Janwillem De Wetering - The Hollow-Eyed Angel

"And you didn't gain weight?" Antonio asked, looking down at his own protruding belly. "I gained forty pounds. It's two years now and I still haven't lost it."

"What's your secret, pal?" Freddie asked.

De Gier said he mostly ate sliced radishes on toast for breakfast and was spending more time on unarmed combat police training and repeated a mantra whenever he tended to think about chocolate.

"What mantra?"

De Gier blushed. "Nothing special."

"No slips?"

"Some slips."

"Doesn't that prolong the agony?"

"It does."

"How do you cope with agony?"

De Gier demonstrated. He got up, stretched, put his hands in his pockets and leaned his forehead against a doorpost.

"That helps?"

"After a few minutes."

While de Gier drank his coffee concoction Antonio frowned and concentrated.

"You know," Antonio said, "I kind of liked your guy. I called him 'the frozen jumper.' He would stand at crossings, ready to leap, and then not move until you'd given up on him, and then he would make a giant jump and run up a path, waving and hollering. The bearded philosopher type. What did you say his name was?"

"Termeer."

Antonio' strong fingers dug about in his beard. "Termeer reminded me of the Sadguru. Are you into Hinduism at all? You've heard about the Sadguru, the Inner Teacher, He Who Won't Be Denied Ever? Your true inner self? You can keep being stupid, fucking up and so on, but the Sadguru is getting ready."

De Gier said he was more into Buddhism.

"Okay," Antonio said. "Same thing. Call it Buddha Nature. The Relentless Force that won't put up with Ego Bullshit. That'll make you move one day in the right direction."

"I think it's called Emptiness in Buddhism," de Gier said. "I like that. The Void. You could fall into it forever."

"The Void where all the Buddhas live." Antonio nodded. He spoke solemnly. "You can't grasp Nothing. But it grasps you all right if you keep messing up. Termeer was kind of ungraspable, I thought. The other park crazies are just sick guys. Schizophrenics. Your guy looked like maybe he had it together."

"Antonio is a hopeful seeker," Freddie said. "He goes to New Age weekends." Freddie put on a stage voice. "On the mountaintop where soul-seeking men drum while growing and sharing. A hundred bucks for enlightenment; throw in another fifty and you get a semitransparent rock that holds insight."

Antonio smiled. "I get discounts." He looked serious again. "I liked Termeer's dog too. He sometimes had a dog with him, an Alsatian, a huge animal, but you know…" Antonio shook his head. "I'm confused now. That dog was with another guy. Nice guy. An older man. Well dressed. With a funny way of walking. He dragged a leg. Quite a muscular fellow otherwise."

"Two dogs?" Freddie suggested.

Antonio was thinking again.

It was pleasant in the little garden. De Gier, six hours ahead of his usual bedtime, felt the increased perception that often hit him just before falling asleep. Time seemed to slow down and Antonio's words reached him separately, clearly, floating slowly under the canopy of a Japanese maple tree.

"Same dog," Antonio said. "I know. A seeing-eye dog. Maybe the St. Nick guy and the other man shared it. But neither of those guys was blind."

"Were you in Central Park," de Gier asked, "when there was a balloon dinosaur, some gigantic beast, that kind of bobbed about, and when there was a contest of look-alike movie characters? Do you remember?"

"Yes," Antonio said.

"Did you see that man and his dog?"

Antonio thought he might have.

Antonio, in his hospital whites, due to go to work at eleven, served a late breakfast in the garden. He told de Gier he was in his after-meditation "quiet mode," programmed for practical matters only. "Capers and a little chopped onion with your smoked salmon?"

"Please."

"Another poppyseed bagel?"

"Yes, thank you."

De Gier asked for a telephone. Antonio brought him a cordless model. The Japanese female clerk at the Cavendish desk said there was a problem, then connected him to the bellhop.

"This is Ignacio," the bellhop said. "Huevones, remember? We talked yesterday. Your friend isn't feeling good. You better come over quick. The old man was mugged. He broke his glasses."

Antonio, advising against using a taxi for such a long trip, drove de Gier to the Astor Place subway station in his gleaming restored MG sportscar. He also gave de Gier a subway token. The train was quick. De Gier, after sidestepping a woman, well dressed except for a battered straw hat, who said she had AIDS, that her name was Lisa, that she was being evicted and that she needed a hundred dollars to consult her lawyer, ran the blocks from the Eighty-sixth Street station on Lexington Avenue over to the Cavendish. He found the commissaris in his suite, sipping tea.

"Ah," the commissaris said. "They're exaggerating downstairs. Looks like I am mostly blind, though. I had multifocals, but I've lost the prescription. Katrien is express-mailing my spare pair. They'll take a few days to get here."

"Were you hurt, sir?"

The commissaris had been rattled, he reluctantly reported. The plan that day had been that, after a leisurely breakfast at Le Chat Complet, he would spend his free morning checking out Central Park, especially the area where Bert Turmeer had died. As the commissaris was approaching a cluster of bushes just east of the Sheep Meadow a jogger slowed down and fell into step with him. There was no one else in sight. The jogger was quiet.

"I am Dutch," the commissaris said, to break the silence.

"I am black," the jogger said.

The jogger suddenly hugged the commissaris, as if he were a long-lost friend. As the jogger applied pressure the commissaris's glasses slipped, fell and were stepped on. "Oh man oh man," the jogger kept shouting, "good to see you, man. How are you doing?"

"When did this happen, sir?" de Gier asked.

"An hour and a half ago," the commissaris said. "Maybe a little longer?"

"Can you describe your attacker?"

The commissaris did.

De Gier checked the maps Antoinette had loaned him. The Sheep Meadow was to the south; it wouldn't take him long to get there.

"But he could be anywhere now," the commissaris said. "It doesn't matter, Rinus." He raised a shoulder sadly. "It looks like I'm pretty vulnerable here, a lost cause. I'm just trouble." He looked up. "Hey? Where are you going? Rinus! Wait!"

De Gier jogged down paths south of the Great Lawn, then cruised the area around the lake. After a twenty-minute search he noted a six-foot-three-inch-tall black young adult in a sky blue sweatsuit, carrying a new white plastic shoulder bag with Adidas imprint, new ankle-high suede boots with laces, dark sunglasses in bright red frames, a pink baseball hat, wearing several big rings on the fingers of both hands, who came jogging toward him.

De Gier ran on, made a full turn, and ran after the robber.

"I am Dutch," de Gier shouted.

The jogger was quiet.

"Oh man oh man," de Gier shouted when he was abreast of his quarry, "good to see you, man. How are you doing?"

The robber ran faster.

De Gier ran faster too.

The robber stopped, backed away, took a switchblade from his bag and pressed its button. De Gier stopped too and carefully approached his opponent. The robber pointed the knife at de Gier's belly. "Fuck off, okay?"

De Gier smiled, made a pass to the right, then kicked the man's arm. He jumped the robber while the knife was still flying, got hold of a wrist, twisted it behind the man's back. He exerted some pressure.

The robber screamed.

"The money," de Gier said.

"In my back pocket, man," the robber said. "I only took sixty bucks. I left the funny money. It's still in the wallet."