The Seacoast of Bohemia, page 25
“I incline at present to let the second homicide charge fall, since this is unclear. You survived the noosing and the strangulation. Accident or even suicide could be—will be—pleaded and knowing doctors as I do they’ll refuse to pronounce.
“I’ll probably be pressing rape and incitement to rape; that seems clearly established. It may depend upon your wife whether I remain reserved on the homicide. The Procureur du Roi wants to push for the double murder, to keep the press happy. I’m not sure I agree; I’m not convinced the Assize Court will like it either.
“I’m going to question you now, as a professional observer; we can even call you a professional witness. That carries weight. And as a civilised—disciplined—human being.
“So let’s begin, shall we?”
Searchingly, for an hour and a half. In the old days the clerk took it all down word by word, a laborious process. Judges still take notes; the pen a formidable instrument of concentration and coercion. Like a conductor’s baton. When she put it down—
“This really got to you; hit you very hard, didn’t it?”
“I’ve noticed it progressively these last three years. A time in Italy, I found the body of a woman I’d just had breakfast with, blown away by a rifle bullet. I kneeled down and sicked up like a greeny.”
She nodded: the law states that where possible the Procureur and the Judge of Instruction shall visit a scene-of-crime in situ and shall there observe the physical evidence. No bad rule. Apply it to writers and much bad fiction would not be written.
“No bad idea to retire cops early. Over thirty one is no longer fit for war … At what age, one wonders, should one apply this to judges?” Nice white teeth the woman has.
The police are like doctors in the need to block emotion. But they need to use force too often. It translates into brutality.
“Balance,” he said. “Old judges are like old cops, meaning old bastards. Or are they the less likely to be bent? If cynical,” he added, “you’d say they’ve been bent these thirty years already.”
She took off her glasses to smile.
“We have too much power. We are feared; it breeds hatred. A moment’s pettishness, irritability, inattention even, one will pay for dearly. Never to show fatigue or boredom, never to show either sympathy or antipathy. To conquer nausea—worse, to conquer indifference. In their eye, their little affair is so very urgent, so supremely important. To be alert for that tiny whisper promising advantage or influence. To handle a journalist as though it were a snake—over-timid, they loathe that and get itchy, but squeeze them roughly, they’ll bite. Lawyers; if anything, worse still. The men seek to intimidate and the women to humiliate … You’d like this fucking job?”
It came at the right moment and he laughed.
Outside her door, in handcuffs, a cop on the bench alongside, was ‘the lout’. Looking as dense as ever but the sight sent a shudder. Electric currents ran through legs and arms and a gripe settled in Castang’s gut. This … one must say man has been ‘extracted’. Madame le Juge spoke of nausea and of indifference. She will have a number of simple techniques in between witnesses—I have used them myself. To clasp the hands behind the neck; stretch and turn, matching your breathing. You go for a pee and you wash your hands. Vera used to say, ‘Read a page of a poem’. He had only to stop and stand for a moment, to refuse to run away.
The man looked up hopefully.
“Not got a fag about you, mate?” The horrifying thing was that he was looking at Castang without the slightest sign of recognition.
He fished in his pocket, took one and settled it in the corner of his own mouth, threw the pack to where it was caught, unhandily, since attached to the cop by a length of chain.
“Thanks chief.” Castang found a lighter in his trouser pocket.
“‘Whatever’s the matter with Mary Jane? She isn’t ill and she hasn’t a pain’,” asked Lydia.
“Something simple,” her mother answered. “But being French he makes it complicated.”
“He always says he isn’t really French.”
“That’s just it; he doesn’t know. Simpler for me. Czech—Stalinist.”
“So being simple what do you say?”
“I think I say three close friends in a row come to a bad end and he’d somehow made matters worse.”
“But that’s ridiculous.”
“It’s tied up with being a cop for too long and wanting to get out of it and he thinks making a poor job.”
“What utter balls.” At her age everything seems clear-cut, but Vera was still glad to hear her say so.
“At your age I was very silly. I caused a great deal of trouble, and my parents a lot of unnecessary pain. He’s been paying for this ever since. He took the responsibility for my foolishness and it was a big handicap in his career. He doesn’t complain, saddled all these years with the stupid Czech cow.”
“This also is utter balls.”
“Utter ovaries you mean,” Vera is always supposed to have ‘no sense of humour’; one is never quite sure about this.
“You had some corners knocked off you in France. I lost a few in New York. Are you doing the supper?” Face-savingly, since Vera has her apron on. “I’m going to talk to him, where is he?”
“Sulking in the music room. Kindertotenlieder or whatever, he does wallow rather. Fetch him a drink, show him your new frock.”
Not Mahler. Lenny Goodman Quartet.
“I hate Gene Krupa,” said Lydia. “Self-advertiser.”
“Hey,” showing a willingness to be interrupted, “that was my present.” A single malt ‘off the plane’. “You’re supposed to be addicted to the salty dogs and the silver bullets.”
“Wouldn’t have brought it if I didn’t like it.”
“You’re oddly like me. Odd’s not the right word.”
“I’d find it odder if I wasn’t. Listen, you worry me. I was prepared to find Ma badly dented by this experience, and she’s being resilient about it. Whereas you’ve been handling things like this since forever.”
“The woman meant a lot to me.”
“I know.”
“Your mother …”
“She knows. We aren’t being angelical. If there’s a road accident I close my eyes and hurry past. Other things one looks at when one has to.”
“I wasn’t sleeping with her.”
“She knows that too. She can tell, you know. Damn, I’m conjugating this verb. Conocer, saber.”
“I didn’t know you knew any Spanish—now I’ve slipped on the same banana.”
“Don’t tell me about her. Tell me about you.”
Castang topped up the drinks. Their shared northern blood—Vera doesn’t like the flavour. An Islay, tasting of seaweed and iodine …
“I’ve got abraded, I suppose. One thinks oneself hard stone. Rubbed down, over the years, by the grinding. Polished. Whereas suddenly, one is badly eroded. I had a thing once with rare stamps. Man showed me. Screened, if they’ve been restored patches show. Thins, they’re called. Under a strong light, bits of me have worn thin.”
Lydia sat staring at nothing. Her imagination, too, is like mine.
“You’ve become nice. You’re no longer sarcastic towards me.” She took a good pull at her Scotch. “Odd language, American. They freshen their drinks and then they sip them. Munching meanwhile on a sandwich.”
“What d’you want, them to talk Sioux? Don’t be so Europeanly snobbish.” She came suddenly and gave him a big kiss. “We’ll fix you up. Like in the Brel song, take you to the bordel, la mère Fraņcoise has some new girls in.”
“Your mother …” laughing.
Vera put her head in and said, “Supper’s ready. God, stinks in here, somebody open a few windows.”
A month or so passed. This seemed to be necessary, to clear up sticky bits left in the office. There was also the long discussion about the house, with people who deal in property. Palavers; it could be sold, and still leave a lot of money after the mortgage was paid off. Yes, erm, and no, and maybe: ‘Norman answers’. He went on feeling Mary-Jane, refusing to eat her pudding. Bored. Couldn’t get interested. Needed a holiday and didn’t want it.
“I have an idea,” said Vera. “The tourist season’s over and I’d like to go to the seaside.”
“Uh.”
“I want to go to the Golfe de Gascogne.”
“And get shot at by Spanish fishermen.”
“You’ve always liked Biarritz—old haunt of yours.”
“And with too many nasty memories.”
“It’s time you settled your ghosts. It’s a very good idea. You can be massaged under water by delicious girls. Thalassotherapy.”
“Oh god” and in the same moment he thought how nice this would be.
No question, one was eroded. Lydia, who had disappeared—‘gone after a job’—had been right. “Once I went to the desert. They have balancing rocks. A pillar, and sometimes the stone below is softer, erodes faster. The one on top sits there, balanced on a point. But sooner or later, it topples.” Not only in Arizona.
There were bad omens, driving across France. At the frontier, already, Vera shivered. Why?
“I no longer like it. I no longer feel safe. No rule of law, here. A government which does as it pleases.” After all these years, with a husband a police officer … Castang fell into a subdued silence. For a lifetime he has laughed at the euphemisms. These are far worse than any American puritanism of calling the lavatory the bathroom. The French world, in which the greatest thieves are ‘indiscreet’, the oldest whore is ‘charming company’ and a violent child-rapist ‘an indelicate individual’. These people can no longer see realities. They stopped for the night in Beaune, where one eats and drinks so well. The television was showing the weather forecast, and the girl was talking about an abundant nebulosity. What the fuck does she mean—is that mist? Once he had been off duty with pneumonia. A service note handed to his superior stated that ‘This officer is suffering from an infectious state of bronchial origin’. Richard had been sarcastic for a week. Does the whole world then talk like this now? He cheered up only next day when an autoroute exit near Sète pointed directions towards Poussan, Gigean and Bouzigues: this was so plainly a firm of Funeral Directors. Or conceivably, thought Vera, crooked notaries.
“Indelicate notaries,” corrected Castang. “Just as the Cannes Film Festival always reminds one of Eskimo Nell. ‘Forty whores tore down their drawers at Deadeye Dick’s command.’” But even a French autoroute will reach an end and one will think of strolling by the seaside. Panama hat, parasol; it’s an Edwardian little town.
Strolling forsooth! Castang aghast. What has happened to this place? Cars parked end to end and nowhere to put his own and will you kindly look at these building sites. Drinking tea on a terrace; formerly placid; fuming. Vera if anything amused by this nostalgia peculiar to those in middle age, imprudent enough to revisit the scenes of youthful enjoyment. Still much vexed—“But what is it, a mere ten years since I was here last!”
A simple enough fact: over the last ten years the number of cars in Europe has doubled. This is a very small town and couldn’t be anything else because there’s no room: seaward you are stuck between two rocky promontories and landward you climb a steep hill. If the municipal authority of a hundred such seaside resorts has not had the courage to ban cars altogether, this is the result: vile, noisy, and smelly turmoil, putting everyone in a bad temper. Courage, rather than forethought, since shopkeepers are both influential voters and the last to realise the benefits of making people walk.
Vera returning unperturbed from fact-finding, says she’ll drive if he’ll steer, and in the car, all unstressed calm, begins to sing, goddammit. Her choice of lyric on these occasions is always instructive.
Have I seen her since then?
Only now and agen,
As together they ride
Side by side
Down the Old Spanish Trail!
But probably this was dictated by obscure subliminal instincts, and nowise done on purpose.
Next morning was the loveliest sort of late-summer day. They were having breakfast on a terrace with sea in sight, on the uncrowded, unfashionable and inexpensive southern side of the town which Vera is already calling ‘the dorp’. The old Spanish trail is just outside the door and Thalassotherapy across the road.
“You see? You had only to have faith.”
She has addresses of several flats to be hired because the tourists have all gone home. Her suggestion is that he should go and get Thalassa organised while she does the logistics of supply. He would like to pick quarrels but cannot think of any convincing objection.
“And then we’ll go and eat fish. How far is Saint-Jean-de-Luz?”
“From here? Twenty minutes down the road.”
“Hendaye?”
“Say thirty.”
“And Spain? San Sebastian?”
“Make it forty-five.”
“So who has to stay here hotly cursing?”
“I must give a phone-call to old Richard.”
“I was wondering when you’d think of that.”
Richard, ex- (several years more ex- than himself) had been for many years his Divisional Commissaire in the Police Judiciaire. The younger, energetic Castang (it had been a dozen years and more) had learned much. The older man—he had known Vichy come and go—had taught him more; more unusually taken a liking to and even a fondness for his over-hasty and accident-prone subordinate; a fondness extending to the timid, worried young Czech woman. He’d had a Spanish wife: Judith had also been friends with Vera. She was dead now, and Richard was an old man who, when retired, went to live in Biarritz and play golf. They had no news of him—never been one for Christmas cards …
By lunchtime (over the fish) they had both quite encouraging matters to report. Vera, a furnished flat; to be sure a dog like all such: as with hired cars, you look with some care at everything likely to be broken for which you might get blamed later; the place is filthy and this peculiar smell … Agent with a fixed, pained and patient expression, exasperated by the foibles of this ghastly woman but in need of the business. “All right once I had the windows open for ten minutes and on condition of a gallon of disinfectant. So I bargained rather shrewdly over the price. How about you?”
“I saw a doctor; young, rather pretty, some good Victorian jewellery. This was quite pleasurable, nothing wrong with the heart, blood pressure a bit high. These treatments are altogether apposite and the tired businessmen come down in flocks. No naked girls alas, one-piece black bathing-suits of austere East German design and any elderly satyrs would get karate-chopped pronto. I will be taken to pieces and reassembled, a fortnight will be right, she says any longer is self-defeating.”
Monsieur Richard appeared to have changed both address and phone number. Castang looked in the book; there wouldn’t be that many of them. ‘Richard A.’ seemed to be some way out, towards Ciboure; the voice when he got it was right. Expressed pleasure. Come up for a drink. Can you find the way or will I give you directions?
This was a change. ‘Way’s impossible to find but you’re supposed to be a cop, or so I have been led to believe,’ would have been more like it. But we are all getting older.
“You go,” said Vera coming out of the bathroom. “I’ve been washing my hair.” Well, yes. It is possible that old friends have become a bore. Worse, they might decide that you have become a bore.
Even with the map this was by no means clear. A wooded, canyony part of the world. The coast goes up and down as well as in and out. Where it is flat there will be a bit of beach, a village now sprawling out in housing allotments, straggling as far as the main road. Where it climbs into headlands, pines and gorse bushes. Very suitable, these contours, to the design and construction of yet another golf club. In former times the successful butcher, enterprise de Pompes Funèbres (Poussan, Gigean and Bouzigues) had built himself a Hatter’s Castle on these heights; an Estate around a rambling ramshackle palazzo in the Spanish-gothic-renaissance manner of the Third Republic: Eugénie by then mourning her only son lost in Zululand, the black-draped widow much sympathised with by the other Widow at Windsor. Some of these incredible castles still survive, in and around Biarritz. Others have passed into the claws of the Speculators.
Deals were done on these pieces of barren land. One could carve out a patch, build oneself a bungalow, arrange oneself with the relevant Authority. Electricity cable. Phone line. Services would eventually follow. A few people established in the enclave—and most of them rich—and a dirt road would get exchanged for asphalt, street lights would appear, and the wagon would come out to empty dustbins.
Richard had been an admired specialist of much delicacy and expertise in the world of the power structures. Office chums; he was on tu and toi terms with the chef-de-cabinet in any municipal, ministerial or prefectorial grouping. A divisional commissaire in the Police Judiciaire is no big wheel in the departmental or regional world. He has not been to one of the grand schools whose mere membership will put you on terms of equality with anyone, and all over France. His circle of influence is limited and his social standing low. Police! people think. Brutish, unintelligent and quicker with the gun than the sensitive finger; further coarsened by the rubbing-up against the Unwashed. Even if you want your daughter taken off a drugs charge, a dangerous driving ticket lifted for your son-in-law, there are better addresses. The people Richard had been to school with were all in secondary, anonymous, grey functions, but they all knew how to retard or accelerate a piece of paper; get it to the top of the pile or lose it altogether. As for the Rich, they were all cronies of his at the golf club, and if he wanted something for peppercorns like a good discount from the builder he’d know where to look.
Corrupt? It was a question Castang would not have been able to answer since he had never put it. In any conventional sense, then no. Richard neither gave nor took bribes, and no money of obscure provenance or uncertain attribution had ever stuck to his fingers which were long, well-shaped. Called by colleagues ‘Athos’ for the elegance and languor, refusal of chaffering and hatred of any hard work. Gun?—he hadn’t touched one since the Liberation. The cigars were cheap Brazilians but you’d take them for Havanas; the suits were off the peg but looked thousand-dollar.
