A Long Silence (2 page)

When time hung there were explorations. The jewellery, the antiques, the yellowed picture on an easel with a dim sub-Caravaggio look did not tell him much. Some silky old Persian rugs – looked old anyhow, and might he supposed be silk. In a range of little drawers were small objects wrapped in tissue, replacements as he guessed for the tourist showcase. A drawer of cleaning materials, a cupboard of old sale and auction catalogues, a drawer of small tools for precise measurements and calibrations, packets of stick-on and tie-on labels, a couple of
loupes
which he tried in his eye and got on poorly with. Some very yellowed stuff about what to do in case of fire. He gazed at some modern table-silver and was bored by it: the really good stuff was all out of sight somewhere, he guessed. Before Saint came back he had made another sale: a child's christening mug.

‘What did I tell you?' said Saint calmly. ‘Earned your keep, and with no trouble at all.'

It was just before lunch when an old man came in, a big smooth face with a Roman nose, a lot of wiry grey hair behind a high brown forehead, a moustache, a cigar. He wore baggy grey trousers and a wide jacket of coarse tweed with huge pockets, all apparently full of junk. He looked at Dick incuriously, with benignity.

‘Hallo, Louis,' said Saint easily. ‘This is Richard – we've acquired him, or he's acquired us, we're not sure yet. Everything okay?'

‘Everything okay.' Unmannered, unaffected, very relaxed – Dick felt that his Arabian Nights adventure was turning out with no problems, even if disappointingly prosaic …

*

Van der Valk, sitting in his new office, looked at his neat desk
with mixed feelings, and as was his habit when things got mixed, was writing them down in a notebook. He had several notebooks, ranging from the small one which lived in his pocket to a thick ‘desk diary' bound in artificial leather in which he was writing his thesis, but most of them were school exercise-books. He looked at the small one with curiosity as though it were a clue to something – a pocket diary for the year 1963, full of useful hints for electrical engineers, with ‘Technische Bureau Zijlstra, Dordrechtsekade 81, Alphen a.d. Rijn' printed on the cover. Where could he have acquired that? The smeary pages were stained with rain from being consulted in the street, grease from being written-up while eating a sandwich, and, alarmingly frequently, beer as a result of telephone calls made in cafés. They were full of phone-numbers whose purpose had been forgotten, lines of shorthand made up on the spot, indecipherable even to himself a fortnight later, and chores like' A. sweater pick up cleaners'.

And those exercise-books … virulent plastic covers like kitchen tablecloths or shower-curtains in the Campbell tartan: they'd got arty lately in a jazzy style, he had noticed. Surrealist butterflies all over everything were a recent Dutch craze. These exercise-books, as with children, started by being neat and orderly, each for its own carefully defined purpose, but after a week the right one had invariably been left at home, or wasn't at hand just as he was in a frenzy, and then loose ends from current enquiries appeared upside down in ‘Office Administration', or an orderly exposition to be written up as a formal report this coming week-end had disconcerting interruptions (paraphrase of undoubtedly interesting if turgid remarks by Professor Grimmeisen concerning infantile behaviour, in which certain conclusions by Doctor Summers of Baltimore had been thought ill-judged).

Altogether a sorry collection, belonging in the satchel of a poorly-disciplined twelve-year-old, and out of place in this prissy building annexed to the Ministry of Social Affairs in the Hague. So was he; he took one of the notebooks, turned to a clean page, and wrote down ‘Pride'. He was a disreputable person, and he had come by devious ways, but had reached a
summit that ten years ago would have appeared as unlikely as his going to the South Pole, he thought, writing down ‘South Pole'.

It was the South Pole, which he had imagined in childhood as a rough pillar, tapering to a point, like the war memorial in the Damrak in Amsterdam, and like that deplorable object much shat-on by seagulls. It was a new and shoddy building in a scrambling noisy quarter, a long white oblong like a flower-box stood on end, with some ungainly stilts splayed out at the base to give a fictitious stability. Twenty-eight storeys of odd fragments from several Ministries, acquired to ‘house the overspill'. That was him! along with the effect of exhaust gases upon commuters stuck in traffic jams, and the seepage of industrial effluent into the subsoil. The Commission for Enquiry into Law Reform (sub-committee criminal code, studying the replacement of repressive elements by educative mechanisms), one of whose cogs was Commissaris van der Valk. He was sufficiently wary and experienced a public servant to be sceptical about committees, but he was a Principal Commissaire, and that is an animal high in police hierarchies, a thing to be proud about. He'd never thought of getting that far.

For a few years now, hampered by a crippling physical injury, and a built-in reputation for being both indiscreet and irresponsible, he had been at a dead end. True, as chief of a mobile criminal brigade in South Holland's metroland, he had been kept busy, but was aware of moving sideways,
voie de garage
as Arlette called it; the sensation of being on a shelf. No further promotional prospect and precious little of real interest. Everything in such jobs was cut and dried, dependent upon decisions taken thirty years before. Except in minor details he had no power to innovate. To ‘fluctuate a bit' from time to time; it seemed a disappointing finish for a senior police officer with over twenty-five years' service. Especially in the last five years, in a society breaking up and becoming continually more fluid under the pressure of fermentations not understood yet, and least of all by government functionaries, his work had come to appear increasingly trivial and irrelevant.
Not much interest or pride to be found in the identification and sequestration of criminals in ever-growing numbers, most of them either not really criminals at all or defined as such for the wrong reasons. But all had to be presented to the Officer of Justice, the instructing and prosecuting magistrate, who might sometimes agree with him that the reams of paper, the monstrously involved and detailed dossiers, were a shocking waste of everyone's time.

Even when summoned, as happened perhaps twice a year, to attend upon the Procureur-General, the chief legal authority in the province, he was bored. Once or twice in the past it had meant an enquiry of too delicate or embarrassing a sort to come through legal channels, occasionally productive of amusing or hair-raising episodes, but such things were more trouble than they were worth. Senior officials whose wives had taken to shoplifting, ticklish behaviour by Japanese or Bulgarian purchasing agents – such things no longer interested him. And mostly, anyway, such a summons had meant no more than a telling-off.

This time he had been surprised. The high official had been blunt, almost brief.

‘Sit down. This is unofficial, and in confidence. Recent government conciliabule has tended to become increasingly preoccupied with social questions. The blurring, or obliteration of traditional values – however, I waste no time on this with you; it's stale cake to both of us. Very well – most European countries as you know are studying these problems, and groups exist all over the place, many over-fragmented and isolated. Much work is purely empirical patching-over of holes, and more is over-theoretical. Now it is proposed that a commission be set up to co-ordinate some proposals on a European scale, and to draw up further recommendations. I have myself been asked to submit my own notions, and also to assist in the nomination of some members of this commission. Much of that work concerns the reform of the magistrature, and some purely juristic points – let that pass. It was agreed that a voice from the police would be beneficial, particularly as concerns the relations of the public to legal codes. Your name was
mentioned in this context, eventually put forward for serving upon this commission, and subsequently approved, subject of course to your acceptance. I have called you to offer you this position, and to explain a few of the conditions attached.

‘It is not a paid post, but would in your case and a few others involve full-time work, so that the proposal is to withdraw you for this period, which might amount to two or even three years, from your administrative duties, and transfer you to The Hague, where evidently you would be continued in your rank and at full pay. A civil-service flat and of course an office would be found for you there. You have doubtless further questions; put them.'

He had accepted on the spot. The Procureur-General had, he thought, been pleased by this alacrity.

‘By the way, Van der Valk,' as he was on the verge of leaving, ‘it is felt that the members of this commission should where appropriate possess titles', drily, ‘of a certain weight and substance. I will therefore mention to you that I have implemented a recommendation that you should have the rank and emoluments of a principal commissaire, and add that I think this not inappropriate in an officer of your seniority and experience. That is all, I think.'

‘My wife will be very pleased,' said Van der Valk with a small smile.

The Procureur-General, who was not without humour at odd moments, responded to this smile and tapped his fountain-pen upon the virgin blotter before pointing it at him.

‘Yes. You might give thought too to the idea that it is possibly the first time a police officer has been given his step for – aha – literary reasons. Well, goodbye, Van der Valk. Offer your wife my congratulations would you?'

So now he felt pride. He had his name upon a door instead of his rank. He had an office smaller, to be sure, than the last, and probably even more dismal. But quieter, and definitely more private. And more luxurious, as befitted the higher pay. He no longer had policemen in shirt-sleeves clattering in and out,
or the public with its incoherent rambling tales of persecution and victimization. To tell the truth he missed both these elements. But he didn't miss the wire baskets, piled with paper of unbearable crassness, the phone ringing all the time and the floor which stayed dirty no matter how often it got mopped.

No linoleum here! A modern office, with moquette wall-to-wall! An austere desk, slab of so-called teak on a complicated metal undercarriage, and a black leather chair. A window which wouldn't open, for reasons of dust, noise, vertigo, possible suicides, and upsetting the air-conditioning. The phones were throttled to a civil-service purr. And next door, with some chaste filing cabinets, he had a secretary, a rather wearisome female called Wattermann, a name whose associations with fountain pens, venereal disease and French tram-drivers confused him, so that he sometimes called her Miss Hasselblad or Miss Valentine, and she was convinced he did this on purpose, and tended to bridle – or was it bristle? Down in the basement was an IBM computer which he was waiting to catch out in some exceptionally childish error, and which supplied him with a great many more statistics than really he wanted to know (amazing the number of persons convicted of indictable offences in Pittsburg one or both of whose parents, when known, suffered from tuberculosis). Next door was a professor of something or other behavioural from Utrecht who was rather nice, quite human except first thing in the morning, and smoked Three Nuns in an English pipe, just what you would expect.

The desk was bare, but for the notebooks and a jamjar full of ball-point pens and paper-clips, but there were a few things put away in drawers: the small, bland, Swiss cigars he smoked nowadays, eau-de-cologne, and a terribly secret bottle of brandy, in case Watterman came all over queer and had to be revived. There was nothing else in the office but shelves holding his law books, a growing collection of paperback thrillers, and a vase of flowers: he had thrown out – to Wattermann's consternation – all the climbing plants. The corners were silting up inexorably with deposits of learning about Criminal
Law: there was an awful lot of it. Under ‘Pride' in the notebook he wrote ‘Claustrophobia' because every now and then he found himself wishing that the mayor would suddenly ring him up with a tale about embezzlement in municipal parking lots; just the kind of thing that used to make him swear so. He looked at his notebook, scratched, and suddenly wondered what some bright young Ph.D. from Besancon or Berkhamsted would make of all that if he were to drop dead suddenly. These palaeontological speculations were interrupted by his secretary. Not that you could call those discreet sliding movements an interruption, or even an irruption. Arlette called her Miss Typhoo Tea: when asked why said because she appeared like the tiny tip of the tender leaf.

‘There's a young man,' said Miss Wattermann, ‘asking to see you.'

‘Has he filled in all the proper forms?'

‘He says his business is personal and unofficial.'

‘Does he seem agitated?'

‘No, quite reasonable and relaxed.'

‘So he's safe in your opinion?'

‘He doesn't seem to be on a trip or anything.'

‘Then I think frisk him for concealed weapons and send him in.'

Van der Valk had learned a long time ago that to stand up and be polite, no matter who it was, never did any harm. The young man seemed ‘reasonable and relaxed' enough but he had a balky look Van der Valk knew well, that of someone who is already regretting an impulse.

‘No, no, you don't disturb me; I'm accessible. You're quite wet, I suggest you hang your raincoat up over there, and there's a chair in that corner.'

The young man had a student look, but was dressed in a suit and a white shirt, giving him a formal air. Dark hair, fairly long and very clean; pale skin and a washed appearance, or was that the effect of rain? The sober suit was that of a bank-clerk. Neat hands; clean nails. Polished shoes, too, instead of those huge suede boots. Intelligent face; manner neither aggressive nor dotty. The usual difficulty in starting.