Not of course the Petty Functionary. He is a bastard anywhere, intoxicated by his petty authority. He is the Postmaster from Przemysl, bawling out Turkish immigrants for daring to spell their names in Turkish. Inventing new sorts of rubber stamps. Atrophied both by his arrogance and his servility, he is scarcely alive at all.
But there are superior functionaries too. They are sometimes alive.
Castang had spent much of his life in these rabbit warrens, and tapped briskly down corridors.
Equipment; subdivision Environment. Parks and Open Spaces. Waters and Forests. A Departmental Director for Sanitary and Social Action; he was getting warm. National Agency for Amelioration of Housing; chilly again. He turned a corner.
Ah. Building Permits. Commercial, Industrial. Public Works. Last, Persons. He was a Person. Members of the Public Apply Next Door, but he knocked smartly and entered. A spruce elderly man looked up from a crowded desk.
‘You know,’ mildly, ‘this is a private office. It’s even written there, in large letters.’
‘Police,’ said Castang, producing a card. ‘I wanted it to be discreet.’
‘Well. Police Judiciaire I see. Monsieur Castang. Well. My name is Delalande. Sit down. No, that’s a bad chair; try this. I don’t smoke, but please do. So: a breath of excitement. I am agog.’ He didn’t look in the least agog, but he never would.
The door to the communicating office opened and a fat man came in with papers, importance, a draught.
‘I think you see that I have a visitor,’ said Delalande. This mildness was more deadly than shouting: the fat person withdrew.
‘In what way can I serve you?’ Professional urbanity, and perhaps, too, a desire to be of service.
‘Do you have a young man called Lipschitz working in your service?’
‘Indeed I do. Today he is on a leave of absence. He lost his mother under tragic circumstances. Known as leave upon Family Affairs. I dare say that you know all about this.’
‘That’s right. I’m enquiring into this death, as you guess or already know. The family affairs; they’re a bit complicated. So it occurred to me to come and see you, for a character reference, in a sense. No, better, a different viewpoint. We tend to see things from too narrow an angle.’
‘It could hardly be narrower than mine,’ mildly. ‘I know nothing of his family affairs.’
‘Piercing spotlights from all angles,’ suggested Castang. ‘Even upon the front shown in working hours.’
‘I see. You might think of circulating a little memo, to point out the beauty of piercing spotlights. A means, for instance, of promoting broadened vision within the framework of interdepartmental intercourse. I’m thinking of the Sewerage people. Now they stand somewhat in need of broadened vision. However to your purpose: Monsieur Lipschitz: yes… He does me good, I dare say. He’s an intelligent young man. He provides, aha, an astringent element. Gingers me up, you know. Most valuable… On the other hand, it could perhaps be said of him that his horizons too stood in need of a little broadening.’
‘You’re thinking perhaps of getting him transferred to the Sewerage?’
‘Yes, they could do with an astringent element: there’s much to be said for that. However, as Promoter of the Faith I am bound to wage a just war.’
‘But a Holy War.’
‘I must remain scrupulous,’ said Monsieur Delalande, who had evidently a taste for mild civil-service jokes. ‘An act such as you describe would be contrary to the Geneva Convention. Much like poison gas. Or perhaps explosive bullets.’
‘An ultimate weapon.’
‘Not a bad description; he is rather a violent young man. Suffers from excess thyroid, to judge by his eyes. Says astonishing things. He told me the other day that honesty was a ridiculous concept. He’s all the plagues of Egypt – minus one if we admit the Sewerage. Well,’ dropping into his normal voice, ‘suppose we don’t dramatise. He’d be quite interesting to a pathologist. He can turn a polished phrase; produces indeed the most ingenious sophisms. Witness the example I gave you: asked to explain himself, he said that honesty being contrary to all human nature he found it a dishonest concept. He has an extreme fear of deprivation, which leads to naked covetousness. A perfect Attila of anarchy. And no notion of property at all: there isn’t a paperclip safe anywhere along the corridor. The entire office is plundered, and lives terrorised beneath his heel.’
‘Bar yourself.’
‘I have my methods,’ agreed Monsieur Delalande, with the French attachment to the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
‘Do you feel sorry for him?’
‘It’s astonishingly difficult to feel sorry for him,’ ruefully. ‘Very immature, of course. Is it a psychopathic element? I hesitate to use other jargons than my own. An accomplished actor.’
‘That and the feeling of deprivation – you’ve quoted two classic symptoms.’
‘True. And the skill at self-justification.’
‘Would he commit a crime?’
‘No, no,’ smiling faintly, ‘you musn’t ask me that. I have no knowledge of anything beyond misdemeanour. But he’s not a good person. He can see, you understand, no need to be. He’s in the right, totally, at all times. Nothing will convince him of the contrary. An anarchist.’
‘He sounds, in official language, a sore trial.’
‘Family affairs,’ remarked Delalande elliptically. ‘Birthdays and boyfriends one leaves to the typists, in general, but I have gathered that he had a bad start. An orphan. And the elements, the metals and things in his composition: they’re at war with each other. If the metaphor is not too lurid for you he’s highly radioactive: he glows in the dark.’
Castang was liking his new witness.
‘One would wish to be sorry for him, very much. Plainly he’s very unhappy. Equally, he’ll never get out of the…’
‘Shit.’
‘Quite. You see why the Sewerage couldn’t cope. Too much of their own.’
‘Can I seize on a few of the points you’ve made?’
‘By all means.’
‘The naked covetousness, honesty a ridiculous concept, anarchy, no notion of property – he doesn’t exactly sound cut out for public service.’
‘Just so. And of course I see where you are tending. I take precautions, naturally. I should in any case. No public service is ever altogether free of abuses and corruption. A fact one must always bear in mind when dealing with it.’
‘As witness,’ said Castang, ‘the police.’
‘The point is well taken. This particular service is vulnerable, building permits being a sought-after commodity. Let’s say that I see his claws are kept cut. Naturally, any abuse would see the end of him at once. It would be a pity really. His abilities are great, whereas one is never short of competent mediocrities. He knows, of course, that I wouldn’t give threepence for his future here. I don’t want to prejudice another future, elsewhere. I’ve been hoping that he would anticipate me. I’d be rid of a scourge. What can I tell you? – it will come, one way or the other, shortly; within weeks. This bereavement may help me avoid the obligation by making it unnecessary: there was a murmur about coming into some money.’
‘In confidence,’ said Castang, ‘can you tell me whether you have in fact had any small trouble?’
‘Not yet…’
‘Has there been any approach to your office for a permit to build on the Lipschitz property – from any quarter?’
‘Yes, there was, but eight or nine months ago. A house agent asking whether, theoretically, permission would be forthcoming.’
‘Monsieur Thonon?’
‘That’s correct. Nothing unreasonable – an informal approach. I told him naturally that if a technical dossier was presented with the usual architectural plans it would be considered in the normal way. There is no objection a priori, from the urbanisation angle.’
‘He was just checking up in a prudent way?’
‘No doubt, with a view to making an offer presumably. If you’re won
dering whether there was or is any collusion with our young man – set that thought at rest.’
‘And – if you’ll forgive me – no effort at putting pressure on yourself?’
‘Such efforts are frequent,’ smiling thinly, ‘but not in this instance.’
‘Any personal opinion about Thonon that you’d feel able to give me? Hints have been made that he sails close to the law occasionally, and you might be well placed to judge of that.’
‘Not in specific terms. Most house agents dabble in building promotion if they see an opportunity to turn it to advantage. You know as well as I do that the profits are considerable. There’s evidently a temptation to small dishonesties in various shades of grey: that’s inevitable. Most promoters as a consequence get a reputation for being sharks. I do not need, I imagine, to say that I don’t go clapping telescopes to my blind eye, but I don’t hold their mouths open to look at their teeth, either. It’s the difference between a bit of wire and a bit of string. Some people are born bent; others have bentness thrust upon them.’
‘I’m obliged to you,’ said Castang.
‘I’m an experienced official,’ said Delalande mildly. ‘Where building permits are concerned, the skulduggery is a bottomless pit. I don’t make a parade of my skill in detecting it. That young man keeps me on my toes, but I’m accustomed to that.’
‘I don’t suppose I’m likely to create any troubles for you,’ said Castang. ‘If I see any likelihood I’ll give you a phone-call. I don’t like scandals any more than you do. And the judge has a holy horror of them.’
The two shook hands, with polite, civil-service laughs.
TWENTY-SIX
Castang was feeling the need for a short jolt at the pub, but the Place de la République didn’t have a pub. He had to go sneaking past the Commissariat of Police with a guilty conscience, frightened lest Monsieur Peyrefitte come bouncing out to take him by the collar. He got back feeling a bit better equipped to interrogate his fisherman.
Stupid damn fisherman! Dim-witted crime, dim-witted behaviour. Trying to make sense of him, Castang found himself growing denser every second. The sharp-witted civil servant indeed! With a horrid rapidity he turned into the sort of cop to be found in all police stations, belching when he sat down (he’d had two beers) and making an unnatural number of typing errors, cursing and plying the rubber laboriously. One of those animals skilful at adopting the colours and patterns of their background.
The fisherman was indeed unusually clueless about absolutely everything – he was quite willing to say whatever anybody wanted him to say, or whatever he thought that was at any given moment. Thought is not quite the right word. The dialogue jolted along on a cat-sat-on-the-mat level.
‘Trapping fish, see, that’s not right. Dynamite and that.’ Illegal methods, typed Castang. It didn’t look right. He’d spelt it with one l and two gs.
‘What d’you mean you were standing behind him? He was facing you, you said, a moment ago.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, which was it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Now look,’ patiently, ‘try and reconstruct it. You had this knife in your hand, right?’
‘That was for my fish.’
‘Never mind that. You push the button and it opens. Now that’s an offensive weapon and classed as such.’
‘With the locking blade, see, doesn’t close back on your own finger.’
‘Listen, man, you had a go at him, not at your finger.’
‘Well, he’s bigger than me.’
Castang wished either that he’d had no beer at all, or that he’d had two more.
It wasn’t fair. One got muddled up with people like Sabine. One should stick to people like this. After all, most crimes were like this. Meaningless in the sense that there wasn’t any why, or at least the why didn’t play any part. As well ask why an eighteen-year-old boy arrived drunk in a café near closing time (Castang’s last homicide case, just three weeks before). Why had the owner refused to serve him? Why had the boy got all aggressive with a knife? – enormous German hunting knife, inconvenient and cumbersome object. So the owner, a big tough fellow who wasn’t taking cheek from snot-boys, went to put the little bugger out the door. And died six hours later as a result. All these stupid ‘why’ questions simply didn’t enter into it.
He really did wish like hell that Peyrefitte had been right all along and that Sabine had been clonked by a yobbo who’d simply thought the house was empty and would be easy to break into. Not specially to steal anything: just for excitement. Day by day life was so boring. No reason at all for killing her. I mean, these old women started yelling and you gave them a tap, like, to keep them quiet and they just fell down. Didn’t even know she was dead. No reason why she should be dead. Most unreasonable of her. You went away then. It wasn’t interesting and exciting any more. You were bored again.
Don’t know why. All the sociologists, all the industrial psychologists, all the educational authorities say you’re bored. Why?
Boring existence, boring job. Dim-witted at the start. Born bored. Even your own mother was bored with you.
The trouble with this scenario was that nobody had seen the yobbo. He could perfectly well be a figment of the imagination. A product of wishful thinking. He simplified policemen’s lives. Or would, if the judge wasn’t so tiresome, and if that blasted mayor hadn’t been on the fiddle with building permits, and Thonon on the fiddle with his income tax, and everybody, quite as usual, in this stupid little town on the fiddle in some small way with some small thing. Even Sophie was on the fiddle with Commissaire Peyrefitte. To make ends meet; that was all they wanted, just to make ends meet. Bits of string, and bits of wire.
The fisherman signed everything he was asked to. It could have been written that he thought he was the reincarnation of John Wilkes Booth and this other fellow looked like Abraham Lincoln (who as everyone knew had a bad habit of fishing with dynamite in the intervals of building log cabins and making speeches) – he’d still have signed it.
His job finished, Castang went to see Commissaire Peyrefitte.
Monsieur Peyrefitte was in a good mood. Castang had tidied up all that fish nonsense. He himself was in fine fettle. He’d tied the four brothers to all sorts of weird things. What was more he’d found out who had written the anonymous letter denouncing them for the Sabine do. A butcher, another bastard, a fat white one this time, a French bastard. He’d had his eye on that one for some time. Suspicion of trafficking in animal carcasses condemned by the Health Department as unfit for human consumption. He had too many gold coins too. There wasn’t much else you could pin on him, and the pains and penalties prescribed by law for these misdemeanours were notoriously inadequate. Didn’t matter. Fellow had no notions of honour, by Spanish standards. Monsieur Peyrefitte didn’t have to make a fool of himself writing out a lot of bullshit charge-sheets. He would just tell the fellow the Spaniards would turn him into shepherd’s pie, and watch him shake like a jelly, and he, Peyrefitte, would laugh, yes, laugh.
He was, thus, sympathetic to Monsieur Castang’s worries about this tiresome boy Gérard, whose name was legally Lipschitz but who didn’t want to be Lipschitz. Not that one blamed him really: silly sort of name, I mean, say it slowly, several times.
‘I like this. You, butcher, you’re hamburger.’
‘Petburger,’ suggested Castang.
‘What’s petburger?’
‘American for dogfood.’
‘Good, good, I like that. Butcher, you’re a carcass unfit for human consumption, and you’ve been condemned by the Health Department from Bilbao. And don’t come to me saying you’re being threatened, because I’ll laugh.’
‘Lovely,’ said Castang. ‘Now this horrible boy – I don’t want to twist his tail without your advice and consent, since you’re the senator round here.’
‘Senator for Petburgville,’ Mr Peyrefitte, much refreshed by his blinding wit.
‘Problem is that the j
udge wants something cut and dried. Little point in handing him an inconclusive sort of situation that’s liable to go dragging on for months. And those two terrible women; he doesn’t want them to bother him.’
‘Just so.’
‘Can’t see much point in reopening the technical dossier. I’m not very happy about that woodshed door, but nothing to make of it the technical end.’
‘That would be my opinion too.’
‘But the time might be ripe to look at the boy’s teeth a bit, close to,’ in another vague echo of Monsieur Delalande.
‘Don’t see that as much of a problem.’
‘Got to get him away from those two women.’
‘Well, he’s at home. We get him down here.’
‘Would you like to question him?’ asked Castang tactfully.
‘No no, don’t want to hamper you.’
‘As long then as it’s in your presence.’
The long and the short of all this was a piece of paper delivered at home by a cop. Printed form: Monsieur such-and-such is urgently requested to present himself with all possible speed at the local commissariat. Motive: Affair Concerning Him. From curiosity or from fear, this piece of paper works like a dose of salts.
Gérard came tramping in with assurance. Peyrefitte had become a familiar figure, the man in charge of the pompous formalities in cases of violent and unexplained death. Lots of bits of paper, culminating in that civil-service masterpiece known as the Permission to Bury. This was just another of those. And as for that idiot PJ cop, who thought himself sophisticated, that was just a busybody. Running about pretending to be active, giving himself a countenance by assumed airs of importance (quite an accurate diagnosis: Castang would have quite agreed).
This was all nonsense: the judge had admitted as much to Ma. An enquiry into vagabondage and violence, a matter of statistics, worked up by the computer at the PJ regional office, back in the city.
This fellow Castang was just a clerk in an administration. Gérard was one himself: he knew all about them. One had to give the fellow rope enough to satisfy that mania for interference. And hope he’d hang his stupid self while at it.
Lake Isle Page 17