“I know who brings them,” said Henriette suddenly.
Arlette realized that she must not be too greedy all at once. There was some way. Arthur would know how one could make publicity. And fraud – getting legal proof of fraud. A thing Xavier would know about. And, surely, her friend Sergeant Subleyras … one hadn’t been on a crime squad for nothing, surely.
“I’ll settle up with you, waiter,” she said abruptly. While other settlements were pending.
Chapter 23
Friendly supermarket
The note said ‘Don’t act scared: just make like normal’. The words were cut out of the local paper, pinned to a narrow strip by an edge of scotch tape. The strip had been folded small to the size of a price ticket, and lay on a tin of tomatoes. It wasn’t a price ticket, and this caught Arlette’s eye. The tomatoes sat in a supermarket trolley, which she was pushing. The note had been planted in a moment of that special supermarket trance: your habitual brand of paddywhack has vanished and been replaced by another, totally unknown to you and thirty per cent dearer.
French supermarkets divide into those with canned air and those without. On the whole, she preferred the latter. The smell, predominantly synthetic vanilla and cardboard, does have notes of rotted vegetables and cheese as well as wet dog. This is better than no smell: food after all ought to smell of something, reasoned Arlette. On the other hand, the air-conditioned ones have big wide corridors for you and your bier. In the small ones you can die of asphyxia, or buried under a landslide of special-offer, or stabbed by a Bulgarian sword-stick, and you will still get carried along by the inexorable flow towards the checkout, without anybody noticing. It is a splendid setting for one of those antique locked-room mysteries, with the body under the avalanche of empty cartons in the corner: could stay there a week unnoticed. Won’t be the smell that draws attention finally, neither. Nero Wolfe would reckon you deserved all you got: these places don’t just sell petfood; they sell nothing else.
Backed into a bay surrounded by towering crates of beer, Arlette read the note and threw it away. Necessary gesture of insolence, even if it were a clue for Mr Casabianca. She was frightened, though more of claustrophobia than anything else.
It was a test of her nerve and resolution. Very well, she’d stay perfectly quiet and go along with it.
Sure enough, while she was pointing at cheese, and saying to the girl ‘No not that one, That One’, another note arrived. This said ‘Don’t scream, don’t panic. Go down to the parking lot and unlock the car door.’ This one was handwritten, but by someone who knew that no expert can make much of printing with a ballpoint pen. Her mouth was dry; she took a packet of chewing-gum from the stack by the pay-off. She did have a moment of wanting to grab the cashgirl’s bell and ring it frenziedly, but what good would that do? Somebody might leap the barrier and bolt off, but who’d be interested? Not carrying a crate of whisky, was he?
All underground parking lots are grisly. Deep Throat is there behind the pillar, not to speak of tyre-slashers, penis-flashers, and people who will hit you across the face with wrenched-off metal radio-antennas. You can imagine pretty nearly anything, particularly when chewing gum, supposed to promote a flow of saliva, doesn’t. A curt graffito on the wall told her the Minister of the Interior Equalled Hitler, which was no news. Nor help. A notice saying Do not Leave your Trolley Here, completed by Climb in it and Go to Sleep, was no better. She packed things into the boot of the Lancia, her neck hair doing horrible primitive defence-reactions. She could see no one, though a perpetual slamming of tinny doors told her people were everywhere. She unlocked the driver’s door, got in, rolled the window down, took several deep breaths, spat out the chewing-gum which hadn’t helped and tasted disgusting, rolled the window up again, settled herself, flexed her toes, clipped the safety belt, discovered that getting to her gun under her car-coat was difficult enough without, unclipped it again, put the lights on and eased the motor gently into gear. At the last moment she leaned across and unlocked the catch on the off door.
The lights, sweeping across naked concrete and Way Out, showed her nothing. There was nobody, but people occupied stowing cardboard cartons in cars, taking no notice of her. It was just a gag, to shake her nerves.
Just before Out, a sharp right-angle turn slows you before you accelerate up the ramp into something resembling air. As she flicked her lights out somebody opened the door and got in, so neatly she would have admired it. There was nothing to see: one needs one’s eyes for the narrow ramp. On the street, when she could swivel a glance sideways there was a gun loosely pointing in her direction on a knee: a soft hoarse voice she recognized said, “Just drive quietly where I tell you.”
This scene from a thousand movies steadied her, obscurely comforted her: she felt she was on familiar ground after all. She found her voice.
“I didn’t need to unlock the door. I’ve been wanting to talk to you. You needn’t point the thing at me.”
“Just keep your eyes on the road.” A hand went up and twisted the inside mirror, so that he could see around. They turned a while following his directions, came out on the long quiet stretch of the Quai des Belges. It prolongs into a tree-lined, pleasant section called the Quai du Genéral Picquart, with the canal on one side and comfortable, quiet houses with gardens across the street.
“Pull in under the trees and park.” She did so, docile. “Cut the motor and give me the keys. No, don’t look at me. Right, now I think you’ve got a gun. Bring it out slow and let’s have it. All right. Nobody following you, no cops. Good. Now if you want to yell or something I’ll tip you in the canal. You going to play ball?”
“I have to know what you want.”
“We drive a bit further, we can talk. Just in case they got a direction-finder on your car, we change cars. Hop.” While he was locking her car she got a look at him, which told her very little. A drab raincoat and a little hat. Dark glasses on a face with no colour and little feature. Anyone, Monsieur Toutlemonde between thirty and forty, drab, tidy, and utterly inconspicuous. He pointed with his chin to where another car stood a few metres along, pointing the way they had come, a medium-size Renault as drab as himself, dark red, neither clean nor dirty. He handed her a key on a tab. “You drive.” They went back, over the Pont d’Anvers, turned right at the coal harbour, along towards Neudorf, back over the canal bridge, left at the Rue du Havre, and along the industrial terrain of the Rue de la Rochelle, until at last they turned off to the bank of the Rhine at the ship-lock, where at length he seemed satisfied that they were neither followed nor overheard.
She felt for a cigarette: he took the bag from her, looked in it before giving it back to her.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said impatiently, “stop being dramatic. All this act since the supermarket – come to that, for a week, now. Just tell me what it’s all about.”
“Been talking to your cop friends?”
“I don’t have any cop friends.”
“Look, try to cross me up, quickest way to getting acid in your face.”
“Oh, this is useless. What can I do to persuade you that I had nothing to do with Henri le Hollandais? I didn’t even know who he was. I was with Berger, went along for the ride. I had nothing better to do. He told me nothing. His name. That he was a gangster. So what? It wasn’t and isn’t any business of mine. You’re another, but I don’t know you, you do nothing to make me want to know you. Pestering me just makes you conspicuous. It’s stupid.”
“You’re a grass for them. And bait.”
“Oh, Bonne Mère. I have to be able to convince you that I don’t meddle with police business. You’re police business. I don’t want to know anything about you.”
“What are you getting at?” The voice told her nothing either. Traces of a local accent, but acquired rather than inborn. Just ordinary.
“I’m trying to tell you I work on sufferance. If I didn’t, I’d be out of a job: I have to obey the rule.”
“So you do what they tell you.”
“It doesn’t have to include being catspaw for them. What can I do but tell you? I couldn’t make you out; you’re part of something I don’t know. It’s some PJ business – I could see that. I went to Casabianca to protect myself. He’d like to mousetrap you; that’s his affair: concerns me no further.”
“You used to be married, they tell me, to a Dutch cop. You better persuade me but good that you didn’t sell the Hollandais out.”
“That was ten years ago: it’s a piece of my life that’s gone. Can’t you see, you fool, that you’re butting your own nose in trouble? Pester me, and follow me like this, I can’t help but lead them to you. Attack me and they’ll know who did it. I ask only that you leave me alone. If the car is booby-trapped I know nothing about it. I could have a bug on me right now and not know it,” inventing recklessly from television films. “If you could drop a note in my trolley back there, couldn’t they put something in my pocket?”
“It wouldn’t carry any distance.”
“Oh, was that why you dragged me all the way out here? Well, if I’m not back before lunch my husband will be making a hullabaloo, and the first thing he’ll call will be cops, and not city cops. Casabianca.”
“Prove it. Go on, prove it. Lead a cop anywhere near me, and there’ll never be a day you pass without fearing for your skin and your eyesight. I got friends, too.”
“You poor ass, it’s your own suspicion dragging you down. You’re in a dilemma. You can only get out of it by trusting me.”
He looked carefully all around. There was a small boy throwing stones in the water. There was an elderly man, watching rapt a big Swiss motor barge being processed in the ship lock. There were two men in overalls and a bashed-up Renault Four utility which had Service des Voiries written on it. They were sitting smoking. They looked extremely like plainclothes cops, which probably meant they were the Service des Voiries having a smoke and doing nothing: hell, the municipality of a town the size of Strasbourg has a thousand employees at any moment of the day, doing just that.
“I could blast you with your own gun and tip you in the Rhine.”
“You could, I suppose, if it were anywhere near worth it, or if I had deserved it. If I have to make the choice, I dare say I’d rather be shot than drowned, like the Hollandais.”
There was a silence, during which he took his eyes off the roving activity of the scene outside and focused them on her, even swivelling his body to face her, holding the look so long that for the first time she began to feel real fear. She had felt frightened, yes, but it had been a surface fear. She had been touched by the world of violence, pulled by the coat, as it were, into the toothed gears of the criminal world, where violence exists for violence’s sake and no rational argument can protect one. But this had happened before and she had felt strangely unmarked by it.
In her own car, only a twelvemonth ago, she had been kidnapped, held down by force, tied up and gagged – most unpleasantly, with sticking-plaster – threatened, and finally shown a violence that, it had been calculated, was quite enough of a trauma to crush a human being, and a woman at that: the palm of her hand had been cut cruelly and deeply with a razor. She had been left like that, in the middle of the night in the empty car, on a deserted pathway beyond the outskirts of the town. And somehow she had not been nearly as frightened as she should have been.
Arthur had been surprised. He had offered to get rid of the car for her, though it was nearly new, thinking that an experience this traumatic would make it impossible for her to use it. She had been most indignant. What, my car? It was a wedding present. Never!
To Arlette there was an explanation, and a simple one. ‘I came out of a sheltered home,’ she told Arthur, ‘but much more important I grew up surrounded by love. It was nothing much. My father was a vague, lazy, self-indulgent person, with something of an addiction to burgundy. My mother was a silly woman on the whole: when I was young I thought she had the brains of a hen. But they were always there.’ It had been difficult for Arthur to understand. She could very well remember the shock and extreme horror of betrayal, by people she had thought trustworthy, people who should have been trustworthy. Schoolteacher, nun, official. But the refuge of her home had not betrayed her: she had never been deprived of it.
She became so conscious of this, so aware of her immense and unlikely fortune, that trust became the hinge on which her whole life turned; when she married, and it was her turn to carry the responsibility of never betraying the trust reposed in her, she carried it very far, to lengths people found unreasonable. She had resolved from the moment she found herself pregnant that never would a child that comes in saying ‘Where’s Mama?’ be disappointed. The child, she said, that has this total security of never having been betrayed, will grow up able to face anything. It is an impossible ideal, said Arthur. Maybe, she returned: it is a necessity.
She gazed stonily out in front of her through the dirty windscreen, surrounded by the stink of car. These men, whose whole life is one long agony of the fear of betrayal, these men who are the criminals, they are the endproduct of a world in which nobody keeps his word. Starting with our beloved President, whose every utterance is a lie.
“The Hollandais,” said her Friend slowly, “was not drowned. He was shot, and thrown in the water.” Now it was her turn to face him, mouth stupidly open. “You didn’t know that?”
“No.”
“Believing kind of a simpleton, aren’t you?”
“Yes. I am. That’s the only way I can work. Believing what people tell me.”
“Won’t do you much good.”
“No, it gets me into a lot of trouble. But it does me this much good. Sometimes people start believing me.”
He drove her back to the Quai des Belges; dropped her outside the Foreign Legion barrack. It was a couple of hundred metres short of where her car was parked. As the Renault gathered speed he tossed her her keys. Even if she had wanted to, it would have been useless taking the number: the plates would be fake, anyhow.
Friend … Well, perhaps. She didn’t know what his definition of friendship was. Perhaps Henri le Hollandais had been a Friend, and a friend too, maybe. The friendship in the milieu, the underworld, between people who have done time together; there’s a lot of folklore about this. Maybe it exists, thought Arlette. It could be something to be envied by a lot of people who have never done time, and never will, but to whom friendship is something your neighbourhood supermarket feels for you.
Chapter 24
Abidance by law
She got home late and flustered; dinner was a patched-up performance. Arthur did not ask where she had been, nor what she-thought-she-had-been doing. If he did, when a meal was both late and uneatable, as sometimes happened, it was a rhetorical expression. It did not mean Where Have You Been? It meant Hasn’t your intelligence and experience yet made you aware that giving your man a vile meal rebounds in his making himself as disagreeable as may be for it may be several hours? …
Arthur had learned about the trust. A man who had suffered much betrayal throughout his life, and whose difficulties sprang, quite often, from an irrational belief in the virtues of intelligence. Arlette snorted with bottomless contempt for all this so-called intelligence. ‘Homo sapiens,’ she had said cuttingly, before they were married, ‘who invented this imbecile expression? Knowledge … if sapientia had ever led to any wisdom, mankind wouldn’t be in the hole it is today.’ ‘Dog who hasn’t the brains of a peahen,’ she had concluded more recently, ‘knows a lot more about how to live than man does. Good old boy, yes I do love you, oh get your horrible claws off my stockings, you vile beast.’
Apart from more vulgar attractions, Arthur knew very well, he had seen quite mindlessly that this was a trustworthy woman.
There was a payment to be made. From odd scraps of conversation, reminiscence and examples of a wry, sour humour, he had noticed that life with Piet van der Valk had not always been domestic bliss on either side. On his side, the good Inspector had had
a naughty feebleness for young girls who were not as innocent as they made out: and Arlette had a very shrewd, French hard-headed judgment of people. And especially young girls. On her side, she had a sexual jealousy that could quite simply and literally be murderous. Old Piet had been kept in line now and then by a healthy respect for his own skin. A consideration kept in the forefront of cops’ minds. Especially those on homicide squads. A whore, as the Book of Proverbs says succinctly, is a deep ditch; And a strange woman is a narrow pit. She also lieth in wait as for a prey, And increaseth the transgressors among men.
Arlette had a special way of saying ‘Getting sentimental about young girls’. Arthur, battered and sometimes pathetic English sociologist in middle age, and often sadly muddle-headed with it, was a wary soul.
When Arthur went out after supper, saying vaguely ‘I don’t suppose I’ll be very late’, she did not suppose he had an appointment somewhere to go and commit adultery. Simply, one is in the mood occasionally for solitude. If there were a lecture or a learned conference, as sometimes happened, though he was just as likely to say he had far too much work, and then sit enrapt watching John Wayne, he would probably have said so. But it wasn’t a thing to which she proposed to give thought. She had lots to give thought to; on the whole too much. So better on the whole to enjoy this lovely solitude, which was rare enough to be a treat. Instead of thinking one could Do-something-to-one’s-face, adopt a horizontal attitude, and listen perhaps to Teresa Berganza singing Carmen? Which would be Enjoyment: there was all too little of that.
It must have been about a quarter to nine when enjoyment was abruptly bruised by a sharp ring at the doorbell. She decided to pay no attention but the ring was repeated and it was no good anyhow: – the shrill note clashed jarringly with Don José. She pressed the button that lifted the needle, the button releasing the front door; peeked through the judas in the landing door: wasn’t letting just anyone in this time of night.
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