The Only Problem (14 page)

Stewart
said, ‘You amaze me.

‘Why?’

‘Don’t
you want to know the facts about Effie?’

‘Oh,
Effie.’

Harvey
had in his hands one of Lévêque’s volumes. ‘He accepts Leviathan as the
crocodile and Behemoth as the hippopotamus. He takes Behemoth to be a
hippopotamus or at least a large beast.’

‘What
about these other new Bibles?’ said Stewart, pointing to a couple of new translations.
He wondered if perhaps Harvey was not so guileless as he seemed. Stewart
thought perhaps Harvey might really be involved with Effie and her liberation
movement. There was something not very convincing about Harvey’s
cool-headedness.

‘Messy,’
said Harvey. ‘They all try to reach everybody and end by saying nothing to
anybody. There are no good new Bibles. The 1945
Knox
wasn’t bad but
still obscure — it’s a Vulgate translation, of course; the
Jerusalem Bible
and
this
Good News Bible
are not much improvement on the old
Moffat.’

‘You
stick to the
Authorised
then?’

‘For my
purpose, it’s the best English basis. One can get to know the obvious mistakes
and annotate accordingly.’

Harvey
poured drinks and handed one to Stewart.

‘I
think I can see,’ said Stewart, ‘that you’re happy here. I didn’t realise how
much this work meant to you. It has puzzled me slightly; I knew you were
dedicated to the subject but didn’t understand how much, until I came here. You
shouldn’t think of marriage. ‘‘I don’t. I think of Effie.’

‘Only
when you’re not thinking of
Job?’

‘Yes.
What can I do for her by thinking?’

‘Your
work here would make a good cover if you were in with Effie,’ said the lawyer.

‘A very
bad cover. The police aren’t really convinced by my story. Why should you be?’

‘Oh,
Harvey, I didn’t mean —Anne-Marie arrived with a grind of brakes in the little
Renault. She left the car with a bang of the door and began to proclaim an
urgency before she had opened the cottage gate.

‘Mr Gotham,
a phone call from Canada.’

Harvey
went to open the door to her. ‘What is it from Canada?’ he said.

‘Your
aunt on the telephone. She’ll ring you back in ten minutes.’

‘I’ll
come up to the house right away.’

To
Stewart, he said, ‘Wait for me. I’ll be back shortly and we’ll go out to lunch.
You know, there could have been an influence of
Prometheus
on
Job;
the
dates could quite possibly coincide. But I find vast differences. Prometheus
wasn’t innocent, for one thing. He stole fire from Heaven. Job was innocent.’

‘Out to
lunch!’ said Anne-Marie. ‘I’m preparing lunch at the château.’

‘We’ll
have it cold for dinner,’ thundered Harvey as he got into the car. Anne-Marie
followed him; looking back at Stewart who gave her a long smile full of what
looked like meaning, but decidedly so unspecific as to mean nothing.

As they
whizzed up the drive to the château Anne-Marie said, ‘You think because you are
rich you can do anything with people. I planned a lunch.’

‘You
should first have enquired whether we would be in for lunch,’ said Harvey.

‘Oh, no,’
she said, with some point. ‘It was for you to say you would be out.’

‘I
apologise.’

‘The
apologies of the rich. They are cheap.’

Half an
hour went by before the telephone rang again. The police were vetting the
calls, turning away half the world’s reporters and others who wanted to speak
to the terrorist’s guru husband. Harvey therefore made no complaint. He sat in
patience reading all about himself once more in the local morning newspaper,
until the telephone rang.

‘Oh, it’s
you, Auntie Pet. It must be the middle of the night with you; how are you?’

‘How
are
you?’

‘All
right.’

‘I saw
you on the television and it’s all in the paper. How could you blaspheme in
that terrible way, saying those things about your Creator?’

‘Auntie
Pet, you’ve got to understand that I said nothing whatsoever about God, I mean
our Creator. What I was talking about was a fictional character in the
Book
of Job,
called God. I don’t know what you’ve seen or read, but it’s not yet
proved finally that Effie, my wife, is a terrorist.’

‘Oh,
Effie isn’t involved, it goes without saying. I never said Effie was a
terrorist, I know she isn’t, in fact. What I’m calling about is this far more
serious thing, it’s a disgrace to the family. I mean, this is to blaspheme when
you say that God is what you said he was.’

‘I
never said what they said I said he was,’ said Harvey. ‘How are you, Auntie
Pet? How is Uncle Joe?’

‘Uncle
Joe, I never hear from. But I get to know.’

‘And
yourself? I haven’t heard from you for ages.

‘Well,
I don’t write much. The prohibitive price of stamps. My health is everything
that can be expected by a woman who does right and fears the Lord. Your Uncle
Joe just lives on there with old Collier who is very much to blame, too.
Neither of them has darkened the door of the church for as long as I can
remember. They are unbelievers like you.

‘On the
contrary, I have abounding faith.’

‘You
shouldn’t question the Bible. Job was a good man. There is a Christian message
in the
Book of Job.’

‘But
Job didn’t know that.’

‘How do
you know? We have a lovely Bible, there. Why do you want to change it? You
should look after your wife and have a family, and be a good husband, with all
your advantages, and the business doing so well. Your Uncle Joe refused the
merger.

‘Well,
Auntie Pet, it’s been a pleasure to talk to you. I have to go out with my
lawyer for lunch, now. I’m glad you managed to get my number so you could put
your mind at rest.’

‘I got
your number with the utmost difficulty.’

‘Yes, I
was wondering how you got it, Auntie Pet.’

‘Money,’
said Auntie Pet.

‘Ah,’
said Harvey.

‘I’ll
be in touch again.’

‘Keep
well. Don’t take the slightest notice of what the newspapers and the television
say.

‘What
about the radio?’

‘Also,
the radio.’

‘Are
you starting a new religion, Harvey?’

‘No.’

Stewart
and Harvey crossed the Place Stanislas at Nancy. The rain had stopped and a
silvery light touched the gilded gates at the corners of the square, it
glittered on the lamp-posts with their golden garlands and crown-topped heads,
and on the bright and lacy iron-work of all the balconies of the
hôtel de ville.

‘The
square always looks lovely out of season,’ said Stewart.

‘It’s
supposed to have crowds,’ Harvey said. ‘That’s what it was evidently made for.’

Two
police cars turned into the square and followed them at a crawl.

‘The
bistro I had in mind is down a narrow street,’ said Harvey. ‘Let them follow us
there. The police have to eat, too.’

But
they had a snack-lunch in the police station at Nancy, two policemen having got
out of their car and invited Harvey and Stewart to join them.

‘What’s
the matter, now?’ Harvey had said when the police approached them.

Stewart
said, ‘I require an explanation.’

The
explanation was not forthcoming until they were taken later in the afternoon to
the police headquarters in Epinal.

‘A
policeman has been killed in Paris.’

NINE

Stewart Cowper, having
invoked the British Consul, was allowed to leave the police headquarters the
same afternoon that he was detained with Harvey. He refused to answer any
questions at all, and his parting advice to Harvey was to do likewise. They
were alone in a corridor.

‘The
least I can do,’ said Harvey, ‘is to defend Effie.’

‘Understandable,’
said Stewart, and left to collect his luggage from the château and get a hired
car to Paris, and a plane to London.

Harvey
got home later that night, having failed to elicit, from the questions he was
asked by an officer who had come to Epinal for the purpose — the same old
questions — what had exactly happened in Paris that morning, and where Effie
was supposed to fit into the murder of the policeman.

‘Did
you hear about the killing on the radio, M. Gotham?’

‘No. I’ve
only just learned of it from you. I wasn’t in the château this morning. I was
in the cottage with my English lawyer, Stewart Cowper.’

‘What
did you discuss with your lawyer?’

‘The
different versions of the
Book of Job
in various recent English
translations of the Bible.’

Harvey’s
interrogator looked at him with real rage. ‘One of our policemen has been
killed,’ he said.

‘I’m
sorry to hear it,’ said Harvey.

They
escorted him to pick up his car at Nancy, and followed him home.

Next
day the Sunday papers had the same photograph of Effie. There was also a
photograph of the policeman, lying in the street beside a police car, covered
by a sheet, with some police standing by. Effie had been recognised by
eye-witnesses at the scene of the killing, in the eighteenth
arrondissement.
A blonde, longhaired girl with a gun. She was the killer. Her hair was
drawn back in a pony-tail at the time of the commando-raid; she was wearing
blue jeans and a grey pullover. The Paris security police and the
gendarmerie
were now operating jointly in the search for FLE and its supporters, and
especially for the Montmartre killers.

That
was the whole of the news, though it filled several pages of the newspapers.
The volume of printed words was to be explained by the length of the many
paragraphs ending with a question mark, by numerous interpolations about Harvey
and his Bible-sect, his wealth, his château, and by details of the unfortunate
policeman’s family life.

It was
not till after lunch on Monday that he was invited to the commissariat at Epinal
once more. Two security men from Paris had arrived to interrogate him. Two tall
men, one of them in his late forties, robust, with silvering sideburns, the
other fair and skinny, not much over thirty, with gilt-rimmed glasses, an
intellectual. Harvey thought, if he had seen them together in a restaurant, he
would have taken the older man for a business-man, the younger for a priest.

Later,
when he chewed over their questions, he was to find it difficult to distinguish
between this second interrogation and the first one of a few days ago. This was
partly because the older man, who introduced himself by the name of Chatelain,
spent a lot of time going over Harvey’s previous deposition.

‘My
house is surrounded by your men,’ said Harvey. ‘You have your young woman
auxiliary in my house. What are you accusing me of?’ (Stewart Cowper had
advised him: If they question you again, ask them what they have against you,
demand to know what is the charge.)

‘We are
not accusing, Mr Gotham, we are questioning.’

‘Questions
can sound like accusations.’

‘A
policeman has been shot dead.’

And
their continual probe into why he had settled in France:

Harvey
recalled later.

‘I
liked the house,’ said Harvey, ‘I got my permit to stay in France. I’m regular
with the police.’

‘Your
wife has been in trouble before.’

‘I
know,’ said Harvey.

‘Do you
love your wife?’

‘That’s
rather a personal question.’

‘It was
a personal question for the policeman who was killed.’

‘I
wonder,’ said Harvey, conversationally. He was suddenly indignant and
determined to be himself, thoughtfully in charge of his reasoning mind, not any
sort of victim. ‘I wonder … I’m not sure that death is personal in the
sense of being in love. So far as we know, we don’t feel death. We know the
fear of death, we know the process of dying. From the outside it looks the most
personal of phenomena. But isn’t death the very negation of the personal,
therefore strictly speaking impersonal? A dead body is the most impersonal
thing I can think of. Unless one believes in the continuity of personality in
its terrestrially recognisable form, as opposed to life-after-death which is
something else. Many disbelieve in life after death, of course, but —’

‘Pardon?
Are you trying to tell me that the death of one of
our men is trivial?’

‘No. I
was reflecting on a remark of yours. Philosophising, I’m afraid. I meant —’