Double-Barrel

by Nicolas Freeling

  ‘Where are the plants?’

  ‘Old Mother Counterpoint has them.’ This was the old lady on the ground floor who gave piano lessons, a dear old lady. Arlette was fond of her, especially as they agreed that Samson François was the only pianist in the world who can play Debussy.

  ‘A drink, quick.’

  ‘There’s some cognac left from Zwinderen. In the brown one with the broken lock. Careful; it’s only held by the strap.’

  ‘To Drente.’

  ‘And may we never have to go back.’

  We went to bed early. I was tired, but I lay awake a long while. Reaction, I told myself.

  I went next day to the office, where a good deal of humour, intended as wit, was fired at me. My boss – that old maid Commissaris Tak – was inclined to approve of me for once.

  ‘I’m bound to say you’ve wasted no excessive amount of time. You’re due, in justice, some time off – mm, today’s Friday. Take the weekend which is due to you anyway. I’ll expect you Monday morning.’

  It sounded generous, but I was due the weekend anyway. Tak is good at this trick of making a regulation sound like generosity.

  ‘You’ll have to make a report to the Palais.’

  ‘I’ll be doing that over the weekend.’

  But instead of going home – if I didn’t get out quick he’d get a phone call, fly up the wall, and call me back – I sat in my office for ten minutes, brooding. My colleague was out working; I had it to myself. At the end of the ten minutes I picked up the intercom telephone that links all the offices in the headquarters building.

  ‘Morning, Klaas.’

  ‘Hey, you back? What’s new?’

  ‘Tell you over a beer.’

  ‘No time today.’

  ‘Monday maybe. I wanted to know the phone number of the Jewish bureau in Vienna.’

  ‘You don’t need it. One right here in Amsterdam. They’ll phone Vienna for you if they don’t happen to have what you want. Don’t tell me you’re mixed up with that racket?’

  ‘I’m mixed up in all the rackets,’ I said ruefully. ‘What’s the address?’

  Doctor Eli Lazarus was a mild, fat man, who looked as though his greatest enemy were no more than the female malaria mosquito. He showed no outward signs of damage; he had a smooth unwrinkled baby face with a sad joviality about it, like an intellectual comedian. But he had lost anything up to a hundred relatives in the camps – every single person he possessed. Like Besançon, like hundreds and thousands more. Can one accuse people like that of losing their integrity, their balance, their inner peace? Who knew – it was Besançon all over again – what happened to the mentality of people who had spent years in the ‘dustbin of the Reich’ as Heidrich called it jokingly. Exactly like Besançon, he belonged to another world; one could not reach the depths of a man like that.

  He was one of the mild, implacable, kind, reasonable monomaniacs that have sworn never to rest until the last German or Slav or just plain man accused of genocide has been brought to justice. I found it a peculiar sensation just being in his office; abominable crimes were filed here the way the employment bureau filed plumbers and salesgirls. Murder, torture, sterilization, enforced prostitution, infection with mortal disease – you name it, he’d got it.

  ‘In a certain sense, we’re near the end of our tether,’ he was saying in the quiet earnest voice of a man dedicated to pre-Cambrian fossils. ‘We have accounted for nearly all the persons against whom we have any hope of bringing convincing evidence. Experience has shown us that not even the Superior Court in Karlsruhe can get a conviction without witnesses. I do not mean the silent witnesses – I mean men and women that can still appear, speak, exercise the power of words – “I saw, I heard, I have felt”. There were so terribly few, and now, fifteen years after …’ He rested his big double chin on a square firm hand.

  ‘And what remains?’

  ‘There remains a large – painfully large – file of persons whom we know perfectly well. We know their identity, we know their quite shocking history, and we know that they sometimes, quite cynically, admit everything that we could accuse them of. But we have no juridical grip upon them. We find it impossible to bring them to trial simply for lack of the compelling evidence I have mentioned.’

  ‘It is no longer enough to say “I accuse”?’

  ‘It is not enough.’

  ‘And the real higher-ups? The top few, whose names are known to the whole world? Like the one who killed himself last year in Egypt, the one who is supposed to be in Paraguay? The ones that have remained lost or hidden up till now?’

  A minute smile twitched at Doctor Lazarus’ big shaved jaw.

  ‘Are you falling into the temptation of the treasure hunt, Mr van der Valk?’

  ‘You mean the so-called secrets of the Toplitz See?’

  ‘Not exactly, though that is as good an example as any. While the Austrian authorities were diving for those so- called treasures, we were pestered with a wasps’ nest of rumour. Every well-publicized figure of those times was placed by a thousand eye-witness tales within a thousand metres of that lake. Every hoary legend got a new lease of life. Even Skorzeny, who was quietly in Spain and is in any case no criminal at all. Even Müller, hardiest and most persistent legend of all.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The treasure hunt, Mr van der Valk, consists largely of following up people who say they have seen Müller. It happens constantly. Only today we have a long tale that he is directing the secret police in Albania. It is and remains a chronic obsession.’

  ‘And what do you know for certain about Müller?’

  ‘For certain, not even if he is alive at all. We have followed innumerable false trails, some of which seemed remarkably authentic, so great is the aura, the sort of sinister romance, that surrounds Müller’s name. Who – tell me – can come to me and claim he has even a remote notion what Müller looks like? There exist descriptions, photographs, you might answer. I will reply that these photographs and descriptions are of anybody and everybody. I could go here with you into the street, and in a quarter of an hour point you out twenty Müllers – a tram-conductor, a clerk at the Bourse, the teller of your bank.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘We know, of course, certain facts, such as those that enabled us to examine the grave in Berlin, but we cannot say, “That is the man”. And we have said, so many times, “That is not the man”. Müller defeats us – on that plane. Further, there are curious inconsistencies in all the accounts, contemporary accounts you understand, of the man’s actions, behaviour. To take one of the classic examples, a British officer, Captain Best, who was interrogated by Müller. He mentions the features that have become cliché – the eyes, the shouting and so on – and then remarks pleasantly, “I found him rather a decent little man.” We do of course,’ dryly, ‘have evidence of the contrary.’

  ‘And is there nothing to be done then?’

  ‘We wait. As we do with many more. Evidence has been secured against people whose cases were given up as hopeless. After so many years, some of these persons have felt sufficiently secure – and, I should add, sufficiently protected – to creep out into the open. They range,’ with a ferocious irony, ‘from farm-labourers in Schleswig-Holstein to the directors of old people’s homes.’

  ‘I am very grateful to you, Doctor Lazarus.’

  ‘I am quite at your disposal. Should you find, in the course of your duties – as, if I have understood the purpose of your visit, you may guess you can find – the tiniest of facts that may fit into a larger pattern, do not hesitate to apply to me. But let me warn you against becoming obsessed by the treasure hunt. There are many, many, many men, less widely known, with whom justice could be just as summary.’

  ‘Even if you caught Müller, you could not hang him twice.’

  ‘Just so, Inspector. Müller has publicity value. Which can be a decided handicap to ourselves, as we discovered in the case of Eichmann.’

  ‘And if you never catc
h him?’

  I was interested in Doctor Lazarus. It seemed to me that he would never rest in peace, that his life’s work could never be done.

  He looked at me thoughtfully, weighing what answer he should give me.

  ‘I take it, Inspector, that you believe in the justice of God?’

  ‘I do. I am, however, a paid professional servant of a very inadequate, pathetically incompetent human justice.’

  ‘My answer to your question might well be your answer, Inspector.’

  ‘I might – possibly – answer that I did not know – nor could I know – what punishments – human punishments – have visited such a man.’

  ‘And have you developed that argument?’

  ‘It is neither my task nor my right.’

  ‘Nor mine.’

  I thought on the way home that Doctor Lazarus had spent years in the camps. He was a doctor of medicine, and of parapsychology. He knew a great deal about law. And he knew what it was like to have no person left in the world. He would be quite an expert on punishments.

  Whereas I was a bum inspector of police, an expert on asking rag-and-bone men to show their pushcart licences. An expert, perhaps, on rag-and-bone men.

  I couldn’t eat my dinner.

  I couldn’t explain to Arlette.

  I opened a drawer, strapped on a shoulder-holster, put a pistol in it, shrugged my shoulders and put the whole lot back.

  I thought of everybody I knew. I know a Jewish doctor who is a neurologist – I know the Procureur-Général – I know a few retired policemen – I have read a lot of books; some of them by writers who know a good deal about people. I stared at my bookshelves. Mauriac, Simenon, Flaubert, Charles de Foucauld, Saint Teresa, Büchner, Dostoyevski, Racine, the Memorial of Saint Helena.

  Either there weren’t enough books, or I hadn’t read them properly. Nobody could help me, not even Arlette.

  I muttered something at her, took a tram to the Central Station, and got on a train that smelt very nasty indeed, of stale cheap cigarsmoke and imperfectly washed humanity that has a prejudice against open windows.

  I thought about Corneille and Oliver Cromwell.

  The only person I could think of in the whole world who might be able to help me was SS Lieutenant-General Heinrich Müller. Whose grave was in Berlin. Written on it: ‘To our beloved father’.

  Doctor Lazarus, or one of his friends, had come along busily looking at bones and said the back teeth were wrong. Anyway the bones of several people were in the grave.

  Perhaps Mr Müller had had no objection at the time to company.

  6

  In Drente it was dry, and the night air felt warm, with a gentle westerly breeze. I had the idea the sun had been shining all day. That was all wrong. It was supposed to get warmer as one went south and nearer the sea – and in Amsterdam the streets had been full of greasy half-frozen slush, the air at or below freezing point, and the sky trying hard either to snow or to rain and achieving neither, just a foul misty mizzle.

  I walked from the station, in Zwinderen. Nobody looked at me. I got to the lunatic asylum and wondered whether they’d been brave enough to put Burger there. No such luck probably; they were more likely to keep her havering for months, poor bitch, in the House of Keeping in Assen.

  I rang at the gate and pretty soon I heard the slow, shuffling, but still firm footstep across the brick path. The eyes glanced through the gap in the barricade; when they saw me a great jump of the nerves went across the whole face like electricity; a spark that penetrated the powerful facial muscles, the dark glasses, all the insulation.

  ‘Forgive me; I failed for a second to recognize you. But come in. Pleasant surprise. I suppose there is some detail that has been forgotten, that you have posted back to fill in a few more forms?’

  He was talking too much too.

  ‘That’s about it,’ vaguely.

  I sat down in the accustomed place, the creaky cane armchair. Besançon sat at his desk, hands folded in his lap, head and shoulders bowed. Like that, he was an insignificant little man.

  I had no idea what to say; a silence grew that was almost as complete as the one I had broken into.

  ‘A detail,’ I said at last with an effort, ‘that must be repaired. I am often very stupid.’

  ‘I have never yet had that impression.’

  ‘You don’t know me that well, General,’ I said in German. It was funny: I had a sort of embarrassment. I was unable to say straight out – ‘You are a notorious man; the execrated, the fearful, the larger-than-life.’ Quite right. This was not any of those things. This was an ageing, tired, frightened, dying man.

  ‘Your German has a Hamburg sound, it seems to me.’

  ‘I was stationed there – nearly a year. In nineteen forty-five. It’s not good.’

  ‘I understand what you say, well enough.’

  ‘I thought you would.’

  He straightened his shoulders, lifted his head; I began to recognize the man I knew more. The voice got its timbre back, its sardonic tone.

  ‘I would like only to disclaim the General. Napoleon created Marshals of France and the Empire; they were right to keep their titles. I have never had the slightest use for this one. Since at last, apparently, I have a name, use it.’

  ‘I might, if I knew what to say.’

  ‘You came, I take it, to do, not just to say.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do, either.’

  He looked at me. He got up then, shuffled slowly across the room – I could see he missed his stick – and brought his brandy bottle and two glasses. He offered one to me; I took it. We clinked together solemnly, two men separated by everything and by nothing.

  ‘You’re drinking, then?’ I said stupidly.

  ‘I am forbidden alcohol, yes. What importance has it? I shall not in any case live long.’

  I suddenly got an extremely silly idea, which startled me.

  ‘This brandy’s not poisoned, is it?’ It got his ironical smile.

  ‘I had thought my melodramatic days over. I possess no poisons. I have no wish to kill myself; I have no interest even in killing you.’

  ‘Yet I have told no one I was coming here.’ Did I wish to tempt him, I wondered. Why did I say that?

  ‘I think I understand that.’

  ‘I dare say that I could, quite easily, disappear. Not even my wife knows where I am?

  ‘Are you suggesting that I should disappear?’

  ‘Would it help?’

  ‘No longer.’

  ‘You’d rather go in front of a tribunal?’

  ‘At least I should not defend myself with excuses. Like Eichmann. The eternal subordinate. The man was always, you know, something of a fool. A competent fool.’

  ‘I don’t think it ever occurred to anyone to bother whether he was a fool,’ I said, perhaps too sarcastically.

  ‘Is that what you propose doing? To hand me to the Jews? Whom I persecuted, killed? Whose identity, finally, I stole? It would be more than just.’

  ‘I don’t want to be more than just. And I must not be less.’

  ‘You simply don’t know,’ looking straight at me.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t think I should ever understand. Even if you told me. I don’t want any confessions. I could not grasp it. You have done things that are monstrous, unbelievable. Legend has exaggerated your exploits to a degree where I can’t take them seriously. I can only see you as you are. A retired civil servant with a nervous illness. A man I have known, spoken to, shaken hands with, clinked glasses with. A man I like. Or is that Besançon?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ gravely.

  ‘I should prefer to have had none of these experiences.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘The real Besançon, I take it…’

  ‘Is buried in the grave in Berlin.’

  ‘He resembled you closely?’

  ‘Very. Looking at us together, one could not tell which was the Jew. Bormann
made a coarse joke about it one day.’

  ‘You had planned it for a long time?’

  ‘I planned,’ impassively, ‘to steal him. Which I did.’

  ‘Your family knows?’

  ‘No.’

  I left it at that.

  ‘It was noticed, here, that you shunned the company of women. It was thought by some a suspicious circumstance.’

  He laughed, quite ordinarily, pleasantly.

  ‘Why do you laugh?’

  ‘I had told myself, you see, that I would keep a sort of fidelity to my wife. I was – I am – what is called a good family man. That, it seems, has drawn attention to me. When I had no other fidelities … neither to myself, to my country, to my state, to my function, to my absurd Leader. To nothing.’ He held his open hands up as though to show me that they contained nothing. He laid them then on the table, flat, loose, watching the trembling with a sort of curiosity.

  It was good French cognac. Written on the label was Fournisseur à Sa Majest é le Roi de Suède. He had given me a generous glass too. Perhaps it gave me false courage.

  ‘Tell me, then. What did you do?’

  ‘What happens to civil servants, Inspector van der Valk, who come to the conclusion that their government has betrayed them? They commit treason. Himmler, that idealist, tried to bargain with the Americans. I was more clear-sighted. I had understood the meaning of Yalta, of Casablanca. Germans alone could save Germany. I was too late; we had committed too many crimes.’

  I do believe he had forgotten I was there. He had passed into his familiar train of thought, from which there was no outlet. He had perhaps been mad – he was no longer so, and he doubted whether it ever had been so. He had deceived himself with mass hysteria, and remained too clear-sighted to believe in it. He had taken refuge in the peculiar German cloudiness and confusion of thought that accompany German orderliness and efficiency, and found his thought refused to cloud; the merciful opacity of Himmler had eluded him. Everything had failed him, one refuge after the other. The mystique of the Administration, of the Fatherland, of the Leader – all had crumbled and collapsed.

  He had looked for every possible excuse. When he had seen what crimes he had committed in the name of his sacred Department he had tried to quieten his torments by embarking on wilder, more fantastic, more dreadful crimes than ever. He had fallen into the myth of predestination, believing – for a while – that he had been sent as a scourge, himself damned, but elected by God to lie heavy on the necks of his fellow men.