The Japanese Corpse

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The Commissaris' black Citroen nosed into the courtyard of Amsterdam Police Headquarters followed by a gray VW which contained the photographer and a fingerprint man. De Gier was asleep in the front seat, his head lolling and his mouth slightly open. Grijpstra shook the sergeant's shoulder. "We are home."

"Hm?" de Gier asked.

"Home. Get out. We have work to do."

"Yes, yes, yes," de Gier said, and turned around. "Sorry, sir, must have dozed off."

"Ha," Grijpstra said. "You fell asleep as we got on the speedway in Utrecht and you have snored for the last hour. Dozed off!"

"Never mind," the commissaris said. "Sleep is an ideal condition to be in and there was nothing to do anyway. I think we know all there is to know at this stage. And we have blood samples and the bullet. Maybe the car should be examined again when it gets here, adjutant. The fingerprint man might want to have another look. Most surfaces were wiped clean but one never knows."

A tow truck was maneuvering into the courtyard, with the white BMW dangling from its hook.

"Quick work," Grijpstra said. "I'll see to it, sir. That truck must have been speeding."

"A police tow truck is allowed to speed," the commissaris said. "De Gier, have the snapshot of the presumable victim, Mr. Nagai, multiplied and get some detectives to show it around Amsterdam and Utrecht, tonight if possible. It would be nice if we could find out what his companion or companions looked like. Maybe they had a few drinks before they started their trip. There hasn't been much happening lately so you should be able to round up enough men, a dozen perhaps. The case looks nasty enough. Put Cardozo in charge."

"Grijpstra?"

"Sir."

"Get hold of the young lady who came to see you this morning. Miss Andrews. We'll have to see her straightaway. Send a car for her if necessary or go yourself. Bring her to my office when you have her and de Gier can come too when he is ready. And you can contact the State Police. Looks as if we have a murder without a body. The body must have been dumped off the speedway somewhere. Let them investigate both sides. They should be given copies of the snapshot but they probably don't need them. The car is conspicuous; somebody must have seen it parked while the body was dumped or buried. And be very polite; the State Police hate taking orders. Make it a request and sound humble, and if they start trouble about the case being theirs you can connect them with me. I'll be in my office."

"Yes, sir," Grijpstra said, and grinned. De Gier grinned too.

"We would be awfully grateful if you could perhaps…" de Gier said. "If it isn't too much trouble of course…"

Grijpstra added, "But we do have this problem, you see, and it may link up with a serious crime and you fellows are known for your ability to follow up on the slightest clue, and there is this gleaming brand new white BMW which must have monkeyed around near the Amsterdam-Utrecht speedway yesterday, and we thought that you might be able perhaps…"

The commissaris smiled. "Yes, that's the way to do it. Good luck." He turned and got into the eternally revolving open elevator which was grinding past them. He grabbed the metal tube of the little cage which had just reached their level. The two detectives were ready to help him but he managed on his own. Together they watched the frail old man, close to retirement age and in continuous pain, for his rheumatism never seemed to lose its hold and often lamed his legs so that he had to limp and hold on to the walls and furniture.

When the cage was out of sight Grijpstra sighed. "Well, on our way. Here is the snapshot. One dead Japanese. All we have to do is find him."

"He might be wounded," de Gier said.

"He is dead. The fingerprint man has a bone sliver, he says it came from the head. The bullet must have cracked Nagai's skull and blown it to bits. Why would anyone want to kill a man selling art from the Far East, do you think?"

"Maybe he was selling something else," de Gier said, "or the killing is connected with a robbery. Miss Andrews said that Nagai often had expensive objects for sale, didn't she? Or the competition got him maybe. Or we've run into a love affair again. But the victim is Japanese, we have stumbled into the Far East, maybe we've got ourselves into something subtle for a change." He poked Grijpstra in the stomach. "A case with a delicate flavor."

Grijpstra frowned. "Don't look so eager. If it's subtle we could never solve it. It took us a week to figure out who killed that garbage man last month and it turned out to be a simple manslaughter, performed with the help of a sledgehammer."

De Gier looked sheepish.

"And you kept on suggesting that his poor wife had done it," Grijpstra said.

"I heard you say that too."

"Yes, maybe I did say it, but only once. And the woman did look like a hippopotamus."

"If she had the strength to do it she must have done it. That's what you said. Some reasoning. Good thing you said it to me and not to the commissaris."

Grijpstra sighed. "But we did find the man, and without anyone sending us an anonymous note."

"And without the help of the journalists, wasn't that clever of us?"

"Yes, very. Well, on our way. I'll see you in the commissaris' office as soon as I can get hold of that young lady. I hope I can get her on the telephone. She should know more than she told us this morning." Grijpstra patted his pocket, looked surprised, and fished out a pistol. "What the hell? I was looking for my cigars."

"That's my pistol, adjutant," de Gier said pleasantly. "You forgot to return it and made me walk about unarmed. And you've got tobacco grains all over the barrel." He took it out of Grijpstra's hand and blew the tobacco off and polished it with his handkerchief, and checked the mechanism. "And the safety catch isn't on. But there isn't a cartridge in the chamber, I'll say that for you." He slipped it into his shoulder holster.

"It's got a new screw," Grijpstra said, "and they replaced the left grip-plate. They didn't want to do it but I insisted. You should be grateful."

"I am grateful. The poor thing is getting old. I wish they would give us some decent arms. This one dates back to 1929, the sergeant in the arms room was telling me the other day. It's an antique. The criminals have fully automatic firearms these days. I read a report that our colleagues caught a drug dealer in Rotterdam who had a machine pistol in his car, the size of our FNs, or a little bigger maybe. Fourteen cartridges in the clip and it could fire them all in four seconds. All you do is squeeze the trigger and hold it."

"Bah," Grypstra said. "Who wants to fire fourteen bullets in four seconds? I don't want to fire one bullet in one year. Why are you so murderous all of a sudden? Are you getting restless again?" He scowled. "We didn't join the police to become heroes, you know. We are supposed to maintain order. How can you maintain order if you fire fourteen bullets in four seconds? The silly thing will be jumping about in your hand and you will blow the head off the old grandmother across the street, trying to do a little shopping, and another bullet is bound to knock a baby out of a pram." Grijpstra's face had reddened and he was waving his arms. "Why don't you go to Africa? There was a story in the paper last night about mercenaries driving their tanks straight through a village, smashing and burning huts and killing everybody in sight."

De Gier smiled and patted Grijpstra's cheek. "I only said I wanted a proper weapon," he said soothingly, "not something made out of cast iron fifty years ago and which is likely to blow apart in my hand."

Grijpstra shook his head as he watched the tall sergeant striding down the long empty corridor. "Our adventurer," he said aloud, "our knight on his eternal quest. Fighting Evil and supporting Good, under the banner of the Goddess of Beauty."

He coughed and looked about him but he was alone. Goddess of Beauty, he thought. De Gier's girlfriend wasn't so beautiful but she was certainly a remarkable woman. Lithe, and with a lovely head on a slender neck, and very quiet. He thought of his own wife and shook his head again. A pudding of flesh addicted to television and creamcakes, and bad-tempered if she could find the energy, which wasn't so often anymore. She was given to staring at him now, nasty stares out of small bloodshot eyes, sunken into the puffy gleaming blubber which covered her skull. He breathed deeply and forced the thought to go away. He could think of his wife when he was with her, which didn't happen so much now.

He would think about the Japanese. He remembered the photograph and saw the thin man again, on his cane chair, peering at the camera's eye. A man dealing in art. A man with a sensitive face, a defenseless face. A man interested in reading, with a stack of pocketbooks next to his chair. He had just come off the plane from Tokyo and he had been reading during the flight, but he was still carrying his books, even when he was in the company of Joanne Andrews, his girlfriend whom he hadn't seen for some time. An attractive girl who was in love with him and who drove his car when he wasn't in Amsterdam. A new BMW, an elegant sleek car, now in the police courtyard with blood on the front seat and a fragment of the victim's skull spattered into the upholstery. He would have been shot from the back seat, maybe while the car was speeding along the highway between Amsterdam and Utrecht. It's a busy highway, Grijpstra thought. A thousand cars a minute, racing along in four lanes. Wouldn't anyone have seen the man slump forward, grabbing his head, oozing blood?

A Japanese, he thought again. What did he know about Japanese? His memory responded with a number of images. He saw a kamikaze pilot diving at an American aircraft carrier, directing his flimsy machine loaded with explosives straight at the gigantic ship's bridge. No chance to survive the impact. A young man with a white strip of cotton wound round his forehead, his teeth showing in a desperate grimace of fear and joy. Kamikaze, he even knew the origin of the word; he had read it somewhere in a magazine article. A holy storm which had destroyed the Korean fleet intent on landing in Japan and conquering the country. Long ago now. What else did he associate with Japanese? Cruelty, yes. Grijpstra's cousin had survived a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. He had come out as a living toothless skeleton, amazed to find himself alive. Only a small percentage of the original inmates of the camp had survived the brutalities of the guards. Grijpstra's cousin, now a man in his late sixties, a clerk working for the mayor's office, would almost faint if he saw Japanese tourists in the streets of Amsterdam.

What else? Japanese temple music. He had a record at home showing a pagoda on its cover, the several-storied temple set against a background of artfully pruned pine trees. He often played the record, for it contained some unusual percussion, eerie broken sounds evoked by wooden drums, accentuated by sudden shouts out of priestly throats. He had tried to imitate the sounds on his own set of drums and de Gier had helped him, for de Gier had borrowed the record and shared Grijpstra's fascination. Together they had practiced the shouts and yells, and de Gier had even found an instrument, a wooden cucumber on a tripod, the tone of which matched the temple drums. Unusual music from a faraway religion. Buddhism. The commissaris had once told him that Buddhism rests on two pillars, compassion and equanimity. He shook his head. A pilot killing himself while killing hundreds of others, a guard beating prisoners to death, a temple drum splitting the silence. Did he know any more about Japan? He thought of the airport scene and the two lines of obedient human insects, following their guides waving colored flags. And now one of these human insects was dead, with a big hole in his skull and his body hidden somewhere in the Dutch swamp.

He began to walk toward his office. He was going to phone the State Police.