Criminal Conversation (12 page)

Here in Dr Post's consulting-room, however, it was cool and delicious. One was deeply grateful for the solidity of old-fashioned houses, for the thick insect-haunted shade of the lindens outside, that shed a kind of sticky deposit on their patches of pavement, above which spiders clambered up and down their ropes with such charming agility.

Dr van der Post was certainly unaffected by heat. His suit was perfect, his shirt had an elegant sit achieved only by good hand-cutting, his untroubled eyes had their warm smiling sympathy.

“I like the heat, myself,” said van der Valk.

“So do I. It is rare, and precious if on that count only.”

“Cabestan's flat must be pretty hot on a day like this.”

“I dare say.”

“I'd be interested to see that flat.”

No answer. Post took a cigarette and lit it, weighing a slim lighter in his long well-shaped fingers as though meditating the pros and cons of something.

“What plans do you have for the place? Going to find another artist as tenant?”

Suddenly he got up, surprising van der Valk who was used now to immobility and indifference.

“Come and see for yourself. Satisfy your curiosity. I prefer to hold no secrets from you than to find a legion of spies observing my movements, gossiping with my chauffeur. I wish to put a stop to this itch of yours.”

He walked out into the hall, a tall man moving quietly. Van der Valk followed him to the street, where he took a key-ring from his pocket and stopped to look at the lindens.

“Considerable insect population – I'm quite surprised to see no policemen up there.” He opened the door at the corner and motioned van der Valk to go first. Threadbare stair-carpet, steep steps within narrow walls, flight after flight. A twenty-five watt bulb at each narrow landing. One storey, two storeys, three: a painted deal door. The landing was lit by a skylight, but the big studio had mansard windows as well, and enough day came in for any painter.
Curtains were now drawn against the sunlight; stained and faded beige cretonne that had once been yellow. It was hot, stuffy and dusty, but not as much as van der Valk had expected. A spider sat motionless in a corner of the ceiling and a big daddy-long-legs had taken up his post on the curtain rail, but it had not a totally deserted or neglected air.

He realised that someone had swept, even dusted, done something to make it habitable. And had spent time here. Whose was the glass and the bottle of mineral water? Whose was that elegant silk dressing-gown? Not Casimir's.

“Ah, I see you've taken up camping.”

“I did not, you may imagine, wish you pawing about among my possessions without my being there to keep an eye on the performance.”

“Rather pleasant.”

“I have a certain taste for solitude.”

“Yes, I've noticed. Doing your own cleaning even – no women allowed up here.” He was looking at books with interest. What was this?

Police work is not a great encouragement to intellectual interests. And van der Valk's education had been nothing spectacular. But he was in no sense the sheep that looks up and is not fed. More like a goat, that having devoured all the rosebushes in sight gets busy with the neighbours' vines.

His father had been a carpenter whose hobby was cabinet-making for his own home: by the time he died he had even taught himself marquetry. Going on a three-day trip to Paris he had stood open-mouthed in the Louvre, and for the rest of his life been full of Oeben and Riesener, Leleu, Weisweiler and Molitor, mispronounced but thoroughly understood.

His mother had in her own words ‘bookwormed herself through the whole damn public library'. It was not really surprising that he had become the kind of person that cannot pass a book without picking it up.

One of these books struck him because of a coincidence. The author's name was Van der Post! When he picked it up it seemed familiar: yes, about Africa, he remembered it; vivid book, by an expert, just the kind of man he liked. There was a phrase in it that had lodged in his memory too, the way a phrase will after the book is forgotten. Something about the individual – one must learn to work out one's individual problems, and see every other man as an individual, and only when that had been done would it be time to turn to collective thinking, people in groups, people as groups.

He picked up another book, and was straight away curious about it. What was this? Myth? Elves and dwarfs and goblins – did Dr Post have fairy stories by his bed, then? Yet it seemed to be an adult book, somehow. He sat on the divan absorbed for some time, looked up suddenly, and saw Post the other side of the room. He had hung a picture on the wall, and was now standing back tasting the effect.

This doctor lived among objects of perfect taste, in luxury, well away from the smell of cheap shops and ugly objects, sweaty people with shapeless shoes crowded around sale counters. What did he like about this half-sordid, shabby room, with a smell of old sun-heated paint and cheap linoleum and paraffin? A heap of rubbish that someone had looked at and decided was not worth the effort of carting away. What was so attractive about this to this man, who was even sleeping up here on a cheap divan carefully made up. A whimsical fantasy? Was that the way a man acted who had killed the last inhabitant of this draggled flat?

He didn't know. He would have to think about it. And Post was just standing there looking amused. He beat a retreat, hoping he didn't look too disconcerted.

In the street, however, his detachment switched on, like the photo-electric cell that lights the street-lamps at dusk. Certainly, he thought, I must look exceedingly ridiculous. Both there in Post's house, and right here in the street. Like the classic caricature of a German tourist, stopping to gaze at buildings of great antiquity and hideous ugliness with cloud-wrapped piety – he had just caught himself raptly reading a torn poster for an exhibition that had been held a month ago, peeling off the metal pillbox of a public lavatory.

When nearly at home he went into his local bookshop, where several people were standing transfixed, tasting the latest pornographic fiction, oblivious to their surroundings. The owner, who knew him well, was leaning on his counter, maliciously studying these sad people.

“Two ballpoints, one red, one green…come on, there are cheaper ones than that… You know a book called
The Lord of the Rings
?”

“Sure. Got it in stock if you want it.”

“You have? Let's see… This a best-seller or something?”

“No, no. I buy one at a time and it sells every month: has for years. Specialised appeal. I've read it – a total new world, landscapes, languages, history, all complete. It has all the things people like – war, poetry, kings, castles – and leaves out everything they have to live with. No money, no sex, no commerce, no industry
- remarkable, and great power of imagination. It's not like anything else; it's a phenomenon.”

Van der Valk stood for three-quarters of an hour, quite as transfixed as the students of pornography. When the bookseller told him so, he was so cross he bought the book.

What was more, he sat up half the night with it. Strange thing for a Dutch policeman. It was English of course; a Frenchman would not write that. But a German would like it too; rustic humour and pastoral verse, many songs and rhymes, mountains full of wizards and romantic horrors, a hero in armour and a pale princess. Just the book for Ludwig of Bavaria but one would hardly have thought for a specialist in women and neurology.

The author had a strange name, not very English sounding. Tolkien. That could almost be a Dutch name. Which was remarkable.

The national character, he thought vaguely, is a thing about which a lot of nonsense is spoken and believed. They are very proud of what they call ‘sobriety' – spoken of as the national virtue daily. Looking at both-sides-of-the-penny, down-to-earth, you-can't-fool-me. Determined to see what is, and to detect, and abolish, what only might be. It leads to a hateful caution, a loathing of imagination, a fear of fantasy. If hypocrisy is the English vice, and vanity the French vice, and obedience the German vice, then surely sobriety is the Dutch vice.

It was four in the morning. His wife had gone to bed indignant with him. It couldn't be helped.

‘Tolk' in Dutch means an interpreter. ‘Ien' is a diminutive. Had the man or his ancestors gone to England? That other Van der Post, the African one – his grandfather had run away too, from Holland.

Why did the doctor go and live in the top-floor studio where poor old Cabestan had been a failed painter? Was this doctor a bit of a failed poet? Being a successful doctor might be a strain on the man? Why had he married the woman from the family of magistrates, with artistic tastes? That first pressing of the grapes of a bourgeois nation, where all the aristocracy and all the tramps had been most carefully,
conscientiously throttled, years and years ago. Did he deliberately choose and seduce women from the same background? With his head full of dwarfs and goblins, he took a long while getting to sleep.

A police department is a rigid hierarchy, like any other civil service branch. Van der Valk, an inspector, was a captain. Under him came a crew of noncommissioned officers and simple soldiers, who had been given a special training to raise them above the common ruck of police duties, which have never been described better than they were by Fouché a hundred and fifty years ago. Whores, thieves, and street-lamps.

Van der Valk disliked the rigidity of the hierarchy. To take an example, the ‘filature' or throwing of a net of policemen around any individual whose habits and movements one may wish to study. It is entrusted automatically to flatfeet, whereas, he thought, it is very difficult and delicate. However, this time he could do it himself – he had to do it himself – in his own time at that. Not only was Dr van der Post not official business but he was on the lookout for insects in the linden trees.

He had been wondering for some time where he had seen the man before. The dandified narrow suits, the long elegant hands, the delicate gesture pushing the handkerchief up the sleeve to avoid any wrinkles or bulge in the jacket. He was familiar from somewhere with that long neat head, the stiff hair cut short with what would be a fringe were it not suddenly combed sideways to present a level untroubled forehead; the eyes perceptive and melancholy, the wide mouth with its perpetual mocking smile, the large well-modelled ears.

It was easy. Once a week the doctor went to a sort of athletic club which went in for less popular, almost snobbish sports. Fencing, badminton, squash. Some of the judo boys trained here, and a few of the physical-fitness fiends who went in for the formal balletic rituals of gymnastics. It was a nice place, with a tiny twenty-metre pool such as one finds in a turkish bath, and one heard the sporting gossip of Europe there. The subscriptions were high but van der Valk did not mind; one got to know all sorts of amusing people. He was no earthly good at games, but was active and supple enough to play most with enjoyment, and it was nice after sitting cramped over some thirty-page pomposity of a report all afternoon to box a bit and then go headlong into the little pool, legs anyhow, and come out with a villainous thrash that the back-stroke champion, a friend, called the ‘Harbour-Police-Special'.

But he had hardly noticed the doctor, and the doctor had certainly never noticed him, because Post belonged to the club's exclusive, fastidious clique, that had a special room with proper lockers. A few other specialist doctors and lawyers, a brace of high municipal executives, a Consul and a concert singer… They did not dream of playing with riffraff like businessmen or television stars. Squash was their game. Dr Post was rather good, with venomous shots coming back at totally unexpected angles, and that spectacular service that trickles meanly back along the ceiling and the wall behind, where one can never get a fair swing at it…

Even now he did not notice van der Valk, though that gentleman put himself more and more impudently in full view. The ‘Heavy Mob' went for a swim in the pool that was kept a whole hour for them on ‘their' evening, reappeared beautifully dressed for a ceremonious whisky at the bar, and left soon afterwards, Dr Post still unconscious, apparently, of the police presence that had been drinking whisky at his very elbow.

Dr Post was also a concert-goer. Van der Valk found himself at five in two weeks on this account. He knew nothing about music, except from Arlette's gramophone, and her taste was personal and cranky, with a tendency to dislike all sopranos. He enjoyed himself now very much, discovered Bruckner, and was very taken with a Hungarian whose name he could not capture and who did the eighth symphony of Dvorák, which he was delighted with. When he told Arlette about it she was, typically, sniffy about ‘Czech folklore' and he was indignant. There was, too, a wonderful American negress who did a Schumann group, a snobbish visiting conductor who did messy Mozart and got clapped furiously for it (to the disgust, he was glad to see through a little glass, of Dr Post, alone and austere among the abonnés) and a splendid German woman, quiet and gentle-looking, but who played the violin with such love that he became quite converted to Bach sonatas that he had always thought of as very dull.

No, he did not think there was anything puritanical about the doctor. The lecherous puritan is a common enough phenomenon
in Holland, but Post was more as well as more complex. He was a lover of sensuous delights, of civilised and luxurious arts, of pure pleasure. That bathroom of his jarred; it was too much the ostentatious vulgarity of a very expensive hotel. That was to tell him, surely, and quite openly, that Post was a collector of women the way he might have been of Sèvres china. Mrs Merckel was not the only one: he would make a little bet on that.

Mrs Beatrix van der Post had some connection with it, he felt. He had seen her by now: meditating on the luscious summer evenings under the lindens he had had plenty of chances of studying Madam. For the movements of both were predictable, since they belonged to the chauffeured stratum of society. Not that this chauffeur was the figure of caricature that stands stiffly saluting outside the marble portal of a Rolls-Royce, but he brought the Alfa Romeo round to the front on evenings when Dr Post was going out – and drove it too, for Post either could not drive or greatly disliked driving. And he brought Madam's little auto round every evening, because she always went out. It was a trim white BMW, pretty little object, and it fitted her like one of her elegant long white gloves. She had a trick of standing by it surveying her house and herself with satisfaction before climbing in, which she did well, with no display of stockings.