Criminal Conversation (2 page)

“But you have certainty, if I have understood you?”

“You may judge of that. I will not lay myself open to any charge of malicious falsehood. My word has never been questioned; it is not going to be now. You may act or not, as you think fit, on what I have to say, but I will make no formal accusation, I will not have my name brought forward. If proof is supplied, it is for you to supply it. Are you so surprised that I should have scruples, that I should hesitate to give my name, before being satisfied that a man of
responsibility and intelligence was prepared to respect my words? Do you think that a man like me is going to walk up the steps of a police bureau, give his card to the first man he sees in a uniform, and blurt out a damaging tale, that carries weight simply because it comes from a man accustomed to weigh his words, to the first nonentity with sufficient years' service to give him a seat behind a desk? I wrote my anonymous letter deliberately, doubtful whether you would react at all. Since you have, it encourages me to believe I may be able to go a step further, but it is not too late, Mr van der Valk, to remain strangers to one another.”

Van der Valk, impassive during all this, took out a cigarette, lit it, turned a little towards the man next to him, and leaned his elbow on the leather back-rest.

“You are a tortuous person. You wish to make an accusation, but wish not to be responsible for making it. So you think up all this, wishing and hoping, I have no doubt, to excite my curiosity and thereby secure my interest. That was, I think, the real purpose of this taxi game. Very well, I can understand that. You are not happy because you think your accusation may have no value, even that I might think you activated by malice. Let's cut this through. If I think there is nothing in what you may think or know, I will forget this conversation. I will not even try to pierce your identity. If I think action is needed, I will take the responsibility of acting, and your name will not be disclosed till proof is found – if it is found. Will that satisfy you of my good faith?”

“Yes. You are obviously an intelligent person.”

“If you had chosen, you could have told me all that you knew in a letter, and still remained anonymous. Leaving me the decision whether to act or no.”

“The tale involves members of my family. But aside from that incidental fact, this is a grave allegation. If I make it, I make it in person. I am not a street-corner informer.” Where, wondered van der Valk, does pomposity become dignity?

“You know,” he said heavily, “you are asking a great deal of me.”

“That is true. You will also see that I am asking a lot of myself. It would have been a great deal more in my interest to have kept silence. That silence would, however, have been guilty. I would have become a conniver.”

“I think the time has come when I should know your name.”

Curious, he was thinking – even comic. A bond exists between this very stiff, very rich, very careful character and Shaved Rita.

“My name is Carl Merckel. I am a merchant banker. I am the managing director of the firm of Lutz Brothers.”

This short sentence irritated van der Valk very much indeed. He realised instantly that he was on treacherous ground. This man was one of the half-dozen most important men in Holland; fingers in all the important affairs, financing numerous state projects, with a whole portfolio of twopenny ministers and threeha'penny state secretaries in his left trouser pocket. He could, if he had wished, have put the whole police apparatus in motion without his name ever appearing at all. He had not done so. Van der Valk respected this man, but that did not check his irritation. A man who, last night, at the Amstel Hotel, had sat at table at a formal dinner with the Minister of Justice, a Royal Highness, two directors of the Netherlands Trading Company, and the burgomaster of Amsterdam…

“I know your name,” he said. “I know your friends. Why did you not go to them with your story?”

Mr Merckel disregarded this without moving his face. Cold eyes bored into the highly polished wood that panelled his dashboard.

“I am talking to you in a parked auto,” he said curtly. “I have not asked you to come to my house nor to my office, and I should be grateful if you will not at any time come to see me at either. I will give you a telephone number. Now: to the point.”

Van der Valk lit another cigarette and leaned back. Inside the range of his eye and ear trams clanked and autos tooted, bicycles clattered and people chattered – the New Side Voorburgwal, one of Amsterdam's dreariest, dustiest streets. It is devoted to newspaper offices and advertising agencies, second-hand bookshops that look
seedy and cafés that seem always to be empty. All the doors seemed covered with dust and peeling paint; the pavement was littered with dustbins that still had not been taken in, and the access to the public lavatory was completely blocked by bicycles in varying stages of decay. Locked in a smell of expensive leather and fine machinery, he felt a strong sense of unreality.

“A man came to see me not long ago, whom I once knew slightly because many years ago, at a time when he was a fashionable painter, I had commissioned him to do a portrait of my first wife. This man was called or called himself Casimir Cabestan. He wished, he said, to paint my second wife, who is a very good-looking woman. I refused. He then came out with a most confused tale, full of vague hints and veiled threats, which I judged to be an effort at blackmail. I spoke to him sharply.”

Ah, thought van der Valk; I can well believe it.

“He claimed that my wife was conducting an affair of pleasure with a doctor she has consulted, that he had found this out, how he did not say, and that he deserved, he seemed to think, a reward for telling me. I told him that I would not hesitate to sue him: I should judge that I frightened him sufficiently.”

His eyes, for the first time, turned towards van der Valk with something more behind them. A shade of warmth coloured his voice when he again began speaking.

“I am very fond indeed of my wife. If I looked into this scrap of malice any further it was to ensure that I would be able to protect her from the consequences of any indiscreet word or impulse. The man Cabestan, I found, lived in a sort of apartment under the eaves of a house occupied by a doctor that my wife has indeed consulted. I have consulted him myself. He is an excellent doctor, skilful and sensitive. He is, I believe, well known in his profession as unorthodox, possibly, in his methods, but as a man who cures his patients. I had, in short, no reason whatever to wish him ill or to suspect him of ill. I concluded that the whole tale was a piece of malicious invention. For I had enquiries made about this Cabestan. He has lost his reputation – had, I should say. He drank too much,
was reduced to all sorts of shifts to make ends meet. Then - I learned it accidentally while glancing at the newspaper; it was the usual three-line item in a column of fatal accidents – the man had died suddenly, the cause of death, seemingly, a trifle obscure. It attracted my attention. I have not much experience of blackmailers” – the words were spoken quite without irony – “but it did engage my thought that if such a one had a stronger hold than that which this man had upon me, and if he tried to exert pressure upon a person with a certain public life, as I have, he would then run a risk of an attack. Your experience will know how much weight to give to this point. I come to the kernel of my tale.

“Only a day or two after this death, my wife went to see this doctor. She made no secret of it - I asked her indifferently where she was going and she answered freely that she had been told to go for a check-up. It was a small point but it was the second small coincidence to catch my attention and for the first time I took the whole matter seriously. I am not going to tell you how I came to feel certain of the truth but I will tell you this. There are things that one may have cause to tell a doctor, particularly a neurologist. I will leave it at this. My wife is a young, healthy woman with a considerable need for an emotional life. I do not, in fact, give her enough interest or amusement in life. The story has truth. With reluctance I have come to believe that this odious Cabestan had in some way guessed at a fact.

“I do not believe that there is any passion involved, although I am not, perhaps, a very good judge. Under the influence of passion I can understand that a man might do things he would not ordinarily do. Cabestan, however, was not assaulted, or struck, as I understand. You may, of course, disregard my beliefs, which are not evidential, but I am certain that the man was murdered, in some manner that a doctor might choose, in order to keep the association with my wife from reaching any ears.

“If that is so, you might ask why I should intervene, since it is obviously in my interest to keep silent. It has not been easy. I choose to disregard my wife's actions – I do not believe her guilty of any
complicity in this death. I realise what the consequences will be if any such complicity should be discovered. I have still found myself forced to speak. In the position I occupy, in the function that I fill, with its many bearings on public life – you realise that I am frequently called upon to give decisions regarding municipal and even state projects – I have sometimes had to decide whether or not I might be contributing to dishonesty, even corruption. I have sometimes closed my eyes and remained certain that I was bringing a benefit to people who needed it even if some rogues enriched themselves along the way. A banker, Mr van der Valk, cannot be subject to minute scrupulosities of this nature. He cannot, by the same law and in the same breath, give way to a dishonest silence regarding a crime. As an officer of law under oath, you will understand that. I might add that a doctor has also a professional oath.”

“It is not, in fact, exactly going to be easy for any one of the three of us,” said van der Valk abruptly. Suddenly, he could not stand all this another minute: he opened the auto door and fell thankfully out into fresh air. “You have to understand, Mr Merckel, that you have given this matter long thought, as you tell me,” he added more calmly. “Before I can tell what can or will be done in the light of all this, I have to do some serious thinking myself. Just tell me where I can get into touch with you.”

He stood vaguely in the middle of the pavement with tourists bumping into him, staring vacantly up the New Side Voorburgwal. He gave a loud sigh, as though he had been very thirsty and had drunk a whole glass of cold beer up in one breath, and a slovenly woman dragging in her dustbin stared at him, recognised him, and gave a squawking cackle of laughter.

“Whatsamatter, Smiler – in love?”

He hadn't even the heart to look at her.

“Stuck up, these days,” she remarked, slamming the door after herself and her dustbin, indignantly.

The morning, and most of the afternoon, since really the disposal of the pornographic-magazines man was child's play, he spent finding out all he could about the death of one Cabestan, together with any information he could pick up about Mr Carl Merckel, managing director of Lutz Brothers, merchant bankers, and Dr Hubert van der Post, neurologist, specialist in short-wave and other electrical treatments. There wasn't much. The doctor – a young GP who often did police work in the precinct but was not an official police surgeon – had signed a death certificate indicating heart failure as cause of death, and had scribbled in a few pointers that had struck him as obviously explanatory. Cabestan was a chronic drinker if not actually alcoholic in the clinical sense, had suffered from bronchial trouble, and had lived in a flat up three steep long flights of stairs. No lift, and anything heavy, like a Butane gas cylinder, had to be carried up those three flights. A sudden exertion, suggested the doctor on the telephone, a shortage of breath, a circulatory and respiratory system weakened by abusive use of alcohol…nobody had dreamed of questioning this death. He had been found dressed, on the floor, a good thirty-six hours after death, by some acquaintance who had wondered why he was nowhere to be seen, had been bothered at getting no answer to the door, and had finally warned the landlord – Dr van der Post, who lived in the house…

No, not the doctor, who had been busy with patients. The secretary, said a brief police report, had found a spare key kept in
case of fire – for the attic flat had a totally separate street door – and had given it to the policeman, stating that the two households had had nothing to do with each other, that she barely knew Cabestan, who had been the tenant since the time of the last owner, and that he was an untroublesome person who paid his rent regularly. Dr Post, seen briefly at lunchtime, had been courteous and concerned, confirmed that he hardly knew his tenant, and suggested calling the bank that paid the rent.

Bank too had little to say. Had handled Cabestan for thirty years. He had made a fortune in his day, but had for ten years now been going through lean times. Yes, they had received odd irregular payments; they always had: it was normal for an artist to earn his living in irregular lump sums. There was very little in the account at the time of death. Executor was a younger brother in the provinces, a small-town builder-contractor, who had seen nothing of his brother in twenty years: neither their paths nor their interests had ever coincided. Quite.

No breath of scandal had ever touched either banker or doctor. Plenty was known about the public lives of both; little about the private lives of either. Doctor married, first marriage on both sides, childless. Degree from Amsterdam, another from Edinburgh, various post-graduate studies and papers, but member of no particular learned societies, nor did he hold any defined consultant or hospital posts. Purely private practice, slightly unorthodox in methods, extensive connection with society patients, regarded as very skilful and able.

Banker married and likewise childless; second marriage on both sides – first wife Jewess, died in Canada in exile during war years. Remarried to attractive and elegant young widow of editor – lively provincial daily paper; shot by Germans as resistance worker in ‘44. Widow left with one daughter at age of twenty-two. Remarried at thirty when working as secretary to banking colleague. Never been the slightest sign of malaise in this marriage.