Janwillem De Wetering: The Hollow-Eyed Angel

The commissaris wanted to leave but de Gier, who had been guided to and from the bathroom by Kali, asked how Charlie had found a seeing-eye dog.

It was the other way around, Charlie said.

The dog had approached him when he was working out in Central Park. The dog was scooting along on her bottom, trying to get the path's gravel to scratch her infected and blocked anal glands.

The dog was an Alsatian; in the death camps the SS had used Alsatians to terrorize the inmates.

Charlie walked away but the dog ran after him, sat on the path and offered her paw.

Charlie took the dog to an animal clinic. A vet squeezed the almost bursting glands empty and prescribed medication. Charlie bought a bag of food and emptied it out in the street. The dog ate everything and barked her thanks.

On the way home Kali-he had named her by then-didn't allow Charlie to cross a street against a red light. She pushed his leg when the end of a sidewalk came close, or when roller skaters got near.

Charlie visited the Lighthouse, the society for the blind, which promised to make inquiries about a lost seeing-eye dog. He was called a week later. A woman, who wouldn't give her name, said her blind husband had died and that she had abandoned his dog in Central Park. "You keep her. I never liked her."

The woman hung up.

The commissaris, dozing off in his bathtub, faced the long-legged tram driver. De Gier, musing in the Metropolitan Museum, faced a Papuan demon sculpture.

Both detectives, at about the same time, felt a wave of serious and multiple misgivings. The wave wiped out their conclusion that Charles G. Perrin could be controlled by evil. He could not. Therefore he could not commit evil either. Charlie castrate Bert? Never.

The commissaris, wide awake now, clambered out of his bathtub, dried himself and dressed quickly.

De Gier left the Metropolitan Museum and walked to the nearby Cavendish.

The commissaris planned to face the hollow-eyed tram driver directly, to pull the phantom out of her hazy dreamscapes.

The commissaris and de Gier met in the Cavendish's lobby, where they were greeted by Ignacio. "A sus ordenes, sefiores."

The detectives found comfortable armchairs.

"Charlie is a good guy," de Gier said. "Don't you think so, sir? That dog, the way he treated that dog, and even better, the way the dog treated Charlie. I should have seen that."

"Yes," the commissaris said.

"Also the general atmosphere of Charlie's part of number two Watts Street," de Gier said. "I felt happy there."

The commissaris had felt happy too.

"And," de Gier said, "there was the tea ceremony, and all that hoo-ha about the elevator-that was nice, didn't you think so? Moving about in an exhibition that moves? And the empty wall with the invisible incomprehensible Sanskrit "

"Arabic," the commissaris said.

"Arabic," de Gier said, "and the way he had fitted that hardwood floor together, that was beautiful. I thought, you can look at those patterns when you feel bad and it will be better. And that one, two forward in Poland and three backward "

The commissaris agreed.

"So he didn't do it," de Gier said.

The commissaris thought that might be a possibility, but he wanted to know why the hollow-eyed angel wouldn't leave him in peace, and now he meant to see the voodoo lady.

Ignacio was asked to telephone Mamere. He came back to say that Mamere was home and expected to see the commissaris within the hour.

"A hundred bucks," Ignacio said. "Bad dreams don't come cheap."

De Gier checked his map. Ignacio helped him locate Brooklyn, Flatbush and Nostrand Avenue beyond Flat-bush and told him where to catch the Number Five train.

The detectives sat quietly in the subway.

The Nostrand Avenue block where Mamere lived consisted of three-story buildings, with stores on the ground level, some separated by small alleys.

Mamere's was one of the better buildings.

De Gier waited in a coffee shop while the commissaris rang the buzzer and then hobbled up the steps.

Mamere, after pulling the blinds of her small sitting room and diffusing the light to please the spirits, sat in a large yellow reclining armchair and the commissaris sat in a large orange reclining armchair. Mamere's dog, which she told him was the grandson of the dog in the painting at Le Chat Complet, lolled a long red tongue out of its furry black face.

"Les dollars Mamere asked.

He handed them over: two twenties, one ten, one fifty.

"Merci. You relax now, don't care about nothing."

Nothing would please the commissaris more. He semi-dozed while Mamere hummed, then sang a fairly long song. African West Coast, the commissaris thought, although he hadn't been there. Toward the end of the song the commissaris lost his mind, although his mind never left the room, for he saw it float around Mamere's potted plants and the budgie birds in their multistoried bamboo cage, waft through the eyes of an alligator skull on a sideboard, then whirl about in the smoke of smouldering herb leaves.

He really liked being mindless.

Mindless, he saw Road Warrior drag a white-bearded man into some bushes. It didn't matter that the commissaris hadn't seen the movie and that he had never met Bert Termeer. There they were, Road Warrior screaming abuse, Bert Termeer whining for mercy.

Road Warrior shook the old man like a dog shakes a squirrel. Termeer lost his dentures. The commissaris saw Road Warrior bend over the helpless body of his enemy, saw a sharp blade flash and blood spout. He saw Road Warrior emerge from flowering azalea bushes, a zombie from the grave, moving one foot, the other foot, one foot, the other foot.

He didn't see the hollow-eyed long-legged beautiful blond angel. He asked Mamere about the angel when she let him out. "Someone you know?" Mamere asked. "More dollars sometime soon?"

"The angel drives a tram, Mamere."

"You can't trust angels," Mamere said.

"I saw Road Warrior and he wasn't Charlie," the commissaris said, "as I knew all along, and didn't want to know all along. I was sorry for the fellow, and I was flattered, of course. Coming to me, the Grand Old Man of Crime Detection. What did I see coming? What did you see coming? Did you see the uncle-loving nephew, fellow cop, fearless street fighter, Grijpstra's star student?" He glared at de Gier. "The truth, Rinus, stares me in the face, and my mind rushes off to look for lies. How many times has this happened?"

He sat next to de Gier in the coffee shop, sipping weak coffee and eating a donut as if that is what you do after having lost your mind for a while, then, alas, regained it. You sit in a coffee shop, between big black men on small stools, and you ask for more weak coffee and another donut.

"You know what you get when you eat a donut?" a man wearing a baseball cap the wrong way around told another. "You get a zero with the ring removed."

While riding the Number Five train back to Manhattan, de Gier wrote to the commissaris's dictation. De Gier got off at Fourteenth Street to make his dinner engagement with Maggie and the commissaris got off at Eighty-sixth Street to fax his notes home.

"Now what?" Grijpstra asked, reading the commissaris's latest fax. "How many fourths of June do we have here, eh?"

He put the paper down, staring at it furiously, then brightening up. "Cardozo!"

Cardozo grunted.

Grijpstra's smile widened. "Let me tell you how you do this. You really disliked that Eugene character, didn't you?" Grijpstra beamed at Cardozo, slumped behind de Gier's desk. Grijpstra suddenly scowled again. "You did dislike him." Grijpstra thumped the desk. "Am I right?"

Cardozo opened long-lashed eyes. "I dislike all assholes."