The Hollow-Eyed Angel Read Online Free

off the commissaris's right sleeve. "Beautiful out there, you know. Karel and I went last year. We saw all the Warhols and the aircraft carrier parked on the river. Karel says it is a work of art in a way. That horror and violence are art, too." Antoinette unfolded a leaflet that she had pulled from the envelope. "Your congress is about horror too, about violence today. Will you just look at this cover photo? A dead girl with spittle on her lips?" Antoinette closed her eyes. "Yech."
    She opened them again, to smile at Termeer.
    "Isn't he lucky, hey? That chief of mine. A free week in New York, and I get my taxes deducted from my paycheck. The High and the Mighty."
    The commissaris looked surprised.
    Antoinette beamed. Now that the commissaris was going to retire anyway and she was going to miss him dearly, the distance between them had lessened. She pushed a little against him and looked down on his balding head. "New York. Some city. And the mugging isn't so bad if you keep alert. Everything is so cheap there, and the food is different everywhere, and everything is different, and all those other kinds of people." Antoinette's eyes grew bigger. "And those buildings, all that glass!"
    All parties were quiet.
    "So, if you were going anyway," Termeer said.
    The commissaris frowned. "I weren't."
    * The ranks of the Amsterdam Police are constable, constable-first-class, sergeant, adjutant, inspector, chief-inspector, commissaris and chief-constable.

Chapter 2
                                            "He were," Detective-Sergeant de Gier said two days later. De Gier had Detective-Adjutant Grijpstra to tea at his apartment because Grijpstra had walked out on his girlfriend that evening.
    "Oh yes, oh yes, oh YES?" Grijpstra had asked, stomping down the stairs at Nellie's.
    Nellie kept a hotel at the Straight Tree Ditch. A water pipe had broken that day and food had burned. Reciprocal irritation prevented sexual togetherness from reaching the level of love.
    "But it did," Grijpstra said.
    "Maybe for you," Nellie said and tried to explain the idea "together" but Grijpstra heard only criticism.
    He was tired, after several hours of questioning a junkie charged with breaking and entering. The junkie kept falling asleep and couldn't quite remember where he had worked, the nature of the loot and where or to whom he had sold it.
    "Or maybe not," the junkie said after every statement, not so much because he wanted to obstruct the course of justice but because he wanted, philosophically, to indicate relativity and the chaotic nature of All and Everything.
    "But what do you know?" the junkie asked Grijpstra. "Eh? You loutish moron. You should try the drug yourself, man, then you'll be on God's steps. Won't have to try to figure out what's what anymore. Won't bother free souls like me."
    Grijpstra extracted croquettes from a vending machine in Leyden Street. He could have gone to his own place, a neat upstairs apartment on the Linenmakers Canal vacated some years ago by his family. He had, in order not to be reminded of her, urged his wife to take most of the furnishings. He had never redone the large rooms. The idea at the time was that "an intelligent man really needs little." Now it often seemed as if the empty space had no need of Grijpstra. "Pure emptiness illuminated by the glow of the void," chanted poet Grijpstra when She and the Noisy Ones got the hell out. That day the sun was shining.
    Appearances change. He now saw the empty apartment as an extension of Holland's overall overcast climate. "Drafty absence of necessities partly illuminated by a dangling bare bulb," composed poet Grijpstra.
    A Turk listened in. The Turk was a dismal import, once welcomed by the Dutch to perform tedious hard labor. Automation made the Turk superfluous. He was on the dole now, for his residential permit was permanent. The Turk was a thin man in a threadbare coat waiting, like Grijpstra, for a streetcar to splash