But one needed amateurs too, as Holland showed. A country needed huge armies of thoroughly trained professional administrators, and surely it needed large numbers of poets and philosophers, eccentric persons who knew nothing about productivity statistics but all about Etruscan civilizations? It wasn’t enough to fill your government with eager beavers that all had a first-class degree in economics.
Take this situation. What could a professional policeman do in these circumstances? His famous rules and procedures were all meaningless – nobody had broken any laws. A professional policeman, if he had any sense, would have washed his hands of it at once, turned his back resolutely. Mr Marschal’s wanderlust, Mr Canisius’ devious twitching at the thread, the tortuous whims of Anne-Marie and the over-simple, over-ingenuous impulses of little Dagmar – any sensible policeman would shake his head with a smile and return to the comfortable, professional, exactly posed-and-pegged-out problem of how to stop jewel thefts.
Of course the fatal mistake – going after Marschal at all – had been right at the start; the Chief Commissaire of Police, a professional and a bureaucrat to his fingertips, had fallen head-first, delightedly, into the pit directly Canisius had stepped with his beautiful shoes on the concealed button that released the trapdoor. Van der Valk had not been able to turn back; the typical Dutch mistake had been made of fiddling obsessively at the individual till he got back into line.
He felt sure that in England they would have been wiser. A Commissioner or a Superintendent or whatever it was they had there – the high pooha of the police – would have listened to Canisius with old Etonian courtesy, and murmured in a veiled way that under the circumstances he did not really see his way … there were, of course, or so he understood, er—private detectives (dirtiest of all dirty words) …
A private detective, the beautiful unspoiled darling of a detective story, would of course have leaped straight into bed with Anne-Marie, given Canisius the old right hook straight to the shiny false teeth, beaten Marschal by two seconds flat on the Olympic Piste at Innsbruck, had the tanzmariechen fall in love with him instead, and been paid ten thousand pounds on the last page by grateful millionaires.
And here I am, thought Van der Valk ruefully. I’ve made every mistake I could have. I haven’t been professional, I’m not clever enough, being much too Dutch, to be an amateur, and now, as a fitting climax to so much inefficacity, I’m driving across the whole breadth of France in a hired Renault when, obviously, I should be burning up the highway in James Bond’s Aston Martin. What I need is a world like Kipling’s India, where natives are natives, subalterns are sensitive and self-sacrificing, the whole world is ruled by the Widow of Windsor, and there isn’t a single thing that a twenty-one-year-old journalist doesn’t understand perfectly in the space of fifteen hundred words. Ichabod: a glory is departed.
Fair Ichabod O’Man – Mr Polly was one of Van der Valk’s favourite characters. (Now if Mr Polly had tried that lark nowadays, the police would have had him in a second less than no time for Conveying Passengers without a Licence. What, in charge of a punt, and no diploma for punting?)
A Dutch policeman was really good for only one thing, and that was filling in a form explaining how some other very naughty asocial individual had filled in another form incorrectly.
His petrol tank was getting low and he had to keep a lookout for one of those large French notice-boards saying TOTAL 2 KM. That was it; nothing was really important any more. All poetry and all wisdom were in that simple phrase. Total two kilometres. Total knowledge, total safety, total destruction. Only two kilometres to go.
The alert reader will have noticed that he was very tired. Total two kay em. Everything else, to quote Mr Polly, was sheer sesquippledan verblejuice.
*
A sensible policeman – a professional policeman – would have stopped several times on the road for solid provincial French meals, a good night’s sleep between sheets. Come to that, a professional policeman would never have embarked at all upon as ridiculous a goosechase as this one. He would have rung up Canisius. He would have rung up the gendarmerie of the Department of the Basses-Pyrénées and told them to stop a grey Opel Rekord with a bundle of skis on the roof. After all, from Strasbourg to Biarritz is just about one thousand kilometres by road. Twelve hours’ driving; if you were very young and resilient, an excellent driver in a powerful auto, and you had had a good night’s peaceful rest, and you started at dawn, and had good weather and fairly uncrowded roads, you could do it in a day with a two-hour break for lunch. You would need to be pretty good. Either a famous amateur in an Aston Martin – back again – or a professional seasoned on intercontinental rallies.
Van der Valk was doing it because there was no space here for a professional any more. He had no evidence that Anne-Marie even had the gun, he had no evidence that she was even going to Biarritz. Nobody in the world would have believed him if he shouted at the top of his voice that he knew, with absolute certainty, she was heading for a professional financier in a fur-collared overcoat and a Paisley silk scarf and a grey trilby hat – how would types like Canisius dress themselves in a place like Biarritz? – with the fixed idea of planting a bullet in him: it was too unlikely. Things like that do not happen, least of all in Biarritz, a pleasant town once favoured by His Majesty the King of England and Emperor of India, and now thought highly of by the new French upper class known as the ‘cadres’.
The fact was that the cleavage between professionals and amateurs was here shown at its sharpest. Marschal – the old Marschal – had been a survivor of nineteenth-century banditry. A brilliant adventurer, like an American railroad king. Just the type Kipling would have recognized and appreciated – Harvey Cheyne. In our days, a sort of coelacanth. Everybody is convinced it is extinct, and the rediscovery creates a fearful hullabaloo in scientific circles.
Canisius was the modern professional financier, at home in modern circles of power and influence. The presence of the old man, that glaring anachronism, had stuck in his throat for years. But senility and delusion helping, he had successfully set Monsieur Sylvestre Marschal aside. Remained the young Harvey Cheyne, Jean-Claude. He would have liked to tip him overboard into the Atlantic, but financiers don’t do such things.
Anne-Marie, and not her husband, was the last of the Marschals. It was ironic; the old man had done all he could to improve his ‘image’, as the publicity boys had it: the formal, beautiful, sombre house in St Cloud was a peculiar setting for a man like that, whom one imagined more easily in a restless, vulgar atmosphere – the hotel room in Lisbon: wasn’t that where ‘Mister five per cent’ – in many ways a similar figure – had lived and died? And he had wished to found a dynasty like the Rothschilds. That was a good example; they were as professional as you could wish, but they knew the value of the amateur mind. Old Marschal had succeeded in marrying his son off to a most suitable person, convent bred, the chateau-dweller, with a considerable fortune in land, an ancient name, and Parisian first-night looks. A little wild, but ski-ing was quite a respectable sport, and she would be tamed by chinchilla furs and diamonds.
But she had had a streak of buccaneer’s blood that ran true to old Sylvestre’s, and she had somewhere a confused feeling of loyalty to the Marschals. She had seen the direction behind the mortally slow and tortuous insinuations of Canisius and his tribe, she had seen the way the old man had been gradually trimmed by legal sidling, she had tried to whip up Jean-Claude and he had failed her. With his aristocratic instincts, his long nose in which money stank, his fine hands to which the stinking pennies would stick if he let them – a Marschal! Who could tell what efforts she had made, what pressure she had put on the man before he bolted? He had bolted, and had promptly caved in utterly.
And now Anne-Marie was on her way to strike a last blow for the Marschals, with a rifle. God knew what she was thinking; quite possibly she imagined that that was what the old man would have done in similar circumstances.
She had known something about
the little house in a Vosges village. The extraordinary performance Jean-Claude had put on at Innsbruck must have destroyed much of what balance she had left. For – Van der Valk saw that now clearly – the man had not run away from him, nor from the police in general, nor from Canisius: he had run away from his wife. And he had taken absurd melodramatic risks to make it clear to her. She had got the message; she had gone to the little house for one last plea, perhaps. Jealousy of the girl had complicated and confused her ideas further, and Jean-Claude had reacted in one way that she had not, perhaps, foreseen. Or was she familiar with the tale of Crown Prince Rudolf von Hapsburg?
What had the police of Wien done when they heard about the events of Mayerling? It was thought they had known, that they had been warned beforehand. They had been sensible: they had refused to know, refused to meddle. They had shown more sense than the Chief Commissaire of the Amsterdam Police, who had been impressed by the Sopexique, and had had a real Dutch mistrust of the house in the Keizersgracht and its inhabitants …
He was too tired. He had started at night, after a difficult day: he had had a good few thousand kilometres in his bones before beginning this absurd chase. For the sake of the shaky old man in Paris, for the sake of an innocent girl’s parents, for the sake of Jean-Claude, who had made an effort for a scrap of peace and happiness, and yes, for the sake of Anne-Marie herself – he had liked her – he wasn’t stirring up the whole French police apparatus. He was a fool and an amateur, but this had to be done in an amateurish way. He was going against a woman with a rifle – had she any idea how to use it? – with his bare hands like Bulldog Drummond. But he was too tired. If he went on this way there would be an accident, and he was too much of a policeman not to know that as tired as that he was a menace. It was dawn; traffic would be thickening on the roads. He could not get into Biarritz that evening. Van der Valk pulled the Renault into the side of the road somewhere not far from Moulins – he had the difficult mountain roads of the central massif of France ahead of him – and slept while the day came up like thunder behind him in the east.
*
When he woke he looked at his watch and made a face to see how late it was. But Anne-Marie would have to rest too, somewhere. She might even be near him. There was of course no guarantee she was on the same road and he had had no great hopes of seeing or catching the grey Opel. But she would not have reached Biarritz before the middle of the night any more than he would. And Canisius would be deep in pleasant dreams in a luxury suite facing the sea, on the second floor of the Prince de Galles.
He had breakfast at the first place he came to; nothing particularly wonderful looking, but the coffee was hot and strong. They cut him huge slices of ham, boiled three fresh eggs for him, took him for one of those crazy Englishmen that drive their autos the whole way to Spain on the wrong side of the road, and charged him a fortune. He didn’t care – Marschal money. The only important thing was that Canisius should not know what efforts were being made on his behalf: he knew that this was really why he had chosen not to warn the French police about the rifle in among the skis. If Canisius heard – and he would hear – that she was gunning for him she was a dead duck: nothing else stood between Canisius and all the Napoleonic bank accounts strewn about Europe. As long as Anne-Marie was not a criminal she inherited, surely, the Marschal money, and she had two children, two girls. Van der Valk had thought about those two girls at their convent in Brussels often, the more since seeing the dead body of the tanzmariechen in bed in that room – her hair had been tousled and the wound hardly showed at the entry point: she had looked fourteen.
Did Anne-Marie know Biarritz well? Did she know where Canisius would be staying? What his movements were, what his habits were? What sort of plan was she making, there somewhere ahead of him in the rented Opel?
*
He got in around one in the morning, and felt fairly safe. He had hoped originally to be there by ten the previous night but before he was past Dijon he had known this would be impossible. He parked the auto in a quiet spot, found to his relief that the early-morning temperature in Biarritz was some six degrees higher than it had been in the mountains, and tapped his forehead four times. He would be awake at four.
Coffee in the Station Buffet – it was like Innsbruck all over again, or Chamonix. This was a story of coffee in the early mornings in station buffets; Van der Valk, who had been a policeman for nearly twenty years, had known many more of those stories. He felt horribly middle-aged, but there were points in being professional. He had reached forty without getting shot, and that was more than James Bond had succeeded in doing!
Still, the station buffet was like a leitmotiv in Wagner – it meant, he rather thought, drama boiling up not far away.
He struck up a variety of casual acquaintances in the station, among others a Customs man, who told him about the Spanish frontier – the river Bidassoa! One didn’t get away from the Marshals; if he had ever heard of the Bidassoa, it was because of Soult in Spain in 1813! He found the bookstall woman too, and though her stall was not yet open she had got some parcels to unpack, and some Paris papers off the night train to Irun, and she let him have a Michelin which he studied carefully. He did a good deal of driving around in the pale early sunlight, and decided that Biarritz was a nice place. Arlette would like it, here. Be a fine place for a holiday, though the prices, even out of season, would make her shudder. Still, they weren’t – much – higher than in her precious Department of the Var.
He had a wash, a comfortable shave, drenched himself in eau-de-cologne, changed his slept-in suit, and felt almost human, human enough to risk the early morning snootiness of the Prince de Galles’s reception desk.
‘I’m afraid that Mr Canisius is not yet awake.’
‘When’s he have his breakfast sent up?’ The pale creature consulted the Spirit of Tact, balanced the results against the cherished principle of being as Rude as you Dare to Unknown Persons, and reached languidly for one of his telephones.
‘Eight o’clock.’
‘Five to now. Give him just a teeny buzz and tell him my name.’
With reluctance, this was done, in a hushed tone of noiseless respect.
‘Mr Canisius asks you to be good enough to wait ten minutes. A page will take you.’
‘Thank you, young man,’ said Van der Valk in the tones of the Dowager Duchess.
A thin elegant floor-waiter – like all floor-waiters he looked a great deal more distinguished than the guests did – was wheeling out a trolley. There was a tinkle of silver and porcelain going on, a smell of hot chocolate – Madame de Sévigné – a whiff of aftershave – Yardley lavender – and overall that indefinable hotel smell of old carpets. Mr Canisius, cosseted and comfortable, was breaking bread on his little balcony, in a nervous-looking way, as though a paper snake on a spring might suddenly come whizzing out. Van der Valk, who had noticed that all foreigners in France do this, probably frightened of getting crumbs on the carpet, thought of Raymond Chandler, who described himself as being yes, extremely tough, even known to have broken a Vienna roll with his bare hands.
Like all business men, Mr Canisius looked utterly indecent in pyjamas, though they were a restrained maroon colour, with edgings of thin silver cord, quite correct. He was also considerably too grand to stand up or shake hands with policemen at breakfast, but he nodded amicably, patted his lip with a fringed napkin, and said ‘Quite a surprise. How are you?’ in his soft milky voice.
‘Tired.’
‘Sit down. Have you had breakfast?’ Van der Valk sat in a rococo cane rocker with buttoned cushions and looked out at the expensive view across the Avenue de I’Impératrice to the lighthouse.
‘Yes thanks.’
‘But how did you know I was here?’
‘Your secretary told me.’ A slight frown disturbed the milky surface.
‘However, don’t be hard on him; I had to twist his arm.’
‘Yes – there is some property of the company’s in Spain, and this is qu
ite an old haunt of mine. So I combine a little necessary supervision with a little fresh air and exercise. Golf, you know.’
‘Ah yes. He mentioned that you had business in Spain, but no more.’ Canisius nodded approval of this discretion.
‘We have certain investments in housing along the coast. As you probably know, flats and bungalows there have had a spectacular success with the European public. I like to keep an eye on the building projects. In fact I will have to ask you to excuse me very shortly, since I have arranged with one or two of my associates to pay a little visit this morning.’
‘Oh, it can wait till you get back,’ said Van der Valk. ‘Unless you happen to be late coming back.’
‘By no means. It is about a hundred kilometres and we shall be lunching there, but I will be back at around three this afternoon. You wish to give me all the details?’
‘Yes. It is a fairly complex business and I thought it right to come and see you personally, straight away.’
‘Excellent, excellent. I am most appreciative, believe me, of the zeal you have showed throughout this unhappy business. Pity that you weren’t in time to prevent that very sad death.’ There was something about these words, mouthed by a business man in maroon pyjamas drinking cocoa, that irritated Van der Valk.
‘The truth about the very sad death will not appear in the written report I will make to my superiors.’
‘You’re being rather enigmatic. I’m afraid that I know nothing but the bare fact of the death, and that I only learned in quite a roundabout way from the police in Paris.’
‘Oh there’s nothing at all doubtful about the death itself. That’s perfectly plain sailing from the administrative angle. Indeed the authorities there in Strasbourg cut the formalities to a minimum in order to spare unnecessary pain to the girl’s parents.’
The King of the Rainy Country Page 15