"Jo," Peter said quietly, "Jo? Can you hear me? Look at me, it's me, Peter. Eugene is here too."
"I am here," Eugene said. "We're all here, Jo."
The garden on Queens Avenue was quiet again, until, from the next house, softly, punctuated by the hollow tones of a wooden drum, came the sound of a sutra being chanted in Sanskrit.
How frightening, the commissaris thought. Am I the only one who knows that this is about the void, that there is neither wisdom nor any attainment, that there is nothing to attain, that there are no obstructions and therefore no fear, that there is no ignorance, and no ending of ignorance, no suffering, no cause of suffering, no cessation of suffering, and no path, and here we pretend to sit around being busy?
"Did you cut him?" Peter asked. "Are you sorry that you cut off his penis, is that what has been bothering you? Do you want us to forgive you?"
Jo was being Road Warrior now, driving his supercar across the Australian desert looking for perverts who had ended his hope of having a wife and a child, like the good people in the farmland north of Amsterdam, where his dad and mom had him and where it had all been just fine for a while.
"Just a little counseling," Eugene whispered to Grijpstra. "That's all he needed. I told him that, but he was always so uptight. But maybe he didn't ever have a chance. Once they are raised in strict dualism-Dutch Reformed Country Church-and then, suddenly, there is the permissive city here, add abuse to that, call up guilt, provoke lying and twisting to get out of that guilt…"
Jo looked at the commissaris. "Uncle was alive when I cut him." Jo got up and looked down at the commissaris from his great height. "I wanted you to find out, and now I want you to tell me about it. What do you make of this, sir?"
Peter stood next to Jo. He had his arm around Jo's shoulders. He asked Jo what the commissaris could tell him. Since when is a policeman a judge? Jo should thank the commissaris, who had done all he could, had investigated a crime, had located the guilty party, but couldn't dispense justice.
Jo howled, then cried.
Eugene got up. "Well, you know," Eugene said, "you have to figure this out yourself, Jobo. You did it, but you did it stupidly, because you wanted to be caught by the little old father figure, or rather"-Eugene looked at the commissaris-"the little old grandfather figure." Eugene punched Jo Termeer in the stomach. "Your stupidity is your cleverness. You left some psychological traces but this is the physical world, Jobo, the Justice Department is into sperm and blood." Eugene rubbed Jo's cheek affectionately. "Look here, if you want approval of your homemade morality, applause for Road Warriors of the Mind who castrate and kill uncles…eh." Eugene patted Jo's other cheek. "Tell you what, let me get you into a place in the country, nice and quiet, where you can figure things out and Peter and I will come see you."
"You're not a psychologist, are you?" Cardozo asked Eugene.
"He is," Peter said. "Eugene works for the Top Job Institute; he helps pick the chief executive officers of the future."
Jo sat down. He was calm now, momentarily in control of his emotions, de Gier thought. He had seen that happen before-murder suspects, during intense interrogation, unexpectedly becoming lucid.
"If I did the right thing," Jo said pleasantly, "I was ahead of my time. Present-day morality does not excuse the castration of abusive and perverted uncles. Commissaris?"
"Jo?" the commissaris asked.
"You can't get me a trial? Nothing you can do, except this"-Jo gestured-"meeting with sympathetic authorities, unofficially, while I'm in the company of my pals?"
"I'm afraid not, Jo."
"But by being bad I created my demon," Jo said. "I can't stand my demon, sir. She is driving me cra2y."
"The Bad Conscience Demon," Eugene told Cardozo when it was all over and de Gier was pouring cold jenever from a stone jug and Katrien was handing out peanuts and the commissaris was talking to Peter and Grijpstra to de Gier and Turtle was sleeping between his favorite rocks. "Did you ever study Hieronymus Bosch's paintings?" Eugene asked Cardozo. "They crawl with Bad Conscience Demons. It would be interesting for you to do that, you being a copper. We live within a certain morality, the rules of our time, and then we break those rules, and thereby create our demons. They're totally unreal but we feel we have to appease them anyway."
Eugene looked gloomy. "Or suffer forever after."
That was hours after a streetcar rang its bell at the tram stop behind the willow trees, and Jo jumped up and thanked everybody for everything and said he had to go now.
Chapter 26
The accident that killed Jo Termeer was reported by the crew of a patrol car called by the tram driver via her radio.
The policemen's report said that, according to the tram's passengers, the victim came running toward it well after the streetcar, of the Number Two line, had pulled away from the Queens Avenue tram stop.
A modern streetcar's safety features do not allow the vehicle to drive off when its sliding doors are still open. No system, however, is foolproof. This time the vehicle's safety feature didn't work. The streetcar's doors were still closing as the vehicle gathered speed.
The victim managed to jump through the closing doors but slipped on something inside the car-what that could have been hadn't been determined. It could have been anything-someone's spittle maybe, fruit juice, a crushed sweet. The passenger then fell over backward and, as the doors were still closing, his body was pinned between them. His head was still outside the tram and it hit the concrete base of a light post that marked the end of the tram stop.
The Number Two streetcar's driver,. tall blond twenty-nine-year-old Agatha Franken, an experienced operator with an unblemished record, had not been aware of anything being amiss as the tram gathered speed. She stopped as soon as passengers began calling out. Miss Franken had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance, where she was successfully treated for shock.
That night the commissaris did not dream. As usual after a case he had managed to solve, thanks to having good assistants, not being presented with the impossible and to good luck, he rested well.
Monday morning, 8:30, found the commissaris waiting at the tram stop, feeling chipper, as he had told his wife, but when the streetcar came he turned and went back to his house.
He had forgotten that, since he had as of that date been retired from active duty, his presence at Moose Canal Headquarters was no longer required.