Post said nothing. Van der Valk picked up the enormous glass, stood it on his nose, and licked his lips happily.
“I must be off; my wife will be wondering where I’ve got to. Think I’ll take a little stroll though, back along the river as far as the Rembrandtplein. Smoke this as I go. They taste best along the waterside.”
“Good night.”
“My pleasure. Ring me up some time…when you’ve had enough of it. Don’t get like Casimir – you start collecting younger and younger girls…no future in it. You’d really like to be free of that house too, wouldn’t you? You can, you know. So long.”
Rather wearily, Post caught the waiter’s eye and ordered another brandy. He wished heartily he were back in his studio, lying in his silk dressing-gown on the cheap divan, with a book, Jane Austen - he was getting quite to enjoy Jane Austen…
It was with some glee that van der Valk heard about Dr van der Post’s little holiday in the Schwarzwald. That was a good sign – nothing like a good German introspective forest landscape to bring out one’s melancholy poetic nature, what? One renounced women for the little volume of Rilke bound in limp leather, ha. Or of course one took one’s rifle and went deer-hunting. Even better! Post in the role of hunter would be fine: he would spend a good deal of time sympathising with the deer. What thoughts would pass through his mind at the moment when, after a long crawl through sodden bracken, he finally got downwind of an unsuspecting beast, found a sightline, saw the cross-hairs on his backsight wavering across that rough warm sympathetic flank, loosened all his muscles, breathing shallowly through the mouth, and waited for the rifle-barrel to steady on the sturdy muscled shoulder? Would he really be able to feel the skin tighten and whiten on the top knuckle of the right hand?
Whatever the fellow did, he, van der Valk, busy deer-hunting in a smelly little office in the Marnixstraat, would be thinking up some new medicine to tighten the screw still more. He had at the moment no very good idea how, but he would find one, oh yes.
Unfortunately he got drowned all of a sudden in one of the incomprehensible busy periods of a policeman’s life. Instead of pleasant summery evenings observing the demeanour of the art whore he was getting home at eleven at night, dulled and silent, to be given cocoa and rolled towards his bed by a wife he did not see at all during the day and hardly saw now when she dragged his socks off and pulled his shirt out of his belt to tap his back-muscles loose. Not for the first time, he was forced to forget all about Dr van der Post. There were other pots that might come to the boil if he stoked hard enough.
It was Chief Inspector Kan, all the same, that finally got Cross-eyed Janus, who made the grievous mistake of getting over-ambitious. If he had stuck to second-hand cars they would never have reached him, but Janus was tired of being a garage-attendant. He wanted to be a gentleman – damn it, there were criminals a lot worse than he to whom the Public Prosecutor took his hat off when he saw them on the street. He made an unwary phone-call. When Kan called, prim and tidy, Janus, who had always thought Kan a good subject for a horse-laugh, was disconcerted. Worse, he lost his head. He offered Kan a big bribe – they were all quite startled how big, and if it had been anybody but Kan they would have suspected him of exaggerating. Poor old Janus – all that money, and his looks against him, and the fearful Amsterdam accent, and those Charing Cross Road clothes. He should never have got friendly with Rouppe, who looked like a gentleman and even behaved like one, so that Janus had never imagined he might be a police informer…
They had him. Issuing of false written statements (a great Dutch catch-all), incomplete and falsified income-tax returns, receiving of goods known to be stolen, harbouring of same, attempted disposal of same, interfering with an officer in the execution of his duty, attempted corruption of a state functionary – the Officer of Justice (red round a receding hairline after a delightful holiday in the Aegean) made a little addition of penalties, arrived at a fantastic total, and rather regretfully concluded that a lot of these sentences would have to Run Concurrently.
The police department was jubilant. They were being jubilant when the telephone rang.
“For you, van der Valk.”
“Gentleman asking to speak to you” – the concierge at the switchboard.
“Well we’re all gentlemen today,” handsomely. “Put him on. Gentleman have a name?”
“A Dr Post.”
Van der Valk had a tiny shock of self-blame at having forgotten, and gave himself a rap on the knuckle of his trigger finger. His deer was within range, and he had been busy badger-watching.
“Van der Valk. Good morning to you. No, this is a private line. Yes, I’m alone in the office.” The others were gawking, but they held their tongues.
“Would you care to come and see me in my consulting-room, when you can spare the time?” Post’s quiet voice sounded remote and cool, as unemotional as ever. “Are you still there?”
“Certainly I’m still there. I was thinking. I’d be inclined to make another suggestion. Suppose you came to see me here?”
“There? In that headquarters building or whatever you call it?” Post sounded a scrap shocked at this invasion of privacy.
“I believe – I base this on the experience of a good many people – you’d find this a great deal easier in my office than in yours. We’d be perfectly private, and undisturbed. Simply ask at the desk for Commissaris Samson’s office. I’ll see that the concierge does not keep you waiting.”
There was another pause, at Post’s end this time.
“Why do you suggest this?” he asked at last. The answer, thought van der Valk, would be important.
“That terrible house,” he said. “Wait a minute, I’m looking for the right way to express myself.” Van der Valk’s eye glanced round the room. Mr Kan was already making notes on the margin of a report. Mr Samson was sitting – or rather standing with his backside propped against a table, his hands in his pockets, watching. He had a faint grin, as though curious to see how van der Valk would handle this.
“Perhaps the best way of putting it is to say that once here, you can shed, completely, an identity that has grown distasteful. The gestures we go through here are almost totally automatic and impersonal. We no longer have any hostility, you see. If anything, it’s rather a friendly performance.”
The pause this time was slighter.
“Are you free at this minute? I mean, to be more precise, in about twenty minutes?”
“Free as the wind.”
“Very well,” suddenly. “You can expect me.”
Van der Valk put the phone down and said “Oof”.
“Post, if I’m not much mistaken,” said the old gentleman.
“Quite right. In a quarter of an hour. I’d like to make it easy for him.”
Mr Samson had understood.
“Very well. In my office then. You can be stenographer. So – he’s realised at last that he’s without a friend in the world?”
“He’s realised, I think,” said van der Valk soberly, “that I’m the only one he’s got.”
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
Copyright © 1965, 2001 Nicolas Freeling
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Criminal Conversation Page 20