Freddie and Antonio laughed. 'Like Snoopy…Snoopy likes to frolic in parks.'
Right, de Gier said, but there could be more to the need to frolic. There were many cases in Amsterdam's Vondel Park where women danced around and, once they had attracted an audience, slipped out of their fur coats or cloaks and pranced about naked, and there were men who pretended to amuse little girls, by means of games or dolls, and then suddenly exposed themselves.
'So what do you cops do?' Antonio asked.
Nothing much, de Gier said. Take the foolish folks home maybe. Be kind and forgiving. Keep tensions down. Amsterdam is known for permissiveness, the city welcomes alternative lifestyles, but the American East Coast is known for more Puritan values. De Gier became enthusiastic. Now what if old Termeer had dared to point his pecker at a female cop, a mounted female cop, a dominatrix on a high horse? Wouldn't that get him in trouble? Get him kicked in the chest by the officer's horse? The perpetrator gallops off. Doesn't tell anyone what happened. Victim dies in the bushes. The NYPD covers up. Perhaps there was repressed anger in the policewoman's subconscious. Maybe she was of Puritan stock?
De Gier got up and walked excitedly around the small Horatio Street garden, acting out the scene. Imagine this extreme case of a supposedly neat old gent, in tweeds, with a lovely white beard, a St. Nick figure, dropping his mask by opening his fly, being utterly disgusting, provoking an impeccably uniformed law enforcement officer by waving his dick at the goddamn woman?
De Gier's audience was amused but not impressed. 'No Puritans in New York,' Freddie said.
Antonio agreed. 'You're thinking of Massachusetts. Massachusetts was setded by hypocrites in hats. You guys, the Dutch, settled Manhattan. Flamboyant folks. 'New Amsterdam,' remember? And then, after you guys, it was the British. The Brits were merchants and aristocrats. They're not after dicks, they're after money.' He laughed. 'Money buys the good life, eh, Fred?'
Freddie told de Gier that he specialized in trading furniture and art objects from those early days. Through his dealings he had absorbed some of the distinctive atmosphere of that historical period. Neither the Dutch not the British had been concerned about prescribing restrictive behavior in order to impress a forbidding Father.
'Show him that picture of the cross-dressing governor, Freddie.'
Freddie knew of a portrait of one of the Tory governors, a well-known transvestite. He went inside and came back with an art book. There was a full-page reproduction of an oil painting showing a powerful figure in an extravagant satin dress. 'Here,' Freddie said. 'Mark the shaven jowls. His ladyship. An early J. Edgar Hoover.'
'And the governor held court here' Antonio said, 'in New York City. Nobody minded much.'
De Gier's theory crumbled while Freddie and Antonio, taking turns, being careful not to interrupt each other, like TV anchormen, lectured him on the history of New York City. The sergeant was told that the city had been on the British side during the American Revolution and had spent the Civil War sympathizing with the southern slavery states.
'Bah!' Freddie concluded.
'Sin and corruption,' Antonio said. 'We have a bad name here; the rest of the country hates us. We like that. You think you guys are way-out in Holland? Go to Central Park, watch out-of-state wannabe-shockers try to be naughty in spandex shorts, in bare-bottom thongs, even…' Antonio grinned. 'There was a bare-top guy on the Promontory in a kind of lampshade that he wore as a skirt. The shade folded up if he pulled a string, and then he'd pull another string and erect something that could be a Day-Glo-velvet-upholstered cucumber and waggle that'- Antonio looked at de Gier triumphantly-'and still nobody looked.'
Freddie smiled. 'We all know what Amsterdam is like today, but New York has long been there.'
'More apricot juice?' Antonio asked.
'Some hazelnut latte with fat-free topping?' Freddie asked.
De Gier had both.
'Sorry to disappoint you,' Antonio said. 'But you've got to get real.'
'You can't shock a New York policewoman,' Freddie said. 'That's Real for you.' He cleared his throat. 'Eh, Rainus? That how you pronounce your name? Just one question. I should have asked you before. We don't tolerate smoking in this building. You don't use nicotine, do you? If you do we can easily find you other lodging.'
De Gier claimed to have given up smoking some months before.
'And you didn't gain weight?' Antonio asked, looking down at his own protruding belly. 'I gained forty pounds. It's two years now and I still haven't lost it.'
'What's your secret, pal?' Freddie asked.
De Gier said he mostly ate sliced radishes on toast for breakfast and was spending more time on unarmed combat police training and repeated a mantra whenever he tended to think about chocolate.
'What mantra?'
De Gier blushed. 'Nothing special.'
'No slips?'
'Some slips.'
'Doesn't that prolong the agony?'
'It does.'
'How do you cope with agony?'
De Gier demonstrated. He got up, stretched, put his hands in his pockets and leaned his forehead against a doorpost.
'That helps?'
'After a few minutes.'
While de Gier drank his coffee concoction Antonio frowned and concentrated.
'You know,' Antonio said, 'I kind of liked your guy. I called him 'the frozen jumper.' He would stand at crossings, ready to leap, and then not move until you'd given up on him, and then he would make a giant jump and run up a path, waving and hollering. The bearded philosopher type. What did you say his name was?'
'Termeer.'
Antonio' strong fingers dug about in his beard. 'Termeer reminded me of the Sadguru. Are you into Hinduism at all? You've heard about the Sadguru, the Inner Teacher, He Who Won't Be Denied Ever? Your true inner self? You can keep being stupid, fucking up and so on, but the Sadguru is getting ready.'
De Gier said he was more into Buddhism.
'Okay,' Antonio said. 'Same thing. Call it Buddha Nature. The Relentless Force that won't put up with Ego Bullshit. That'll make you move one day in the right direction.'
'I think it's called Emptiness in Buddhism,' de Gier said. 'I like that. The Void. You could fall into it forever.'
'The Void where all the Buddhas live.' Antonio nodded. He spoke solemnly. 'You can't grasp Nothing. But it grasps you all right if you keep messing up. Termeer was kind of ungraspable, I thought. The other park crazies are just sick guys. Schizophrenics. Your guy looked like maybe he had it together.'
'Antonio is a hopeful seeker,' Freddie said. 'He goes to New Age weekends.' Freddie put on a stage voice. 'On the mountaintop where soul-seeking men drum while growing and sharing. A hundred bucks for enlightenment; throw in another fifty and you get a semitransparent rock that holds insight.'
Antonio smiled. 'I get discounts.' He looked serious again. 'I liked Termeer's dog too. He sometimes had a dog with him, an Alsatian, a huge animal, but you know…' Antonio shook his head. 'I'm confused now. That dog was with another guy. Nice guy. An older man. Well dressed. With a funny way of walking. He dragged a leg. Quite a muscular fellow otherwise.'
'Two dogs?' Freddie suggested.
Antonio was thinking again.
It was pleasant in the little garden. De Gier, six hours ahead of his usual bedtime, felt the increased perception that often hit him just before falling asleep. Time seemed to slow down and Antonio's words reached him separately, clearly, floating slowly under the canopy of a Japanese maple tree.
'Same dog,' Antonio said. 'I know. A seeing-eye dog. Maybe the St. Nick guy and the other man shared it. But neither of those guys was blind.'
'Were you in Central Park,' de Gier asked, 'when there was a balloon dinosaur, some gigantic beast, that kind of bobbed about, and when there was a contest of look-alike movie characters? Do you remember?'
'Yes,' Antonio said.
