A Long Silence (12 page)

‘Don't be so preoccupied with detail,' his neighbour, Professor de Hartog, had said to him today, quite kindly: they had been talking about punishment and he had given rather a lamentable demonstration of not seeing the wood for the trees. ‘You're not in the police now. Never mind who fills the forms in; your job is to draft the texts.'

He crossed the road again, waiting patiently till the lights gave him permission. Nearly home already. This little stroll was no more than therapeutic, a moment for distancing, for getting the things into perspective that had crept too close during the day, gone blurred and out of focus. Promoters of eyestrain; he pinched the bridge of his nose automatically. This wasn't exercise anyhow – breathing exhaust gases. Since being here he had got into the way of taking another stroll at night, through the wooded outskirts of the town where The Hague slithers out to the sea and Scheveningen. At that time there were no hurrying crowds jostling him or treading on his toes: much these typists cared for the important Committee Member! He liked those solitary strolls: there were long weekends, now, to spend with Arlette and she had never been much of a one for walks at night – been on her feet all day …

He wished though that a little restaurant existed somewhere, something unpretentious, a place to go when one just didn't
feel like cooking supper. A place to sit and eat shellfish with one's fingers, to look out at a darkened harbour and hear the thudding of a belated fishing-boat's diesel, and the slap of the tide against the slimy jetty – had it been a mistake, the Vosges cottage, drowned in woods and silence, a place where deer strolled up to your kitchen window and stared inquisitively in?

Couldn't help that now – it had been all they could afford, and lucky to have that – bought half a dozen years ago, too, when still in Amsterdam, with a lump gratuity payment made after his big bullet wound – it would cost double, now …

It had been the summit of his ambition then to grow his own fruit, chop his own wood, strap on skis in winter for when snow smothered the mossy forest paths. Well, perhaps it still was. Three years to go. They had spent their holidays there now for five years, and the little house was nearly ‘ready' – and more home now than anything here in The Hague. Wine in the cellar, and a marvellous fruitwood bed with pineapples carved on the headposts. He wrinkled his nose at the smell of car exhausts and wished he was there now, crossing the road for the last time, entering the bleak hermetic hallway of his building, unlocking his letterbox to see if anything had come, pressing the lift call button with the tip of his stick.

He was disappointed at not finding Arlette at home. Still, the stove had switched itself on under the soup. No warmth, no joy, but a smell of supper, and the narrow living-room smelt of her, faintly. He wandered about, wanting a drink but deciding to wait and not pour it out till he heard her key in the door. What was biting him? He brought it home suddenly; something he had glimpsed vaguely in the street, absent-mindedly, without interest. Some one, to be exact: it had only been the back of a head. Recalled some person he had had dealings with – remote? – less remote?

Of course – the boy from that jewellers'; his little personal problem, his ‘experiment' in private detection. Dear, dear, this last couple of weeks he had had no time. It had gone cold on him now: the private detective needed lots of leisure! There was something there of interest all right, but hell, he had so little to go on. Two or three times he had been on the verge
of ringing up Amsterdam and asking them to take a closer look, but he had no really convincing premise to offer them. Fidgety little heaps of fragments, coincidental for the most part.

A tedious little affair anyway. It wasn't even any of his business strictly speaking; he was no longer an active policeman with reports coming in upon his desk, and subordinates to carry out the chores, and this was a chore. To be sure, that had been the point originally: he had welcomed this little actuality as something that engrossed and puzzled – a box, with a trick opening to fiddle at, and perhaps a few thorns to prick one's fingers. He had needed that at first, a counterpoise to the road of purely theoretical work, stuff with no name on it, with which he had no personal involvement.

But there, he wasn't getting paid to have personal involvements: he had been told that clearly enough, and reminded only today. And to get anywhere with the experiment he had to go stumping about Amsterdam. For a fortnight he had been there almost daily, in a series of meetings and consultations as well as that archive stuff he had been working on, but for the last ten days he hadn't been there at all and had been glad of it, having a formidable pile of desk work getting fed him daily by the ineffable Wattermann. He had made notes – scattered alas through two or three of his books – half-hearted and incompetent work, which had never been more than a fantasy really.

There was something there … yes. But it was a tiresome little problem. Not a box – more of an egg; all smooth curves. You couldn't get inside without breaking the egg. A smooth, self-satisfied, slippery fellow that whatsisname, and there would have been a certain enjoyment in giving him a tap with the eggspoon, but really it was all too much trouble.

There was Arlette, slightly late, he thought irritably, smelling the soup suddenly, realizing that he had turned it up too high and that it was now boiling over. She would tell him off! He poured two glasses of port and picked up
Monde
.

*

Larry Saint braked the car gently to a stop and glanced in the
rear mirror, suppressing a smile as the boy caught up, opened the door and got in.

‘A snip,' he said quietly, giving a tiny touch to the accelerator to start it rolling again. ‘A man of habit, bless his heart. I had one moment of disquiet when you let him catch up with you a bit awkwardly, but he stared straight through the back of your neck and hadn't a clue. Seemed almost a bit too easy. You see, a policeman is not exactly altogether a soft touch, because of his training – there's an instinctive layer of observation and enquiry beneath the immediate surface that one does well to be wary of. But in ten days I haven't seen this fellow use his eyes.'

‘I'd like to be sure of that,' muttered Richard.

‘I had no intention of letting you make the slightest movement before I was sure of it,' retorted Saint tranquilly. ‘Why d'you think I've been so careful? I've made enquiries. This fellow has been put out to grass. He was in the criminal brigade in Amsterdam, and a bit of an original. It wouldn't have been so easy, then. He was an unexpected kind of object, who did unexpected things. Then he got shot up – there isn't any secret about it, it's easy to trace back if one takes the trouble, a woman shot him up in Spain, good luck to her. They put him out to pasture in the provinces. Now they've moved him again right off the active list on to some committee work for the government – he was past his work, plainly. Now he bums about being the absent-minded professor.'

‘Then surely he's no risk?' argued Dick.

‘I would remind you,' dryly, ‘that to succeed in business one takes risks, but not unnecessary ones. This is an unnecessary risk. Why'd he show himself so goddam curious? What's he doing sniffing round Louis? Coming to the shop with a phony tale about a watch? Messing about in the Apples? He wasn't looking like Louis for a good girly book, don't imagine it. He's a threat. So are you. I propose to get rid of both. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if tonight wasn't the night. Weather's ideal. We'll just see whether he goes to take his dog for a walk.'

Saint parked the car, turned out the lights, and looked with approval at the twilight gathering in front of the windscreen,
and the fine drizzle, no more than a Scotch mist, blotting out visibility. He reached forward, unlocked the glove compartment, and took out a nine-millimetre pistol. A Luger. It remains one of the simplest, most direct, efficient of weapons. It is only semi-automatic, and hardly ever jams or catches. It balances well, and has a comfortable, secure grip. It has a light pull, takes standard ammunition, and when it hits you you stay hit. It is not the fussy, fashionable little gun – the Walthers and Sauers – of fictional secret agents and snobbish private eyes. It was one of Mr Saint's little objects of art – so much better designed than all those other things …

‘Now don't go blazing away,' said Saint tetchily. ‘Three or four at the very most and sight at the small of the back.'

*

‘You don't feel like a stroll?' asked Van der Valk hopefully. He did not know why, but he would enjoy her company this evening. Arlette was stacking things in the dishwasher. They had never before had a dishwasher – never before had she had a flat so easy to keep and to clean. She loathed it as much as he did. There was every comfort and no luxury, every sensible idea and nothing of any interest. No character, charm, breadth or generosity. No sense of proportion and quite unfurnishable. Everything here was predigested; there was one place you could hang your hat and one position for your bed. No wonder, said Van der Valk, that once on the street or in a car people who live in these places become utterly demented.

‘Sorry,' she said, ‘but I've ironing to do, and I haven't read the paper yet, and it's raining – I had my hair done yesterday and I'm not in the mood to stagger about under an umbrella. Anyway I've only one comfortable pair of walking shoes and they need to go to the menders. I've been looking for others,' vaguely, ‘but they're all so hideous this year.'

It was all unutterably unanswerable. But when he came back he would find the place liveable for once, with a smell of ironing, clothes in piles, and a wife in a housecoat, all nicely stuffy and reactionary: a wife-slave, and happy about it.

Not much fresh air, out here. Real February night. Very low
cloud-ceiling and rain that is part of it. No sea wind despite a westerly airstream, no smell of sea, no smell of spring either to hope for, not for about another month at this rate.

It was the evening of March the third.

There was a smell of rotted dead leaves from last autumn, of rain-slimed and exhaust-blackened treetrunks, of sodden muddy grass underfoot alongside the pavements. The street-lamps had a depressed droop like undernourished tulips: the shimmering halo of light, reflected off raindrops, hung around them like bad breath. But this is part of it, thought Van der Valk without discontent; without this there would be no spring, no hairy pussywillows, reminding him of the scent of mimosa far down in the south. He had bought some that morning for his wife: it had been in cellophane, already desiccated from the long weary voyage that Arlette too had made, the wonderful scent long departed. Just as well, she had said, pleased, smiling at him – that way she would feel no homesickness. His wife's smile, and the scent of mimosa vividly pictured and for one instant recaptured, would be the last thing in his life. That, and the moisture on his loden coat, and the dead leaves, and a wet leather glove: the smells of Holland.

There was nothing in the sound of a car to make him turn; a relaxed sound, of a car idling along under no pressure; a contented sound, of a motor turning easily in the moist air. There was no instinct of danger to make him turn – it was the idlest of curiosity when the car slowed behind him. Probably some out-of-season tourist checking whether the road really did lead to Scheveningen. In a years-old police automatism he did bring his back foot round to narrow the target and start going down to look for cover. There were four shots, and two missed him altogether, but he had no interest in that. He had no interest even in the face; distorted, rigid with fear, with terror at what it was doing and the complete inability to stop. The pistol had commanded its owner to shoot and there was nothing else for it. An actor for many years, Van der Valk would have been interested in this piece of theatre, but he had a new part to study, the most important of his parts. In the words of the seventeenth-century actor, he was in the way to study a long silence.

So that he had no interest in the rough clash of the transmission and the squeal of the tyres pulling away in haste. He was down on his face in the dead leaves. He knew that he was dying and was pleased that he knew, and could say the words he wished to say – very simple words.

And a few simple thoughts. He had never been afraid of dying, and least of all now. He had had a life, married a wife, raised children, dug ground and planted a tree, sailed a boat and ski'd down hill, eaten and drunk and made love. He was ready for what came next. He felt his life spilling out on the ground and turned his head a little.
Bereitsein ist alles
. He thought of Arlette without disappointment and without pain.

It wasn't a bad place at all to die. With a last flick of recognition for this world he remembered Stendhal saying there was no disgrace in dying in the street, when not done on purpose. And he had …

Van der Valk began to study his long silence but was interrupted. He was dead.

*

‘The trouble with public-spirited witnesses is that they're such infernal busybodies.' Arlette would remember the phrase. Others too; light-hearted or disillusioned, even slightly soured.

‘One definition of aristocracy is a person who does not stop to gawk at a street fight.' In one of the villas to the side of the road, beyond the strip of sodden poached dog-infected grass, beyond the cycle-path and the row of leafless trees, lived a public-spirited person. He had been in a first-floor front room, and he hadn't had the television on, being absorbed at the moment in his stamp collection. The coppery bonk of pistol shots at thirty yards, however dulled by the saturated air, had startled him, and he had run to his window and jerked the curtain – but he had not seen much through the wavering fine rain which coarsened the grain of the air, so that what he had seen was a worn old gangster movie of the early thirties, made by Warner Brothers. Van der Valk had enjoyed them greatly. George Raft and James Cagney, Paul Muni and Edward G.
Robinson; the young Bogart. A man lying face-down in the rain, and the dark-coloured car accelerating away. Probably with Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet in the back.