\\ 24 /////
Modern science has developed a type of glass that is transparent on one side and mirrored on the other. The invention benefits detection. With a suspect on one side and a detective on the other, much that was hidden becomes instantly clear. A wall of this type of glass divides two rooms in Amsterdam Police Headquarters. On the suspect's side of the glass wall, much work was done that day, observed by curious eyes hidden behind the mirror. Cardozo and the Madame Tussaud friend didn't know that Adjutant Grypstra watched their movements. They could have known, but they were too busy creating. True creation, the Madame Tussaud friend explained, reconstructs reality. Modern reality may be of divine origin, but once the thing is done, the artist gets his chance in duplication.
Grypstra didn't hear that, or he would have frowned. The adjutant smiled, for he was listening to jazz through earphones connected to a box. He had the box because Jane wanted him to repair it. The box only needed new batteries, and a cassette that Grypstra happened to find on de Gier's desk. He now listened to a jazz mathematician on piano- nameless, for the sergeant had left the label blank. Grypstra smiled because it wasn't often that luck reached him from 264 several sides at once. The beautiful constable and the perfect music met in his mind, housed in a rhythmically wobbling head. Let it all come to me, Grypstra thought, and not by my own effort, and while it does, I can watch those two jokers. While I do nothing myself, all the mysteries are clarified, beginning with the riddle of Douwe Scherjoen's being.
'Yahoo!' and 'Whee!' Cardozo and the Madame Tussaud friend shouted while they worked on their tangible expression of the dead man's dark side. Their diligent hands stapled strips of black cotton material to wooden sticks, hinged so that they would move at the pull of a string. Douwe could already sit down and get up. He also had to take a step forward while stretching out his hands, and the hands, emerging from cotton cuffs, were to give the visitor the gift. The gift, sent by the commissaris, waited in its plastic bag. As the bony thumbs kept slipping, the Madame Tussaud friend experimented with wires meant to hold joints together while Cardozo worked on the lights, which hung in the corners of the room and were able to turn and flash.
'A sudden impression,' the Madame Tussaud friend said. 'It has to work for only a single moment.'
Grijpstra's jazz cassette had come to the end, and the adjutant now listened to the artists' dialogue, picked up by microphones and amplified on his side of the glass.
'Never mind Douwe's bright side,' Cardozo said, closing the album that he had been studying before. 'Let's show him at his worst, chill the visitor with pure nastiness.'
'Too abstract,' the Madame Tussaud friend said. 'They won't believe it. We'll make Douwe beg for forgiveness. Let's give him a pathetic touch.'
'Revenge?' Cardozo asked. 'He's a ghost now, without peace. He's still a businessman, too. He'll suggest a fair exchange. They can have dead Eddy, and in return they find Douwe's killer.'
'Who wants a dead rat?'
'Okay,' Cardozo said. 'He's threatening them. A dead rat is revolting.'
'Death,' the Madame Tussaud friend said, 'that's what we have to work on. The death of Douwe's burned skull, the black holes of his eye sockets, the limp corpse of the rat, tail and feet hanging down, the end of everything.'
The artists took time off, to roll cigarettes, suck smoke, reflect on their intentions. 'Frighten them, okay,' Cardozo said. 'But they've got to feel sorry for him, too. And for themselves, that they reduced him to this state. The murderer is among them.'
The Madame Tussaud friend jumped up. 'Let's make him more pathetic.'
Douwe sat down and got up again, stepped forward slowly. They bent his spine, slowed the movement of the arms, turned the skull to the side, flashed more sudden light.
'Please,' Douwe begged, 'please help me. I never killed anyone, the punishment was too cruel, fill in the gap, show your guilt, please confess.'
He's asking for compassion, Grjjpstra thought, that's better. He wants help. We all want help. We're weakly human. I'm seeing myself now, I'm as damned as Douwe, I'll be damned if I don't want to help him. They're doing a good job.
'Done!' Cardozo and the Madame Tussaud friend shouted. They had pressed a flat black cap on Douwe's skull, and beyond that final touch, there was no more to be done. The skull's reconstruction had succeeded. Only the top part, with the grinning sockets, had been Douwe's property once; the wired-on lower jaw had been picked up in a forgotten corner of the police laboratory, but that the two halves didn't belong together was satisfactorily smoothed over by the shadow of the cap's visor, strengthened by pulsating light.
Cardozo amp; Co. entered Grjjpstra's room. 'I didn't know you were here, Adjutant,' Cardozo said. 'What do you think?'
'Not bad,' Grypstra said.
'You hear?' Cardozo asked.
'Who needs praise?' the Madame Tussaud friend asked.
'The adjutant never approves of me,' Cardozo said.
'They weren't your efforts so much,' the Madame Tussaud friend said. 'All you did was hand me tools. But that's fine, you were useful in a way.'
The commissaris came in. Cardozo went back to the other room and brought Douwe to life by pulling strings. Douwe got up and offered the dead Eddy. Eddy's eyes glowed a sparkling red in the suddenly switched-on light.
'Really,' the commissaris said, 'aren't we overdoing this a trifle? I hadn't meant to go quite this far. No. Not at all.'
'Okay?' Cardozo asked, rushing into the room.
'Your chief isn't sure,' the Madame Tussaud friend said. 'Will you be canceling the performance, sir?'
The commissaris shook his head. 'I don't want to waste your work.'
The telephone near Grijpstra's hand rang. He picked it up. 'The reception desk downstairs, sir. Suspects have arrived.'
'Go down, Adjutant, and fetch them, one by one. Pyr, Tyark, and Yelte first. Don't go in yourself. Pull the door closed after them, and come here.'
Pyr entered the room. Of all the suspects, he resembled Douwe most. Pyr was small and bent forward. What Pyr said, when Douwe offered him Eddy, wasn't Frisian, but the prehistoric scream of those who are suddenly faced with the ultimate threat that life can offer, as the commissaris explained later, yanking his own watch chain until it broke. 'Pyr saw his own being,' the commissaris explained.
'Trrruahahahahee,' Pyr screamed, according to the tape that preserved the sounds of the interrogation room and was played back after the suspects had left.
After that scream, Pyr understood that he was in the presence of a lifeless puppet made of cloth and sticks, nothing to get upset about. Pyr wandered about the room, guiltless but shaken, as could be expected. Grijpstra fetched him and took him to another room. The commissaris casually dropped in. Pyr, angry now, swore in Dutch.
'Mr. Wydema,' the commissaris interrupted. 'I'm sorry we had you come all this way for this, but I wanted to save you the trouble of endless interrogation.'
'You don't have any proof at all!' Pyr shouted.
'Tell me,' the commissaris said, 'the sheep that you export, do you know their eventual destination?'
'Turkey!' Pyr shouted.
'You collect the money over there?'
Pyr had been to Turkey.
'You ever spend any money there?'
'On what?'
'On purchases? Products? Something to bring back?'
'From Turkey?' Pyr asked. 'What have they got out there? Flies? Old women? Holes in the street?'
Pyr was sent back to Friesland. Tyark Tamminga was sent to Douwe. Tyark, a tall, wide-shouldered man, had to cry a little. He threw his cap on the floor and staggered to the door. The door was locked. Tyark pressed himself
