Grijpstra, as he left the room, remembered the commissaris saying that lack of substance makes people float to the top.
'Yessir,' the adjutant said. 'Thank you.' He waved his signed document. 'This will get things going.'
Chapter 10
Detective-Sergeant de Gier, six thousand miles west of his jurisdiction, helicoptered from Kennedy Airport to the Heliport on Manhattan's East Side.
New York impressed him. The spectacular city looked the part of a major power center. Manhattan's unique skyline convinced de Gier that whatever was thought up here would cause ripples all around the planet, for a while anyway. Nothing is forever but what force could wipe out this metropolis of glass and steel? Warfare? Internal strife? One of the modern drug-resistant plagues? He wondered if someday an earthquake would topple those splendid tall buildings.
Would some people be crushed by their own top-heavy creations and the rest flee? He knew about the abandoned cities of Central and South America, where the jungle had reclaimed huge buildings. Not only did the citizens disappear, but there was no memory of what might have happened. Yet there was obviously technology there, knowledge, a high degree of organization, a well-developed infrastructure. Anthropologists had come up with vague theories, in which facts didn't fit.
Would the New York skyscrapers degenerate into crumpled shapes leaning across each other, with skeletons staring out of broken windows? Would vines, mold, lichens and mosses gradually smooth their jumbled lines?
Maybe, de Gier thought, it will all slide into the ocean, to the bottom of the sea, like Atlantis, like Amsterdam. With Amsterdam there is the certainty, in a foreseeable, calculable future, that the sea will flood the city. Ice caps melt and ocean levels rise and dikes cannot be built up forever.
There would be fish again, huge schools, unbothered by hunger at the top of the food chain. De Gier imagined fish swimming through his apartment.
'Quite a place you have here,' de Gier told the Trump Air stewardess. He read her the address of a bed and breakfast Antoinette had written down in his notebook. Antoinette and Karel had enjoyed the place. How to get there?
'Horatio Street?' the stewardess asked. De Gier had his map out. She pointed the way. 'A little bit complicated. The subway is cheap but I would advise a cab.'
He found coordinates for the Cavendish on his map and thought that he might contact the commissaris first. There was plenty of time. It wouldn't do to make things easy. If New York was to be his hunting ground for the next few days he should investigate on foot. A cab was too easy. He told the stewardess he would call on a friend first, proudly reciting the address: Eighty-third and Fifth.
He only carried a leather shoulder bag holding three changes of linen, a CD player, six Miles Davis CDs and a novel by Alvaro Mutis, in the original Spanish. De Gier had been puzzling through the tale during the flight across the Adantic. His Spanish was poor and he hadn't brought a dictionary, so many words had to be guessed at. De Gier, a self-taught linguist, had managed to wade halfway through the first chapter. He had figured out what seemed to be a plot line. A writer of technical brochures on petrochemical subjects travels to Finland. It's cold in Helsinki. The protagonist goes to the harbor from where he can see the domes of St. Petersburg and watches a tramp steamer enter port. But now, to de Gier's delight, he is no longer in forty-degrees-below Finland but in ninety-degrees-above Honduras, where a woman in a bikini runs toward a yacht. In spite of her large feet she is attractive, due to good makeup. Her husband is shooting at seabirds with a. 45 automatic, but misses.
'You're Spanish?' the stewardess asked, seeing the book in de Gier's hand. 'You don't sound Spanish.' She was smiling. The stewardess, like de Gier, was in her forties. De Gier had noticed that older women were now sending signals. De Gier, known at Amsterdam Headquarters as 'Mr. B Movie,' was tall, wide shouldered, athletic looking. Women liked his thick curly hair and huge cavalry-officer-style swept-up mustache. In potential sexual encounters he had been backing offlately, preferring the company of his cat. He had told Grijpstra, when the adjutant was about to be taken over by the hotel owner and former prostitute Nellie, 'Animals have smaller brains but they use them better.'
'You dislike women now?'
De Gier gestured ail-inclusively. 'I dislike people.'
'You're people yourself.'
'Anyone,' de Gier said. But he didn't see himself so much. Only in the mirror.
'But you often look in mirrors,' Grijpstra said. 'You're very vain, you know. Combing your hair. Brushing up the old mustache.'
De Gier didn't like vain people either.
The stewardess watched her passenger stride off, going west on Sixty-third Street. She liked the cut of his long linen breeches. The leather flight jacket looked good too. The fellow was probably gay, due to meet a clone on Horatio Street. The stewardess wished the pair luck as she picked up Dixie cups in the helicopter's cabin.
It was a nice day. De Gier walked, map in hand, up Fifth Avenue, glancing at Central Park, the grisly scene of Uncle Bert Termeer's demise, but the park looked pleasant. He reached the Cavendish and happened to meet the commissaris in the lobby.
'What?' the commissaris asked. 'Is it you De Gier said he had always wanted to visit New York again, that his last visit had been too short, that he had taken a few days off. And as he knew the commissaris was in town too he had thought he might look him up.
'How are you, sir?'
'That last time you were trailing me too,' the commissaris said. He took off his round spectacles and furiously blew on the glasses. 'Who is paying for this nonsense?'
'Yessir,' de Gier said. 'Nice day. I walked here from the river. I came in by chopper. Did you use the helicopter too? Beautiful, all those buildings. I have been reading this novel, sir, by a Colombian author, in Spanish. Do you have any idea what 'huevones' means? I didn't bring a dictionary, you see. It's more fun to guess but sometimes I get lost a bit. The meaning of huevones escapes me.'
The bellhop was a Latino who looked like a dwarfed Anthony Quinn. Thinking de Gier was a guest, he had come over to carry luggage. 'Huevones,' the bellhop said, 'literally means 'balls,' but what is the context, sir? Could you show me the passage?'
De Gier opened his book and found the relevant sentence. 'Si me Megan a dejar se mueren de hambre, huevones.'
'And the context?' the bellhop asked.
De Gier had figured out that a bikini-clad woman was yelling at men on a boat, sailors who were about to take off without her, and that she wanted to go along, for she was the cook. She was yelling at the men that 'without her they would die of hunger.
'Ah,' the bellhop said. 'Then 'huevones' should be taken as 'assholes,' as a derogatory term, sir. Where did you put your luggage?'
'You're not staying here,' the commissaris told de Gier.
'I'm not staying here,' de Gier told the bellhop.
'Jack of all trades,' the bellhop said, pointing at his chest. 'Teach Spanish, offer referrals for analysis of dreams.' He handed over cards to the commissaris and de Gier. 'Ignacio is the name, a sus ordenes, senores. Journeys can be arranged. Voodoo is an expensive option.'
'Journeys?' de Gier asked.
'A Native American shortcut,' the bellhop explained, 'to the realm of collective subconscious spirits. We Mexicans are part Indian. But it may be that voodoo will explain your dreams better. My favorite black voodoo lady can guide you through all the netherworlds.'
Netherlandic de Gier wanted to be clever. 'I've just come from there.'
Ignacio saluted. The reception clerk had rung her bell. The bellhop turned and ran.
'My golf blunder,' the commissaris told de Gier while they ate in a nearby sushi restaurant, 'alarmed you.'
