‘What happened to him?’
‘How should I know? He disappeared – as well he might.’
‘I wish I could go on allowing him to disappear,’ with feeling.
‘You think he killed Esther Marx?’
‘I don’t know. I have to go on turning stones over, finding things I would much prefer not to find. Raking up old enmities, bitterness – and injustice. There’s not much doubt in my mind. But there’s never certainty in police work. When there is, it’s negative. If I know that her husband did not kill her it still does not allow me to say her lover did. I have to find the man and I think it probable that you can help me.’
Voisin flexed the fingers of his hand as though to get stiffness out of his system.
‘I am accustomed to unenviable situations,’ he agreed. ‘But I am reluctant to relaunch a hunt against a man who has been hounded once.’
‘He’s a civilian now, mon colonel. He will have a right to his mitigating circumstances.’
‘Vision,’ said Voisin abruptly. ‘We have so little.’ He wrote on a scrap of paper and handed it to Van der Valk. ‘You started with a general – I send you back to a general. A paratroop general.’ The scrap of paper had a name and an address in the Rue Saint-Dominique in Paris. Well, anyway it was a step in the direction of home, he thought. It might well have been Pau …
As he crunched heavily down the last gritty stairs, the concierge stood beaming with his warmed dried raincoat.
‘Good appetite.’
‘Thanks. The same to you.’
And why not? Why not some warm and welcoming brasserie where he could eat solid Auvergnat food full of cabbage and sausage? Shoulders sagging he plodded back towards the centre of the town through uneven antique streets that turned and wound as darkly as his thoughts.
A voice behind him said, ‘How about some lunch, Commissaire?’ He turned around, furious. Not poxing DST again!
‘You know what Raymond Chandler said?’
That had him flummoxed!
‘Who?’
‘When you don’t know what to do next have a man come in the door with a gun in his hand. And I wish one would … following me about like that. Shoot you my bloody self for two pins,’ bellowed Van der Valk.
‘Oh Commissaire? Shoot a man who’s just invited you to lunch?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very well then, I’ll pay for the lunch.’ He put his hand in his pocket, produced a handful of change, and started clowning. ‘One, two, three, oops, that’s a Swiss franc, what’s he doing here, four, four fifty, four seventy, wait a bit …’ It was like punching somebody under water – or in a dream, where you hit out furiously but your fist stops humiliatingly, just short of its target … ‘Oh very well, very well. Come on and be tricky. Do you at least know a good place or do you have to buy a guidebook?’
He was a brown man, with a face like pale wood, eyes as brown and shiny as an Auvergne chestnut, a brown raincoat and hat, and well-polished but sadly splashed brown leather boots.
‘A lot of footwork,’ said Van der Valk with his eye on these boots.
‘Yes,’ smiling. He had sunburst wrinkles at the corners of simian eyes, that went right back to his ears. The face was studded with tiny scars as though he had had smallpox, and there was a whitish look of surgical repair about the chin.
‘Indochina?’
‘Algeria,’ grinning as though it had been immensely funny. ‘Grenade fragments.’
‘Lucky to have your eyes.’
‘Very very lucky. Some hot wine, don’t you think?’
‘Now I know,’ said Van der Valk hanging his coat up, ‘why a kind friend warned me I was heading for a horrible great merdier. Why did I ever leave St Louis?’
‘You weren’t to know,’ said the brown man kindly, ‘that all officials would remember the name of Esther Marx and curse. But don’t be mad at us – we didn’t plan to make life a misery for you. Nor do we now. What you were told in Holland holds good here – you are helping us and we will help you. We wondered – I wondered – what Monsieur Marie could have been telling you. But he had the very good idea of ringing me up and asking what I knew about all this. He always wants to know a little more, you know – it’s knowing a little more that makes him so successful.’
‘I don’t see much sign of either of us helping the other much,’ said Van der Valk with a very lumpish Dutch irony.
‘You do, you know. The general wouldn’t have told us anything. Kept in the family, you might say. But he can’t stop you. I was astonished – and full of admiration – when you went up against him like that.’
‘Handy for you.’
‘I give you my word – I’d never even heard of Laforêt. It is perfectly true that our people in Holland were as puzzled as you were. It meant nothing to me at all. Then I check up in Paris just in case, and lo, we have a file on him. File with nothing in it. Dead.’ The neat mouth mimicked someone blowing dust off a file, and dust was brushed fastidiously off the agile brown fingers. He took a swig of hot wine.
‘What the hell do you want a file for?’ asked Van der Valk, taking a swig at his.
‘I completely agree but it’s automatic, you know. Officer dismissed with ignominy – may harbour wicked thoughts. Nobody ever followed it up – we knew nothing whatever about Laforêt, in Paris or anywhere else.’
Van der Valk’s grumbling, gloomy rage boiled over stickily, like porridge.
‘Five minutes ago I was telling myself that if I’d been five years younger I’d be taking a swing at you. Now you’d better get out of my sight, or call your judo expert – he can’t be far away.’ He felt like a bear being teased by little yapping dogs.
‘I see that you subscribe to the legends about us,’ said the brown man. ‘Get this into your thick Dutch skull – we have our share of crass stupidity. By yourself, not knowing a damn thing, you have worked this out. With all our resources of judo experts, with bits of information sticking out all over the place, we failed to make the connection. The old story – the right hand not knowing about the left. Do I have to map it out? Your story interested them in Holland and they thought there was something there for us. They sent a signal asking us here to look it up. The name Esther Marx rang a vague bell. By pure coincidence old Marie gave me a ring, thinking of nothing but securing his own rear. Since then I’ve been panting along breathless, trying to catch up with you. When I got here it occurred to me that we’d better try to tune our violins to the same pitch.’
‘The file on Laforêt.’
‘I didn’t know it existed an hour ago. Tidy little minds in Paris would like to see it closed and concluded that you’d make an excellent last entry. We don’t know where he is or even that he’s really alive. All I succeeded in finding out is that there was a charge of violence – he was wounded in a struggle with Esther Marx but it was his gun. The charge wasn’t pushed at the time because he’d been hammered and they were rid of him.’
‘Charge of violence my arse,’ said Van der Valk bleakly. ‘He was framed.’
The brown man put down the drink he was sipping.
‘The funny thing is that there’s a note on the file suggesting just that, but it couldn’t be proved. In fact you’d find it quite hard at this stage to prove Laforêt ever existed.’ He looked at Van der Valk and gave a little laugh. ‘You – you’ve really got the military eating out of your hand.’
‘Now tell me,’ said Van der Valk in a grating voice like a nineteen thirties gangster movie. ‘What is your real interest in this affair?’
‘Yes.’ The man smoked a moment in silence, muttered ‘No very bad thing, telling the truth every six months’, smoked a moment longer and decided to stop playing secret service.
‘We’re a standing joke here, like the telephone system. The seventeen different kinds of parallel police, and the little rivalries – each one determined to keep the others from knowing anything. Sacred tradition that the Sûreté Nationale came under Interior, and the PJ under the
Prefect, and so on. All been changed now.’
‘Since the toss-potting that went on over Ben Barka.’
‘Just so – the right word. Didn’t look good, did it? Two policemen getting bent – if ever I felt sorry it’s for those two poor bastards – the chief gossip-centre at Orly blown sky high, did the principal witness fall or was he pushed? – talk about pigsticking … Well, it has small importance now, but ten years ago and more, at the time of Algeria, there was not an awful lot of love lost between these silly little intelligence organizations. Specifically, not exactly a warm friendship between DST and some army units. Paratroop formations, mostly – there was a fairly well-known instance where a para unit raided an office in Algiers and quietly swiped all the DST files as a small aid in organizing their own intelligence.’
‘I see,’ said Van der Valk.
‘Our interest in Laforêt dates from then. At that time, I emphasize, the paratroop mafia cast a long shadow. Now all this means very little. I think, probably, that they would never have allowed him to survive if we hadn’t been barking at their heels. In a sense, you see, what has now happened is our fault.’
‘Do you know Laforêt’s whereabouts?’
‘No. But I dare say we can find out. What d’you want to eat – duck?’
‘Something with chestnuts in.’
‘Seriously,’ said the brown man with his mouth full of chestnuts, ‘they had to answer your questions. You’re an officer of the PJ on a job, and they were profoundly grateful – so are we, though I’m not saying so – that you didn’t launch a big official tra-la, asking the magistrate here for an interrogatory commission, sending the dossier back for supplement of information, the whole works.’
Yes, Van der Valk was thinking, maybe those civil servants back in The Hague are not quite as stupid as we thought them.
‘Who did you see back there – old Voisin? I thought as much. I’m not quite barefaced enough to ask what you got out of him, and unlike that old twister Marie he’s not going to ring up and tell me! But I’d be interested to know how you’re going to go about this.’
‘Since there’s not a hope of my getting across Paris without a few of your squalid informers noticing,’ said Van der Valk pleasantly, ‘I got the address of a brigadier-general in the Rue Saint-Dominique.’
‘Really?’
‘That surprise you?’
‘It does indeed. That’s not just an underdone steak you have there on your plate – that’s a chop off a live lion.’
‘I have to look up the goddam train times.’
‘No need. Permit me to smooth your path.’
‘Huh?’
‘I can get you on a military plane, and you don’t have to make any parachute jumps at the end either. You can be in central Paris in two hours – have some coffee.’
Chapter Sixteen
Arlette was waiting anxiously for some news. She was always nervous when the man was away. One controlled it, naturally. What would be the point of a police wife who came out with remarks like ‘Make sure you have regular meals and don’t drink too much’? Even the time he was carried in with half his middle missing from a bare hillside near St Jean de Luz, after being nearly blown in two by a big-game rifle, had not been the shock to her she would have expected; she had been waiting so long for something of the sort that she was more relieved than anything! As a young nervous wife, sitting alone in a creaky house after nightfall and starting at every sound, she had had to be merciless with herself to conquer panic. Now that she was an old bag she allowed herself, occasionally, a bit of fuss. But this was altogether different.
It was not just being ‘involved’ – wasn’t one always, in varying degree? One could respect rules long laid down, like never asking questions, and never allowing work to be discussed at home, but after twenty years of marriage one was telepathic, and instantly recognized a man frightened, bewildered, exhausted or frustrated. But this time, she felt, she was the origin of the whole mess. She had brought it upon him and herself with her silly hysteria. Just because she had been an embarrassment to him back in 1957 …
She had had no plan, no system. Everything had swarmed all over her, so that she had had to ward off the blows without time to organize a counter-attack. ‘Boucher les trous’, as she called it. Since the moment when she had ‘known’ instinctively that Esther had been at Dien Bien Phu, she had felt an uneasy identification, as though she was herself Esther … no, she couldn’t sort it out, she was confused and darkened, she had no equilibrium, no sense. Her thoughts were like herself, fiddling stupidly about and not getting anything done properly.
‘This won’t be in the least funny,’ the man had said, standing around at Schiphol, his professional eye gliding gloomily over the senseless activities and the atmosphere of anxiety for which she hated airports, ‘just a mess.’
She had wanted to be a support and an encouragement, and had of course only succeeded in saying something cretinous.
‘But she had a dramatic past. It will be most absorbing to turn it up leaf by leaf.’
‘My poor friend, you’ve been reading detective stories again. It will be dull and flat like a restaurant on New Year’s Day. Ice buckets full of lukewarm water, with dead flowers and disintegrated cigarette-ends floating. Broken paper streamers knee deep, and a frightful stink.’
‘Oh you’re seeing things too black, surely.’
‘No, no. Sordid pathetic people, frightened and anxious, repeating themselves.’ She had crept home on her belly, feeling suicidal!
His telephone calls had not helped. A voice sounding drunken and slightly crazy had spoken to her from Marseilles, with Jean-Michel’s voice being funny – so he thought – in the background, and Claudine unusually raucous and screeching, so that her teeth had been on edge throughout. Not just that they were all bibulous, but they had all sounded so silly. He had done something very stupid, or very clever – or both together – she hadn’t understood what or why. She couldn’t understand anything at all. And now he had rung up from Paris, terribly depressed, and had been in Clermont-Ferrand of all places, and it all seemed to be going from bad to worse from what she could make out …
Arlette sat in the still house alone, for Ruth, the only other person there, was in bed asleep, upstairs, terribly far away. The weather had gone foggy as a prelude to becoming warmer, and the whole of life outside seemed dulled and muted. Food had no savour. Even music had not helped. Whenever Arlette felt miserable she put on Fidelio – it never failed. Never did she miss feeling renewed and stiffened after the prisoners had sung, never fail to enjoy the sinister swagger of Pizarro’s march, never stop her neck prickling and her eyes stinging as the voices join one after another in ‘Mir ist so wunderbar’ – and tonight she had been limp as a corpse throughout.
She felt besieged. She knew now, she felt, the sensations of a soldier in a little muddy hole on one of the pitons of Dien Bien Phu – and all around the ring of iron hills swarming with unseen silent Vietminh soldiers waiting patiently – for the kill. A thought struck her silent body and noisy mind. Esther, in that ramshackle, jerrybuilt municipal block – had she too not been besieged? Surrounded by a Dutch vietminh! Was that too fantastic? She had not stayed limp, a stale cucumber waiting to be thrown in the dustbin; she had defended herself, inch by inch, bitterly, as the paratroopers had. She had not given up. But she had lost slowly, her hope, her child, her life, in the end …
Knowing nothing, able to do nothing. ‘What the hell are they playing at, in Hanoi?’ had snarled the embittered and exasperated soldiers, crouched in the mud to watch the sky for the help that did not come.
Arlette had no idea of it – her man would have been amused, wryly – but she too was conducting a little investigation, trying to understand Esther Marx, trying to understand that for the first time she was not just touched by a criminal affair, not just tangentially or peripherally involved, but entangled to the neck at the very source. Through Ruth, she was trying to penetrate the darkness muc
h, had she known it, as her man was through the jungle of passions and loyalties of which Monsieur Marie and Colonel Voisin had been distant, uncomprehending spectators. Arlette did not realize this. On the surface, she was trying to build a home, a warmth, a security and a love for this child. Within, she felt unhappily, she was herself clutching desperately at the child for relief from pain and anxiety. Much the same dichotomy, had she known it, was affecting Van der Valk: on one side a typically dull and wearisome police inquiry, further muddied and distorted by the ten-year-old petty jealousies between DST and the army! – while on the other lay the genuine tragedy of two human beings who had loved each other.
Arlette had been making efforts to use her sense and her experience in handling Ruth. Affection, confidence, reliance – twenty psychological clichés went trotting through her head. Luckily, the child was easy. They were getting on quite well together, in the three days that ‘Dad’ (as the boys used to call him sardonically) had been away.
‘Vous êtes gentille, vous savez.’
‘Tu sais, tu peux me tutoyer.’
Arlette and Ruth were discovering one another. Both had much the same trouble: slight embarrassment. The woman was unaccustomed to girls of this age. The child had had little contact with women, knowing only her abrupt uncertain mother and the over-bright, over-assured voices of elementary-school teachers.
They were both in turn brusque and effusive, elaborately calm and self-consciously undemonstrative, hardly able as yet to show spontaneous affection one for the other. They both had to play detective, taking hours to discover the obvious.
Arlette had to learn what she could without forcing the child’s confidence: she was succeeding fairly well, she thought with some vanity. Ruth – on the lowest, purely physical level of communication – was accustomed to a silent, morose existence, and chattered like a jackdaw, and it was surely good, Arlette told herself, to allow this. Especially about her mother, for that way the pain and shock would be dulled most quickly. Nothing could be worse than Esther promoted into a taboo. That Arlette herself was passionately interested in all that concerned Esther was beside the point. Nor was Ruth old enough to have lost spontaneity; she chattered all day, however disjointedly and inconsequently, and she seemed to have confidence, for there seemed to be no areas at the frontiers of which she closed up. Must be good, Arlette reassured herself again: the silent bottled-up ones who creep off by themselves are the most difficult to reach.
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