Double-Barrel (11 page)

Fairly typical Arlette description – sounded as though the woman were not bad at all. Mm, another young, pretty married woman.

‘Listen. This sounds to me a good example of the faintly queer type of emotional scene that's being played around here more often than one would expect, lately. It might of course be nothing at all, but again it might be significant, and I want to find out. You continue tomorrow – pally tea-drinking.'

‘Oh, that awful Mrs Tattle – you've no idea. Nosy … she tells as much as she asks, I'm bound to admit. I know already all about her menopause and Grandpa's hernia, her daughter's boy-friend, what stars she's born under …'

‘Lovely. Important that she doesn't think you toffee-nosed. Now I'm going to make my phone call. Amusing, in a sense, that I won't hear for days; I'll have to get a transcript of police interrogations from the burgomaster, sneakily.'

I didn't have to bother gazing out or peeping through a teeny teeny gap in the curtains myself to know that a police car stopped down the road an hour later. I sat cracking the joints of my huge, dry, knobbly fingers like Newman Noggs.

I had thought it comic, making a phone call in a hushed sticky voice, bringing the boys in blue pounding out. Comedy is never far away wherever Van der Valk is operating, our well-known cross-eyed detective with the two left feet. And his intoxicating, cliff-hanging certainty of always doing the wrong thing.

But I am quite good at ethnography, I thought with odious self-satisfaction. I was becoming quite an expert on Zwinderen, and especially on the Mimosa Street. I had masses of poignant information, provided by Arlette's great new friend Mrs Prins – a jewel, that woman; I had counted greatly on her – the milkman, and my new great friend, the secretary of the local Good Neighbours' Association. Wonderful fellow this, zealous for communal activities and Getting to Know One Another. With enthusiasm, he had shown an admiring Van der Valk all his schemes for social evenings, conversation groups, amateur drama classes, and a splendid notion for sending flowers to every member of the Association on their wedding anniversaries.

These Elks and Kiwanis were, in their own estimation, a great help to everyone, but they might have been surprised to discover what a help they were to me; I picked their brains with delight.

Enchanting to discover all the characters from Sinclair Lewis, flourishing here forty years after their time. Babbitt, Will Kennicott, Doctor Almus Pickerbaugh, the man who
knew Coolidge – a Dutch Coolidge; there are many, and I have sometimes thought that Cal's immortal phrase, ‘there exists no necessity for becoming excited', would make the ideal motto, graven in letters of bronze, outside Ministries, here in Holland.

I had a little map with all the houses of the Mimosastraat. I looked at it and laughed. Cockeyed way of behaving. I hadn't any suspects at all; I had a little map and a notebook full of gossip. Not one single suspect, not even Besançon.

I knew what Besançon was, to me. He was my confidant, the secret adviser, the
chef de cabinet
, the power behind the sofa. Father Joseph. It is good when there is someone like this, someone connected with the business you are working on, yet somehow outside it. You can talk to these people almost with freedom, sometimes even with friendship. They have character in a mass of blank shapeless faces; their voices have individual timbre. I recall many times when they have shown me what to do. This time, I needed a person of this sort more than ever.

I had known, most of those other times, whom I had been looking for, and why. The trouble had been proving it without provoking a ghastly drama. I had always provoked the ghastly drama, having a childish liking for such things. But here I had nothing to prove. I had no theories, no hypotheses. The dramas had already happened; little tiny domestic dramas, nothing grandiose nor lurid. No headlines on this one. No spectacular interventions or interrogations.

I simply had to stay still, observe, learn. When I had learned, I would know. The author – as far as there was an author – would drop off the tree into my hand. No proving. There wouldn't be anything to prove. It would all be terribly obvious, and everyone would say, ‘But how is it that we never thought of that?'

The crime – what a word – belonged to the town where it
had happened. An inevitable, inextricable consequence of a way of life. What were the problems, here, that had accompanied the laying of a thin veneer of glitter, a coating of wealthy materialism, on the old calvinist roots of a stick-in-the-mud country market town?

I think that there is a streak of fatalism in most policemen. There come so many times when one has no very clear idea how to play one's cards. One throws them down – play them as they lie. I had a labyrinth here. To save my life I could not have said why I thought Besançon could help me penetrate it. I had nothing whatever to justify our little chats. Perhaps one tiny thing. It was doubtless out of character but I agreed with that State Recherche man. There was something queer about the old man, something hidden. Sinister? – no, that is not the word.

I've no idea what the word is.

But why should he have been, all along, Suspect Number One? The case against him was so very thin. It simply didn't exist. All the policemen, and now I added myself to that distinguished list, had stubbornly gone on thinking that even if he wasn't guilty of this, damn it, the fellow must be guilty of something. What?

They hadn't the faintest idea and no more had I.

I simply could not and would not believe that he had written those letters. I knew them by heart now. I could quote them from memory. They were sexy, mm; yes, but only vaguely, almost inconsequently, as though the writer had obeyed a conventional feeling that an anonymous letter has to be a bit sexy or nobody will bother reading it; too dull, else.

A religious feeling was much stronger in them. Certainly, they were very calvinist. They spoke of God and the Devil in that characteristically literal, familiar, glib way. In this
person's life God and the Devil were very much physically present; looming, almost tangible. Listening, urging, arguing, fighting.

And the other kind of calvinism, the Coolidge kind – Cal for President, Cal for President – an overwhelming respectability, conservatism, love of regulation and formula and bureaucracy; a mincing mutton-headed hatred of risk and innovation.

A local person, I was sure by now – or I thought I was sure – born and bred here, with a distrust, a dislike of anything that came from outside. Cities were spoken of with fear and hatred – strongholds of the Devil. An undertone of anxiety: Zwinderen was being invaded by the Devil – the witches of Salem again – and he must be fought with his own vile weapons.

There was one queer, perhaps significant fact. The men who were attacked in the letters were all strangers. The women – I hadn't checked this yet to a watertight certainty – were all local women. Local – all from this province or the borders of it. This background, this atmosphere. I thought there was an unspoken appeal in the letters to them: not to play this background false.

Nothing was watertight. Sometimes I thought that maybe ten per cent of the letters had come to light. How could I be sure about anything in them, when I probably hadn't seen more than a tiny percentage?

Was the writer a woman? There was a feminist streak, and a fear – yes, a hatred – of men. Just men. But was this a convincing argument? I know feminist men. I am feminist myself. I know a fellow who carries it a long way. He says that only women make good business men – singularly unpopular point of view in Holland. He even says he can only be friends with women. He is a nice fellow – talks too much, but so do I. He's right in a way – I can't find myself friends with him but Arlette does.

He has quite a few loose screws. A few more and he could write letters like these.

Besançon had a sort of distrust of women. I would have to see if he had any feminist views.

I ruminated over Mr Besançon's home-made bookshelves. He sat at his table, calm and gentle as always. The eyes were very bright and steady behind those dark glasses of his, whatever the vision was like.

‘You have the best kind of books,' I said suddenly.

‘Have I? I value them very much, but why should you approve of them?'

‘I only meant the books that are read and read till the covers fall off.'

‘Ah.' He smiled. ‘Have you ever read the memoirs of Aimée de Coigny?' – surprisingly.

‘No idea even who he is.'

‘A she, but there's no earthly reason why you ever should have heard of her. She was simply a pretty, adventurous, intelligent woman who was mixed up with many interesting persons and events during the Napoleonic time, and left interesting memoirs. She draws a very attractive portrait of Talleyrand in a library, picking up books, “talking to them as though they were alive”. I like that.'

‘I can see that you like memoirs.'

‘To my taste, the only really interesting books. Is it not a strange thing that in the eighteenth century a complete nonentity should write memoirs that are read today with pleasure, whereas today a man whose name is known to all the world writes four hundred pages of the most wearisome sawdust?'.

‘Today's celebrity is tomorrow's nonentity.'

‘One wishes always to be a hundred years either ahead of or behind one's own time. Nothing can be duller than the present.'

I sat down and lit a cigar. I crossed my hands peacefully upon my ample stomach. I gazed at cigar-smoke, at Besançon.

His stillness was remarkable, untouched by the nervous tremble. There was suspicion in it, the deep-seated, ever present wariness of a man who has spent years in the hands of his enemies, treated with jocularity and feline cruelty more than with crude brutality. The world to him is nothing but policemen. No wonder he prefers the eighteenth century: the century that proclaimed that freedom of thought was universal, whatever servitude one might be born to. He can never lose sight of the fact that I may begin again at any moment to persecute him. How can he stand having me in the house? I knew well enough that I was intruding. One aspect of police training – one no longer cares whether one is intruding or not.

‘I am depressed,' I said. ‘I'm not enjoying this job, my own thoughts, my own actions.'

I got the smile around the eyes, the slight twitch of the wide mouth. The deeply sunk facial muscles hardly moved. Interesting mouth. The lips were thin and sensitive, but that sensitivity had been held, clamped taut, for so many years that no emotion would ever again show there. The lines all around had been cut in with a chisel and mallet.

‘Develop,' said the mouth. ‘Amplify. You wish to exercise your thoughts – you are a boxer, and I am your punching ball.'

‘The job is tedious – but that I am accustomed to. The pressure to be a pure bureaucrat is great, as always. One wishes for situations that are cut and dried. For a case out of a textbook or a detective story – cut, dried, and pigeon-holed too. Everything tidy – the bureaucrat's dream. And they never are. They are invariably untidy, sloppy, shapeless.'

‘Here, too, I must peek and pry, in a way that is mean and ignoble. These people, these – to me – total foreigners, they resent me, dislike and avoid me. They are quite right. What business have I to come here disapproving of them, laughing at them, holding up their ways to ridicule? I have to do my work, and here I cannot do it without taking away their dignity, without imposing my officially approved norms on their ways, that they've had for years. I am the government, the eternal enemy. I have never felt so strongly how destructive a force that government exerts upon a small provincial settlement, a village geared to village life.'

‘So you come to me for consolation? To share your solitude with another solitary? You have, unless I gravely misjudge, other motives for your visits.'

‘I have, yes.'

‘You see, Inspector, you suspect me. Still. Always.'

It was so, but I was not going to let him cut me with the thin, bitter edge of his amusement at it. He knew well enough that I had no grounds for suspecting him.

‘No. That is not what I meant. I think that I come for your advice.'

‘However dubious I am of its value, I can scarcely refuse.'

‘Has it ever occurred to you – no, I have phrased this wrongly – does it ever now occur to you, as a Jew, to feel – now – sympathy with the Gestapo? Understanding, now, can you feel a certain pity? Not for what they did – for them, the men who were your captors and persecutors?'

‘Perhaps. Has this some connexion with problems of yours?'

‘I don't know.'

‘But let us be factual. As an abstract idea, my answer would be no. In certain circumstances, under certain conditions, I have thought that I understood my captors, as you call them, very well. Even at the time I often sympathized with them. State your case.'

I wanted to get up and walk about; I was unaccountably
restless and nervous that day. But I had to oppose, I do not know why, to his stillness and watchfulness my own. I felt remarkably young and raw; I have seen that same expression of weary calm on the faces of old policemen in their last years before they got put out to grass. I last saw it in Paris, waiting for a taxi in the rush hour outside the Gare du Nord. The agent on duty had the same complete indifference, that of the man who has obeyed orders his whole life, who has seen everything. Everything.

‘I am here, possessing administrative and interrogatory powers, in a defeated, occupied land. If I were a simple official here to carry out my orders from the central government openly, honestly, I might feel less uneasy. I would take refuge in my officialdom. I would be the impersonal functionary. Because I am here secretly, anonymously, I do not fit into the pattern, and I lack the security of a formal position. You find me ridiculous?'