The Japanese Corpse

\\\\\ 19 /////

"Yes, Sir," Adjutant Grijpstra said. "The Drug-brigade detectives are ready to raid the place tonight, sir. They are after the cook; he is supposed to be the boss here. And I am after Mr. Fujitani, the manager. I think I've got enough on him now to hold him for two days, and maybe he'll break if we question him."

He listened carefully, sucking noisily on his cigar and holding the telephone gingerly. The commissaris' voice was coming through clearly, but there was a slight buzz in the background to remind him of the distance. Six thousand miles, he thought vaguely, or ten thousand miles? He would have to look it up that night in his son's atlas. If he was in the mood for it. Perhaps the raid would take a lot of time or effort. He shrugged. It shouldn't be a problem really. Twelve men to raid one rather small restaurant, at five-thirty in the afternoon. There probably wouldn't be any clients to complicate the situation.

"Yes," he said. "I think he'll break easily. Cardozo has had a little film made. We are going to show it to the suspect on a video recorder. It's a clever little film, I think. Shots of the corpse of Nagai and a few close-ups of Joanne Andrews. Made by a professional filmer. Very nice. He is a friend of Cardozo and we took him to your niece's house. Day before yesterday. A rainy afternoon it was, very hazy. He filmed her walking through the forest behind your niece's house, sir. She never saw us. For the shots of Nagai's corpse I had to use the police black-and-white film, but it isn't too bad. There is a gruesome bit in it, when the constables are dragging the body out of the grave and the head lolls backward. Turned my stomach when I saw it, and Cardozo rushed out of the room. He was sick, I think, although he came up with some excuse afterward. Fujitani's nerves are in a bad state already. The drug-brigade detectives have been questioning him and I have been around too. At the restaurant, almost every day for the last week or so. I won't say much to him tonight, I'll just pick him up and have him put in a cell. I'll show him the movie tomorrow. Tomorrow morning early, I think. He will have had a bad night. He should break straightaway, sir."

The commissaris spoke again, and Grijpstra listened, his head askew.

"Yes, sir! Thank you. But the idea was Cardozo's, really."

He rang off and grinned. He hadn't been too sure about the film, but the commissaris was in agreement. He thought he had heard some reluctance in the way the commissaris had phrased his accordance. Maybe the old man thought the method was too advanced. But it was proper police procedure, used everywhere nowadays. There had been a long article on crime-association with regard to questioning suspects in the Police Gazette, a few numbers back. Maybe the technique had its cruel side, but going fishing with a man and blowing the man's brain out with a. 38 revolver… Well.

He looked at his watch. Four o'clock. The cars would leave in an hour's time.

"Cardozo," he said, turning toward the young man who had been scribbling away at his small desk near the door.

"Adjutant?"

"Time for coffee, Cardozo. Got any money?"

"No, adjutant. And the machine is out of order. I was in the canteen ten minutes ago. They have been at the mechanism again, trying to make it work for nothing."

"Then go and borrow some money and get two cartons from the snackbar at the corner."

"The inspector is waiting for this report, adjutant."

Grijpstra pushed his chair back and got up. He had put a little too much force in the movement, and he hurt his knee against a drawer. He was getting red in the face.

"Yes, adjutant," Cardozo said. "Right away, adjutant."

It was four A.M. when Grijpstra came home, and he forgot to look up the distance between Kyoto and Amsterdam in his son's atlas. It had been a hectic night. The drug brigade had set up the raid properly. The detectives had come in through the front door, through the garden door, and through the windows of the top floor, all at the same time. But there had been complications: one detective had sprained his ankle, trying to swing his body into a window while he was hanging on to a rotten gutter which cracked. He had applied too much strength to his swing and had landed badly. And another detective had been knifed by the cook. The knife touched a lung. The cook was behind the counter, and he had got away while the detectives were taking care of their colleague, who was spitting blood. The cook reached his car, and the car got away too, in spite of a roadblock. A middle-aged lady was hurt when she jumped away as the cook's car careened over the sidewalk. The State Police stopped the car eventually, three hours later, cutting it off the road as it was trying to move in between two large trucks. One of the trucks landed up in a field, spilled a load of canned beer, and a State Police Porsche turned over. The sergeant at the wheel dislocated his shoulder. The raid had been planned well, but there wasn't much left of the plan by the time the radios finally gave the all-clear.

Grijpstra had followed the proceedings in the communication room at Amsterdam Headquarters, where excited constables were switching from set to set, and officers had vainly tried to direct the adventure. Some twenty cars had been involved in the chase, for the cook never lost his nerve, and his car, moving at normal cruising speed, had been hard to find. Fortunately he had driven an unusual car, a silver-colored Citroen Pallas. The car was spotted close to the Belgian border by a police airplane and stopped five miles from the frontier. A very close chase.

But the case was wrapped up. Heroin samples had been found in the restaurant, and frisking of the staff had produced three pistols and several long-bladed knives. Fighting knives, not kitchen knives. In Mrs. Fujitani's clothes-chest, a red laquered leather trunk, Grijpstra had found several scrolls. He was hoping the Japanese Embassy staff would be able to confirm that they had been stolen by temple priests. With the death of Nagai and the arrests of the Dutch and Japanese ships' officers the connection ought to be cut.

And when Grijpstra woke up again, three hours later, to go to Headquarters and question Mr. Fujitani, luck was still with him. Mr. Fujitani had put up a fight the night before and had to be dragged to the police van. Now he broke down halfway through the film and smashed the video recorder with a chair. He was trembling and biting his lips, and his small, rather plump body was shaking with sobs. Cardozo, upset by Mr. Fujitani's nervous antics, looked away, but Grijpstra stared stonily until the suspect, still sobbing, confessed to having shot Kikuji Nagai through the head with a revolver, which he had thrown into the pond close to the grave and close to the spot where he had been seen washing Mr. Nagai's white BMW. A statement was typed out, read and signed. A constable took Mr. Fujitani back to his cell, while Grijpstra telephoned the chief constable. He and Cardozo were asked to deliver the statement in person, and Grijpstra's hand was shaken. Cardozo was smiled at.

That evening Grijpstra took his young assistant to a small pub in the old city, made him drink four brandies while he had six himself, and paid the bill. But they didn't talk much while they drank. Joanne Andrews was still walking through the silent forest where the trunks of pines and spruces drew black lines against the soft greenness of alders and maples. And Kikuji Nagai's skull gleamed and his half-eaten lips smiled, as a State Policeman's gloved hand gently tugged the corpse out of a wet black hole in a lush meadow.