Janwillem De Wetering - The Hollow-Eyed Angel

Grijpstra's "Hmm" showed interest.

"Our judgmental language is proof," the commissaris said. "Under our set of rules offenders can be judged to be criminally insane and referred to a mental institution 'at the queen's pleasure.' That sort of thing, Adjutant. 'At the queen's pleasure' sounds a whole lot better than 'for an indefinite period' or even, as I read in the paper here, 'for the duration.' Insert a royal person into your rules-a queen, a divine mother-and immediately there is a feeling of warmth, of divine love. It makes us look better too. As policemen we are the queen's servants. A man like Baldert wants us to lift him into a higher sphere where things finally make sense, where there is absolute good and bad, and a queen-appointed judge to tell him the difference. Baldert requires us to serve as angels." The commissaris coughed. "It would be harder to do that here."

Grijpstra professed curiosity. "Why?"

"Why, Adjutant? Because here The People judge the people."

"My God," Grijpstra said, sounding shocked.

"See?" the commissaris said. "Even you, a cynic, are appalled by such level-mindedness. Now then, Adjutant, where I really want to get to, and am getting to, is our alleged Central Park Murder Case. This is what I want you to do now. You and Cardozo. Maybe there is no killer but there is a much-mangled dead body. I want you to look into those body parts' background." "I thought," Grijpstra said, "that we were all about to tentatively agree, based upon available facts, that we would tell complainant that there is no case, sir."

"The NYPD is about to close the case here," the commissaris said, "but I still feel uneasy. This time you won't be alone chasing phantoms. I want to do some background searching too. De Gier and I plan to get a certain Charlie, Termeer's landlord, to let us into Ter-meer's apartment and workplace. I understand the two men shared a building. We may pick up some ideas, clues, what have you, by walking about the premises where the victim lived. If I could get a better idea of how Termeer came to frolic into the azalea bushes…"

"But why do you feel uneasy, sir?" Grijpstra asked. "We have hard facts here. Subject habitually overexerts himself, even after open-heart surgery, a bypass and so forth. The surgery is a fact." Grijpstra waved a document at the phone. "You faxed me the autopsy, remember? The New York coroner saw the marks. Here, right here, on official stationery…"

"Yes," the commissaris said soothingly. "I know…"

"So," Grijpstra said, "we have an old man who frolics in parks, which means that he runs and dances about like a madman, for God's sake. During one of these fits subject frightens a horse and is touched by its hoof. It says so, right here, sir." Grijpstra waved his own report. "…Termeer now staggers about. Passersby, reliable witnesses interviewed by de Gier and me, well-educated society folks, set him down on a park bench. Subject now seemingly recovers and is left by the Good Samaritans. However, Termeer obviously has a relapse, for his dead body is found under azalea bushes, well off the path, the next morning. So? So the old boy staggers into nearby azalea bushes, collapses, dies. What else could possibly have happened? There was nobody about by then. The entire park's population was watching events. Cause of death? Heart attack. The coroner says so."

There was some silence.

"Sir?" Grijpstra asked.

"Not all that much left for the coroner to investigate," the commissaris said. "I faxed you photographs of the corpse, Adjutant. Bits and pieces here and there. Upper parts of the thighs and the lower part of the torso are missing."

"Most of the chest was there," Grijpstra said. "The heart is in the chest. Coroner mentions a heart attack as cause of death. Isn't that all we need to know, sir?"

"Yes."

"They really have raccoons in that park, sir?"

They discussed raccoons. Grijpstra said that the raccoons released by a fur farm in Germany that Hermann Goring owned, but gave up on because of better profits in the Nazi business, had now spread into both Poland and Holland. "Maybe soon they'll arrive in our very own Vondel Park," Grijpstra said morosely. "They look cute, with those little masks on, but they're devils, sir. Raccoons get in your garbage and when you want to send them on their way they'll charge you in your own kitchen."

"Devilish denizens of the future," the commissaris said, not uncheerfully. "They won't create as much horror and terror as our species, that's for certain."

The commissaris, after cradling the phone, mused for a few moments. Was there anything in his and Grijpstra's discussion that might fit in with the persistent nightmare of the tram-driving hollow-eyed woman? Some hint that would relieve his anxiety? Hunches, parts of thoughts, even entire logical and acceptable conclusions seemed to float just under his level of consciousness.

Lying back on the springy mattress of his huge four-poster bed, the commissaris tried to concentrate. Why was he thinking that he should pay attention to something that wasn't anywhere anymore?

He drifted off into sleep again. The dream immediately produced the tram-driving Angel of Death. This time there was also chanting.

The chanting was performed by the commissaris's neighbors on Queen's Avenue, Amsterdam. The woman was Chinese, a successful artist; the man, a well-known Dutch Orientalist. The couple was Buddhist. The professor and his wife sang sutras every morning in their temple room, which was next to the commissaris's bedroom. Listening to the exotic songs had become a daily pleasure. He especially liked the "Makahanya Paramita," a term that has to do, he learned, with obtaining "Penetrating Insight." While having a Chinese fried lobster dinner with the neighbors one enjoyable evening, he was told by Suhon, the Chinese lady, that she and her learned husband opened their early-morning routine by chanting the Heart Sutra, which she called the most basic Buddhist text ever formulated. She translated a few paragraphs-the sutra was fairly brief-while she hit a small wooden hand drum to provide proper punctuation.

The lines that the commissaris remembered, when he had to wake up to go to the bathroom, were part of a dialogue between Avalokitasavara, a bodhisattva, who returns from his meditations in high realms, and Sariputra, a less-developed Buddha-spirit.

As the sutra is outlined further the bodhisattva dominates the stage. Avalokitasavara wants to share with his pupil his basic discovery:

Sariputra, form is not other than emptiness and emptiness is not other than form form is precisely emptiness and emptiness precisely form

Beautiful, the commissaris thought. So now what? So now not what? He liked the idea of emptiness. If something isn't there, one doesn't have to worry about maintaining or protecting it. The two spirits were active on higher levels, however. The commissaris, from his lowly position as an incarnate human, could only see the empty aspects of his case, the loopholes. How to turn them around and give the bits of void form?

"Imagine the missing piece," the commissaris told his mirror image in the bathroom, "right here. On your lower level."

"Mounted Maggie," as the desk sergeant called her, was late coming from duty. As she strode into the precinct's front room she seemed pleasantly surprised to see de Gier. "Are you the foreign policeman?"

De Gier shared her feelings. Maggie •was a good-also intelligent-looking woman. He explained his presence. She looked less pleased. "The old freeze and frolic man. I called him Fritz. Fritz won't go away, will he? Did you see those terrible photos?" She shook her head in disgust. "The Urban Rangers say raccoons are a plague now. Never see them myself; the varmints mostly move at night. We should hunt them with hounds and flashlights like they do in the country."