Double-Barrel (19 page)

I walked on. Perhaps semiconsciously I turned into the Koninginneweg. Here the housewives did not do menial chores like sweeping pavements, and the daily girls dodged
it – wasn't their pavement; my footsteps were muffled, and creaked sometimes on snow still untrodden. I had no idea at all what to do. I passed Will Reinders' ugly little house and thought it had the same awkward innocence as the girls on the bike. I did not think there was any crime there. I reached the big house on the corner – a grand affair for this three-halfpenny town, flashing with polished brass and fresh paint. I didn't think there was any crime there, either. My road was leading me towards Besançon, inevitably. What could I do about it? In some way, there lay the key to what I was searching for.

The sagging little cottage behind its high wall and the ragged row of cypresses was older and wiser than the houses in the Queen's Street, I thought, looking through the chink in the gate. I hadn't any reason for doing so but I tinkled the bell. Placid Mrs Thing came out with her duster in her hand. She showed no curiosity at seeing me – the only one in the whole of Drente that hasn't, I thought. Or perhaps Miss Burger? – no, that is more professional discretion. I thought of questioning her and decided not to. Her deposition was on the file – what more could she have to tell me?

She smiled with friendly recognition.

‘Shall I bother him? – I realize it's working hours.'

‘I think he'll be glad to see you. He's shaky these last few days; can't settle to his work. He's not getting any better you know,' she added rather sadly, ‘but there's nothing the doctors can do, they say.' I could see that she was fond of him.

‘Is the road really going to be widened?' she asked as she shut the gate carefully behind me. ‘It would be an awful pity. You can't see it at present but he's done wonders with the garden.'

‘I'm pleased to see you,' said Besançon, getting up and holding out his hand. There was a spark of cordiality in the quiet controlled voice. ‘Sit down then, in your usual chair.
Mrs Bakhuis will bring you coffee, I feel sure; she approves of you.'

He was not at all surprised that I kept coming.

‘You can't really be pleased to see me.'

‘Why not? You are agreeable company. What good would it do me to be displeased? I cannot stop you coming. You are a policeman, and despite a certain unwilling sympathy you have for me, you suspect me. You do not quite know why, but you do.'

‘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.

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?'