The Japanese Corpse (15 page)

"So tonight we may have our first adventure," de Gier said.

"Your second adventure," the commissaris said. "You had one in Tokyo, you remember? You will have to restrain yourself. I don't want a dead man hovering around us, not even a dead yakusa."

"Sir," de Gier said, and closed his eyes. The commissaris fell asleep a little later. Only Dorin was left to feel the last impact of the holy mountain, its white dome touching the stratosphere.

\\\\\ 12 /////

"H
OLD IT!" THE ADJUTANT SHOUTED. "I DIDN'T HEAR you properly. Start all over again, please."

"This is the State Police, adjutant. Lieutenant Blok speaking. I am told you are temporarily in charge of the Japanese corpse investigation, and that you are interested in the location of the corpse. Is that right?"

"Yes," Grijpstra shouted. "Yes, sir. And you found it?"

"Don't shout, adjutant. Yes, I think we found it. But we haven't dug deeply yet. We have touched the body. So far only a hand is showing. I have told my men to wait for you before they go any further."

"Where are you, lieutenant?" Grijpstra whispered.

"In the White Horse pub in Abcoude,
*
adjutant. If you come out right away, you should be here in thirty minutes, it isn't rush hour yet, but you'll have to leave right now or you will take forever."

"I am on my way, sir," Grijpstra shouted, and banged the phone down, grabbing bis coat on the way out.

*    *    *

"No," he shouted at the elderly sergeant in charge of the garage. "I don't want my own car. I am in a hurry and I want a marked car with a light and a siren. Give it to me.

"But I haven't got one available," the sergeant explained patiently. "What's wrong with your own car? We tuned it this morning and took the rattle out of the right door and fixed the horn. We have even put new batteries in the flashlight and we had the carbine checked by the arms room and..."

"Ha," Grijpstra shouted, as a white VW drove into the garage. "Give here. Out! Out! you fellows!"

The two uniformed constables looked at him in consternation.

"We are on patrol duty, adjutant, we only came in for gas."

"Out!" Grijpstra's heavy voice boomed, as he pulled the driver's door open. The constables got out, looking at the sergeant who made a helpless gesture.

"Murder-brigade business?" the driver asked. "Somebody got shot? I heard nothing on the radio. It's been quiet all afternoon. All we found was a drunken lady pushing a perambulator full of bottles. There was a baby stuck between the bottles and we took the lot to the station. The chief told us to take the baby to the crisis center, but we are almost out of gas. We need that car, adjutant."

"Take my car," Grijpstra said. "The flashlight has fresh batteries and the carbine has just been oiled."

"But..." the driver said, but Grijpstra was behind the wheel and the car backed out of the garage, its blue top-light flashing. They heard the VW's tires complain as Grijpstra forced it through a half circle in the yard, and the siren began to wail as he drove through the gates.

"What's eating
him?
" the driver asked the sergeant.

"His girlfriend called," the sergeant said. "The hot weather is bothering her and she took all her clothes off and now she feels lonely. Take that gray car over there."

"But it isn't marked," the driver said sadly. "We are supposed to drive a marked car."

Another VW drove into the garage, driven by a cadet-constable. "Your rank is higher," the sergeant said softly.

The driver jumped at the VW. "Out, you fellow!" he roared. "We need that car!"

"But I am supposed to do an errand for the chief inspector," the young constable said. He said it to the sergeant. The car was already leaving the garage.

"Far?" the sergeant asked.

"No."

"Take a bicycle," the sergeant said. "There's a nice one, that one in the corner, with the rusty mudguard. But be quick or somebody will come rushing in and take it off you, and it's a hot day and I am tired."

Grijpstra parked the car and screwed himself out of the narrow seat. He looked at his watch and smiled. Twenty-one minutes, and every light he had gone through had been red. The wail of the siren was still in his ears as he pumped the burly lieutenant's powerful hand.

"You haven't had dinner yet, have you?" the lieutenant asked.

"No sir. It's only half-past four. I had lunch."

"I hope it's properly digested. That corpse won't be a pleasant sight."

They went out to the grave in the lieutenant's elegant Porsche and found half a dozen State Police constables in their neat dark blue tunics waiting respectfully around a hole which looked conspicuously black in the warm, dark green meadow. A ten-year-old boy stood next to one of the constables and was introduced to Grijpstra. The boy had heard what the police were looking for and had remembered that he had seen a man dig in a held.

"One man?" Grijpstra asked.

"One man," the boy said.

"A yellow man with funny eyes? Japanese?"

"We have already questioned the boy a few times," the lieutenant whispered into Grijpstra's ear. "He doesn't know what a Japanese looks hke, so we tried a Chinese on him. There's a Chinese restaurant nearby and he has often eaten there with his parents. But he says he was too far away to see what your suspect looked like. All he remembers is that the man was fairly small and dressed in a dark suit. He also remembers the BMW, a white car parked where my car is parked now. He thought it was strange at the time that a man should be digging in his uncle's field. The field hasn't been used for a few years and the grass is high, as you can see."

"A pity he didn't stop to find out what the man was doing," Grijpstra whispered.

"Yes, the boy was on his way to the cinema and he didn't have time to stop. But he came to us, good thing he did. We might have found the grave on our own, we were getting close to this field, but it would have been another few days and we could have missed it. The grass was growing again in the loose earth. With this sort of weather and the night rain we have been having lately, it grows quickly."

Grijpstra patted the boy on the head. "Yes, well, I am ready when you are."

The lieutenant nodded at his men. The constables began to dig, while the lieutenant told the boy to go home. The constables were groaning and sweating. The thin hand was free now and the arm followed. The constables cursed. Insects had eaten some of the flesh away and they were approaching the head. They were handling their short spades as if the clumsy tools were surgical instruments. Grijpstra was on his knees, peering down, as the head came free. Kikuji Nagai's body had assumed the prenatal posture; in death he had crawled back into the womb. His knees were up against his chin, the back was bent, the head turned down; only the one arm was stretched out, the other supported his head. There wasn't a stitch of clothing on the body. Two men in civilian clothes were taking photographs from every possible angle, even going as far as lowering their cameras into the grave. The flashes of their light bulbs accentuated the weirdness of the corpse with its bald sleeping head, part face, part skull.

"This is the victim?" the lieutenant asked. Grijpstra took a photograph from his wallet and they studied it together. The lieutenant grunted. "Yes, it's him. The bugs managed to get his hair off, but the face is still recognizable. An Eastern gentleman. There's the bullet hole, went in at the back, came out at the front, blew part of his forehead away, see? That must account for the bit of bone you fellows found. I wonder what happened to his clothes. Pretty silly, don't you think? A corpse isn't recognized by the clothes alone, and it must have been quite a business undressing him. I suppose the murderer put the clothes in a garbage can somewhere. They must have been burned by the sanitation department. Never mind, here is your corpse, adjutant, with our compliments. Where do you want it, on the back seat of your VW?"

"For God's sake," Grijpstra said, and turned around as if he had been stung.

The lieutenant grinned. "I was only joking. We'll have it delivered to your morgue this evening. It'll be wrapped in plastic and transported in one of our vans. Don't worry about it, adjutant."

"An amateur," Grijpstra thought, as he drove the white VW back into the garage. "No professional would have stripped the body. And our two suspects are supposed to be gangsters. Joanne Andrews says so, the Japanese consul says so, I say so. Two fat uttle cool cucumbers living it up in jail. They are absolutely sure they are going to be released. And why are they so sure?" He parked the car and gave the keys to the sergeant.

"Did you have a nice time?" the sergeant asked.

"I found a nice corpse," Grijpstra said. "The worms found it first though. It looked a little strange, pale green, you know, and the eyes..."

"Never mind," the sergeant said, walking away. "I was only being polite. You should have said 'yes, thank you,' that's quite enough. I don't want to know about eyes and worms."

"Well, there weren't any eyes," Grijpstra said, but the sergeant was looking at him from behind a glass door with his fingers in his ears. "Because they never killed poor Mr. Nagai," Grijpstra continued his monologue. "So who did?"

He was breathing deeply as he climbed the stairs which led to the floor where the inspector had his office. Never punch an officer, he was saying to himself. If you get very angry with an officer you can shoot him in the back, when nobody is looking. Now don't get angry with the poor little idiot just because he has a nasty way of talking. All you have to do is report to him and he hasn't any real power over you. The commissaris is your direct chief and you can telephone him tonight, you don't even have to go through the operator, all you have to do is dial a lot of numbers.

*
A small town just outside Amsterdam.

\\\\\ 13 /////

T
HE COMMISSARIS WAS WATCHING INTENTLY AS THE priest, with much hissing and bowing, reverently lifted the scroll from its simple wooden box and held it up with both hands. Dorin had knelt down, his hands placed flat on the floormat, and the head with the bristly black crew cut bobbed rapidly up and down. De Gier was sitting farther back, some four feet from the commissaris. He had crossed his legs and was smoking one of the commissaris ' small cigars, but he stubbed it out as he felt the concentrated mood of the room.

The priest, a man in his late thirties, simply dressed in a brown cotton robe, raised his small head, looking even smaller because of the shaved skull. His quiet eyes swept the room, taking in the three men facing him. "Very good painting this," he said, searching painfully for words, "done by great master, Chinese painter, not just painter, very much more than painter, great master, great wisdom."

He paused, vainly attempting to collect more words.

Dorin cleared his throat. "Perhaps you can unroll the painting and our guests can see, then explanations may be unnecessary."

The priest smiled gratefully and raised himself to his feet in one supple movement without taking his hands off the rolled-up scroll. De Gier whistled with admiration. After much practice he had taught his body to change from the sitting to the standing position without pushing it up with his hands, but the movement had always been jerky, consisting of a great many separate muscle actions. With the priest there seemed to be no effort at all. He wondered if the man was taught judo or other sports in the monastery, or whether such suppleness of limbs came naturally to these strange people. The scroll rolled free by its own weight and they saw a drawing in ink, done in a few flowing brush strokes. An old bald-headed man in a tattered robe was resting his head and right shoulder on a large sleeping tiger. The animal lay stretched out, every muscle and sinew and tendon relaxed. The large eyes, shadowed by huge eyebrows, were tightly shut and the paws were flat on the ground, the nails out. The old man's eyes were closed too and the expressions of both faces were absolutely identical.

"Shin K'o," the priest was saying. "Chinese master, tenth century, but this is not the original. Original is in China, kept in museum. This is thirteenth-century copy by Japanese master, unknown." He thought again. "Anonymous, but great master all the same. Very valuable scroll, worth fortune in West."

"Beautiful, beautiful," the commissaris mumbled. The drawing was in perfect balance, man and animal completed each other, but there was more than just harmony and perfect detail, in spite of the seemingly haphazard flow of the lines. The folds and contours of the old man's robe were done with thick strokes that conveyed a great power to the image.

"Painting is called 'Two Patriarchs Harmonizing Their Minds,'" the priest said shyly.

"What is a patriarch?" de Gier asked.

"A master, an old master who has taught many disciples, many monks, many lay people."

"A master?" de Gier asked, shuffling forward on his knees to get closer. "So the tiger is a master too? Like in a fairy tale?"

The priest didn't know the meaning of "fairy tale," and Dorin translated quickly. The priest smiled. "Yes. But this is real fairy tele. Tiger is master, old man is master. Two masters meet. Minds meet. Two minds, one mind."

"Very beautiful," the commissaris said again. "But we don't want to handle this valuable piece; it may get damaged. Perhaps you'd better take it back to your temple and we can pretend you are asking a high price and we are not ready to pay it yet. You are not alone, are you? If the yakusa want it they may take it from you on your way back."

"He is safe," Dorin said. 'The yakusa don't want just this piece; they want everything they can get and they can only get it through the priest. If they start robbing openly, the whole thing comes to the surface, the police will be alerted and public opinion will be roused. They don't want that. Kyoto is the heart of Japan, most of our national treasures can be found here; almost every Japanese will visit the city a few times in his life. Robbing art from here is a heinous crime. It would upset the whole country. The yakusa will have to work in the dark."