The King of the Rainy Country

by Nicolas Freeling

‘You have not quite the right picture,’ unruffled. ‘I understand that such a conclusion might be drawn, but to say that Monsieur Marschal has no great parts is inexact. He has unquestioned ability. A far greater say in affairs, numerous positions of real responsibility, have been open to him at all times and repeatedly offered. He has always rejected them. I do not pretend to understand why. Business matters have no grasp, possibly, upon his mind. He has always been content with the work he chose. I have only one criticism of him, that he preferred to use his charm rather than his mind.’

  ‘What were his interests? What did engage his mind?’

  ‘That is a puzzling question. I have asked it myself. When young, the usual amusements of a sportive nature. I know nothing of such. He was an excellent horseman, skier, pilot of racing cars. He played polo, sailed yachts –all the conventional pursuits. He was very gifted at all of them, I am told. I am also told that he lacked perseverance, and always loosened the rein at the moment he should have tightened it. He did not want to win enough. It is too easy for me, he used to exclaim.’

  ‘He’s married?’

  ‘Yes. I will forestall you and state that it is not a stormy marriage and that there have been no upheavals nor scandals.’

  ‘Does he chase women?’

  ‘In a lacklustre way.’

  ‘You mean that he’s occasionally seen in restaurants with other people’s wives but nobody has ever got in an uproar?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It comes down to this: he has vanished, without fuss or furore, quite simply, with no indication where or why.’

  ‘That is exact.’

  ‘And you simply want him found.’

  ‘Equally. It is puzzling, you understand. There may have been a rootlessness, a restlessness, but it has been replaced by many years of calm and stability. He has shown no evidence of emotional disturbance, is not given to extravagance or a parade of wealth, and is in perfect health.’

  ‘There is one thing I do not see, Mr Canisius, and that is why you come to me. You confirm that he has done nothing illegal. There is no suggestion of fraud or false pretence. He is just missing, and since there is a fortune involved, that is disturbing. I can see that, but isn’t this a job for a private detective?’

  Mr Canisius smiled then, very slightly, for the first time. He got up and settled his coat, though it had remained precisely buttoned throughout the interview. He picked up his hat and examined it for signs of contamination. Finding none he put it on his head. He drew on his glove.

  ‘I do not think I need answer that question, Mr Van der Valk. I think, though, that you may receive an answer to it.’ He bowed slightly with perfect politeness, opened the door, and was gone.

  *

  Van der Valk shrugged. He scratched his jaw, then behind his ear, reading over the notes he had made. There were any number of possibilities. The man could have had a row with his wife without it being public. He could have done something to make him the victim of a blackmail attempt. He could have just felt like getting away from it all for a while and forgotten to tell anyone. Mr Canisius might have told him a lot of eyewash. Good grief, there were a million tensions or disturbances that might exist in the life of a very rich man to explain his bunking. None of them were of much interest to him: his job was the detection and prevention of infringements of the criminal code in the city of Amsterdam.

  He shut the notebook and picked up a file he had been interrupted in reading. He then felt a tickle in the middle of his back; a hair must be lodged there. This was altogether more complicated and interesting; with his free hand he dragged at his tie, undid his collar-button and poked a pencil down the back of his neck. Mr Canisius was interesting, and so no doubt was Mr Jean-Claude Marschal, and it was all very mysterious, but the tickle was altogether more urgent.

  The pencil was not long enough. There was a wooden ruler somewhere; he was hunting for it in a drawer when the phone rang.

  ‘Van der Valk.’ There it was; he slid it down luxuriantly and slalomed with both shoulders.

  ‘Hoofd Commissaris here,’ an elderly fussy tone, familiar to him. He left the ruler sticking where it was; this was the head of the Amsterdam Police, and his Commander in Chief.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You’re the desk duty officer over there, are you?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  There was a long pause as though he were talking to someone with his hand on the mouthpiece. Old boy’s voice sounded a scrap querulous. Had there been a complaint again about the towels in the washroom getting dirty so quickly? This was just the kind of thing that would bring out all his Highness’ administrative and detective talents. Van der Valk hated those towels; they were the horrible mechanical type that buzzed and clicked when you pulled at them, and then let you have a grudging ten centimetres. Last week he had given a brisk jerk, and brought the whole damn lot out like a huge hateful roll of lavatory paper.

  ‘You have had a call from a certain Mr Canisius.’

  So there the wind lay.

  ‘Yes sir. Missing person.’

  ‘You will act upon this request, Van der Valk. Yourself, personally, immediately. You are detached from your normal duties; your superiors will be notified. You will take steps to find this missing person.’

  Well … That was categorical enough. Was it really his Highness that had decided he would be a good choice for finding missing millionaires? Or was it conceivably Mr Canisius?

  ‘Ha-hm. You are not permitted to use official transport or official channels. Your expenses will be allowed, within reason. You need no help. You will work quietly, discreetly. Courtesy, Van der Valk, caution, tact – quiet. You understand, hm? Is that clear? Despatch, energy, acuity – but quiet. Hm?’

  ‘Perfectly clear, sir.’

  ‘You may be called on to cross the frontier. That is authorized. No authorization for any appeal to the administration in this or any other country unless circumstances expressly demand it.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘You can begin at once. The sub-inspector will take over your duty. The Commissaire will be in his office this afternoon.’

  ‘Understood, sir.’

  The voice had a rasping, nagging note, worse than lavatory towels.

  ‘Mr Canisius expects you at his office at two this afternoon.’

  ‘Very well, sir.’ The phone had clanked crossly. Well … Thunder on the left was, as far as he could recall, considered a bad omen by the Roman augurs.

  Mr Canisius, or the Sopexique, whichever way you cared to read it, possessed one hell of a drag. They didn’t need publicity; oh dear no. They picked up the telephone, and asked for the Minister.

  Big firms did that, of course; there wasn’t anything immoral about it. He recalled a recent case, not unlike this one; a fairly important brick in one of the huge industrial pyramids who vanished on his way back from a conference in Paris. The whole police apparatus of the entire country had been turned out, with remarkable speed, and the man had been found a week later in an obscure waterside village. The very simple explanation was that the poor bugger had gone off the rails with overwork and had been within a sheet of paper’s thickness of going mataglap; his psychiatrist had prescribed an immediate complete break and a fishing-rod. So distraught had the wretched fellow been – pity the poor executive – that he had forgotten even to tell his wife. She had rushed about bedevilled with anxiety and the press had got the whole tale.

  The press hadn’t got this one.

  There is also a difference, he thought, between ringing the bell for a rabble of country gendarmerie and going on tiptoe to the Chief of Police with instructions to detach a full inspector of the criminal brigade, quietly, courteously, tactfully. With all his expenses paid, of course! Poor old Highness must have really had his arm twisted.

  The inference was, presumably, that the Sopexique had just as much drag or more as a firm that was a household word over the entire world. If whatever was good for General Motors was good for
the nation it was also a logical conclusion that whatever was bad for the Sopex was bad, very, for several nations.

  Which was not exactly going to make things easy for him …

  He went on scratching with the ruler while he made notes. He decided that the courtesy campaign had better begin with going home, having the best lunch he could lay his hands on, putting on a clean shirt, asking his wife to pack a weekend case, and immediately having a quick super-de-luxe haircut. He would then put on his new suit, very dark brown, from Olde Englande – he didn’t know who he mightn’t be meeting.

  *

  The tourist, getting the quick rundown on Rembrandt, is told that what makes the city of Amsterdam notable is, firstly, twice as many waterways and bridges as Venice and, secondly, the very fine seventeenth-century architecture. It is true that at a time when the glories of Paris and Vienna were still to come, when the political capital of the world was Madrid and the diplomatic and artistic capital was Venice, Amsterdam was the world’s commercial and banking capital. The tourist, seeing little evidence of all this, is inclined to be sceptical. For with less intelligence than Venice, less than Innsbruck, less even than St Malo, the city fathers have allowed the automobile full liberty and destroyed practically all the beauty.

  There was beauty; there was a great deal. The money-grubbing materialists of Amsterdam were among the world’s foremost art patrons; they loved beauty and paid money for it. If artists died broke or in the workhouse, like Hals, or sold pictures to pay the baker, like Vermeer, it was not altogether the fault of the money-grubbers, for these vulgar bankers and burgomasters built themselves superb houses and filled them with beauty.

  The houses can still be seen, lying in a tight neat belt around the heart of Amsterdam in four concentric circles. The Singel, the Gentlemen’s Waterway, the Emperors’ Waterway, the Princes’ Waterway. Puffy names that sound ludicrous to our ears: these men were, however, all they claimed.

  The friends of the automobile claim that the belt strangles Amsterdam. They would like to see all the waterways filled in and made into ring roads, with Underground Parking Lots. The city fathers squirm and snivel, and do nothing.

  The beautiful houses are degraded and squalid, and nothing is left but the façades; the insides have been devoured like cheese by the cheesemites of a dingier and pettier commerce than that of the seventeenth century. In each house there are four or five three-ha’penny pricecutters, and as many worthy people crammed into garrets, politely called flats, above. Sometimes a very-important-business has spread its fat bottom over a whole house, and embellished it with a Reception Hall, and massive-marble-and-mahogany, and curly bronze letters, and safes with Deeds, and an air of weight suitable to Atlas.

  There are plenty of bombastic nobodies, Delegations and Missions and Consuls, and there are plenty of slummy shysters. If there are two or three of these lovely houses in private ownership still, it is a little miracle.

  As far as Van der Valk was concerned there were none. (Does not the Palace of Justice itself take up several hundred metres of hydra ugliness along the Prinsengracht?) He had been in many of these houses to sort out anything from a fraudulent book-keeper to a phony palmist, but private ownership on the waterways encourages nobody’s eyes. The houses will be blind and shuttered, with a door that never opens, for against the basement railings bicycles are piled like bones at Verdun. Typists and clerks clatter on the minuscule cobbled pavement all day long. The business men’s famous autos are stacked along the water like the tins of salmon in a grocer’s they so resemble. There is dust and straw and dirty newspaper, amid which dogs and humans sniff and pee and rummage about. Vans bump and grind; there is a horrible racket, a bad smell and no room at all. Van der Valk, stepping delicately like a cat, arrived at the offices of the Sopexique, which had, of course, a house to itself.

  There was a very small, very highly polished brass plate, and immediately inside the door, allowing room for one thin person to put his mouth somewhere near the concierge’s forbidding peephole, there was another door, armour-plated and massive, that would yield to nothing but a teeny button that lived under the concierge’s bunion. He showed his card, murmured, and waited humbly while checking went on over the telephone.

  Mr Canisius lived in an office like that in many very rich businesses. It was clean, tidy and quiet, and had at least the merit of no pretensions at all.

  ‘Sit down … I will tell you outright that I do not wish you to question the staff here. I have made very careful inquiries. No eccentricity, no irregularity has been found whatever.’

  ‘I will tell you something, equally outright, with your permission,’ said Van der Valk, pleasantly and politely. ‘I will question whom I please, discreetly, according to my instructions, or I will go quietly and catch the plague and you can find someone élse.’

  Mr Canisius smiled very faintly.

  ‘I make no restriction outside this building. I will give you the addresses of Mrs Marschal, a doctor, a notary, and the last person known to have spoken to Mr Marschal, a man with whom he was friendly. You must take my word for it that nobody in this office can help you.’

  ‘I’ll take your word with pleasure right here and now. What I learn elsewhere may change my mind.’

  ‘In that case I will give you my home address. Telephone if you wish, come to see me if necessary – but do not, please, call or telephone here.’

  ‘Who had most to do with him, here?’

  ‘His personal secretary. Very well, she is a discreet person: I will allow the exception. Outside the office, please.’

  He picked up the telephone.

  ‘Twenty-three. Miss Kramer? I wish you to meet someone this evening for a short talk. Five-thirty? Café Polen? – that suit you?’ to Van der Valk. Nod. ‘Take that as settled, Miss Kramer. I need say no more, I think? Thank you.’

  Van der Valk stood up, took the piece of paper handed to him with neat writing upon it, tucked it in his breast pocket, bowed and opened the door.

  ‘Telephone me from time to time, Mr Van der Valk,’ came the polite murmur. ‘Shall we say at least once a week. I am always at home. Oftener, if you have anything of importance.’

  He nodded and closed the door.

  The piece of paper had ‘From F. R. Canisius’ engraved on it. It carried the firm’s Amsterdam address, was banknote quality, and had no little pictures or slogans whatever.

  Mr Canisius lived in a dinky villa well outside the town, the kind that has glass walls and photo-electric cells to open doors, but all the other addresses, he was pleased to see, were within a couple of hundred metres of where he stood.

  At the notary’s, he was let in straight away, treated with freezing distaste in the darkest office he had ever seen, as dim and dreary as a pine forest in Lapland on Midwinter Day, and told nothing whatever. The private affairs, financial circumstances, testamentary dispositions and family relationships of Mr Marschal were no concern whatever either of the police, or the Sopex, or all the Canisiuses in creation. He left with a flea in his ear and a suspicion that Canisius had known this all perfectly and staged a tiny trap for him.

  The doctor was a lot more difficult of access, but a great deal more forthcoming. Not that it helped.

  ‘I gave him a routine checkover once a year, and apart from that he consulted me occasionally for something banal like laryngitis. Constitution of an athlete, lived a regular and pretty sober life, no weaknesses whatever. Sorry I can’t help you. No handy medical way out, I’m afraid. No epilepsy, syphilis, tuberculosis, nothing. No neurotic fears or fantasies – or if he had he never told me about them. Anything disabling I’d certainly have noticed. You can rule out a fugue, or any sort of syndrome. No physiological disability at all; heart, lungs and liver of a man of twenty. Psychological troubles …’ Shrug.

  ‘Did he ever consult a doctor of psychiatry or whatever, to your knowledge?’

  ‘No, not to my knowledge. I’d be surprised, frankly. There’d be a certain neuropsychic pat
tern. He’d had various slight injuries, ski-ing accidents or whatnot, but no disturbance or dilapidation. If he hadn’t better health than you and me put together, my dear inspector, I’ll eat that telephone directory.’

  ‘When was it you last saw him?’ A file was flipped through.

  ‘Last October, a little virus infection; there was quite a bit floating at the time. August, renewal of vaccinations. February, a back-garden strep throat. Three calls in thirteen months.’

  ‘Many thanks.’

  ‘Many regrets.’

  Mrs Marschal was only just across the road in the Keizersgracht. He had not been surprised, since there are plenty of expensive flats there, but he found a house; a blind closed wall of aristocratic privacy. He had read of such things but never seen one. He walked up steep stone steps, a bit awestruck in spite of himself, and found a bell with some difficulty, concealed in intricate but pure baroque wrought-ironwork.

  Nothing happened, and he got a feeling that he had been observed through a periscope and put down as some yob, selling things and knowing no better than to ring here. He had nearly given up when a soft voice surprised him; his back was to the door.

  ‘Monsieur wishes?’

  Astonishment; there stood a majordomo, in full classic costume, striped yellow waistcoat and all. Nestor?!

  ‘I should very much like to see Madame if she is at home. Here is my card.’

  ‘I am sorry to disappoint you, sir, but Madame cannot receive you unless she is expecting you.’ Courteous regret, in the correct, pedantic Dutch of someone who has learned the language off gramophone records.

  The answer is, of course, to say ‘Police’ but he had been told … Was this chap perhaps Spanish?

  ‘I hope,’ he said slowly, stumbling a little in his elementary Spanish, ‘that Madame agrees when she looks at the card.’ On the back he had written ‘Canisius’.

  A smile, through the mask of courteous gravity.

  ‘I am Portuguese, Monsieur. I will certainly ask. Excuse my hesitation; the instruction is formal. If Monsieur will give himself the trouble of coming in …’