One Damn Thing After Another (23 page)

“Of course. And those gangs of boys are frightening. Run away, or let off a gun. I see the point too. But afterwards … Wouldn't one think, I've done something awful. There's an excuse to be found, but it's still awful. If you admit that a death is unimportant, then next stop Treblinka. Everyone that seems antisocial, exterminate them. You just saw him as callous and egoist, because you're used to him. But it was criminal, you know.”

“I do see.”

“And because property, in this vile country, is more thought of than humans, the judge let him go.”

“But why come to me?” sadly; angrily.

“It's vengeful, which is all wrong, but I wanted to find out something disgraceful about him, to show him up. And I felt sure you'd know.”

“Yes,” in a very small voice. “But I couldn't. I owe him loyalty after all.”

“When I saw you locking up, I had even a wild idea of pinching your keys.”

“You mean you would …? – but you couldn't do that!”

“I think I could, if I screwed myself up to it. I'm convinced there's something to be found, something compromising that he wouldn't want made public. But I couldn't, without getting you into trouble. Without the keys I can't; I wouldn't know how. So I thought of asking you, instead.”

“I could never let you have the keys. Even if I pretended I'd lost them. Had my bag snatched or something. I'm trusted with them.”

“Yes. I know. But you're not trusted with his little tricks. He doesn't hide them; you said yourself. Out of contempt.”

Henriette stared bleakly across the overdecorated, horrid little lobby.

“I'm not going to do anything violent,” said Arlette, finishing a dribble of Perrier water tasting faintly of whisky. “I must have something I can prove. I can use it then as leverage on him. I damn well don't have to be strictly law-abiding.”

“He has illegal skins,” suddenly looking at her.

“What way illegal? – duty not paid or something?”

“Protected species,” unhappily.

“You mean panthers?” Arthur Davidson's wishful thinking!

“I don't know about that – though there have been panthers. But alligators, and a sort of long-haired monkey. And sea-otter.”

“Sea-otter! Look, we must get hold of one. Or better, a paper, an invoice or something – linking him to it.”

“I couldn't do that,” horrified.

“Perhaps just the accusation,” thinking out loud. “Force him
anyhow to get rid of them, to cover up. One small thing he wouldn't make a profit on. It wouldn't point to you. Several other people must know. They must be shipped in – disguised as something else.”

“I know who brings them,” said Henriette suddenly.

Arlette realized that she must not be too greedy all at once. There was some way. Arthur would know how one could make publicity. And fraud – getting legal proof of fraud. A thing Xavier would know about. And, surely, her friend Sergeant Subleyras … one hadn't been on a crime squad for nothing, surely.

“I'll settle up with you, waiter,” she said abruptly. While other settlements were pending.

The note said ‘Don't act scared: just make like normal'. The words were cut out of the local paper, pinned to a narrow strip by an edge of scotch tape. The strip had been folded small to the size of a price ticket, and lay on a tin of tomatoes. It wasn't a price ticket, and this caught Arlette's eye. The tomatoes sat in a supermarket trolley, which she was pushing. The note had been planted in a moment of that special supermarket trance: your habitual brand of paddywhack has vanished and been replaced by another, totally unknown to you and thirty per cent dearer.

French supermarkets divide into those with canned air and those without. On the whole, she preferred the latter. The smell, predominantly synthetic vanilla and cardboard, does have notes of rotted vegetables and cheese as well as wet dog. This is better than no smell: food after all ought to smell of something, reasoned Arlette. On the other hand, the air-conditioned
ones have big wide corridors for you and your bier. In the small ones you can die of asphyxia, or buried under a landslide of special-offer, or stabbed by a Bulgarian sword-stick, and you will still get carried along by the inexorable flow towards the checkout, without anybody noticing. It is a splendid setting for one of those antique locked-room mysteries, with the body under the avalanche of empty cartons in the corner: could stay there a week unnoticed. Won't be the smell that draws attention finally, neither. Nero Wolfe would reckon you deserved all you got: these places don't just sell petfood; they sell nothing else.

Backed into a bay surrounded by towering crates of beer, Arlette read the note and threw it away. Necessary gesture of insolence, even if it were a clue for Mr Casabianca. She was frightened, though more of claustrophobia than anything else.

It was a test of her nerve and resolution. Very well, she'd stay perfectly quiet and go along with it.

Sure enough, while she was pointing at cheese, and saying to the girl ‘No not that one, That One', another note arrived. This said ‘Don't scream, don't panic. Go down to the parking lot and unlock the car door.' This one was handwritten, but by someone who knew that no expert can make much of printing with a ballpoint pen. Her mouth was dry; she took a packet of chewing-gum from the stack by the pay-off. She did have a moment of wanting to grab the cashgirl's bell and ring it frenziedly, but what good would that do? Somebody might leap the barrier and bolt off, but who'd be interested? Not carrying a crate of whisky, was he?

All underground parking lots are grisly. Deep Throat is there behind the pillar, not to speak of tyre-slashers, penis-flashers, and people who will hit you across the face with wrenched-off metal radio-antennas. You can imagine pretty nearly anything, particularly when chewing gum, supposed to promote a flow of saliva, doesn't. A curt graffito on the wall told her the Minister of the Interior Equalled Hitler, which was no news. Nor help. A notice saying Do not Leave your Trolley Here, completed by Climb in it and Go to Sleep, was no better. She packed things into the boot of the Lancia, her neck hair
doing horrible primitive defence-reactions. She could see no one, though a perpetual slamming of tinny doors told her people were everywhere. She unlocked the driver's door, got in, rolled the window down, took several deep breaths, spat out the chewing-gum which hadn't helped and tasted disgusting, rolled the window up again, settled herself, flexed her toes, clipped the safety belt, discovered that getting to her gun under her car-coat was difficult enough without, unclipped it again, put the lights on and eased the motor gently into gear. At the last moment she leaned across and unlocked the catch on the off door.

The lights, sweeping across naked concrete and Way Out, showed her nothing. There was nobody, but people occupied stowing cardboard cartons in cars, taking no notice of her. It was just a gag, to shake her nerves.

Just before Out, a sharp right-angle turn slows you before you accelerate up the ramp into something resembling air. As she flicked her lights out somebody opened the door and got in, so neatly she would have admired it. There was nothing to see: one needs one's eyes for the narrow ramp. On the street, when she could swivel a glance sideways there was a gun loosely pointing in her direction on a knee: a soft hoarse voice she recognized said, “Just drive quietly where I tell you.”

This scene from a thousand movies steadied her, obscurely comforted her: she felt she was on familiar ground after all. She found her voice.

“I didn't need to unlock the door. I've been wanting to talk to you. You needn't point the thing at me.”

“Just keep your eyes on the road.” A hand went up and twisted the inside mirror, so that he could see around. They turned a while following his directions, came out on the long quiet stretch of the Quai des Belges. It prolongs into a tree-lined, pleasant section called the Quai du Genéral Picquart, with the canal on one side and comfortable, quiet houses with gardens across the street.

“Pull in under the trees and park.” She did so, docile. “Cut the motor and give me the keys. No, don't look at me. Right, now I think you've got a gun. Bring it out slow and let's have
it. All right. Nobody following you, no cops. Good. Now if you want to yell or something I'll tip you in the canal. You going to play ball?”

“I have to know what you want.”

“We drive a bit further, we can talk. Just in case they got a direction-finder on your car, we change cars. Hop.” While he was locking her car she got a look at him, which told her very little. A drab raincoat and a little hat. Dark glasses on a face with no colour and little feature. Anyone, Monsieur Toutlemonde between thirty and forty, drab, tidy, and utterly inconspicuous. He pointed with his chin to where another car stood a few metres along, pointing the way they had come, a medium-size Renault as drab as himself, dark red, neither clean nor dirty. He handed her a key on a tab. “You drive.” They went back, over the Pont d'Anvers, turned right at the coal harbour, along towards Neudorf, back over the canal bridge, left at the Rue du Havre, and along the industrial terrain of the Rue de la Rochelle, until at last they turned off to the bank of the Rhine at the ship-lock, where at length he seemed satisfied that they were neither followed nor overheard.

She felt for a cigarette: he took the bag from her, looked in it before giving it back to her.

“Oh, for God's sake,” she said impatiently, “stop being dramatic. All this act since the supermarket – come to that, for a week, now. Just tell me what it's all about.”

“Been talking to your cop friends?”

“I don't have any cop friends.”

“Look, try to cross me up, quickest way to getting acid in your face.”

“Oh, this is useless. What can I do to persuade you that I had nothing to do with Henri le Hollandais? I didn't even know who he was. I was with Berger, went along for the ride. I had nothing better to do. He told me nothing. His name. That he was a gangster. So what? It wasn't and isn't any business of mine. You're another, but I don't know you, you do nothing to make me want to know you. Pestering me just makes you conspicuous. It's stupid.”

“You're a grass for them. And bait.”

“Oh, Bonne Mère. I have to be able to convince you that I don't meddle with police business. You're police business. I don't want to know anything about you.”

“What are you getting at?” The voice told her nothing either. Traces of a local accent, but acquired rather than inborn. Just ordinary.

“I'm trying to tell you I work on sufferance. If I didn't, I'd be out of a job: I have to obey the rule.”

“So you do what they tell you.”

“It doesn't have to include being catspaw for them. What can I do but tell you? I couldn't make you out; you're part of something I don't know. It's some PJ business – I could see that. I went to Casabianca to protect myself. He'd like to mousetrap you; that's his affair: concerns me no further.”

“You used to be married, they tell me, to a Dutch cop. You better persuade me but good that you didn't sell the Hollandais out.”

“That was ten years ago: it's a piece of my life that's gone. Can't you see, you fool, that you're butting your own nose in trouble? Pester me, and follow me like this, I can't help but lead them to you. Attack me and they'll know who did it. I ask only that you leave me alone. If the car is booby-trapped I know nothing about it. I could have a bug on me right now and not know it,” inventing recklessly from television films. “If you could drop a note in my trolley back there, couldn't they put something in my pocket?”

“It wouldn't carry any distance.”

“Oh, was that why you dragged me all the way out here? Well, if I'm not back before lunch my husband will be making a hullabaloo, and the first thing he'll call will be cops, and not city cops. Casabianca.”

“Prove it. Go on, prove it. Lead a cop anywhere near me, and there'll never be a day you pass without fearing for your skin and your eyesight. I got friends, too.”

“You poor ass, it's your own suspicion dragging you down. You're in a dilemma. You can only get out of it by trusting me.”

He looked carefully all around. There was a small boy
throwing stones in the water. There was an elderly man, watching rapt a big Swiss motor barge being processed in the ship lock. There were two men in overalls and a bashed-up Renault Four utility which had Service des Voiries written on it. They were sitting smoking. They looked extremely like plainclothes cops, which probably meant they were the Service des Voiries having a smoke and doing nothing: hell, the municipality of a town the size of Strasbourg has a thousand employees at any moment of the day, doing just that.

“I could blast you with your own gun and tip you in the Rhine.”

“You could, I suppose, if it were anywhere near worth it, or if I had deserved it. If I have to make the choice, I dare say I'd rather be shot than drowned, like the Hollandais.”

There was a silence, during which he took his eyes off the roving activity of the scene outside and focused them on her, even swivelling his body to face her, holding the look so long that for the first time she began to feel real fear. She had felt frightened, yes, but it had been a surface fear. She had been touched by the world of violence, pulled by the coat, as it were, into the toothed gears of the criminal world, where violence exists for violence's sake and no rational argument can protect one. But this had happened before and she had felt strangely unmarked by it.

In her own car, only a twelvemonth ago, she had been kidnapped, held down by force, tied up and gagged – most unpleasantly, with sticking-plaster – threatened, and finally shown a violence that, it had been calculated, was quite enough of a trauma to crush a human being, and a woman at that: the palm of her hand had been cut cruelly and deeply with a razor. She had been left like that, in the middle of the night in the empty car, on a deserted pathway beyond the outskirts of the town. And somehow she had not been nearly as frightened as she should have been.