Janwillem De Wetering - The Hollow-Eyed Angel

De Gier pressed the remote's power button.

He stretched out on the couch and tried to rest his eyes by looking at a bouquet of silk roses in a bright green vase on a mirrored coffee table, then turned on his back so that he could look at the ceiling.

Maggie woke him up. "You snore."

It was two hours later.

De Gier sat up and apologized. "Why didn't you wake me?"

"You probably have jet lag. I thought you needed rest but you were making such a racket. Were you choking on your mustache?"

She had made gin and tonics decorated with slices of orange.

They toasted each other.

De Gier told her the snoring might be due to a recent operation. His nose had been damaged during an arrest some years ago and hadn't healed well. A surgeon broke it again to open up the left nostril. Both nostrils were sometimes blocked now. He 'would have to go back. Maybe have another operation.

She was interested. "When did this happen?"

He tried to remember. "Two months ago?"

"You don't know exactly?" She looked concerned.

De Gier laughed.

She stirred her gin and tonic. "What's so funny?"

"Nothing," de Gier said. "But before an operation a hospital will check a patient's blood. If there is AIDS it will inform the patient."

"So you were clean," Maggie said.

He wasn't sure. The AIDS virus takes sixty days to become visible in testing.

"And you had been active within the sixty days before your nose job?"

He had been active.

Maggie sighed. "So have I."

She stood looking down at him. "My guy is married. A safe and solid kind of a guy. His wife has lymph cancer. He can't divorce her."

"Ah," de Gier said.

"So you were active with what kind of person?"

"With a prostitute," de Gier said. "Kind of high class.

The type that is careful."

Maggie said prostitution was illegal. She knew cops who protected prostitutes, so they got free service.

De Gier said prostitution was legal in Holland. He had paid. Maggie liked that. Nobody likes to give free service. "Am I right?"

"You are right," de Gier said.

"You sure you paid?"

He nodded. "Top guilder."

"You do that often?"

De Gier said he did not. Once during three months. He was getting older.

"And you don't have girlfriends?"

He shook his head. "They always want to get married."

"Yes," Maggie said. "We can't always ride tall horses." She poured more gin, pushed The Road Warrior into her VCR and sat down next to de Gier on the beige plastic couch.

During the movie, which he liked, he was aware of her body in the semitransparent robe. She had untied her ponytail. He thought she looked very inviting and attractive.

She stopped the movie when de Gier said he'd like to see the man in longjohns fly his machine again, "or whatever it was, the thing with the blade." He also had to go to the bathroom. "Take a shower," Maggie said. "Wrap yourself in a towel afterward. I put out a huge one. You can shave too if you like. There is gear next to the washstand; there's nice aftershave, too."

"I could see you as Road Warrior," Maggie said when he came back, "in leather, and with that riot gun pistol, and the boots, driving hot rods across endless deserts. The lonely hero to be comforted by the lady in white."

She had refilled their glasses. They both began to slur their words while commenting on the movie's final and spectacular battle between odd-looking automobiles. Maggie was sad when the lady in white, who manipulated a flame thrower from the top of a tank truck driven by Mel Gibson, was killed by an arrow.

"If that was me, we couldn't do it."

The movie ended. Maggie led de Gier to her bedroom. His towel slipped off. Her robe slipped off too.

"Don't we look nice?" Maggie whispered.

He thought they might have just one more drink.

When she came back with the refilled glasses he asked whether she had seen a Road Warrior look-alike in the park the day that Bert Termeer got killed.

"I sure did," Maggie said. "It should have been you."

"How many?"

"Just one." She laughed. "Should have been two and you would have been the other and you would have done something bad and I would have arrested you and dragged you along behind me."

De Gier made himself smile at that S amp;M scene. "Did you see him from close by?"

"No." She leaned over to kiss his cheek and sniffed the aftershave. "My favorite. Herbal. You like herbal?"

De Gier didn't. "Sure."

"I was on my horse," Maggie said. "I had to be everywhere. There were all these kids. Falling in the pond. Trying to prick holes in the balloons of the dinosaur. There was that loud tuba thumping that makes Jagger prance and rear."

They sat on the double bed, sipping their gins, admiring each other's bodies. She complimented him on his wide chest. He complimented her on her beautiful bosom.

They put their drinks down and lay back, just to relax for a moment, before getting "serious," Maggie said.

He went back to the bathroom, where he had left his clothes.

"You brought a condom?" Maggie asked. "How thoughtful." She frowned. "Always ready, eh?" Her smile came back. "Shall I put it on?" She touched him and laughed at the prompt reaction. "Instant hydraulics!"

"Powerful." She played some more, too roughly. The condom broke. "You think it is all right?" she asked. "I am wearing something."

He thought it might be all right. He didn't sound sure.

Her hand slipped away. They lay back again, not touching.

His eyelids dropped. He was snoring again, and she turned him on his side and made her breasts caress his shoulder so that he would wake up, which he did, but then she dozed off herself.

The palms of his hands rubbed her breasts lightly. What beautiful duplicity. How generous of nature to multiply such a perfectly firm and smooth living shape. He lifted his hands, then touched one breast, then the other. "Two," de Gier murmured dreamily, then he frowned, thinking about being the second Road Warrior, being dragged to Twelfth Street by a horse.

Good twos, bad twos.

Two Road Warriors in Central Park.

De Gier, breakfasting late with a somewhat rested commissaris at the Cavendish the next day, was handed Grijpstra's and Cardozo's faxed report on the visit to Old Man's Gate. The document had been delivered by the bellhop Ignacio to the commissaris's suite together with his morning coffee and his spare glasses, brought over by a courier at considerable expense.

The commissaris couldn't see well, as the spare glasses had been manufactured ten years ago according to a much weaker prescription.

He complained about have bad dreams again. "About a streetcar driver."

"What did he do, sir?"

"It was a she."

"What did she do?"

"I think she wanted me to deliver something." The commissaris took off his useless glasses and stared hopelessly at de Gier. "All legs, no eyes." He waved. "Never mind. Read that report, Sergeant. Let's catch up with the homefront."

De Gier read aloud while the commissaris cut kiwis and arranged the slices on his yogurt.

"More juice?" the commissaris asked. "Try grapefruit this time. Another aspirin? Feeling better?"

De Gier felt worse but he was forcing himself to pay attention. "What do you think, sir?"

The commissaris was done thinking. De Gier was in charge. The commissaris had another lecture that day, on homemade lethal weapons. Chief O'Neill would pick him up in an hour. He was still interested in the Termeer case, of course. He was more than willing to hear about de Gier's progress.

De Gier suggested that, on the strength of the report from Amsterdam, Jo Termeer might be a suspect.

The commissaris, while buttering a crisp white bun, investigated his choice of cheeses. "You see possibilities that weren't available to us before?"