The Japanese Corpse

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"It must have been an interesting experience for you," the commissaris said, and stretched himself out on the thin mattress which a servant girl had unrolled from a cupboard cleverly hidden in the wall. She had made the bed quickly, with a minimum of movements, tucking in sheets and covering it with a light padded cotton blanket. The cushion was small and hard but the commissaris had pounded it into shape, grunting with pleasure.

De Gier had been watching him from his own bed, at a distance of exactly four mats, and had enjoyed the old man's antics. De Gier had had the large room to himself for five days. There were other rooms available, but when the innkeeper suggested that they should share, both to save expense and to enjoy each other's company, the commissaris had assented at once. Dorin had left as soon as he saw that his guests were comfortable and had promised to return later that evening.

"Very nice," the commissaris was saying, half to himself, half to the sergeant. "That bath!"

"The only civilized way to bathe," de Gier said. "We are primitive people. It had never occurred to me that there are other ways to take a bath but there was no comparison."

"Yes." The commissaris had lit a cigar and was looking at a sliding door covered with tightly stretched white paper. The moon caused a shadow of some waving reed grass in the small garden outside. The grass stalks moved slightly and a pattern was formed on the door. "Yes, sergeant, obviously it is best to stress the pleasure of soaking. Soaking in hot water is the good part of a bath, but the way we do it is silly. We lie in our own dirty water, for we wash first and then soak. Here we washed first too, but we did it outside the bath, on a tiled floor. And then we soaked. Afterward. In clean very hot water. For a long time. My legs don't hurt at all. Ah." He stretched again.

"You said something about an interesting experience, sir. Were you referring to the bath?"

"No. I was referring to your attempted manslaughter. You very nearly killed one man, I am told, and seriously hurt two others. They were torturing a cat. Your crime doesn't balance theirs, so technically you are at fault and you may be arrested and charged. Not having given yourself up, you are now a fugitive. I don't think you have ever been a fugitive before."

De Gier grinned. "I see, sir. I hadn't thought about it really. Maybe I have come to the end of the road?"

"No." The commissaris contemplated his toes. The ten wriggling shrimps at the end of the mattress took him back to the blurred warm dreamland where his mother would pick him up from his bath and put him on a couch, wrapped in a towel. There wasn't anything left to wish for. De Gier's presence, the lanky figure sitting in a corner of the beautifully quiet room, comforted him and his mind went back for a moment to the memory of the meal they had just shared: a fried fish on an oval plate decorated with rice and vegetables, served on the low table which now carried a tray and two small jugs with matching cups.

As De Gier got up to pour sake into the cups, the commissaris thought that he knew the sergeant well. He accepted the cup of sake and sipped the strong hot liquid, smiling at de Gier who winked at him. "Strong stuff, sergeant. I'd better be careful, we may have things to do tomorrow."

"Yes sir, but a few cups won't do much harm. These jugs are designed for Japanese stomachs, and they are a lot smaller than ours. One jug will relax them; they begin to get drunk on the second. We can probably have two jugs each and still stay perfectly sober."

There was no tension in the sergeant as he sat back against a post in the wall, his legs tucked into each other and his back almost straight. A different man from the mental patient the commissaris had taken care of in his house in Amsterdam. The doctor had kept him in a drugged sleep for the first few days, but the sergeant woke up every few hours, mumbling the names of Esther and the dead cat Oliver and feeling for the girl's hand and the cat's paw. He had called the commissaris "father" and looked at his superior officer with large troubled eyes, often filled with tears. As the medication became less potent the sergeant began to approach a crisis and one night the commissaris had sat up until morning, moistening de Gier's head with a wet towel, making him drink tea and restraining the sergeant's antics by talking gently and even holding his hand. De Gier talked endlessly, but most of the talk was garbled. He had whined and groaned and thrown himself about in the bed, tearing at the sheets and his pillow. It had been the beginning of the rage which would later attack three Japanese hoodlums, three bad men killing a cat in a dark alley.

The commissaris wondered if the rage would kill a yakusa. They hadn't come to kill anyone. They had come to be human bait, worms crinkling at a hook dangled by the Japanese Secret Service. The commissaris grimaced. He wondered if the Dutch government would be tactless enough to mail an invoice to some Japanese government agency in Tokyo. It had happened before. He remembered how he had once asked the army to send him some frogmen to look for a corpse in a lake. The frogmen found the corpse, and the murder brigade received an invoice for some ridiculous amount, so many hours of diving at so much an hour. He had instructed the police clerks to send an even bigger bill to the army for some detection work his brigade had once done to solve the death of an army officer. Both bills were protested and never paid. He shrugged. If they had been paid it wouldn't have meant more than a useless shifting about of the taxpayer's guilders.

He held up his cup and the sergeant jumped up and filled it. He swallowed the sake, smacked his lips and coughed. The sergeant went back to his corner.

"So you like it here, eh, sergeant?"

"Yes, sir. This place is several steps ahead of us. Food tastes good and looks beautiful, the architecture is better, the women are more accommodating, and people are friendly. I have only lived here a week and it seems that they have accepted me as a full member of their neighborhood. Yesterday I got lost in the street. The streets look a little alike and I had been watching shop windows and going here and there without minding my way, and suddenly I had no idea where I was. I asked a young fellow on a motorcycle for directions and he took me on the back of his cycle and rode me straight home."

The commissaris laughed. "That's nice. So what else do you like?"

De Gier got up and opened the sliding doors leading to the balcony. "The moss gardens," he said. "They are everywhere. Not in town, unfortunately; pollution will kill anything in the center of town, but here we are a long way from the city proper. Each house has a little garden and most of the gardens have moss. I have seen them working on the moss patches. Square inch by square inch. All sorts of weeds grow into them, and the moss has to be raked and combed and kept moist, but the result is magnificent. I should have had moss on my balcony in Amsterdam."

The commissaris had got up and was standing next to the sergeant. The inn's garden flowed in low miniature hills and banks, surrounding a pond. A few bushes were planted behind the hills, creating the impression of a forest, and all of the ground was covered with thick mosses, glowing softly in the light of a single lantern, a weak electric bulb set in a hollow stone pillar. Each side of the pillar had an open oval, and the pillar had a small roof, also covered with moss.

"There are at least ten varieties of moss in this garden," the sergeant said. "The innkeeper gets up early every morning to pull the weeds out. Sometimes his son helps him. I don't think it is work to them, it's more like a discipline which rests the mind. That's what Dorin said."

"Beautiful. What else did you notice?"

The sergeant emptied the second jug into their cups and they both went back to the balcony doors and looked at the garden again. "I feel a little uncomfortable at times, sir. I am too tall. When I walk in the street my head floats on top of the crowd, like a conspicuous bird sitting on the surface of a lake. With a Western body it is impossible to fit in here. I have been wishing I were a Japanese. People smile and snigger and little children nudge each other and start shouting HELLO HELLO when they see me. Endlessly. It's the only English word they know, I think. After a while you feel like shooting them."

"Shooting," the commissaris said, and adjusted the cloth strip which held his kimono in place, a gray kimono supplied by the inn. He had found it in the bathroom. "You have a gun, sergeant?"

"Yes, sir." De Gier took a pistol from a holster which had been hidden under his kimono. "I didn't bring my own. It's in the arms room in Amsterdam. This pistol was given to me by Dorin. I have another one for you. It's German, a Walther. I don't think the Japanese manufacture firearms nowadays. We practiced with it two days ago on a beach, shooting at bottles. Very accurate and light. I got better results than at the range in Headquarters, and at double the distance." He rummaged about in the cupboard and came back. "Here, try it on, sir. It's small enough not to make a bulge. Dorin carries an enormous revolver, you must have noticed it too, it attracts attention, but he says it is his commando gun and that he can't live without it."

The commissaris got his belt and strapped it over his kimono.

"Good," de Gier said. "We are armed. Welcome to the yakusa. We can pick off six each and I have some spare clips. If they stand quietly and forget to defend themselves we can have a massacre. By the way, sir, about this attempted manslaughter of mine, I was thinking it would be better if I resigned from the force once we are back in Amsterdam. I don't seem to have the right reactions anymore, and the worst is that I don't care much. I suppose I should feel guilty about those three young men in the hospital, but I don't. They can live or die, it's all the same to me now, but when I went for them I meant to kill them."

"Never mind," the commissaris said, "and don't resign. We can talk about it afterward but perhaps it won't be necessary. Let's do the job on hand and forget to worry about our motivations for a while."

"So you don't mind much, sir?"

"Not now," the commissaris said. "Let's get some sleep, sergeant."

De Gier dropped his kimono, pulled his bedding out of the cupboard and fell down, pulling the padded blanket over his body. He had switched off the light as he fell down.

The commissaris grinned in the dark. A free man, he thought, shocked out of having to carry the weight of his own identity. He had felt the sergeant's freedom the moment de Gier had come running out of the inn to open the door of Dorin's car and to shake the commissaris' hand. But it's dangerous to be free, to stop caring. The commissaris remembered one of his subordinates in the underground army squad during the war years. The man had been frightened, nervous, overcautious until the Germans caught his young wife and tortured and kiUed her. After the loss, which set him free, the man had changed. His colleagues called him the demon of death. He volunteered to do the impossible again and again and never failed to come back. His specialty had become to catch the most malicious ghouls the Germans employed, the Gestapo detectives and bring them in, squeeze them for information and kill them, usually by a shot in the neck after he had casually asked the prisoner to look at something.

The man was still alive. He had started his own business, a textile agency which he handled in the same detached manner in which he had once treated the war game. The commissaris still met him occasionally and sometimes went to the man's luxury apartment, where he lived alone, sharing his evenings with a pet raven who liked to rip expensive wallpaper into ribbons.

"It's all in our mind," de Gier was saying in the dark room, as if he had been following the commissaris' thoughts.

"Pardon?"

"It's all in our mind," de Gier repeated. "The innkeeper said that when I complimented him on his moss garden. Japanese wisdom. Maybe this adventure of ours, the yakusa and the stolen art and the drugs, is also in our own mind. Did Dorin tell you about the trap he is setting up in Kyoto?"

"A little, but tell me."

"He has a contact with Daidharmaji. 'Ji' means 'temple.' Daidharma is the name of the temple. 'Dai' means 'great,' I have forgotten what 'dharma' means. Something like 'insight,' I suppose, all the temples have names like that. This Daidharmaji is not one temple, but a great complex. It has a monastery and a master and high priests and an enormous compound and gardens and so on. It employs a lot of priests and monks. It is famous for its art collections, but the yakusa have never been able to get at them, for the temples are well run and Daidharmaji is a very religious place. The priests either don't care about money or they are kept in check by their superiors and discipline.

"Dorin has friends there, and he has talked to the high priest who administrates the temple. The high priest has ordered one of his men to start running about in town and to drink and chase the whores. This man has been going to a bar called the Golden Dragon, it's the Kyoto headquarters of the yakusa. He went in civilian clothes, of course, not in his priestly robes, but he made it obvious that he was a corrupted priest, and the yakusa caught on and pushed some nice women his way and asked him to try his luck at gambling. He won a bit and then he started losing, but they didn't press him for payment, until yesterday. They have got him now, he owes a few thousand dollars. So now he has to bring them a few scrolls from the temple he is supposed to be in charge of. There are many small temples in the Daidharmaji compound, and each is run by a priest, and each has its own art collection which is shown to the public once a year."

"That's very good," the commissaris said. "So is he going to deliver? This priest?"

"No," de Gier said. "That's the clever part of it. The priest said he would deliver, but then he changed his mind. He told the yakusa that he has some very famous scroll paintings, but that he has another buyer who may pay a lot more than they will. He told them he would pay his debt in a few days' time."

"And we are the buyers?"

"Yes, sir. We'll go to Kyoto and check into an inn close to Daidharmaji. The priest will come and visit us and we'll buy his wares. Then he'll pay the yakusa. Everybody will be polite and the yakusa will take the money, but they will be annoyed and start following the priest to see where he takes his merchandise. Dorin has arranged that other priests and monks will come to see us too. We'll set up a regular racket, and all the time we will be in Kyoto which is a holy city and where the yakusa can't throw their weight about. Kyoto has a pleasure quarter, a red light district lined with willow trees, and it is run by the yakusa, but they never get really tough. They are Japanese too and maybe they are restrained by the atmosphere, or perhaps they are concerned about crime in Kyoto being written up in the national newspapers and attracting too much attention to them. So they'll have to sit back and gnash their teeth."

"I see," the commissaris said slowly. "Until they get so irritated that they'll do something. We'll draw them out and force them to show their face."

"Dorin had some trouble getting Daidharmaji to cooperate. Their art is the best in Japan. A lot of it is Chinese, a thousand years old. If it is lost or damaged it would be a calamity. Dorin only got his way because the monastery's master, the Zen master-it's a Zen Buddhist temple, I am told-told the high priest in charge of routine and discipline to go ahead. The Zen master said all that art is a lot of junk anyway and nobody should care if it gets lost. He said, in fact, that he didn't mind the yakusa stealing and selling it. That way it gets around and people can see it; in Daidharmaji it is kept in vaults."

The commissaris chuckled. "He must be a nice fellow, this master. Isn't he a high priest? I would think that a master would be the highest authority."

"I suppose he is," de Gier said, "but he doesn't run the place. He is only concerned with training the monks, but what he does I don't know. Dorin said that the monks spend most of their time sitting still in a big hall. Maybe the master sits with them."

"But he is consulted on important decisions," the commissaris said, "like our chief constable. Maybe we are a religious organization too, sergeant. The laws we defend were religious once, in origin anyway."

De Gier propped his head on his arm and looked at the huddled shape across the room. The commissaris had begun to snore gently. The sergeant was falling asleep too. He saw Esther's face and felt the movement of his cat, curling up between his feet.

His arm began to hurt and he woke up again. Maybe I'll resign anyway when he gets back to Amsterdam, he thought. I'll have to deliver the old man safe and sound and then I'll see. I'll see, he thought again. Another dream started. He was in a forest, walking down a fairly wide path, and Oliver was walking ahead of him, his long black-tipped silver tail flicking nervously. They were walking on a thick carpet of fir needles. It had to be late in the day for the sunrays were low, cutting through the open spaces left in between tree trunks. There was light at the end of the path and Oliver began to run. De Gier turned over and the dream stopped.