The King of the Rainy Country

by Nicolas Freeling

  But it was not difficult to find the place; all he had to do was to keep turning till he saw the road from exactly the right height and distance. Near enough to toss a stone weighing a kilo or more, far enough back to have a comfortable shot – the range was not more than about forty metres. There were three more biggish stones collected, so that his was not, probably, the last rehearsal. She had practised too with pine cones, to get the exact moment at which to throw, to get the auto to stop at the right spot. Ten metres either way on the road did not make the shot more difficult; he could have been shot five times, and tossed over into the bushes on the other side. Quite likely he would have been. But she must have been disconcerted at seeing him. Would anyone even have heard the shots? She could have taken his auto. Where would hers be? Anywhere along the road – likely a kilometre away.

  Nothing showed her presence; the pine needles had been scuffled, a twig broken. There was a handy branch to rest the gun barrel on. Sitting would be the best shot; one cannot lie well pointing downhill. A naughty little boy might have made the signs he found, a naughty little boy with a catapult. But he knew it was her; his sense there at the frontier, where he had spent an hour with his skin crawling had been so strong.

  She must have gone uphill – there was no way back on to the road, or he would have noticed. She had had plenty of start. Behind the trees of the ridge that stuck out, forcing the road to make a loop, there was a higher, barer hill. If he went up that way he might see something. As long as he could keep her moving … He looked at his watch – it was after eleven already. Canisius would be back about three.

  ‘Anne-Marie,’ he shouted. ‘Anne-Marie. It’s useless. You won’t get anything done this way.’ His voice sounded thin and impotent, and higher up it might not even be heard: the wind was blowing against him, down the slope. Stalking from leeward – pretty inefficient, he told himself. But the underbrush was thinner already. He stopped, panting; he must be three hundred metres above sea level already, and working inland all the time.

  As he thought, behind the ridge the ground went upwards at a much gentler angle but much longer. There were trees still but scattered. There were patches of tough grass that sheep or goats could graze on, and patches of rock showing at the steeper parts. Up at the top would be the snow line, probably – the timber was thicker again up there. He went on climbing, stopping to use his binoculars wherever he got a patch of open ground to look across. It was warmer up here, where the sun was not filtered through trees, and at the same time colder. The breeze was blowing straight off the snow line.

  He never saw her at all; it was a wink of sudden intense light that caught his eye. It might have been metal, but it was more likely the lens on the telescopic sight that caught the sun for an instant and caused a reflection like a mirror. He looked through the binoculars but saw nothing: it must be her, though, he told himself. He had no idea of what he was doing and no particular fear: it was not as it had been on the road. He had forgotten the rifle altogether, very nearly, and when the shot came it took him by surprise in a way he would never have thought possible. There was physical surprise, if you can call it a surprise when something like a huge iron hand takes you full swing from nowhere in the middle of your body, and sends you crashing ten metres down the slope in a huddle of limp clothes with no breath or feeling left in you. Yet before he lost consciousness he had time to register the mental surprise of being shot. She’s shot me, he told himself in a querulous, old-maidish voice. The stupid, stupid bitch. He felt pain from a graze on his nose and forehead – he had scraped himself falling.

  Little idiot, he said. What will she do now, when she realizes she’s killed me? Probably she’ll know at least that she isn’t a killer. She won’t go back to her hide-out to wait for Canisius, now; probably she’ll give herself up to the police. I don’t particularly mind being killed, since it had to come some time. But it is very stupid. Nobody knows but me.

  He went under.

  *

  ‘How do you feel?’ asked Mr Lira. He had been taking Van der Valk over one point after another, never in a hurry, never surprised, never critical, writing slowly in a school exercise book in longhand. Handwriting that was square, shapely, legible; like a schoolmaster’s.

  ‘I feel all right. It’s not disagreeable – like being a baby all over again. They roll you about and wash you and slap you and sit you on the pot and pin nappies on you. They enjoy it and I don’t mind it – I just wonder how long it all goes on, that’s all.’

  ‘I had a colleague of yours in to see me. They’re very filled with concern. They were agitated at your having come running down here, so I had to tell them a few things, which fluttered their pigeons a bit. They’ll get a nice long report from me too. They won’t be able to say you exceeded your instructions – they simply won’t dare. I’ve also explained the facts of life to your financial friend.’

  ‘Canisius?’

  ‘Canisius. You never really got it clear, did you? How he’d worked it out. Why he insisted on you or someone like you.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I read it all over and thought I saw it. So I made myself a bit scary – rattled chains at him a good deal. I got it out of him. He’d been told to hold himself at the disposition of the examining magistrate, and I sent him over a summons. Showed him the bullet – the one we got out the hillside below you. The one that went through Mrs Marschal,’ said Lira drily, ‘we left where it was. I put it on the desk, very melo, and asked him if he realized how easily it could have made a hole in him. Have you ever noticed? – you can’t scare those ones with lawbooks – he knew all the law backwards, he’d done nothing the least illegal – but if you can frighten them physically they melt. He went like ice-cream in a hot sun.’

  Van der Valk was entranced.

  ‘I mustn’t laugh because it hurts, but tell me.’

  ‘Ah. Well, hearing all your tale, reading the report Strasbourg made, getting some dope on this Sopexique from Paris – there were a few points that struck me. The same things that worried you, the same things that bothered Strasbourg. Why was Canisius so insistent on getting a professional policeman? Why was he in such a hurry, when the chap would certainly turn up sooner or later? And so on.

  ‘You’ve got to see it as a question of character. Canisius understood that couple pretty well. He caused as much friction as possible. From one side, he bored and irritated Marschal as much as he could with all the little petty trickeries and mean expedients the business involved. If a competitor had to be attacked, he brought Marschal into it. If a supplier had to be bribed, he got Marschal to do it. And on the other side, he tickled the woman every way he could think – knowing that she would be nagging at Marschal continually to stand up for himself, to fight, to work at the business and get some control of it instead of standing passive and watching Canisius get the whole thing between his hands. He even let the wife know that the old man in Paris was losing his grip and that it was only a question of time before he and his pals had absolute control. Sooner or later Marschal would just turn his back and walk away – the wife knew that too. Neither of them would have been very surprised when it happened.

  ‘The idea of stirring up the police was simply a move to keep up the pressure on Marschal. The woman, I think, couldn’t make it out, not at first, anyhow.’

  ‘She was undecided,’ said Van der Valk, thinking about Anne-Marie in the house in Amsterdam. ‘She would have liked to have put a stop to it but she couldn’t very well. Too official.’

  ‘That was just the point. One reason why Canisius went to your boss. He wanted a pompous, official rigid reaction. Another reason may have been – I’m only guessing at this one – that a professional of the criminal brigade would – just by nature of his training – imagine that there was more to this than he had been told, uh? Would go after Marschal wondering whether he was going to find something fishy. There wasn’t anything the least fishy, but you would find it hard to believe that. I might be overestimating our
friend here, but it has the sort of complex craftiness I see in his character. When your bird really ran off with this girl from Germany, it must have been a success past his wildest dreams. Not only was Marschal behaving in a wild way, without foresight or judgement, but he even did something technically criminal and stirred up all the police in Germany.

  ‘Now I reckon then that Canisius was so confident he had it all in the bag that he couldn’t resist ringing the wife up and taunting her with it.’

  ‘No doubt about that. She went haywire. Jealousy as well – she was badly upset by the German girl. When I saw her there first in Austria she was more wild at that than anything else. Then she realized that I was more of a menace than she’d thought. Originally she’d counted on me to find Marschal, make him see a bit of sense, and get him to come home. She started to see me as an ally of Canisius, as a threat. She’d hoped I would lead her to Marschal, where she could talk to him, work on him, patch it all up. She tried to get me to go to bed with her – did I tell you that? When she realized that all she’d done was to make me more curious and more determined to find out what the hell was going on, she lost her head when it came to the point, and yelled at him. I thought for a while she might have got some message to him, through the bank perhaps. I doubt that now. I think when Marschal saw her there at the top of the ski-slope it was unexpected, and I think he was a lot more upset at seeing her than at seeing me. What could I do to him, really? – there wouldn’t have been any real grounds for my making a fuss. I’d have seen to it the girl went home, sure. But I simply wanted to talk to him – find out what he thought about it all.’

  ‘Her tragedy was that he thought of her as an enemy as great as Canisius. That was why she shot herself, in the long run. Why she shot you. Everything she touched turned to ashes. Finding that he’d killed himself in bed with that girl was a shock that put her completely off the rails. You know what I thought? Sounds lunatic to you perhaps, coming from someone like me. I think she didn’t forgive his not killing himself in bed with her.’

  ‘No,’ said Van der Valk slowly. ‘I don’t find that lunatic. Not that there’s any explanation needed. They were both doomed. The world we live in, it’s the types like Canisius who win.’

  ‘Canisius,’ said Mr Lira, with a little smile as he thought about that gentleman. ‘I really scared him badly. And I got the reaction you’d expect from a type like that. You took his bullet. He’s overflowing with conscience money: he’ll make you a present of a couple of marshals any time. Not that the flow of generosity will last long,’ drily.

  ‘I couldn’t care less about him. Let him arrange all the funerals – pleasant job for him.’

  ‘You’re wrong, my boy. I know how you feel, but you’re wrong. I’ve talked to your wife. And I’ve taken the liberty of doing a bit of bargaining on your behalf. Your social security pays your hospital bill – but it doesn’t pay you the pain. Maybe – I don’t say it’s sure or even probable – you have a bit of a disability. You get a pension payment – no no, don’t quarrel with me, I’m a policeman myself, I know how these things go. Say they shove you out on pension, what would you get? How old are you, forty? Have you even twenty years’ service? What would you get? Your wife told me. So don’t get mad at me – I screwed your Mr Canisius a bit. The Marschal estate – I have this in writing – will triple any payment made you or your wife.’

  ‘Give me a cigarette … What are they saying about me? Total disability?’

  ‘They can’t honestly say. They tell me that they’re eighty per cent certain they’ll put you on your feet as good as new – or nearly. I know Gachassin pretty well. If he said that he meant it. It’s good – it isn’t quite good enough.’

  Van der Valk started to grin. ‘All the same – how the hell did you manage to get a thing like that out of Canisius? He’s tough – he can’t have been that frightened.’

  Mr Lira started to grin too.

  ‘No – he wasn’t. Not of me. It was your wife did it. Nice woman, your wife. I’d asked her to the office when he was there – I wanted to see the two of them together.’ His grin broadened. ‘She did fine.’

  ‘What did she say?’ Van der Valk knew that Arlette, in the push, was capable of anything. Not unlike Anne-Marie Marschal.

  ‘She walked straight up to him,’ said Lira with great enjoyment, ‘and said for two pins she’d shoot him herself. And he saw she meant it, what’s more. I tell you there’s nothing like a bit of physical fear to cut those ones down to size. Every woman he sees for the rest of his life he’s going to look at and wonder.’

  Van der Valk started to laugh. It hurt so much he had to stop, but it was worth it.

  ‘How does it strike you – finally? I made a mess of it. I make a hell of a fool of myself – look where it puts me – in a plaster coffin.’

  Mr Lira tucked his exercise book under his arm and shook his head.

  ‘Nothing strikes me. What does one ever do, knowing it to be the right thing?’ He shook hands. The door opened and he looked up, but it was Arlette. ‘Hallo, Madame, how are you? No no, I’m just going. All finished. When you’re up’ – to Van der Valk – ‘we’ll go fishing.’ He stopped at the door and snapped his fingers. ‘There’s a phrase I’m trying to remember. La Bruyère. The one they give out to tease the philosophy students with. I got it as theme for my baccalauréat – my God, forty years ago.’

  Van der Valk looked blank.

  ‘I know it,’ said Arlette with a laugh. She had come over to the bed to give him a kiss. ‘You don’t know it, my poor wolf, you’re too Dutch. Tout est dit…’

  ‘Everything is said and we come too late …’

  ‘Since more than seven thousand years, since men exist, and think.’

  Van der Valk began to laugh again.

  ‘We’ll drink to that – the three of us. The moment I’m on one foot.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we invite Canisius?’ asked Arlette, maliciously.

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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  Copyright © Nicolas Freeling, 1965

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  ISBN: 9781448207060

  eISBN: 9781448206971

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