"And dead anyway."
The commissaris couldn't see himself bothering Paulie Potock, one of the few Jewish children to survive the Nazi atrocities in Poland. After the basement revelation, back in Charlie's artistically pleasing environment, the commissaris had inquired into Charlie's painful past and the source of his present comforts.
Charlie talked easily, breaking out the cookies again. "Japanese," Charlie said. "Advanced food. There is a nice store in SoHo. Seaweed is the future."
"How did you get out of Poland, sir?"
The detectives saw Paulie, together with forty-eight other Jewish Polish little kids, guarded by two SS men, march, with a few surviving mothers, to Nowogrodziec Railway Station.
March 1945: The Russian Third Army was close. The Nazis were emptying out all death camps. A train waited. Boxcars closed off with barbed wire were to take the Jews to Germany to be killed, but Soviet war planes dived and set the train on fire.
It had been snowing heavily. The children and the mothers marched in singe file. Paulie was trying not to drag his bad leg. The mother up front sang out: "One, two, three."
In order to obey the guards but to delay reaching the platform, where, because of the train not taking them to Germany, all prisoners would surely be shot, the column moved forward on "one" and "two" but stepped back on "three."
The SS men, older soldiers, tired too, stumbled along.
The German forces had long since run out of motor fuel.
The SS men disappeared into the woods when they heard a rumble of powerful engines.
The column stopped when black spots appeared on the eastern snow-covered plain.
The spots were little tanks that grew in size as they came nearer.
The huge tanks stopped close to the standing column. From the tank turrets jumped older kids, Russian tank soldiers.
The Jewish Polish kids were in the eight-to-nine-year-old age group and the Russian soldier kids were in the fourteen-to-fifteen-year-old age group.
March 1945: The Russian army had lost ten million young and middle-aged male and female soldiers. Old folks manufactured deadly equipment to be handled by kids.
Once liberated, Paulie, without relatives but knowing by now how to take care of himself, lived here and there, and finally moved to America. He worked in a bank. He received money from the new Germany government, Wiedergutmachungs Funding, "money to make good," a fairly large amount that he invested profitably. He also went crazy. He was institutionalized for depression. A Chinese-American psychiatric nurse suggested the patient should write a list of things he liked, and brought him a new pencil and a sheet of white paper, which Paulie destroyed.
Every day the nurse brought fresh paper and another new pencil, which Paulie tore up and broke, until, one pleasant morning, there was a sparrow on his windowsill. Charlie watched the sparrow, then wrote his list of Nice Things to Do. Watching seals off the Maine Coast would be nice. Having a dog would be nice. Starting his own growth fund would be nice. Owning lots of private space would be nice. Arranging temporarily owned objects would be nice. Laying an assorted hardwood floor- changing his name-working out in Central Park-would be nice. It would be nice to speculate as to what would happen (Charlie had read some Nietzsche by then, and tried to follow existentialism) to his state of mind if he removed the concept of selfishness from cynicism.
The commissaris wanted to leave but de Gier, who had been guided to and from the bathroom by Kali, asked how Charlie had found a seeing-eye dog.
It was the other way around, Charlie said.
The dog had approached him when he was working out in Central Park. The dog was scooting along on her bottom, trying to get the path's gravel to scratch her infected and blocked anal glands.
The dog was an Alsatian; in the death camps the SS had used Alsatians to terrorize the inmates.
Charlie walked away but the dog ran after him, sat on the path and offered her paw.
Charlie took the dog to an animal clinic. A vet squeezed the almost bursting glands empty and prescribed medication. Charlie bought a bag of food and emptied it out in the street. The dog ate everything and barked her thanks.
On the way home Kali-he had named her by then-didn't allow Charlie to cross a street against a red light. She pushed his leg when the end of a sidewalk came close, or when roller skaters got near.
Charlie visited the Lighthouse, the society for the blind, which promised to make inquiries about a lost seeing-eye dog. He was called a week later. A woman, who wouldn't give her name, said her blind husband had died and that she had abandoned his dog in Central Park. "You keep her. I never liked her."
The woman hung up.
Chapter 23
The commissaris, dozing off in his bathtub, faced the long-legged tram driver. De Gier, musing in the Metropolitan Museum, faced a Papuan demon sculpture.
Both detectives, at about the same time, felt a wave of serious and multiple misgivings. The wave wiped out their conclusion that Charles G. Perrin could be controlled by evil. He could not. Therefore he could not commit evil either. Charlie castrate Bert? Never.
The commissaris, wide awake now, clambered out of his bathtub, dried himself and dressed quickly.
De Gier left the Metropolitan Museum and walked to the nearby Cavendish.
The commissaris planned to face the hollow-eyed tram driver directly, to pull the phantom out of her hazy dreamscapes.
The commissaris and de Gier met in the Cavendish's lobby, where they were greeted by Ignacio. "A sus ordenes, sefiores."
The detectives found comfortable armchairs.
"Charlie is a good guy," de Gier said. "Don't you think so, sir? That dog, the way he treated that dog, and even better, the way the dog treated Charlie. I should have seen that."
"Yes," the commissaris said.
"Also the general atmosphere of Charlie's part of number two Watts Street," de Gier said. "I felt happy there."
The commissaris had felt happy too.
"And," de Gier said, "there was the tea ceremony, and all that hoo-ha about the elevator-that was nice, didn't you think so? Moving about in an exhibition that moves? And the empty wall with the invisible incomprehensible Sanskrit "
"Arabic," the commissaris said.
"Arabic," de Gier said, "and the way he had fitted that hardwood floor together, that was beautiful. I thought, you can look at those patterns when you feel bad and it will be better. And that one, two forward in Poland and three backward "
The commissaris agreed.
"So he didn't do it," de Gier said.
The commissaris thought that might be a possibility, but he wanted to know why the hollow-eyed angel wouldn't leave him in peace, and now he meant to see the voodoo lady.
Ignacio was asked to telephone Mamere. He came back to say that Mamere was home and expected to see the commissaris within the hour.
"A hundred bucks," Ignacio said. "Bad dreams don't come cheap."
De Gier checked his map. Ignacio helped him locate Brooklyn, Flatbush and Nostrand Avenue beyond Flat-bush and told him where to catch the Number Five train.
The detectives sat quietly in the subway.
The Nostrand Avenue block where Mamere lived consisted of three-story buildings, with stores on the ground level, some separated by small alleys.
Mamere's was one of the better buildings.
De Gier waited in a coffee shop while the commissaris rang the buzzer and then hobbled up the steps.
Mamere, after pulling the blinds of her small sitting room and diffusing the light to please the spirits, sat in a large yellow reclining armchair and the commissaris sat in a large orange reclining armchair. Mamere's dog, which she told him was the grandson of the dog in the painting at Le Chat Complet, lolled a long red tongue out of its furry black face.