The King of the Rainy Country (19 page)

Of course he could get Wollek out of bed. The more he thought about this the less he liked it.

He had a rented car too, didn't he? And she had only an hour's start.

*

What was it Anne-Marie had called him? Slow and obstinate, mean and narrow, stupidly literal-minded, very Dutch. He sighed heavily and opened the window beside him to let the smoke out
of the auto and get a bit of oxygen into his bloodstream. That was quite true. He couldn't help it either, he had been born that way, trained that way, and his daily life only settled him further into the grooves of official rigidity. He was a professional. It is only in books that one finds the brilliant amateur detective X; real policemen are obstinate and hardheaded, are slow and literal-minded, are frequently mean and nearly always narrow: they have to be. They are part of the administrative machine, a tool of government control, and in our days the government, in order to make head against the pressures and distortions, the tides of economic change and the winds of upheaval, must possess a machine so complex and so detailed that its tentacles can grip and manipulate every soul within its frontiers. That is a job for professional civil servants, not for amateurs. Holland, thought Van der Valk, with its inexhaustible supply of good administrative lance-corporals, possesses a wonderful machine, of which he was part. The trouble with Holland was indeed that the machine was far too good. It was so detailed, so perfected, so rigidly armoured against attack or pressure, that if it did break down it took a year to get it back on the rails. There is nobody that can improvise, nobody that can imagine, nobody capable of independent effort. All the wooden dollies, so perfectly co-ordinated, jerk about in agony mouthing and gesticulating, waiting for a super-professional that can pull the master string. Which is very hard to find. All the soldiers are lance-corporals, all the officers are colonels, they are all absolutely admirable, and there isn't any general.

People often said that England was the opposite, that it was a country run by amateurs on the old-boy network. Van der Valk did not know a great deal about it, but he rather doubted that. He had met some English civil servants, and seen how carefully trained and selected they were. Of course there was the parliament and the government, full of public-school types getting together in clubs exchanging passwords about prep and hols, but he thought that they were pretty unimportant: they talked a great deal, but they did very little. The English might remain convinced that their famous parliament was the seat of might and decision, but they
must secretly know that countries nowadays were not run by talkative old Etonians that had been brilliant in the debating society and had got a third in history at Oxford.

But one needed amateurs too, as Holland showed. A country needed huge armies of thoroughly trained professional administrators, and surely it needed large numbers of poets and philosophers, eccentric persons who knew nothing about productivity statistics but all about Etruscan civilizations? It wasn't enough to fill your government with eager beavers that all had a first-class degree in economics.

Take this situation. What could a professional policeman do in these circumstances? His famous rules and procedures were all meaningless – nobody had broken any laws. A professional policeman, if he had any sense, would have washed his hands of it at once, turned his back resolutely. Mr Marschal's wanderlust, Mr Canisius' devious twitching at the thread, the tortuous whims of Anne-Marie and the over-simple, over-ingenuous impulses of little Dagmar – any sensible policeman would shake his head with a smile and return to the comfortable, professional, exactly posed-and-pegged-out problem of how to stop jewel thefts.

Of course the fatal mistake – going after Marschal at all – had been right at the start; the Chief Commissaire of Police, a professional and a bureaucrat to his fingertips, had fallen head-first, delightedly, into the pit directly Canisius had stepped with his beautiful shoes on the concealed button that released the trapdoor. Van der Valk had not been able to turn back; the typical Dutch mistake had been made of fiddling obsessively at the individual till he got back into line.

He felt sure that in England they would have been wiser. A Commissioner or a Superintendent or whatever it was they had there – the high pooha of the police – would have listened to Canisius with old Etonian courtesy, and murmured in a veiled way that under the circumstances he did not really see his way … there were, of course, or so he understood, er—private detectives (dirtiest of all dirty words) …

A private detective, the beautiful unspoiled darling of a
detective story, would of course have leaped straight into bed with Anne-Marie, given Canisius the old right hook straight to the shiny false teeth, beaten Marschal by two seconds flat on the Olympic Piste at Innsbruck, had the tanzmariechen fall in love with him instead, and been paid ten thousand pounds on the last page by grateful millionaires.

And here I am, thought Van der Valk ruefully. I've made every mistake I could have. I haven't been professional, I'm not clever enough, being much too Dutch, to be an amateur, and now, as a fitting climax to so much inefficacity, I'm driving across the whole breadth of France in a hired Renault when, obviously, I should be burning up the highway in James Bond's Aston Martin. What I need is a world like Kipling's India, where natives are natives, subalterns are sensitive and self-sacrificing, the whole world is ruled by the Widow of Windsor, and there isn't a single thing that a twenty-one-year-old journalist doesn't understand perfectly in the space of fifteen hundred words. Ichabod: a glory is departed.

Fair Ichabod O'Man – Mr Polly was one of Van der Valk's favourite characters. (Now if Mr Polly had tried that lark nowadays, the police would have had him in a second less than no time for Conveying Passengers without a Licence. What, in charge of a punt, and no diploma for punting?)

A Dutch policeman was really good for only one thing, and that was filling in a form explaining how some other very naughty asocial individual had filled in another form incorrectly.

His petrol tank was getting low and he had to keep a lookout for one of those large French notice-boards saying TOTAL 2 KM. That was it; nothing was really important any more. All poetry and all wisdom were in that simple phrase. Total two kilometres. Total knowledge, total safety, total destruction. Only two kilometres to go.

The alert reader will have noticed that he was very tired. Total two kay em. Everything else, to quote Mr Polly, was sheer sesquippledan verblejuice.

*

A sensible policeman – a professional policeman – would have stopped several times on the road for solid provincial French meals, a good night's sleep between sheets. Come to that, a professional policeman would never have embarked at all upon as ridiculous a goosechase as this one. He would have rung up Canisius. He would have rung up the gendarmerie of the Department of the Basses-Pyrénées and told them to stop a grey Opel Rekord with a bundle of skis on the roof. After all, from Strasbourg to Biarritz is just about one thousand kilometres by road. Twelve hours' driving; if you were very young and resilient, an excellent driver in a powerful auto, and you had had a good night's peaceful rest, and you started at dawn, and had good weather and fairly uncrowded roads, you could do it in a day with a two-hour break for lunch. You would need to be pretty good. Either a famous amateur in an Aston Martin – back again – or a professional seasoned on intercontinental rallies.

Van der Valk was doing it because there was no space here for a professional any more. He had no evidence that Anne-Marie even had the gun, he had no evidence that she was even going to Biarritz. Nobody in the world would have believed him if he shouted at the top of his voice that he knew, with absolute certainty, she was heading for a professional financier in a fur-collared overcoat and a Paisley silk scarf and a grey trilby hat – how would types like Canisius dress themselves in a place like Biarritz? – with the fixed idea of planting a bullet in him: it was too unlikely. Things like that do not happen, least of all in Biarritz, a pleasant town once favoured by His Majesty the King of England and Emperor of India, and now thought highly of by the new French upper class known as the ‘cadres'.

The fact was that the cleavage between professionals and amateurs was here shown at its sharpest. Marschal – the old Marschal – had been a survivor of nineteenth-century banditry. A brilliant adventurer, like an American railroad king. Just the type Kipling would have recognized and appreciated – Harvey Cheyne. In our days, a sort of coelacanth. Everybody is convinced
it is extinct, and the rediscovery creates a fearful hullabaloo in scientific circles.

Canisius was the modern professional financier, at home in modern circles of power and influence. The presence of the old man, that glaring anachronism, had stuck in his throat for years. But senility and delusion helping, he had successfully set Monsieur Sylvestre Marschal aside. Remained the young Harvey Cheyne, Jean-Claude. He would have liked to tip him overboard into the Atlantic, but financiers don't do such things.

Anne-Marie, and not her husband, was the last of the Marschals. It was ironic; the old man had done all he could to improve his ‘image', as the publicity boys had it: the formal, beautiful, sombre house in St Cloud was a peculiar setting for a man like that, whom one imagined more easily in a restless, vulgar atmosphere – the hotel room in Lisbon: wasn't that where ‘Mister five per cent' – in many ways a similar figure – had lived and died? And he had wished to found a dynasty like the Rothschilds. That was a good example; they were as professional as you could wish, but they knew the value of the amateur mind. Old Marschal had succeeded in marrying his son off to a most suitable person, convent bred, the chateau-dweller, with a considerable fortune in land, an ancient name, and Parisian first-night looks. A little wild, but ski-ing was quite a respectable sport, and she would be tamed by chinchilla furs and diamonds.

But she had had a streak of buccaneer's blood that ran true to old Sylvestre's, and she had somewhere a confused feeling of loyalty to the Marschals. She had seen the direction behind the mortally slow and tortuous insinuations of Canisius and his tribe, she had seen the way the old man had been gradually trimmed by legal sidling, she had tried to whip up Jean-Claude and he had failed her. With his aristocratic instincts, his long nose in which money stank, his fine hands to which the stinking pennies would stick if he let them – a Marschal! Who could tell what efforts she had made, what pressure she had put on the man before he bolted? He had bolted, and had promptly caved in utterly.

And now Anne-Marie was on her way to strike a last blow for
the Marschals, with a rifle. God knew what she was thinking; quite possibly she imagined that that was what the old man would have done in similar circumstances.

She had known something about the little house in a Vosges village. The extraordinary performance Jean-Claude had put on at Innsbruck must have destroyed much of what balance she had left. For – Van der Valk saw that now clearly – the man had not run away from him, nor from the police in general, nor from Canisius: he had run away from his wife. And he had taken absurd melodramatic risks to make it clear to her. She had got the message; she had gone to the little house for one last plea, perhaps. Jealousy of the girl had complicated and confused her ideas further, and Jean-Claude had reacted in one way that she had not, perhaps, foreseen. Or was she familiar with the tale of Crown Prince Rudolf von Hapsburg?

What had the police of Wien done when they heard about the events of Mayerling? It was thought they had known, that they had been warned beforehand. They had been sensible: they had refused to know, refused to meddle. They had shown more sense than the Chief Commissaire of the Amsterdam Police, who had been impressed by the Sopexique, and had had a real Dutch mistrust of the house in the Keizersgracht and its inhabitants …

He was too tired. He had started at night, after a difficult day: he had had a good few thousand kilometres in his bones before beginning this absurd chase. For the sake of the shaky old man in Paris, for the sake of an innocent girl's parents, for the sake of Jean-Claude, who had made an effort for a scrap of peace and happiness, and yes, for the sake of Anne-Marie herself – he had liked her – he wasn't stirring up the whole French police apparatus. He was a fool and an amateur, but this had to be done in an amateurish way. He was going against a woman with a rifle – had she any idea how to use it? – with his bare hands like Bulldog Drummond. But he was too tired. If he went on this way there would be an accident, and he was too much of a policeman not to know that as tired as that he was a menace. It was dawn; traffic would be thickening on the roads. He could not get into Biarritz
that evening. Van der Valk pulled the Renault into the side of the road somewhere not far from Moulins – he had the difficult mountain roads of the central massif of France ahead of him – and slept while the day came up like thunder behind him in the east.

*

When he woke he looked at his watch and made a face to see how late it was. But Anne-Marie would have to rest too, somewhere. She might even be near him. There was of course no guarantee she was on the same road and he had had no great hopes of seeing or catching the grey Opel. But she would not have reached Biarritz before the middle of the night any more than he would. And Canisius would be deep in pleasant dreams in a luxury suite facing the sea, on the second floor of the Prince de Galles.

He had breakfast at the first place he came to; nothing particularly wonderful looking, but the coffee was hot and strong. They cut him huge slices of ham, boiled three fresh eggs for him, took him for one of those crazy Englishmen that drive their autos the whole way to Spain on the wrong side of the road, and charged him a fortune. He didn't care – Marschal money. The only important thing was that Canisius should not know what efforts were being made on his behalf: he knew that this was really why he had chosen not to warn the French police about the rifle in among the skis. If Canisius heard – and he would hear – that she was gunning for him she was a dead duck: nothing else stood between Canisius and all the Napoleonic bank accounts strewn about Europe. As long as Anne-Marie was not a criminal she inherited, surely, the Marschal money, and she had two children, two girls. Van der Valk had thought about those two girls at their convent in Brussels often, the more since seeing the dead body of the tanzmariechen in bed in that room – her hair had been tousled and the wound hardly showed at the entry point: she had looked fourteen.