Charlie, Termeer's landlord, to let us into Ter-meer's apartment and workplace. I understand the two men shared a building. We may pick up some ideas, clues, what have you, by walking about the premises where the victim lived. If I could get a better idea of how Termeer came to frolic into the azalea bushes…'
'But why do you feel uneasy, sir?' Grijpstra asked. 'We have hard facts here. Subject habitually overexerts himself, even after open-heart surgery, a bypass and so forth. The surgery is a fact.' Grijpstra waved a document at the phone. 'You faxed me the autopsy, remember? The New York coroner saw the marks. Here, right here, on official stationery…'
'Yes,' the commissaris said soothingly. 'I know…'
'So,' Grijpstra said, 'we have an old man who frolics in parks, which means that he runs and dances about like a madman, for God's sake. During one of these fits subject frightens a horse and is touched by its hoof. It says so, right here, sir.' Grijpstra waved his own report. '…Termeer now staggers about. Passersby, reliable witnesses interviewed by de Gier and me, well-educated society folks, set him down on a park bench. Subject now seemingly recovers and is left by the Good Samaritans. However, Termeer obviously has a relapse, for his dead body is found under azalea bushes, well off the path, the next morning. So? So the old boy staggers into nearby azalea bushes, collapses, dies. What else could possibly have happened? There was nobody about by then. The entire park's population was watching events. Cause of death? Heart attack. The coroner says so.'
There was some silence.
'Sir?' Grijpstra asked.
'Not all that much left for the coroner to investigate,' the commissaris said. 'I faxed you photographs of the corpse, Adjutant. Bits and pieces here and there. Upper parts of the thighs and the lower part of the torso are missing.'
'Most of the chest was there,' Grijpstra said. 'The heart is in the chest. Coroner mentions a heart attack as cause of death. Isn't that all we need to know, sir?'
'Yes.'
'They really have raccoons in that park, sir?'
They discussed raccoons. Grijpstra said that the raccoons released by a fur farm in Germany that Hermann Goring owned, but gave up on because of better profits in the Nazi business, had now spread into both Poland and Holland. 'Maybe soon they'll arrive in our very own Vondel Park,' Grijpstra said morosely. 'They look cute, with those little masks on, but they're devils, sir. Raccoons get in your garbage and when you want to send them on their way they'll charge you in your own kitchen.'
'Devilish denizens of the future,' the commissaris said, not uncheerfully. 'They won't create as much horror and terror as our species, that's for certain.'
The commissaris, after cradling the phone, mused for a few moments. Was there anything in his and Grijpstra's discussion that might fit in with the persistent nightmare of the tram-driving hollow-eyed woman? Some hint that would relieve his anxiety? Hunches, parts of thoughts, even entire logical and acceptable conclusions seemed to float just under his level of consciousness.
Lying back on the springy mattress of his huge four-poster bed, the commissaris tried to concentrate. Why was he thinking that he should pay attention to something that wasn't anywhere anymore?
He drifted off into sleep again. The dream immediately produced the tram-driving Angel of Death. This time there was also chanting.
The chanting was performed by the commissaris's neighbors on Queen's Avenue, Amsterdam. The woman was Chinese, a successful artist; the man, a well-known Dutch Orientalist. The couple was Buddhist. The professor and his wife sang sutras every morning in their temple room, which was next to the commissaris's bedroom. Listening to the exotic songs had become a daily pleasure. He especially liked the 'Makahanya Paramita,' a term that has to do, he learned, with obtaining 'Penetrating Insight.' While having a Chinese fried lobster dinner with the neighbors one enjoyable evening, he was told by Suhon, the Chinese lady, that she and her learned husband opened their early-morning routine by chanting the Heart Sutra, which she called the most basic Buddhist text ever formulated. She translated a few paragraphs-the sutra was fairly brief-while she hit a small wooden hand drum to provide proper punctuation.
The lines that the commissaris remembered, when he had to wake up to go to the bathroom, were part of a dialogue between Avalokitasavara, a bodhisattva, who returns from his meditations in high realms, and Sariputra, a less-developed Buddha-spirit.
As the sutra is outlined further the bodhisattva dominates the stage. Avalokitasavara wants to share with his pupil his basic discovery:
Sariputra, form is not other than emptiness and emptiness is not other than form form is precisely emptiness and emptiness precisely form
Beautiful, the commissaris thought. So now what? So now not what? He liked the idea of emptiness. If something isn't there, one doesn't have to worry about maintaining or protecting it. The two spirits were active on higher levels, however. The commissaris, from his lowly position as an incarnate human, could only see the empty aspects of his case, the loopholes. How to turn them around and give the bits of void form?
'Imagine the missing piece,' the commissaris told his mirror image in the bathroom, 'right here. On your lower level.'
Chapter 14
'Mounted Maggie,' as the desk sergeant called her, was late coming from duty. As she strode into the precinct's front room she seemed pleasantly surprised to see de Gier. 'Are you the foreign policeman?'
De Gier shared her feelings. Maggie •was a good-also intelligent-looking woman. He explained his presence. She looked less pleased. 'The old freeze and frolic man. I called him Fritz. Fritz won't go away, will he? Did you see those terrible photos?' She shook her head in disgust. 'The Urban Rangers say raccoons are a plague now. Never see them myself; the varmints mostly move at night. We should hunt them with hounds and flashlights like they do in the country.'
Maggie's ponytail bobbed as she walked next to him. 'And you came all the way from Amsterdam? What is so special about the old man?'
De Gier suggested lunch but Maggie was still in uniform and wanted to go home and change. Home was on West Twelfth Street, where she shared an apartment with another female 'mountie.' She asked questions as he walked her to her car, a battered enclosed jeep parked behind the building on the Eighty-fifth Street transverse. So he was only staying a few days. So he knew no one but his superior at the Cavendish Hotel ('But that's a thousand bucks a day. Is your chief connected?'). So he wasn't married-did he have a boyfriend? No? Did he like sports? Judo? Really? And where was he staying?
Their addresses were close. She dropped him off at Fourteenth Street and Eight Avenue. She touched his arm as he got out of the jeep. 'You like Italian food? Can you find your way around? Want to meet me in SoHo? Prince and Sullivan Streets, in an hour?'
He walked over to the restaurant, worrying. The carefree days were over, he didn't feel at ease with attractive women who signaled welcome. Did she think Europeans were exciting lovers? He should have told her he was married. She probably expected him to perform. Keep it up for some record period. Do weird stuff like sucking toes while she played French harmonica music on a CD.
De Gier felt sleepy. He had a vision of his quiet Horatio Street rooms. He could open the windows there and listen to birds singing. Have tea. Play Miles Davis through his earphones. Take a nap.
Walking down Greenwich Avenue he was stared at by men in black leather, in safari suits, in riding breeches and oversize linen shirts, in bib overalls and back-to-front caps. De Gier stopped consulting his street map to avoid offers to show him the way 'to wherever you may be going, Mistah Macho. You're from out of town?'
'No, thank you,' de Gier told a bodybuilder in a straw hat, an Indonesian sepia-colored vest and short shorts. 'I think I know where I am going.'
Maggie, looking gorgeous, he thought, sedately sexy in a close-fitting flowerprinted dress, was waiting in the restaurant. The restaurant was decorated with posters advertising Fellini films and tall plants with large leaves. The furniture was heavy pine, varnished. Rustic looking. The waiters wore aprons and bow ties and seemed to like
