doing nothing."

"What are you going to do, sir?" Grijpstra asked. "When you retire?"

The chief-constable smiled. "I will just fade away, Adjutant. I am good at that. I have been practicing for years."

Grijpstra, as he left the room, remembered the commissaris saying that lack of substance makes people float to the top.

"Yessir," the adjutant said. "Thank you." He waved his signed document. "This will get things going."

Detective-Sergeant de Gier, six thousand miles west of his jurisdiction, helicoptered from Kennedy Airport to the Heliport on Manhattan's East Side.

New York impressed him. The spectacular city looked the part of a major power center. Manhattan's unique skyline convinced de Gier that whatever was thought up here would cause ripples all around the planet, for a while anyway. Nothing is forever but what force could wipe out this metropolis of glass and steel? Warfare? Internal strife? One of the modern drug-resistant plagues? He wondered if someday an earthquake would topple those splendid tall buildings.

Would some people be crushed by their own top-heavy creations and the rest flee? He knew about the abandoned cities of Central and South America, where the jungle had reclaimed huge buildings. Not only did the citizens disappear, but there was no memory of what might have happened. Yet there was obviously technology there, knowledge, a high degree of organization, a well-developed infrastructure. Anthropologists had come up with vague theories, in which facts didn't fit.

Would the New York skyscrapers degenerate into crumpled shapes leaning across each other, with skeletons staring out of broken windows? Would vines, mold, lichens and mosses gradually smooth their jumbled lines?

Maybe, de Gier thought, it will all slide into the ocean, to the bottom of the sea, like Atlantis, like Amsterdam. With Amsterdam there is the certainty, in a foreseeable, calculable future, that the sea will flood the city. Ice caps melt and ocean levels rise and dikes cannot be built up forever.

There would be fish again, huge schools, unbothered by hunger at the top of the food chain. De Gier imagined fish swimming through his apartment.

"Quite a place you have here," de Gier told the Trump Air stewardess. He read her the address of a bed and breakfast Antoinette had written down in his notebook. Antoinette and Karel had enjoyed the place. How to get there?

"Horatio Street?" the stewardess asked. De Gier had his map out. She pointed the way. "A little bit complicated. The subway is cheap but I would advise a cab."

He found coordinates for the Cavendish on his map and thought that he might contact the commissaris first. There was plenty of time. It wouldn't do to make things easy. If New York was to be his hunting ground for the next few days he should investigate on foot. A cab was too easy. He told the stewardess he would call on a friend first, proudly reciting the address: Eighty-third and Fifth.

He only carried a leather shoulder bag holding three changes of linen, a CD player, six Miles Davis CDs and a novel by Alvaro Mutis, in the original Spanish. De Gier had been puzzling through the tale during the flight across the Adantic. His Spanish was poor and he hadn't brought a dictionary, so many words had to be guessed at. De Gier, a self-taught linguist, had managed to wade halfway through the first chapter. He had figured out what seemed to be a plot line. A writer of technical brochures on petrochemical subjects travels to Finland. It's cold in Helsinki. The protagonist goes to the harbor from where he can see the domes of St. Petersburg and watches a tramp steamer enter port. But now, to de Gier's delight, he is no longer in forty-degrees-below Finland but in ninety-degrees-above Honduras, where a woman in a bikini runs toward a yacht. In spite of her large feet she is attractive, due to good makeup. Her husband is shooting at seabirds with a. 45 automatic, but misses.

"You're Spanish?" the stewardess asked, seeing the book in de Gier's hand. "You don't sound Spanish." She was smiling. The stewardess, like de Gier, was in her forties. De Gier had noticed that older women were now sending signals. De Gier, known at Amsterdam Headquarters as "Mr. B Movie," was tall, wide shouldered, athletic looking. Women liked his thick curly hair and huge cavalry-officer-style swept-up mustache. In potential sexual encounters he had been backing offlately, preferring the company of his cat. He had told Grijpstra, when the adjutant was about to be taken over by the hotel owner and former prostitute Nellie, "Animals have smaller brains but they use them better."