I felt more bored with my problem than ever. It was so unimportant, so downright trivial. An outcrop of peasant superstition and puritan resentment. A kind of sabotage. Whoever the person was, it was somebody pathetic and potty. It had caused, yes, two deaths, and even that was failing to get me excited. Neither Will Reinders nor the milkman looked to me very tragic.
But it was important; it was my job, my duty, my dedicated work. But I had to keep reminding myself of that. I couldn’t help it; I felt bored with it that evening. I had the report on the affair in the Mimosastraat in my pocket – damn it; I could read it just as well tomorrow. It was an evening on which in Amsterdam I would have taken Arlette to the cinema. But not in Zwinderen, where the local pleasure palace catered for rustic youths; science fiction and ten-year-old American musicals. Tonight there was a comedy, the English kind with eccentric dukes, farcical burglars, a chase in their beloved old-fashioned autos, and an elderly haughty dowager who clonked insubordinate policemen with her handbag.
‘What are you doing tonight?’ asked Arlette lazily.
‘I was just going to ask you the same.’
‘Lovely Europa Cup football. Appeals – or are you going out?’
I didn’t feel in the mood, oddly; usually the Europa Cup fills me with passion.
‘I might, if you can bear to do without me.’
‘I’ll be so excited cheering that I can do without you easily. Hup Racing Club. I’m going to yell “Foul” and “Offside” with the best of them.’
I looked for something crushing to say.
‘You don’t know offside from a hole in the wall.’
‘The wall – lovely – where they line up like chorus girls and the other tries to get a cunning kick in over the heads.’ Arlette has never seen a football match in her life and doesn’t know the first thing about it, but is a total addict of television games.
‘Something perverted about women watching football; all those sweaty jockstraps.’
She just looked disdainful.
The soup was wonderful; I had the greatest difficulty in not overeating.
2
‘What it is you find of interest in a boring old man with the shakes escapes me, I confess.’
‘What I find of interest in the rest of Zwinderen, I must confess escapes me.’
I was beginning by now to feel at home a little in this house; I had found the position in which to be comfortable in the creaky cane arm-chair, where to find the ash-tray, how to get the right amount of light. The old man was accustomed to solitude, not used to repeated visits – and none at all at night – but had seemed glad to see me.
He was sitting as always in the upright chair behind the desk. Heaven knew what junk shop he had found it in; enormous ugly Victorian thing of mahogany upholstered in black leather, but they had understood comfort in those days. One could sit bolt upright, back supported, at a proper level for writing, without fatigue; I have never found a modern chair that allows this. His desk lamp put light on the working top, where he wanted it, but the standard lamp lit the whole room just enough; a pleasant, affectionate gleam upon the books and the face. That extremely tough face, that had survived, like the Abbé Sieyès. He had been reading when I came in, one of his shabby books that gave such vitality to the room. I looked at it.
‘Memoirs of the Baron de Marbot – heard of but never read – like so many others.’
‘Remarkable enough; full of good stories. Perhaps the only sympathetic cavalry officer there has ever been. The Napoleonic period is full of interest. But I incline more and more towards the thought that the world was more interesting before the Revolution.’
He seemed in the mood for conversation; I had never known him so forthcoming. I had been afraid that he would shut up and refuse to talk.
‘More interesting, or better?’ Van der Valk quite ready to rush to the defence of the Republic.
‘Better if you like. People’s minds were less filled with demagogue sentiments. Kings bled their subjects white building grandiose copies of Versailles and everybody found it quite natural – even approved.’
‘And we are now grateful for Dresden and Darmstadt.’
‘Indeed. And even the idiotic castles built by Ludwig of Bavaria. The enlightened despot is something we need. There is nothing worse than the sentimental sobbing over the common man made fashionable in the last century. I detest the common man.’
I was greatly astonished. Still, I had to keep my end up.
‘But the tyrant who all too frequently takes the place of your enlightened despot can only be overthrown by revolution – by your despised common man.’
‘An aristocratic conspiracy,’ said Besançon calmly, ‘was cheaper, easier, and did less damage. Aristocrats might feel their privileges threatened by an abuse of power, but they protected the principle of monarchy, because in doing so they protected themselves.’
‘One cannot reverse history.’
‘Recent history is very dull. Recent history will only become interesting in another hundred years.’
‘When Hitler and Stalin are no longer emotional figures?’
‘And when democracy, perhaps, is out of date.’
‘I was thinking today, oddly, in connexion with my work here, that perhaps the local people here would agree with you. They have a strong conservative sentiment, opposed to nineteenth-century liberalism. Based perhaps on puritan religion, which wasn’t opposed to monarchy at all.’
‘Perhaps that is why I find this countryside sympathetic. The people here may be superstitious, but they are more tolerant of an elderly eccentric than your precious government. Which cannot tolerate anything but the proclamation of the universal godhead of their infernal common man.’
‘You’re a reactionary,’ I said, grinning. ‘I have been thinking that my letter-writer has – dimly – this sort of feeling. Someone who also detests the government, bureaucracy, the all-powerful authority of the common man. Perhaps you’re right at that. More servitude in those days, but more individual liberty too.’
Besançon gave his slow deliberate smile.
‘Am I being brought, after all, under suspicion of writing these letters?’
‘I’m asking only whether you’d agree that letters of this sort might be a protest against the sort of society that’s taking shape here.’
‘I have no idea. I might agree that in a bureaucratic society the bureaucrat is himself a prisoner of the system and might himself grow to resent it.’
To a policeman every conversation is something of an interrogation, I was thinking. Mister Bloodhound, with an enormous red nose, tracking things. The drift of what Besançon was saying was interesting me because I had been picking vaguely at the same sort of idea. His last phrase brought me up with a start. I remembered thinking that afternoon that his thoughts and his mind must have been changed a good deal by his experiences in Germany.
‘We’ve been talking about governments,’ I said. ‘For a few years you lived very close to the men at the centre of an important government. Did that confirm your ideas about these subjects, or have you only arrived at them by reading eighteenth-century memoirs?’
He shrugged indifferently.
‘Are you interested in the Third Reich? I am not a political philosopher. What value has an idly-held theory of mine?’
‘I’m still interested in your ideas about bureaucracy. Remember that as a policeman, I am myself the prisoner you mention.’
‘The Hitler regime might provide illustrations for what I have said. I saw something, certainly, of many of those men.’
‘Then let’s hear.’
Besançon looked at me curiously, keeping silent for some time, thinking it over. He seemed to make his mind up.
‘If it amuses you … I dislike talking about these episodes in my life, which have no real importance. But there, there can be no real objection now. It is history; they are all gone and finished.
‘Where can I begin? Perhaps with the axiom that absol
ute power is supposed to corrupt absolutely. It is half true, like most proverbs. I said, I think, that I approve of aristocratic governments; perhaps I should have said that power is safest in the hands of those born to power, to rule, who have no axes to grind, no little revenges to take upon society. The Reich contained many cloudy idealists – Himmler for an instance – and many men with great force of character and intelligence, who behaved with a savagery, a vengefulness, that pointed to very personal reasons for their conduct. Witness Heidrich, or Göring. Himmler, you know – extraordinary mixture of imbecility and great acumen – detested Goring, and valued Heidrich only as a highly gifted administrator. He wished to provide Germany with an aristocracy: that was his great aim; his SS was to produce this. I can quite see his point. He became fatally entangled, of course. What chance had he, not only against bloodthirsty despots, but against the civil servants that made up the third governmental group? Who also possessed power. Too much. Far too much.’
I listened with my mouth open. Who would have believed that the old man would grow so warm?
‘A bureaucrat is nothing; he serves. Enclosed in a deadening mould of formality. Unless,’ slowly, ‘one of them is sufficiently gifted to break out – and receives unusual opportunities of exercising great power. Then, perhaps, he is more dangerous than the other two kinds. For the civil servant, it is dangerous to do anything but serve. Nothing is so dangerous as the bureaucrat in revolt.’ He broke off abruptly.
‘I prefer not to discuss the subject further.’
‘I saw you this afternoon, while passing on some errand, by the Jewish cemetery. I looked at it later with some interest; I hadn’t known there was one here.’
‘Jews are everywhere. These are dead ones – to me, at least, preferable to the live ones, with their zionism – another lot busy building a bureaucracy with their mouths.’
The expression amused me.
‘I enjoy hearing you on the subject of Jews.’
‘It is no longer fashionable to say so’ – his voice had lost the heat with which he had spoken of the ogres of the Reich, and had its usual tone again: detached, ironic, controlled – ‘but there was some truth in the accusations made against them. Aristocratic governments in earlier centuries carried, no doubt, in themselves their own destruction, but they were largely corrupted, rotted, by crowds of ghetto pawnbrokers. No wonder, then, that the Teutonic Knights dreamed of by that ass Himmler feared and detested Jews. A better reason than that Heidrich had – did you know that Heidrich had himself Jewish blood? It was alluded to quite freely after his death.’
He always says ‘Jews’ I thought. Is not that unusual? Even an atheist Jew, I should have thought, says ‘Us’.
‘You don’t care for Jews, yet you make a little pilgrimage to their graves.’
He did not make the sort of excuse I had anticipated.
‘It was a crime, though, to murder Jews – was it not?’ he inquired, mildly.
3
‘We won,’ said Arlette proudly, when I got home, not very late. ‘We scored three goals. They would have drawn, but we saved a penalty.’
‘Uh,’ I said, totally uninterested. I kissed her absent-mindedly, and did a double-take, coming back to sniff.
‘You stink of drink.’
‘Just getting into training,’ comfortably, ‘waiting for you to get back.’
‘So I see. Smell, rather.’
‘You’ve had nothing?’ innocently.
‘Two cups of tea. I’ve been with old Besançon.’
‘Fancy that. I thought you were bored and had gone off to pick up a Drentse dancing girl.’
‘I do believe you’re drunk.’
‘Supposing that to be so,’ with dignity, ‘then I’m about to get drunker.’ Like a child doing a conjuring trick, she produced a bottle. ‘I had that hidden at home, and brought it thinking a day would come, and this is it.’
I agreed that the day had come, and picked up the corkscrew. Paul Olive, said the label. Négotiant à Frontignan (Hérault). It was yellowish, with an enormous scent that filled the whole room. I thought with some pleasure that it would not be difficult to catch up, and forgot happily all about Jews.
‘I wish,’ she was saying dreamily, half an hour later, ‘that I had a suspender-belt with little silver bells on.’
It wasn’t till I was half asleep that I remembered that I still hadn’t read the report about the couple down the road, and sniggered. Arlette had her ways of combating her dislike of being a suburban housewife in an identical row of tiny mean houses in the Mimosastraat. How many of the housewives of Zwinderen, I wondered, danced tangos in their living-rooms dressed in a suspender belt. My snigger must have been sensible if not audible because Arlette muttered sleepily.
‘Shut up. In my present condition I mustn’t be vibrated.’
4
It was the most unpleasant sort of Dutch weather, next morning. By the thermometer, not so very cold – six below zero – but not a hard, clear, bearable cold. A thick sullen mist hung on the sour landscape, and a mean little wind pierced everything but a leather coat. Never had the little living-room, with its dreary furniture belonging to nobody, seemed so uncomfortable. I settled down with my report and my notebook, annoyed with myself for not being able to take it all more seriously. Perhaps it came from not having an office to go to; I am a creature of routine.
When these affairs aren’t cleared up in a day they always tend to take three weeks, I told myself. In the next breath I was telling myself that I ought to have been on top of it by now. I would be getting a reprimand for wasting public funds.
Working in this left-handed way, snooping about in a pretentious shroud of anonymity, that everybody had probably seen through by now … What was I doing away from paperwork, from the familiar police smell of the room in the big building on the Marnixstraat, from the old-maidish natter of Mr Tak?
What am I doing away from my home?
Have to make an effort. Look, three-quarters of Holland lives in the Mimosastraat, in one or the other provincial town, and provincial towns are the same all over Europe. Think of one of the really dreadful French towns. Meanness, nosiness, obstructionist pettiness – every bit as bad as here and probably worse.
Still, there I wouldn’t find the sixteen different churches. Bigotry, yes, sex, yes, and a prudish love of secretly using four-letter words – but this calvinism?
Or the ghastly heath country south of Hamburg – they had witches there. There was a doctor in Hamburg who was an expert on witches.
Sweden – this cocktail of provincial sex and calvinist religion was common coin there, to go by what one hears.
I wished I knew more, that I was not so ignorant, so inexperienced, so damned helpless. There was nothing extraordinary about this. This little town in Drente wasn’t unique.
The report was no great help. The couple down the road had committed no offence, nor even a misdemeanour. The struggle to stop the car – driving without due care and attention; twenty gulden fine. It was the fear of publicity more than the twenty gulden that had helped the police twist these people’s arms a little.
There had been letters all right; claimed destroyed. (Frustrated again; I wished I could get my hands on just one letter; just one.) The usual stuff, it seemed. Husband accused of corrupting the morals of all and sundry, peddling the demon drink of course, and being free with waitresses. Wife had taken it seriously because there was some truth in it apparently, and she was a jealous woman. She had made a scene. The man had wanted to go straight to the police, and this had upset her even more. To have the police in the house … well, now she had them. The husband had turned on her defensively and accused her of carrying on with men herself – she had boiled over then into a galloping hysteria. Anonymous letters – they should be me, I thought. I’ve had dozens; one always gets a few if one’s name is in the paper during an inquiry.
No, it was not conclusive; just one more straw. There was a grain of truth perhaps in the allegat
ions – the husband was one of these self-satisfied men, conscious of having good looks and a glib tongue – but our letter-writer never seemed to care greatly whether an accusation was true or not. Perhaps they are true in his mind. But whether true or false these letters could be very effective – upon the right character.
The engineer from Rotterdam – his wife had given the letters to the police too. He didn’t care about them and neither did she. On inquiry he seemed to be vaguely but generally known as a skirt-chaser, and she as respectable as all the other wives. Using my alias, I had got Miss Burger to turn up some papers relative to the flat complex, had questioned her idly, and heard a bit of gossip. Not that the woman was a gossip in the neighbourhood sense, Mrs Tattle over the garden wall – she simply knew everybody. One does, as the burgomaster’s secretary in a small provincial town.
I was floundering still. What was the significance of the listening apparatus? It had disappeared all right. I had never believed that it had played any real part, though. I had said, of course, that otherwise things were unexplainable, but that had been to twist what’s-his-name’s arm, the owner of the factory. I hadn’t believed it. All the knowledge shown by the writer was either vague gossip, surely known, indirectly, to any number of people, or quite likely invented – it couldn’t be proved either true or untrue.
The only piece of evidence that sounded conclusive on that point was the remark made by the burgomaster’s wife, that the letter-writer had shown knowledge of a private conversation. Hm. I had been told in Amsterdam to be very discreet indeed. I had better go easy with the burgomaster.
Why was it that whenever the police had started inquiring, letters had promptly ceased, information had dried up, nothing had ever got anywhere? It was as though the letter-writer had some mysterious knowledge of the police activities, and in detail too.
I had thought of this a long while ago, and made a list of the people who had known something of what was going on, and what the police were up to during the long series of dragging inquiries. I had thought that with my alias I might possibly get somewhere. But this line had petered out too.
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