One Damn Thing After Another (20 page)

“I have wasted no time in coming to see you; it is essential that you should understand, that you should not be frightened, and that you should do nothing impetuous. By accident, you
have become entwined in a matter of which you know nothing: I shall explain it. Clarity, above all.” They are all superior liars, and the moment they speak of clarity they are going to bullshit you, but he did it well. Arlette was mesmerized.

“We knew this person existed, but had failed to identify him. A petty fellow, of no importance. Capable, doubtless, of small annoyances: you, dear lady, furnish us with evidence of this. I rely upon your discretion. If your husband, as a general rule, is in your confidence I see no objection, but let it go no further.

“The deceased Henri, ah, the Hollandais. Folklore name. He was, as you have heard say, a criminal individual. Dabbling in things; all was fish to his net, one might say. Engaged among other things in traffics for which his activities on board boats lent a cloak of legitimacy.

“You need not, I need hardly say, imagine lurid matters. There were no barges with false bottoms stuffed with cocaine. But he made regular trips, could enter or leave a country without causing comment. A courier is useful, staging-posts are useful: there are things to organize, a route to keep greased and smooth. I need not go into detail. Drugs, I think not. Certainly, between Europe and these countries – Iran for one – there is always traffic in narcotics, but professionally these gentry keep things separate. A link may part, but there'll be no run in the stocking. You have a right to an explanation; I content myself by saying a traffic in women. White slavery as it is journalistically spoken of never quite ceases: the emphasis changes. A clutter of cabaret singers and topless dancers and hostess this-or-that: they're aware enough of the fact that this is polite prostitution, but make the mistake of thinking of it as both lucrative and voluntary until they get trapped. Now we can't stop people going where they choose, and we can't warn people who don't want to listen to warnings. We try to put brakes upon it; we try to stop a railroading that is seen to be too brazen and too greedy. Leave it at that.

“Now the Hollandais came to grief: no need to go into that. We may suppose that this individual was his tool, knowing something, probably not much, of his affairs. Would like, very possibly, to step into his shoes. We may suppose that he has
not. Why? Because, it is plain, this is not a very bright person. He's a crude, smallsize rogue. He attempts to convince you that his aim is to avenge. Rogues do not devote themselves in honour to avenging the fallen comrade: they leave such notions to Jean-Paul Belmondo. Furthermore why behave so stupidly, why telephone his intentions, why this ridiculous attack upon a man hardly known to you? It is clear, he is feeling you out. If he can frighten you, if he can gain any leverage upon you, he smells a chance of squeezing some money out of you. Absurd? – you aren't rich? – you're a poor choice for a ransom attempt? So he needs small sums, and this fact advertises that he needs money, and plays no important role in the schemes of the Hollandais – or others. He was, no doubt, used for little errands. A few hundred francs at a time. He misses this supplement of income.

“Am I making sense? Then here is the rest. We should like to put him out of circulation. To remove a nuisance, naturally. There is the possibility, too, that he may know something more. Little, and fragmentary; no doubt of that. But we are patient searchers after small missing pieces in cutouts. Fit him in, and a picture may have become clearer. So to conclude: I'd like you to mousetrap this silly little man for me, and your balanced good sense and experience make you an excellent choice. You aren't getting entwined in a PJ operation: disabuse yourself of any such supposition. Rather, I entwine a thread of my own into an operation of yours, help you to bring it to a rapid conclusion, remove a scrap of grit in your eye, and hope that it may be of use to ourselves. Very likely it won't, but it's worth trying. All right?”

“I'm glad myself of help and advice, so what is there to say?”

“Good. Now you need have no apprehension. He attacks somebody nearby, but not close to you. He will not do that, but he'll try to persuade you he will. He'll make more of these phonecalls. We won't tap you, but keep your recorder on. You have a scrap of his voice, I believe.”

Arlette reached for the little recorder on the table and unclipped the cassette.

“I thought his voice sounded rather like yours,” she said amiably.

Mr Casabianca had a little smile. Like Corinne's, a thought superior, a scrap of condescension, that the police tend to wear in face of someone who has been, is being, is about to be manipulated. With him, something else again. A divisional commissaire can be accounted a subtle sort of fellow. He is more than a high-grade civil servant. He is the legal expert trained to smell the equivocal in a dossier: himself a past master in the art of prevarication, he can put his finger unerringly on a passage of prose that is a thought too smooth. There is complicity in his smile, and a little contempt. ‘I know how to protect myself' says this faint hint of a snicker ‘but do you? We shall see.'

“We'll have him, in the course of the next day or so.” A greasy affability, but the grease is not cheap or rancid. Buttery. “I don't need to give you any prompting. If you were reading from a script, he'd be sly enough to smell that this was mousetrap cheese he was being offered. If you sound a little unsure of yourself, it'll make just the bait he'll reach for. Play him along, hesitate, shuffle and mumble, and while he thinks he has a hook well into you, he'll be the less conscious that it's in his own dumb-bell jaw. You ring young Corinne Klein, and she'll look after it. Mmmm?” Arlette reached out slowly for a cigarette and took her time getting it right way round. Being mousetrapped herself into being cheese … it was somehow typical. And if she said she wanted nothing to do with it … that would not only be ‘a bad mark' but would leave her vulnerable to the Friend. Who might not be everything – nor quite such a fool – as they were suggesting. She was perfectly well aware that the confidential tales of Mr Casabianca were like government statistics: they could be fitted in to anything. At the very least, Arlette could be a silly girl, but she wasn't getting chatted into white slavery.

“I'm not sure,” she said, “that I'm either clever enough or stupid enough to be adept at this sort of operation. When there is something I can do, and it renders a service, I'm glad to do it, and I'm glad to place reliance in your help. This man
frightens me, because frankly violence does frighten me, and if I'm to be rid of him I need your help, so I'm in no position to refuse you mine. I don't like what you suggest, and if I had any choice I'd refuse it, but you've put it in a way that makes it impossible to say no, so that I'd better swallow it and like it. Well – I'll have to wait upon what my Friend has to suggest.”

“That's very sensibly put,” said the Commissaire, “so we'll leave it at that. As soon as you hear anything, give us a buzz. Should Klein be out of the office, leave the usual message; to contact you urgently. I'll leave you to get on with your supper,” affably. “Don't trouble, dear lady, I can find my way. And should your friend be keeping an eye upon your homecoming, let me tell you that you won't be compromised. I left a man in the car, who has been maintaining an interest in the street outside. Good evening to you, and a bon appetit.”

“Likewise.” He looked, indeed, like a man who took a keen interest in what was on his plate. She felt uncertain whether or no this would be thought a reassuring trait.

Arthur, in an apron, was tasting soup off a wooden spoon, was interested in the unexpected visitor, grinned a bit and made up an impromptu Dutch rhyme, which stumbled and then collapsed.

She went and put some music on the player: Davidova playing Chopin.

We are the marginals, she thought. The police, very worldly – wise, not to say self-satisfied, puts its gleaming little crumblike eye upon us. Intellectuals, it says with a snigger. Talk a lot, but nowise dangerous. Big mouth, nasty tongue, coarse language about Our President, but not a threat to public order. We will, though, always be watched. Any little opportunity to place a bananaskin in our path will not be missed. And if we should happen to slip on it, they will not be displeased. The man Davidson; he does little harm. Rude about the Gross National Product and the Nation, and the Liberal Society. But sticks to his job on the whole, which is to find ways of abolishing prisons, and that's a forlorn hope, huh? The bonne-femme van der Valk, she does no harm either. Meddlesome mare but all this folk – it carries no weight. You can always
distract it with Human Rights in Czechoslovakia. Marginal, all that. But keep an eye on it, simply because it's marginal. If at any moment it becomes a nuisance, then it's nice to have a little something in reserve. A technical infringement, which will be pretext enough should the occasion arise to have it sent back to scrubbing floors, which is where it belongs.

The police, by its nature, wishes heartily that General Franco would arrive, and set the Nation to rights.

It's a funny place, Neudorf. Arlette had lived several years in Strasbourg without ever setting foot there. There is no reason for going there: it is totally without interest; as a part of the world it is both boring and hideous. If you are going towards Germany it is the inexplicably long and dreary stretch before you reach the river, the Europa Bridge, the frontier posts gay with flags. If you are coming from Germany you wonder impatiently when you will reach Strasbourg. The city was built five kilometres away from the river precisely because the land on this bank is lowlying and marshy, and the Rhine made a habit of flooding it. The problem was solved by a network of canals and harbours, giving a Dutch look to the whole of East Strasbourg and creating an impassable barrier. On the other, southern side of Neudorf the main road to Colmar, now an autoroute, makes equally a frontier. The whole ‘quarter' is shaped like a literal quarter of a cake or cheese, with its central pointed end touching Strasbourg – one must cross yet another canal to reach the old city – and its outer perimeter the industrial terrains round the river-harbour. Between these rigid barricades, Neudorf asphyxiates.

It is ridiculously named, being neither new, nor a village. It
is small consolation that the neighbouring quarter on the south-west side, the Montagne Verte, is anything but green and even from river level far from being a mountain.

Arthur Davidson was interested in Neudorf because, he said, being a sociologist means, supposedly, that you take an interest in society; a thing remarkably few sociologists do: as a rule they prefer statistics. Working as he did for the Council of Europe, an organization much like the United Nations, having no contact whatever with reality but feeding him with reams and reams of statistics about the consumption of patent medicines (subsection constipation remedies) in, say, Jugoslavia, he had a hunger for real life. This was one reason why Arlette had been urged to take up help-and-counsel work. Another was that the Council, and its incestuous kindred the European Parliament and the Court of Human Rights, is a toney affair, very well paid and with high prestige. It is all housed in the flossy northeastern quarter of Strasbourg; the pleasant wooded and watered district along the river Ill. The personnel naturally lives along here: asked where Neudorf was they'd look puzzled.

It is the most ‘working class' district of Strasbourg; the most urban, crowded, populous. And of course the most underprivileged; albeit the largest, the least represented on the city council, with no park or open green space whatsoever, and completely lacking any leisure or cultural amenity. You will look in vain here for any rest or refreshment apart from getting drunk. There are however two cemeteries, an orphanage and an abandoned gasworks.

One interesting development is that up to twenty years ago there were tiny enclaves, almost rural. At the industrial edges along the canals and railway lines was a close huddle of grimy sheds and workshops, but in the middle were cottages and orchards; even a field or two where things grew. As the city had expanded Neudorf has become an inner suburb and these spaces have been seized for a population of petty-bourgeois white-collar flat-dwellers. There is no prestige to living here, but that need not stop the rents being high.

Arlette had got to know the place well: it was fertile in her customers. Put Strasbourg in scale to New York and Neudorf
would be its Brooklyn. Here one can just glimpse still the palimpsest of a village. How many generations ago was it possible to trace the outlines of the wooded ridges that Washington defended against the redcoats, before falling back across the East River to the Harlem Heights?

Solange Bartholdi was just going out shopping. When she saw Arlette she put her bag down, her apron back on, suggested a cup of coffee.

“Or would you rather a beer? I don't drink it, but the boys … Pascal … I can see it in your face, what you've come to say. Nice of you. You could have written a little line. If that. Most people would think all right, if there's nothing to say, say nothing, forget it. I'd have understood. You aren't like that. But you needn't, you know.” Arlette tried to struggle against this fatalism but her words were lame. No doubt of it, there was nothing useful she could suggest. Against Monsieur Thibault's flat hard-edged words she had found no riposte: there was nothing to say to Solange. Somewhere away at the back of her mind was a wish to say that tunnels had curves imperceptible in the dark. Follow … but altogether too many people have used this metaphor: there is no way it can even be a joke any more. It is too saddening. People want to go on believing in a turn, in a patch of darkness paler than the rest, in a crumb of brightness one scarcely dares believe can be light. Something phosphorescent; or an optical illusion. There is no light, nor possibility of any. Go on, and at the end is a rockfall, a caving-in. The air is bad, here: turn around and go back, while you still have strength to put a foot before the other.