The Widow (32 page)

‘What's this business of loving people?' she asked rhetorically.

‘Laurens Van der Post somewhere talks about loving Africa. Pretty well. Harshness and pain, cruelty and heat. Bushman paintings and tin shacks. The incredible wealth and beauty, and you can't move without stumbling over bleached bones. You can't see out of the Land-Rover because the flies are so thick on the windscreen. It's not a marshmallow affair, love.'

‘It's holding on, come what may.'

‘He gets a bit mad. You'll get on terribly well with old so-and-so because you both so love Africa. Toasted marshmallows.'

‘So may I go out?'

‘You may go anywhere you please and do anything you please. May I come with you?'

‘And even if you can't?'

‘Then let's go to the movies. Woody Allen for preference.'

‘What about the police?'

‘Look, I know nothing about the police, and care less. No, I know a good deal about them. They'll tell us nothing. No good expecting your pal the Commissaire to drop in and smoke a pipe and tell you all about it: they won't.

‘I'm allowed to do my little circus, right? That's fine as long as they're left completely tranquil, as long as I don't go
screaming for help, yelping I've been mugged, as long as I say and do nothing that could conceivably embarrass or annoy them. This I know about; lived with it twenty years.

‘Right, I stumble upon something that unwittingly I followed when it was their business. Demazís was accident or suicide and does it really matter? I can get hunches about homicide but that's not their way of thinking: they're interested, slightly: it might prove something. They go all soothing and tut-tut: poor you, don't worry, we'll watch over you. All bread-and-butter and soft-boiled egg: they just want me immobilized and not kicking up any further dust.'

‘You think they're not watching the place at all?'

‘Christ knows: they could be there and we don't know it. They don't have a little man up there in the Observatory with binoculars, you know. They could pretend to ignore the whole affair, or they could hang about ostentatiously hoping to provoke something. Whatever they tell us you can be sure it's lies.'

‘So if you go out …'

‘I'm frightened to. But I have to. Lead a normal life, they say. What is, I wonder, a normal life?'

‘What does Madame le Juge say?'

‘She doesn't say. I annoy her. I'm a sort of hermaphrodite, not competent enough to do a male job in a male way, nor with the sense to do a female one. Just as well she didn't see you cleaning up my kitchen.'

‘She wouldn't be impressed by me either.'

‘She can get stuffed. Madame le Juge,' said Arlette, sounding like Louis Quatorze, ‘is me.'

‘So we go to the pictures?'

‘Why not? I can't think of anything more normal. And I'm in the mood for a bit of artificial life for a change.'

They took the bus on the Boulevard de la Victoire. Strasbourg seemed quite depressingly normal. Nobody seemed to be hanging about. Nobody followed them or shadowed them.

Arthur liked to walk when he came out of a cinema. It disintoxicated, he said. All that wirra-wirra in front of his eyes, he said. And why did they turn the soundtrack up so loud? It's for the people who go to pop concerts, Arlette said : they're all as deaf as posts. He supposed this must be so; he could think of no adequate reason but force of habit. Was she not too tired?

Not a bit. Felt in fine form. Loved walking anyhow. And it's a lovely evening. She loved autumn evenings just a bit foggy, when the lights were on in shops.

‘Being protected by police anyhow is quite meaningless. Schleyer had how many – four was it – just gunned down.'

‘Aldo Moro had five. But that was a highly professional gang.'

‘So is this,' said Arlette. ‘Or is it? Nobody knows really. They behaved in a professional way, cutting me like that, and there is something strangely amateurish too.'

‘This is one of the things that's bothered me,' said Arthur delighted that she felt able at last to talk about it.

‘Madame le Juge is foxed by it too. “Curious” she kept saying, as though she didn't believe a word of it. But it is curious. The cops of course don't say what they think.'

‘And what do you think?'

‘I'm not sure that the idea isn't deliberately left vague. I
mean look at the point of view of the man who cut me. It's a warning, and at the same time a punishment.'

‘Explain yourself,' said Arthur.

‘Suppose I did something illegal, committed even something criminal, like suppressing evidence – the private eyes are always doing that. You'd get pretty hostile handling from the cops. Not necessarily slapped about, but various brutalities more or less subtle. The tribunal would take away any licence you happened to have, likely a month or two in jail, a fine or both. It wouldn't be just a telling off. A real punishment; that's professional. Isn't this more or less the same? I am kidnapped, like an arrest; badly frightened, severely hurt. I can't do anything much physically for a few weeks. Unless I take a lot of pills, which also diminish me and make me sick and muzzy, it's really painful. Pretty adequate I'd have thought.'

‘And next time, goes the warning, it'll be your throat.'

‘That's right,' said Arlette quite coolly. ‘I thought for one minute he was going to kill me.'

‘Were you frightened then?'

‘Of dying, no. One dies, whatever happens. Of pain yes. Then he said he didn't want to draw attention to himself. Well, I thought, you do. And then perhaps no, perhaps it's cleverer than it looks. It might be senseless, like that imbecile Robert with his guns and his bombs. Or a personal vengeance. If I did something that really got to Freddy Ulrich deep down – let's say – would he do a thing like that?'

‘Of course not. A bourgeois vengeance, you saw, is giving you bad publicity, hitting you in the pocket, having you slammed by the tax collector. Nothing to do with blood.'

‘I'm none too sure. Hurt a bourgeois in his blood, which is his profit and his reputation, and he might well turn back at you with a thing like a razor.'

‘But you don't think you were kidnapped by Freddy Ulrich.'

‘No, of course not.'

Arthur bought some mushrooms, nice big ones, and a bunch of chives.

‘Leave the supper to me,' he said. You could see his mind
going ‘egg and breadcrumb? No, too much trouble. But perhaps a nice kind of batter with chopped chives in, and fry them? Sort of beignets?'

Arlette, who had switched her phone back to ‘record' found the little light on and stopped to listen to the message. Then she made a phone call, which went on a long time.

‘Supper's ready. What was all that?'

‘Well, that was rather pathetic. And in a way what this business is all about. And it comes a bit close to the bone. There's nothing I can do really to help her. Console a bit, possibly. Reassure, explain – I don't know. I say, these are good.'

‘There was sort of a tiny dirty leftover, bit of ham. Chopped it all up and flung it in the batter. Tell.'

‘Well,' between bites, ‘two teenage girls out of Duttlenheim, that's that village in the valley of the Bruche where the autoroute ends, hitch-hiked into town to go to a dance or something and never arrived. Disappeared on the autoroute. So they find out at home, quite early as it happens. Somebody rings – where are the girls? But aren't they with you? No? Then where are they? Gendarmerie, hospitals, police. No sign of girls. This was last night. So she's waited all day. And the police won't tell her anything. And she fears the worst. And she's naturally utterly distraught. Don't blame her. She's sure they've found the worst and won't tell her.'

‘And what does she think you can do?'

‘Heaven knows,' tranquilly, ‘but the least I can do is go out and try to inject a bit of comfort and commonsense. She's surrounded by neighbours whose imaginings are each more hideous than the last. I'm trying to tell her that not hearing by now is as likely good as bad. At its most brutal, that if they were killed or raped they'd probably be found by now. Better that they flipped, thought it was going to be a heavenly invention, got taken somewhere, got made very drunk, and are still sleeping it off in some pad, the results not too terrible apart from ghastly hangover and feeling fearfully sick.'

‘Mmm,' said Arthur. ‘You mean you want to go there? I'll have to drive you.'

‘It's only a quarter of an hour.'

‘It'll be foggy. Always is out that way.'

‘So you drive carefully. I have to, you see.'

The ‘northern autoroute' which goes all the way to Paris, and links with the German autobahn at Saarbrucken, is very modern, quite luxurious, and madly expensive. The ‘southern autoroute' is a perfect fraud, announcing boldly in huge letters that it will whisk you down to Colmar and Mulhouse, and various vaguely hinted destinations in south-eastern France. Once out of Strasbourg, you can indeed switch onto this road; for the most part an ordinary main road, which is to say good in bits. Stay on the autoroute and it will lead you bravely out towards the Vosges and the town of Obernai, for exactly thirteen kilometres, when it stops dead and chucklingly decants you into country byways. It is to be presumed that the highway authority of Ponts et Chaussées did once have a project for crossing the Vosges over to Epinal and Burgundy. Thought better of it after ten minutes. Someone probably made a lot of money in the process.

Duttlenheim is the second village out from the end. Notorious for a road surface straight out of the
Wages of Fear –
remember the truck loaded with nitroglycerine? This is where you'll meet it.

Arthur, after fussing with the Lancia's driving seat, took the direct way to the autoroute junction, Place de Haguenau. He was not, save over long distances when he found a rhythm, a good driver: far too slow in traffic and too fast once it thinned.

Fortunately around eight at night traffic is thinning. The suburbanites are already at home, eating indigestible food and looking at the news, which won't help. More of a mixed blessing is that the valley of the Bruche, a small river joining the III at Strasbourg, is a notorious foggy corner. Visibility on an autumn night fifty metres at best, thirty more often, and sudden patches really thick.

Good, it's an autoroute. Thus well marked with broad
stripes of paint. Smooth surface, regular curves. No oncoming traffic. Arthur clicked into top past the bright lights of the Colmar junction and adopted a steady gait around a hundred.

‘Too fast,' said Arlette. He slowed to ninety, reluctantly. ‘Still too fast.' He paid no heed, hit a thick bit, and slowed abruptly to eighty.

‘Perfectly safe,' crossly. He was in the slow lane. Belated homegoers who knew it all by heart were whisking by on the fast lane.

‘It's our skin, not theirs,' said Arlette primly.

You get oddly isolated in the fog. The cars in front of and behind you lose their identity, loom up suddenly as blurred lights. You don't see the car at all.

‘Stupe,' said Arthur cross, pulling out abruptly to pass a cautious-Clara kerbcrawling, and forgetting to signal.

‘Idiot,' a moment later. Sticking to his back end, and much too close were the glaring lights of a large truck. Too high, not properly adjusted to ‘dip' and blinding white – a German probably. Very annoying; neither passing nor falling back. Arthur accelerated smartly to shake him off. He kept pace. People do this in fog and very annoying it is, as well as dangerous. What happens if you have to brake suddenly? ‘Cunt' muttered Arthur viperish. He was up to a hundred and ten and still the big truck kept pace. He slowed again progressively.

Suddenly a frightening thing happened, which happens too in fog, where people become sillier than usual. The truck came up fast, swung abruptly out into the fast lane, bored no doubt with Arthur's manoeuvres, and thundered past at a hundred and thirty. Huge articulated thing.

‘God DAMN it.' The thing was barely past, right under his nose, and cut in back on top of him. The brake lights flared up brilliant red; the whole enormous mass slowed as though it had run into a wall. Probably the driver had suddenly seen two more crawlers blocking both lanes. Going himself far too fast, he had had to take off speed in a great hurry. Too bad for the little fellow behind.

Arthur braked too hard, skidded a little towards the left, corrected a little oversharp, skidded to the right, lurched over the line on to the emergency track, slammed down into second with a howl from the motor, dragged to a stop more or less in line, found his nose two feet from the yellow metal post with the emergency telephone, sat there trembling and shaking. He had switched the motor out instinctively. The lights pointed down over the soft shoulder into field. Ploughed, looking soft down there two or three metres below. But not soft to fall into at sixty kilometres an hour. Like water. At that speed it's concrete. He undid his belt, got shakily out, leaned on the roof, took big breaths of night air.

‘Great leaping Jesus,' he said. Arlette got slowly out on the right. She had the torch from the glove compartment. She looked down into the ravine.

‘Things keep happening to me in this car,' she said softly.

‘You don't imagine that was on purpose,' said Arthur at last in an over-casual way.

‘No. Of course not. You can't organize a thing like that. Nor plan – well, maybe you can. I don't know. Nobody knew we were coming here.'

‘But we're ready to believe anything,' said Arthur taking, the torch to look. ‘Now if I'd been going just a little faster …'

It is one of the things one says. Life went on as before, tranquilly. Cars went singing past. The truck driver had doubtless already forgotten what was not even an episode.