The King of the Rainy Country (5 page)

‘What did he say to that?'

‘Oh just vaguely that yes, a carnival would enliven things a bit.'

‘And there was no oddity or tension at all? Nothing harassing or especially boring?'

‘Not at all, I'm afraid.'

‘I'm very grateful.'

‘Not much reward for a whisky.'

‘Do you know his wife at all?'

‘Never even seen her. He never mentioned anything private – don't think he was the type to weep on his secretary's shoulder. I liked him; I miss him a lot.'

‘Who is doing his work?'

‘I am, most of it. Not the dining and the wining.'

‘I won't hold you up. What have you got for supper?'

She laughed.

‘Scrambled egg with deep-freeze shrimps – pretty dull, I'm afraid.'

‘Good appetite.'

*

He still had to ring the Amstel Hotel. Mr Libuda was back, and could see him straight away if he cared to come. Remembering
suddenly that his expenses were being paid, he took a taxi. Mr Libuda was in the bar, and bought the whisky.

‘Yes, it was about this time of day – let's see – it was today a week ago. We had dinner here – I had to go to Köln the next day. Came back yesterday – glad to be out of that, I can tell you. Carnival!' Of course. Today was Monday. The last Monday before Lent. Rosenmontag in the Rheinland – high jinks in Köln.

‘Did you mention it while you were with him?'

‘He reminded me, now that you mention it. I'd forgotten all about it. I was groaning and he said he liked carnivals and I said rather he than me. Good grief, I left Rio to get away from all that Mardi Gras lark.'

There was no more to be heard from Mr Libuda, and it probably didn't mean anything at all. Still, it was a crossbearing of sorts. It was the only damn one he had. He went home, taking the tram this time; the rush hour was finished.

*

There was ham omelette with spinach for supper, and the television showed snips from the carnival-gallivanting in various corners of Europe, including Köln, Mainz and München. The Germans were all roaring about happily in cowboy suits, and the beer was going down glockglockglock; herr jé, how did the German bladder stand it?

*

He went to the office next morning with the bored feeling of a lot of tedious routine jobs to be done, and so it proved. The day was spent with airline and shipping bookings, car-hire firms, hotel fiches. A whole damn day, and at the end of it a vague certainty that Jean-Claude Marschal hadn't just gone off to some obscure corner of Holland to do some fishing.

‘I hear you've got a nice soft job out of the private bin,' said Chief Inspector Kan cattily, meeting him in the corridor. Van der Valk cursed halfheartedly.

Towards evening time he got an idea. Jean-Claude Marschal had served during the war with a British Army Intelligence unit. Nothing spectacular: rank of major, the usual fistful of decorations, no wounds. Nine tenths of it desk work; still … Had he ever done anything special? Was there any corner of Europe where he had been parachuted or infiltrated or rowed ashore in a little rubber dinghy? Anything that might give him a nostalgia for a time that had been less boring? Van der Valk rang up the War Office in London; they were quite polite in a sticky way, and once they overcame a natural inertia they promised to get him off a night letter.

Anne-Marie had promised him photographs, and on his way home he picked them up. None were very recent, but the bony face with the sharp nose was not one that would change a great deal. It was even fairly distinctive; there was something about that nose that reminded him of somebody-but-he-couldn't-say-who – it would occur to him later.

More jollification this evening; climax of carnival, under the cold, dry, bitter, dusty north-east wind. Holland watched the goings-on with a confusion of disapproval, envy, and a slightly concussed horror.

‘Turn the rubbish off, it gets on my nerves,' said Arlette: she was dressmaking in an angry way peculiar to herself, with vicious snips and clashes. The tock of her thread breaking sounded like an arrow in a target; her machine had a sudden nervous whirr like partridges in stubble. There was an anguished squawk as she ripped a length of cotton across. He studied the map of Europe. Mr Marschal had a French passport. If he was in Holland he would surely have shown up by now; nobody was sleeping under any bushes in carnival weather. He had left his little Panhard coupé behind. Where was he? Or was he dead?

If one went places, to get away, to flee, to withdraw, to be alone, did one go to a place that held a special kind of memory?

Why had Mr Canisius been so insistent on bringing the police into it? Could there be any reason at all for suspecting a crime?
Anne-Marie … complex woman … Van der Valk went to bed to mend his head. Vinegar and brown paper …

*

Ash Wednesday. Arlette went to church to have her forehead marked and be reminded that she was dust. He went to the office, with a gloomy feeling that a policeman was reminded daily he was dust, but there was the reply waiting for him from London.

Major Marschal had not done anything fancy. He had worked after the landings as a liaison officer between the British and General de Lattre. He had been at Colmar, Stuttgart, Ulm – the French ‘Rhine and Danube' army. Later, under the occupation, he had been De Lattre's contact man with the British commander in Köln – ha ha, the one that had decided that Adenauer must be sacked. Köln again; strange, that. A superstitious person sometimes, especially when he had no facts to go on, Van der Valk was fascinated by the way the name kept cropping up. He had once been there himself, to arrest a gentleman working a cheque fraud. Man had made an amusing travelling companion, though that had not stopped him getting eighteen months.

He had made a friend, too, of the German policeman that had tidied it up for him. Heinz Stössel was as German as his name, but you would have to be up early in the morning to get ahead of him. Poor old Heinz; carnival would be a naughty time; all those drunks in cowboy costume who turned out next day to be company directors. How would Heinz look in cowboy costume?

It was ridiculous, of course; there was absolutely no reason to believe that Jean-Claude Marschal was anywhere in the Rhein-land. Fellow was in Switzerland long gone, with a damned great bank account under a code number in Zürich. Enjoying that healthy diet of milk chocolate.

Still, he had been told not to make official inquiries, but nothing had been said about the old-boy network. He picked up his telephone.

‘Police Praesidium, Köln. Hallo? Any chance of finding Stössel
in his office? May not be gone yet? – put me through anyway. Hallo? Heinz? How are all the cowboys?'

A deep dramatic groan vibrated the diaphragm.

‘Gets worse every year – dustbin men swore they'd go on strike, three taxi-drivers were attacked, we had one hundred and forty-seven auto thefts and the bill for broken glass is astronomical. The insurance people refuse all carnival claims on principle – they say it comes under civil war. Over now – I love Lent!'

‘How's your trade in missing persons?'

There was a sudden silence.

‘Why d'you ask? I have a very naughty one but it's not on your teletype yet. You clairvoyant or something?' The voice sharpened suddenly. ‘You haven't found a girl, have you?'

‘No. I've lost a man.'

‘You've come to the wrong address, son. We've lost a girl – and the press got it before we did.'

‘Yes, that's the worst sort.'

‘There's worse still – we've just found her clothes in some woods. You can see the headline – Naked Beauty Disappears!'

‘Any starting point?'

‘Precious little – a barman saw her the night of Rose Monday with what is described as a handsome middle-aged man. Now you tell me your troubles. I haven't seen any signal, but to be honest I've been too busy to look.'

‘It isn't on the teletype. It's one of those confidential jobs. Man's a millionaire.'

A groan of disgust.

‘And I suppose he's handsome and middle-aged, is he?'

‘I suppose he could be called that – by a barman. I'm not seriously suggesting it: I've got no pointer at all. But the name of Köln has come up three or four times in an oddly peculiar way. The thing is that just before he ducked my man was talking vaguely about the carnival.'

‘So was everybody else.'

‘Do you believe in coincidence, dad?'

‘You got photos?'

‘In my pocket.'

‘Not much though, is it? Handsome middle-aged man. You might as well say he had a glass of beer and a cowboy costume.'

‘I'm going to catch a plane.'

‘Are you serious?'

‘My expenses are guaranteed.'

There wasn't any need to tell anybody, even Heinz Stössel, who would understand. There were two things driving him. One was simply the wish to get off the ground: he had had a feeling already for twenty-four hours that he was going round and round and staying in the same place. The other was pure wishful thinking. Like a poker player, with a fistful of rubbish, who discards three and keeps two miserable small hearts; by wishing hard enough he feels certain that his three new cards, turning them cautiously, one by one, corner by corner, up towards his twitching nose, will be three more hearts. Occasionally, they are.

He rang the airport; no space on the afternoon plane, but one at midday. He went home to pick up his bag, regretting the impulse a little already: it meant that instead of getting dinner from Arlette he would get a plastic tray with thingummybobs in aspic, and dry salad, and a huge piece of pastry with whipped cream that had gone slightly cardboardy from being kept in the fridge – he knew that airport food!

He didn't believe Mr Marschal was dead: he didn't believe in any crime: he couldn't accept that the man was any sort of criminal. Yet because he heard a nonsensical tale about a naked girl and a handsome middle-aged man he went haring off to Köln. I am like the man in the Bible, he told himself, who strained at a gnat but swallowed a camel. Or was that in the Bible? Not that it mattered.

*

In Köln there was a message from Heinz. He had gone home to get some sleep; he would meet Van der Valk this evening at six on the Rhine Terrace. Here, in the meanwhile, was a transcript of the meagre facts available.

The girl was seventeen, rising eighteen. Her name was Dagmar Schwiewelbein – the kind of name a German sees nothing comic in. She was described as extremely pretty. There were photos available but they were misleading, apparently; the girl had shot up suddenly and changed her hairstyle, plucked her eyebrows, done all sorts of things the parents disapproved of. These parents were very quiet, simple honest folk. Father was clerk in an insurance office, a very nice chap, not conspicuous for brains. There was an elder brother in the army; the girl had lived at home with her parents. They were utterly distraught, of course. They had brought their daughter up simply, innocently; she had always been quiet and good, an honest little German girl wearing an apron with little pockets in the shape of hearts, and her hair in ringlets. Not an outstanding schoolgirl, not bright enough to go on to a higher school. She had taken a job in an expensive flashy shop as countergirl, selling sports clothes. She had never been away from home till last year, when she had gone with two other girls on a wintersport holiday; her hobby was gymnastics and she was mad on ski-ing. She had never had a regular boyfriend, though she had been to the cinema with various young hopefuls. A good, quiet, innocent girl.

The parents had not liked the job: she had got hard and flashy, ‘like all the other girls nowadays', and sometimes wilful and cheeky with her mum.

Last month a big event had come to her life. She had been chosen for the Carnival as a Tanzmariechen.

This is a German phenomenon: the Carnival Prince has a troop of attendants, among them a sort of bodyguard that he carts about with him. These are the tanzmariechen, twenty or so of the prettiest and longest-legged girls in the town. They wear a very fetching musical-comedy-military costume: a kind of hussar tunic, tights, high boots, and a Cossack fur hat. It is very becoming on a tall slim girl.

I can't think about her, thought Van der Valk, as Dagmar Schwiewelbein. I can think of her, though, as the tanzmariechen, which is a pretty name for a delightful phenomenon.

They ride in the parade with the Carnival Prince, on Rose
Monday, and they appear of course at the great ball and banquet. This one hadn't; she had just disappeared. She had been seen that night having a drink with the famous ‘handsome man' in a café; nobody had thought anything of it. Nobody had ever seen her again. The costume – recognized by the sobbing mother – had been found in a neat pile in some woods ten kilometres or so outside the town, that were being searched as a matter of routine. There was no sign at all of trampling or a struggle or anything else: just a little pile of clothes. A naked tanzmariechen had disappeared into the cold March wind, veering between north-west, when it inclined to be wet, and north-east, when it was just cold.

Van der Valk trudged through Köln and got as far as the Rhine Terrace. Ash Wednesday – a carnival hangover: the streets seemed empty, the people slow and depressed. There were scarcely any people in the big glassed-in air-conditioned terrace. There was a view over a glaucous clouded-over Rhine, the huge heavy current even dirtier and more sullen than usual. The totally deserted outside terrace was decorated with flags of many countries, a few upside-down and almost all frayed by the wind and eaten by the Ruhr air. A vast poster announced that the Köln Football Club was host that Saturday to Borussia Dortmund. Banners advertised beer and fizzy lemonade. Another huge poster shouted the praises of the great ancient Roman Kennedy-visited Capital of the Rheinland. Everywhere one looked one saw the familiar twin towers of the Cathedral and the leggy stilts of the Rhine bridge.