Castang’s City

by Nicolas Freeling

  Light means not leaning on people: the surveilled aren’t supposed to notice. There exist plenty of ploys like the ‘open tail’ where Dingus is supposed to notice, and get all uneasy about it, but they depend on the controlling officer’s discretion, and the beginnings of discretion, as Richard would say, begin with being discreet.

  It will probably mean a tap on the phone, but not a bug planted: microphones and transmitters and stuff mean breaking-and-entering, and all sorts of procedures illegal unless ordered by an instructing magistrate, and he’d be a bit uncomfortable at its coming out in court unless he can talk loudly and emphatically about the Safety of the Realm.

  In principle it calls for one agent at a time, with a flexibility about relaying and replacing same, and see note about My Free Sunday. This agent is there to observe, and log what he observes: she and he are supposed to use their common sense about meals and going for a pee.

  It can be lifted off a subject who has plainly settled to a humdrum occupation, and moved to another. It is not, in fact, enormously ambitious. The essential aim is that of all police work: to establish a pattern, after which variations in that pattern attract a certain interest. Most people vary little in their patterns: hence the observation that life in Paris, that thrilling city, boils down to Metro – Boulot – Dodo; in London – Bore, Snore, and Stanmore. Or as the diarist put it: Got Up, Washed, Went to Bed; with the note on the third day ‘Did not Wash’.

  Lastly, light surveillance takes some time; a fortnight at least. This was achieved by Commissaire Richard explaining at some length to the Mayor that the enquiry was like the Bakerloo Tube: it had to go underground before popping out in daylight. To the Press, that printing anything further in attempts to whet public greed for sensation was contrary to the interests of justice. To the examining magistrate, Madame Delavigne, not only explaining that this was a good idea, but persuading her that she’d thought of it herself.

  Light surveillance to Castang meant in fact not more than two or three days, which was not enough to show up anything at all interesting. After that, Vera was released from her clinic and came home proudly with the baby dumped in her lap, trembling a bit because this was rather a responsibility (there’d always been some nurse or another frigging about with it, annoying her considerably, holding it upside-down, shoving safetypins into its defenceless flesh, and so on; treating it in general with the utmost callousness and brutality, as professional nurses always do).

  Castang pressed with the greatest resolution for his days off; got them with no trouble. There didn’t seem to be anything much happening anyhow. He’d set up his scheme, and it was working smoothly.

  With Liliane he had no problem. Since she came from Lille (her real name was Agnes) they drank lots of cups of coffee together. She was suspected too of going round her highly-polished flat with felt soles on (known in France as skates) but this might have been an exaggeration. Certainly the flat was full to the brim with potted plants climbing and writhing everywhere; you can see them through the lace curtains, said Maryvonne (‘I swear it’). She was a good deal liberated, but so, Vera-trained, was he. Cantoni was an unliberated oaf, but what did you expect of the Intervention brigade? Lasserre is a phallocrat pig. Massip dips his dick in the inkwell to write with. But being Polish she was a believer in hard work and Christian charity, and Castang found her good to work with.

  Maryvonne he’d got keen on; conscientious, observant and patient, a good cop. And brief readable well-written paperwork. Having two women – however liberated they were they understood what it meant having a baby was a great help when it came to being missing.

  The three men he knew of course well, and could appreciate their various talents. Davignon both quietly spoken and taciturn; nearly his age, and ambitious. Had susceptibilities you had to know about. Studious. Sleepy in the mornings, at his best in the evening. Experienced, and reliable; would be getting his step soon.

  Lucciani, sleepy both in the mornings and the evenings, but given to sudden bursts of interest, energy and inventiveness at odd moments. Results irregular, said his dossier (‘en dents de scie’ which is expressive). A Southerner from Nice; intelligent, vain, sly. Talked enough to make up for Davignon; worse he was a tale-bearer, a back-biter and gossip-shop. But he had good qualities, too.

  Orthez was a good cop because constantly surprising and unexpected. Looked a dolt, mostly acted like one; thick, tactless, woodenly insensitive. A gifted mechanic, and the best driver in the department. It was not a recommendation in Castang’s eye: an interest in cars is a classic sign of a sub-normal intelligence, and Orthez could both look and act maddeningly sub. He often smelt not very nice, too. How had he ever passed his examinations? – the examiners must have got the papers muddled. Learning how unsafe, facile and stupid this opinion was had been a lesson in humility for Master Castang. Orthez could sometimes be much brighter than he was. He had Vera-like characteristics too: modesty, simplicity, common sense and sound judgement. A terrific worker, with tenacity, staying power. Ausdauer as the Germans say: he came from Carcassonne and looked like a bullet-headed Bavarian, particularly in dark-blue blazers, to which he was given in the summer months.

  Surveillance, if to be continued any length of time by a limited group, means a good deal of masquerading. The cops do not dress up in disguises more often than they can help, and not as much as the public imagines, but a bit of camouflage is desirable. The personage with the dirty raincoat and the large flat feet, ostentatiously reading the racing news in crowded doorways, will not do. One has thus a couple of people on the technical squad, known as the artists, who are given a small amount of money and urged not to be too tricky. It shows up first in the cars used by the department. Beside the ordinary workhorses, medium-sized, solid unimaginative things of the Peugeot-station-wagon type, there is a litter of small tatty cars fixed so that their bodywork comes easily to pieces. Known in France, charmingly, as ‘banalised’. There are one or two souped-up but most are, as the name suggests, designed not to attract any notice from anyone. If you are in a small grey mongrel Renault, with a few lengths of metallic piping on the roofrack, and a plaque on the side saying something unreadable and preferably unpronounceable, like say Chomfieh S.A.R.L. Technical Supplier, you can hang about anywhere without being asked your business. But the Artists are perpetually put to it to invent new ones, and must keep a repertory in hand, and be flexible. What will do nicely in a crowded city street would stick out like Fred Karno’s Army in the leafy residential avenue. Start mucking about with the gas mains outside the Algerian Embassy, and you will become aware of this.

  Above all be simple. The Red Faction stopped Schleyer’s car by pushing a pram in front of it. Avoid complex and ingenious technicalities. That black man with the nice face, in ‘Mission Impossible’ who is never seen without a swarm of conjuror’s contraptions – he has a lot to answer for.

  If Castang wanted gadgets, Lucciani, who had a childish passion for them, was handy: a great setter-up of infrared binoculars, cameras in wristwatches, and tape recorders in Gitane packets. And most technical squads contain someone with a taste for electronic doodads. Why have some cop outside the garage door all night, probably in the pouring rain, when a thing the size of a cigarette-butt will tell you all you want to know?

  Castang, with no interest and small talent for gadgets, was mistrustful. He was sure that the thing, having once been dropped on the floor, would when activated have no effect whatever save to set off all the air raid sirens in the entire municipal area. But it was nice sometimes when Lucciani said, "I know a better way of doing that." His little repertory would have been bigger but that whenever he dashed in all excited with one of his catalogues the controller would make a prim mouth and say ‘Too dear’.

  His own instinct was to keep the affair very light-handed indeed. Better, to his mind, to miss a few things almost certainly trivial, than jar someone’s funnybone. These are intelligent, observant, wary people. The whole of Etienne Marcel’s family h
as had some training in prudence, discretion, carefulness, indeed quite a considerable wiliness, he dared say. Even the pretended naivetes of such as Clothilde (‘I’m a born pigeon; walk wide-eyed into everybody’s gluepot’) were to be taken with a big discount. ‘If you want a good folklore phrase, the soup isn’t eaten as hot as it’s cooked.’ On the likes of Noelle and her children were few flies. And one could not tell – in or around these cosy set-ups there is possibly a connection with some cool and cunning types. Otherwise what’s the point of this operation? Don’t let’s forget, two people have been killed… And they know the police take a certain interest.

  As for him, he had surveillance to do at home. At night too. That baby howled. Lucky the walls were thick, and as far as he knew there were no electronic ears a-listening.

  EIGHTEEN

  COMING UP FOR AIR

  "You’re moving very well," said Castang admiringly. He himself was moving awkwardly, clutching the baby, a sleepy bundle rolled up in shawls and not objecting so far to this bony male presence, and with Vera’s overnight bag dangling from a couple of spare fingers.

  "Don’t grip it so hard. It’s this lovely empty belly. And being dressed again after so long. Morale is extremely high." Vera had her stick, and was pottering down steps gingerly, but with unusual freedom. The cramped stiff hobble that had been her lot since learning again to walk at all was now a walk. Halting, but a walk. "And I’ve been exercising like mad. Scandalised the nurses rather; always coming in and finding my bottom up in the air but old Paddy was thrilled." This was her gynaecologist, whose name was Patrice, She got in the car unaided too, holding out her arms and saying, "Shove her over to me."

  "Even so, unusually well," getting in beside her. "Are you all healed up?"

  "There was a horrid moment when Paddy took the stitches out and fiddled interminably with my fan. But that’s all very muscular you know, vaginal wall and I don’t know what besides and it healed up like one o’clock."

  "Your back," moving the car through traffic, "I find it less locked."

  "Yes, well, it was supposed to be a surprise but there’s no keeping anything from the observant Detective. Not even one’s fan. The fact is there are things I couldn’t do before. So Paddy phoned Rab." Professor Rabinowics, a surgeon of a complicated and technical orthopaedic kind, had treated Vera after her accident. "And Rab came, and said God moves in mysterious ways, and so does the spine, and having a baby is sometimes even better than having a wonderful clean-out and he’d seen it before but one couldn’t bet on it, and all round you’d think it was him who’d been so clever and not us."

  "But what exactly happened?"

  "Oh, some nerve endings got unblocked or something. Very technical and I hadn’t wanted to tell you till we got home."

  "We are home," parking the car and getting the bundle back, which yapped faintly and then fell asleep again.

  "How nice it all does look," she said happily. He had scrubbed everything, done his best with flowers – there was still an armful in the back of the car – and whitewashed a ceiling he’d ‘never had time for’.

  It was an old house, on a street called a quay because it overlooked a disused canal, with poplar trees and a former towing path. A bourgeois house and too expensive for an inspector of police, but having nobody on the far side meant quiet, as well as having trees and water, and quantities of rusty old iron beyond, whose colours Vera liked, and a neglected railway siding, and a general air of industrial decay, and the sun going down to one side. This was all well worth the money, when one has a wife who can’t get out much.

  Their flat was on the third floor, small and awkward, with the kitchen in a former passage. They had three rooms, two of them small, and a bathroom quite as antique and cranky as that in which Didier had been found. Across the landing lived the landlady, a thin and energetic widow who kept a close eye on her property. This was certainly a big black spot. But the rooms had balconies, and a lot of windowboxes, and the baby would be put out there to air, between the chives and the geraniums. These gave the house a gay look, said the landlady: by acquiring merit in this way Vera had earned small indulgences.

  Inside, too, a strong personality had asserted itself. The furniture had all been bought in flea markets, until the moment when these got delusions of grandeur and started charging antique-shop prices Chairs with no bottoms and disembowelled sofas. Vera didn’t care, and had taught herself clumsy but efficient upholstery. As long as the frames were solid wood, so that one could hammer tacks in, and a good shape. The latest was a large old-fashioned cot, and a high chair with by God a real abacus to play with. Castang who had spent groaning hours sandpapering all this started by being obstructive but ended up excited. There was even a cradle, with rockers. All too Brother Grimm for words, since already she had a rocking-chair. "All you need now is a spinning-wheel," groaned Castang, who was sick of hearing about her Czech granny’s ingenious arrangements (‘wasting good shit like that; go out and do it in the currant-bushes’).

  "There seem to be a great many flowers," said Castang, seeking jamjars, "and these are still quite fresh."

  "Rab had some sent, which I thought rather touching," all abeam and rocking the cradle, with the object in it, with her foot; it seemed to enjoy this, after all the clinical hygiene, "and Colette Delavigne brought more."

  "I wondered whether she would."

  "And an immense surprise."

  "Who?"

  "You’ll never guess."

  "Oh, stop it."

  "Madame Richard."

  "No!"

  "Stop saying no in that imbecile way. I say, could I have a drink, or would it make Lydia pissed?"

  "A spot won’t do her any harm. Is her name Concepcion, or Encarnacion?"

  "Stop being so silly."

  "Then stop saying stop."

  "Her name is Judith and she’s perfectly sweet. She’s shy and doesn’t utter much, and her voice is barely audible."

  "But do you speak Spanish?"

  "This is bullshit, she speaks perfectly good French with less accent than I do, and I’m sick of this rubbish about nationalities, there’s no earthly difference between being Czech and being Spanish. She was terrified of being indiscreet, and Richard isn’t allowed to know, but she heard something from him and screwed up her courage and rang Fausta to know where I was."

  "That cow Fausta never let on."

  "No, and she won’t either. And just look at what she, I mean Judith brought," rummaging in her bag. She unwrapped tissuepaper and there was a battered toy of rococo silver. One end was a grip of mother of pearl that a child could clutch and shove in its mouth – how many had not cut their teeth on it? The silver end was a whistle. Attached to this should have been five tiny bells, but two were missing.

  "Oh, that’s nice," said the sentimental father, all set to experiment and see what the baby did with it. Vera stopped this.

  "Too tiny – shove it in its own eye. In a few weeks. It’s a coral-and-bells, and it’s made by a gipsy silversmith in the Albaicín where all the dancers come from. Very suitable, isn’t it my poppet?"

  "Now who’s being sentimental?"

  It was so farcically, so – outrageously – different a world that he felt like a diver, in the antique time before Commandant Cousteau. A Bibendum or Michelin-Man, with lead upon the feet and a huge copper globe that screwed on, and a life-support system through a long fragile pipe that would snag all the time in things. Wonders of the marine world. You got down to maybe twenty-five metres, and thought it hellish dangerous, which it was.

  He had a reasonable job. That’s to say, a loony job. But makes more sense than being intent on beating last year with automobile sales. And sorry; whatever the progress made (always called technological to make it sound more progressive somehow) somebody, in the ancient French phrase, has to empty the pot. Sewerage, dustbins and cops remain, and will go on remaining major municipal preoccupations. National preoccupations. You went to the office, and even thought it was a wei
rd and hideous world full of corpses, frauds, hold-ups, everything for the Moral Pathologist – and stinks as bad as physical pathology, said Maryvonne disgustedly, there seem to be just as many samples of blood, pus, and faecal matter – someone had to do it, and be interested in it, be devoted to it.

  He was. He liked the feeling, the atmosphere, the – despite everything – comradeship. The odd police jargon. What, odd! No odder than any other shop talk. Odder than, say, television cameramen? Or the English when they talked about cricket.

  But down there, in the great big submarine hunting-ground (vague childhood memories of reading Jules Verne) – that was the office. One didn’t come up for air in the office. This was the real world, here.

  "What’s she like?"

  "Who?"

  "Judith of course."

  "Plain, and very beautiful. Extraordinary huge eyes. Dreary hair in a plait wound round and held with pins. I can’t wait to draw her." Vera, daring, had recently launched into drawing people. Very, very difficult. But drawing trees or flowers or stones is also very difficult.

  "Where will you draw her?"

  "Here. She’ll come here. But you’re not allowed to lay eyes upon her. Richard is not allowed to know. There are things that none of you are allowed to know." Conspiracy was multiplying like dry rot around here. Mutterings and scuttlings and secret threads a-spinning underneath Richard’s very feet. If Fausta got caught at all this her arse would be on the grill: St. Lawrence would be nothing to it. There would be hideous, primitive martyrdoms that started with being tied to a wheel: extremely Spanish. And Czech too. Who burned John Huss? Castang couldn’t remember, but felt sure Czechs were mixed up in it. Nasty goings-on with melted lead. Human beings have always done unspeakable things to one another. Still do. Ask – well, ask Amnesty International. Is there much difference between today and the year – say roughly 1500? The main difference would be that things today are less public. The Police Judiciaire… Cantoni would look very well in a Guardia Civil hat. Come to that, Castang my boy, try one on yourself. Might look more becoming on you than you realise. Let’s not have any foolish talk though. The PJ could become a powerful instrument of oppression, and was certainly unpleasantly pliable in the hands of its masters in Paris. But believe me, it’s necessary to any semblance of civilisation. Which is more, Castang suspected, than you could say for Electricité de France. And that is a body which is every bit as fascist, and a good deal more oppressive.