Tsing-Boum (11 page)

‘No – this is an administrative thing: what standing I have professionally in France, what expenses I'm entitled to. They want it kept quiet, not to upset the French, not to alert the Press, at all costs nothing political. Like the Marschal time.'

‘Where you ended up getting shot.'

‘Oddly enough, that's just what the Minister said. Don't worry, having eaten Anne-Marie's rifle bullet I'll be very cautious of this maniac with the sub-machine-gun. The thing is, how to go about it. I go to the spot, I get dusty answers. That policeman – champagne or no champagne – he's a last resort. I have to have something to go on, first. I can't trot in and ask what it was Esther did and why it got smothered. I have to make a more indirect approach. The thing is, perhaps, to find people who were in the battle, and try to find someone who knew her. It was a relatively small group – how many, about?'

‘The good ones – who survived the camps too? About two thousand. There are plenty around.' She hesitated. ‘Those who were there … why don't you ask Jean-Michel?' Her brother, who lived in Toulon and sometimes lent them his country house. An engineer, very prosperous. When he had had his wound, in the Pyrenees, they had stayed a fortnight in Toulon after he was half convalescent. He liked Jean-Michel.

‘He wasn't there, was he?'

‘No, but he was in the delta. Another one who tried to get in. But he was a bridge engineer – at that stage they'd no use for the likes of him. Why don't we ring him?' reasonably.

The simplicity of the solution appealed to him.

‘Go ahead.'

As she was dialling, his impulse, suddenly reversed, was to put his hand out to strangle the purring throat of the chat-machine:
did he really want to bring her further into this by introducing her talkative, clever family? Was there not something ignoble in thus baring Esther's private life, which she had fought so hard to keep secret, for the amusement and edification of the Toulon upper crust? Too late, now; she had composed several sets of figures with great care and her tongue sticking out, automatic long-distance had done its fell work, Toulon had flown towards him like released elastic and the little bip-bip was already sounding in Jean-Michel's living-room. She brandished the instrument at him in triumph.

‘Hallo? Claudine? Yes, it's me. Yes, fine, yes, she's here. Me? Suffering as usual; how are you? And Jean-Michel? Is he there? Would you put him on a minute and then I'll get you Arlette. Hallo, vieux, how's life? Tell me, are you at home more or less, this next couple of days? I've a notion to drop in if that's not a horrible thought. I've something rather interesting on which I'd value your opinion. Yes – yes – oh, a long rambling tale. No no: professional. Something banal here and suddenly the shit hit the fan. Won't put you out? Nor Claudine? But of course: over a long blissful drink. Tomorrow evening probably – what can I bring you – a smoked eel? Yes of course – hold on, here's Arlette.'

There it was; he was committed now. Ach, the idea was not that bad. Jean-Michel was bright and alert and very modern. He knew how to operate the System D anywhere in the Var or the Bouches-du-Rhône. Better still he was a balanced person and no fool at all. One could do a great deal worse. Arlette was gossiping happily down the chat-machine; he went to the kitchen for some milk.

‘Alors bye-bye,' she was saying when he got back: that awful way French women had on the phone, using idiotic franglais phrases like ‘because le job' which he had heard in the doorway. It was the same when they were in France – the first day Arlette exaggerated everything, her accent, her appetite, her mannerisms, to show that she was ‘home'. One couldn't blame her; it was human that even after twenty years in Holland she still cared passionately for the smell and sound and feel of her land. That was not chauvinism; it was right and proper. What had Esther felt? Had she too hungered for
her ‘own' land while she sat in the municipal flat on the sterile Van Lennepweg? What was her own land? Jugoslavia which she had quite likely never even seen? The Pas de Calais where she was born? The arid, fiercely hot and bitterly cold uplands of the South-west? Or Indochina?

‘Remind me to buy a smoked eel for them.'

‘And I'll remind you to bring back a smoked goose for
me.'

‘I'll ring the airport.'

Airports … do you think they had a flight to Marseilles next day? After an intolerable argy-bargy he got an Iberia flight that would land him in Paris and after some hours' delay an Air-Inter down to the coast, after rejecting two that would gain him one hour and land him (a) at Nice and (b) at Lyons … He would miss lunch again.

At eleven the next morning the Commissaire, clutching his smoked eel, was at Schiphol, with an official warrant authorizing Van der Valk, Peter Simon Joseph to proceed upon the affairs of the State of the Netherlands by air (tourist class). A bored ticket girl translated this into an illegible carbon saying Amsterdam-Schiphol to Marseilles-Marignane via Paris-Orly, with a great deal of small print all about the Warsaw Convention. Chauvinism showed; the morning paper was full of how the French were being very naughty and wounding to the Dutch about subsidized margarine.

‘Rather you than me,' she whined, unconsciously echoing the Ministry of Justice. Van der Valk – loyal to Arlette, loyal to Esther – was irritated.

‘Just stick to the job, Sissi. Keep the home-thoughts-from-abroad for the distressed provincial lady.'

Arlette was waiting by the registration desk with his case, containing, had he known it, cosmetics-for-Claudine, so cheap at airports.

‘And duty-free whisky, so you aren't empty-handed.'

‘I should say not,' he groaned, taking the case. ‘God, it's like lead.'

‘I packed your raincoat and a suit and thick shoes and a good shirt in case you go somewhere …'

‘Oh, woman – all I need is spare underclothes.' Women … always so bloody zealous when it came to packing!

‘That's what you think. You don't know Marseilles – freezing cold and simply pouring – you'll see.'

‘Many thanks.'

‘I can't stop – I've Ruth coming home for lunch.'

‘What are you having?' full of envy. He would get an airport meal, as revolting as it was expensive, at silly Orly …

‘Escalopes, as it's just us girls, with that cream that went sour – and grilled bananas.'

‘Oh – with rum …'

‘Never mind – Claudine is a good cook. Look after yourself, my love – and don't worry. I'm on your side. Did you think I was against?'

‘For a little while.'

‘My love to the family.'

‘My love to Ruth.' She smiled, happy at this. She had high heels, to kiss without stretching.

‘Alors bye-bye.' He had found just the right phrase, before being sucked into the conveyor-belt.

Van der Valk had leisure to inspect Schipol, and would have even more to inspect Orly – and he loathed airports. No humanity. Railway stations were civilized; airports were not. The human was channelled and chivvied, stamped and docketed, squeezed through tubes like toothpaste and finally encapsulated in an abject little tunnel that cost the earth, so that a computer had calculated to the last milligramme the profit that could be made. The loss of dignity cowed one into accepting the conditions of a very bland, very humane slaughterhouse where one got a small gin before euthanasia. Worst was the fiction whereby airports pretended to set one basking in kissy luxury.

Airports always made him wish he were in Cuba.

In consequence he walked about Orly with a heavy forbidding step like Commissaire Maigret, looked at all the restaurant menus with a pouched and glaucous eye, had a meal that was all he had feared, found a corner so gloomy that even Americans in plastic overshoes slunk away from it, and settled down to read
Playboy
with an obscure notion that it was exactly suited somehow to his frame of mind. All that gigantic tit – took one straight back to the Zeppelin age … At last he could stagger back into the eager bustle, even get a peppermint, and be squeezed on another worm of toothpaste all the way to Marseilles. At Marignane the rain was like a dogwhip across his face, but Arlette must have phoned because Jean-Michel was there to pick him up, in a DS with swivelling headlamps
of iode, whatever that was, a radio-telephone and an invisible deathray in front to clear the rubbishy cars out of its flight.

He often teased Arlette about her brother. Jean-Michel was so like ‘Monsieur-Tout-le-Monde' in television serials, rich as a walking safe-deposit box but always a good laugh; absent-minded, gay, casual, irresponsible. Snappy clothes and a passion for toys and gadgets; the big engineer, slim and youthful in a bikini on the beach at Arcachon, blowing up the children's inflatable canoe to play with it himself …

Jean-Michel had suddenly become middle-aged, but still in the correctly dashing way; his waistline had not thickened, he was beautifully tanned, but he had rimless glasses and a roguish little beard. Classically, ludicrously French, he ate noisily, talking through every mouthful, he smoked terrible tasteless cigarettes and drank whisky before meals busily ‘counting cubes' according to official anti-alcohol campaigns, was terrifyingly intelligent and thought writing letters a shocking waste of time, got on with everyone, and could play bridge with the examining magistrate or pelota in a lorry-drivers' pull-up with complete ease. He was pleasantly childish and got much innocent pleasure out of an engineer's diary full of useful data all in Russian, and a pen which had ‘With the personal good wishes of Dwight D. Eisenhower' stamped on it. His gigantic skyscraper flat in Super-Toulon amused Van der Valk intensely; more mirrors than the ladies' lavatory in a Hilton …

The bathroom was green marble, with lots of spotlights recessed behind copper portholes, the hallway was full of little buttons commanding things, but the living-room was a prehistoric cavern, with huge stones and guaranteed-genuine Greek amphorae. One entered through an irregular arch of rough concrete and found that all the furniture had peculiar foetal shapes. Here one could be sure of finding transparent sofas filled with water, tables like huge fungoids containing fountains, bars, and high-fidelity apparatus, and hallucinatory mural paintings.

Claudine went with this; a thin supple woman with pale-silver shingled hair, curled bonelessly in a chair like someone's left lung. She smelt delicious and loved giving people tiny
complicated things to eat; there were quantities of hot ferocious bits of fried octopus and devilled chicken to greet him, together with ouzo, retsina, and frightful Macedonian brandy – hm, Claudine was having a Greek Week. He liked it here: spontaneous, warm-hearted, bursting with life. Claudine looked the total butterfly and was a kindergarten teacher. Every time he met them he remarked, staggered, how horribly rich they were. Yes, they agreed, beaming: stinking, madly rich, isn't it lovely – and so it was.

‘And how is Holland?'

‘Greatly upset this morning about the bastardly French.' Happy shrieks.

‘What happens if I stick a pin in this sofa?'

‘I don't think one could, it's like elephant hide and it even resists a cigarette end, but one might try acid,' said Jean-Michel, looking quite eager to start that minute.

‘Shouldn't there be a naked woman?'

‘Oh but there is frequently; Claudine leaps about naked as a ball-bearing.'

He took a mouthful of something odd.

‘What's in this?'

‘No idea; they're communist. Something radioactive from the Sea of Japan, the tin said,' replied Claudine.

‘I'll tell you why I'm here,' said Van der Valk when he had finished stuffing himself, and did, in bits.

‘I want to know all about the battle of Dien Bien Phu.'

‘Good grief.' Jean-Michel was getting serious in stages. ‘A wilderness of unanswered questions. I was Génie, you know. We calculated that if the Viet had one-o-five artillery the camp needed thirty thousand tons of engineering material for protection. They found three thousand on the spot, chopping wood. Two thousand in bits and pieces were airlifted in. The rest was an embarrassment so was hastily forgotten.'

‘No no, not shop statistics. The men.'

‘Langlais is a general, Bigeard finally is too, Brèche left the army and I see him from time to time …'

‘Not now. Then.'

‘Then – everything was queer then. Double-think and let's-pretend. Looking at it now one can hardly believe that ten
thousand men were dumped in that pisspot with no protection whatever. The Viet could count the aspirins in one's bottle – they knew every gun, every hole, every radio. That had no importance of course – we would massacre them with firepower the second their nose showed. What is astonishing is that despite everything we nearly did. In April, you know, after a month's siege, Bigeard moved out with a thousand paras and knocked them arse over tit off the Huguettes and off Eliane. You know that to the last day we held Eliane? When I think that I volunteered to jump in! If ever there was a
merdier
… The thing to remember is that everyone who was there is loony on the subject. If your woman was machine-gunned – by someone who was there – (a) I'm not a bit surprised and (b) you'll never find out.'

‘More or less my conclusion,' murmured Van der Valk, ‘but I've got to try and get upstream to where all this started before I can draw any conclusions. I've nothing whatever to suggest that “he was there” – my elusive pimpernel. She was in Hanoi – that's official sources. My first question is that she may have had a lover there. The thing is, can you think of someone who might know?'

‘I'll have to think about it,' said Jean-Michel a bit evasively, ‘I might.'

‘What does that mean, you might?'

‘People are loony on the subject, as I said. People have elaborate explanations for things they did then which seemed reasonable at the time but which would now be thought damn stupid. People clam up. Admit your girl had a lover, admit she did something daft, admit the improbable and say' you find someone who knows – you'll never get them to admit it.'