One Damn Thing After Another

by Nicolas Freeling

  Arthur was pretending to be asleep.

  “You haven’t been five minutes,” he said. “You’ve been fifteen.”

  The road from Grendelbruch winds steeply down into a valley and climbs again to a plateau, before the more deliberate descent to the little foothill towns of the wine country: Rosheim, Obernai and Barr, picturesque places with little medieval gateways and toy-soldier ramparts. It is all real enough, despite nineteenth-century romanticism. All these villages were fortified. They were refuges, against the inrush of the Barbarian across the Rhine; forlorn hopes against the blood-boltered, baby-crunching Swedes of the Thirty Years’ War. The holocaust’s brighter ideas, such as herding peasants into a wooden church and then setting fire to it, are really nothing very new around here.

  The foothills are soft and gentle, in spring placidly bosomy with apple and cherry blossom, and the tender green tendrils of vineshoots. But immediately behind is the scarp of the Hohwald, and the road is in hairpins. Narrow gorges are overhung by perpendicular cliffs, rising to commanding heights, round which one must twist and thread a way over the Vosges passes. By night, the black wings of Dracula fold all about one, but even by day the pinewoods are sombre, in stiff serried ridges like the teeth of a comb.

  Wherever there is a pass, the curious eye discerns, upon the height, fingers pointing upward; ruined cliffs and chimneys of stonework that is not natural but built, perched with much daring and greater pain upon narrow ledges of rock. These are the castles of Alsace, a hundred odd, the mountain eyries of the robber barons; built, and improved upon, between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, caring little for bishop or duke, less still for the Holy Roman Emperor. Virtually inaccessible and impregnable, yet often managing to change hands by violence, and more often still by treachery. They are all in ruin, but in nearly all can be traced the skull of a keep, the jagged teeth of portcullis.

  Kaiser Wilhelm, arriving in his lovely new province of Alsace in 1870, rather fancied one of these. They had built him a hideous house in Strasbourg, but now they set to and built a really splendid huge baronial hall on the top of a hill. It is called the Haut Koenigsberg; it is all still there, complete and untouched and in perfect order, central heating and elks’ antlers: Balmoral is nothing to it.

  Discredited minor nobility, younger sons gone bad, poor as rats, climbed up here, screwed themselves in, swooped down to pillage monk, pilgrim, with luck a fatter commercial type, with a purse, dreaming of snatching a bishop or some rich count’s daughter that would cough up a ransom. Much, we may suppose, like the mosstrooping Elliots and Liddells of the Scotch Border and like them a hardy crowd, freezing up there in draughty stone hovels, nothing to eat but abominably tough venison, barley bread like granite; plentiful swigs of firewater.

  Driving from Grendelbruch down to Strasbourg, Arlette passed three or four, unseen but there. They make nice picnic grounds on a fine day. Nobody will be up there – too steep a climb for the comfort-loving bourgeois: they’d rather sit in the car with the radio on.

  There are still robber-barons, and they still build themselves castles on hill-summits in the Vosges. Fat little affairs like tame rabbits, but their owners steal on a scale far beyond the wildest dreams of the twelfth century.

  She turned on to the main road down in the plain, driving cautiously because of late-night drunks. She was thinking of the Chateau de Joux, which guards the horrid gorge from Pontarlier across to Switzerland, and is more terrifying than anything in Alsace. There are in it two things at which the imagination really does boggle. One is a well, some seven-eight metres wide, driven down a hundred and thirty metres through the naked, living rock. The other is that the Seigneur de Joux came back one day unexpectedly from the day’s pastime of having people pulled apart by four horses, or whatever, and caught his pretty young wife, Berthe, in a bit of casual adultery with a cavalier. Berthe was put in a cell, two metres by one and a half in the thickness of the wall, and there left for fifteen years. Once a day they brought her out for edification, to look upon her lover’s remains displayed in the courtyard. After the fifteen years Monsieur de Joux was kind, or perhaps bored, enough to permit Berthe to retire, aged thirty-three, to a convent for the remainder of her days. Now a robber-baron nowadays, thought Arlette, has to find other pastimes. Do they differ all that much?

  Arthur, if he had not been asleep, could have told her about the bourgeois gentleman who decided to sell his house. A prospective buyer, intrigued like Bluebeard’s wife by a locked room and what seemed over-elaborate evasions, told people. The gendarmerie arrived. In the room, just her and a mattress, they found the gentleman’s mentally-handicapped daughter, who’d been there for more than fifteen years. It was to avoid embarrassment, the gentleman explained.

  Arthur was snoring when they reached the Rue de l’Observatoire, and needed a good hard nudge, and woke cross.

  Arlette had concluded from a glance at the Weekend Cottage that Mr Thibault would be unlikely to listen with much sympathy to any suggestion of Madame Bartholdi’s having had a rough deal. Since any vindictiveness he had felt towards the burglars was presumably stilled, it might have been lack of imagination, or even an understandable diffidence about going to the mother of the boy you have killed and saying Sorry about that, rather. She had thought of a person perhaps narrow, dense, self-righteous, obstinately entrenched in puritan virtue, unable even to hint to himself that perhaps he might have been in the wrong. Someone perhaps who would have liked to mumble Well, what about a hundred quid or something, to think no more about it, but capable, dimly, of realizing that this was not quite good enough.

  She had been prepared for a frightened little bourgeois meanness, like that German insurance company. Man lost his wife? Our client is legally responsible? Well, considering the man’s age and everything (fairly advanced, mercifully) we suggest a compensation of six hundred marks a month. That’s plenty, plenty. Generous. Why, the woman didn’t even work: it’s not as if he were deprived of INCOME.

  She no longer thought all this. The hilltop castle gave her a different picture. Maybe she was wrong, and it had to be verified, but what she saw was Cutpurse. To impress his neighbours, and his family, and those he calls his friends, he spends much money on his rustic retreat. He calls in architects, builders, fitters, landscapists, choosing carefully people he thinks owe him a favour, or will be glad to buy themselves into his graces. Get this big job done, costs a lot, must be had at cut price.

  The result is visible, though not to him. However much he spends, and vulgarity will always demand that it be a great deal; The Best; it will always look like a cutprice job for Cutpurse.

  There’s something to be said for him; at least he’s a leopard. Those spots he has, that he can’t change, that spell out Look after Number One, they can be all sorts of beasts, right down to things like colorado beetles. There are things much worse.

  “As long as it’s a person,” said Arthur, consulted at breakfast. “Whatever sort of animal it is, there’s an individual. As long as it’s not an institution, what sociology calls a Blessed Trinity. Merck, Sharp and Dohme, Freeman, Hardy and Willis, Smith, French and Kline. Try to fit them to faces. You might come up with a picture of something grim of jaw, steely-eyed and slickum-haired, you know, looking something like Robert MacNamara, but you’re quite wrong. If there’s anything alive at all, it’s a gaga old lady on a life rent in Bournemouth or Santa Barb, but even that’s the greatest rarity. Dear old John Buchan blithers away happily about getting behind the façade. First a prognathous Westphalian business man, and then a white-faced little Jew in a bathchair: as a description of reality this is about as accurate as it would be of James Bond and M.”

  “I particularly like the bathchair.”

  “Yes, there’s no more sinister symbol of the universal spider spinning secret webs.”

  You’ve got the cliché: find the person.

  The cliché is one of the Communist Party’s staunchest old workhorses: ‘les nantis’. It is a skilful word,
difficult to translate because of overtones. Literally ‘those provided with goods’, but ‘the bosses’; ‘the possessors’? More ‘the cornerers’, ‘the plunderers’, but these are too crude, too libellous. Arlette’s English, though workmanlike, was not subtle enough to find a perfectly innocuous word with as pungent a reek of acquisitive greed.

  Strasbourg has its share of multinationals: Swiss supermarkets and Dutch beerbarons; squalid ramifications, bath-chairs everywhere: seven-sisterish intrigues as obscure as the butter mountain and the wine lake. It has perhaps more than its share of family firms with sturdy, reassuring Alsacien names. Like all such enclaves, it is a very clannish place, and is as happy to be robbed by two or even three generations of local nantis as by the Margarine Trust. These people have no Wall Street subtleties: France, since the time of Colbert, has been dug in behind a fortress of protectionism, and their philosophy has always been simple: slap a hundred per cent mark-up on everything. The manufacturer has the same mentality: he would rather sell ten paperclips at ten per cent profit than a hundred at one per cent, and pass his day complaining to the government about unfair German competition. This is why shopping in France is so laborious, and so nasty. Appetite whetted by the high-value German and Swiss currencies next door, Strasbourg’s good-old Schmidt and Muller put their prices still further up, and make it the dearest town in France. Arlette who had lived for twenty years in Holland wished forlornly that these two beastly countries would start civilizing one another.

  The Place Broglie, pronounced Breuil to make it more élite, is the most elegant bit of the old town: down at the bottom is the operahouse, and the Military Government, with a rather toney Officers’ Club. Midway is the Hotel de Ville, an eighteenth century palace of real distinction and genuine beauty. Up at the top is rather lower, not only architecturally: commerce is just low. This end is dominated by the Bank of France, occupying a large and ugly fortress, formerly the mayor’s residence; and here, it is said, Rouget de l’Isle first played to an admiring audience a recent composition entitled the Song of the Rhine Army, later tolerably well-known as La Marseillaise. The commercial enterprises around, lent distinction by this privileged proximity, are not as grand as one might think. Monsieur Thibault’s leather-shop (‘Maroquinerie’ is a lot grander than just leather) was the showiest. He had several floors, and a bargain-basement below.

  Arlette had a purse, old but much-loved, bought for her by Ruth. As well as having sentimental value, it had a nice shape, was of excellent design, and of good material: in fact, the sort of thing you never can find when you look for it. After many years of violent abuse, it had not given way – being moreover of good workmanship – but its catch had become afflicted by the palsy, and no longer caught, but fell in and out instead. Arthur’s mechanical abilities, like hers, were zero: he had looked at it and failed to understand why it should no longer catch.

  “Can you fix this?”

  The salesgirl turned it round and round, languid and clueless.

  “You’d do better to buy a new one, wouldn’t you.” Not put as a question.

  “I like this one.” Plainly, that was too difficult. Thought is so exhausting. The solution generally hit upon is Pass it along to someone else.

  “You might try upstairs, I suppose.” Left bombed-out by this much effort.

  Next floor was the Arts of Living; a disembowelling of goats and baby camels whose flesh Arabs, presumably, had eaten. Zebras and ostriches cost a lot more. Several reptiles have become endangered species as a consequence of this racket. Arlette had no particular sympathy for alligators, but they are preferable to the two-footed ones. Nothing for her here: she floated up a further flight to Haute Couture. This began with Personalizing things – your telephone, your shopping list – right down to your meat-grinder if you like. It took in things like elephant-feet umbrella stands along the way. The clients here can neither read nor write, so that desk tops, bureau sets and pen trays can safely be left to the bookbinder, but anything to do with cards, drinks or cigars goes well.

  As you go up floor by floor the saleswomen rise in age and in status, but not in energy. The vendeuse looked with loathing at Arlette, who wore no fur nor even skin, and with more at the worn and shabby purse.

  “Of course we can repair it, if you wish,” taking a card with a gold letterhead out of a drawer. “What name?”

  “You mean three weeks’ wait, forty francs, and value-added-tax on top?”

  “For a new catch, what did you expect?”

  “I don’t believe it needs anything of the sort.”

  “It has in any case to go up to the workshop.”

  “Which is here? Why can’t we just ask them?”

  “What,” asked a man’s voice, “is creating all the difficulty?”

  “The catch is worn out in all probability and the lady seems to think –” The man snatched the purse impatiently without looking at Arlette, held it under the light and shouted, “Madame Henriette,” still without looking up. A stout middle-aged lady came running from somewhere. “Pliers,” he said. The vendeuse arranged objects that were already arranged. The stout lady ran behind a screen, pattered back breathing heavily. The man held his hand out without looking, brought the spring-balanced lamp a little closer, took a deft grip, bent the metal imperceptibly, snapped the catch which now worked perfectly, pushed the lamp impatiently back, held both purse and pliers out to Madame Henriette, who seemed quite accustomed to all this, and said simply, “Here.” The stout lady, who had gold hair in curls and a kind face, handed Arlette her purse with a timid smile.

  “Thank you very much,” said Arlette and left. Was it the young one who answered the old one, ‘So am I, Obadiah, so am I.’?

  She had not brought the car into central Strasbourg: leaving it outside was less trouble than working it into some misbegotten underground parking. But she took it to go to the Rue Ravel, where Madame Laboisserie was effusive in greeting. Another pack of nantis. She listened to a lot of voluble explanations, told herself that the rich are people too. When they look at you, that is.

  Chapter 17

  Plainly police business

  When she started ‘the office’ she had been told to be careful not to get involved with matters concerning the police, and the very first thing she’d gone and done was to do just that. She had been forgiven, since her tangle, further entangled by her own inexperience, had brought kudos to a number of police officers. Her paternal commissaire from PJ had kept a fatherly eye upon her for some months until, satisfied that on the whole she did more good than harm, he had left her, as she now realized, with a neat lesson: do not seek to understand why the police do things; equally, why they do not do other things you might have thought, in your innocence, they ought to be doing. Above all, do not get in their hair and do not call yourself unnecessarily to their attention.

  She had become friendly enough with the paternal to ring him up once or twice when oddities appeared that she felt uncertain how to handle. After all, he had told her to do just that. It could happen, too, that one felt vulnerable, even obscurely threatened. Aren’t the police supposed to be there to protect people? In the same fashion, the citizen may sometimes feel he needs legal advice. The law is there to remedy inequity, or so he was led to believe as a child. In practice, if you do trot off to legal gentlemen, warmed by the belief that you are experiencing injustices, you will be told that it is a much better idea to endure the lack of equity in most human relations. Just so with the police. If you persist in telling them about the evil person who stole your child’s new and expensive bicycle, they will try to suppress yawns and focus their wandering attention, but only within the limits of the same official courtesy which makes a motorbike cop salute you with disciplined smartness before telling you about the speed limit on that patch back there. They’d far rather not see you at all. Don’t kid yourself into thinking they’d like to build statistics on bike thefts, and have a file on the frequency of certain places, methods, times-of-day, and so
forth.

  Thus, though much perturbed by the attack upon poor Xavier, Arlette was going to be wary about prodding cops on the subject. Whatever their reasons were, and Sergeant Subleyras neither knew, nor was any longer in a position to find out (pity, rather, he had resigned: no bad thing to have a friend inside a bureaucracy), they had decided apparently that the matter wasn’t interesting. Lock-picking intruder who got disturbed, disliked that, bashed the disturber: a banality. If you don’t like that, then a homosexual encounter that turned sour. It’ll all be the same by the time your bruises are healed.

  The complete lack of logic in all this didn’t perturb them at all. This left Arlette high and dry. People ring you up making nasty suggestions? You should hear the things people say to us …

  So she smiled cheerfully upon Xavier, said she was pursuing one or two little ideas but wasn’t sure they’d come to much, and to get his bruises healed; that was the first priority. She sorted out the abortion-seeker. She listened to her tape, made some phonecalls, wrote a couple of letters, dealt with a couple of bores. Her telephone rang.

  “Have a nice quiet weekend?” said the soft, hoarse voice. “I’m in no hurry either. Thinking of what game we’ll play next, to ginger you up, like.” She had put a pocket recorder on the spare ear-piece; she leaned forward and switched it on: this should not alter the sound the way a tapped line did. Fellow didn’t want to be recorded. Because of what he says? Or because, somewhere, his voice might be recognized? Voiceprints, Arthur told her, are as individual as fingers. It might not be a waste of time.

  “I’d really like to understand, you know. I don’t mean your purpose; that seems clear enough. But the meaning – if there is any. Is there some link to anybody I know?” Chuckles.

  “Maybe I’ll help you just a little bit. Just so as you’ll know who you owe it to, when it comes to you. A friend, a good friend, of Henri le Hollandais.”