Strike Out Where Not Applicable

by Nicolas Freeling

  ‘He wouldn’t bother,’ proudly. ‘He’d hit out and not care.’

  ‘You still think it might have been Rob?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You think Dick would do a thing like that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I would have thought he wouldn’t care that much – not enough to kill someone.’

  ‘What did you want to do, tonight – when you went?’

  ‘I wanted to make a clean ending. To say I’d gone wrong, but I wasn’t going to go on.’

  ‘How often did you sleep with him – once?’

  ‘Just once.’

  ‘Very well. Listen attentively. I’d like to leave this – finish with it, send you home. I’m certain you’ve told the truth. But I won’t do that. I’m keeping you here till you’ve seen the Officer of Justice. I may question you again, speak sharply, call you a liar. I’m the Commissaire of Police, it’s my job to interrogate people. Plenty would grumble – the crowd always grumbles, saying, “The police are always against the poor; they’ll always stick up for the rich” – do you believe that?’

  ‘Not now,’ slowly. ‘I’ve known it would come to this – that I’d have to swallow it.’

  ‘You aren’t wrong. The law’s a fool, and unfair. You’ve said it all your life – so have I. But it bears down on everybody once they’re involved. You and I both – we have to carry responsibility. You’re not a criminal, but you might be called to suffer. I have to put you through it – I’d have to do the same to my own wife. You get that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Come on then – I’m going to lock you up.’

  He felt very tired. It had been a long day and was nearly midnight. He could do with his bed. The painter could wait till morning, couldn’t he? No, he couldn’t.

  No no no, thought Van der Valk, swallow it boy, just like you just told Janine.

  He called the ‘cipier’, as the old quiet policeman is called whose job is to sit in a guardroom outside a row of cells. They need to be old and quiet: it is not difficult work to lock someone up after taking away all ties, shoelaces, belts and bits of string, but it takes stability.

  ‘Verbiest gone home?’ he called through to the inspectors’ room. At this time of night the criminal brigade was not ordinarily on duty at all: what did one have municipal police for? The boy had had his share of work today; Van der Valk would not blame him if he had just sloped off.

  ‘No, sir,’ came the duty brigadier’s voice. ‘He’s gone to scrounge a cup of coffee; he didn’t know whether you’d need him.’ Good. The young man wanted to learn his trade. Very well, the odds were that he would get the kind of lesson that is best quickly forgotten. Buried, thought Van der Valk – tactfully buried in an obscure corner of the mind. Like morphine – a dangerous drug, but there are times when it is still useful.

  ‘Tell him to come in and pick up a shorthand pad. And to bring me a cup of coffee too.’

  A young uniformed agent brought in the painter. There had been no nibbling at his ego yet; he hadn’t been wearing a tie, and he had sandals with buckles. He was in shirt-sleeves, carrying his jacket – it wasn’t a cold jail.

  ‘Sit down there.’ The boy sat, paying no heed to anything, without particular ostentation or insolence, simply as though all this bureaucratic paraphernalia were a great bore, which of course it is. Verbiest came in silently with his pad and pencil.

  ‘Sorry, sir – I was just getting …’

  ‘That’s all right. You don’t have to take any notes till we get a pattern of question and answer; we have to get a few things straight first.’

  ‘Tell him not to waste his time,’ said the painter calmly. ‘There aren’t going to be any answers. I went out on the bike and met a girl with whom I had a date. Nothing illegal in that. Being in the dunes is forbidden – fine of ten gulden. You know my name and address.’

  Van der Valk paid no heed, but sat on the corner of his desk and stirred his coffee.

  ‘That’s all you’ll get from me – make up your mind to that. You can keep me here all night and you won’t get any farther.’

  Van der Valk went on paying no attention to Verbiest.

  ‘What d’you do with the motorbike?’

  ‘Told the boys where to find it and to put it in the van, bring it back to the owner in the morning.’

  ‘Good.’ He stayed sipping till the coffee, black and smelling good, was finished. Verbiest, after an interrogatory glance, lit a cigarette. Van der Valk put the cup down carefully, walked around and sat behind his desk, and said, ‘Look at me’, in a soft voice. The painter glanced at him and looked away contemptuously. He smiled in a bored way – he had seen this tactic so often.

  ‘Verbiest.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Put a headlock on him – choke him a bit – just till he falls unconscious.’ The painter jumped to his feet; the young inspector, a healthy football-playing boy, was a lot faster, twisted an arm up behind the back in a professional way and got his elbow crooked round the throat. He did not put any pressure on, but watched his chief, who sat polite as a cashier waiting for a cheque to be made out.

  ‘A silly boy. Thinks I’m stupid. Thinks I’m just a cop. Thinks I’ll hit him. Mistake – I want you to feel what it’s like being murdered. You’re a painter – an artist. Very well, I’ll treat you as an artist. Choke him, Verbiest.’

  The young man struggled, heaved, was helpless in the grip of a stronger heavier man, thrashed about trying to kick, got feebler, went limp, tried to scream, collapsed on the floor like a dishcloth.

  ‘Glass of water … no, throw it at him. Pick him up and dump him in the chair. Stay behind him; you don’t need your pencil awhile.… Nasty, isn’t it? If he’d gone on another thirty seconds you’d have been dead. All your life still to lead, cut off by a sadistic old swine like me. Dead. That’s what it’s like being murdered. Look at me now.’ The blueness went out of the boy’s face and he got his natural sallow pallor back. He looked.

  ‘You’re not a bad artist – I’ve taken a look at some of your stuff. You’re intelligent enough to understand what I say to you. You’re all right now – unless he starts again. It leaves no mark – just cuts off the blood supply to your brain. I want you to use your brain so he won’t start again unless I tell him to. That is my responsibility. An illegal act, putting pressure on a suspect. What the English – they’re sweet – call aiding us in our enquiries. I commit an illegal act, that’s my personal responsibility. You understand anything about the doctrine of personal responsibility? The law is based on it. Do something – anything you like – and answer for it.’

  There was a hint of a return to not-caring.

  ‘Look at me,’ softly.

  ‘Better. Stay looking at me and understand clearly. You thought I’d question you and you wouldn’t answer. Then I’d get the little old psychiatrist and he’d get you out of it all right. Big mistake. In this office I’m my own psychiatrist. The world owes you a living – I know. Diminished sense of responsibility – I’ll undiminish you, sonny. Divorced from reality, feelings of hostility and desire for vengeance – I know. Get an extra kick out of finding a girl in something the same situation – it won’t help. You’re going to learn, while here in this office, to answer for your actions.

  ‘I know the tale you tell yourself, too. You’re an artist, so the rules don’t apply to you. You argue that the world is a place of total rot, inhabited by stinking bourgeois like me. Since there’s a bomb, since a hundred thousand die by fire in one breath, since a million more die of famine, it doesn’t matter if you kill a fellow. He’s nobody – it’s an artist’s duty to dismiss these stupid scruples. An artist’s duty to do anything he can to shock and hit and cut into the rottenness, to hit back against little scientific lunatics who sit thinking up new ways of killing people.

  ‘You don’t know me – I’m an artist too. A policeman, you think, capable of dirty tricks to fix poor little you. That’s right. I could kill you this minute and fix it aft
erwards. You could be found three days from now, as the maggots are getting at you.

  ‘Go ahead and spit – you’ll wipe it up later. You’re an innocent little lad. Been kicked off a park bench by a chap in a cape in Paris – pinched food a few times, fiddled a few shopkeepers – think you know it all. You know what it’s like, finding a dead body? You ever made a painting of a dead body? Someone that’s been strangled, and stayed in a closed room for a week, in summertime? I have. I’ve gone out of the door to vomit, before coming back to have pretty pictures made.

  ‘Do you even know what a dead body means? You’ve read crime stories. A riotous game. Fellow who’s killed is just a Hollywood Indian, paid to fall down. The murderer is nobody either – he’s just the loser. In the old days he was a real hero, because they set the guillotine up for him at dawn, and shaved his neck and gave him a drink, and shoved a cigarette in his mouth, and a crucifix to hold. Then he said “Oh, Mummy” and they chopped him, and he dirtied his trousers while he jerked about on the plank like a frog, but the police were real tough, they’d learned not to pay any notice. All the boys in the prison lit candles for him. Heroic, huh? Well, right now you’re not the hero. Choke him some more, Verbiest.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh,’ politely. ‘You’ve changed your mind. Maybe you got a new fine idea. You make a big sobbing phoney confession, and I’m so dim I’ll be delighted, and tell Mister Verbiest here to write it all busily down, and then I’ll let you go, so that when you get into court you can make a big drama. The press will be there – big day! A write-up – boy, will you have a good time telling the president and thinking how you’ll have your name in the paper just like a hero – five whole columns. About how you were tortured, and brainwashed, and how you were ready to sign anything, but it’s not true at all, and how it was Janine killed him, or Rob, or Marion. He was blackmailing her too, wasn’t he? You simply had to kill him – he was such an obnoxious fat slob anyhow.

  ‘I’m not interested in any of that – how long you go to prison for, and whether Doctor Ganzgek thinks he can make a decent citizen of you with ten years’ re-education. I’m not interested in good citizens. I’m a bad citizen; I want nothing but for you to know right now and here what it’s like being chopped. Pin his arms, Verbiest.’

  ‘You’re a ham actor,’ said the boy with a frightened anger.

  Van der Valk was hunting in his desk drawer. He came up with a round metal weight, the old-fashioned circular disc kind, weighing five hundred grammes.

  ‘Quite right, I’m a ham actor. Sir Henry Irving. People nowadays dismiss it all with the one word “ham”, which is meant to make me sink into the ground. They forget one thing about ham actors – they had a remarkable effect on even intelligent and artistic members of the audience. My dear old mother told me that.’ He put the weight on the desk and slowly took his jacket off. He rolled up his sleeve and settled the weight in his fist so that it projected edgeways between his middle fingers. He got up and walked round the desk.

  ‘Turn him round. Hold him pinned.’ He brought his fist slowly up and forwards till the metal touched the young man’s temple.

  ‘Just – there – was where fat Bernhard got it. One punch, you get it. Oh it’ll show, but that’s of no consequence. You struggled, you made a hysterical plunge and tripped, and you hit your head on the edge of that filing cabinet, which is metal. You’ve got ten seconds to live, which is more than you gave Bernhard when he got off his horse. Yell if it pleases you.’

  The boy glared helplessly at the face, which was terrifying, even unaided by green light, unlike Sir Henry Irving. Even Mr Verbiest thought Van der Valk capable of it. The muscles in the bare arm tightened.

  ‘Don’t.’

  Van der Valk, who was tired, limped over the other side of the room, rubbed his nose once or twice, and limped back.

  ‘You want anything to drink – coffee, water – a cup of tea?’

  ‘Can I have a cup of tea?’ doubtful that this too might be a Tantalus act.

  ‘Verbiest, make us all a cup of tea.’ The young inspector left the room, grateful for a breathing-space.

  ‘You had to understand, you realize? You can have all sorts of things putting pressure on you. You can be forced to do pretty near anything, but not to kill. If you kill, you weren’t forced. There’s your hand, your arm,’ he laid his bare arm out along the desk, ‘that makes the decisive movement. You could be holding a gun, a stick, a knife, a bottle of pills, a pen, a telephone – there is one gesture you make, means a man alive or a man dead. Nobody is responsible for that gesture but you. Exactly how responsible is not my job. I’m not a lawyer. What you have to do with me is finish the step you took when you hit him. Say yes. Yes I did it and I’ll accept the consequences. No art without responsibility. You make a stroke on paper, your mind can be conscious, unconscious or subconscious and I don’t give a damn, it’s still yours and nobody can take it away from you or do it for you. Want a cigarette?’

  ‘I don’t smoke.’

  The boy looked at him with a faint glimmer of something in his face – not sympathy or even respect – but there was a contact. That, thought Van der Valk, is all we need. Just to belong to the human race. Verbiest came back with tea.

  ‘Better,’ drinking it. ‘Now question and answer. Goes down in the little book, he types it up, you sign it, it goes to the Officer of Justice. You’re not being asked to confess any weakness or anything else. You’re asked not to try and get other people to sign the pictures you paint. Right?’

  The tea seemed to have put heart back into the boy. The pale, handsome face had regained its calm.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Fischer got to know there was something between you and Janine, whom I may as well call by her name. He mentioned this to you?’

  ‘He said he’d ruin me.’

  ‘What interest could he have in that?’

  ‘Just spite, probably. He was a spiteful type.’

  ‘How did he propose to ruin you?’

  ‘Said he’d tell Zwemmer to do me up.’

  ‘You thought Zwemmer would believe him?’

  ‘He said if he made it public Zwemmer would be forced to.’

  ‘You believed that?’

  ‘Not really. I was afraid he’d do something.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘He said he’d break my hands. Like you. He was a big fellow. I was afraid of him.’

  ‘What had you done to him that he should get violent?’

  ‘I told him he was a dirty Boche.’

  ‘No use taking all this down,’ in a resigned voice, to Verbiest.

  ‘Why?’ asked the painter, startled.

  ‘It’s all nonsense,’ patiently. ‘You’re making it up as you go along.’

  ‘I’m not,’ indignantly.

  ‘We’ll see. When exactly was it you realized Fischer had a hold on Janine?’

  ‘He told me.’

  ‘On what occasion?’

  ‘He came into the place I have – in Francis’ shed.’

  ‘And what were his words?’

  ‘He said, “You’re playing games with that woman. D’you want the whole neighbourhood to know?” ’

  ‘What was your answer to that?’

  ‘I said even if it was true what did he propose to do about it, and he said he could ruin my whole life, just by a few words to Zwemmer and to Francis, who wouldn’t stand for anything like that around his place.’

  ‘And that frightened you? To that extent?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what was to be the price of his silence?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He wasn’t doing all this for fun, or because you called him a Boche. He wanted something out of it. Not money – he had plenty, and you had none. What did he want?’

  ‘He wanted – he wanted Janine to be his mistress. He wanted me to fix it up.’

  ‘Janine?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a pause. Van der Val
k smiled, put his cigarette out, and said with unexpected mildness, ‘All right.’

  ‘All right?’ replied the painter, startled.

  ‘I’m tired. So are you. We’ve had a hard day. We’ll leave this till tomorrow, when we feel fresher. Night, they say, brings counsel. Verbiest, tell the boys to fix our friend up, will you?’

  The young man came back looking puzzled.

  ‘I say, Commissaire, I don’t understand this. It sounds – odd, doesn’t it?’ His voice was dubious; he was not sure whether he might not be talking out of turn. This amused Van der Valk.

  ‘Very odd.’

  Very odd! Understatement of the year.

  ‘He may not have quite realized how absurd he sounded,’ went on Van der Valk, thinking aloud. ‘He guessed of course that I would have to take in the Zwemmer girl.’

  ‘I can’t make head or tail of it. He’s a cool customer, isn’t he? You can’t see him murdering Fischer – what on earth would make him do it?’

  ‘Can’t see him murdering Fischer in a sordid way.… You’re quite right; this idea of a threat is what sticks in my throat. It’s fairly common knowledge – it always was – that Fischer was rather a nasty person. Several hints were made about blackmail but they never added up to what a court would call blackmail. He liked to get hold of little scraps of information, secrets if you like, that seemed slightly disgraceful. I don’t mean anything criminal especially – so and so used to be in the Nazi Party, so and so, who is very rich, got his money from his mum who kept a stall in the fishmarket – more that kind of thing. He dropped these remarks in the hearing of their subjects, for the pleasure of seeing them squirm. His death seems in that context exaggerated, huh? – overdone. Listen to the scene tonight, and the kind of conclusion we’re being asked to draw is that this boy and the Zwemmer woman had an affair, Fischer found out, threatened to make it public, and to suppress him they – separately or together – sloshed him.’

  ‘Which doesn’t sound very likely,’ said Verbiest sensibly.

  ‘Right, it doesn’t. Suppose Fischer is as good as his word. It won’t affect the painter – who cares if he has an affair with a girl, especially one all that crowd thinks little of. If it had been anybody else … Mrs La Touche, or the wife of a big industrialist – or my wife.’