Double-Barrel

by Nicolas Freeling

  I had a feeling that it wasn’t only indignation. Fear there too. I hadn’t done anything to make her frightened.

  ‘My husband’s at his office. He gave me a report or something at lunch-time – or so he called it – to be left in your hands if you called. I see you have it; I cannot imagine why you should think it necessary to bother me further.’

  She was eyeing the manila envelope in my hand as though it were the famous packet that, in fiction, is deposited in the litter basket for the blackmailer – the big wad of used tens and twenties. I put the envelope in my inner pocket – she interested me greatly.

  ‘I think we’d better continue this conversation under four eyes only.’ I motioned towards the living-room; she followed, stickily.

  I had added several good examples to my collection of living-rooms since coming to Drente; I am bitten by them the way people are bitten by stamps or butterflies. This story, like many others, was a story of living-rooms, lived or unlived. Excellent example here of genus provincial grandeur; species higher functionary.

  It was a big room, L-shaped, a pleasant room, bright and sparkling, and it illustrated well, I thought, the species. Coming in, formally, from the hall, it was dead and dry as the bones of Merovingian kings. Low coffee-table in front of the window, with a tall vase of desiccated pampas grass. In the place of honour on the wall, large tinted photograph: reigning monarch and consort, much bedizened with stars on the bosom, sashes and epaulettes, not a hair out of place, glazed stares and a general look of having eaten too much Christmas pudding. On the hearth, sawed birch logs that had been carefully dusted, and on either side a neat little electric radiator. Pale pastel rugs; beige, pink and almond green. Large sofa and arm-chairs upholstered in a most expensive and grandiose stuff – cut velvet, I thought; leaf green where cut and bottle green where not cut – acanthus-leaf pattern. All decorated with silvery green satin cushions plumped out like a poulterer’s turkeys. All the seams of sofas, chairs and cushions were bound with silver cord, with flourishes and cloverleaf hitches and, at the four corners of the sofa, ending in resplendent silver tassels. Must have cost a year of my income and I would not even have dared sit in it in the morning-coat I hired from Moss Bros for Ascot. On the coffee-table was a presentation silver tray with a cut-glass decanter and six cut-glass whatnots designed to make the grocer’s port taste like the Cockburn twenty-seven.

  I hurried past all this holding my breath, noting in passing a glassed bookcase with chaste blue curtains, undoubtedly holding bound company reports and the volumes of Punch between 1867 and 1882.

  Getting round the corner was a pleasant surprise; here the chairs were sat in, the television set looked at, there were engravings on the wall of views of The Hague, and the burgomaster had pipes in a rack. Wifey had magazines and a Japanese lacquer-work sewing-table with nests of cunning little drawers. Over the arms of chairs were little bronze ash-trays on broad leather straps, more ash-trays on the table – the ones that mustn’t be used, Limoges enamel – and a vase of early daffodils. There was still a strong feeling that dogs and policemen were not permitted, but it was at least human.

  I wasn’t asked to sit down.

  ‘And what, Mr van der Valk, can you have to say to me that is private – and what, I wonder, gives you the right to order me about in my house?’

  ‘A burgomaster, Madame, is an important state functionary. No questionable interpretation can ever be put on his actions, or his family’s; that is self-evident.’

  ‘I fail to see … this impertinence …’

  ‘If it were ever suggested – malicious tongues are never lacking – that there were some irregularity, misuse of municipal funds, anything you like – he can – he must – be able to disprove it openly and at once. Isn’t it so? And of course he can; everything is on paper. His private life must also be above damaging insinuation. If anybody makes such remarks about an ordinary citizen he can be sued for slander, but suppose a whispering campaign were started, underhand, against a high functionary in public service, it would be difficult to combat. Disregard a whisper and that is seen as a tacit admission; deny it and you simply draw attention to there being, possibly, something that needs denying. A classic dilemma.’

  ‘All very interesting. I must ask you to excuse me now.’

  ‘His wife does all she can to help, of course. Superior functionaries sometimes get – one of the thorns on their rose-bush – anonymous, often vulgar, generally illiterate letters. Mostly abusive complaint from some rather simple person with a fancied grievance. You, now, have probably had similar experiences.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said.

  ‘Luckily there are people whose job it is to help.’

  I had been wondering why the woman was acting so strangely. I had even wondered for a moment whether I had accidentally stumbled on something even more interesting than another person who had had letters. She turned the tables on me rather neatly.

  ‘Is it you who wrote?’ she asked in a terrified whisper.

  I was floored. I had had to pick my way, using very pompous formal phrases, ready to cover up if I saw I was going wrong. And here I had hit a bull’s-eye – and been hit a smartish crack in my own bull’s-eye. Van der Valk bereft of speech – extremely comic, thinking himself so clever.

  ‘You mean you don’t know who I am?’

  ‘No – I mean I’ve seen you making those secretive calls on my husband.’

  ‘You thought I was squeezing money out of him?’

  ‘I don’t know what I thought.’

  ‘Didn’t he tell you, then?’

  ‘He said it was confidential.’

  ‘I am an inspector of police, trying to sort out this rather nasty little affair. It is true that my identity was kept confidential, that I am supposed to be a civil servant making a survey. I have been working with your husband – that is the meaning of these private interviews that burned you. You thought I was blackmailing him …’

  ‘He’s been very worried and silent.’

  ‘Ah. He’s concerned about his administration, and his town – his folk. He’s done a great deal for this place, and he cannot understand why some people, apparently, should take that amiss. You’ve shown him the letters?’

  ‘I threw them all down the lavatory and I’ve never shown them or mentioned them. I didn’t know – I thought it best to behave as though I hadn’t had them.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘That my husband and I were threatened with a dreadful scandal, that he would lose his position, that – this person – would help, could stop it all, if I did what he told me.’

  ‘And what was it you had to do?’

  ‘It was never put clearly. But – uh – immorality. I – I knew he must be not – not normal.’

  ‘You know – or don’t you? – that there have been other letters?’

  ‘Some of the suggestions – I have been at my wits’ end with worry. My husband has never mentioned it, but I have heard rumours that there have been other letters of this kind. I have even heard it said that that was why Mrs Reinders killed herself – she was supposed to have taken an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.’

  ‘You knew her?’

  ‘Not personally. I’ve met her – oh, I’m terribly sorry; please do sit down – at various functions and parties. She was quite a pleasant woman, a little nervous and abrupt.’

  ‘Church functions?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so; we didn’t belong to the same church.’

  ‘You’re a local woman, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, I come from Friesland – that hardly counts as local. From the north, at least. My husband comes from Utrecht.’

  ‘Why did you think I had written these letters?’

  ‘But how did you know I had had any?’

  ‘I didn’t. I guessed something of the sort. Your behaviour arrested my attention.’ Delightful police language. Arresting something, even if only attention. ‘You have to realize that I’v
e been on the look-out for this kind of thing. I have to – you see, people have not admitted that they have had letters. You should have told the police.’

  ‘Yes. I do see,’ shamefaced.

  ‘In what sort of way are the letters written?’

  ‘Newsprint cut out and stuck on paper.’

  ‘No, I mean the kind of language, the way of speaking.’

  I didn’t think she was acting. Her face was very pink still; her forehead puckered up with anxious concentration. She looked like a schoolgirl who has to answer a tricky question in front of the class. She had quite lost the glossy self-possession of the burgomaster’s wife, and her countrified, innocent look was showing through.

  ‘They sound knowing in a horrible sneaky manner, and they kind of offer to protect me, in a beastly slimy way.’ She had even slipped back into the schoolgirl vocabulary.

  ‘It’s a pity you haven’t kept them.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have such filthy things in my house.’

  ‘They’re sexy, are they?’

  Terrific blush.

  ‘Well, in a certain way, yes, rather.’

  ‘What way do they sound knowing?’

  ‘Well, saying things about my husband that nobody would know – as a sort of proof that there were other things he knew.’

  ‘For instance?’

  She looked mulish. She wasn’t going to tell me.

  ‘Details – of a conversation – a private one, between my husband and myself.’

  Now what did that mean? Was that a euphemism for some bedtime chat? Or did it mean that the listening apparatus was cropping up again? That thing was a pest; I didn’t like it at all.

  ‘Did it say, “I am God; I see and hear everything.” Words to that effect?’ I am especially fond of the phrase ‘words to that effect’. Never did so short a phrase contain so much.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll have to decide what I can do. I can protect both you and your husband, so don’t worry. Do nothing. But keep any letters you may get. Don’t tell your husband; I don’t see any need to worry him. I’m here twice a week to keep him informed on my researches, so you can always get hold of me.’

  ‘I see now.’ Her face had lit up as though she were allowed to go to the circus after all. ‘I thought you were somebody horrible.’

  I gave my reassuring laugh; Doctor Boomph telling the wine-merchant tactfully that he hasn’t got cirrhosis of the liver just yet awhile.

  ‘Be reassured. This business will soon be sorted out.’

  7

  I drove out along the Koninginneweg towards a less upper-crust side street leading back towards the main street. The houses were here more scattered, and there were patches of waste ground. It was freezing now; the snow on the ground had been flattened into icy rinks here and there and I progressed with majestic leisure, gazing around at a Drentse landscape made beautiful.

  Suddenly, on the far side of the road, I saw a familiar figure, that turned away from a high rusty iron gate between two stone pillars. Besançon, in his long overcoat with its old-fashioned look, and rubber overshoes. He hadn’t seen me; he was walking away slowly, upright, firm, but using a rubber-tipped stick. A casual passer-by would not notice the trill of the degenerating nervous system.

  I slowed the Volkswagen and stopped. I had not before noticed those gates. A disused cemetery, it looked like from across the road. There was a low wall, and a belt of trees. On the gates was some plaque or inscription. I got out, and walked across to see.

  Yes, a cemetery. Old headstones among rank grass and overgrown bushes. Pretty neglected. The gate was locked with a chain and padlock which looked as if it had been unopened for ten years. A board inside invited interested persons to apply for the key to the municipal grave-digger, but there didn’t seem to have been any interested persons for quite a while. A tiny cemetery in a little sleeping neglected plot of ground with trees all round it. Forgotten, it seemed, by everyone around here, except possibly Mr Besançon.

  It was like his house in the disused corner of the asylum fields. Perhaps he just liked places like that. I sympathized; so did I.

  Ah, that was it. An old Jewish cemetery. The capitals of the pillars in the gateway were inscribed with thick, deep Hebrew letters. Underneath was a dedication: ‘To our fellow burghers, and to all our compatriots, who disappeared, carried away into night and fog, and who never returned. 1940–45.’ On the other pillar was a consoling if slightly banal text from the Book of Proverbs.

  There had been Jews here once. Were there any now, besides Besançon? No community, at least. Perhaps one or two, isolated. I could always ask Miss Burger; it was the kind of thing she knew straight off.

  Strange man. Says he detests Jews, never wants to see another Jew, but that does not stop him making little pilgrimages to this spot. He feels, perhaps, his essential Jewishness more than he will admit. One does not go through the camps without knowing how deep it goes, the Jewishness.

  Doubtless, if questioned, he would say it made a pleasant walk, with his slight smile, in his deep level voice that still kept a German intonation. It was a kilometre from his home, along the only street in Zwinderen that had broad quiet pavements lined with trees; it did make a pleasant walk.

  I got back into the auto and sat meditating. Only man of any real interest I had met or heard of around here – was that the reason why my interest in him remained so vivid? Of course there is a lot about his existence that’s remarkable. A man who has survived where millions were massacred. Survived for five years, and in the innermost centre, what is more, of the Thousand Year Reich. In close communion with the nervous intellectuals like Schellenberg, the scientist soldiers like Dornberger, the weird visionaries and mad idealists like Himmler, the half-understood, misty characters like Bormann and Müller.

  I knew little enough about any of them. The innermost circle – an extraordinary mixture. A few sheer gangsters – Kaltenbrünner – and a few who remained utterly honest, scrupulous, like Berger, the Waffen SS chief. It was possible, even in that circle. Himmler himself had been in many ways likeable; kind, generous – no more than amiably potty, one would have thought. What impression had it all made on a Jew, in the middle there, being cynically manipulated for who knew what obscure purposes?

  Some were cold and clever, merciless executants of the horrors conceived by their fearful master. But they had known – they must have known – that he was no dreadful sorcerer, but a pathetic object, mentally deluded and physically crippled by syphilitic progressive paralysis. They had known, and they had stayed true to the bitter end.

  Some, anyway. Himmler one couldn’t count; he was split right down the centre. Schellenberg the Intelligence chief had played both ends against the middle, one might even say idealistically. And Müller, according anyway to shadowy and inconclusive witness, including Besançon’s, had played a game with the Russians. Perhaps a double game? Perhaps a triple game? Who knew? Nobody. A Jew hadn’t lived alongside people like this without learning remarkable things.

  I thought, as I often had, about that perplexed phrase left on the report by the State Recherche officer. ‘As though he possessed some terrible secret.’ Mm, the deaths of a million Jews, and the lives of a handful of the real werewolves – there were terrible secrets there. Did Besançon believe in God? And in the Devil? Very likely, but hardly in the same manner as these people here, the calvinists, the anti-revolutionaries.

  This town; village; whatever you call it. It is like Besançon. There is something different and alien overlaying centuries of history. You will get throwbacks peeping through: old beliefs and old loyalties; deep distrusts and inborn, ingrained fears, suspicions, superstitions. The peasants here were rather like Jews, come to that. They asked to be left alone, allowed to have their beliefs and practices in peace. But the government, uneasy at anything that departs from the sacred norm, never can leave them in peace. Some busybody bureaucrat would be for ever fiddling at them. The German bureaucrats had simply been u
nable to stop fiddling at Jews.

  Even now there was a certain power in these places. They were strong in their faith and their fanaticism. In Staphorst, the stranger got his camera broken, and the wrongdoer was judged their way, according to grim rules, and given what they found in the Book, to be the God-ordained punishment. Just as in Salem, in seventeenth-century Massachusetts. The Book said, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’.

  Here in Zwinderen they would like to hang witches too. And bundle the bureaucrats about their business. Unfortunately, it is no longer possible, in Holland, to bundle senior functionaries. Burgomasters, say, or inspectors of police.

  Part four: ‘Knowledge’

  1

  At home the vegetables were in the pea-soup, and a smoked sausage, and the perfume was filling the house. We would be allowed to eat some tonight, but only tomorrow would it reach its real glory; Arlette says it has to stand overnight before the flavour really comes out. She fishes the bone out then, and the piece of pickled pork. This she cuts in slices and puts on pumpernickel with lots of mustard – sacred accompaniment to pea-soup; it isn’t just soup, it’s a meal, like a bouillabaisse. I like a calves-foot in it – I enjoy that sticky gelatinous feel, and a soup you can really jump up and down on – but she says a beef bone gives a better flavour.

  I gave a loud greedy sniff.

  ‘Much too early yet,’ she said reprovingly. She was sitting on top of the fire – ‘behind the stove’ as the Dutch call it – reading Match.

  ‘You’re not to eat biscuits either; you’ll spoil your appetite.’

  On a day like this all Holland makes pea-soup. Perhaps Besançon’s housekeeper would make it for him too, and he would sit in his little room listening to the gramophone or reading, and perhaps he would feel something of the same content I was feeling. He had had a wife – gone up the chimney, one of the very first. Did the man think often of the soup she used to make? What could it be like to have no one left? No one at all.