A Long Silence (11 page)

‘Professor Sammels has been on the line.'

‘This early?' groaned Van der Valk. ‘What's the old pedant want?'

‘He's most anxious to have your opinion on his abortion law.'

‘Oh
bonne mère,'
moaned Van der Valk. Professor Sammels was the most tenacious talker he knew, and on the subject of his proposed new abortion law notoriously inexhaustible. It would be a hard day.

*

It turned out too a hard day for young Richard Oddinga. Not that the morning had anything especially troublesome about it; just that Larry stayed the whole morning, unaccountably still and silent. Usually he came in first thing, to open up the shop and do the usual rounds of chores; checking the locks and shutters for any sign of interference, testing all the alarm circuits, keeping a severe eye on the cleaning woman, going to
the bank with the take and bringing back the petty cash ‘float', and then as a rule spending an hour with the mail, typing a few letters, signing a few cheques, while Dick rearranged things, bringing out and cleaning up an acquisition of Louis's that would be left a few days casually in the front of the shop even if, as was often the case, it was already sold. After which Dick would make a cup of coffee, Larry would drink it while giving any memos or instructions he might have, and immediately after he would be gone, and quite possibly for the whole day, though he did mostly drop in again either before lunch or after it. But only for five minutes – what had got into Larry that he stayed the whole damned morning in the little cubbyhole where he wrote letters, reading the paper and putting it down every two minutes, gazing into space – a rarity – and smoking a great deal – even more of a rarity? Dick brought him coffee and he drank it without looking. Jackie Baur the silversmith, who liked coffee – and a nice gossip – got short shrift this morning. Even The Baron' – one of their best customers and a snip for anything even remotely Louis Quinze – was made to feel faintly unwelcome when he dropped in for advice about the specially made gilt nails for re-covering a footstool which he liked to believe had once supported Madame de Pompadour's active and artistic shoes. Richard felt somehow bothered. But it was nearly eleven before Larry suddenly called him, rubbing out a cigarette lengthily in the big bronze bowl which Louis had finally proved was not as he had hoped fourth-century Gallo-Roman, but a pretty impudent Italian fake.

‘Dicky!'

‘Hallo?'

‘Shut the shop.'

That by itself was highly unusual, rather disturbing; even slightly ominous. Even if there were no customers at all, Larry hated shutting the shop.

‘Done. Here's the keys. Aye, aye, sir.'

‘Don't be funny. Sit down. Stay still. Listen attentively. Don't tell lies. Dicky, who is the man that came in with a big load of bullshit about dropping a watch in the tramline? Don't
say “what man?” – his voice was carrying from here to the Rozengracht. You were cleaning the window. You dropped everything and bunked. You afterwards claimed you had to go to the lavatory which was manifestly untrue because I heard you prowling the whole time he was here. I conclude that this peculiar gentleman was not unknown to you. Don't interrupt. Now people don't drop their watches in tramlines; it's a ridiculous tale. The tale was meant to be ridiculous and I was meant to notice that. It was a warning. You being an exceptionally downy chick would know nothing about that, so I'll explain. It's the thing the police do when they're looking at you but they've got no evidence. It so happens that the same man has been calling on my uncle with an equally absurd tale about export licences. It just happens that I know something of the man who works on that. I've checked up. He knows nothing about it and he knows nobody who corresponds to the description: ergo a phony policeman. That interested me. I worked for a while on that assumption. Until considering your behaviour it struck me that it might not have been a phony policeman – simply one from another department trying on an act which I do not understand at present, but which I intend to understand. Now who among your acquaintances fits that description, Dicky?'

There was not an awful lot Richard could do. He twisted about in the net, but it closed on him. Saint was a handy cross-examiner, witty, wounding, sarcastic, joking, implacable. He let Dick develop complicated lies for as much as five minutes on end before puncturing them. He never lost his easy conversational voice. He never forgot a detail or an expression used a quarter of an hour before. He would have made a good prosecutor had it not been for a slight sadism which a judge would not have permitted – an enjoyment at embarrassing, at confusing, at setting the boy floundering. By lunchtime he had found out everything.

‘Well, Dick, go and eat your dinner. Good appetite.' It was a very well-aimed Parthian shot.

When the kangaroo court sat again that afternoon judgement
was reached without any great delay: Larry Saint had spent his lunch break usefully.

‘Well,' very gently, ‘I have now a little more background. A commissaire of police who is not actually on the retired list, but who is now inactive – committee work for a ministry in the Hague. Having weighed it all up rather carefully, I think it most unlikely that he has made or even can make any official move. His own words to you – please correct me if I am mistaken – were that no complaint had been registered, no official action could be envisaged, and that he himself was prepared to forget the whole thing. And yet he didn't. I wonder why. Could it be, Dicky, that this fellow is taking an interest in any of my business activities? And would that be on account of your childish indiscretions? No, Dicky boy, I don't think we would be going very far wrong if we were to say that you've made a hole in the dyke and that it's now up to you to mend it. Wouldn't you agree, Dicky?'

‘Well – I don't know – I suppose that sounds logical – but I don't see – I mean I didn't know how could I – I mean I had no idea of giving you away in any sense. Anyway I don't see what I could do. I mean it's too late now.'

‘Is it? I wonder. I rather think not. Not for a cyclone shot. Which might appear a bit radical applied to an elderly busybody with time on his hands, but that, as you will shortly realize, is exactly the greatest danger. The police, my dear Dick, are disinclined to waste time on anything they can't prove. Whereas an elderly busybody, poking his nose into my affairs – now that might be tiresome. He can't prove anything either? Possibly, but he can very considerably hamper some of my short-term schemes, a few of which promised to be fruitful, very fruitful, I'm glad to say, until a day or so ago. And I'm not prepared, I fear, Dick, to allow your imbecilities to destroy much patient work.'

‘But what could I do? Nothing at all.'

‘More a question of what you can do. Or rather what you are going to do. And I'm very much afraid, Dick, that you haven't any choice. You will do what I tell you to do.'

‘Well … I don't know why you talk like that. You don't
boss me around to that extent. I mean hell, at that rate I'd just tell you up yours and walk out, I mean shit, what do you think, you can't force me into anything.'

‘No. I can't. I can make you force yourself though. Shall I tell you?'

‘You mean you'd accuse me of pinching that watch? Well hell, so what? I didn't like it at the time and what's more I told that copper so and he'd confirm that.'

‘No, not the watch,' gently. ‘Though of course you are mistaken. I could prove very easily that you stole the watch. And your policeman friend wouldn't stir a finger to help you. You, see, whatever you may have told him, you took the watch and kept it. Oh it wouldn't be worth much. Perhaps six months' jail – a small affair for a boy your age. No no, we'll say nothing about the watch. No threats. But perhaps I might remind you of a detail I once mentioned – that I'd been a medical student. I think I remember telling you that one had to know when to leave alone and when to make an incision. I might find it necessary to incise you just a wee bit.'

The sound of Saint snapping his lighter reflectively, playing with it, was suddenly very small and very far away.

‘Are you telling me you'd kill me or something?' It should have sounded disdainful, even supercilious: Richard was furious at not being able to stop his voice quavering.

‘Oh well, one could, you know, without really very much trouble.'

The voice was that of somebody complaining that the tea is too weak, and this is a hard thing to understand. Storybook gangsters have made so many melodramatic threats in suave sidling voices that we have every one of us become anaesthetized. Suppose we met a real gangster in real life, and he threatened us with a nasty death, and of a sudden we understood that he meant it. The sensation would be similar to watching an old Harold Lloyd film, in which he clings with fingertips to a flagpole three hundred feet above the street, and being unexpectedly plunged through the looking glass. It is here; it is now; it is happening to me. The relatively trivial acts of violence, which we come across quite frequently, committed
by adolescents of retarded mentality, have still the power to nauseate and to frighten, so that our whole day is permeated by shock and vertigo. How then can we grasp a threat of death which is serious, feasible, immediate? We cannot, and this is why we take refuge in poverty-stricken clichés like ‘nightmarish'.

It is necessary to understand that at the moment he understood that Saint was serious he disintegrated completely, poor boy.

‘But what d'you want me to do?' with a hysterical petulance. Anger at his impotence and humiliation before his servility forced his voice up into a shrill wail. ‘What can I do?'

‘Now there you are – look at you,' said Saint with chiding gentleness, ‘You've no control and no courage – the moment a little difficulty presents itself in front of you what do you do? – collapse and scream about it. Oh well, that's just inexperience. You're, bright enough, and you're able to learn. You ask me what you can do, and you can start by studying how to repair your mistake. You've made a considerable blunder, and you can't mend this fence with just a box of matches. It will need work – in fact it will need all your free time for a week or more. You'll have to make a project, and then study the means of putting it into practice. Well, well—,' with condescending amiability, ‘I'll help you. By the way, Dicky – what is this man's name?'

‘Van der Valk.'

*

Van der Valk was worrying as well about society's anaesthesia to violence. Not real, inhuman, extreme, barbaric violence, but the stupid, ignorant, vandalistic greed of a child picking cherries out of a cake, the miserable slaughter of landscape and townscape. What difference is there, he wondered, between a band of suburban youths breaking all the young trees and the speculators who built the suburb in the first place? If you left a child at the controls of a bulldozer you would be asking for a smash, no? Similarly, allow people who might have made quite good plumbers' mates the control of vast
amounts of money, and the results were identical. He felt disagreeably tired. The way he spent most of his days, shut up inside this odious box, and the problems over which he found himself stooped – all so different from what he had been accustomed to – made up an existence to which he was not yet accustomed, which strained and wearied him very much.

New standards of behaviour, for a new kind of society? Reforming the criminal code, he felt inclined to support, was a classic example of shutting the stable door after your horse has already knocked down three pedestrians, all of whom have sued you for gigantic damages. And he was sitting there at his desk like King Canute on the beach. Was it Xerxes who ordered the sea to be flogged for disobeying his express orders?
Bonne mere
, he thought, my mind is wandering. Xerxes, Canute – several megalomaniac tyrants, and come to that vast numbers of bureaucrats, oil executives, municipal engineers concerned about sewage, people interested in building marinas on picturesque coastal sites, all had the same reaction, getting extremely cross with the sea for refusing to obey their convenience and profit.

As a lawmaker one was exactly like a general, who always understood exactly how to fight wars fifteen years after the wars were finished. Propose changing anything at all, and you got looked on as the worst kind of woolly permissive liberal. The way to stop the sea – he had been told that morning by a committee member – was, as all good Dutchmen knew, to build a dyke to hold it back. He had kept quiet, himself. He knew little enough about law, despite several diplomas, though, he had to admit, he was learning. And what about all those years of experience? He shrugged: as a policeman he had spent all those years applying regulations; nothing at all to do with law.

He walked home: he had got into the habit in his last job where his house had only been five minutes from the office. Here it was twenty-five, and through extremely crowded streets, but he had too little exercise. Mm, law. These laws, a progressive colleague had remarked, are about as out of date as the dietary observances of orthodox Jewry. Van der Valk said he agreed, but wasn't sure he had yet been given any really
good reasons for changing them either. What was law anyway : wasn't it moral law? I suppose, he had been told impatiently, that you're in favour of stoning adulterers? These people were very unreasonable. Now you're stoning me, he complained, only half laughing, or at least riding me on a cart and pelting me with rotten vegetables, as in Staphorst – with a placard round my neck saying ‘Regressive Reactionary Fascist.'

There, he had crossed a road without looking, thoroughly distrait if not distraught, and if he had been hit he would have taken no further interest in the problem.

He had not really learned yet how to look round problems – he had been too recently released from the little pragmatic details of how things would look to his superiors. This horse was still turning round from force of habit to shut the stable door itself.