by Muriel Spark
‘There must be some good arguments in favour of Behemoth and Leviathan both being the crocodile, though,’ Stewart said.
‘Of course there are arguments. The scholars try to rationalise Job by rearranging the verses where there is obviously no sense in them. Sometimes, of course, the textual evidence irresistibly calls for a passage to be moved from the traditional place to another. But moving passages about for no other reason than that they are more logical is no good for the Book of Job. It doesn’t make it come clear. The Book of Job will never come clear. It doesn’t matter; it’s a poem. As for Leviathan and Behemoth, Lévêque who is the best modern scholar on Job distinguishes between the two.’ Harvey was apparently back in his element. He seemed to have forgotten about the police outside his house, and that Effie was a criminal at large.
Stewart said, ‘You amaze me.
‘Why?’
‘Don’t you want to know the facts about Effie?’
‘Oh, Effie.’
Harvey had in his hands one of Lévêque’s volumes. ‘He accepts Leviathan as the crocodile and Behemoth as the hippopotamus. He takes Behemoth to be a hippopotamus or at least a large beast.’
‘What about these other new Bibles?’ said Stewart, pointing to a couple of new translations. He wondered if perhaps Harvey was not so guileless as he seemed. Stewart thought perhaps Harvey might really be involved with Effie and her liberation movement. There was something not very convincing about Harvey’s cool-headedness.
‘Messy,’ said Harvey. ‘They all try to reach everybody and end by saying nothing to anybody. There are no good new Bibles. The 1945 Knox wasn’t bad but still obscure — it’s a Vulgate translation, of course; the Jerusalem Bible and this Good News Bible are not much improvement on the old Moffat.’
‘You stick to the Authorised then?’
‘For my purpose, it’s the best English basis. One can get to know the obvious mistakes and annotate accordingly.’
Harvey poured drinks and handed one to Stewart.
‘I think I can see,’ said Stewart, ‘that you’re happy here. I didn’t realise how much this work meant to you. It has puzzled me slightly; I knew you were dedicated to the subject but didn’t understand how much, until I came here. You shouldn’t think of marriage. ‘‘I don’t. I think of Effie.’
‘Only when you’re not thinking of Job?’
‘Yes. What can I do for her by thinking?’
‘Your work here would make a good cover if you were in with Effie,’ said the lawyer.
‘A very bad cover. The police aren’t really convinced by my story. Why should you be?’
‘Oh, Harvey, I didn’t mean —Anne-Marie arrived with a grind of brakes in the little Renault. She left the car with a bang of the door and began to proclaim an urgency before she had opened the cottage gate.
‘Mr Gotham, a phone call from Canada.’
Harvey went to open the door to her. ‘What is it from Canada?’ he said.
‘Your aunt on the telephone. She’ll ring you back in ten minutes.’
‘I’ll come up to the house right away.’
To Stewart, he said, ‘Wait for me. I’ll be back shortly and we’ll go out to lunch. You know, there could have been an influence of Prometheus on Job; the dates could quite possibly coincide. But I find vast differences. Prometheus wasn’t innocent, for one thing. He stole fire from Heaven. Job was innocent.’
‘Out to lunch!’ said Anne-Marie. ‘I’m preparing lunch at the château.’
‘We’ll have it cold for dinner,’ thundered Harvey as he got into the car. Anne-Marie followed him; looking back at Stewart who gave her a long smile full of what looked like meaning, but decidedly so unspecific as to mean nothing.
As they whizzed up the drive to the château Anne-Marie said, ‘You think because you are rich you can do anything with people. I planned a lunch.’
‘You should first have enquired whether we would be in for lunch,’ said Harvey.
‘Oh, no,’ she said, with some point. ‘It was for you to say you would be out.’
‘I apologise.’
‘The apologies of the rich. They are cheap.’
Half an hour went by before the telephone rang again. The police were vetting the calls, turning away half the world’s reporters and others who wanted to speak to the terrorist’s guru husband. Harvey therefore made no complaint. He sat in patience reading all about himself once more in the local morning newspaper, until the telephone rang.
‘Oh, it’s you, Auntie Pet. It must be the middle of the night with you; how are you?’
‘How are you?’
‘All right.’
‘I saw you on the television and it’s all in the paper. How could you blaspheme in that terrible way, saying those things about your Creator?’
‘Auntie Pet, you’ve got to understand that I said nothing whatsoever about God, I mean our Creator. What I was talking about was a fictional character in the Book of Job, called God. I don’t know what you’ve seen or read, but it’s not yet proved finally that Effie, my wife, is a terrorist.’
‘Oh, Effie isn’t involved, it goes without saying. I never said Effie was a terrorist, I know she isn’t, in fact. What I’m calling about is this far more serious thing, it’s a disgrace to the family. I mean, this is to blaspheme when you say that God is what you said he was.’
‘I never said what they said I said he was,’ said Harvey. ‘How are you, Auntie Pet? How is Uncle Joe?’
‘Uncle Joe, I never hear from. But I get to know.’
‘And yourself? I haven’t heard from you for ages.
‘Well, I don’t write much. The prohibitive price of stamps. My health is everything that can be expected by a woman who does right and fears the Lord. Your Uncle Joe just lives on there with old Collier who is very much to blame, too. Neither of them has darkened the door of the church for as long as I can remember. They are unbelievers like you.
‘On the contrary, I have abounding faith.’
‘You shouldn’t question the Bible. Job was a good man. There is a Christian message in the Book of Job.’
‘But Job didn’t know that.’
‘How do you know? We have a lovely Bible, there. Why do you want to change it? You should look after your wife and have a family, and be a good husband, with all your advantages, and the business doing so well. Your Uncle Joe refused the merger.
‘Well, Auntie Pet, it’s been a pleasure to talk to you. I have to go out with my lawyer for lunch, now. I’m glad you managed to get my number so you could put your mind at rest.’
‘I got your number with the utmost difficulty.’
‘Yes, I was wondering how you got it, Auntie Pet.’
‘Money,’ said Auntie Pet.
‘Ah,’ said Harvey.
‘I’ll be in touch again.’
‘Keep well. Don’t take the slightest notice of what the newspapers and the television say.
‘What about the radio?’
‘Also, the radio.’
‘Are you starting a new religion, Harvey?’
‘No.’
Stewart and Harvey crossed the Place Stanislas at Nancy. The rain had stopped and a silvery light touched the gilded gates at the corners of the square, it glittered on the lamp-posts with their golden garlands and crown-topped heads, and on the bright and lacy iron-work of all the balconies of the hôtel de ville.
‘The square always looks lovely out of season,’ said Stewart.
‘It’s supposed to have crowds,’ Harvey said. ‘That’s what it was evidently made for.’
Two police cars turned into the square and followed them at a crawl.
‘The bistro I had in mind is down a narrow street,’ said Harvey. ‘Let them follow us there. The police have to eat, too.’
But they had a snack-lunch in the police station at Nancy, two policemen having got out of their car and invited Harvey and Stewart to join them.
‘What’s the matter, now?’ Harvey had said when the police app
roached them.
Stewart said, ‘I require an explanation.’
The explanation was not forthcoming until they were taken later in the afternoon to the police headquarters in Epinal.
‘A policeman has been killed in Paris.’
NINE
Stewart Cowper, having invoked the British Consul, was allowed to leave the police headquarters the same afternoon that he was detained with Harvey. He refused to answer any questions at all, and his parting advice to Harvey was to do likewise. They were alone in a corridor.
‘The least I can do,’ said Harvey, ‘is to defend Effie.’
‘Understandable,’ said Stewart, and left to collect his luggage from the château and get a hired car to Paris, and a plane to London.
Harvey got home later that night, having failed to elicit, from the questions he was asked by an officer who had come to Epinal for the purpose — the same old questions — what had exactly happened in Paris that morning, and where Effie was supposed to fit into the murder of the policeman.
‘Did you hear about the killing on the radio, M. Gotham?’
‘No. I’ve only just learned of it from you. I wasn’t in the château this morning. I was in the cottage with my English lawyer, Stewart Cowper.’
‘What did you discuss with your lawyer?’
‘The different versions of the Book of Job in various recent English translations of the Bible.’
Harvey’s interrogator looked at him with real rage. ‘One of our policemen has been killed,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ said Harvey.
They escorted him to pick up his car at Nancy, and followed him home.
Next day the Sunday papers had the same photograph of Effie. There was also a photograph of the policeman, lying in the street beside a police car, covered by a sheet, with some police standing by. Effie had been recognised by eye-witnesses at the scene of the killing, in the eighteenth arrondissement. A blonde, longhaired girl with a gun. She was the killer. Her hair was drawn back in a pony-tail at the time of the commando-raid; she was wearing blue jeans and a grey pullover. The Paris security police and the gendarmerie were now operating jointly in the search for FLE and its supporters, and especially for the Montmartre killers.
That was the whole of the news, though it filled several pages of the newspapers. The volume of printed words was to be explained by the length of the many paragraphs ending with a question mark, by numerous interpolations about Harvey and his Bible-sect, his wealth, his château, and by details of the unfortunate policeman’s family life.
It was not till after lunch on Monday that he was invited to the commissariat at Epinal once more. Two security men from Paris had arrived to interrogate him. Two tall men, one of them in his late forties, robust, with silvering sideburns, the other fair and skinny, not much over thirty, with gilt-rimmed glasses, an intellectual. Harvey thought, if he had seen them together in a restaurant, he would have taken the older man for a business-man, the younger for a priest.
Later, when he chewed over their questions, he was to find it difficult to distinguish between this second interrogation and the first one of a few days ago. This was partly because the older man, who introduced himself by the name of Chatelain, spent a lot of time going over Harvey’s previous deposition.
‘My house is surrounded by your men,’ said Harvey. ‘You have your young woman auxiliary in my house. What are you accusing me of?’ (Stewart Cowper had advised him: If they question you again, ask them what they have against you, demand to know what is the charge.)
‘We are not accusing, Mr Gotham, we are questioning.’
‘Questions can sound like accusations.’
‘A policeman has been shot dead.’
And their continual probe into why he had settled in France:
Harvey recalled later.
‘I liked the house,’ said Harvey, ‘I got my permit to stay in France. I’m regular with the police.’
‘Your wife has been in trouble before.’
‘I know,’ said Harvey.
‘Do you love your wife?’
‘That’s rather a personal question.’
‘It was a personal question for the policeman who was killed.’
‘I wonder,’ said Harvey, conversationally. He was suddenly indignant and determined to be himself, thoughtfully in charge of his reasoning mind, not any sort of victim. ‘I wonder … I’m not sure that death is personal in the sense of being in love. So far as we know, we don’t feel death. We know the fear of death, we know the process of dying. From the outside it looks the most personal of phenomena. But isn’t death the very negation of the personal, therefore strictly speaking impersonal? A dead body is the most impersonal thing I can think of. Unless one believes in the continuity of personality in its terrestrially recognisable form, as opposed to life-after-death which is something else. Many disbelieve in life after death, of course, but —’
‘Pardon? Are you trying to tell me that the death of one of our men is trivial?’
‘No. I was reflecting on a remark of yours. Philosophising, I’m afraid. I meant —’
‘Kindly don’t philosophise,’ said Chatelain. ‘This is not the place. I want to know where your wife is. Where is Effie?’
‘I don’t know where Mine Gotham is.’
And again:
‘A policeman has been killed by the FLE gang. Two men and a girl, all armed. In the eighteenth arrondissement in Paris.’
‘I’m sorry that a policeman has been shot,’ said Harvey. ‘Why in the eighteenth arrondissement?’
‘That’s what we’re asking you,’ said Chatelain.
‘I have no idea. I thought these terrorists acted mainly in popular suburbs.’
‘Was your wife ever before in the eighteenth arrondissement, do you know?’
‘Of course,’ said Harvey. ‘Who hasn’t been in the eighteenth? It’s Montmartre.’
‘Have you and your wife any friends there?’
‘I have friends there and I suppose my wife has, too.’
‘Who are your friends?’
‘You should know. Your colleagues here went through my address book last week and checked all my friends.’
In the middle of the afternoon Chatelain became more confidential. He began to melt, but only in resemblance to a refrigerator which thaws when the current is turned off. True warmth, thought Harvey at the time, doesn’t drip, drip, drip. And later, in his cottage, when he reconstituted the scene he thought: And I ask myself, why was he a refrigerator in the first place?
‘Don’t think I don’t sympathise with you, Mr Gotham,’ said Chatelain, on the defreeze. ‘Not to know where one’s wife is can not be a pleasant experience.
‘Don’t think I don’t sympathise with you,’ said Harvey. ‘I know you’ve lost one of your men. That’s serious. And I sympathise, as everyone should, with his family. But you offer no proof that my wife, Effie, is involved. You offer only a photograph that you confiscated from a box on my table.’
‘We confiscated …?’ The man consulted Harvey’s thick file which lay on the desk. ‘Ah, yes. You are right. The Vosges police obtained that photograph from your house. Witnesses have identified that photograph as the girl in the gang. And look — the identikit, constructed with the help of eye-witnesses to a bank robbery and supermarket bombings, some days prior to our obtaining the photograph. Look at it — isn’t that your wife?’
Harvey looked at the drawing.
‘When I first saw it in the paper I thought it resembled my wife’s sister, Ruth, rather than my wife,’ he said. ‘Since it couldn’t possibly refer to Ruth it seems to me even more unlikely that it refers to Effie.’
‘Mme Gotham was arrested in Trieste.’
Harvey was still looking at the identikit. It reminded him, now, of Job’s wife in La Tour’s painting even though the drawing was full-face and the painting showed a profile.
‘She was arrested for shop-lifting,’ said Harvey.
; ‘Why did she do that?’
Harvey put down the identikit and gave Chatelain his attention. ‘I don’t know that she did it. If she did, it does not follow that she bombs supermarkets and kills policemen.’
‘If I was in your place,’ said Chatelain, ‘I would probably speak as you do. But if you were in my place, you would press for some indication, any indication, any guess, as to where she is. I don’t blame you for trying to protect your wife. You see,’ he said, leaning back in his chair and looking away from Harvey, towards the window, ‘a policeman has been shot dead. His wife is in a shop on the outskirts of Paris where they live, a popular quarter, with her twelve-year-old daughter who has a transistor radio. The lady is waiting her turn at the cash-desk. The child draws her mother’s attention to a flash item of news that has interrupted the music. A policeman has been shot and killed in the eighteenth arrondissement; the name is being withheld until the family can be informed. The assassins, two men and a girl, have escaped. The terrorist gang FLE have immediately telephoned the press to claim the crime. The main points of the news flash are repeated: a policeman killed, leaving a wife and two daughters aged fourteen and twelve respectively. Now this lady, the policeman’s wife, is always worried when she hears of the death or wounding of a policeman. In this case the description is alarmingly close. The eighteenth arrondissement where her husband is on duty; the ages of their daughters. She hurries home and finds a police car outside her block of flats. It is indeed her husband who has been killed. Did she deserve this?’