You Who Know, page 13
“How did you get on? I’d like a small ice-cream please,” and has a long argument with the waitress about passion-fruit.
Castang: one of his small post-prandial cigars. “Why d’you think Eamonn married a woman like Jane in the first place?” Vera psychologist, Vera theologian; both good, but at their worst both illuminating. “And as you know, I was good friends with ol’ Jane.”
But how about a good afternoon walk, then? The post-prandial digestive stroll will extend itself into something more vigorous. I mean if one gets to the end of the Lichtenthaler Allée and then goes on—what happens then? But he must go back to the hotel first because he’d like to change his shoes. And there is that red light winking on the telephone meaning there’s a call, but this can be handled while she’s in the lav.
The call was from de Man, suggesting dinner together, saying there were things he wanted to talk over, naming a diplomatic sort of address. Oh, yes, thought Castang cheerfully.
And I think I understand Eamonn better since being in Ireland. A complicated Jesuitical Volk. Going to confession one day and sleeping with the curé the next … Which, inevitably, meant beginning to unwind a long and tangled ball of string, because yes, complicated and Jesuitical were two adjectives one would use about Eamonn. But why do people drink? Or pick their nose? Or gaze at themselves in the mirror? In Castang’s police days one didn’t ask oneself such questions. They came to mind, but one hadn’t the time to pursue them, even if the inclination existed. That was a job for the examining magistrate instructing a case, and sometimes it would go on a long time, accumulate several kilos of paper, give employment to many lawyers, doctors, psychiatrists, and all the people who tell you that giving up smoking and eating margarine are the keys to eternal life.
Eamonn Hickey had wished to rid himself of some very notorious tangles in the persona of the Scotch-Irish. For one’s father this had been a question of sheer resolution. Colonel Maurice Devaney dated back to a time as difficult as any in the traumatic history of a tormented land (Czechs would understand this—yes, or Belgians—better than the French or the English who had not the remotest clue).
“Let’s see,” counting on her fingers, “that generation, he’d be born around 1920 or even earlier; you don’t know much about this but I read it up at the time I knew Iris … ”
Partition, and then the civil war. Devaney decided where his loyalties lay, went into the army like so many of those northern Irish: almost a military caste, no? A nursery of professional soldiers. Even in southern Ireland there were many, many. And what a powerful magnetism is in that soil, that after the end of your active life you come back and live in Sandycove, with that view out over Dublin Bay and behind you those strange compelling hills called the Wicklow Mountains—which would remind Belgians of the Ardennes and that other odd frontier Volk, the Alsaciens, of the blue line of the Vosges or the Jura. Difficult enough for Colonel Devaney, but military discipline is a way through the tangle.
“But now imagine Eamonn, whose mother is southern Irish, and Catholic, and whose name is Hickey … When would he be born? Late ‘thirties. De Valera time, all Ireland still had the most vivid memories of the Civil War. Collins was assassinated—another real tough called Kevin O’Higgins, shot coming out from Mass, I think as late as around ‘thirty-seven, and this is all in your blood and it sinks into your earliest childhood. I’d have been perfectly ready to believe he was IRA. If I were Brit, and somebody came and whispered in my ear; Eamonn is an able and respected Community man, a good legal mind. But going back, he’s a mind which belongs to the government in Dublin. They’ve an extraordinary appetite for legalism there; chicanery is in their every fibre. Oh yes, I’d be asking myself questions.
“Put it like that and it’s as we know, he has this powerful sexual possessiveness, this hunt, this thirst after the kitchen-maids. All right, I’m not a man, I’ve no wide experience. I have to remind you that I’m—that you’re the only man I’ve ever slept with. And you are a considerable sexual fascist. No no, I promise I’m not going to be tedious. But if you take this extremism of Irishness and all the political complexity of it, and you add the extremely devious nature of the character which is also so very Irish, and on top of that you put the total madness of Irish sexual theology: then nothing will surprise me.
“I’d say that Jane was an enormous effort to counterbalance, to—to disinfect all that. I mean she’s English, she’s straight as a die, I happen to know she’d be burned at the stake rather than be unfaithful to the man she married, she has this intensely firm and tenacious English character.
“I ought to know something about this. I mean I never have, I mean I never would.”
Eyes aflame.
“I’m incredibly old-fashioned? Or am I, I wonder, a few years in advance? That Spanish phrase—Sun, Sex, Seat? Well, the sun’s already finished because it gives you skin cancer. Seat—unless we do something bloody quick about the private car, we’ll be driven mad around the same moment we choke and roll over and die from the toxic metals. Remains sex, don’t think I don’t like it, I love it.”
Out in that innocent German countryside (a never-ending stream of Mercedes cars, trucks and heavyweight lorries along the main road five metres to our right hand) Castang is falling about laughing.
“I enjoy it myself,” said Castang. She is funny when she embarks upon one of her tirades, so that yes, he does get the giggles, but she is shrewd and he also feels respect.
“I wonder,” she is saying, “whether a historian wouldn’t find a co-relation. Perhaps even an equation? That when, like now, there is an exaggerated sense of sexual freedom it means that real, personal liberty has become much diminished.”
There’s always plenty of sex, says Castang copwise. Human beings are what they are. People didn’t always talk about it so interminably nor, as you just remarked, display it so blatantly.
Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps, thought Vera, love is there just the same but people don’t talk about it. As though they were ashamed of it.
It seemed a good moment to tell her about Coralie, who to Eamonn had been more than just a kitchen-maid; so much more that he hadn’t known how to cope with it. Love like the Loch Ness Monster, Surfacing when you least expect it.
“Have you seen her? What’s she like?”
“Very pretty,” colourlessly. “Remarkable eyes, a blue unusually brilliant and intense, and beautifully shaped. But hardly Greta Garbo, you know. Fine figure, fine features but otherwise I’d have thought a commonplace enough girl,” wondering whether he was sounding too careful. Not already said too much? Vera didn’t seem to have noticed.
“Being very pretty doesn’t have to mean much. Look, here’s a village. We can get a bus back; my feet are telling me I’ve had enough.” A respectable, boring, rich and perfectly ordinary village, and who knew what went on in it? Plenty of sex: love too, no doubt. It doesn’t show.
He didn’t want to talk at a bus stop, nor in the bus: one doesn’t know who talks French, or English either, nor whose ear might be hanging out. He had never learned any Czech; the children, to whom Vera talked Czech when they were tiny, can patter quite well. But in Germany one would be wary even of this. He has had to subdue a loose mouth; he has often been told how indiscreet he is.
Vera took her shoes off, lay on the bed and wiggled her toes.
“My man,” said Castang, “my fellow here has asked me to dinner. I will take you, of course … that will disconcert him further.”
“Really? I’ll be quite curious.”
“He’s made a great fuss about it being a purely social occasion. Insists on the hotel along the road; the very grand one.”
Vera sat bolt upright. “I’ve nothing I can possibly wear in a place like that.”
“Your cotton frock will do very well,” said Castang tranquilly. “Long and a bit bare on top, you’ll look very nice. Place like that, full of whores and pop singers who go there because it’s the most expensive, you wouldn’t want to look like that anyhow.”
“But why,” alarmed, “insist on snobbish surroundings?”
“Two reasons, I think. First, that sort of place is discreet, there’s lots of space and they’re used to people being secretive about business deals. And I think he needs a show of luxury to give him confidence.”
“I must go and do my hair,” rushing for the bathroom.
It’s a short walk and a fine warm evening. One wouldn’t bring the car anyhow. Can’t have a dirty Golf among all the shiny limousines. One isn’t worrying about the people inside. Sure, a few very smart old gentlemen in panama hats, a few old ladies covered in diamonds, but businessmen look more loutish still in flossy surroundings and Vera is not in the least intimidated really, well aware that she looks very nice and even rather pretty. Probably, said Castang, he’ll be wearing a white dinner-jacket; amused at the thought.
Very nearly! Silk and mohair, so that Castang was jealous. Brought up short by the sight of Vera, and covering it with the social manner.
“My wife,” said Castang. “I told you there was nothing formal about our business.”
“Of course. I’m delighted. I got them to give me a nice corner because we do quite a lot of television business here.”
“Television business, that’s exactly right,” said Castang. “Nice and quiet.”
“You’d like some champagne, I’m sure. This menu’s rather pompous; do tell me, Madame, when you’ve any special taste.”
“Vera … when I was a child I longed to be called Magdalena von Dietrich. Don’t worry about me, I like everything.”
“Bordeaux, d’you think?” fussily. “Or Bourgogne?”
“We’ll follow our destiny,” said Castang. Candlelight and silken footsteps, but it’ll be back to spaghetti and meatballs tomorrow. “We aren’t in Brussels so I won’t eat fish, and steak is all wrong in a place like that.”
“I’m always a pest, being Czech, can I have fish, please?”
Plenty of good wine, Castang was thinking. Who cares what you eat in this kind of house—it’ll all taste the same. But give Vera lashings of champagne and you’ll be surprised. People fall in love with her simplicity, and when she’s a bit pissed with her perfect honesty. Transparency. “Good like bread”. Or as the Prince, the Leopard, says “like a true Sicilian”, there’s nothing as good as water.
Krug the man’s asked for, and here’s a magnum coming; television must pay pretty well. (One of Vera’s favourite quotations: “Not that wine, dear, it’s what we keep for the police.”)
He holds silence. Vera, alarmed by this, talks.
Herr Paul de Man, not knowing quite what to make of either the silence or the volubility, orders a lot more wine (rather a fuss about Vera’s fish). The men eat boring old veal, even if there’s bits of lobster with it to make it more exciting. He’s keyed up to the extreme, notices Castang, and there are fears, and there’s emptiness; he’ll drink a lot, and Castang will by God help him drink it. His own philosophical tenets are simple enough.
When that I was a little tiny boy
With a heigh-ho, the wind and the rain.
The rain it raineth every day; Vera is the theologian in the family.
“It’s only elementary-school philosophy,” (she isn’t even noticing what she’s eating: if it’s white it’s halibut; can’t be salmon because it isn’t pink). “Roughly, a pleasure has to be paid for; but you have to want to pay for it. When you were a child you had to get up early to go to school. On your free day you could stay in bed. This is only a pleasure when it’s agony on the other six days, but further only when you don’t go on lying-in. After more than an hour the pleasure’s no longer worth having. Right?”
Laughing, Mr de Man allows this.
“You understand because you are an artist, which is better than being an intellectual.”
“It’s possible to be both,” he says, fatuously.
“The same with girls. You have lots and lots of them. Notoriously the expense is great and the position preposterous, but the point I’m making is they’re no fun any more, it’s like lying in bed all day. One good one is worth more than all the women in this room.” Careful, thought Castang; you’ll scandalise the waiters. But she doesn’t raise her voice. “Haven’t you found it so?”
“Yes,” said de Man. “I have.”
They sat on when the restaurant emptied, and the head waiter had had to whisper tactfully that perhaps the Herrschaft would feel more comfortable outside on the terrace. Vera does not want any more to drink, and it’s just as well, thought Castang (who does) that neither of them has to drive. That large puddle of brandy is going to tumble Monsieur de Man into a vin-triste. But he is coherent still; so am I, so am I, and which of us is now the more reckless?
Down at the end of the garden the brook, as tactful as a waiter, is just audible. Beyond, the lights of soft-voiced cars flit behind the trees of the park. Smile of the summer night. Around these three unimportant personages, courtesy of the hotel, is a pool of space. At a distance other men in silk suits, other pretty bare-shouldered women (but Vera wears no jewellery because she possesses none) are speaking softly: of love perhaps, or ten per cent; how much does ten per cent of love amount to? Paul de Man had wanted ten per cent of Coralie, and found it not enough.
A girl; no more. Nor was she Maria Magdalena von Dietrich: girls seldom are. But she possessed earth magic. Had Castang not felt it himself on just such a night as this on the shore of Lake Como?
LAKE LUGANO
A phrase could be found, thought Castang: he was lying on his back gazing at the ceiling; breathing shallowly since his chest hurt.
“Subsequent events interested him no more”? It wasn’t quite that: he had not been executed. Though it had, as he was beginning to gather, been a close thing.
“Knowing he is to be hanged in a fortnight”? No, because his mind had not been concentrated. Nor had he “known”. Wasn’t he more like the man in The Occurrence at Owl Street Bridge? He had gone off with the rope around his neck. He had survived. Or was it that he had not yet reached the bottom of the rope? Why was his chest so tight, painful?
There was a legend about a man “they couldn’t hang”. Trap stuck; damp had swollen the wood or something; they’d tried several times—nice for the chap in question! There’d always been these legends, in France too, stories of the blade refusing to fall. Everyone struck dumb by superstitious terror; the machine had worked perfectly when tried out that morning, and the moment they took the chap off it worked afresh. Divine intervention!
He’d never believed a word of such stuff. As a young man he’d been like all criminal-brigade cops, blood-thirsty. “Pull the string myself,” as they all said. Until he’d had to go on parade one day for the real thing, and that had cured him: he’d come away with the realisation that one could only survive this if dehumanised. So he’d survived now, and was he still human? He slept a little.
He woke, and his mind seemed preternaturally clear now, over the last few days: was that normal?
He had thought himself clever and had nearly lost his life! By a number of shifts he’d wrung out that bit of information Paul de Man had had to give. It hadn’t been much, but it was vital. Vera had done it by persuading a pliable, weak-natured sort of man (finally rather likeable) that he didn’t have to be a total shit; not for his entire existence.
They’d done it between them, the classic technique of working in pairs; the nice one and the nasty one alternating the interrogations. Castang had done this before, had even done it with a woman in the other role: the novelty was that this woman was not a professional, she was his wife; she had not known. But there lay her natural force; in her truth, in her simplicity. It would not have worked, but for that.
For the man was frightened, both by Castang’s threats and by Vera’s persuasions to look himself in the eye (and they’d been helped, on both counts, by palace surroundings and a great deal to drink), but there was something of which he was a lot worse frightened.
Well, yes … he’d been the cat’s-paw, he’d been chatted into things; he had been charmed along the road of money and power—“all this”—and sometimes he’d been shown the razor held inside a silk glove. Being the literary type (seduced by Vera also being “an artist”) he had tied himself up in fantasy scenarios. Be it the IRA, or the Mafia, the Red Brigades; all those lurid stories of private armies implanted by the CIA in order to Combat Communism. How often has Castang not heard them and damned those meddlers who had filled so many weak minds with phoney ideologies and Monopoly money!
The difficulty here is that some of these stories have a grain of truth in them. Far too many people in “secret services” had been paranoiac, and in possession of far too much money. Castang has known better people than this poor type, entangled in such tales. And he knew of clever people who fed these fears, and manipulated imbeciles to gain a heftier share in the money and the power and the leverage which both gave.
He was not surprised when the name “Lugano” popped up at last. “But be careful; be careful. This man kills people.”
How much did de Man know, or guess at? He knew that Eamonn Hickey had been killed. He did not know that “Margaret Rawlings” had been killed. Castang, who knows, guesses that he is only half a step in front of “Mr Rawlings” who will surely come to work this out, and soon. His guess is that it is the familiar problem of being too close and not seeing the wood for trees: he himself has the detachment of being no longer a police official but still having (rusted) police training. He has the great advantage of having a mandate only from Mr Suarez.
