The King of the Rainy Country (11 page)

There are several powerful arguments against this. First, it might look a little too much as though I had been sleeping with Anne-Marie – or worse. I have already committed the imprudence of taking a sweater she bought me!

Second, bigger reason was the tanzmariechen. Not only had she been charmed away from her home into what must seem to her a very romantic and glamorous adventure, but Marschal was, for some reason known only to him and perhaps obscure even at that, not letting go. He was cornered now, and frightened. Might he do something even more reckless than pinching a helicopter?

Van der Valk could understand the attraction a girl like that might have to a man sick to death of expensive and sophisticated women: he could understand the excitement of hiding her, smuggling her out of the country, being chased by the German police, taking her off to the winter sports. To someone who found it as difficult to get excited by anything as Marschal, to someone with Marschal's reckless, incurably romantic nature, that was understandable.

But did he love her? How seriously did he take her? Was he aware that she was caught up in a tangle she could not possibly imagine? She certainly loved him furiously, uncaring: for him she
would sacrifice anything. But he – he was sacrificing an innocent girl on the altar of his own boredom.

That was the flashpoint – whatever Van der Valk did, he had to get little Dagmar Schwiewelbein back to her distracted parents in Köln. Heinz Stössel was right, Marschal was of no importance: the central figure in this tale was not Jean-Claude the millionaire, nor Anne-Marie de Meeus, ex ski-champion, nor Canisius, regional manager to one of the world's biggest financial trusts – but an eighteen-year-old shopgirl who had put on a Cossack hat and high boots to show off her pretty legs and face at the carnival. Van der Valk drank off his cognac and asked the waitress for a couple of coffeebeans to chew.

*

Mr Bratfisch was sitting at his desk telephoning.

‘Quite right … no damage? … well then, there's no more to worry about, is there? … yes of course, but that can wait till this evening … Right you are.' He put the phone down, picked up a forgotten cigarette smouldering in his ashtray, and grinned at Van der Valk.

‘Well – found your millionaire yet?'

‘Found your helicopter yet?' Eyebrows went up.

‘So the wind lies there, does it?' He got up and went to stare out of the window. ‘Clouding up, and we're going to get a
föhn
. Make the snow sticky. Now if that had happened yesterday we'd have won that slalom.'

‘I was out there, but I had other things on my mind.'

‘That French sister act again. So it was you. He ran away when he saw you?'

‘He doesn't know me. He may have guessed what I am. His wife came here, supposedly to help find him. I was with her. She shouted when she saw him, in a stupid way. We were at the top of the piste. He was on skis and I wasn't. I can't ski anyway; I had to go down on the bucket. He took a remarkably drastic way of getting out.'

‘That's of little enough consequence. We weren't worried. You
can't hide a thing like a heli. We've just found it. Took us two hours searching, for all that; it was quite cleverly hidden, at the top of a valley in a stand of pines. Might have taken us longer, but we took another heli to search for the first one – since last year, we have two.' He threw away the cigarette, picked up a half eaten piece of bread and cheese, and bit into it with strong white teeth, brushing crumbs negligently on to the floor. ‘The one irritation was that I got no dinner.'

‘And?'

‘Yes, I admit, this changes things. He have this girl with him? – this one the Germans were flapping about?'

‘Yes.'

‘Bit exaggerated all this, isn't it? I mean I don't know why you're after him, but when he sees you he grabs our heli. That's in itself not serious, is it? I mean there's no larcenous intent, so we're left with joyriding. Is a joyride in a heli any more dangerous or serious than the same thing in a sports car? But for him to do a thing like that makes me think there's more in this than meets the eye.'

Well, this Bratfisch might be casual, but he was not stupid.

‘I don't know myself what he thinks I'm after. My instructions were to find him and learn why he chose to vanish from his home. He may have something on his mind I know nothing of. The point is that he feels himself cornered and he may do something more reckless than joyriding. He has a young girl with him who is innocent of anything at all.'

‘Mm,' Bratfisch tapped the white teeth and hitched a bit of cheese out of some corner. ‘We'd better go and look. And you must come, since you can recognize this chap. We've got no proper description. I may say I meant to sound lukewarm when you came to see me last night, because it all sounded a bit too hole-and-corner, and I hadn't had this chap signalled, or anything. Still – I can act on the signal Köln sent me about the girl. You do understand why I didn't regard that as serious? We had a smash and grab in a jeweller's last night, right here in the street. Impudence, that. It's been taking up most of the resources I possess. Still,
we'll see what we can do now,' leading the way downstairs.

He had a car outside, one of the old BMW saloons that are extremely solid and a great deal faster than they look. ‘Give me a description and I'll broadcast it,' he said with a finger flicked at the radio transmitter. ‘Mark, this valley's not wide, and they may quite likely be still in it, since the roads are being watched. They left the heli at the head of the valley and skied down.'

*

After a bit of boy scout work they found the chalet where Marschal had been honeymooning with his tanzmariechen: there was nobody there. It was furnished with the ordinary things one finds in all mountain chalets. There were plenty of expensive things strewn about, from roses – flown into Innsbruck by plane at that time of year, and forced quite likely in Holland or Hyères, costing the earth – to a fancy Japanese camera which, alas, had no films in it. It was hard to say whether they had been back there or not. They had made little effort to take anything with them, and certainly no real luggage: the clothes that had been bought in München – and in Innsbruck! – were lying about everywhere. A careful search failed to turn up anything remarkable.

Back in Innsbruck a bit of hustling among files showed the chalet to be the property of an Italian business man: probably turn out to be a pal of Marschal's – and quite likely someone with something to do with the Sopex! Whether he had been there or not, there would be nothing suspect or unusual to him about Jean-Claude's turning up with a girl.

‘They'll try to get out of Austria, now.'

‘Well, there aren't all that many ways of getting out,' said Bratfisch comfortably. ‘We've got the red Fiat, so they'd have to get another auto – and we've warned all garages and filling stations. Plane is right out, and I've got men on every train leaving Austria. He's got to follow the valleys and what choice does that give him? Back towards Salzburg, the other way into the Vorarlberg and over towards Constance, up towards Germany, Mittenwald and Garmisch, or south over the Brenner. That looks likeliest, with the
place belonging to this whatsisname from Torino, but hell, it's easy enough to block the Brenner!'

‘What about the high passes? He seems to be useful on skis.'

Bratfisch laughed.

‘You don't know much about mountains, do you? First, there's an enormous amount of snow everywhere, and all but the main road passes are blocked. Second, there's a
föhn
blowing. Avalanche weather. Nobody with one penny's worth of sense is going to do any boy scout stuff on any mountains in these conditions, and anyone with no sense but a bad conscience would get stuck in a drift before he was up five hundred metres. Or might, very easily, get killed. This chap of yours wouldn't do anything like that. No, wait twenty-four hours and we have him in a bag, girl and all.'

Van der Valk, feeling slightly curious, passed the Kaisershof on his way back to supper. There was an uproarious party going on; the French ski-team, with a crowd of trainers and hangers-on from ski and wax manufacturers, as many journalists, and a good many of the Austrian equivalents, were having a whoopee for the end of the competition season. There had been a big prizegiving and speechmaking already, with a good many banalities from the burgomaster and the President of the International Federation, and the five National Federations, and the Alpine Club, and … Anne-Marie was gone. She had packed her skis on to her hired car, and driven off earlier that afternoon, the porter said. No, she had been alone. No, she had had no messages or telephone calls, nor had she made any. No, she had seemed quite calm and sunny.

It was easy enough to check. Anne-Marie, alone, yes, quite alone, yes, they were quite sure, had passed the border at Füssen half an hour ago, in the hired car still, with the skis on top. They had noticed her particularly – yes, naturally.

Where the hell was Füssen? He had heard of it – they had an ice hockey team there. After a minute's hunting on the map he found it, a little town just over the German border, thirty kilometres or so west of Garmisch. It didn't have to mean anything.
Anne-Marie had lost her taste for mountains and perhaps felt like a nice flat plain – Holland, for instance.

He couldn't sleep. He was overtired and overtense, and his shoulder was swollen, had stiffened, and was so painful that he could not lie on it. At midnight he was still wandering about Innsbruck. Competition skiers, whose batteries take a lot of recharging, sleep twelve hours when they can get it, but the season was over, and the revelry still in full blast. After months of being forbidden to drink, forbidden to smoke, forbidden to eat toffees, after months on a gloomy diet of grapefruit, raw carrots and underdone steak, the girls were letting down furiously. He wasn't surprised; they were kept as overwound as he was himself for months on end. He was in no mood for squeakers and balloons and dancing the surf; he found a little bar where he could do some nice neurotic solitary drinking.

There was Wien of course, a powerful magnet. But Jean-Claude could not know how seriously the Austrian police might be inclined to take people that jumped around in government helicopters – the most valuable tools of the mountain rescue brigades. A helicopter is a sacred cow in the Alps – there are too many places where the air is the only bridge between life and death.

There was Zürich; he was quite sure that the millionaire side of Marschal had not neglected to keep a few bolivars in Zurich – the town of Marshal Masséna!

Which way would the cat jump? Surely not Germany, with every bum policeman there looking for the tanzmariechen, and Heinz Stössel's highpowered machine. The Jugoslav and Czech and Hungarian borders appeared unlikely for obvious reasons: no, it must surely be Switzerland or Italy. And trains would be out, for Marschal would surely know that the passports on a train are easily checked if anyone cares to take the trouble. The answer lay on the roads, hiding on a lorry or something. Naturally, but he had to consider Marschal's character as well as those huge packets of banknotes: skulking like a refugee across the Curtain wasn't his
style. He would find it more in his nature to try something impudent, a gay piece of bluff, the riskier the better: if he was caught, then it would be time to try a bribe. He could see Marschal sailing across the Italian frontier in a huge Rolls Royce, bowing slightly from side to side, with Ethiopian flags flying from the wings…

It was no use; he still couldn't sleep, even with half a bottle of brandy inside him. At four in the morning he was hunting again through the unsympathetic streets in search of humanity. Experience told him the only place he would find warmth was the railway station.

The humanity was only just out of bed, perfunctorily washed, and not talkative: a smell of damp clothes quarrelled with that of fresh bread and coffee. The man next door had a powerful agricultural flavour of mouldy hay about him, had disdained shaving, and had given himself early-morning courage by putting rum in his coffee. The
föhn
was blowing and a thick fog hung in the station. It was horribly cold, but not freezing; on the mountains thick wet nasty snow was drizzling down. The winter sports, he thought with relief, were over.

He had the prickling eyes and tender skin that come from not sleeping. His neighbour – how that damp loden coat smelt! – slept happily, waking miraculously at the exact moment his train came in: there, no doubt, he could have another little snooze between here and Salzburg, jolting to and fro with his mouth open in a sickly waft of rum.

Van der Valk smoked and meditated, the kind of philosophical meditation one does have on workmen's trains at five in the morning. It was still pitchblack out, blue and orange lights glaring livid through sleet, the mountains huge unguessable shapes brooding out there like statues on Easter Island. Van der Valk thought about passion.

There are two kinds, he was thinking. There is the northern kind, that thinks it is high on emotion and is only high on imagination. That is us: me, the Germans, the Scandinavians, the English, the Americans. Much given to misty unreality and sobbing gulping melodrama; we don't have passions, but we imagine them so
strongly we delude ourselves that we are ready for any grand dramatic gesture. That is our romance, which is not romance at all, but romanticism. We weep buckets over passion, but we don't have it; we commit suicide all the time, and it is from pure self-pity. Our grand gestures are prompted by a moist and profuse sense of theatre.

Real passion belongs to Latin peoples. Read the newspaper in France or Italy. The crime of passion is a commonplace, whereas in Northern Europe it is extremely rare. For a man to shoot his wife, perhaps, and then himself, is a thing regarded as reasonable and psychologically probable. A man utterly lacking in imagination, a shop assistant, a traveller in chemical manure, will strangle his mistress, who has taken up with a sales-manager, walk into the local police station, and not cause even a lifted eyebrow.