Double-Barrel

by Nicolas Freeling

  ‘Perfectly true – and very silly.’

  ‘You are an intelligent man, Mr van der Valk. Stupid people stare at me owlishly, and I know they feel resentment, perhaps hatred, at my being different from the people they are accustomed to. Whereas I see your eyes constantly on me, not rudely, but trying to understand what it is that puzzles you. Yet it is all in the dossier.’ He sounded resigned, as though he knew I would never understand.

  He looked very small and thin in the high-backed solid chair. He rested his hands in his lap, loosely folded together. I studied the thin grey hair, the lines in the face like axe-cuts, the sharp flicker of the very bright eyes behind the mask of dark glasses. The mouth so tightened and pulled and reined in through long years that the lips scarcely showed. As always he was carefully shaved and spotlessly neat, wearing his shabby, well-brushed jacket as though it were a full dress uniform with gold lace. Looks like Captain Dreyfus, I thought, after his epaulettes had been torn off in public. He has a lot of dignity. Now there was another one to whom suspicion had clung obstinately, quite unreasoning. Even after the rather clumsy plot had been exposed, kind and honest people had refused to abandon their conviction that he was a villain and a traitor. And even now, people are ready to believe Jews capable of anything, from cheating the tax inspector to ritual child-murder.

  Am I like that too? I wondered. I have, after all, nothing, absolutely nothing, of which I can suspect this man.

  ‘You haven’t in the least a Jewish physiognomy, have you?’

  ‘I know – or knew – Jews with blonde hair and blue eyes.’

  ‘But we still go round thinking of Jews as round-shouldered, hook-nosed, with big moist cunning brown eyes and thick sensual mouths.’

  Abruptly he changed the subject.

  ‘How long have you been a policeman?’

  It surprised me, but he had a perfect right to ask. Why not?

  ‘Since nineteen forty-six. Straight out of the army. I was one of those dimwit idealists.’ That earned me the slight, vivid smile. ‘A policeman is like a doctor, I thought; he serves society. The naivete of both these ideas …’

  ‘You have acquired a professionalism, a competence – and the usual police skills. But not the real police mentality.’

  ‘You understand me better than I do you.’

  ‘Yet you have had a successful career, already.’

  I must have looked sour. ‘You have had disillusion, bitter moments?’ he added.

  ‘Certainly. But I am lucky enough to have a wife with a very strong character.’

  ‘Ah.’ I could not see enough of the expression around the eyes, behind the dark glasses. ‘Tell me more about your life.’

  ‘I am one of these characters who like the wrong things and too often the wrong people. I thought myself a fair boxer when I was a boy. Thought I was a fair boxer? I thought myself a second Cerdan. But boxing is not thought respectable here – unsuitable for a public servant. I wanted to study languages, medicine, psychology – I had an idea that these things would be a help. All stopped. I had no chance: I didn’t have the money for studies, you see. I got put to studying jurisprudence – very dull. Out of sheer rage, probably, I passed my examinations to become a police-officer. Went to the school for cadet officers. Got top marks in my class. Found out later that I’d got the worst recommendation in the class too, from the instructors. I became an inspector, but I’ve been reprimanded a dozen times, seen my seniority clipped twice for exceeding instructions. I know that my promotion is blocked. If I hadn’t been lucky, and occasionally solved a few little puzzles that had flummoxed the orthodox, I’d probably be clerking behind a desk by now. I’m here now – that will be another question of luck. If I clear this up smartly, after a lot of others have ballsed it all up, it will do me a lot of good – and if I don’t, as looks extremely likely, I’ll be in the dog-house for ever, probably.’

  ‘You lack the art of pleasing your superiors.’ The smile had crept back.

  ‘I lack pretty nearly everything. And especially the right mind. A fellow junior to me – and even a little stupider – got made chief inspector a month ago.’

  Besançon leaned forward on the desk and seemed rapt in some thought of his own. I looked at the books. Memoirs, history, astronomy, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers; books in Russian, in French, in German. Suddenly he said something astonishing.

  ‘You will clear this up, all right. It would not surprise me if you cleared up a lot of other things too, that have for long remained obscure.’

  I must have looked astonished, in a stupid way. He got up, abruptly.

  ‘I will ask you to excuse me. I do not feel well, and I think I wish to lie down for a short time.’

  At that moment the door opened. Mrs Thing – I never could remember her name – with coffee for me. Besançon smiled.

  ‘You must not think I am chasing you away. Sit here quietly, have your coffee in peace. Here,’ he picked up a book from his desk and gave it me, ‘read that for a while, and fortify yourself.’ The dramatic works of Corneille. Well, I certainly could do a great deal worse. He gave me a look as he went out. ‘Learn what you can,’ it seemed to say. ‘Conclude what you like.’ He shut the bedroom door behind him with no further interest in what I did.

  The coffee was too hot to drink. I walked about, staring at the bookshelves. I sat down again deliberately in his chair, at his table. I bit into a biscuit, and brushed the crumbs away. I got up again to look at the record folders, rummaged through the long row of cardboard files containing typed transcripts, and left them alone again with a wrinkled nose. Technical German and Russian – jaw-breaking jargon; a language on its own. My German is none too good at the best of times.

  All German music – no Frenchmen or Russians, nothing from the romantic period. Haydn, not much Bach, surprisingly little Beethoven. No, here we have later stuff. Gluck, Weber, ‘Vogelhändler’, ‘Schwarzwald Mädel’ – operettas, by heaven. And such German operettas. Opera? No Wagner, no Mozart, no Italians. But plenty, plenty of Richard Strauss.

  Remarkable.

  There was nothing on the desk; no memopad, no diary. Nothing like a photograph, a present, an ornament, a souvenir anywhere in the room. The room of a man who came back walking, wearing refugee charity clothes, carrying nothing. Everything that happened before 1945 wiped clean out. Fair enough.

  On the desk was a Bible in old Gothic German, printed in Leipzig in 1911, and two surprises – the memoirs of Charles de Gaulle and a biography in English of Oliver Cromwell. The one I could understand – Besançon was interested in the problems of power. And the other? Cromwell’s sources of power? Cromwell’s calvinist conscience?

  Was it not unusual that there was no book in the whole room that had anything to do with Jews? Except Feucht-wanger’s best seller of the thirties, Jew Suss. And that was a novel.

  There was nothing here for me or that was any of a policeman’s business. I went home. There was a pork chop, cooked in the oven with an onion and an apple, sage, garlic, bread-crumbs, with mashed potatoes. Good. Endive à la crème to follow. And an orange.

  6

  I took my mind away with a jolt from Besançon. He was only distracting me from my business. I went, that afternoon, for a long, long walk alone. My report to the burgomaster was due that evening. I was rather late: I had to go home and change my shoes; I had to walk up to the garage again to pick up the auto, and the buggers made me wait, of course. I thought while I was waiting, about the people who were so obviously out of place here, like Will Reinders. For a first-class mind, he was a singularly naive man. He made it so difficult for himself. He had to put Religion Reformed, Politics Anti-Rev, on all the little forms, he had to pay lip service to all the conventions he detested, and he did such silly things.

  Like me, I thought. Still, I don’t have to live here.

  Reinders had a better job than he would have had anywhere else. The owner had explained to me that he kept his business here because his costs were
two to three per cent lower than elsewhere in Holland – and it was just this money that he could devote to research, at which Reinders was good. Poor old Will, stuck in Drente.

  It will obviously never occur to him that he is in several senses responsible for his wife’s death – nor that to marry the sister will hardly put an end to his problem.

  I thought about the lover boy, the draughtsman who had been given the sack. A juvenile Reinders – another boy who did not believe in governments or churches, who had thought it virtually a sacred duty, as well as the handiest expression of his revolt against convention, to make love to his boss’s wife. Poor Betty, she had had a hard time. I wondered whether she’d ever got as far as sleeping with the boy. Reinders would not be a difficult subject to cocufy.

  I thought about ‘the imports’ – the other men and women who had the responsible jobs in the local factories, who lived on the Koninginneweg, who put up with Drente because they had good jobs, but were certainly all on the alert for even better jobs, that might get them out again. None of them had had letters – had they? They were the ones most likely to bring letters to the police if they did. Their positions were secure, and independent of what Zwinderen said or thought. It was only the local women, like Betty, who had been small-town women all their lives, that cared what Zwinderen said or thought. She had tried so hard. I recalled one of Will’s stories; he had talked (and how he had talked) freely once I got him going. Betty had been interested in a book that had caused a lot of stir, about incest or something. He had bought it for her in Rotterdam. She had read it pretending indifference, but he had seen, he said with intolerable self-satisfaction, that she had been much shocked. Poor Betty.

  Now how to explain to the burgomaster that the nets were undoubtedly getting very narrow, but that I still had no fish? Ah, there was the auto ready at last. The mechanic gave me a long lecture about the vitals of a Volkswagen, in which I wasn’t in the least interested.

  In the study, papers were being sorted out, a lot of municipal bumph for next day’s council meeting. I said my little piece; he seemed fairly satisfied.

  ‘Burgomaster, I have a small but pertinent question, which I must ask you not to take amiss.’

  ‘Ask by all means.’

  ‘I’m aware of course that you treat municipal affairs with the utmost discretion. But I would like to know whether any unauthorized person could ever get access to any confidential memoranda.’

  ‘Oh, I understand. Similar questions were asked by the State Recherche – they were very thorough. I don’t take it amiss. In this house – I often have papers here in this room. But they are kept in this cabinet, of which I have the only key. Surely there’s a note to that effect in your file?’

  ‘There is, yes. It was, paradoxically, more the complete opposite that I was thinking of. Could any personal papers of your own – perhaps a private letter, or something concerning family affairs, your wife, for instance – ever get mixed up with any official work you might have here? So that a letter, say, got brought inadvertently to the office?’

  ‘I’ve never thought about it.’

  ‘Why should you? The security aspect is all on the other boot, so to speak.’

  ‘It could happen – it has no importance though.’

  ‘Can you recall any such occasions?’

  ‘Two or three, I think. Letters get into my brief-case – people who think that by writing a personal letter to my home they will somehow get a more favourable reaction. Begging letters, mostly. Miss Burger deals with them. Occasionally a genuine personal letter has got mixed up with those, probably because it had a typewritten envelope or some such reason.’

  ‘Has anything of the sort ever happened that bothered you – I mean some item of news or information that was really no concern of anyone bar you. Of course I realize that it would only reach Miss Burger and go no further.’

  ‘On that account I would have no worry – she’s discretion itself. I do recall once a letter that I’d picked up on my way to work and had stuffed in my pocket. It came inadvertently under her eye and caused me, I admit, some slight embarrassment. But directly she read the first lines and realized its personal import she handed it straight back to me, apologizing profusely.’

  ‘Have you any objection to telling me what was in it?’

  ‘You’re not suspecting Miss Burger, are you?’

  ‘No no, just a cross-check.’

  ‘Well,’ he hemmed, ‘it was a letter from a doctor – a medical matter – concerning only myself – I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you.’

  ‘No matter.’

  ‘If you’re concerned whether Miss Burger could have discovered your identity, I can reassure you. I have a “for my eyes only” file – the correspondence relative to your purpose here went in that.’

  ‘That does indeed reassure me.’

  ‘Oh, I dare say Miss Burger has a certain curiosity about your doings. But she’s not only well trained – she has a very strongly developed conscience.’

  ‘Conscience as a worker?’

  ‘Not only conscientious – that’s not so rare after all in public servants – she has a tremendous sense of right and wrong; that’s what makes my trust in her considerable.’

  ‘She’s rather pretty.’

  ‘She’s not unattractive. I suppose I’m so used to her I hardly notice.’

  ‘Odd that she hasn’t married.’

  ‘She’s devoted practically her whole life to public work.’

  I concluded that it would be unfair to suspect the burgomaster of pinching Miss Burger’s bottom.

  On my way out I saw the wife hovering. She came out on to the step with me, leaving the porch light out and almost closing the front door.

  ‘He has no idea at all,’ I said carefully. ‘Just behave normally with him.’

  ‘That’s one relief, at least.’

  ‘The thing that our author knows about your husband – was it personal only to him, or did it concern you as well?’

  Her voice in the dimness was uncomfortable.

  ‘Er – just him. Myself only indirectly – I can’t tell you, I’m afraid.’

  ‘No matter. Just one query more and I’ll ask no further. Was it anything that would concern a doctor?’

  ‘No.’ That was that ruled out.

  ‘Good night, Madame.’

  And now home.

  7

  Arlette was waiting for me. I have only once seen her so pinched and tense: an occasion when I was four hours late on a night when she knew I was carrying a gun; a thing I do maybe once a year. Contrary to belief, plain-clothes policemen have ordinarily no right to carry weapons.

  ‘But what’s the matter? I’m not very late. The garage was very slow.’

  She did not speak, but with a nervous shudder held out a plain white envelope.

  I was delighted. Yes, delighted. Never have I been so pleased.

  ‘Is this what I think it is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When did it come? And how?’

  ‘Through the letter-box. But I don’t know when. It’s been dark an hour. People put things in the box all the time. Children with pamphlets from shops; bargains, advertisements; sometimes two or three together.’

  ‘Anything else come?’

  ‘Like I say, just pamphlets.’

  ‘Did you keep them?’

  ‘Why should I? I never do. You want them? In the bin in the kitchen.’

  I scrabbled. Yes, the local supermarket, with a banner headline about cheap vermouth and tuppence off oatmeal, biscuits and condensed milk till Saturday. A printed postcard inviting us to write for free details of extraordinarily cheap sewing machines. A little mimeographed circular reminded us that a very superior doctor of divinity would address interested persons next Tuesday at seven p.m. Subject, ‘The Ecumenical Survival’.

  Mm.

  The envelope was quite good quality, plain, unaddressed, had been sealed. I wondered whether it was worth while to r
un chemical tests on it.

  ‘I half guessed,’ said Arlette miserably. ‘When I read it …’ A violent shudder.

  ‘It’s aimed at you?’ Curious, very curious – when all the other women had been local.

  ‘As far as I can see at both of us. Venomously indiscriminate.’

  I sat down in the living-room and drew the paper out slowly.

  ‘Bring both of us a drink. Just make sure the curtains are shut properly.’

  ‘I thought of that too,’ bitterly. Fright, shock, disgust. She wasn’t over it by any means; she poured two glasses of port and spilt some. However, the policeman had to come in front of the husband. Sorry, Arlette.

  It was all I had wished, had longed for. And more. ‘The one of you is no better than the other. Hypocrites. An official from the ministry – nosing in our affairs, looking down at us because we are plain honest people. How do you have the nerve to bring a woman with you? – I should like to see her marriage papers.

  ‘Foreign harlot – why don’t you go back to whatever brothel in Paris you came out of? The women here are decent God-fearing people. They know that God watches them. God was watching you. Seeing a woman behave like that in our town.

  ‘You call yourself a public servant. Pervert, abandoned, vicious. I have written to the ministry in The Hague to denounce you to your superiors. Holland is utterly sunk in sin. But we know here what it is we have to fight. Get out and take your prostitute with you.’

  No spelling mistakes, and careful punctuation. Even a question mark had been carefully clipped and inserted. I wanted to jump about with enjoyment but I was sorry for Arlette. I gave her a broad smile.

  ‘Very tame after a few I’ve had. I’m unhappy that you had to see it first – but, you know, this was all I needed.’

  She drank some port and tried to grin back. ‘Last night when I got silly and did idiotic tricks with my suspender belt. I got seen – my god, darling. Horrible.’

  ‘Listen to me. This is not the usual kind of letter, but it’s clearly by the same writer. This is the ordinary three-a-penny abusive kind, and a complete give-away. She just couldn’t resist the temptation to take a chance, wanting to show how clever she was. It’ll hang her.’