Tsing-Boum (16 page)

‘Do you know Laforêt's whereabouts?'

‘No. But I dare say we can find out. What d'you want to eat – duck?'

‘Something with chestnuts in.'

‘Seriously,' said the brown man with his mouth full of chestnuts, ‘they had to answer your questions. You're an officer of the PJ on a job, and they were profoundly grateful – so are we, though I'm not saying so – that you didn't launch a big official tra-la, asking the magistrate here for an interrogatory commission, sending the dossier back for supplement of information, the whole works.'

Yes, Van der Valk was thinking, maybe those civil servants back in The Hague are not quite as stupid as we thought them.

‘Who did you see back there – old Voisin? I thought as much. I'm not quite barefaced enough to ask what you got out
of him, and unlike that old twister Marie he's not going to ring up and tell me! But I'd be interested to know how you're going to go about this.'

‘Since there's not a hope of my getting across Paris without a few of your squalid informers noticing,' said Van der Valk pleasantly, ‘I got the address of a brigadier-general in the Rue Saint-Dominique.'

‘Really?'

‘That surprise you?'

‘It does indeed. That's not just an underdone steak you have there on your plate – that's a chop off a live lion.'

‘I have to look up the goddam train times.'

‘No need. Permit me to smooth your path.'

‘Huh?'

‘I can get you on a military plane, and you don't have to make any parachute jumps at the end either. You can be in central Paris in two hours – have some coffee.'

Arlette was waiting anxiously for some news. She was always nervous when the man was away. One controlled it, naturally. What would be the point of a police wife who came out with remarks like ‘Make sure you have regular meals and don't drink too much'? Even the time he was carried in with half his middle missing from a bare hillside near St Jean de Luz, after being nearly blown in two by a big-game rifle, had not been the shock to her she would have expected; she had been waiting so long for something of the sort that she was more relieved than anything! As a young nervous wife, sitting alone in a creaky house after nightfall and starting at every sound, she had had to be merciless with herself to conquer panic. Now that she was an old bag she allowed herself, occasionally, a bit of fuss. But this was altogether different.

It was not just being ‘involved' – wasn't one always, in varying degree? One could respect rules long laid down, like never asking questions, and never allowing work to be discussed at home, but after twenty years of marriage one was telepathic, and instantly recognized a man frightened, bewildered, exhausted or frustrated. But this time, she felt, she was the origin of the whole mess. She had brought it upon him and herself with her silly hysteria. Just because she had been an embarrassment to him back in 1957 …

She had had no plan, no system. Everything had swarmed all over her, so that she had had to ward off the blows without time to organize a counter-attack.
‘Boucher les trous'
, as she called it. Since the moment when she had ‘known' instinctively that Esther had been at Dien Bien Phu, she had felt an uneasy identification, as though she was herself Esther … no, she couldn't sort it out, she was confused and darkened, she had no equilibrium, no sense. Her thoughts were like herself,
fiddling stupidly about and not getting anything done properly.

‘This won't be in the least funny,' the man had said, standing around at Schiphol, his professional eye gliding gloomily over the senseless activities and the atmosphere of anxiety for which she hated airports, ‘just a mess.'

She had wanted to be a support and an encouragement, and had of course only succeeded in saying something cretinous.

‘But she had a dramatic past. It will be most absorbing to turn it up leaf by leaf.'

‘My poor friend, you've been reading detective stories again. It will be dull and flat like a restaurant on New Year's Day. Ice buckets full of lukewarm water, with dead flowers and disintegrated cigarette-ends floating. Broken paper streamers knee deep, and a frightful stink.'

‘Oh you're seeing things too black, surely.'

‘No, no. Sordid pathetic people, frightened and anxious, repeating themselves.' She had crept home on her belly, feeling suicidal!

His telephone calls had not helped. A voice sounding drunken and slightly crazy had spoken to her from Marseilles, with Jean-Michel's voice being funny – so he thought – in the background, and Claudine unusually raucous and screeching, so that her teeth had been on edge throughout. Not just that they were all bibulous, but they had all sounded so silly. He had done something very stupid, or very clever – or both together – she hadn't understood what or why. She couldn't understand anything at all. And now he had rung up from Paris, terribly depressed, and had been in Clermont-Ferrand of all places, and it all seemed to be going from bad to worse from what she could make out …

Arlette sat in the still house alone, for Ruth, the only other person there, was in bed asleep, upstairs, terribly far away. The weather had gone foggy as a prelude to becoming warmer, and the whole of life outside seemed dulled and muted. Food had no savour. Even music had not helped. Whenever Arlette felt miserable she put on
Fidelio
– it never failed. Never did she miss feeling renewed and stiffened after the prisoners had sung, never fail to enjoy the sinister swagger of Pizarro's march, never stop her neck prickling and her eyes stinging as
the voices join one after another in
‘Mir ist so wunderbar' –
and tonight she had been limp as a corpse throughout.

She felt besieged. She knew now, she felt, the sensations of a soldier in a little muddy hole on one of the
pitons
of Dien Bien Phu – and all around the ring of iron hills swarming with unseen silent Vietminh soldiers waiting patiently – for the kill. A thought struck her silent body and noisy mind. Esther, in that ramshackle, jerrybuilt municipal block – had she too not been besieged? Surrounded by a Dutch vietminh! Was that too fantastic? She had not stayed limp, a stale cucumber waiting to be thrown in the dustbin; she had defended herself, inch by inch, bitterly, as the paratroopers had. She had not given up. But she had lost slowly, her hope, her child, her life, in the end …

Knowing nothing, able to do nothing. ‘What the hell are they playing at, in Hanoi?' had snarled the embittered and exasperated soldiers, crouched in the mud to watch the sky for the help that did not come.

Arlette had no idea of it – her man would have been amused, wryly – but she too was conducting a little investigation, trying to understand Esther Marx, trying to understand that for the first time she was not just touched by a criminal affair, not just tangentially or peripherally involved, but entangled to the neck at the very source. Through Ruth, she was trying to penetrate the darkness much, had she known it, as her man was through the jungle of passions and loyalties of which Monsieur Marie and Colonel Voisin had been distant, uncomprehending spectators. Arlette did not realize this. On the surface, she was trying to build a home, a warmth, a security and a love for this child. Within, she felt unhappily, she was herself clutching desperately at the child for relief from pain and anxiety. Much the same dichotomy, had she known it, was affecting Van der Valk: on one side a typically dull and wearisome police inquiry, further muddied and distorted by the ten-year-old petty jealousies between DST and the army! – while on the other lay the genuine tragedy of two human beings who had loved each other.

Arlette had been making efforts to use her sense and her experience in handling Ruth. Affection, confidence, reliance –
twenty psychological clichés went trotting through her head. Luckily, the child was easy. They were getting on quite well together, in the three days that ‘Dad' (as the boys used to call him sardonically) had been away.

‘Vous êtes gentille, vous savez.'

‘Tu sais, tu peux me tutoyer.'

Arlette and Ruth were discovering one another. Both had much the same trouble: slight embarrassment. The woman was unaccustomed to girls of this age. The child had had little contact with women, knowing only her abrupt uncertain mother and the over-bright, over-assured voices of elementary-school teachers.

They were both in turn brusque and effusive, elaborately calm and self-consciously undemonstrative, hardly able as yet to show spontaneous affection one for the other. They both had to play detective, taking hours to discover the obvious.

Arlette had to learn what she could without forcing the child's confidence: she was succeeding fairly well, she thought with some vanity. Ruth – on the lowest, purely physical level of communication – was accustomed to a silent, morose existence, and chattered like a jackdaw, and it was surely good, Arlette told herself, to allow this. Especially about her mother, for that way the pain and shock would be dulled most quickly. Nothing could be worse than Esther promoted into a taboo. That Arlette herself was passionately interested in all that concerned Esther was beside the point. Nor was Ruth old enough to have lost spontaneity; she chattered all day, however disjointedly and inconsequently, and she seemed to have confidence, for there seemed to be no areas at the frontiers of which she closed up. Must be good, Arlette reassured herself again: the silent bottled-up ones who creep off by themselves are the most difficult to reach.

She was lucky, too, she told herself. She had always been convinced that she was no good with children – excruciating boredom of the prattle of tiny tongues – and with astonishment she found she enjoyed the company of this marmot.

I suppose, she thought, that I am a fairly easy woman. Mum type; broad maternal bosom – oh yes, that reminded her, and she went into the kitchen and wrote ‘Bra' on her
shopping list. At least I am still pretty even if I am an old bag. Comfortable – a bit overweight. A Bonnard woman. As the man says threateningly, ‘If you go on eating cake you will become one of those rosy uncorseted Renoir women. Down on your hands and knees and scrub the floor – good exercise for your belly and make you luscious in bed.' Yes, yes, but keep your mind on work, you scoundrel!

She could take no credit for it, but she did have natural gaiety. She sang, she took pleasure in everything and got amusement from small things – like women with fat calves who wear boots, that familiar feature of the Dutch landscape in the winter months.

She loved food, and did the week's shopping with Ruth to carry the spare basket.

‘While Petit Père is away we're going to have especially nice meals. No cauliflowers!'

She found a bottle of cider and bought it happily; put her in a Norman mood.

‘Such a pity that chickens do not exist in Holland.'

‘Do you like pancakes?' Of course; all children love pancakes.

Esther had been silent and dour; buttoned lip, pinned-back thoughts. She had smoked all day and drunk too much whisky. She had been bored by food, tending to open tins of corned beef or buy smelly
patates
as the Dutch call chips – or worse still, one of those ready-to-cook packets with everything all snipped fine and dehydrated in little plastic envelopes. She liked rice … Whereas Arlette loved rice too, but didn't at all mind – in fact enjoyed – the fiddly cutting of leeks and cabbage hearts in strips and making peanut-butter sauce.

‘The reason why the Americans are a dead loss in Vietnam is that they don't like rice.'

‘Mamma liked Indochina.'

‘Everybody we know loved Indochina.' Yes, it helped, her being French. The child had been born there, and felt some sense of belonging; she knew no more than that about her parentage, but she shared a heritage with Arlette, who like Esther was an ‘exile'.

‘Esther found rice too much trouble.' There – she had stopped
saying ‘Mamma'. She had tried ‘My mother' once or twice, but had found it too self-conscious.

Arlette was shaking the vegetables in the large pan: Ruth alongside was shaking a pork fillet, cut in cubes, in the little pan.

‘And she said in restaurants it was no good because they made it too long beforehand.'

‘Quite right. Sensible Esther. Don't let it stick.' Arlette peeled two bulbs of garlic and smashed them with the flat of the knife, fried a banana with a bit of curry powder sprinkled on it, and coloured the sauce with a little soya.

‘Don't let the vegetables get soft; they should be just transparent and no more. Yoohoo, the rice is ready … What did Esther do in the evenings?'

‘She read lots. Newspapers and magazines and books – everything.'

‘What about when your father was home?'

‘They used to play cards – can you play cards?'

‘Belote …'

‘Yes, that's it. Or go out – I don't know – to the cinema I think.'

‘Esther liked the cinema?'

‘Yes, ever so much – often I came home and found a note saying she'd gone to the cinema. Then she'd come home and say how silly it was but she always went again!'

The telephone rang.

‘Aha that'll be Dad, living it up in Toulon, the lucky boy. Hallo. What d'you mean my voice is funny. Well, my mouth's full of rice. Pouring rain? – I'm delighted to hear it. Oh, you're in Marseilles – even worse. What? Called a general up? You must have been drunk. Do tell Jean-Michel to shut up. Is the general drunk too? You'd better go easy or you'll be a wreck – yes well, even if your raincoat was soaking, no need to go stuffing yourself. Ruth's here. I'll put her on in a sec. What? Yes, I see, a name alone doesn't tell one much. You're not making much sense, you know that? That noise like a parrot, is that Claudine? No, it's profoundly irritating and I'm anything but clear. Here, I'll pass you Ruth.'