Janwillem De Wetering - The Japanese Corpse

The sergeant emptied the second jug into their cups and they both went back to the balcony doors and looked at the garden again. "I feel a little uncomfortable at times, sir. I am too tall. When I walk in the street my head floats on top of the crowd, like a conspicuous bird sitting on the surface of a lake. With a Western body it is impossible to fit in here. I have been wishing I were a Japanese. People smile and snigger and little children nudge each other and start shouting HELLO HELLO when they see me. Endlessly. It's the only English word they know, I think. After a while you feel like shooting them."

"Shooting," the commissaris said, and adjusted the cloth strip which held his kimono in place, a gray kimono supplied by the inn. He had found it in the bathroom. "You have a gun, sergeant?"

"Yes, sir." De Gier took a pistol from a holster which had been hidden under his kimono. "I didn't bring my own. It's in the arms room in Amsterdam. This pistol was given to me by Dorin. I have another one for you. It's German, a Walther. I don't think the Japanese manufacture firearms nowadays. We practiced with it two days ago on a beach, shooting at bottles. Very accurate and light. I got better results than at the range in Headquarters, and at double the distance." He rummaged about in the cupboard and came back. "Here, try it on, sir. It's small enough not to make a bulge. Dorin carries an enormous revolver, you must have noticed it too, it attracts attention, but he says it is his commando gun and that he can't live without it."

The commissaris got his belt and strapped it over his kimono.

"Good," de Gier said. "We are armed. Welcome to the yakusa. We can pick off six each and I have some spare clips. If they stand quietly and forget to defend themselves we can have a massacre. By the way, sir, about this attempted manslaughter of mine, I was thinking it would be better if I resigned from the force once we are back in Amsterdam. I don't seem to have the right reactions anymore, and the worst is that I don't care much. I suppose I should feel guilty about those three young men in the hospital, but I don't. They can live or die, it's all the same to me now, but when I went for them I meant to kill them."

"Never mind," the commissaris said, "and don't resign. We can talk about it afterward but perhaps it won't be necessary. Let's do the job on hand and forget to worry about our motivations for a while."

"So you don't mind much, sir?"

"Not now," the commissaris said. "Let's get some sleep, sergeant."

De Gier dropped his kimono, pulled his bedding out of the cupboard and fell down, pulling the padded blanket over his body. He had switched off the light as he fell down.

The commissaris grinned in the dark. A free man, he thought, shocked out of having to carry the weight of his own identity. He had felt the sergeant's freedom the moment de Gier had come running out of the inn to open the door of Dorin's car and to shake the commissaris' hand. But it's dangerous to be free, to stop caring. The commissaris remembered one of his subordinates in the underground army squad during the war years. The man had been frightened, nervous, overcautious until the Germans caught his young wife and tortured and kiUed her. After the loss, which set him free, the man had changed. His colleagues called him the demon of death. He volunteered to do the impossible again and again and never failed to come back. His specialty had become to catch the most malicious ghouls the Germans employed, the Gestapo detectives and bring them in, squeeze them for information and kill them, usually by a shot in the neck after he had casually asked the prisoner to look at something.

The man was still alive. He had started his own business, a textile agency which he handled in the same detached manner in which he had once treated the war game. The commissaris still met him occasionally and sometimes went to the man's luxury apartment, where he lived alone, sharing his evenings with a pet raven who liked to rip expensive wallpaper into ribbons.

"It's all in our mind," de Gier was saying in the dark room, as if he had been following the commissaris' thoughts.

"Pardon?"

"It's all in our mind," de Gier repeated. "The innkeeper said that when I complimented him on his moss garden. Japanese wisdom. Maybe this adventure of ours, the yakusa and the stolen art and the drugs, is also in our own mind. Did Dorin tell you about the trap he is setting up in Kyoto?"

"A little, but tell me."

"He has a contact with Daidharmaji. 'Ji' means 'temple.' Daidharma is the name of the temple. 'Dai' means 'great,' I have forgotten what 'dharma' means. Something like 'insight,' I suppose, all the temples have names like that. This Daidharmaji is not one temple, but a great complex. It has a monastery and a master and high priests and an enormous compound and gardens and so on. It employs a lot of priests and monks. It is famous for its art collections, but the yakusa have never been able to get at them, for the temples are well run and Daidharmaji is a very religious place. The priests either don't care about money or they are kept in check by their superiors and discipline.

"Dorin has friends there, and he has talked to the high priest who administrates the temple. The high priest has ordered one of his men to start running about in town and to drink and chase the whores. This man has been going to a bar called the Golden Dragon, it's the Kyoto headquarters of the yakusa. He went in civilian clothes, of course, not in his priestly robes, but he made it obvious that he was a corrupted priest, and the yakusa caught on and pushed some nice women his way and asked him to try his luck at gambling. He won a bit and then he started losing, but they didn't press him for payment, until yesterday. They have got him now, he owes a few thousand dollars. So now he has to bring them a few scrolls from the temple he is supposed to be in charge of. There are many small temples in the Daidharmaji compound, and each is run by a priest, and each has its own art collection which is shown to the public once a year."

"That's very good," the commissaris said. "So is he going to deliver? This priest?"

"No," de Gier said. "That's the clever part of it. The priest said he would deliver, but then he changed his mind. He told the yakusa that he has some very famous scroll paintings, but that he has another buyer who may pay a lot more than they will. He told them he would pay his debt in a few days' time."

"And we are the buyers?"

"Yes, sir. We'll go to Kyoto and check into an inn close to Daidharmaji. The priest will come and visit us and we'll buy his wares. Then he'll pay the yakusa. Everybody will be polite and the yakusa will take the money, but they will be annoyed and start following the priest to see where he takes his merchandise. Dorin has arranged that other priests and monks will come to see us too. We'll set up a regular racket, and all the time we will be in Kyoto which is a holy city and where the yakusa can't throw their weight about. Kyoto has a pleasure quarter, a red light district lined with willow trees, and it is run by the yakusa, but they never get really tough. They are Japanese too and maybe they are restrained by the atmosphere, or perhaps they are concerned about crime in Kyoto being written up in the national newspapers and attracting too much attention to them. So they'll have to sit back and gnash their teeth."

"I see," the commissaris said slowly. "Until they get so irritated that they'll do something. We'll draw them out and force them to show their face."

"Dorin had some trouble getting Daidharmaji to cooperate. Their art is the best in Japan. A lot of it is Chinese, a thousand years old. If it is lost or damaged it would be a calamity. Dorin only got his way because the monastery's master, the Zen master-it's a Zen Buddhist temple, I am told-told the high priest in charge of routine and discipline to go ahead. The Zen master said all that art is a lot of junk anyway and nobody should care if it gets lost. He said, in fact, that he didn't mind the yakusa stealing and selling it. That way it gets around and people can see it; in Daidharmaji it is kept in vaults."