Janwillem De Wetering - Just a Corpse at Twilight

"The bags sank too," Grijpstra said.

De Giers lecture continued. What happens if a bag filled with salt drops into the sea? That bag sinks. What happens once the salt melts? That bag pops up, provided contents are lighter than water. Cocaine, packed in airtight cans, is much lighter than water. If the weight ofsalt per bag and the speed of such weight dissolving into the ocean are given-and they are, de Gier assured the nonmathematical Grijpstra-the time that the bags, without salt, but still loaded with cocaine in airtight cans, require to surface can be figured out. Being around at that time ensures master smuggler Hairy Harry of being able to fish up the valuable cargo without being seen with the cargo-dropping plane.

"It always gets worse," Grijpstra said. "You start with a small thing, like allowing your pals to grow a little pot… and before you know it, you're into the big figures."

"How true," de Gier said. "Next you're destroying other people's property. Next you're destroying other people. Next you've destroyed yourself-the old Mafia merry-go-round."

"Better row me across to the diner," Grijpstra said.

"To make things enter a final stage?"

"All I ever make," Grijpstra said, "is phone calls. Maybe you know what comes next?"

"You don't want to know," de Gier said.

"Some bullshit again?" Grijpstra asked. "Some Papuan nonsense like what you reported on while you were out in New Guinea? The tribe gathers its strong spirits together and gets them to point a bone at some subject that endangers the tribe's social health, and no matter where the subject may be, once said strong spirits are done with sitting around their campfire while chanting a ditty…"

"Yep," de Gier said.

Grijpstra never believed that Nellie and Katrien-please, Nellie and Katrien-humming over a leftover lamb's bone, "pointing the bone," with the commissaris leading the chant-What the hell did he chant? The Dutch national anthem?-had anything to do with subsequent mishaps that happened to kill off some parties.

Mishaps happen on the coast ofMaine, especially in the Twilight Zone. Fishermen sail into the fog and stay there. Divers step into waterholes, lose their sense of direction, swim down instead of up. Hikers get eaten by blackflies in the woods. Boats burn. Seaplanes flip over. Hunters shoot each other.

Hairy Harry was shot because of Ishmael's bear mask. The foreseeable, hermit Jeremy used to say, usually doesn't occur but the unpredictable invariably happens. Aki had given the mask to Little Max. Little Max clowned around in the diner, caught the sheriff's attention, sold the mask to Hairy Harry for ten big ones. Hairy Harry andBilly Boy had a thousand-dollar bet (wagers held by Bildah Farnsworth) on who would shoot Mr. Bear. The sheriff, off duty, in his private speedboat, and Billy Boy, on duty, using the Sheriff's Office patrol boat, unbeknownst to each other, happened to choose Jeremy Island as common ground the same Sunday morning. Hairy Harry, wearing the mask and some expensive female bear scent that he had sent away for, showed his head above a rock to fool Mr. Bear and fooled Billy Boy instead. A. 308 bullet, fired from Billy Boy's scoped deer rifle, pierced the mask, then messed about in the head behind it.

Billy Boy, after checking out his kill, panicked. He died later that day, pushing the patrol boat's twin engines as he raced her home to Jameson Harbor. State police officers, alerted by Billy Boy's garbled radio call that mentioned a hunting accident with one man down, waited in vain on the Jameson town dock for the sheriff's patrol to return. While Mr. Bear humped the sheriff's body, Billy Boy's boat struck rocks.

When the patrol boat didn't show, the state police chartered Big Max's lobster boat. State police detectives working with Coast Guard experts, reconstructing the accident, eventually came up with an acceptable explanation: Freak winds-Maine's infamous "cat's paws" that suddenly reach down, create havoc, and are gone again-must have shifted channel markers. The patrol boat, driven by Billy Boy, upset by accidentally shooting the sheriff, hit a shoal. The boat's hull flew over the shoal but the twin Johnson outboards were held back by solid rock. The boat could only tip over backward, had no choice but to crush her driver's body.

Grijpstra and de Gier, after one last lobster dinner, said goodbye to their fellow Algonquins and drove the Ford product to Boston's Logan Airport. Nellie met the plane in Amsterdam.

"Rinus is moving in with us, Nellie, to help with the agency. Isn't that nice?"

"Isn't it," Nellie said.

De Gier stayed in Nellie's house at Straight Tree Canal, using the gable house's loft, which he furnished with an old bath tub on a platform, a Navy hammock, and a large Oriental carpet that he found at the flea market and that Grijpstra helped him clean. Tabriz moved up with his former companion, mostly because the Grijpstra household was joined by an overactive minimongrel, soon to be named Deneuve, who followed Grijpstra home one night and declared eternal love to Nellie.

De Gier, well above all this in his loft, liked to sit in his tub and practice jazz trumpet to amuse Tabriz. Instead of reading French literature, he now borrowed South American books from the university library, which he found fascinating as, again refusing to own a dictionary, he had to guess what the Spanish or Portuguese words meant. Nellie hardly saw her unwelcome tenant as de Gier, using professional skills, managed to avoid her awesome presence. He rigged up a kitchenette, and started off each day with a ceremonial meal, enjoyed while sitting down on the carpet or, weather permitting, squatting on his small balcony in the shadow of Nellie's rooftop stone angel, bravely and forever blowing the trumpet of eternal blessings. He had his other meals out, mostly in the Chinese restaurants of Amsterdam's inner city. Massive weeds, grown from seedlings found in city alleys and on speedway shoulders, tended carefully, grew from large pots in the loft and on the balcony, where they attracted songbirds.

"When we pointed the bone," Katrien had asked the commissaris the evening before Grijpstra and de Gier returned, "the party the bone points at was supposed to die?"

"I'm afraid that's correct, Katrien."

"We weren't playing?"

"No, Katrien."

"The party the bone points at dies straightaway?"

"Soon," the commissaris said.

"You really believe that?"

"Katrien," the commissaris said. "Of course I really believe that. Pointing the bone, if done properly, according to rules that de Gier left with me, is terminal magic. And we did it right. All conditions were met. We were serious. You and Nellie, in spite of what you two pretend to be sometimes, are evolved and powerful spirits. You assisted me voluntarily. The tribe requested our help and empowered our action by appropriate ritual. Of course Hairy Harry and Billy Boy terminated their temporal projections."

"How, Jan?"

"Quickly," the commissaris said.

"You sure?"

"That's what I asked for when I pointed the bone."

Katrien was knitting. The needles ticked peacefully. Sparrows chirpedin the garden. An ice cream truckplayedits chimes in the Queen'sBoulevard at the other side of the house.

"Why do you think I sent de Gier to New Guinea?" the commissaris asked.

Katrien put her knitting down. "You're arrogant, Jan. De Gier wanted to live with warriors, Papuans engaged in tribal warfare. He talked about it for years. Palm trees and jungle glades and naked women and tom-toms and hallucinogenic plants…"

"I nurtured de Gel's desire on my own behalf," the commissaris said. "I couldn't go myself I am getting too feeble."

"So de Gier is your extension?"

The commissaris sat quietly.