'Self-defense?'
'No. He was throwing stones at a cat.'
Grijpstra rubbed his short bristly gray hairs and stared at the phone which sat in his hand, innocently gray. De Gier's voice had sounded very quiet.
'Shit,' Grijpstra said. 'Is there a charge against you?'
'I suppose so, but I got away.'
'The commissaris knows?'
'Yes.'
'And you are still on the job?'
'Sure.'
'Ah well,' Grijpstra said. 'Send me a postcard sometime. And if they catch you I'll come and blow up the jail. It will be a change. Maybe I can get my two little fat friends here to help me. I've gotten quite friendly with them, you know, especially since I found them Japanese newspapers. Yes, that's a good idea.' He was feeling really cheerful now. It would be a change, waltzing around Tokyo arm in arm with two trained gangsters. And with de Gier in jail, waiting patiently in some smelly cell, living on half a bowl of cold mushy rice a day. Saving his friend. His only friend. Did he have any other friends? No. Grijpstra nodded to himself.
'How are you otherwise?' he asked.
'Funny,' de Gier said, 'very funny. It seems as if there is nothing left in me, everything goes straight through. I see all these beautiful things here, temples, gardens, lovely girls. The man they assigned to us is quite a character and we get on well. I do judo practice, I learn Japanese words, I study maps, I think about what we are supposed to do here. But nothing really seems to register. It all goes straight through, as if I am not there. Even when I drink I am not there.'
'But that must be a good feeling,' Grijpstra said, surprised.
'Sure. I am not complaining. Maybe the only worry I have is that the feeling will stop. I will remember who I am and that I live in Amsterdam and that I am a policeman and all that. Now there is nothing. I am some sort of mirror. Things reflect in me and then the things go away and the reflection goes too.'
'Yes,' Grijpstra said. 'I think I know what you mean. But I only get that after the twelfth drink or so, and by that time I am staggering about, and the feeling never lasts. I just get sick after that, throw up and all.'
'Where are you?' de Gier asked.
'In our room, at my desk. I wouldn't phone Japan from my own house, would I? The bill will be for an unpronounceable amount.'
'You are really there, eh?' de Gier asked. 'And I am here, at the other end of the world. And I have to get back to our room. We are pretending to buy a valuable painting from a corrupt priest. Maybe the chase will be on by tomorrow.'
Grijpstra hung up. 'Twisted a man's neck because the man was throwing stones at a cat,' he said aloud.
He was still shaking his head as he left the building. Ten minutes later he was knocking on the door of a small hotel reputed to keep its bar open right through the night. A number of bearded and bleary-eyed poets looked up as the portly gentleman elbowed his way to the counter and ordered two jenevers.
'Two?' the girl in the low blouse asked. 'In one glass?'
'In two glasses,' Grijpstra said. 'I'll drink them both at the same time. I am drinking with my friend, you see, but he is in Japan.'
'I see,' the girl said, and poured the drinks. She smiled reassuringly at the poets. The poets still looked worried.
She went to them to spell out her message.
'It's all right,' she said, 'he is crazy too.' * Cha means tea, O is a polite preface.
\\ 14 /////
The Commissaris woke up because he dreamed that he had been caught up in a flood and washed down a sewer and that its creamy contents were bubbling and foaming up to his lips. He screamed and tore at the bed- sheets and rolled off the mattress onto the doormat, where he hurt his shoulder on the brass strap of his old- fashioned suitcase. He sat up, mumbling and rubbing his shoulder. De Gier was up too, standing with his back against the wall, the Walther gleaming in his hand, the barrel of the gun sweeping between the balcony doors and the door leading to the corridor.
'It's all right, sergeant,' the commissaris said. 'A bad dream. What's that terrible smell? Do you think they are having trouble with the sanitation here?'
De Gier put the gun back in the holster which was strapped over his pajamas, and stretched. He looked at his watch. 'Five o'clock, sir, pretty early still, but I keep on waking up. They are making quite a racket in the temples across the street. Bells, clappers, gongs; must be a merry party. They were chanting too just now, deep voices, some religious ceremony, I suppose, I'll ask Dorin about it. It's amazing you didn't wake up. I thought they were in the garden, but I went on the balcony and it's coming from behind those high walls. I looked through the gate yesterday; the main templets another hundred yards behind the waU. The monks are getting up at three o'clock over there, every day I imagine. Must be a strange life.'
'They wouldn't be causing that smell, would they?' the commissaris asked, wrinkling his nose. 'Powerful smell, must be pure excrement, and human excrement too.'
De Gier laughed and lay down. 'Yes, sir, that's shit. There are no flush toilets here. The pipe leads to a wooden bucket and every day the buckets are picked up. That was the cart you are smelling; it came by a few minutes ago, a horse-drawn cart. Dorin says they call it the 'honey-cart.' It's the same all over Japan. They use it for manure here. Dorin was joking about it. 'The base of our economy is pure shit.''
'Not a bad idea,' the commissaris said. 'Better than blowing it into the sea under pressure, as we do, and then swimming in it. A waste and a nuisance. But we don't have the smell. I have noticed it before but not as strongly as just now.'
There was a sound on the balcony and de Gier reached for his gun again. The commissaris felt guilty. His pistol was somewhere in his suitcase. He got up and began to rummage about, Ashing the holster out of a pile of shirts.
Dorin's head peered around the balcony door.
'O.K.,' de Gier said. 'We can't sleep, that's all.'
'I heard a scream.' Dorin came into the room. He was dressed only in a fundoshi, a white wrap covering his genitals. The long-barreled revolver looked out of place in the quiet room. He was pointing it at the floor, his index finger stretched along the trigger guard.
'Bad dream,' the commissaris said. Dorin smiled and turned, and they heard him jump from their balcony onto his own, next door.
'We are well protected,' the commissaris said. 'I hope he really called his henchmen off. They were making me very uncomfortable in Tokyo. They were always somewhere behind me, two brooding little men with wide shoulders and long arms.'
'Sad-faced monkeys,' de Gier said sleepily, and pulled the blanket over his shoulder. 'Dorin was telling me that in the old days the Chinese seriously doubted that the Japanese were human. Maybe they have changed since then. I find them very human, with a few exceptions, those cat-killers and the bodyguards you mentioned just now and a few other types I saw on the Ginza in Tokyo. The others seem to be very pleasant people, and intelligent too. Their average I.Q. is said to be considerably higher than ours. I'd like to be able to read their literature.'
'Just to be able to learn how to read Japanese requires genius,' the commissaris said sadly. 'How can we ever trick them? To read a newspaper means that you have learned eighteen hundred and fifty Chinese characters and a hundred odd Japanese scribbles. The simplest yakusa can read a newspaper.'
'They lost the war, didn't they?' de Gier said, and fell asleep.
When the commissaris woke up again the maids were serving breakfast and de Gier was dressed and shaved. The breakfast was American, fried eggs and bacon and sausages and toast and good coffee. He got up as the maids
