Lake Isle

by Nicolas Freeling

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  ONE

  Henri Castang, an officer of police in the criminal brigade of a large city in the provinces, loitered through a Paris street, his hands in his pockets. He was a smallish, closely-knit man and did not slouch: he strolled. He was on his way towards work, a bit before time.

  Going down a steepish hill, he had Paris at his feet. He had been a boy here, a student here, and since then ten years away from here had given him objectivity. An image came into his mind.

  It is like a stained-glass window, he thought. An old one, medieval even; much broken and patched, and suffering like most old things from a lot of restoring in bad taste. Filthy too, etched and scored by the acids of pollution, and crusted by plain dirt, and perhaps the more brilliant for that.

  He had nothing else to think about and his image pleased him. He did not want to think of what lay ahead. The long grey boulevards of Paris are lead, the lead in the window, but between these monotonous streets are irregular splinters of brilliant glass, high in colour. Seen on a sunny morning at the beginning of autumn – it was mid-September – the grimy streets had the patina of an old coin on which the ugliest, lumpiest profile has become dignified, ennobled.

  Nobody could become sentimental about the Porte Saint Denis, least of all Castang. An uninteresting piece of meaningless masonry, dividing a slummy street from a slummy faubourg, at the crossing of a vulgar noisy boulevard. Still, it was an ancient highroad, full of history. Full too of horse-butchers, whores, and rotting greengrocery, and he liked it.

  He went on down the hill. He was in the Rue d’Aboukir. No lead here; it is one of the most luminous splinters in the huge brilliant rose window.

  It is a steep, narrow street where the traffic is always jammed. A double row of tawdry shop-fronts full of cheap textiles. Tourists do not come here, where the wholesale rag trade is crammed in greasy proximity. Darting in and out of every doorway are meagre painted shopgirls, young men too well dressed. In the windows are the sewing-machine girls, nervous and anaemic. On the pavements the elderly businessmen with diamonds and suits beautifully cut talk in mime, and the tough middle-aged businesswomen in complicated bras are giving their bra-less young ladies fierce brief lessons in sales strategy – or the sack.

  In the street is Fagin, theatrical against the backdrop of gaudy fairground booths, like the coachmen in Petrushka, shaking a long-nailed finger at the dirty boy pushing the handcart. And the mighty army too of the old women of Paris with their bandaged poor legs and old tennis shoes slit to ease bunions, doing everything imaginable that is eccentric and dignified, humble and proud.

  Castang was looking at it all, but with only one eye. The other was professionally examining the Levantine boltholes of the Rue d’Alexandrie and the Place de Caire. Somewhere along here a man was in hiding, a man whom Castang had come to Paris to arrest. A dangerous man, who carried a gun. Castang was on his way to meet someone who had found out the hiding-place. The disposition of traffic might come to have importance.

  He pattered on, sweating slightly in warm humid air, his jacket buttoned because of his gun in a belt holster. Shoulder holsters sound fancier, but are mortally slow.

  The Rue d’Aboukir ends abruptly. Contrasting-coloured glass: the Place des Victoires, a quiet, shabby little square with a discoloured periwigged Louis on a horse. Here policemen hold discreet rendezvous with pigeons; a colleague was waiting for him, a bony man with dust-coloured hair, eating small bits of bread with a sad head held on one side, the pigeons sneering at him. The two men shook hands limply. The Paris cop left his car where it was: in the Rue d’Aboukir a car is no use to anybody. Behind them two more plain-clothes cops strolled up the hill, all marble unconcern. When their superiors turned into a courtyard stuffed with rags they posted themselves and waited quietly. Nobody appeared to be expecting them, but the place was oddly free of people.

  The two officers had not met before this morning, but understood each other: a simple sign language guided them. They crossed the court, entered a passage, found themselves with a choice of doors. The first was an office, empty but for dust and paper, the second a dank lavatory. The third, when gently tried, seemed locked. There was a brief mimed debate. There are various ways of dealing with locked doors but the shortest was the best. They examined the door frame, nodded, stepped back, lifted each a leg, and hit the wooden traverse together hard. The door broke, but gave unwillingly: it was barricaded with bales of rags. It delayed them, and the delay meant a fusillade. They couldn’t help that, but were glad that baled rags will stop bullets.

  Three pistols together made a tremendous noise. The Paris cop, flat on his chest, fired five times without stopping, with no particular idea of hitting anything but hoping to intimidate, to make the man duck, flinch, and give Castang behind a bale time to get over it. He was elastically built and had been a fairish performer on parallel bars: he went over feet first and found himself very close to a man with a gun, close enough to punch him in the stomach with his pistol barrel instead of shooting him. While they were both on the floor the dusty man, now dustier than ever, jumped the bale and hit the gunman under the nose with the heel of his hand. They all got up sneezing, the gunman further handicapped by tears, a smear of blood and handcuffs. Ten shots had been fired and only the rags had been hit. Castang picked up two pistols and gave the man a paper handkerchief.

  A kind of nest had been made, furnished and fortified by bales. There were some empty coffee cups and beer bottles, some gnawed sausage and several newspapers. For some days it had been home.

  Behind his barricades this man had built illusions of peace. He had been left quiet and had come to believe in safety. He could daydream of green fields and softly flowing water. He could gather strength, concentrate force, hope, plan. To be sure there was very little difference from a cell in the Santé prison. But Castang, sharpened by having just risked his life, saw beyond the rags.

  One could dream about peace anywhere. What difference was there that counted between this dusty storeroom and a country cottage, or, come to that, a suburban living-room with a piano? Or a flat with a picture window, looking down onto Paris-by-night, high in a tower? It was the peace which counted. Home can be the framework of one’s mattress.

  In the yard, the two cops were saying ‘Move’ to a few morbid onlookers attracted by gunfire. In the building, nobody had budged, which was as planned. They took the handcuffed man by the elbows, neither gently nor roughly, and hurried him down to the car in the square. People looked with mild interest. A change from waiting for the lights to go green at the top, but it was just another bundle of rags, more or less. There were circles under Castang’s arms, from fear as much as humidity. He hitched his shirt off a sticky back, but the others were in the same state.

  TWO

  At Police Headquarters there was a long boring wait. Most police work is a problem of disposal. Arresting somebody takes a second; the paperwork following takes hours. Castang thought, now, about nothing at all.

  Of everyone present the gunman was the least bored. He was a professional: he had been here before and knew all about it. He sat on a wooden chair and watched the coming and going, and fussing with papers, with no curiosity but with a kind of interest. It was a distraction: from now on he would
have a lot of time on his hands, and this was as good a way of passing it as any that would be proposed. One plans little recreations in advance, rationing them to fill the hours getting something to eat or to drink, going to the lavatory under escort and cadging a cigarette on the way. Nobody worried him: he might have been on a little island surrounded by peace, with tiny waves lapping round the wooden chair.

  Paris was in no hurry. This was a provincial affair, and Paris had disposal problems enough of its own. Nobody bothered about Castang’s time, for he was only a provincial police officer. Nobody was even interested in the boring crimes – a matter of thirty-five robberies committed ‘with offensive weapons’. All this had to be written down in lifeless formulae. Eventually, this man would be tried down where he, and Castang, came from. Paris was only acting on an interrogatory commission, issued by a provincial magistrate. In a few weeks – there was no hurry – a couple of yawning gendarmes would ferry him down like a parcel in a railway compartment.

  Just as Castang and his gunman were both falling into a coma, from sitting on wooden chairs staring at their toes, a judge of instruction was found who unaccountably was not in a coma; who had even read the interrogatory commission, which nobody else had. Who was impatient with disposal problems, and even sensitive about a waste of public funds. Castang was going home, wasn’t he? And this man would go too, to be judged? What did a robbery more or less in Paris matter? The judge signed a form turning him over to a different jurisdiction, and Castang had to sign several more. Accepting responsibility for a body, for its possessions, for a shopping-bag with a gun and a few other legal exhibits. Goodbye shower, not to speak of a possible pleasant meal. Police car, grim little railway-police waiting-room, snack-bar sandwich. And a few hours to spend in a train being sorry for himself.

  He had to keep awake too. His gunman was overcome by apathy, and they were handcuffed together, but even if prudence was maintained he needed to stay alert.

  The gunman had some money, luckily. Professional criminals take care to be provided with money when facing a longish stretch in the jug. Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof, and this is the cops’ motto too. The gunman was agreeable to Castang making a small investment for him, in cigarettes, chewing gum and comics. For himself he bought a crossword-puzzle book. All he really wanted was peace, but you couldn’t buy that at the bookstall.

  He had time in front of him, to think. Of something professional, and not the thirty-five armed robberies, which were boring as hell. To pass a few hours in a train, without losing sight of his Siamese twin, who lacked imagination, but mustn’t be allowed to get ideas contrary to the regulations of the railway company.

  THREE

  The train stood still in a station. Doors finished slamming and the sound of feet hurrying died: there was the familiar complete silence of a train about to start. Softly, another train alongside pulled away, giving one the disconcerting feeling of travelling backwards.

  How had the old woman got in to see him? He had no clear idea; attempts had been made to get rid of her: he had made a few himself. Suggestions that she went to see a lawyer, or took the advice of the bank manager or the pastor, or practically anybody, had been turned firmly down. A woman of strong character. As she said herself, she had taken a long time making up her mind but once it was made up she wasn’t going to be deflected from her purpose.

  He had such a feeling of going backwards that he had to fix his eye on a lamp standard.

  His gunman had fallen asleep, boneless and comfortable in the corner. Best thing he could do. Barricaded by Castang’s legs; and the door was locked. But he couldn’t go to sleep himself.

  How, or why, she had made up her mind that the police could be of use to her he had not determined. No crime had been committed. Nor, she said, did she have any knowledge of a crime about to be committed, or planned, or even envisaged. She had funny feelings, and the obstinate notion that the police could be of help, if not of use.

  She’d gone to the local commissaire of police, in her local small town. A man of experience, he’d been firm with her. Polite, yes. He didn’t laugh, or suggest she consult a psychiatrist. But sorry, Madame; he just could not see any conceivable way he could be concerned. He would like to be of service, but with respect and apologies, his time was much taken up.

  Why hadn’t Castang said this too? So he had, several times. It hadn’t stuck. Admitted, he wasn’t doing much at that moment, so he had listened. And in the end, in spite of himself, he had become interested. It wasn’t just eccentricity. What was it that had brought an old woman an hour and more in the local train, from a little town called Soulay out in a cul de sac of the province, where Castang had never even been? All the way to the city and trotting through streets to the ‘Cité Administrative’ to search out the Regional Service of Police Judiciaire, the group of small specialised brigades existing to combat gangsterism or the narcotics traffic. Who wouldn’t as a rule be in the least interested in the imaginary terrors of old ladies leading a solitary existence. He asked her. What good, she asked, were cops who would be no more excited than they would by a stolen bicycle?

  How, in heaven’s name, had she got in to see Richard? The Commissaire, head of the local PJ, didn’t as a rule get his time taken up by old biddies. He was protected by filters. Sometimes, though, the very efficiency of these filters created a backlash. Richard could become irritated at what he called ‘isolation by over-zealous subordinates’, and instead of staying deskbound cruised about, and listened to unlikely people. Naughtier was his habit of listening for a few sentences and then deciding that an inspector could listen to the rest.

  This was one reason why he could not dismiss her out of hand. She had succeeded in catching Richard’s eye. Another reason was that she was no ‘old biddy’. A lady!

  Not a lady in the sense of ‘family’, perhaps, and certainly not placed in a position by a couple of generations of prosperous bourgeois commerce. A character in her own right, a woman of education, a person with manners and elegance. He was further impressed to learn that she was a poet. A Lady Poetess. He hadn’t known there were any. The name of Sabine Arthur hadn’t meant anything to him.

  He was relieved to find later that it meant nothing to Richard either. Typically, Richard at once rung up somebody who would know, and did. He had peculiar friends, who knew everything. Irritating the way Richard always wanted to know everything. Still, he was a divisional commissaire. Castang was a ‘Principal Officer’, a nobody.

  Ho, yes, the friend – some pedantic professor, no doubt – knew all about Sabine. Good poet. Not well known, but commanding respect. Individual writer, didn’t waste words. Difficult. Lucid though, and had written some memorable lines. She dated from a while back: the professor thought she must be getting on in years. Hadn’t published anything in a stretch. Not better-known because, you know, prickly. Not a cosy sort of writer.

  Castang hadn’t found her really cosy either.

  ‘Dotty?’ asked Richard. ‘Fairies at the bottom of the garden? Malign influence, just outside the bathroom door?’

  ‘No, no,’ replied the professor. ‘Feet firmly on the ground.’

  ‘I didn’t see anything dotty,’ said Castang honestly. ‘Uncomfortable, yes.’ He knew the professor was not talking nonsense because he himself had been oddly reminded of a picture Vera liked, by Delacroix, quite jaunty and circussy at first. A horse, in a gay blue colour, prancing. There was a tiger riding on its back, looking in some danger of falling off. It was only after looking twice that you saw a sanguinary death, not drawn but in the picture, so that the circus became, abruptly, disconcerting. He thought that Sabine was to be taken seriously.

  Richard, who wore glasses for reading, suddenly put them on.

  ‘I was struck by her myself,’ he said.

  She sat very straight, upright as an elderly dancer. A trim and wiry figure still muscular and vital: the lined grey face was firm, the look direct. Behind spectacles the grey eyes were bright and candi
d. The mouth was thinned and puckered by age but even now wide and generous. There was nothing weak or foolish.

  He had been himself sufficiently struck to tell Vera, that evening. She knew all about tigers and wild horses, and things that weren’t quite in the picture.

  ‘No, you aren’t talking nonsense,’ she said – a strong-minded and sometimes acid woman. ‘As long as you say what you see.’

  But even while looking at Sabine he had tried to behave in a chill professional way. The thin figure, spare but tough in its navy blue jumper and serge trousers, was compelling. But what is written down can be looked at afterwards by another man, seen through Richard’s eyes.

  Name Sabine Arthur, age seventy-three. In excellent health, thank God, she added offhand. Was never ill. Never had been. Relict of Vincent Lipschitz, deceased. Profession – none. Housewife, if he liked. Forget about the poetry.

  Lived on a small pension, and a small income from rents. Mr Lipschitz had been a municipal employee, which was to say curator of the local museum. The town was historic: there were Roman, Gallic, and other remnants. Much of this was of interest, and Mr Lipschitz had been an authority on the architecture, history, ethnography of this corner of the province.

  Castang said he was sorry; he had never been in Soulay. Hadn’t it been fortified by Vauban in the seventeenth century? There were walls, weren’t there, and a citadel?

  Yes it was, and there were, and all preserved, and a historic monument, and Mr Lipschitz had been justly proud of his work in averting destruction, or speculative building. The museum was in the citadel. Soulay was still a smallish town, of fifteen to twenty thousand souls, but had spilt beyond the ramparts. Had grown a lot in recent years.

  She lived herself in a village, a few kilometres outside. Even there a lot of new houses had been built.

  Very good, Madame. Now, at least, he had some idea. But why now, exactly, had she come to them? What was it she hoped for?