The Hollow-Eyed Angel

Chapter 21

The commissaris, that evening, unable to sleep after the long-legged tram-driving demon once again tried to get him to do something he didn't understand, and that, he felt sure, he wouldn't want to do if he did understand, used his ivory bedside phone to wake Katrien.

Katrien, blinking at early sunlight pouring into the bedroom's windows on Queens Avenue, Amsterdam, said she would make coffee and return the call, once she was washed up somewhat and settled on the veranda.

It took her twenty minutes. The commissaris had dozed off. The Number Two streetcar was pushing through traffic, clanging its bells which became the telephone on the night table, ringing.

It took him a while to accept the change from streetcar to phone.

Katrien was unhappy. "Jan, what kept you?"

"I couldn't pick up a streetcar, dear."

"Your dream again? You feel better now?"

He did now that he heard his wife's mothering voice. He sketched, briefly, succinctly, the reasoning that had made him and de Gier decide there was another suspect and how he had devised and applied a trick to try and shock Charles Gilbert Perrin into opening up.

"A ripped-off penis," Katrien said. "Isn't that the worst that can happen to those who have one? Doesn't that make ripping it off a heinous crime? How did the suspect take your sudden outburst?" She watched a row of tulips that hadn't been pushed over by Turtle yet. "Tell me everything, Jan."

Charlie, the commissaris reported, had taken the outburst calmly. But there had been a change of atmosphere that he set about to repair.

He guided-his bad leg dragging more noticeably- his guests to the dining table, where, with the dedication of a priest serving mass, he served iced tea and seaweed biscuits.

Kali sat on a chair too, lapping water from her bowl after gently pushing the glazed biscuits away with her nose. Charlie said that he regretted what had happened to his tenant, acquaintance, friend if you like.

He had known Bert Termeer for some years. Nobody likes to lose a friend. But, Charlie said, what happened had to happen.

How so?

Because Bert Termeer thought of himself as bad.

How so?

Because Bert Termeer knew that Bert Termeer was sneaky.

Charlie said that "externalization is the beginning of liberation." He also said, "We have to be open about what we are. That is, if we want to solve the problem."

"The personal problem?"

Why not? But Charlie also, more particularly, meant the overall problem. He had been attracted to Termeer by the man's sincere quest for-Charlie smiled at Kali, who had pricked up her ears, as if she were going to hear something worthwhile-Termeer's quest for what? For seeing through the human condition? "All that activity in book trading, in playing the fool-'God's fool,' that kind of role is called in religion…"

They had come to the end of the iced tea ceremony by then and were being taken on a tour of the building.

Charlie unlocked and pushed and pulled huge doors, walked the detectives through hollow-sounding corridors that led to Termeer's part of the building, in and out of another elevator (a bare cage this time), even made them climb a ladder to inspect the building's attic.

Charlie led the way, Kali guarded the expedition's rear end.

Kali even wanted to climb the ladder. The ladder was deemed too steep by Charlie but Kali nudged de Gier, got him to pick her up, turn his back to the ladder and climb its rungs with his heels.

De Gier cradled the dog, who kept perfectly still, resting her long snout on his shoulder. The attic was filled with piles of unsorted books and pamphlets.

The commissaris inspected Bert Termeer's private quarters, bare as a monk's cell, uncomfortable but for the huge water bed. Termeer's printing shop contained outmoded equipment, used to manufacture his monthly catalogue. Empty cartons and rolls of packing paper were stacked.

Then there were, in the basement, props for Termeer's former acts.

"You think that was worth the trouble?" the commissaris asked, picking up and putting down a trumpet, holding up a monkey-size robe and hat.

"Producing, directing, acting out a show that might liberate people from dead-end routines?" Charlie became enthusiastic. "Sure." He nodded. "That's why I let Termeer live here. I thought we might have fun together. Test some theories. Do some philosophizing. Get weightless together. There was a time I thought I might join in his performance."

The commissaris was grinning. Charlie grinned back. "You would like to do that yourself, wouldn't you? An adult version of throwing water balloons at folks?

"And," Charlie said, "Bert wasn't a do-gooder, like the outfit that I bought this building from. The give-l time-give-money-do-things-for-God crowd. Not that," Charlie said, pulling a face. "No. Never."

"You don't care for do-gooding?" de Gier asked.

"Please," Charlie said. "After my Polish Experience?" He shrugged. "Yes, sure, maybe for a little while.

Set the needy up till they can take care of themselves again. I wouldn't help anyone to prolong his misery, though. Encourage depression?" He made a fist and pounded his palm. "Set them free, let them go. Don't shackle them with welfare."

"You set up Bert Termeer here?" the commissaris asked.

Charlie held his head to one side. "Yes. Sure. When I met Bert in Central Park, years ago, we had this conversation. I had some apples. I asked him if he wanted one. He said he would take the apple if I would give it to him without using my hands. I told him he could have the apple if he took it without using his hands."

"Zen," de Gier said.

Charlie nodded. "We had both read the same book on Zen koans."

"Same level of insight," the commissaris said.

"Right. But it didn't mean much. Exchanging book knowledge doesn't, you know. I thought we had a beginning. Bert wanted to get into New York, he was living in some flophouse, and I had all this space here-I got the building cheap from the do-things-for-God-folks- and Bert might have explored avenues I hadn't even thought of yet so I loaned him money and charged minimal rent."

"Did he pay you back?" the commissaris asked.

"Some," Charlie said. "Yes. Little by little."

"And Bert impressed you?"

"Look at this," Charlie said, sweeping his hand toward a long row of figures lined up against the room's wall, representing a single person's (Bert Termeer's own) physical lifetime changes. "That plate on the left-can you see it?-holds a microscopic object, a fertilized human egg. The plate on the right-can you see it?-shows remnants of a human bone."

Dust to dust.

"Of course," Charlie said, '"dust to dust' is still something.

"One should really look left of the embryo, where there is nothing, and right of the bone crumbs, where there is nothing again."

"Nothing to nothing."

And, Charlie said, what Termeer had wanted to show Sunday morning crowds in the public parks of Boston, Massachusetts, and Bangor, Maine (the Central Park authorities had thrown the exhibit out), after he had put up his line of figures, a tiring exercise since some of them were heavy, was that there was nothing in between the two nothings either.

Termeer's show-nothing, to rapidly changing embryos, to baby, to toddler, to little kid, to kid, to young adult, to grown person, to middle-aged man, to codger in C 246 1 increasingly debilitated and demented stages, to corpse, to skeleton, to crumbling bone, to nothing-highlighted a common denominator: lack of substance.

No substance to the body. No substance to the mind.

"Would you," Charlie asked the commissaris, "accept as your essence your aches and pains?

"Would you," Charlie asked de Gier, "accept as your essence your guilts and depressions?

"So what are we?" Charlie laughed. "I liked Termeer's implied line of questioning. It was in all of his shows. Even here in New York. A dignified gendeman ruminating in an exaggerated pose. A dignified gentleman frolicking in childlike joy."

They all looked at all the Bert Termeer's again, standing at the far side of the room, with porcelain faces, each showing the aging process, the right clothes, thickening, then thinning hair, giving way to baldness, all different shapes, only sharing a name.

The commissaris said that. "They're all Bert Termeer."

"My name," Charlie said, "was once Paulie Potock. Would you say I am that frightened little boy in Poland? Would you say I am the frightened old man who is told by the doctor he has Alzheimer's disease?"

"You think you might have that?"

Charlie waved indifferently. "Brain tumor, colon cancer, whatever we die of these days, irreparable blocked arteries…"

"But," the commissaris asked, "your friend. Bert Termeer. Wasn't he just another faker?"

Charlie patted Kali's head. "No. Not altogether. I think Bert did have true insights. Eh?" he asked the dog. "You liked Bert, didn't you? When you were with him in the park? You would bounce about and play?"

"A prophet?" the commissaris asked.

"Oh yes."

"What didn't you show us?" the commissaris asked, after twisting his painful hips so that he could face his suspect.

"What didn't he show you?" Katrien asked on the phone.

"But he did show me," the commissaris said, "in that very building's dank dungeons."

What Charlie showed the detectives in the badly lit basement was Bert Termeer's second activity, another mail-order business, also complete with all it needed: an antique press, an obsolete but functional labeling machine, shelving, boxes, packing paper, rolls of packing tape, stocks of product.

The piles of imported magazines Charlie kicked around in the basement-while Kali crouched, growled, even howled with fury-the imported videotapes Charlie roughly pushed off their shelving, the posters and pictures he picked up and tore in half mostly showed small children being tortured.