Janwillem De Wetering - The Hollow-Eyed Angel

The commissaris handed over his card. De Gier said his name. Charlie read the commissaris's last name easily, without any accent.

Charlie smiled. "Step right up."

"You speak Dutch?" the commissaris asked, surprised at Charlie's faultless pronunciation of the many consonants in his long name.

"I lived in Aachen for a while," Charlie said, "just over the border. I sometimes went across and so I learned how to pronounce the sounds on your side."

"You speak many languages?" de Gier asked.

"Anyone," Charlie said, "who has to try to grow up the way I did better learn languages, my friend. Mine are, in chronological order, Yiddish, Polish, German, French and, last but not least, English. English"-Charlie smiled- "is easy to pick up, impossible to master." He beckoned his guests into a clean and empty red-brick hallway. "Always good to be fluent in communication when you're passing through hostile lands."

"Is Perrin a Polish name?" the commissaris asked.

"I was once called by another name, long ago, before World War II," Charlie said, "but there was too much blood on it. After I finally reached America I chose my own label. 'Charles' refers to my favorite author, Charles Willeford, a cheerful nihilist. 'Gilbert' is in homage to a schoolteacher I loved prematurely. 'Perrin' is a town in Maine I dream about when the wind goes the wrong way and Watts Street stinks. I sometimes go to Perrin to listen to loons."

"Loons sometimes chant with coyotes," the commissaris said. "Listening to the chant makes one replace wornout ideas."

Charlie laughed. "Exactly." He looked into the commissaris's eyes. "That's exactly right. You have obviously been there."

They followed Charlie, whose bad leg slowed him I 222 1 down somewhat, into an old-fashioned industrial elevator. The cage-like cubicle was furnished like a room. The detectives sat on straight-back chairs while Charlie manipulated two long handles. On a card table a long-stemmed rose drooped gracefully from a slim vase. An Oriental carpet covered the floor.

"Why not?" Charlie asked. "Nobody likes cages. This lift has been everything. I like to go to auctions or find things in the street, use them, replace them. Last month this was a cabinet for albums of West African colonial stamps that I sold the other day." He waved. "A nonprofit hobby. I liked being able to live with those stamps, for a while. Wonderful colors. Nice little pictures. A chance to experience those colonial times. The lift also exhibited photos of Laurel and Hardy. I collected those for years, then gave them to a museum. Before that I tried to recreate a Maori temple with painted bamboo and a rattan floor. Before that, let me see…right, the complete works of Rene Daumal. Here, on that table." He faced his guests. "Rene Daumal? The name is familiar? No? It is not?"

The elevator stopped but Charlie didn't open the accordion door yet. "Daumal appeared as a French essayist and poet who wouldn't stay with us. Thirty-six years old in 1943." Charlie clicked his fingers. "Daumal's complete denial cheered me up completely. You really haven't read him?"

He looked at the commissaris. "A Night of Serious Drinking, or La Grande Beuverie? No?"

He looked at de Gier. "Mount Analogue? Unfinished. Because Daumal died halfway through the last, but not least, chapter. Of tuberculosis, like the parents of Wille-ford. Such a useful disease. Suddenly sets us up on our own. No?"

De Gier brought out his notebook and wrote down the poet's name and the titles.

"You're interested," Charlie said, sliding open the elevator's door soundlessly. Apparently it was well oiled.

The commissaris said that de Gier understood French and was always looking for nothing, "…and as you said that Daumal denies.

Charlie concentrated on de Gier. "You know what I liked that Daumal said? No? Then I will tell you."

He help up a hand until he was sure he had de Gier's attention. "This is beautiful I think. Je vais,' Daumal said, 'vers un avenir qui n'existe pas, laissant derriere moi a chaque instant un nouve. au cadavre.' Would you translate that?"

De Gier asked Charlie to repeat the phrase.

Charlie obliged.

"I go," de Gier translated, "toward a future that doesn't exist, leaving behind me, at every instant, a new corpse."

"Beautiful," Charlie said. He pointed at the elevator decorated as a Victoria boudoir. "I had all eight of Daumal's published books there. In various editions. I don't have them now. I only kept he Mont Analogue, the one Daumal didn't finish."

The commissaris looked back at the elevator. "This is the way it's going to stay?"

"Is anything going to stay the way it is, ever?" Charlie asked.

"Your next project?"

"I have shelves holding up human skulls in mind," Charlie said. "I found some on Canal Street. Party stuff for Halloween, but good strong plastic. I knocked holes in them, tied them together and hung them in the river. I'll take them out in a month. Then I'll line them up on the shelves, out of order, some upside down, some on their sides. Make it look like Guatemala. Have a tape recorder play a Charlie Haden ballad whenever the elevator is activated." He peered into de Gier's face. "You like Charlie Haden?"

De Gier did.

"What does he play?"

"Charlie Haden plays double bass, sir."

Charlie held de Gier lovingly by the shoulders. "You're not applying for discipleship, are you? I don't teach, you know." He kept smiling and winking. "Just kidding, just kidding. Maybe I won't do the skulls at all, let them rot in the river." He looked cheerful. "What do you think of my other idea? A display of plywood dolls, flat like regular people, no depth to those dolls, have a piece of string dangling between their legs, yank the string and we're all waving and smiling."

The commissaris, still looking back at the elevator, discovered a framed colored-in photograph of a red-haired woman with green eyes and milky skin hung from a metal bar.

"Carolien," Charlie said. "Bert's girlfriend. Now that Bert is dead I thought I would put that up, Bert's better side…"

The commissaris stepped back into the elevator to study the picture.

"It isn't really Carolien," Charlie said. "I found it in a junkyard the day I identified Bert's remains at the morgue. But she does look what Bert told me she looked like. I thought maybe he loved her."

Charlie led the way to his quarters through another empty hallway lined with scrubbed red bricks. "I live here, top story. Bert had the rest of the building. I may rent his part out, or donate it as a shelter."

"I heard," de Gier said, "you helped him with his mail orders. The book business. You don't plan to pursue that?"

Charlie shrugged. "Nah."

A dog was waiting in Charlie's open doorway.

"Hi, Kali," de Gier said.

The German shepherd, wagging her bushy tail slowly, offered the commissaris a paw and barked twice, solemnly and clearly. It greeted de Gier likewise. The dog pulled her paw back and walked ahead of the detectives, looking back to make sure they followed.

Charlie explained that his home used to be a factory loft, that he'd renovated. He had put in the hardwood floor himself, using remnants sold off by a nearby lumberyard. The plastered walls were filled in some, then whitewashed. The solid mahogany roof beams were cleaned up with steel wool before varnishing, so that the gleaming old wood contrasted nicely with the heavy pine boards supported by the beams.

Several large easy chairs, a couch and a round dining table with unmatched chairs took their positions as museum objects representing disparate styles. A kitchen stove, two refrigerators and a washer and dryer, together with cupboards and open shelves, all dissimilar but sprayed the same off-white color, were lined up along the vast room's back wall. All furniture and appliances were clean and seemed to be in working order.