The King of the Rainy Country

by Nicolas Freeling

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Moyng,’ came a triple grunt.

  At this Van der Valk knew it would be difficult. There are two kinds of French people, the nice ones and the sour ones. The sour ones can generally be melted, but it is sometimes hard work. Out of three pairs of eyes looked the glummest kind of peasant distrust.

  ‘Soup smells good.’

  ‘Ugh.’

  ‘Gentian.’ It had become a habit. The man with the cap had to go to the cellar to hunt for a fresh bottle, which he did with poor grace, as though it were an unheard-of demand on his time and energy.

  ‘Have one with me.’

  ‘I’ll take a glass of white,’ in a grudging mutter. The beefy man and the stringy woman seemed to be having an argument. It might have been something to do with potatoes, but the patois they talked was enigmatic. There were French words in it, and words that sounded like German, and an intonation sounding rather like Welsh. He couldn’t be certain they were talking about potatoes, but he knew the way all peasants have of sounding furiously angry while really remaining on quite amicable terms.

  ‘I’m looking for Mr Marschal.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘He lives here.’

  ‘Joh.’

  ‘Far?’

  ‘Ugh.’

  ‘In the village?’

  ‘Up the road.’

  ‘Not far, then?’

  ‘Joh.’

  ‘I’ll go and knock him up if you’ll point me the road out.’

  ‘Nobody there.’

  Oh, god, thought Van der Valk; not again.

  ‘Joh,’ said the woman suddenly. ‘Is too.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Someone there.’

  ‘Ugh. Gone.’

  ‘Shutters were up yesterday.’

  ‘Down today,’ said the thin man with relish.

  ‘I can always try,’ offered Van der Valk. ‘Have another glass?’

  ‘Joh.’

  The beefy man, who had been turning his empty glass round and round and gazing absorbed at the blank television screen, now took a hand.

  ‘Isn’t, neither. Auto’s there.’

  ‘Have one too,’ said Van der Valk hospitably. ‘What about you, Madame?’

  ‘Ugh. Give me a sour stomach.’

  ‘Spot of prunelle?’

  ‘Joh.’

  This was perhaps the key with which Shakespeare unlocked his heart, thought Van der Valk, who was beginning to feel slightly drunk amid all this nonsense. The woman thawed suddenly. ‘You show’m th’way, Albert.’

  Albert seemed to be the beefy one. He was not at all easy to detach from his glass, but after taking off his beret twice to scratch, unwinding his scarf and putting it back again, and accepting one of Van der Valk’s cigarettes, he got unstuck.

  Albert had a tractor outside. He climbed into the saddle, pointed up the side street with a finger like an aubergine, and said, ‘Can’t miss’m. Got green shutters.’

  Van der Valk felt there were twenty houses at least with green shutters.

  ‘Red house,’ Albert admitted, and turned the starter key.

  There was a house built of the Vosges sandstone, and it did have green shutters, and they were down. It was not the isolated log-cabin of fantasy, but a perfectly ordinary house in a village street, standing alone but elbowed in on by bigger neighbours. There was a stone wall with house-leeks growing on it, and a wooden door on the paint of which the village children had written obscenities. Along the wall was a wider double door, through which nobody had passed today, he thought, for the wet snow was untouched.

  Inside the smaller door, which gave to his hand, no one had been either – not for some hours, at least, though that was not much help. The house was set cornerwise towards the street, with a tiny first floor balcony built out across the angle; it was a small house, but old, and remarkably solid. There was an oak front door with a narrow curtained porch window. He disregarded this for the moment and followed the wide paved path that led round to the back. Here was a sort of little yard, with an old-fashioned French wash-house and an open shed, in which were several empty wine bottles, a pile of kindling wood, and a dustbin. The back door led obviously to the kitchen.

  There was no sign of any activity, but between the door and the shed stood an expensive auto, a black Lancia saloon, two and a half litre. The showroom polish was still on it under the thin layer of snow, and the label of the Strasbourg garage was untarnished: Van der Valk had to grin a little. That Jean-Claude – he bought new cars and left them lying about the way you or I leave a half-empty box of matches. He tapped on the door of the kitchen – the shutters were down inside. Nothing happened. He frowned, and tried the kitchen door. It yielded, and he frowned some more. He got down on a cold, wet, snowy step, squirmed with his hand, got the bottom of the shutter off the floor, and wriggled under it, not at all an easy job. It made a hell of a noise but nobody came to inquire what he might think he was doing. He didn’t like all this a bit.

  It was perhaps the extreme ordinariness of the house that struck one most. It might have been any suburban kitchen he was standing in, with its very ordinary gas-stove, refrigerator, whitewood cupboards faced with Formica and table to match. Everything was neat and tidy and, as far as he could see, clean. There was still some soup in a pot on the stove, onions in a metal rack. In the fridge was meat and milk, an opened packet of butter, half a tin of tomato purée, a few slices of ham still in greaseproof paper, a plastic box half full of grated cheese. It was like a million French homes where the wife has gone to work as well as the husband; the house seems dead and empty, but will come to life again suddenly at six that evening.

  The only difference was that this house was cold. He looked at the radiator – its tap was turned on.

  In the hall was a cupboard with a pierced back for ventilation, through to the front porch, and a wiremesh front. It held a whole camembert and a piece of roquefort.

  He did not go at once into either of the downstairs rooms, but down to the cellar. Everything here too had a look of reassuring permanence, of a house lived in for many years, kept by a careful housewife. Nothing could give one more the feeling of stability and a peaceful, patterned, regulated life than these brooms and dusters, these tins of paint and polish, these bottles of turpentine and caustic soda and eau-de-Javel, the vacuum cleaner hanging in its place and the shoe brushes in their tin. There was even a solid carpenter’s table with a backboard and tools hanging on nails. It was the basement of an elderly couple whose children are grown up, who own their house and have a little money in the bank, who grow some vegetables in the garden and keep a few chickens. An ex-foreman in the Post Office or on the railways, who likes fishing and taking his gun out now and again after a rabbit, proud of his tomato plants and his dahlias, who has a couple of bottles of good wine and a box of cigars put away for when his son-in-law comes at the New Year and the Toussaint, who is to be found in the local café every evening between six and seven for two pernods and a game of belote.

  Not the house of Jean-Claude Marschal.

  Van der Valk went through to the back basement and the coal-cellar. A good half-ton of coke was piled under the chute, and there was wood chopped alongside an old stump scarred with axecuts. Old packing cases stacked for kindling; a pile of neatly sawed logs, another pile of yellowing Couriers d’Alsace; the floor was swept with a kitchen broom that stood in its appointed place next to the axe, and a one-man crosscut saw hung where it should on two rusty nails. It was all so perfect that he had a rush of aching homesickness at the peace and order of it all.

  The furnace was very slightly warm. He opened the door. It had not been raked and was full of ash; he felt the ash with his hand and drew the hand back quickly: grey and dead as it looked it was still holding heat. That furnace had been stoked anyway inside fifteen hours; it was the type one makes up twice a day. Van der Valk trudged back up to street level.

  Silence and a little dust lay on the polish
ed furniture, faded cheap carpets lay on the polished floorboards, everything was old fashioned, provincial and ugly. An ornate radio had a vase of flowers standing on it: the flowers were still fresh. On one corner was a dresser with a glass front; here Mother had kept the good plates for visitors, the liqueur glasses, and the souvenirs brought home by soldier sons from Indo-China. They were gone. In their place stood six porcelain figures. Van der Valk opened the door and took one out to handle it: he did not know much about such things, but he knew that this was Dresden work from the best period. That marquis dancing, that coquettish and sophisticated shepherd-girl cuddling a monkey, that splendid parrot – those could be by Kändler. And those were not acquired by an ex-foreman on the SNCF – those came from Jean-Claude. In which case they were quite certainly Kändler, and worth at a guess five hundred pounds apiece.

  He tried the other room. Ah … Jean-Claude had been here. There was a piece bought from an antique dealer – yes, when he looked more closely all these pieces had been bought from the kind of provincial dealer that specializes in ancient farmhouse and peasant furnishings and sells them to filmstars from Paris who wish to give their country houses an authentic look. Authenticity from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as this was, costs many millions. There was a sort of window-seat that gleamed like water with age and loving handling. The wood was dark and had violent unexpected swirls and courses in it of a sort of burnt orange that had been yellow three hundred years before. What could it be? Perhaps box? He had no notion. On it stood a different kind of collection, to which Van der Valk got down on his knees. Stones. Precious stones mounted on little socles of wood, of bronze, of iron, of crystal. Opal matrix, rough turquoise, raw emerald. He had no idea of the names; the geologist distinguishes hundreds and can recognize the provenance of each, for these brilliant colours and exquisite shapes have each their individual unique home. That delicate rose pink is from the Urals and that peacock green from the Canadian Rockies, that amarynth quartz is only found in St Helena and that amazing dark red came from the volcanoes of the Puy de Dôme. Amethysts from Brazil and jade from Tibet; rock crystal more precious than its weight in uncut diamond, and opal eggs that are made by upland Indians on the Paraguay border. The beryl and the sardonyx, the ruby and the chrysoprase…

  They had not only been kept dusted: they had been picked up and loved and handled. They had been felt by the toes of Greek sponge-fishers, stroked the throat of a seven-year-old girl, been contoured by blind men’s fingers, played with by mandarin emperors and little Egyptian boys with bare bottoms and ophthalmia. That one had passed from a Congo pygmy with sleeping sickness to a colonial administrator with blackwater, had been brought to France by a syphilitic German Legionary to bed down in the chalk of arthritic fingers under the arcades of the Palais Royal. No dirt, no vileness, no meanness, no sickness could touch its beauty and purity. Poor Jean-Claude.

  Van der Valk straightened up with a sigh. In the hall there was a rifle on one of those ornate weapon stands beloved of French hunters, all fake St Hubert, with antlers and carved wood. He looked at it incuriously; it was time to go upstairs. The wide shallow stairs of polished oak creaked under his feet, and he had the absurd shame one always has at making too much noise. The rifle was a much heavier calibre than one finds usually in people’s houses, he thought vaguely: every Frenchman that lives in the country keeps a .22 for rats, cats, hooded crows and the fox he always suspects may be after the chickens – but that was the kind of thing one took to shoot lions with.

  Light came through the wooden shutters in thin splinters and gave a dim unreal look to the bedroom. But there were two people in the big bed, real enough, even if they were dead. There was still a tiny trace of the sharp scent that stings the inside of the nose, which comes from two copper-jacket seven-sixty-five pistol cartridges. Mayerling …

  He had to go and find the gendarmerie, he would have to explain who he was and what he was doing, they would have to call the lieutenant – he supposed there would be one in Saverne – and he, after listening to Van der Valk’s ridiculous tale that went on half an hour too long, would very likely decide he would have to ring Strasbourg, making faces at the idea of Authority, possibly even Paris, come to make faces in their turn in his own district.

  *

  It all went off exactly as he had suspected. While they were waiting for the lieutenant of the gendarmerie, the doctor, the magistrate, the technical men, and the ambulance, Van der Valk sat in the downstairs room with the precious stones in them. There were three or four books scattered about: paperback thrillers of the Série Noire type which he did not even glance at, a cheap edition of the poems of Baudelaire. Yes, he could quite see that; Baudelaire was the kind of person that would appeal to Jean-Claude Marschal. He had largely forgotten the poems, they had never appealed to him. Wasn’t it Sartre who called Baudelaire a deliberate failure, who had chosen a bad conscience, chosen to feel guilty, chosen sterility? Not that he cared much for Sartre! but these particular remarks had always seemed to him like sound sense: the fact was that the fellow had been a drip. Not altogether his own fault – Sartre had exaggerated, of course, sympathy with people he didn’t approve of not being his strongest point. Van der Valk started to read the poems; he had nothing else to do. Thinking would come later. This was not a thinking time; this was the bureaucratic time-lapse between pressing the button and getting an answer.

  Spleen – now how did one translate spleen? Depression? – too weak. Ennui? – too vague. Manic depression – too forcible and too clinical. He was sure the Germans had a good compound abstract, five syllables long, meaning black-self-disgust-Supposed in-medieval-times-to-be-governed-by-internal-organ. Spleen was untranslatable. The answer was that it didn’t need translating; everybody understood it.

  He read the poem with a fresh eye; he hadn’t had it under his eye in years. It was a lot better than he had thought it.

  ‘I am like the king of a rainy country: rich – and impotent: young – and very old. Who despises the bowing-down of his preceptors, is as bored with his dogs as with all his other creatures, whom nothing now, neither game nor falcon, can cheer. Not even subjects come to die beneath his balcony. A grotesque song from the indulged clown can no longer unwrinkle the forehead of this cruelly ill man: his fleurdelysed bed has become a tomb, and the ladies in waiting, who find any prince good looking, can think up no more lewd costumes to drag a smile from this young skeléton. The expert that makes his gold has never managed to purify the corrupt element in his being, and in the bloodbaths the Romans showed us, recalled to their memory by ageing tyrants, he has failed to rewarm the dulled stupor of a corpse in which blood no longer flows, but Lethe’s green water.’

  The lieutenant of gendarmerie had read Baudelaire, perhaps, but had other things to think about, and no time at the present moment for poems. (It turned out later that at his office desk, when he had spare time, he read Pascal.) Since this was his district, he was mostly interested in what these people were doing here. There wasn’t much he could do about the two in the bed; they were dead, and there was nothing the police could do to help that, was there? He found a few stray facts to go on in the village: Mr Marschal, pronounced like Marchal, a common name anywhere in France, had owned this house for five years or more, bought it after the old couple had died, from a nephew in Paris with no interest in a house in some Vosges village he had never heard of. Mr Marschal had not come here often, seven or eight times a year, perhaps; mostly for two or three days only; always alone; longest anybody remembered his staying was a fortnight. Nobody had bothered about this; the world was full of eccentric people that left their houses empty. An old woman in the village had had the keys. She had been very well paid to go there every second day or so, to keep things clean and in order. She was accustomed to light the stove once a week to get the place dry and aired.

  Yes, she had seen him arrive with a young girl. No, that hadn’t struck her. She had always thought he would turn up with a woman sooner or lat
er. No, he had been laughing and joking. Not depressed-seeming a bit, if you asked her. Like a couple in love rather than a couple having a furtive week-end.

  *

  The lieutenant was not happy with Van der Valk. This rigmarole of millionaires and winter sports had really nothing to do with him, he conveyed. There might be something odd about it, he agreed, but that was for Strasbourg to decide. A double death had taken place on his territory, straightforward suicide pact, and he had a lot of forms to fill in. He thought that Van der Valk had better repeat his tale to the criminal divisionnaire in Strasbourg.

  Police headquarters in Strasbourg is in a street with a gentle, innocent name. The Street of the Blue Cloud. It has a narrow, heavy frontage, imitation classic, and an archway where uniformed agents stand around bored scratching themselves with submachine-guns. They do not look in the least brutal or sinister; kindly, thickset, family men with corns and five o’clock shadow who do difficult and unpleasant work with good humour and get paid little enough for it.

  Inside there is a cobbled eighteenth-century courtyard with radio vans and squad cars parked, and the sober black Peugeots of senior officers. Beyond the courtyard is a big building with a monstrous chill double staircase upon which the most fairy of police feet falls like a rifle-shot. Van der Valk gave all this a professionally appreciative look and decided that it was even dingier than the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, but a great deal gayer. He was directed on his way by a good-humoured old-China-hand that had thirty years on the cops and still nothing wrong with his digestion: a young agent in the hall was doing an imitation of his superior officer for the benefit of two more with a good deal of schoolboy laughter, and the plainclothes man upstairs, walking between room three-oh-four and three-seventy with an armful of files, was whistling ‘Vissi d’arte’ with verve and some scandalous fioriture. Nobody paid the faintest attention: now at home, thought Van der Valk, some piss-vinegar commissaire would have popped his nose out straight off to complain about levity.