Double-Barrel

by Nicolas Freeling

A religious feeling was much stronger in them. Certainly, they were very calvinist. They spoke of God and the Devil in that characteristically literal, familiar, glib way. In this person’s life God and the Devil were very much physically present; looming, almost tangible. Listening, urging, arguing, fighting.

  And the other kind of calvinism, the Coolidge kind – Cal for President, Cal for President – an overwhelming respectability, conservatism, love of regulation and formula and bureaucracy; a mincing mutton-headed hatred of risk and innovation.

  A local person, I was sure by now – or I thought I was sure – born and bred here, with a distrust, a dislike of anything that came from outside. Cities were spoken of with fear and hatred – strongholds of the Devil. An undertone of anxiety: Zwinderen was being invaded by the Devil – the witches of Salem again – and he must be fought with his own vile weapons.

  There was one queer, perhaps significant fact. The men who were attacked in the letters were all strangers. The women – I hadn’t checked this yet to a watertight certainty – were all local women. Local – all from this province or the borders of it. This background, this atmosphere. I thought there was an unspoken appeal in the letters to them: not to play this background false.

  Nothing was watertight. Sometimes I thought that maybe ten per cent of the letters had come to light. How could I be sure about anything in them, when I probably hadn’t seen more than a tiny percentage?

  Was the writer a woman? There was a feminist streak, and a fear – yes, a hatred – of men. Just men. But was this a convincing argument? I know feminist men. I am feminist myself. I know a fellow who carries it a long way. He says that only women make good business men – singularly unpopular point of view in Holland. He even says he can only be friends with women. He is a nice fellow – talks too much, but so do I. He’s right in a way – I can’t find myself friends with him but Arlette does.

  He has quite a few loose screws. A few more and he could write letters like these.

  Besançon had a sort of distrust of women. I would have to see if he had any feminist views.

  2

  I ruminated over Mr Besançon’s home-made bookshelves. He sat at his table, calm and gentle as always. The eyes were very bright and steady behind those dark glasses of his, whatever the vision was like.

  ‘You have the best kind of books,’ I said suddenly.

  ‘Have I? I value them very much, but why should you approve of them?’

  ‘I only meant the books that are read and read till the covers fall off.’

  ‘Ah.’ He smiled. ‘Have you ever read the memoirs of Aimée de Coigny?’ – surprisingly.

  ‘No idea even who he is.’

  ‘A she, but there’s no earthly reason why you ever should have heard of her. She was simply a pretty, adventurous, intelligent woman who was mixed up with many interesting persons and events during the Napoleonic time, and left interesting memoirs. She draws a very attractive portrait of Talleyrand in a library, picking up books, “talking to them as though they were alive”. I like that.’

  ‘I can see that you like memoirs.’

  ‘To my taste, the only really interesting books. Is it not a strange thing that in the eighteenth century a complete nonentity should write memoirs that are read today with pleasure, whereas today a man whose name is known to all the world writes four hundred pages of the most wearisome sawdust?’.

  ‘Today’s celebrity is tomorrow’s nonentity.’

  ‘One wishes always to be a hundred years either ahead of or behind one’s own time. Nothing can be duller than the present.’

  I sat down and lit a cigar. I crossed my hands peacefully upon my ample stomach. I gazed at cigar-smoke, at Besançon.

  His stillness was remarkable, untouched by the nervous tremble. There was suspicion in it, the deep-seated, ever present wariness of a man who has spent years in the hands of his enemies, treated with jocularity and feline cruelty more than with crude brutality. The world to him is nothing but policemen. No wonder he prefers the eighteenth century: the century that proclaimed that freedom of thought was universal, whatever servitude one might be born to. He can never lose sight of the fact that I may begin again at any moment to persecute him. How can he stand having me in the house? I knew well enough that I was intruding. One aspect of police training – one no longer cares whether one is intruding or not.

  ‘I am depressed,’ I said. ‘I’m not enjoying this job, my own thoughts, my own actions.’

  I got the smile around the eyes, the slight twitch of the wide mouth. The deeply sunk facial muscles hardly moved. Interesting mouth. The lips were thin and sensitive, but that sensitivity had been held, clamped taut, for so many years that no emotion would ever again show there. The lines all around had been cut in with a chisel and mallet.

  ‘Develop,’ said the mouth. ‘Amplify. You wish to exercise your thoughts – you are a boxer, and I am your punching ball.’

  ‘The job is tedious – but that I am accustomed to. The pressure to be a pure bureaucrat is great, as always. One wishes for situations that are cut and dried. For a case out of a textbook or a detective story – cut, dried, and pigeon-holed too. Everything tidy – the bureaucrat’s dream. And they never are. They are invariably untidy, sloppy, shapeless.’

  ‘Here, too, I must peek and pry, in a way that is mean and ignoble. These people, these – to me – total foreigners, they resent me, dislike and avoid me. They are quite right. What business have I to come here disapproving of them, laughing at them, holding up their ways to ridicule? I have to do my work, and here I cannot do it without taking away their dignity, without imposing my officially approved norms on their ways, that they’ve had for years. I am the government, the eternal enemy. I have never felt so strongly how destructive a force that government exerts upon a small provincial settlement, a village geared to village life.’

  ‘So you come to me for consolation? To share your solitude with another solitary? You have, unless I gravely misjudge, other motives for your visits.’

  ‘I have, yes.’

  ‘You see, Inspector, you suspect me. Still. Always.’

  It was so, but I was not going to let him cut me with the thin, bitter edge of his amusement at it. He knew well enough that I had no grounds for suspecting him.

  ‘No. That is not what I meant. I think that I come for your advice.’

  ‘However dubious I am of its value, I can scarcely refuse.’

  ‘Has it ever occurred to you – no, I have phrased this wrongly – does it ever now occur to you, as a Jew, to feel – now – sympathy with the Gestapo? Understanding, now, can you feel a certain pity? Not for what they did – for them, the men who were your captors and persecutors?’

  ‘Perhaps. Has this some connexion with problems of yours?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But let us be factual. As an abstract idea, my answer would be no. In certain circumstances, under certain conditions, I have thought that I understood my captors, as you call them, very well. Even at the time I often sympathized with them. State your case.’

  I wanted to get up and walk about; I was unaccountably restless and nervous that day. But I had to oppose, I do not know why, to his stillness and watchfulness my own. I felt remarkably young and raw; I have seen that same expression of weary calm on the faces of old policemen in their last years before they got put out to grass. I last saw it in Paris, waiting for a taxi in the rush hour outside the Gare du Nord. The agent on duty had the same complete indifference, that of the man who has obeyed orders his whole life, who has seen everything. Everything.

  ‘I am here, possessing administrative and interrogatory powers, in a defeated, occupied land. If I were a simple official here to carry out my orders from the central government openly, honestly, I might feel less uneasy. I would take refuge in my officialdom. I would be the impersonal functionary. Because I am here secretly, anonymously, I do not fit into the pattern, and I lack the security of a formal position. You find me ri
diculous?’

  ‘Not at all. It is an interesting thought.’

  ‘These are people whose lives and ideas I find ridiculous, but I also find myself hostile. They hate and fear me. I have a dangerous tendency to despise them, and to believe that their reactionary ways must be rooted out. They are hindrances to progress and hostile to the state administration – a very little more, and I think I would find myself with the mentality of a good Party man. It occurred to me that I would even find myself in sympathy with one of these characters – basically only a policeman like myself after all – like, say, the notorious Gestapo Müller.’

  ‘Ah – Müller.’ That smile again. ‘I did not really know the gentleman. I should think that he was difficult to know.’

  ‘I should think so too,’ grinning back. ‘Shadowy, opaque individual.’

  ‘I dare say I know him as well as most,’ indifferently. ‘I do have to admit that I found him quite a reasonable fellow – towards me. I worked as you obviously know, in his department.’

  ‘Oh yes – I’ve read the long and interesting dossier on you in the archives.’

  ‘Yes indeed. My dossier. Hm. It would not amuse me to see it; I have no doubt that it is a thick useless rubbish-bin of irrelevant facts and inaccurate conclusions.’

  ‘Like most,’ mildly.

  ‘Indeed. No sillier, I imagine, than the dossier on General Müller.’

  ‘That I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing.’

  ‘I don’t think you need worry that there is any striking resemblance between you,’ said Besançon dryly.

  That made me laugh. Talking about my neuroses, as usual, had dispelled them. I felt better, which was the whole idea. I wondered vaguely about General Müller. I had been reminded of him by one of the recurrent three-line sensation items that are the pepper in the dull stew of a page of newsprint. Müller had been seen in Nicaragua or somewhere – yet again.

  ‘I wonder whether he’ll ever turn up again,’ vaguely.

  ‘Who cares?’ asked Besançon.

  ‘That is one of the surprising facts – so many people still care, and so very deeply.’

  ‘I don’t. Do you?’

  ‘No. Nor do I think he’ll ever reappear. I was just thinking of a man who of all things was a schoolmaster somewhere in the United States. On his death-bed he said, “I am Marshal Ney.” There was quite a bit of evidence – handwriting and so on. Not conclusive of course.’

  ‘And do you believe in that tale?’

  ‘Of course not. Apart from eyewitnesses, it wasn’t in Ney’s character. He had a romantic streak; he wanted to be sacrificed. He could have escaped much earlier if he’d wanted – and he wasn’t in the least afraid of death. Why try and run suddenly, just as it became difficult? No – romantic legend, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I think that General Müller behaved very similarly.’

  ‘Just that there were plenty of people who saw Ney shot. Hell, I have to go and see the burgomaster. He’s a lot duller than you – you’d make a good policeman.’

  ‘Flattered at your compliment, but the career does not greatly appeal to me, at my time of life.’

  ‘Don’t see it surrounded by a rosy glow myself,’ I said at the door. ‘Does it bother you that I sit here talking nonsense?’

  ‘Not in the least. I may even end by taking an interest in your twists of conscience.’

  I walked over towards the Koninginneweg, mentally rehearsing my report.

  3

  It was the wife, again, who let me in. Just as unwelcoming as the last time. Regarding me, I thought, with more than disapproval at the husband being bothered during his free evening by another importunate clown. With suspicion, I thought. Strange that, no? I had two minutes to wait and amused myself wondering about this completely trivial fact. Why should the burgomaster’s wife be suspicious of a functionary from the Ministry of the Interior in The Hague? They are, after all, an integral part of her existence; she must have met dozens. And it is part of her job to be amiable to all of them. This wife, incidentally, was known as a great charmer, most skilful at being amiable to anyone that might be of help in the husband’s career. Odd?

  Hell, I am going round the bend. I sit an hour with Besançon, wondering why I am suspicious of him and why he is still so patently suspicious of me, and I have it on the brain. I begin imagining that this perfectly harmless woman is suspicious of me. I’ll be suspecting her next. Van der Valk will now take all parts previously played by Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s films. He’s not as old and even better looking, and hell with the women, I considered, gazing idly at Madame’s bottom disappearing into the living-room.

  Burgomaster appeared, rather falsely jaunty when he saw me; it didn’t sound good at all, exactly as though he hated my guts but was putting a good face on it.

  ‘Ah, Mr van der Valk. Uh – come into the study. I am so sorry, Ansje – but the town’s welfare as usual comes first.’ The wife nodded sourly. Sour just because she was enjoying the husband’s company? I wondered again.

  Don’t ever start suspecting people – every damn person you meet will act suspiciously from then on.

  ‘Well … how is it progressing?’

  ‘It isn’t a job, alas, where one can mark progress – so many houses built, so many roads mended, on the little chart that hangs above the desk. Wish it were. We’ll go on not knowing for a little while longer, and then, quite suddenly, we’ll know. And that will be the end of it.’

  ‘Surely you form ideas? A certain crystallization? A narrowing of fields?’

  ‘Certainly. There’s a shape that makes itself more precise little by little. But the shape of a mentality, not a person yet. Our facts aren’t complete and we cannot draw conclusions.’

  ‘That has always been the drawback. Every investigating officer has said the same.’

  ‘More facts will turn up. Letters will go on being written, and they won’t all be suppressed. We haven’t had any for a little while – but we are not to conclude from that that the writer just stops. They don’t give up writing. They can’t: they must go on till a crisis is reached. They want to reach a crisis.’

  ‘But we don’t – it has caused quite enough trouble already.’

  ‘We won’t let it get that far. But I’d like it if a few more letters turned up.’

  ‘If I follow you, your method has been to build up a hypothetical portrait, and when that is complete, you will search for a person to correspond? I’m not sure I follow.’

  ‘Haven’t any hypothesis,’ I said woodenly; the fellow was tiresome with his phrases. ‘There is a vague similarity to the method of the robot portrait, where a composite photograph is constructed from details given by witnesses. All that needs more psychological knowledge – I haven’t any. We’re collecting knowledge about the author. Bit by bit. By the way, sir, have you got the transcripts of the police work in the Mimosastraat yet?’

  ‘They aren’t complete but they’ll be brought to me tomorrow; you’ll have them directly. You think that this woman – or her husband – has had letters?’

  ‘I think that something caused a tension, which boiled over in a street fracas. Something painful, to blind them to the public way they were behaving. Could be letters. I very much want to get hold of more. If this pair correspond to a notion I’ve formed, it would strengthen my – call it sense of direction. I’d like, for instance, to know whether she is a local woman – and whether he’s a local man.’

  ‘Miss Burger could find out very easily.’

  ‘Would you be kind enough to add a note if it’s not already in the file?’

  ‘It has a bearing on your ideas?’ making a note with a presentation silver pencil.

  ‘A bearing on character. The local people have, to my eyes, strongly marked features – what one might almost call local traits.’

  ‘Ah, the local character.’ The burgomaster smiled. ‘I had difficulties with it myself when I came; I felt a good deal of an outsider. I was fortunate in th
at my wife comes from this part of the world – she was the greatest help. Secured, so to speak, my admission – of course in any small community the outsider is regarded with suspicion.’

  ‘To be sure.’

  ‘Well … to summarize … your confidence is not diminished.’

  ‘Confidence …’ I had to suppress a grin; it sounded as though he was asking for the loan of half-a-crown’s-worth till Monday. ‘Believe me, burgomaster, there’s no need of it. Patience and concentration. I only wish I was forty feet tall and had a magnifying glass. If I could achieve a minutely accurate observation of everything I’d have this person for you tomorrow. Everything down to temperature of the outside air. A naturalist – Fabre studying ants.’

  The burgomaster had an expression halfway between the bemused and the disapproving.

  ‘You can’t compare human beings to ants, surely.’

  ‘Of course not, except in one sense. There’s a pressure here on human beings to conform, and not conforming is a thing that’s strictly forbidden in antland.’

  I shouldn’t have opened my great mouth, but he held his peace. By profession, training, mentality, upbringing, moral belief, he would find it difficult to sympathize with Van der Valk’s little ways. But he was intelligent, painstakingly tolerant, and had great respect for ability, whether it was the Minister, Miss Burger, or even me. If I showed ability, I would be forgiven the ants.

  ‘I only see one drawback to your exposé – if this uh, observation, patience, takes longer than you count on – what then?’

  ‘It always does. Never never can one sit down and study a peculiar set of circumstances the way I mentioned, like the naturalist. We have to leave that to the sociologists. Time and the taxpayer who foots the bill are our big enemies, as you know yourself, burgomaster.’

  ‘Only too true, alas.’

  ‘Every so often, we just have to take time by the hair; do something that may be precipitate and seem ill-judged. I won’t bother you any longer, burgomaster.’

  ‘You can pick up the report tomorrow afternoon if you wish; I’ll bring it home at lunch-time.’