Termeer laughed. "I'll never forget it."
The commissaris inserted a new tape into his recorder while, hand raised, he mimed a request for silence.
"Right. What would be your age now?"
Jo Termeer had just turned forty.
A forty-year-old young fellow, the commissaris thought. Crewcut, well dressed, athletic, well mannered, well spoken.
"How long has Uncle lived in America?"
Uncle Bert had spent over twenty years abroad and Aunt Carolien had died four years ago.
The commissaris switched off the recorder. He promised to make inquiries, via Interpol and other more direct connections.
"You won't be going to New York yourself?" Termeer asked.
The commissaris excused himself. He was sorry but New York, surely his colleague would understand, was outside the jurisdiction of the Amsterdam Municipal Police. Besides, he was about to be retired.
"But…"
No, the commissaris was certainly not going to America. It wasn't that he didn't want to assist a colleague. The commissaris would see what he could do for the voluntary Reserve Constable-First-Class Johan Termeer, but he was not to indulge in exaggerated expectations.
The commissaris, thinking that his performance had been impeccable, now intended to go and sit behind his imposing desk, each leg of which was sculptured in the image of a growling seated lion. He got up with some effort, dragging his painful leg.
Termeer got up opposite the commissaris and kept getting up. Termeer, standing, was at least a foot taller than his superior, and looked down on him from that height.
A formidable opponent, the commissaris thought, peering up anxiously and to the sides, for Termeer had very wide shoulders indeed. Amazing that he hadn't noticed before how formidable his visitor was.
A matter of attitude? Superior and inferior had faced each other just like this, dwarf versus giant, after Termeer had been marched in by Adjutant Grijpstra, but then the commissaris was convinced of his own value: a staff officer in an imposingly furnished room. Did a perception of discrepancy in height increase with an intensification of feelings of guilt?
Termeer was still talking, in a more pronounced bass voice, which was not at all servile. "Yes, sorry I bothered you, right? Commissaris, I must have been thinking that all my years of free labor for the police department warranted, perhaps…"
The commissaris heard himself apologizing again.
Termeer bent over him. "You do visit the States sometimes, don't you? Adjutant Grijpstra said so. That you used to have a sister living there, and friends and so forth. That you were connected."
The commissaris's secretary, Antoinette, came in to gather cups and plates and "took the liberty" (in her own words, as it turned out that she personally knew complainant) "of interfering a little."
"You don't mind, do you, sir?"
The commissaris looked about distractedly, hoping this would be over soon. He tried to admire the still-glowing carpet, the portraits of chief-constables of long ago, the flaming geranium blossoms on his wide windowsills.
Her husband, Karel, Antoinette said, had helped to refurbish Jo and Peter's hair-care salon in Outfield.
A coincidence.
"You're with the Reserve, aren't you?" Antoinette asked Jo Termeer. She looked at the commissaris. "Another part-time cop serving the community without pay." She turned to Termeer again, with the intimacy caused by bonding while you are helping friends to lay a wall-to-wall carpet in an elegant place of business.
"Didn't you help to arrest that Yugoslav fellow?" Antoinette asked Termeer. "That wild man who shot a regular cop in the drug bust at Warmoes Street?"
"Small world," the commissaris said.
"That cop never healed properly," Antoinette said. "His right arm hangs down, but without Jo Termeer here he would be dead."
Jo told Antoinette that his uncle had been murdered in Central Park, New York. Quite some distance. Hard to reach, especially when your English is not good. Quite a problem.
"Got mugged?" Antoinette asked.
Jo gave her the highlights.
"The poor old man," Antoinette said. "And you're looking into this, sir?"
The commissaris didn't think so.
"There is an invitation in the mail, sir." Antoinette held up a large manila envelope. "A police congress in New York." Antoinette flicked specks of dust off the commissaris's right sleeve. "Beautiful out there, you know. Karel and I went last year. We saw all the Warhols and the aircraft carrier parked on the river. Karel says it is a work of art in a way. That horror and violence are art, too." Antoinette unfolded a leaflet that she had pulled from the envelope. "Your congress is about horror too, about violence today. Will you just look at this cover photo? A dead girl with spittle on her lips?" Antoinette closed her eyes. "Yech."
She opened them again, to smile at Termeer.
"Isn't he lucky, hey? That chief of mine. A free week in New York, and I get my taxes deducted from my paycheck. The High and the Mighty."
The commissaris looked surprised.
Antoinette beamed. Now that the commissaris was going to retire anyway and she was going to miss him dearly, the distance between them had lessened. She pushed a little against him and looked down on his balding head. "New York. Some city. And the mugging isn't so bad if you keep alert. Everything is so cheap there, and the food is different everywhere, and everything is different, and all those other kinds of people." Antoinette's eyes grew bigger. "And those buildings, all that glass!"
All parties were quiet.
"So, if you were going anyway," Termeer said.
The commissaris frowned. "I weren't."
^* The ranks of the Amsterdam Police are constable, constable-first-class, sergeant, adjutant, inspector, chief-inspector, commissaris and chief-constable.
Chapter 2
"He were," Detective-Sergeant de Gier said two days later. De Gier had Detective-Adjutant Grijpstra to tea at his apartment because Grijpstra had walked out on his girlfriend that evening.
"Oh yes, oh yes, oh YES?" Grijpstra had asked, stomping down the stairs at Nellie's.
Nellie kept a hotel at the Straight Tree Ditch. A water pipe had broken that day and food had burned. Reciprocal irritation prevented sexual togetherness from reaching the level of love.
"But it did," Grijpstra said.
"Maybe for you," Nellie said and tried to explain the idea "together" but Grijpstra heard only criticism.
He was tired, after several hours of questioning a junkie charged with breaking and entering. The junkie kept falling asleep and couldn't quite remember where he had worked, the nature of the loot and where or to whom he had sold it.
"Or maybe not," the junkie said after every statement, not so much because he wanted to obstruct the course of justice but because he wanted, philosophically, to indicate relativity and the chaotic nature of All and Everything.
"But what do you know?" the junkie asked Grijpstra. "Eh? You loutish moron. You should try the drug yourself, man, then you'll be on God's steps. Won't have to try to figure out what's what anymore. Won't bother free souls like me."
Grijpstra extracted croquettes from a vending machine in Leyden Street. He could have gone to his own place, a neat upstairs apartment on the Linenmakers Canal vacated some years ago by his family. He had, in order not to be reminded of her, urged his wife to take most of the furnishings. He had never redone the large rooms. The idea at the time was that "an intelligent man really needs little." Now it often seemed as if the empty space had no need of Grijpstra. "Pure emptiness illuminated by the glow of the void," chanted poet Grijpstra when She and the Noisy Ones got the hell out. That day the sun was shining.
Appearances change. He now saw the empty apartment as an extension of Holland's overall overcast climate. "Drafty absence of necessities partly illuminated by a dangling bare bulb," composed poet Grijpstra.