Love in amsterdam, p.15
Love in Amsterdam, page 15
For a moment he collected his thoughts, looking out of the window. Then he sighed and opened the file on his table.
“Paper, paper; heartless stuff. I myself greatly dislike putting my signature to anything; I feel that I have surrendered an integral fraction of myself. Good. The puzzling and troublesome feature of this affair has been the nonaappearance of any other person who is really involved at all. Usually”—the smile again—“we are pestered by an embarrassing number of persons who have acted in a silly or suspicious manner. We face a woman who could be presumed to have a large acquaintance, and nobody has seen her to any purpose in a considerable time.”
This was all stale cake to Martin. He had been delighted and impressed by the little homily on the ethics of jurisprudence, but on this ground he feared that the magistrate would lack Van der Valk’s homely and earthy style of illustration. He listened with attention, but without the ability to take it very seriously. It had happened to someone else. Detachment first, then boredom.
The magistrate’s voice, lucid, brief, detailed characters, movements, actions and reactions; it had all, suddenly, sprung from the pages of a dull book. Bouwman, Herman, Erich van Kampen; all were peeled neatly away from their attachment to an “incident.” Martin realized with clarity that according to the depositions, which were incontestable, nobody, literally nobody, had been on the scene. As the voice summarized the movements and enquiries of Van der Valk in the days following Elsa’s death he saw himself increasingly isolated. Depression seized him. The scrutiny of the state—and this delightful gentleman with his logical mind was preparing to tell him: “It does not look as though you killed her, but we are compelled to believe that you did.” A bad melodrama.
“They were just ready to throw Bulldog Drummond into the pool with the crocodiles, but the villain went on too long with his flowery speech (embodying a full confession) and Algy or Biggles or whoever it was would shout ‘Hold on, Old Son.’” He was in that position. When Algy did come, it would be carrying a camera, according to Van der Valk. “Someone, anyone, appear and get me out of this! Raymond Chandler wrote somewhere, cheerfully, ‘When in doubt have a man come in the door with a gun in his hand.’ Don’t let me down, Raymond!”
Daydreaming, he missed whole sentences as the magistrate spoke; once he contradicted himself very stupidly indeed. He felt hot and flustered. The magistrate looked at him, neither with sympathy nor without. Professional, anti-sym and anti-anti. Here, we are professionally empathetic.
“You are tired and you are not doing yourself justice. We had better in any case call a halt; there are numerous other persons waiting for me to decide what, to some degree, will shape their next few days.” He closed the file and pulled on his cigar. “Looks sticky, doesn’t it?”
The colloquialism was unexpected. Martin had realized that he was being brainwashed. This was a professional inquisitor, expert in disarmament.
“I have come to a conclusion, which is that I cannot justify setting you free. I must therefore write an advice to the Director of the House of Keeping, where I am sure that in the long term you will be best placed. You will be quiet; quiet is what we all need. I shall ask you to come and see me daily at a fixed hour each morning. In an orderly and patient manner we will unravel together some points that are still obscure to me. I can be quite sure that you will benefit from these coming days. At present you are very tired.”
Martin stood up and bowed; the magistrate returned the gesture, and walked over to his window, where he examined his freesias.
“Do not worry. You may feel convinced that the truth will appear, and the truth, you feel certain, will establish the innocence which you maintain. Patience is needed. Molenaar, you might see to my friend, will you?”
As Martin was ushered out by the butler, whose presence he had entirely forgotten, he saw the magistrate pensively lighting another cigar.
He had twenty minutes again in the mousehole down in the basement, before the door was opened again. This time it was out the back way, into a yard. A minibus stood waiting, driver and guard in state police uniforms. Presumably the less intelligent among them did all this footman stuff; it had not occurred to him before. He shrugged; somebody had to empty the dustbins too; at the moment he was, figuratively, a dustbin. Two or three depressed characters sat in the bus.
The guard collected a large manila envelope and locked the doors; the driver smoked, surreptitiously; on the way to the Weteringschans, nobody spoke; they swayed together in a half-felt comradeship, vibrating in unison to the quiet simmer of the motor at red lights, lurching in unison at green. The driver had his cigarette between the fingers of his left hand; it made his gearshifting pretty sloppy.
There was no fuss; the guard got down yawning and rang the bell, and the now-familiar jingle of keys and bolts came faintly through. At the time Martin was struck by the sense of déjà vu as he passed through an anteroom and up a flight of stone steps to a corridor outside an office. It was some hours later that it struck him with amusement how like a convent it all was.
The three or four of them sat like schoolchildren on a wooden form, outside an ordinary ground-glass door. The policeman delivered his envelope and strode off hitching at his breeches in a bucolic way; he could be heard laughing and chatting in a room down the passage. Talk broke out; cigarettes were lit and police stations compared in a worldly-wise way.
It seemed that they had all suffered torments in dark and filthy holes with uneatable food, browbeaten and generally treated with brutality. Martin stayed quiet after distributing his last tailormades; he recognized the normal bragging of scared children, but disliked the chattiness, and when a petty embezzler asked with undue familiarity, “What they got you for, tosher?” he answered, “Murder, tosher,” and there was an awestruck silence before they went back to agreeing that all examining magistrates were sarcastic, sadistic, and bastards to a man.
After a few minutes a sort of clerk, in ordinary clothes, popped his head out and called a name. Each took ten or fifteen minutes; he was the third. Nobody watched them; it was friendly and casual.
It was an ordinary business office inside, very Dutch; white paint, plenty of fresh air, gray metal furniture, window boxes and flowerpots. A desk for the clerk, busy at a noiseless typewriter, and a desk for a sort of commissaire, a big, sturdy-shouldered Dutch businessman in the gray suit and tie with speckles that is the uniform of Dutch businessmen (outside, a soft gray hat). There was nothing penal in the atmosphere.
The commissaire nodded pleasantly and told him to sit down. His tone was calm, brisk and reassuring.
“The Officer of Justice has asked me to commit you to the House of Keeping while your affair is under his consideration. Do you realize what this means?”
“Broadly. I’m not up on the details.”
“Aha. It’s the usual and normal method of handling these judicial preliminaries. Houses such as these hold a large number of people who are in a situation like yours, either awaiting trial or not yet committed. It is not a prison or a house of reform. You are locked up and that is all. Just what the name implies. There are some persons who have committed minor offenses and whom it is not thought necessary to send to a prison, or not worth the trouble. You can have a cell to yourself or be with two or three others; any preference?”
“By myself, if you don’t mind.”
“I agree; advisable anyhow. The magistrate hasn’t made any order that you should be kept au secret; I see no necessity, but it’s better to be alone. Now it is clearly advisable that you should be here; these affairs are often lengthy. There is no hardship; the rules are explicit and must be kept, but that is no hardship. You wear your own clothes; for ease in administration you get underclothes and towels from us. Now, formally, have you any objection to this course of action?”
“Can’t think of any,” grinned Martin.
The man grinned back. “That’s the trick. Now tell me, what about a lawyer? I’ve got a list here, you can pick whom you like, he has full access to you and you can see him in private, naturally. The point hasn’t been brought up earlier since you were only charged this morning. Any ideas?”
“Don’t really want a lawyer; not yet anyhow. Haven’t bothered hitherto and can’t really think it necessary now. You see, I deny this all obstinately—I hope that the magistrate will come to agree with me!”
The commissaire pulled a face, then laughed. “I admire your faith in Dutch justice, but, you know, even so I’d advise you to have someone, a professional who understands legal technicalities. The magistrate might refuse to question you on certain subjects unless your lawyer were present. There are complex rules governing procedures in criminal cases, and a lawyer would advise you how you might avoid prejudicing yourself. However, you needn’t make your mind up instantly, but give it careful thought.”
It jogged on. Martin gave a few possessions into the care of another official, and was rather indignant when he was not allowed to keep his pen; when he found a ballpoint in a side pocket that nobody had noticed he felt able to laugh at bureaucracy. He was searched in a casual, unconvinced manner and finally introduced through a second heavy door into the House itself.
Here he received underclothes, eating implements—several odd objects; very like the army. He was taken by a warder to his room, on the second of several floors built round a large central hallway. Except for locks and bolts, it could have been a hostel for the unemployed poor, run by thrifty and benevolent nuns. He got an hour to acclimatize himself undisturbed before a sort of Reverend Mother in blue overalls and rimless glasses walked in and asked whether everything was all right with him. Tea and sympathy.
At intervals afterward other nuns appeared, carrying library books, little printed pamphlets of instructions and information, food—bread with a generous piece of sausage and two lots of coffee. Prisoners served the food—not prisoners, kept persons. After food, washing water and a question whether he would like some cell work.
“You can earn some money; only wrapping soap, and it passes the time. Concentrates your mind.” Like being hanged, thought Martin, remembering the opinion of Dr. Johnson.
For an hour or two in the evening the loudspeaker relayed music from a radio somewhere, and one could make one’s bed up and lie on it if one felt so inclined. Martin read comfortably till ten and warning bells; bedtime, jongens. He slept better than he had for a month, since before the Tuesday night when Elsa had been killed and he had gone home shrugging, thinking perhaps it was better anyway not to see her in person.
What had happened in that room above the street? Whose eyes had noticed him standing below? Why had death been the result? Could a murder have been a consequence—how he could not see—of his having stood there? Had he been the unwitting—admitted—indirect—admitted—but nevertheless actual cause of Elsa’s death? What would the consequence be for him, if that were so?
* * *
“I invite your close attention,” the voice was saying; Mr. J. F. R. Slotemaker de Bruin. “We are going to examine various details with care. In your conversations with Inspector Van der Valk you talk, frequently, about imagination. You invited him to use his own, and you used yours, to considerable purpose. This appeal you wish to extend to me, no doubt. I may say that I dislike the imagination. I wish you to make a conscious effort, avoid your imagination scrupulously, and use your processes of thought.”
“Not much difference that I can see.”
“My dear friend, everybody has an intellect of sorts. Everybody has an imagination, the power to project an image upon the mind. Your power is unusually active and vivid. That can be a misfortune.”
“Are you telling me I imagine things, and then present them as the truth?” Martin’s voice was indignant.
“It would not be unusual. But do not put words into my mouth; you imagine that I suggest the notion; it is an example of what I am telling you. Your imagination is confused hopelessly with your intellect. You used a word in one of your statements: unthinkable.”
“Probably.”
“What you meant was unimaginable. There is a world of difference. Your statements ask me—it is implied continually—to imagine a situation. If the situation so imagined is sufficiently vivid and striking, you mean to go on, I can accept it as the truth. You appear to forget that I must apply a more stringent test before I can accept these stories. They must satisfy not only my imagination but my intellect.
“This woman, whom I never saw nor knew, I can’t imagine her, her actions and reactions, very readily, but only through the medium of your mind. I wish to inquire into her more closely—can I in fact think these things? Can my intellect accept them, in the light of facts about her that I possess—or are they unthinkable?”
“I am not following you very closely.”
“Exactly. You are not in the habit of thinking. You reverse what should be a normal process. If your imagination accepts a proposition, you see no reason to ask your brain to examine it as well. The intellect is lazy. Imagination steps into its place; a good stick but a bad crutch, as the English say.”
“I still haven’t grasped properly what you want of me.”
“Are you acquainted with a cartoonist called Hergé?”
“Yes, of course.”
“He creates,” went on the magistrate, imperturbable, “a boy called Tintin. An imbecile-looking and undernourished adolescent. This boy is superbly observant; indeed he draws brilliant conclusions from the scantiest of premises. He is expert with every imaginable mechanical contrivance. He survives appalling hardships and disasters uninjured and unfatigued. He tackles organized bodies of armed and desperate criminals, and disrupts them completely. With his friends, a drunken sailor and an absentminded professor—classic figures, pure genius—he is plunged into appalling jeopardy. Not only gangsters but material objects are banded against them, and leap out at them. When all else is conquered they are placed in fresh and terrifying hazard by two singularly cretinous—I speak from wide experience—policemen.
“There is nothing,” he said with relish, “I enjoy more than reading these enchanting books to my grandchildren. You know them?”
“Certainly,” said Martin, tickled into laughter.
“Brilliantly imagined, and most dexterously realized in pen and color. But—is it not so?—quite unthinkable.”
“I see.”
“Well, my friend, you invite my consideration in your statements of things worthy of Captain Haddock.”
“Nevertheless, I have told the truth.” Martin’s voice had a stubborn honesty.
“Truth. It can be true, however much it seems untrue. I do not reject your words. Your constructions hang together, are ingenious and entertaining—much like the inventions of the admirable Professor Tournesol. I wish to know if they are real. Your recollections of your life with this woman, even of the events leading up to the night on which she died, are true in your eyes. Now will you consider, with your intellect, the possibility that your imagination has colored these events and insisted that this account is the truth?”
There was a silence.
“It is the truth as I saw it,” said Martin slowly. “I cannot go further than that.”
“You and I,” said the magistrate amicably, “are going to get along. Truth does not exist, in the accounts of witnesses of an exciting event. Even the most innocent, the hardest headed, the best balanced. Their sense of time is distorted; they will swear that a sequence that cannot logically have taken less than five minutes was all over in thirty seconds. They will swear that a room was empty, when three persons have entered and left again. Asked to say rather that they did not notice, they become indignant, as you did, thinking I am impugning not only their honesty but their sound, reliable senses. In a really dreadful disaster, such as the Mercedes crash at Le Mans in fifty-five, nobody’s word can be relied upon as to what really happened. Except the dead man’s. The witness, the one witness who is not available at the judicial inquiry. That particular man was, by the way, a hero on that occasion.”
A motor-racing fan, thought Martin; complex character. “I have thought, or perhaps imagined, all sorts of things about this,” he said. “I have even wondered whether I had in reality killed the woman and suppressed the memory entirely. Blackout killings have been known.”
“Sounds rather like Captain Haddock,” commented the magistrate, lighting a cigar. Martin grinned, admitting that one.
“I can arrange an investigation into your state of mind. What jargon terms a psychiatric search. These are, as you are aware, used very freely nowadays, often to establish a person’s suitability for an exacting position. One might say that a murderer is in an exacting position, hm? We might find out interesting things, such as your possible aptitude for this crime. Most of all some bearing on your statements as evidence. What sort of witness you make. Apart from what you yourself have told us—this is why the reliability of your words is crucial—any evidence against you is circumstantial, which means of little use. Quite apart from ethics”—the ironic smile—“it is difficult to present such a case to the judges.
“However, it is certainly my duty to tell you that such a search, angled toward your contacts with this woman, could compromise you very deeply. You would be severely cross-examined. I have the right to do the same thing, certainly, but I do not judge the occasion suitable.”
Martin breathed deeply with his eyes shut, like a boxer between rounds. “Would this examination be voluntary, or would you order it?”
