The Only Problem (15 page)

‘Kindly
don’t philosophise,’ said Chatelain. ‘This is not the place. I want to know
where your wife is. Where is Effie?’

‘I don’t
know where Mine Gotham is.’

And
again:

‘A
policeman has been killed by the FLE gang. Two men and a girl, all armed. In
the eighteenth
arrondissement
in Paris.’

‘I’m
sorry that a policeman has been shot,’ said Harvey. ‘Why in the eighteenth
arrondissement?’

‘That’s
what we’re asking you,’ said Chatelain.

‘I have
no idea. I thought these terrorists acted mainly in popular suburbs.’

‘Was
your wife ever before in the eighteenth
arrondissement,
do you know?’

‘Of
course,’ said Harvey. ‘Who hasn’t been in the eighteenth? It’s Montmartre.’

‘Have
you and your wife any friends there?’

‘I have
friends there and I suppose my wife has, too.’

‘Who
are your friends?’

‘You
should know. Your colleagues here went through my address book last week and
checked all my friends.’

In the
middle of the afternoon Chatelain became more confidential. He began to melt,
but only in resemblance to a refrigerator which thaws when the current is
turned off. True warmth, thought Harvey at the time, doesn’t drip, drip, drip.
And later, in his cottage, when he reconstituted the scene he thought: And I
ask myself, why was he a refrigerator in the first place?

‘Don’t
think I don’t sympathise with you, Mr Gotham,’ said Chatelain, on the defreeze.
‘Not to know where one’s wife is can not be a pleasant experience.

‘Don’t
think I don’t sympathise with you,’ said Harvey. ‘I know you’ve lost one of
your men. That’s serious. And I sympathise, as everyone should, with his
family. But you offer no proof that my wife, Effie, is involved. You offer only
a photograph that you confiscated from a box on my table.’

‘We
confiscated …?’ The man consulted Harvey’s thick file which lay on the
desk. ‘Ah, yes. You are right. The Vosges police obtained that photograph from
your house. Witnesses have identified that photograph as the girl in the gang.
And look — the identikit, constructed with the help of eye-witnesses to a bank
robbery and supermarket bombings, some days prior to our obtaining the photograph.
Look at it — isn’t that your wife?’

Harvey
looked at the drawing.

‘When I
first saw it in the paper I thought it resembled my wife’s sister, Ruth, rather
than my wife,’ he said. ‘Since it couldn’t possibly refer to Ruth it seems to
me even more unlikely that it refers to Effie.’

‘Mme Gotham
was arrested in Trieste.’

Harvey
was still looking at the identikit. It reminded him, now, of Job’s wife in La
Tour’s painting even though the drawing was full-face and the painting showed a
profile.

‘She
was arrested for shop-lifting,’ said Harvey.

‘Why
did she do that?’

Harvey
put down the identikit and gave Chatelain his attention. ‘I don’t know that she
did it. If she did, it does not follow that she bombs supermarkets and kills
policemen.’

‘If I
was in your place,’ said Chatelain, ‘I would probably speak as you do. But if
you were in my place, you would press for some indication, any indication, any
guess, as to where she is. I don’t blame you for trying to protect your wife.
You see,’ he said, leaning back in his chair and looking away from Harvey,
towards the window, ‘a policeman has been shot dead. His wife is in a shop on
the outskirts of Paris where they live, a popular quarter, with her
twelve-year-old daughter who has a transistor radio. The lady is waiting her
turn at the cash-desk. The child draws her mother’s attention to a flash item
of news that has interrupted the music. A policeman has been shot and killed in
the eighteenth
arrondissement;
the name is being withheld until the
family can be informed. The assassins, two men and a girl, have escaped. The
terrorist gang FLE have immediately telephoned the press to claim the crime.
The main points of the news flash are repeated: a policeman killed, leaving a
wife and two daughters aged fourteen and twelve respectively. Now this lady,
the policeman’s wife, is always worried when she hears of the death or wounding
of a policeman. In this case the description is alarmingly close. The
eighteenth
arrondissement
where her husband is on duty; the ages of
their daughters. She hurries home and finds a police car outside her block of
flats. It is indeed her husband who has been killed. Did she deserve this?’

‘No,’
said Harvey. ‘Neither did the policeman. We do not get what we merit. The one
thing has nothing to do with the other. Your only course is to prevent it
happening again.

‘Depend
on us,’ said the policeman.

‘If I
may say so,’ said Harvey, ‘you are wasting efforts on me which might profitably
be directed to that end.’

‘Any
clue, any suggestion …’ said Chatelain, with great patience. He almost
pleaded. ‘Are there any houses in Paris that you know of, where they might be
found?’

‘None,’
said Harvey.

‘No
friends?’

‘The
few people I know with establishments in Paris are occupied with business
affairs in rather a large, multinational way. I don’t believe they would like
the FLE.’

‘Nathan
Fox is a good housekeeper?’

‘I
believe he can be useful in a domestic way.’

‘He
could be keeping a safe house for the gang in Paris.’

‘I don’t
see him as the gangster type. Honestly, you know, I don’t think he’s in it.’

‘But
your wife … She is different?’

‘I didn’t
say so.’

‘And
yourself?’

‘What
about myself? What are you asking?’ Harvey said.

‘You
have a connection with the gang?’

‘No.’

‘Why
did you hang baby clothes on the line outside your cottage as early as last
spring?’ said Chatelain next.

Harvey
was given a break at about seven in the evening. He was accompanied to a café
for a meal by the tall young Parisian inspector with metal-rimmed glasses,
Louis Pomfret by name.

Pomfret
spoke what could be described as ‘perfect English’, that awful type of perfect
English that comes over Radio Moscow. He said something apologetic, in
semi-disparagement of the police. Harvey couldn’t now remember the exact words.
But he recalled Pomfret remarking, too, on the way to the café, ‘You must
understand that one of their men has been killed.’ (‘Their’ men, not ‘our men’,
Harvey noted.)

At the
café table the policeman told Harvey, ‘A Canadian lady arrived in Paris who
attempted to reach you on the telephone, and we intercepted her. She’s your
aunt. We’ve escorted her safely to the château where she desired to go.

‘God,
it’s my Aunt Pet. Don’t give her any trouble.’

‘But,
no.

If you
think you’ll make me grateful for all this courtesy, thought Harvey, you are
mistaken. He said, ‘I should hope not.

The
policeman said, ‘I’m afraid the food here is ghastly.’

‘They
make a good omelette. I’ve eaten here before,’ said Harvey.

Ham
omelettes and wine from the Vosges.

‘It’s
unfortunate for you, Gotham,’ said Pomfret, ‘but you appreciate, I hope, our
position.’

‘You
want to capture these members of the FLE before they do more damage.’

‘Yes,
we do. And of course, we will. Now that a member of the police has been killed
… You appreciate, his wife was shopping in a supermarket with her son of
twelve, who had a transistor radio. She was taking no interest in the
programme. At one point the boy said —’

‘Are
you sure it was a boy?’ Harvey said.

‘It was
a girl. How do you know?’

‘The
scene has been described to me by your colleague.’

‘You’re
very observant,’ Pomfret smiled, quite nicely.

‘Well,
of course I’m observant in a case like this,’ said Harvey. ‘I’m hanging on your
lips.’

‘Why?’

‘To
hear if you have any evidence that my wife is involved with a terrorist gang.’

‘We
have a warrant for her arrest,’ said Pomfret.

‘That’s
not evidence.’

‘I
know. But we don’t put out warrants without reason. Your wife was arrested in
Trieste. She was definitely lodging there with a group which has since been
identified as members of the FLE gang. When the police photograph from the
incident at Trieste noticeably resembled the photograph we obtained from you,
and also resembled the identikit made up from eyewitnesses of the bombings and
incursions here in France, we call that sufficient evidence to regard your wife
as a suspect.’

‘I
would like to see the photograph from Trieste,’ said Harvey. ‘Why haven’t I
been shown it?’

‘You
are not investigating the case. We are.’

‘But I’m
interested in her whereabouts,’ Harvey said. ‘What does this photograph from
the police at Trieste look like?’

‘It’s
an ordinary routine photograph that’s taken of all people under arrest. Plain
and flat, like a passport photograph. It looks like your wife. It’s of no
account to you.

‘Why
wasn’t I shown it, told about it?’

‘I
think you can see it if you want.’

‘Your
people at the commissariat evidently don’t believe me when I say I don’t know
where Effie is.’

‘Well,
I suppose that’s why you’ve been questioned. You’ve never been officially
convoked.’

‘The
English word is summoned.’

‘Summoned;
I apologise.’

‘Lousy
wine,’ said Harvey.

‘It’s
what you get in a cheap café,’ said Pomfret.

‘They
had better when I ate here before,’ said Harvey. ‘Look, all you’ve got to go on
is an identikit made in France which resembles two photographs of my wife.’

‘And
the address she was residing at in Trieste. That’s most important of all.’

‘She is
inclined to take up with unconventional people,’ said Harvey.

‘Evidently,
since she married yourself.’

‘Do you
know,’ said Harvey, ‘I’m very conventional, believe it or not.’

‘I don’t
believe it, of course.’

‘Why?’

‘Your
mode of life in France. For an affluent man to establish himself in a cottage
and study the
Book of Job
is not conventional.’

‘Job
was an affluent man. He sat among the ashes. Some say, on a dung-heap outside
the city. He was very conventional. So much so that God was bored with him.’

‘Is
that in the scriptures?’ said the policeman.

‘No, it’s
in my mind.’

‘You’ve
actually written it down. They took photocopies of some of your pages.

‘I
object to that. They had no right.’

‘It’s
possible they had no right. Why have you never brought in a lawyer?’

‘What
for?’

‘Exactly.
But it would be the conventional thing to do.’

‘I hope
you’re impressed,’ said Harvey. ‘You see, if I were writing a film-script or a
pornographic novel, you wouldn’t find it so strange that I came to an
out-of-the way place to work. It’s the subject of Job you can’t understand my
giving my time to.’

‘More
or less. I think, perhaps, you’ve been trying to put yourself in the conditions
of Job. Is that right?’

‘One
can’t write an essay on
Job
sitting round a swimming pool in a ten-acre
park, with all that goes with it. But I could just as well study the subject in
a quiet apartment in some city. I came to these parts because I happened to
find the cottage. There is a painting of Job and his wife here in Epinal which
attracts me. You should see it.’

‘I
should,’ said Pomfret. ‘I shall.’

‘Job’s
wife looks remarkably like my wife. It was painted about the middle of the
seventeenth century so it can’t be Effie, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘We
were discussing Job, not Mine Effie.’

‘Then
what am I doing here,’ said Harvey, ‘being interrogated by you?’

Pomfret
remained good-natured. He said something about their having a supper and a
talk, not an interrogation. ‘I am genuinely interested,’ said Pomfret, ‘speaking
for myself. You are isolated like Job. But you haven’t lost your goods and
fortune. Any possibility of that?’

‘No,
but I’m as good as without them here. More so before I took the château.’

‘Oh, I
was forgetting the château. I’ve only seen your cottage, from the outside. It
looks impoverished enough.’

‘It was
the boils that worried Job.’

‘Pardon?
The boils?’

‘Boils.
Skin-sores. He was covered with them.’

‘Ah,
yes, that is correct. Don’t you, like Job, feel the need of friends to talk to
in your present troubles?’