Gun Before Butter, page 8
‘You can go to Düsseldorf. What you find there will decide the business one way or the other – if this conjecture of yours has anything in it. Got it? All right, boy, you did a good job on that report, apparently – I didn’t read it. You’re off His Highness’s shit-list; now stay that way. In another six months I won’t be here to fight your battles for you; I’ll be fishing.’
Fishing; it gave him an idea. He went and fetched the rod-case. Mr Samson was sufficiently interested to put down his scandal-sheet.
‘That’s freshwater gear – I don’t know much about it; I fish in the sea. Good rod. Cost a bit; wish mine were as good.’
‘Am I mistaken, or is all this brand new?’
‘Sure it’s brand new; see that at a glance. Where was it he went – along the Maas? Not with this rod he didn’t, anyway.’
‘I suppose he just bought new stuff.’
‘Funny-coincidence department.’
‘Don’t ask me; I wondered too.’
The old man grunted, stared a moment, and went back to the misdeeds of minor German public servants.
Just before he went home he got two messages. One said – ‘Inspector Van der Valk has an appointment with Rijksrechercheur Sluis in Maastricht at ten a.m. Tuesday nineteenth inst.’ The other had come on the telex, and read: ‘Following request for all possible information on photo circulated Customs Post Valkenswaard can identify but have no definite facts will you advise ends.’ That was down south of Eindhoven somewhere – Stam seemed to have been a great frontier-wanderer. If, of course, it was him at all. Probably some officious functionary with a long tale about nothing at all. He arranged all his papers neatly in his briefcase and went home.
There was bouillabaisse for supper, Arlette’s economical one of cod and conger-eel, but she had a good hand with the sauce; it was one of her best dishes. He ate tremendously, and afterwards he put Fidelio on the gramophone.
‘I do so love this,’ said Arlette when it got to the sinister rumtytum of Pizarro’s entrance. He sat happily, thinking that if this terrible man in Maastricht was a nuisance tomorrow he would abolish him, by breathing great fumes of garlic all over him.
‘Good morning, Monsieur the Inspector.’
‘Good morning, Monsieur the Rijksrechercheur,’ with equal polite formality. These people made themselves extremely ridiculous; it was as bad as a Deputed Representative of the Land of Schleswig-Holstein. But that was the only way to handle these types. Be as stiff as they were.
These types – these gentlemen – of the Security Service belong neither to the State Police nor the city police. They are only answerable to the five Procureur-Générals of Holland. They have the artificially low sounding rank of ‘State Detective’, which sounds rather like Adolf Eichmann. Belonging to this high judicial authority, a small and select body, they are officers, whatever their rank sounds like. In training, pay, and police protocol, they hold the rank of inspector.
They are, in fact, the political police. They interest themselves in rabble-rousers and provocateurs who manipulate trades unions, disseminators of subversive literature, Ukrainian partisans and Spanish Republicans – in short, they are the Sûreté, the branch that sits like a spider in the Rue des Saussaies in Paris. This sounds very impressive, but they spend a great deal of time persecuting the innocent members of Japanese trade delegations. They are a necessary nuisance, but Van der Valk did not greatly care for them.
They have, of course, a characteristic attitude. They tend to regard everybody as not-quite-all-they-might-be in loyalty and patriotism. They have a characteristic technique too: they apologize with profuse politeness for an inoffensive question about trivia, and the next second they pose the most complex and far-reaching query on the most personal subject, without even noticing. ‘Now tell me, Mister Uh, do you practise your religion?’
They give an impression – perhaps without meaning to – that all other humans are superficial and frivolous, and appear – without caring – both patronizing and finicking. Their forte is to give everybody an impressive notion that they are deep in the counsels of the Minister of Justice, the European Economic Community, NATO, and the Synod of the Reformed Church. Van der Valk found this regrettable but risible.
This one was a nice type. He was a tall thin man with neat, dark wavy hair. He had a worried expression of scrupulosity, like an intellectual playwright being investigated for unAmericanism. His face was deeply lined; he had a habit of pushing his horn-rims up and down on his forehead. He might have been forty-five. He wore a good bluish-greenish suit with a faint brown line; his tie exactly matched this. He had very clean, long, carefully manicured hands. Van der Valk could not have noticed all this at once; he assembled it gradually while they were talking. At first glance he only thought the fellow looked nice, intelligent, competent, as narrow-minded as any fanner could be, and as self-important as an advertising agency.
They shook hands gravely.
‘Sluis, Veiligheidsdienst.’
‘Van der Valk.’
‘Coffee, Inspector?’
‘Gladly.’
‘Not a bad morning.’
‘Foggier our way than here.’
‘That’ll be the North Sea, I suppose.’
‘I suppose. These cigarettes any good to you?’
‘No no, thanks all the same; prefer my own.’ An expensive gas lighter popped its pretty little flame up under Van der Valk’s nose.
‘No trouble driving down?’
‘None at all. Thank you, Miss, one lump.’
‘Well, I suppose we’d better get to business. I’m told you’ve uncovered something in our line.’
‘That’s by no means certain,’ firmly. ‘Briefly, the Procureur in Amsterdam instructs me to put you gentlemen in the picture. The ministry has no file on this man. I’m handling it on the basis that it is a personal affair. If it turns out to have any political motive I am ready to turn the file over to you.’
‘I’m not clear what there is pointing to anything political.’
‘First point is that the man carried large sums of money and possessed more. No business, commerce or activity found to explain that. Why does anyone carry ten thousand in cash to buy cigarettes with?
‘Second point is a secret and obscure life. Had a house in Amsterdam; scarcely lived in it. Had a country cottage in Limburg that might have belonged to a totally different person. In a place that is very isolated, very secluded.
‘Third point; he was in Amsterdam a day, at most two, a week. He spent the weekends in his cottage. Where was he the other three days? Only indication I have is Germany. I haven’t checked that yet.’
Plainly, such things should not be allowed – would never be allowed if Mr Sluis could help it.
‘Final point, the man was knifed, very neatly and quietly. No prints, no indication at all, but a big flashy car was left outside on the street as though deliberately to attract our notice. Keys on the dash – just chucked there for us to wonder why.’
‘Yes . . . yes. And what do you want us to do, that you can’t do yourself?’
Van der Valk answered smoothly. Tactful, he had been told to be, even if he found pleasure in kicking this character in the teeth. ‘His passport states that he was born in Maastricht. I’m not interested in that. I’m pursuing my own thoughts and conclusions. Plainly, a different approach, a second line of enquiry, might give other or better results.’ He let it hang in the air.
Mr Sluis put out his cigarette carefully. ‘Yes, I have had instructions. A bit unusual perhaps, this working in double harness as it were. However, naturally we are happy to cooperate. I take it you have a dossier for me?’
‘All relevant papers have been photostatted and you have my full report.’
‘Good. And we count on you, then, to keep us informed of any progress made on your side.’
Van der Valk went off with a feeling that he had been scrutinized a lot more closely than Stam was likely to be. That damned disapproving look – fellow is probably busy right now compiling a memorandum on my un-American tendencies. Good luck to him – that’ll make nice reading for a rainy afternoon on the Prinsengracht.
He drove north to Venlo; it was on his way. He could have crossed the border as easily from Maastricht, but he wanted to follow whatever path Mr Stam had been accustomed to follow. He called at the shop where the fishing equipment had been bought. Here he got a talkative and enthusiastic man, only too willing to help.
‘Certainly very curious, Inspector. All this equipment that you’ve shown me was certainly bought here from us, but I feel sure that the reason I don’t recall it is that it was bought quite a time ago – something like three years, possibly. It’s hard to say; we have no records of cash transactions, but there are two points that make it easier to say. You see, it is very good gear, an excellent make, but a little obsolete in pattern. As you know, a maker, any maker, thinks up improvements and incorporates them. This part of a joint, now – here – for three years now this maker has been using nylon here. And here – the pattern has changed. And because it is an expensive model, and we don’t stock many at a time, it’s not likely that we sold this rod less than three years ago. You’ll find of course plenty like this in use still; indeed it is a very good one.’
‘And would you say it had had three years’ wear?’
‘No, I would not. It looks handled, but not as though it had been much used. Look at this over here now – same model, a little cheaper, more simplified, and only two years old, but used constantly. Left for repair by a regular customer. See here? – and here? – and there? That’s quite characteristic of what we call fishing wear.’
‘Very odd.’
Certainly it was odd, the man agreed. The more so because he was a fisherman himself and, if he might so claim, knew every fisherman along the Maas. And had never heard of Mr Stam.
‘We are quite a little confraternity, you see. We hold meetings and discussions. We exchange information – about new equipment now. Some firm produces – a landing-net, say, or a gaff, of a new pattern – we’ll try it out and compare impressions. Then – there’s so much else – the habits of the fish, the state of the water and the banks, the types of bait we find best along a certain stretch – I can hardly believe, Inspector, that there’s a fisherman along the Maas that we shouldn’t know. We are very sociable.’
‘Maybe he went fishing in Belgium,’ cheerfully.
‘Maybe,’ agreed the shopman dryly, ‘but if he did his equipment shows no sign of it.’
Van der Valk ate lunch in a snack-bar and wondered whether after all he ought to check up with Valkenswaard before going to Germany. He thought not. Everything pointed to Germany. This question of borders – it had looked as though Mr Stam might be engaged in smuggling. Indeed he had thought of that right at the start. But he didn’t think much of the notion. A report from Venlo had told him that Stam had crossed the frontier station here, known as the Keulse Barrier, every week for some years, perfectly openly. And that had made it the more unlikely to his mind that Stain was a smuggler. What did people smuggle anyway between Holland and Germany? It would need to be something rare to have made him that much money.
Drugs? The vice squad in Amsterdam had pooh-poohed this. And he was not taken with the idea himself. He went straight from the frontier to his cottage, where he sat smoking opium? It made no sense. Now, admittedly, there was this fishing business. Could there be some illegal traffic along the Maas? But if the frontier people had observed him crossing weekly for years, it would have occurred to them too. They would have checked on any peculiar happenings. They had their informers, their whisperers. Smugglers generally got known by things going wrong with the distribution network; the sale and resale of whatever it was.
The frontier guards were indifferent, as he had guessed.
‘Sure we know him. Not a white car, no; black one. Had a weekend place in Holland. Nothing wrong with him, was there?’
The customs too – it only confirmed what he thought.
‘You know how it works, Inspector; we have a purge every so often on watches or cameras. We don’t bother now about coffee or blankets unless they get really insolent about it. How many German housewives come now and do their weekend shopping in Venlo because it’s that much cheaper?’ with a shrug. ‘As for real smuggling, morphine or gold – we don’t try and control that here – this is the Keulse Barrier: main road into the Rhineland, maybe five thousand cars a day. If we get a signal from the vice squad in Amsterdam or Rotterdam – then we’d pull a car off and search it. But you don’t just search odd ones here and there. You could wrap an ounce of morphine in plastic and scotch-tape it to the undercarriage of any car – any at all. Are we to catch that with our little X-ray eye? You know as well as I do, Inspector – smugglers aren’t caught that way. They’re sold by someone who hasn’t had a fair share of the cut.’
Exactly. Down here, nobody noticed a man who crossed the border every week. Plenty crossed every day. How many lived on one side and worked on the other? One hardly noticed here who was Dutch and who was German. Here on the border even the two languages had got so mixed one couldn’t tell them apart.
No no, this smuggling business was not of any use – his idea was different. All this to and fro over the border – he thought it was a distraction, a deliberate confusion. He had formed a theory about Stam, which he now proposed to go and test. Shrugging, he drove on into Germany.
Crossing the Oberkassler bridge an hour later, planing down into the gaudy, dismal heart of Düsseldorf, he was more convinced than ever. The city suited, somehow, the notion he had formed. He rather liked Düsseldorf. It had a second flavour, like Amer Picon. The artificial bounce, the sad glitter, the noisy allure and dead desert stillness – it was somehow suitable.
Van der Valk was not one for a long wearisome search; he had had too many in his day. He would have sent someone else, had it been, to his mind, a question of a real hunt. He wasn’t going to the Polizei Praesidium or the Chamber of Commerce; he wasn’t going to hawk his photos round posterestante counters or hotel reception desks. He wasn’t even going to the tailor’s shop in the Hofgartenstrasse. He had one fixed object in mind, and if that didn’t work he was flummoxed.
He had thought long and keenly about Stam’s character. What he would do, and how he would go about it. Wherever Stam went in Düsseldorf, he had decided, it would be somewhere anonymous, where he would never be noticed. Maybe he lived and did business here – but first, Van der Valk felt sure, he established an alias.
How did one do that? The trouble with going anywhere regularly is that people see, and remember. There are always people. Porters, cleaners, concierges, clerks, always somewhere. Was there a place where one could go that was impersonal, automatic, where one would never be noticed? It has to be, he told himself. He turned from the Breitestrasse into the Graf Adolf and up to the Wilhelm Platz, where he parked by the post office and crossed the road to the Central Station. And ten minutes later he was out again, brimming with triumph, carrying a suitcase.
Mr Stam had not used any cheap hotel or backstreet lodging house. He had simply used the public lavatory next to the rows of left-luggage lockers, that are so like filing-cabinets. It was the key that had helped Van der Valk think of that. What on earth could Stam want with a filing-cabinet, when he could keep his business in a row of diaries on a shelf? How he had puzzled over that key. So many notions, all rejected, and then he had gambled on a notion he had got from a paperback story on Stam’s shelf. And by god it had been the right one.
The suitcase held nothing but a complete change of clothes. A dark anonymous suit – so similar to the ones hanging in that room in Amsterdam. Shirt, tie, shoes, scarf, short driving coat. Mr Stam had gone into the Hauptbahnhof in Düsseldorf every week for years, gone politely to wash his hands, and reappeared in ten minutes a different man. But not a German, as Van der Valk had thought. A Belgian.
In a little leather briefcase lay his complete spare personality. A Belgian driving licence, a Belgian passport, a crocodile wallet with money and papers, a silver cigarette-case, and a new ring of keys, to unlock his new self. And a new hat, to go on top.
The new self was called Gérard de Winter. He lived in Erneghem, was forty-four years old, had been born in Amsterdam – so? – and was by profession hotelier. Van der Valk, sitting in his Volkswagen in a dreary corner of a dreary square, with clanging trams bumping past him, looking at the broad behind of a big Mercedes bus, painted a dirty yellow and with posthorns painted on that, felt enjoyment warming him with a rosy glow. Stam was not only interesting; he was a comedian. How long had he been keeping this up? ‘What are we to call you now? Which is your real name? Is either of them, indeed, your real name? For all we know you can be Vasco da Gama, born in Lisbon, forty-six years old, profession sea-captain.’ He went out happily to get his facts tidied up. Works out quite nicely, he thought. Mr Sluis can occupy himself with Stam. I’ll try and make the acquaintance of Gérard de Winter.
The garage – there might be two, there would be two – was not more than a few minutes walk, he reckoned. A Dutch gentleman would leave a black Mercedes to be cleaned and serviced. Half an hour later – yes. A Belgian gentleman with a black Peugeot had soberly driven off.
