Tsing-Boum

by Nicolas Freeling

  ‘She told me pretty sharpish that I knew nothing about it. Well that was true enough. I suppose she might have been there.’

  ‘You’ve no interest in who killed her?’ Zomerlust looked at him as though he had made a very stupid remark.

  ‘She’s out there underground. She’d had a rough life and precious little luck. Now you’ve got to go routing about with her bones.’

  ‘She may have had a rough life,’ mildly. ‘Which doesn’t mean she was ready to die. Someone thought she was. I’d be interested to know who.’

  Back at the bureau there was curiosity in the air.

  ‘Man to see you, chief. Says you’re expecting him.’

  ‘’s right. Twenty minutes to read my reports. Give him my apologies and say I’ll be at his disposal as soon as I can and I’m sorry to keep him waiting.’ It raised eyebrows among the staff; he wasn’t as a rule one to bother about keeping people waiting. As for him he was curious as hell, which was why he throttled his curiosity with a quarter of an hour’s paperwork.

  ‘Sorry to be so slow. I had to go to the funeral this morning.’ He hadn’t had any idea what to expect, but there were no dirty raincoats – more like somebody from the Embassy. A slim young man looking no more than thirty, with a well-fitting dark-blue suit and a sober silk tie, protected from Dutch weather by a leather raincoat, it was true, but not police style: sportive, supple thing with a tie belt. His briefcase was black and expensive like the raincoat, and slim like him, and didn’t look as if it had a gun it it, but doubtless it was more polite not to inquire. Fair hair cut short, greenish eyes trained not to be mobile, a candid look that – who knew? – might be genuine. He looked – as far as that went – what he doubtless was: bright young French civil servant with a political science degree. He spoke fluent Dutch with little accent.

  ‘Sorry to be a trouble.’

  ‘I hope I won’t be telling you the same.’

  Soft smile, American cigarette, flick of a gold lighter, white intellectual’s hand but a muscular face looking unafraid of fresh air: could be a judo tiger for all Van der Valk could guess.

  ‘I have come from the Embassy, Commissaire, hoping that we may be of some use to one another. I won’t make any bones about this – we do have an interest in this woman. Unusual circumstances surrounding her death.’

  ‘You’re not going to tell me she was connected with any secret armies!’ making an act of throwing up his arms to heaven.

  A laugh.

  ‘I’d be most surprised. We keep a close eye on our secret armies, who are very respectable and discreet – they have to be, you know, or the Dutch Government would not be at all pleased. They don’t run about with any sub-machine guns.’

  ‘What do you know about this?’

  ‘What I read in the press,’ blithely.

  ‘Where there was no mention of machine-guns – very well, you have your ear to the ground and we are all thoroughly infiltrated, and I have no complaints about that.’

  ‘I know,’ unperturbed, ‘that you asked the French authorities for any facts they might know, since she had lived in France. The request was passed on to us, since we are better placed to cooperate with you if need be.’ Mm, he was not going to say he had received a hint that any facts might be conveniently mislaid by the famous authorities. Instead he burst out laughing.

  ‘You have some facts these authorities don’t possess?’

  ‘I have no reason not to be candid. When she arrived here we did look at her with some curiosity, but we have been convinced for a long time that she had nothing whatever to do with any illegal organization. Her death is as much a surprise to us as it is to you; I can’t say to her since I don’t know, do I?’

  ‘No, I don’t either.’ They both laughed in unison, pleased to be understanding each other.

  ‘You’re trailing your coat a bit, which is a thing I do myself, but I’ll be candid too,’ said Van der Valk. ‘We can take it, I think, that she knew her murderer. Any other supposition is contrary to all common sense. Your offer, I take it, is to pass on anything you know or come to know, and that I in return should do the same. It’s a deal; I need all the help I can get. She was killed by a professional. The gun is an Israeli army model and I am told a very sweet job. So was this a very sweet job. Nobody saw any intruder come or go. There was no disturbance, fight, argument, or rape, and the noise was covered by a gangster television serial, a simple trick, but which shows smooth timing. Her husband knows nothing. We learn that she was a military nurse – Convoyeuse de l’Air of sorts. She married a Dutch soldier in France down there in the training camp – who is also a professional – and came to live in Holland quite a few years ago, with a child that is not his. One might suppose that to be out of tune with her temperament; her husband says she wanted peace and very likely that is true. I think that’s really all I know of her, save that quite likely she was at Dien Bien Phu.’ He threw it out to see whether any bombs went off, but this fellow was well trained: didn’t jump at all.

  ‘Really – you know that? You’re quicker in your mind than many would be.’

  ‘Not really – I have a French wife.’

  ‘I know,’ with a sudden charming smile. ‘I had the pleasure of meeting her yesterday.’ Bomb for bomb.

  ‘Well, well – you’re quicker in your mind than many would be.’ The double laugh was quite spontaneous.

  ‘Let me try to help, Commissaire. I know, I think, anything the préfecture or the police down there are likely to, which will save you some time wasted. Yes, Esther Marx served in Indochina, and was at Hanoi in the spring of fifty-four, and she was a girl who liked the soldiers, liked the life. A woman, perhaps, who had had unhappy episodes in her life further back than that, who had reason to be disgusted with human beings, and who appreciated the simplified kind of ideals she met among soldiers in the old colonial army. It might or might not have importance – I wouldn’t know. Nothing is known for sure except that she had love affairs, and on the bounce from something married your Dutch chap, who had qualities of heart that perhaps she appreciated.’ The white hand waved it aside. ‘To the point – perhaps, Commissaire, you might think you had reason to be wary of political entanglements, and we would like to reassure you. If I may put it even more simply – you might wonder whether investigations were going on parallel to your own.’

  ‘The idea had occurred to me. Of course I’m not very politically minded. I’m probably the only person in Holland that likes both ski-ing and rugby.’ The other laughed outright this time and Van der Valk leaned forward to get rid of cigarette ash. ‘But since you’ve met my wife – I should be very unhappy at walking forward along a path that made her bite her nails. Being pro-French has no importance to me; it’s neither here or there. She’s outside her own country and that much more sensitive on the subject. I myself don’t care a rap if a French security organization – or a Dutch one – makes an inquiry into this death. I’m only interested as the chief of the criminal brigade on this territory.’

  The man shed his former manner. He seemed anxious to be friendly.

  ‘I’m not holding any tricky cards, Mr Van der Valk. There is no inquiry projected, or even envisaged. Esther Marx was not a member of any illegal organization, nor did she have any contact with such. You asked for a check on her past life in France: routine request, of which we get given a copy – as we do of any action of the sort originating outside French territory. The woman was killed in an unusual, formal way that could be described as assassination. You mention Indochina and her service there, and I infer that something has led you to suppose a connection of some sort. Then the machine-gun – unusual because unnecessary.’

  ‘Yes. Good. I start by saying that of course you’re right and that it had the flavour of a political assassination. You tell me that makes no sense and I’m very pleased to hear it. You came closer still in suggesting that this formal, mannered killing is an execution, perhaps, and deliberately intended to appear so. That could start on
e on any number of hypotheses, which however amusing would be a waste of time because we know no facts. My mind worked parallel. What facts are there, and what kind of basis do they give me to start any inquiry? That she’d lived her adult life among soldiers. I made a routine request to the French authorities – I don’t really expect to get anything at all; why should I? Even if she did have a police record – unless she shopped somebody. But it is in France that I should look, it seems to me, because there is one thing bizarre about this woman, and that is her marrying a very ordinary kind of Dutch boy and coming to live in Holland in so plain and unexciting a fashion that it seems deliberate. As for Indochina – the woman worked in a military hospital and collected badges the soldiers gave her. She kept a few – among them badges of units that served at Dien Bien Phu. And the dates are right. I haven’t done any research – my wife who has made a kind of cult of the battle noticed the fact. Perhaps Esther made a cult – for the same sort of reasons. Relatives there, perhaps? She was Jugoslav in origin – there were plenty of Jugoslavs among the Legion units. It seems a poor line of inquiry, but I may tell you – it’s about the only one I have. We’ve no description, hint or thread of knowledge about whoever killed her.’

  The man sighed a little, perhaps out of sympathy. Perhaps he was just feeling sad.

  ‘A coincidence, that. That your wife had relations in Indochina. Don’t look at me like that,’ laughing. ‘Your wife’s name is not written in any of our nasty little black books.’

  ‘It is in some of the Dutch ones, though,’ sourly.

  ‘Yes, I knew that.’

  ‘I rather thought you did,’ dry. ‘It cast a slight shadow here, at one time.’

  ‘On you? Professionally? These Dutch … So you’re a scrap embarrassed at this Marx business, are you?’

  ‘Yes. And the more determined to see it through. For Esther’s sake – and my wife’s.’

  ‘Perhaps you are even thinking of going to France?’ so suavely that Van der Valk knew at once that something was up.

  ‘If my kind superiors will kindly allow me, I rather think I will. You know the old saying – nothing propinks like propinquity. One makes requests through official channels and the answer is a lemon. Go and talk to people, face to face – like us – and one might just barely get somewhere.’

  ‘I think you’re wise,’ unexpectedly. ‘Perhaps I’m talking out of turn, but you’ve been very open with me and I appreciate that. I’d like to help you in any way I could. Don’t get the idea I can open any doors – I don’t know where you intend to knock and I’d be none too sure of finding the keyhole. We aren’t too popular in some quarters. In fact,’ blandly, ‘as you certainly know, the petty jealousies between different subsections of the same administration can be quite staggering. Nor am I exactly a large puissant wheel even in my own little organization. However, I’ll try to ensure that if you knock on the doors of our friends the draught coming through the keyhole won’t be too chilly. If you’ll permit me, I’ll add a tiny word of caution.’

  Van der Valk smiled; he thought he knew what was coming.

  ‘The days in Indochina – and the days that came after, in Algeria – caused a good deal of trauma, sometimes in the most unexpected places. Not only among soldiers. I dare say it won’t surprise you if you run up against a certain reticence – even a good few lies.’ Van der Valk smiled some more.

  ‘I’ve had experience of that already – with my wife.’

  Chapter Eleven

  He spent the rest of the day thinking about it. Arlette was a clue to Esther; perhaps not a very good clue, but as he had told the man, it was the only one he had. Both women had married Dutchmen, and had deliberately renounced a good deal of their past. It could be a painful thing. The significance lay in the difference between them. Arlette had been an innocent girl, with a romantic attachment to the soldiers. Esther was a very different cup of tea, a woman hardened and embittered by experience, who had been a soldier herself.

  He knew about the ‘trauma’ for he had experienced it. He had made the effort to understand – not that difficult, in Holland, where for a long while something of the same mentality had prevailed, among those that had seen Indonesia – there was something about the East that got you. He had never been there, himself, and rather regretted it. Dien Bien Phu was a special case but there was plenty of literature on the subject and it took no great powers to understand the ‘slight reticence’ that the DST man had mentioned with such delicacy.

  The soldiers who were there spent some months in Vietminh prison camps – those that survived the march there. It all made a powerful bond, strengthened by each new layer of experience. They were the defeated, but they had not surrendered. They had been isolated, but they had not lost heart. Betrayed as they thought by Paris, they had stayed faithful. Dysentery-ridden, hardly able to stand, they had supported, even carried wounded and dying comrades over the stumbling unending kilometres to the prison camp. Many died. A sort of mystique grew up, of truth to a lunatic ideal of sacrifice and death. They came back to France, where they found that nobody very much cared what had happened to them, increasing their sense of embittered isolation. When what they regarded as the further betrayal of Algeria was borne in on them, many would regard themselves as freed of any allegiance to governments who sent them to die in a wilderness and then bargained away all that they had died to hold. The secret army mentality was plain to grasp at that point.

  Of course, it would be a mistake to think that the secret army was all formed of the Dien Bien Phu survivors, few of whom took the turning that led to trial and condemnation – or escape and exile. But the whole affair had two conclusions that one could rely upon. Anybody with secret army affinities or sympathies who had belonged to the old Indochina group would get a wide tolerance. And anybody from the same group who got into trouble as a result of lawless attitudes – with the civil, military or police authorities – would meet an indulgent, even blind eye; whether he had robbed a bank or merely fiddled the Sécurité Sociale they would leave the stable door unlocked and know nothing when the gendarmerie came to inquire. They were honest people, who would rarely defend or even condone crime, but they would not denounce or help to hunt down. An immensely nuanced and confused double-think. Van der Valk bit on a pencil with his big, slightly horsy teeth, threw it down, and turned to more mundane things like shoplifting.

  A little before lunch he decided to take the bull by the – had this bull horns? No, not unless his wife was a much misunderstood woman, but the Chief Commissaire of Police for the province of North Holland could make himself disagreeable upon occasion. He decided to telephone first to the gentleman in question.

  ‘Ah, Van der Valk. I’ve been wondering when I’d hear from you. What’s this machine-gun nonsense – Bonnie and Clyde come to town, hey?’ Van der Valk laughed heartily at this wit, delighted that the old sourpuss was in a jovial frame of mind.

  ‘Well, it’s liable to be tricky. It’s certainly something out of her past, and her past is quite something.’

  ‘How are you so sure of this?’

  ‘When she married – that’s this sergeant, Zomerlust; he’s a good man with nothing against him whatever – she made it the one condition that the past should never be spoken of. She had a child, true. She was also a French military nurse. Served in Indochina. Crowd that might have something to do with the secret army. However, I’ve just had DST in to see me, who assure me that such is not the case. But since they come at all, it’s obvious that there’s something. What, exactly, remains to be seen. We’re making no headway. It strikes me that the best way would be to go to France, find out just what this famous past of hers is, and thrash it all out. It also strikes me that you may not be very keen on me doing that.’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ sounding a lot less jovial.

  ‘Well, there was a time when our worthy equivalent of DST had a madcap idea in its tiny pointed skull that my wife was in the secret army.’


  There was a growling noise down the telephone, as though the old lion was keeping itself in trim with a few leg-of-mutton bones kept lying handy on his desk. Presently this noise resolved itself into the words ‘Nonsense, nonsense’.

  ‘I’d far rather be left on the job.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ tetchily. ‘But I didn’t say you could go to France. I don’t like the sound of this at all. Still, Van der Valk, you know better than to try that on with me. You know me – loyalty upwards, loyalty downwards.’

  ‘I felt sure of that,’ very bland.

  ‘Yes – well, I have to think about this. I’ll have to ask The Hague before I can authorize you to leave the country, as you know. I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Just as he was about to go home for lunch the telephone rang, that maddening way it had.

  ‘Oh – Commissaire Van der Valk?’ said a bright shiny girl’s voice.

  ‘Yes, speaking.’

  ‘Oh – I was to tell you – secretariat of the Ministry of Justice, here. The Minister would like to see you. He’s very tied up and he would be glad if you could be here at his office at one-thirty precisely.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I said yes, thank you.’

  ‘Then I can tell his secretary?’

  ‘If you would be so good.’

  ‘And we can count on you? The Minister’s very busy and has an appointment at two.’

  ‘Yes, Miss.’

  ‘Thank you,’ all crisp and efficient. He put his hand on the hook, said ‘Oh go and get stuffed’, lifted the hand, got a click from his switchboard, and said ‘Ring my wife, would you’ in a gloomy tone.

  ‘Arlette? What’s for lunch?’

  ‘Cassoulet.’

  ‘Oh God. Is there goose?’

  ‘Of course there’s no goose. Where d’you think you are, Toulouse?’

  ‘Why are there no geese in Holland? – and don’t come with that one about all the geese being human; we’ve had it before.’