Double-Barrel

by Nicolas Freeling

  Apprenticed in family business, and early showed remarkable aptitude. As an adult, gained a rapidly increasing reputation for making unusual timepieces, including so-called eternal clocks. Sun, wind, water-powered. Progressed to speciality in ingenious time-switch mechanisms.

  Had a strong amateur interest in astronomy, and built telescopes as a pastime. Formed, through all this, a connexion with the firm of Carl Zeiss. Went, during the thirties, frequently to Jena, where he collaborated to some extent in the early experiments on planetariums, the artificial heavens driven by clockwork mechanisms.

  Was, however, in Breda at the time of Hitler’s invasion of Holland, and was promptly arrested with entire family. He then disappeared. Was saved from extermination – suffered by entire family down to most distant connexions – by obscure agency. Possibly the firm of Zeiss signalled that his skills were worth more to the Reich than two gold teeth.

  He was, in any case, forced to work on various secret weapon projects, but was never, he recalled wryly, left on any one scheme long enough either to do it any good or any harm. He passed from mines to rocketry, and with another of those sudden whimsical decisions common during that epoch was suddenly detached from the whole thing and brought to Berlin. Someone, he hazarded, knew that he spoke Russian – but there were others who did too … he wasn’t complaining. During the big Russian advance of’44, he was used constantly by Intelligence (Schellenberg) but was drawn more and more into the Kaltenbrünner-Müller orbit. His work, officially, was to penetrate Russian Intelligence reports, working on codes and communications, but he realized later that he had been used in the incredibly involved system of double agents directed by Müller.

  He was, in fact, being used as one of the key figures in secret correspondence with the Russians, but was never allowed to see enough of the complete picture to shed any real light, or give conclusive evidence.

  In the final days of the Berlin siege he was held prisoner in the Bunker, still in almost daily contact with Bormann, and as the Russians entered the city was shot and left for dead by a member of the Bormann entourage. He was discovered by the Russians, patched up roughly in a military hospital, held prisoner for many months – then suddenly, inexplicably released; a typical Russian performance.

  They had come to the conclusion, presumably, after interrogating him, that the man would never be any good any more. He did not know enough to be a valuable counter-espionage prize, and as inventor, even as technical craftsman – finished. Physically, indeed, he recovered from his head wound, but not only did he develop a nervous disease, he had also a mental block. The disease was a kind of slow degeneration of the central nervous system, something similar to Parkinson’s disease. He could walk upright, but he had the constant trembling, and his vision was affected. He could no longer mend an alarm clock, let alone handle fine machinery. And the mental block was not so much, perhaps, the loss of inventive capacity as of the will to do anything, to see what made it tick. He had holes in his memory; a kind of disassociation. He looked at simple mechanical contrivances and could not even remember their names or function.

  He had spent, inevitably, years more in observation clinics, resettlement camps, an atom of flotsam like many more, difficult to help, wearisome and unco-operative; a nuisance, a worry, a responsibility. He was no use to anybody any more. He had the arrogance and obstinacy of the outcast. Refused to give evidence against war-criminals. What was the use, he said. Would God not know the sheep from the goats? Would hanging all the Germans take away Treblinka or Baby Yar? And what could he tell them they did not by now know? He would have nothing to do with other Jews. He said he wished he had been exterminated too – what was left of life? No family, no job, no skill, no friends, nothing.

  In the end he had drifted back to Holland. Not to Breda, but wandering about vaguely, a burden on charitable organizations that were sorry for him, but glad to get rid of him. Finally he had turned up in Drente. He liked it here, he said; there were no Jews, nor Christians either (a remark received charitably, like many more).

  In Zwinderen it had been the burgomaster, new then but as energetic as now, who had found a way out of the impasse, with patience and intelligence. He had seen that nothing was any use without some scrap of independence. He had got a pension for the man, and a disability grant, and a compensation from Germany. And a roof. Besançon had been delighted by the burgomaster’s offer of a little cottage that belonged to the lunatic asylum, tucked in a corner of the grounds there, damp and primitive, used in the nineteenth century to house some turnkey. Nobody in Holland wanted that: he did. He liked the high stone wall, the gloomy cypresses and yews. He dug in the tiny sunless garden with his first show of enthusiasm. Rehabilitation had begun.

  He went, a little later, to the burgomaster, offering to do any work he was still capable of. That was tactfully refused, but the offer was passed to the first factories then being established in Drente. Here he picked up a connexion: the electronics firm could use, they said, a Russian translator from time to time. This spread, and now there were half a dozen firms sending him scientific reports for translation. He had learned pharmaceutical and chemical symbols – or relearned them, along with his lost mathematics – and was much appreciated by his employers. Nobody, they said warmly, could translate Russian or technical German with such lucidity. Nobody was so good at seizing relevant extracts, making a clear and brief paraphrase, piercing the jungle of administrative or bureaucratic phrase, marshalling the kernel of facts in a long waffling report that might cover three years’ work of some dedicated but vague scientific person somewhere behind the Urals.

  His writing was too shaky to be usable, but the grateful electronics firm designed and built a special typewriter for him; it was the owner, too, that found him a housekeeper.

  Now, he said, he was happy. He worked, he earned. He bought books and records. He took long walks and tended his garden. Occasionally someone from ‘his’ firms came to consult him on some point; he saw nobody else. He had been invited to people’s houses; he came courteously and behaved perfectly, but let it be understood that he preferred not to come. People had learned to respect his small eccentricities.

  Of course, when he appeared in the village, as he sometimes did for gum or string, carbon paper or a pair of socks, children whooped and people whispered. He was used by the peasantry as a bogy-man; many a tiny Drentse cropped-head was threatened with ‘the Russian professor’. But his manner, indifferent, formal, always courteous, conquered even peasant suspicions. When he raised his hat so politely to some dumpy mottled milkmaid behind the pencils and envelopes, pointing with a shaky forefinger at a roll of scotch tape, he could hardly be thought of as a bogy.

  He had been here ten years now. He had got shakier, his eyesight worse. He could still walk upright, but uncertainly, with a stick. But mentally he had not failed.

  He wore corduroy trousers like the workmen; cheap ready-made coats; he had a ‘good suit’, indistinguishable from that of a local churchwarden. He had experimented with hats, and wore at present an extraordinary green thing, Dutch-Tyrolean, cut from hairy cardboard. He sometimes shuffled out in the wooden shoes he used for gardening.

  Nothing about him, though, of the comic-strip absent-minded scientist. His hair was cut short and he used a clothes-brush vigorously. At sixty he was trim, neat, and tidy; a small thin man with authority still in his carriage. He had fine flowers behind his high grey wall, and on the sunny side a cherry tree facing the little window of his living-room. The little cottage was only two rooms, with a sort of lean-to kitchen at the back, and a septic-tank lavatory across a tiny yard. He had electricity but no gas.

  He always wore dark glasses over his sharp blue eyes. The doctor had given him maybe another five years. These nervous degeneration diseases are deadly, but extremely slow. He hoped, he said, to have another two of useful work.

  He had been examined dozens of times by every conceivable sort of neurologist and psychiatrist. Perfectly sane, perfec
tly lucid. Remarkably well adjusted to severe trauma.

  Might such a person write threatening obscene letters to respectable married women; creep about peering and listening for some little human misdeed or indiscretion?

  Even if he might he hadn’t known any of them, or anything about them. But a theory had been built up by some artful imbecile of a policeman. The electronics firm manufactured, among other specialized gadgets, tiny microphones and listening sets of incredible power and sensitivity. One of their recent efforts could (classified, highly secret, but the policeman had wormed out certain facts) pick up conversational tones at twenty metres or more, through the walls of houses. Even disregarding the legend that former-engineer Besançon was a conjuring-trick king, had he ever, through his work, had access to any such thing? It had been investigated; answer definitely negative. He had never even been in the factory. Still, it was a seductive notion. How else had the letter-writer found out some of the things he appeared to know?

  ‘Time to go to bed,’ said Arlette, yawning. ‘There’s been quite good variety from München. My German’s getting better, but that Bayerische dialect is beyond me. Come on, get unglued.’

  Part two: ‘Acquaintance’

  1

  Having read that exhaustive dossier, and being quite convinced that this man had nothing whatever to do with writing naughty letters, it was, I admit, a pure waste of time to go and see him. Quite unjustifiable. But I was enjoying the sensation of doing unjustifiable things – there was nobody shouting at me to justify myself. It was not just vulgar curiosity that took me in his direction next day: I had to see for myself – and was it perhaps the expectation, too, of finding somebody human at last in this spot? I thought that my alias would be enough to get me into this little fortress behind the wall of the lunatic asylum. What then? I had no idea.

  It was at the point just outside the town where the bog had been halted. Pavements petered out, street-lighting stopped abruptly, and the muddy digging of foundations for new houses gave way to sodden fields and sparse, tormented trees, with uninviting drainage ditches every hundred metres. A gate in the high wall had an admonishing notice about Unauthorized Persons; I peered in.

  Nothing exciting; fields. Evidence that the lunatic asylum had cows, grew its own vegetables, and kept its own chickens. A roadway led to a ragged belt of poplars, behind which I could see bits of a vast dingy building. I went on along my road, reached after a minute a corner, and sure enough around the corner I found another gate, and could see evergreens over the walls. Gate was a rusty iron affair, backed with a sort of ‘blindage’ of galvanized metal that blocked the view between the bars. I greatly envied Mr Besançon all this privacy. I found an old chain dangling among ivy tendrils, pulled, and heard a cowbell tinkle.

  Woman in apron, sturdy, shapeless. Wore spectacles, apple-cheeked, straggly brown hair; Dutch woman like five million more. She approved of my taking my hat off and tendering one of the mumbo-jumbo cards.

  ‘He’s working, but if you’ll come in I’m sure he’ll … do you mind just waiting here?’

  Yes; door opened straight into the living-room. I admired the flower-borders, though it was February and there was little to see. Even on the shadowed, drippy side of the garden, where thick brambly undergrowth was enough to cut off the view of the asylum altogether, there were rhododendrons and azaleas.

  ‘Will you please come in?’ She bustled off towards a nice smell of stew. I bowed, said good morning, and turned to shut the door. A thin neat man, in old trousers and a baggy jacket, had got up politely. One had a fleeting first impression of short grey hair, a face with very deep sunken wrinkles but a powerful energetic mouth and eyes that flashed still behind the dark glasses.

  ‘Good morning.’ Voice deep and resonant.

  ‘My name is Van der Valk; I’m from the Ministry of the Interior; my field of study includes town-planning. There is no need to trouble you, but since I was passing …’

  ‘But please sit down; allow me to take your hat.’

  There were two shabby arm-chairs with a coffee-table between, and a standard lamp. Mr Besançon sat down again at his desk and examined his guest calmly. It was strange; I at once had the feeling that I was sitting in the wrong chair. As a policeman, it is my business to sit behind desks and look at people that way. The man was immediately impressive; he had a patient watchfulness. I launched into a gabble about possible demolition of the asylum, possible road-widening; blahblah.

  ‘Am I scheduled for demolition?’

  ‘That is too sweeping. In the event of such a decision, you would be notified well in advance; if you objected you would have every opportunity to put your case.’

  Mild smile; faintly raised eyebrow. ‘I am attached to this house, strangely.’

  ‘Do not disquiet yourself; no decision has yet been made or will be made for quite a time. I really only came to sound your opinion.’

  ‘My opinion is that I will not live very long. If these changes are postponed a year, I shall, I think, have very little to say. I am attacked, I must tell you, by a slow but mortal disease. But I should be happy if I were left in peace for what time I have left.’

  ‘I think I can guarantee you some years without interruption.’ I sincerely hoped that no municipal busybody really did have a road-widening project; it was perfectly possible.

  Again the faint smile. ‘More than enough … I suppose that you have informed yourself about my circumstances?’

  ‘I have access to all information normally available to the Ministry,’ sounding correctly prim. I thought I was doing this quite well.

  ‘Just so.’

  ‘Such details are necessarily incomplete.’

  ‘So you make a point of calling on people who may live – let’s say along a road scheduled for rebuilding.’

  ‘When we can.’

  ‘That is conscientious. And courteous. My experience of officials from Ministries is that they frequently have both qualities, but that their function seems to prevent the free exercise of either.’

  My turn for the faint smile. Really, this fellow was shrewd.

  ‘We do our best. It is painful to be criticized for what, to the uninformed eye, simply looks like turning defenceless people out of their homes.’

  ‘Painful, but the state functionary grows an extra skin. Perhaps they have to. I am very grateful that you should spare the time to call on me.’

  ‘We learn’ – thinking I was being sly – ‘to make time our servant. The wheels of Ministries are slow.’

  ‘Ah,’ reflective nod. ‘You have plenty of time. Most functionaries bustle, always in a hurry. You have a bird’s-eye view – in a manner of speaking – of people as well as sites, streets, ciphers, statistics. Most interesting.’

  ‘Certainly.’ I did not quite get the drift but admired the way he was cross-examining me – in a manner of speaking.

  ‘Perhaps my experience has been too one-sided. It is the lower echelon, is it not, that adopts that bustling air, that fiction that there is never time for anything, that determination to obliterate the individual. The tiny self-importance of the village postmaster; once he has a rubber stamp in his hand he imagines that he embodies all the dignity of the State. Whereas you are plainly a senior official.’

  ‘That is so.’ I was being driven like a sheep, and interested enough not to care.

  ‘Since you are not in a hurry,’ inexorably, ‘may I offer you a cup of coffee?’

  ‘That would be kind.’

  ‘I will ask Mrs Bakhuis – she generally brings me some…’

  ‘I am tempted to think,’ coming back with deliberate steps – the trembling was noticeable, but not disconcerting, ‘that as a general rule policemen, perhaps, are fortunate among state servants, in having more obligatory contact with human beings. Even rather objectionable humans, who smell, who could do with delousing, are preferable to none.’

  ‘And yet, if I am to believe what I hear, you are not very fond of the human race.’


  ‘There have been times, you see, when I smelt and needed delousing. A thing quite inconceivable to a civil servant. The pressure upon functionaries to spend more and more time shut away in little cells, monastically devoted to their in and out trays – it is hardly fair on them.’

  I felt like saying straight out what I had come for. What was the point of fencing further? This man was not guilty of any little, dotty, pathetic crimes. But I had to play the scene out a little.

  ‘Aren’t you tending towards special pleading? Every type of state servant has his particular problems. His questions of conscience, call it.’

  He did not answer. He studied his guest with a placid look. I studied the surroundings. There were no pictures, but there were many home-made bookshelves. Lots of books, rows of cardboard files, doubtless containing his work, a shelf full of records. Tidy, for a man who lived alone. A shabby poverty, but not genteel, not ashamed. Those books were in all the major languages of Europe, and they all looked well handled.

  Why were there no pictures? Did the man prefer things heard to things seen? … Mrs Thing came in with a pleasant smile and two cups of coffee. I have often wondered why the Dutch keep the coffee-pot in the kitchen, as though it were something to be ashamed of.

  The door behind the housekeeper shut; we stirred the coffee. I offered him a cigarette, which he shook his head at slightly. I had a feeling we were coming to the point.

  ‘Functionaries,’ I said, ‘good or bad, sensitive or not, one thing they all have in common is their professionalism. In the last analysis, they’re getting paid for it.’

  I had been expecting the reaction, but not that it would be so direct.

  ‘Are you by any chance a policeman?’

  To that kind of question, one cannot hesitate or shuffle.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have been visited by so many, you see,’ politely.