Janwillem De Wetering: The Hollow-Eyed Angel

"If I did the right thing," Jo said pleasantly, "I was ahead of my time. Present-day morality does not excuse the castration of abusive and perverted uncles. Commissaris?"

"Jo?" the commissaris asked.

"You can't get me a trial? Nothing you can do, except this"-Jo gestured-"meeting with sympathetic authorities, unofficially, while I'm in the company of my pals?"

"I'm afraid not, Jo."

"But by being bad I created my demon," Jo said. "I can't stand my demon, sir. She is driving me cra2y."

"The Bad Conscience Demon," Eugene told Cardozo when it was all over and de Gier was pouring cold jenever from a stone jug and Katrien was handing out peanuts and the commissaris was talking to Peter and Grijpstra to de Gier and Turtle was sleeping between his favorite rocks. "Did you ever study Hieronymus Bosch's paintings?" Eugene asked Cardozo. "They crawl with Bad Conscience Demons. It would be interesting for you to do that, you being a copper. We live within a certain morality, the rules of our time, and then we break those rules, and thereby create our demons. They're totally unreal but we feel we have to appease them anyway."

Eugene looked gloomy. "Or suffer forever after."

That was hours after a streetcar rang its bell at the tram stop behind the willow trees, and Jo jumped up and thanked everybody for everything and said he had to go now.

The accident that killed Jo Termeer was reported by the crew of a patrol car called by the tram driver via her radio.

The policemen's report said that, according to the tram's passengers, the victim came running toward it well after the streetcar, of the Number Two line, had pulled away from the Queens Avenue tram stop.

A modern streetcar's safety features do not allow the vehicle to drive off when its sliding doors are still open. No system, however, is foolproof. This time the vehicle's safety feature didn't work. The streetcar's doors were still closing as the vehicle gathered speed.

The victim managed to jump through the closing doors but slipped on something inside the car-what that could have been hadn't been determined. It could have been anything-someone's spittle maybe, fruit juice, a crushed sweet. The passenger then fell over backward and, as the doors were still closing, his body was pinned between them. His head was still outside the tram and it hit the concrete base of a light post that marked the end of the tram stop.

The Number Two streetcar's driver,. tall blond twenty-nine-year-old Agatha Franken, an experienced operator with an unblemished record, had not been aware of anything being amiss as the tram gathered speed. She stopped as soon as passengers began calling out. Miss Franken had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance, where she was successfully treated for shock.

That night the commissaris did not dream. As usual after a case he had managed to solve, thanks to having good assistants, not being presented with the impossible and to good luck, he rested well.

Monday morning, 8:30, found the commissaris waiting at the tram stop, feeling chipper, as he had told his wife, but when the streetcar came he turned and went back to his house.

He had forgotten that, since he had as of that date been retired from active duty, his presence at Moose Canal Headquarters was no longer required.