Tsing-Boum (5 page)

Not a cat on the Van Lennepweg, and in the café were only three dispirited men bleakly drinking beer behind the uncurtained window with its sour pot-plants. And the young were not going to hang about this dragsville boulevard, but went into town to the steamy snackbars: enticing smells of
patates
not only fried in ignoble oil but smothered in mayonnaise – just the medicine for adolescent acne.

Three hundred two-bedroom flats as like as the spruce trees in his forest, tremendously overheated, spotlessly clean. A smell of hot dust from the glowing valves of television sets, a sickly waft of artificial vanilla from the biscuits that were being munched. He climbed steps, his stick under his arm. The man he had posted to watch the building materialized behind him.

‘Hallo, chief.'

‘Been here long?'

‘Took over from Gerard an hour ago. Not a mouse. No husband, no lover, no nobody.'

‘He hear what the neighbours were saying?'

‘Ho yes: full of it, but flummoxed. Nobody knew the woman. Nice little girl, they say, but a different name, foreigner, ja, so that if your husband is away a lot, even if one can't say for sure, you very likely lead a loose immoral life, what?'

The neighbours did not seem to have been startlingly original; Van der Valk shrugged.

‘I'm going to look about for an hour.'

An hour later he knew nothing positive. A few negatives, like finding no photo album. Everyone has a photo album, no? Not even a photo of Ruth, as though, as though … no, no conclusions. Esther Marx was neither tidy nor untidy. Her clothes were expensive, but there were not many of them. She wore trousers a lot, but she had a very nice frock of Chinese silk and a nearly new jersey cocktail dress with the boutique label of a couturier, and two or three pairs of fragile high-heeled sandals. Mm, one would have to show her photograph in hotels and bars, but he felt instinctively that it was a thin idea.

The furniture was dull, conventional; she had had dress sense but no taste. She brightened her day with whisky, it would seem; there was an empty bottle and another a third
full. She liked peanuts and ate a lot of fruit. She cooked a lot of Indonesian rice dishes – so did half Holland. She had no jewellery – a few pairs of earrings. She seemed to get no personal letters and there was no sign of any family or friends anywhere. Her pockets and handbag held several ticket-stubs from cinemas, but only one at a time. No, there was nothing odd or irregular in the pattern, for a woman who lived much alone. The television set was well used, there were no books, but plenty of magazines –
Match, Express
– ordinary French taste.

Personal papers were in a cardboard shoebox. A savings book for Ruth, extract of marriage certificate (the French functionary had had some difficulty with Dutch spelling), Ruth's birth certificate, dated three months later and baldly saying ‘Father Unknown'. No passport or identity card for Esther. There were social security papers, rent receipts, odds and ends that meant nothing.

Ruth's clothes were like her mother's, simple, good quality, and not many of them. He found a suitcase and packed, shoving a few things that needed ironing on top, but whatever was forgotten could easily be picked up later. Damn Esther Marx, why did her home tell him so little? What had the killer come for – to find something, recover something? It was such a dull story. Esther Marx, French woman of Jugoslav origin, Dutch subject by marriage, had earned her living as a nurse in a military hospital, married a Dutch soldier, and lived placidly without passions or dramas, for ten years, and then had been shot. Why should she be shot after ten years? What had brought the upheaval about? And killed with a machine-gun! Brutal, efficient, but reckless. How the devil was it that nobody had paid any heed to the shots? Mrs Chose had talked about a crashing noise, but nobody else appeared to have thought anything of it!

Outside, he picked up his policeman.

‘I can't see any real good in your hanging about here – I'll give you a lift back to the shop.'

‘Thanks, chief.'

‘How is it that in a soundbox like that nobody notices shots? Even assuming he fired all seven together – the woman
across the passage thinks someone maybe fell off a stepladder – what are you sniggering at?'

‘You never look at the television, chief?'

‘What have I missed now?'

‘Of course you haven't had Gerard's report yet. She was done in in the lunch hour – very cleverly, right in the gangster serial.'

‘Oh no,' light dawning.

‘There's always a terrific din – car crashes, broken glass, tommy guns – it's a send-up really: Perils of Pauline, 1970. Fifteen minutes.'

‘Once a week or every day?'

‘Every day. You must know the theme tune – that drummer. You're standing still, dad – Rick Starr.'

‘Why not Rick Shaw?' resignedly.

‘Yesterday they packed the police car with dynamite and it went off when he turned the starter key. Boy, poor old Rick, sticking plaster on for nearly threequarters of an hour and the girls hysterical about his eyebrows, cutting bits off their own hair and sending it into the studio.'

‘Just as a sacrifice, or intended to replace his?' interested.

‘Don't ask me, chief, I've got no daughters, thank God.'

‘A pro who times his jobs to the television – well well. Not original, but effective.'

Arlette was asleep. As he screwed the cap back on the toothpaste, a thing she was quite incapable of doing, he found himself humming a little song. With a little recollection he traced it to the hero of a television serial – words adapted by French urchins …

He levelled a sub-machine-gun at the bathroom glass and said, ‘You've ten seconds to live.' Wasn't his style. He needed a leather coat and a cigar, like Colonel Stok of the KGB. He tried to see himself as Colonel Stok, but his orange pyjamas, bought by Arlette, with
‘Oui à l'amour'
in midnight-blue script across the bosom, quite spoilt the effect.

He nearly turned into Colonel Stok again next morning; it was colder than ever, the wind had risen, and was dashing the now much heavier rain against the panes in a rhythm like automatic-rifle fire. He put on his leather coat and a hat with a wide brim, but forgot his cigars – he had to take Ruth to the hospital and was preoccupied.

‘Those shoes are too thin – put on your gumboots.' Luckily he had packed them last night. He watched Arlette biting her thread; she was sewing a button on Ruth's raincoat.

‘Her birth certificate says “Father Unknown”. Our sergeant offered to give her his name – she was born three months after they married.'

She seemed not to be listening; she had pulled Ruth's red woolly beret out of the raincoat pocket and was regarding it, twiddling it about in an absent way. ‘Arlette.'

‘What? – sorry.'

‘If Zomerlust is not really keen to concern himself about this child – and I wouldn't blame him …'

‘Bring her back to me,' with unexpected vehemence.

‘So you would be in favour – you want me to ask him whether he'd agree?' But it was cut short by Ruth coming back.

‘Better,' said Arlette, buttoning her up. ‘Rain won't get into you.' She pulled the beret on the child's hair, laughed suddenly and tweaked it forward on her forehead, tilting it to one side. ‘Now you're a paratrooper.' To her consternation Ruth broke into violent sobbing.

‘I was being silly,' said Arlette, cuddling her. Van der Valk could see the child making efforts to be docile and reasonable, not to throw herself about and howl. Be courageous before strangers.

‘I know,' hiccuping and snuffling. ‘You were making a joke.'

‘Silly joke.'

‘Mamma used to do the same.' Van der Valk took her hand. Sure enough, she had a metal badge on the beret, military insignia, something of Zomerlust's.

‘Come on, we have to go to the hospital and see what these doctors are getting up to.' He had a car waiting.

‘Will Mamma be long in the hospital?' Ruth had been silent for some time, staring out of the window – rush hour, and they were held up at all the traffic lights.

‘It wouldn't surprise me. She was badly hurt. We'd better be prepared to be told she's pretty ill.' He had stage-managed a little scene at the hospital, asking them to put Esther's body in a bed in a private room. He was wondering why Ruth had never asked what it was exactly that had happened. Did the child know? Or had she decided she didn't want to know?

‘Wait here a moment, Ruth, while I ask which way we have to go … Commissaire Van der Valk. I have the child here; I have to break it to her. Where have you got the woman who was brought in yesterday?'

The woman leaned over with odious complicity to whisper: ‘You understand, Commissaire – it's in the paper – we didn't want people asking questions. Corridor B, and you go right along and turn to the left, and it's IIA. I'll ring up and tell Sister you're coming.'

‘Has the autopsy report been sent me?'

‘I'm afraid I couldn't say.'

He walked heavily back to where the child – how good she was – sat waiting. His leather raincoat squeaked as he sat down heavily beside her. Nobody else around, God be thanked.

‘The news is bad, Ruth, I'm afraid. She was too badly hurt. But she didn't have any pain.' The child looked at him with a face that told him nothing.

‘I knew.'

‘Ah.'

‘She was shot. Like on the television.'

‘People do get shot. Not as often as on the television, perhaps.'

‘Mevrouw Paap said such silly things. She thought she was hiding a secret, and all the time she was giving it away.' Van
der Valk knew that this calm would not last. Luckily a child had very little idea about ‘being shot'. Thanks to the television! One fell down – it was probably a lot better than ‘being ill'. So quick, so clean an ending, in a child's eye.

‘Now I've no one.'

‘Yes, you have. One always has. You don't know the story of Cosette and Monsieur Madeleine?' said Van der Valk, realizing with a lucky stroke of humour that Colonel Stok had turned into Jean Valjean.

‘No.'

‘Cosette was a little girl who had nobody – and who was very ill-treated. Dreadfully ill-treated. I'll tell you about her. Do you want to see your mother?'

‘No,' said Ruth firmly. ‘I've said goodbye.'

‘Would you like the car to take you home to Arlette? I have to go to work.'

‘Yes, please.' How perfect she was.

As he stood up a voice blared at him from fifty centimetres away: ‘Going to go on keeping secrets, Commissaire?'

Van der Valk brought his heel very hastily across this clown's instep, said ‘Oh I am sorry' and took the child's hand. She had started to cry, which was the best thing she could do. He sat her next to the driver, and said, ‘Take her back to my wife, Joe, and pick me up here.' Ruth did not want to say goodbye to Esther, but he did. It was time that Jean Valjean changed back into Colonel Stok.

The pressman in the hall was holding his foot and looking both physically and morally pained.

‘You,' said Van der Valk. ‘You interrupt me when I'm working just once again and I'll unfit you for fatherhood. Six o'clock at the bureau is when I have time for you.'

Esther was in a sort of anteroom to the mortuary where they put relatives; they had screened a corner off. There was nobody there. They had arranged her quite nicely, with a pillow and a hospital nightdress; her hands lay quiet along her body. He didn't want to look at her body; there would not be much left of it. He picked up her hand. A nurse's hand, competent and muscular, with two or three fine white lines from old cuts, but well cared for, a little roughened by housework, very
clean, one nail slightly misshapen from being crushed at some time, no sign of her habitually wearing other rings. The forearm was strong and tanned; she had been out in the fresh air.

The face was an empty shell, like all dead faces, but the marks of her character were there upon the smooth surface, a clear skin still youthful but with the lines of an older woman around the eyes and mouth. One could read resolution and courage – he wished he had seen her alive. She had not been a conventionally pretty woman but her looks had been striking, with a well modelled forehead, a wide and beautiful mouth, a long supple neck. Her hair was brown and straight, cut short, that of a woman caring nothing for fashion and knowing well what suits her. He looked at her with respect; Esther had known how to keep her secrets. He walked slowly back to his car.

‘She just kept crying,' said his driver. ‘She made no fuss. Went eagerly to your wife. Rough for a little girl. The father not want her? What will you do with her?'

‘Keep her,' said Van der Valk, surprising himself at sounding so natural.

The office was very spry and brisk; with the national Press paying such close attention his staff appeared unnaturally bright and as though fresh from their New Year resolutions. He found it all slightly absurd – poor Esther. Had she had a talent for getting into theatrical situations? It didn't look like it, but what could one read on that dead face with closed pages?

His desk was full of paper; he glanced over it while picking up the telephone.

‘Commissaire van der Valk – morning, Burgomaster. Yes, decidedly. No, certainly not. Likeliest, but it's quite hypothetical. A job for the archaeologists – no, I mean we go digging in the past. Yes, naturally we're checking all that but it's all very quiet and decent and frankly I doubt it. Naturally, Burgomaster, you can rely on that. Right, sir, yes. I'll do that, of course. Yes – 'bye.'