Nicolas Freeling
The King of the Rainy Country
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Van der Valk woke up. His mind was filled with confusion and there was a nasty taste in his mouth, like cheap Spanish brandy. Had he fallen asleep after drinking too much? In an overheated room with no window open? It felt like that. He had had horrible dreams too. And these blankets – he had thrashed about, got all wound up. Obnoxious tangle; he gave a great kick and was astonished; nothing happened. Was he still dreaming? – surely he was not still asleep. It seemed his foot was. Something was wrong: he told his leg to kick but the leg refused. The whole leg seemed to be asleep, from the hip downwards; the brandy tasted vile – where had he drunk that? He must still be dreaming because he remembered things about the dream, and it had something to do with Biarritz. Ha, a holiday in Biarritz – bit dear for the likes of him. Nice idea though – neither he nor Arlette had ever seen the Atlantic coast.
It wasn’t a nice idea.
Ham though, he had had bread with raw ham. Not Biarritz but something else beginning with a B. Bayonne, Bayonne; he felt triumphant at remembering. And his dream had had something to do with war. The Spanish border – the river Bidassoa. Soult crossed the Bidassoa, going north. Soult was not much of a general, but then neither was Wellington, who took five years to win a campaign in which every single thing was on his side. Soult was good at moving men but not much good at a fight. He would have to show Soult how to fight.
Stop dreaming and wake up. Well, move an arm. He moved an arm, and the hand touched something very funny. A sort of coarse grass. And a stone, and it felt stony under his head too. He wasn’t in bed at all; he had been drunk and fallen asleep on the hill under the hot sun. He could smell the sun; baked grass and thyme. He suddenly recalled, then, a most important thing. He had been shot.
He was a soldier in Soult’s army, that was it, and that tripe-hound Soult had left him here to die on the hillside; he knew it was a hillside, for his head was quite a lot lower than his heels were. Poor heels: poor head. He had been shot, and when one got shot in Soult’s army one stayed on the hillside and died, because there weren’t any ambulances. Full of self-pity, he cursed. ‘Now’ – dramatic tears were pouring out of his eyes – ‘I’m going to die on some godawful hillside somewhere. I don’t even know if it’s France or Spain, and my bones will be found by Portuguese plasterers gaining illegal entry to the Republic, and they won’t be in the least interested. Going to die, and not even had a shot at the enemy. That romantic imbecile Robert Jordan could say goodbye to his girl and get all nicely propped up with a machine-gun and everything to pop at the Navarrese cavalry, and I have nowt. That’s it, that’s what happens in books. This isn’t a book; this is real.’ Weeping with self-pity he reeled off again to sleep. The brandy was fearfully strong; the hillside spun round, and round, and round.
When he woke up again there was a face that had not belonged to the dream. A round, youngish, muscular face, very French, with crewcut hair and rimless glasses. He moved his eyes; a white rolled-up shirtsleeve and a brown arm. Thin delicate fingers were squirting the airbubble out of a hypodermic syringe; the needle turned in the air with a drop on the end of it and pointed itself at him.
‘Who are you?’
‘Be a good boy and forget about Marshal Soult, will you?’
‘Where is he?’
‘Dead a hundred and twenty years; we’re almost getting to remember him with affection. I’m going to put you to sleep now.’ He turned his eye with difficulty past the hand as it dipped out of sight. He was right enough about the hillside. On it stood a faded grey Citroen ‘two-horse’ and a Peugeot 404 station wagon with a cross painted on it. Yes, Marshal Soult had not known about Peugeot station wagons; what on earth was he doing in this company? The round young face with the glasses came back suddenly.
‘I am like the king of a rainy country,’ Van der Valk told him. ‘Rich, and impotent. Young, and very old.’
‘Really? Dear dear, you’ve been too long in the sun, we get you off Marshal Soult and the first thing you do is quote Baudelaire at us. There there, all gone, all these people. Sleepy-bye.’
*
Next time he remembered waking, though he knew there had been other times, in between, it was better. No bells of Bicêtre, no Soult. Arlette, his wife, instead, her hair wild and tatty-looking, unusually blonde and held back with a white bandeau, so that it almost looked as though they had been on holiday in Biarritz after all. He made a big effort to remember. Arlette … Napoleon’s marshals.
‘My poor boy,’ she said to him in French. He thought there might have been a blank again, after that, for when he looked again there was the youngish man again with the crewcut alongside Arlette, grinning down at him. Things began to slip into place; he remembered he was supposed to be a detective and felt better.
‘I’ve seen you before.’
‘That’s right. Out on the hill. Marshal Soult, remember?’ laughing heartily.
‘But who the hell are you?’
‘I’m Doctor Capdouze. At your service. I will explain. Very briefly, and you won’t understand half of it anyway, but that doesn’t matter. You got shot. A man heard the shot and was curious about it, because there isn’t much round here one shoots with a big rifle. He found you, which was just as well. Being an innocent chap who does his best he gave you some brandy, which bloody near killed you, and ran to get me; I’m the village doctor, ha, of St Jean. We brought you away and you’re not going to die this time; you’ve had several litres of blood belonging to Arabs and black men and lord knows who. You’re in Biarritz, in a nice clinic, ha, not the clink, though there are some policemen who want to talk to you. Don’t worry, I won’t let them in yet. You are perfectly all right. In case you can’t recall you are Inspector Van der Valk of the Amsterdam Police and this is your wife Arlette. I have no idea what you were doing on the hill, but I can answer for it that you are now surrounded by modern post-operative care, social security, nuns, me, Professor Gachassin who is your surgeon, and your wife who is a remarkably nice woman even if she does come from Provence. O.K.? Nothing more to worry about; you’re going to go on catching up with your sleep.’
Van der Valk slept.
*
Arlette did not talk about the rifle-shot, but he stitched information together. He had been shot somewhere near the right hip, with a highspeed Mauser cartridge – whee, that was a whacking great thing, ten-seventy-five millimetre; he had been awfully lucky. It had hit him at a range of about three hundred metres, sideways and downhill; that had saved his life, because the shooter had not known how tricky it is to sight downhill. The bullet had perforated an intestine, luckily just missed the big artery, touched his spine, bust his pelvis, and popped out somewhere in his buttock, leaving a great deal of havoc. He would stay paralysed quite a while, but they didn’t think permanently. Doctor Capdouze was red hot, doctors just didn’t come any better; all the local people agreed on that. This Professor Gachassin was a big authority from Toulouse, and he had sworn that within a year Van der Valk would be walking again. There would be a long long time, with lots of books and lots of remedial exercises.
‘We’ll get him up on skis,’ they had said. Arlette had suspected that this was talk to cheer her up, but was beginning to feel hopeful. She thought the idea of skis would amuse him and give him something to fight for.
He didn’t much like the idea, though he did not tell her that. He had remembered the whole story, by now. Skis came into it. Too much.
As soon as he felt lucid he had himself asked for the police. They turned out to be an elderly commissaire in a grey suit with a scrap
of red cord in the lapel, with short grey hair, who smoked cigarettes in defiance of the nurses. He was about fifty, brown and sun-dried as a Smyrna fig.
‘Lira, commissaire. How are you?’
‘I’m fine: seems there’s a hole in my arse you could drive a truck through. Give me one of those cigarettes.’
‘Hell, boy, you’re not allowed to smoke.’
‘Neither are you, here.’
Mr Lira wasted no time arguing. He put a cigarette in his mouth, lit it, removed it with a scarred brown hand, and put it very neatly and delicately in Van der Valk’s mouth where it wiggled as he talked. From time to time the French policeman took it out with equal delicacy and tipped the ash into the fresh air outside the open window, along with his own. Each time he had a trip of a dozen steps, which he made without irritation, as though he were accustomed to taking trouble over tiny pedestrian things. Which, of course, he was.
‘I understand that you went after a maniac with a rifle for me, and I’m very grateful, because it might otherwise have been me lying there. Strasbourg, though, can’t understand why the two of you came haring down here. What was the point? Just to get over the border?’
‘There’s a man called Canisius, business man. He was here. He went into Spain to look at houses he owns. He was coming back a little later. The idea was to pop him. Going into the hills was with a suicide idea, I thought. That’s why I followed. Was I right?’ Lira nodded.
‘We knew nothing, of course. Only that there was someone up on that hill with a rifle, who could use it, too. We strung boys out with guns, we got a mental doctor from Hendaye, and a loudhailer. Useless. We went up when we heard the shot. Toe job. No head left at that range. I have to make a report for the parquet. I can’t make head or tail of the story I got from Strasbourg; you know the story, it seems. If you can just tell me what you know. Anything that looks good on a report.’
‘Nothing I know ever looks good on a report.’
‘I can see,’ said Mr Lira with no smile at all, hardly, ‘that policemen are much the same where you come from as where I come from.’
‘I’ll tell you,’ said Van der Valk. ‘It’s easy really. And now, there’s nothing to hurry for. I can’t right now. Have to think a bit first. I’m bloody tired. Can you come tomorrow?’
‘Yes.’
‘Bring me some cigarettes. I can hide them. People keep bringing me flowers.’
Mr Lira threw two cigarette-ends out of the window and stood looking down at him.
‘Boy, did you have a narrow squeak – when you’re better we’ll drink to that. I’ll bring you cigarettes.’
‘Bugger off now,’ faintly.
A nurse came banging in very suddenly, the way they do, stopped dead and sniffed.
‘Smoking by god. Policemen … like a pair of silly kids.’
‘Sister,’ said Mr Lira quietly, ‘did you know there’s a defective rear light on your little Simca? Get it fixed, there’s a good girl.’
*
Van der Valk spent twenty-four hours between waking and sleeping, thinking. This was the end of the story that had started ‘Once upon a time, in a rainy country, there was a king …’ The end had not happened in a rainy country, but on a bone-dry Spanish hillside, three hundred metres from where Van der Valk had left a lot of blood, some splintered bone, a few fragments of gut, and a ten-seventy-five Mauser rifle bullet. Only a few more hundred metres away was the spot where Junot had crossed the Bidassoa, going south, where seven years later Soult had crossed, going north, where a hundred and fifty years later the last of the marshals had waited for a Dutch business man called Canisius to stop his car at the border, lying with a rifle in a patch of scrub.
*
Van der Valk had been in his office in Amsterdam, minding, mostly, his own business, when Mr Canisius was announced on the phone from the concierge’s office downstairs.
‘Wants to talk to someone in authority, he says.’
‘What’s he look like?’
‘Sort of a rich guy. His coat’s got a fur collar!’ The policeman at the reception desk had closed his glass partition and could not be heard in the passage. Not that Mr Canisius was trying to listen; he was contemplating his beautifully polished black shoes and looking bored.
‘Send him up to me,’ said Van der Valk.
It was a cold day in early March. Month of cold light dry days and cold wet blowy days. Month of colds. Van der Valk hadn’t a cold, but his pockets were full of Kleenex tissues folded small and put there by his wife, which came flying out like a conjuror’s pigeons every time he searched for an elastic band or an odd peppermint.
‘Are you the duty inspector?’
‘I am. Van der Valk is my name; would you like to sit down?’
Mr Canisius would like to sit down: he had not an athletic aspect and there had been two flights of stairs. Yes, he looked rich. The fur collar on the overcoat was black and sleek, his grey bird’s-eye trousers were dim but expensive, his shoes were handmade. Nothing showed of his top half but a Paisley silk muffler, though the careful cut of the overcoat hid, Van der Valk rather thought, a prosperous little tummy. He had a grey trilby hat lined with white silk; it had a blonde leather band stamped with gold paint, looked as though bought ten minutes ago.
The face was not particularly memorable, but it was impressive – big and bald, a Roman nose and very black eyebrows, large flat ears with long drooping lobes, wide pale lips with a droop at the corners, drooping flesh under alert little dark eyes that did not droop. Mr Canisius took his gloves off slowly to put in his hat, and at least threequarters of a carat of diamond winked from a pale bun of a hand with little bunches of black hair on it. The voice was veiled and rich, like a Wiener Melange coffee with chantilly cream floating on the top.
‘I must ask you to listen to a slightly unusual tale.’ He was taking his time about lighting a short torpedo cigar, dark tobacco; Brazilian or something, thought Van der Valk. There was a faint flavour, not quite a smell, about Mr Canisius, of vanilla and expensive coffee beans, or was that just the force of suggestion? ‘I will develop the background briefly’ – putting away a thin gold lighter. From a kind of inverted snobbery Van der Valk put a cheap French cigarette in his mouth and lit it with a match. He had a perfectly good lighter, which had needed a new flint for three days now. Words were coming rapidly from a practised lucid speaker.
‘You will have heard of the firm colloquially called the Sopexique. The founders made a considerable fortune in the last century, in undeveloped countries. It is a trade company with considerable interests in South and North America, and fewer, I am happy to say, in the Africa where it had its beginnings. The founder of this firm was called Marschal, a name unfamiliar to you. The name is still represented by a Monsieur Sylvestre Marschal, who inherited and expanded a very great fortune. There is real estate in Paris and Rome, in New York and Rio – I will quote no figures, but you may take my word for it that this is one of the largest fortunes in private hands anywhere. I say private, for it is distinct from the holdings of the company, in property and investments, which are themselves very considerable.’ A short pause to let all this sink in.
‘Monsieur Marschal is a man still vigorous and active. He is now over eighty years of age, but he visits the Paris office daily. Some few years ago he settled, for reasons I need not go into, a very large proportion of his wealth upon his only son, a man at present forty-two years old. Jean-Claude Marschal lives in Amsterdam, where the office of the Sopex is administered by me, and is the head of publicity and public relations, for the European offices.’
‘That sounds quite impressive,’ said Van der Valk; there were bits of this story he felt he had heard before. ‘Is it?’
No smile, but a slight slow nod of appreciation.
‘I am pleased you asked; the question shows you to have some judgement. No, Inspector, it is not. The Sopex is largely an investment trust, and where trade is still carried on it is principally in raw materials. We make no electr
ical equipment, no washing powders, no breakfast foods. Our advertising budget is laughable and our public relations virtually non-existent. Everybody has heard of us and nobody knows quite what it is we do, which is just the state of affairs we like. However, I do not wish to give you a notion that Mr Marschal is an incompetent tolerated because of his name. He is an able and intelligent man. His work, which is largely meeting, entertaining and communicating with the men all over the world with whom the company does business, is extremely efficient. He draws an excellent salary. He also commands the very large fortune I have mentioned, income from which flows into balances held in banks throughout Europe, in many different names. An arrangement made at varying times throughout his life by his father, at times of political unrest.’
Quite so.
‘And he’s in trouble, is he?’ It sounded banal. The spoilt child become the spoilt man. What had he done, knocked a pedestrian over while drunk driving?
‘We do not know whether he is in any trouble. He has chosen to disappear. If there is trouble, naturally we wish to prevent it. We do not wish his father, an elderly gentleman in frail health, to know of it. We wish to safeguard a number of things. Health, property, good name.’
‘He could not interfere much with company affairs, if I have understood.’
‘Naturally not, since decisions are taken in concert. However, the fortune, while of course private, is also a company heritage, if I may put it so. We should not like to see it damaged. There are also personal relationships, informal business footings and connexions – I need not elaborate.’
‘Has he any reason or motive to act purposely in a prejudicial way?’ bluntly: he was making notes now.
‘None.’
‘You sketch a man of no great parts, restricted to inconsequential activities in a company he owns, in a manner of speaking. He might feel slighted? Some real or imagined grievance, that might urge him to launch an attack of some kind?’
The King of the Rainy Country Page 1