crime.'
Jo thought again. 'The mounted cop, the beauty with the ponytail on the chestnut horse. She saw me.'
'Not near the azalea bushes,' de Gier said. 'Policewoman McLaughlin saw a Road Warrior look-alike near a bandstand, too far away to be identifiable. I interviewed the policewoman several times.'
Jo nodded. 'I bet you did, Sergeant.'
'Yes.' De Gier looked away from smiling faces. He scratched his thigh. 'Sure.'
'Listen,' Jo told Peter. 'Let's start at the beginning. I was in New York at that time. You know I have two passports. My new passport was stamped. That's proof, isn't it?'
'I believe you destroyed your new passport,' Peter said. 'I believe it was a replacement for the one you said you lost on the Riviera.'
Jo's muscular hands patted his knees. 'Yes.' He addressed the commissaris. 'Maybe Kennedy Immigration has a record of my arrival. I made four trips in all, sir, three to shadow Uncle Bert, to find out what his routine was, and the fourth to kill him. Every time I arrived at Kennedy my passport was stamped. They have computers there; don't they retain such information?'
'I don't think so,' the commissaris said.
Cardozo spoke up. 'I checked with the U.S. Embassy. It's the same routine at Kennedy Airport as here at Schiphol. If everything looks okay no notes are made.'
Cardozo and Eugene served coffee and cookies.
Turtle emerged from the long weeds bordering the commissaris's unkempt lawn. The company watched the reptile, on his 'way to a dish of lettuce, plod steadily along.
'I heard about your turtle,' Jo told the commissaris. 'Nice pet.'
The commissaris smiled. 'He is a friend, Jo.'
Peter waited until Eugene and Cardozo had returned from the kitchen to ask Jo whether he had murdered his uncle.
'Sure,' Jo said. 'I planned it and I did it. Things worked out fine. The horse kicking Uncle made his heart play up. All I had to do was aggravate that condition.'
'There is no proof you did any of that, Jo,' Grijpstra said.
'How can you say that, Adjutant?' Jo's deep voice reverberated under the veranda's low roof. 'You should have seen the mess we made. We were rolling around on the ground. I slapped his face. I put my knee in his balls. I shook him until his dentures went flying. I tore my nail when I was holding on to lapels of his jacket. I banged his face with the top of my head.'
De Gier shook his head. 'No traces, Jo.'
'Please,' Jo said. 'What about all this DNA testing you read about in reports? What about boot prints? I have just read an article in Police Weekly that says a boot print is all a detective needs now.' He held up a finger. 'One boot print, Sergeant! I must have left hundreds.'
'Jo,' the commissaris said. 'Sergeant Hurrell showed you Uncle Bert's body. Animals ate a good deal of it. The clothes found with the body were left by a robber. The robber and the animals erased your prints.'
'Did you castrate your uncle?' Peter asked.
Jo was watching Turtle chomping a lettuce leaf.
'Tell us whether or not you cut Uncle Bert,' Peter said. 'I think you want to tell us that.'
Perhaps the breeze changed direction, opening up the willow leaves, or it could be that a passing streetcar had an unusually loud bell. The tram's clanging penetrated the garden.
Jo was babbling now, talking about liquidating filthy perverts, which should be okay. There were all these perverts around abusing little boys. Jo kept repeating himself, mentioning his parents, who might have had problems, lovers, debts, what the hell, but they weren't gay at least. His dad and mom were just fine, they had him, didn't they? A little son, people like that, having little sons, to carry on their name, inherit the farm, and then Uncle came, and he was nice, yes goddamn it, Uncle Bert was nice, he, Jo, would never say he wasn't. They had gone on boats on the Amstel River together, and they had played at home, Sunday mornings, with a zoo that Aunt Carolien gave him for his birthday, and she unwrapped the plaster-of-Paris animals from the special silk paper that kept them from getting hurt, and he and Uncle Bert put all the animals between their little wooden fences, or in iron cages, and that's where they belonged, and sometimes Uncle Bert got the model train and made it go on rails looping all under and around the dining table, those were great games, and for lunch Aunt Carolien would make little pancakes, with ginger jam, but then after she left, Uncle would do those goddamn things damn it '
'Jo,' Peter said quietly, 'Jo? Can you hear me? Look at me, it's me, Peter. Eugene is here too.'
'I am here,' Eugene said. 'We're all here, Jo.'
The garden on Queens Avenue was quiet again, until, from the next house, softly, punctuated by the hollow tones of a wooden drum, came the sound of a sutra being chanted in Sanskrit.
How frightening, the commissaris thought. Am I the only one who knows that this is about the void, that there is neither wisdom nor any attainment, that there is nothing to attain, that there are no obstructions and therefore no fear, that there is no ignorance, and no ending of ignorance, no suffering, no cause of suffering, no cessation of suffering, and no path, and here we pretend to sit around being busy?
'Did you cut him?' Peter asked. 'Are you sorry that you cut off his penis, is that what has been bothering you? Do you want us to forgive you?'
Jo was being Road Warrior now, driving his supercar across the Australian desert looking for perverts who had ended his hope of having a wife and a child, like the good people in the farmland north of Amsterdam, where his dad and mom had him and where it had all been just fine for a while.
'Just a little counseling,' Eugene whispered to Grijpstra. 'That's all he needed. I told him that, but he was always so uptight. But maybe he didn't ever have a chance. Once they are raised in strict dualism-Dutch Reformed Country Church-and then, suddenly, there is the permissive city here, add abuse to that, call up guilt, provoke lying and twisting to get out of that guilt…'
Jo looked at the commissaris. 'Uncle was alive when I cut him.' Jo got up and looked down at the commissaris from his great height. 'I wanted you to find out, and now I want you to tell me about it. What do you make of this, sir?'
Peter stood next to Jo. He had his arm around Jo's shoulders. He asked Jo what the commissaris could tell him. Since when is a policeman a judge? Jo should thank the commissaris, who had done all he could, had investigated a crime, had located the guilty party, but couldn't dispense justice.
Jo howled, then cried.
Eugene got up. 'Well, you know,' Eugene said, 'you have to figure this out yourself, Jobo. You did it, but you did it stupidly, because you wanted to be caught by the little old father figure, or rather'-Eugene looked at the commissaris-'the little old grandfather figure.' Eugene punched Jo Termeer in the stomach. 'Your stupidity is your cleverness. You left some psychological traces but this is the physical world, Jobo, the Justice Department is into sperm and blood.' Eugene rubbed Jo's cheek affectionately. 'Look here, if you want approval of your homemade morality, applause for Road Warriors of the Mind who castrate and kill uncles…eh.' Eugene patted Jo's other cheek. 'Tell you what, let me get you into a place in the country, nice and quiet, where you can figure things out and Peter and I will come see you.'
'You're not a psychologist, are you?' Cardozo asked Eugene.
'He is,' Peter said. 'Eugene works for the Top Job Institute; he helps pick the chief executive officers of the future.'
Jo sat down. He was calm now, momentarily in control of his emotions, de Gier thought. He had seen that happen before-murder suspects, during intense interrogation, unexpectedly becoming lucid.
'If I did the right thing,' Jo said pleasantly, 'I was ahead of my time. Present-day morality does not excuse the castration of abusive and perverted uncles. Commissaris?'
'Jo?' the commissaris asked.
'You can't get me a trial? Nothing you can do, except this'-Jo gestured-'meeting with sympathetic authorities, unofficially, while I'm in the company of my pals?'
'I'm afraid not, Jo.'
'But by being bad I created my demon,' Jo said. 'I can't stand my demon, sir. She is driving me cra2y.'
'The Bad Conscience Demon,' Eugene told Cardozo when it was all over and de Gier was pouring cold jenever from a stone jug and Katrien was handing out peanuts and the commissaris was talking to Peter and
