The King of the Rainy Country (12 page)

One does not find the house of Bernarda Alba in Vancouver, thought Van der Valk. We can imagine it; a type like me, with an over-active imagination, will buy a toy cowboy-pistol and create a whole damn Mayerling in a suburban bedroom. Given a real pistol, we will flourish it about in a dramatic way, and if we have any normal intelligence we take good care the bullet goes into the bedroom ceiling.

The interesting people are those with mixed blood. Jean-Claude Marschal had streaks of northern blood, and could be misty, no doubt, with the best of them, and he had, quite undoubtedly, a strain of highly-coloured ancestry that was almost Corsican. He could be capable of a violent emotion. The tanzmariechen might be, to him, nothing but a good theatrical gesture – and she might be intensely real and very important; what the English governess was to the Duc de Choiseul-Praslin.

I am too much of a northerner, thought Van der Valk, with my veins full of Ibsen.

It must have been the dark, and the wet snow, and the unseen blind mountains, and a sound of horses outside of a sudden, and Austria, that made him think of Mayerling. Being a bad policeman, these events in classical tragedy had always interested him. Of course it is a gift to northern romanticism and the boulevard
press. Royalty! It has everything. The long white gloves and the red roses, the gloomy hunting-lodge in the snow and the sound of waltzes in the Wiener Wald. High boots with spurs, and the clop-clop-creak of fiacres. Zither music, the soft chime of eighteenth-century clocks, and the echo of two revolver shots. Strip off all this goo, so dear to the heart of every North European, and what do you get? An obscure intrigue, that may have been political; was it in anybody's interest that the unstable Rudolf should not succeed the ancient, frugal, careful Franz-Josef on the Imperial throne?

That has to be stripped off too. It is fashionable nowadays to regard the last years of the Holy Roman Empire as the fall of the house of Usher. Doom, doom, doom. Waltzes play with infinite sadness through the echoing halls of Schönbrunn, the Papagenotor is wreathed in mist, a stinking miasma from the foul sluggish Danube, rank grass grows in the streets of Vienna, and the Hofburg is full of shrieking gibbering wraiths. The revolver shots of Mayerling echo at Sarajevo. We are far away from the Radetsky March on a snowy New Year's morning, Professor Willy conducting with the violin bow, a republican crowd. Happy New Year from the Wiener Filharmoniker.

We are even further from Baron Ochs, like Jupiter, happy in a thousand disguises, and the FeldMarschallin embodied in golden Lotte Lehmann. No, we are Richard Strauss, but not in Dresden in 1911. In the Dresden of 1945, looking at what a thousand English and American bombers did to the world's most beautiful city, packed with refugees, where there was not one single object of military importance.

Thinking of Mayerling, one must forget all that. There remains nothing but a man and a girl.

The interesting thing is surely that at this distance one cannot really know whether one reads the signs right. From the north, of course, it is as plain as print: a nervous and hysterical prince of weak character who may or may not have become entangled in politics, who killed his mistress and himself in a theatrical gesture.

But we do not know. Rudolf had dark, sudden, ancient blood; there is no family in history to which mystery attaches as much as
to the house of Hapsburg. Think of Marie Antoinette's necklace, of the Prisoner of the Temple, of Don Carlos and Antonio Perez, of General Weygand's parentage: think of the blood shed to keep them on their throne – one example, the English blood that painted the slaughterhouse of Malplaquet.

Van der Valk did not know much about the little baroness of sixteen either – Marie Vetsera. She might have had a strong character. It wasn't even an Austrian name, he thought; what part of the empire had she come from? Hungary, perhaps, or Austrian Poland. He was a bad policeman, but too experienced to make up his mind in a hurry about what happened at Mayerling, and too experienced a man to be northern and denounce the passion of a man of forty for a girl of sixteen as ridiculous. It might, after all, have been a crime of pure passion, as real as that of a Marseillais soap-salesman and a shop assistant from Nevers (Prisunic, Grands Boulevards, imitation-leather-handbags counter) in a furnished room in Kremlin-Bicêtre.

He sighed. That was what happened when you had no sleep, and went to drink coffee after too much cognac at the Station Buffet at four in the morning. Come now. Sixteen-year-old girls no longer think like Marie Vetsera. They chew gum, dream of meeting a pop singer on the ski-slope, and have names like Schwiewelbein.

He thought about his wife. Arlette. She looked northern enough, large, blonde, a scrap over-ripe in the figure. But the time or two he had seen Arlette in a red rage he knew very well that her emotions were not to be trifled with: she was not theatrical, she could not be trusted to think whereabouts the bullet ought to land before she pulled the trigger, and if she got up on any barricade there would be no idiotic North-European far-far-better-thinging. He reeled off back to bed and fell instantly asleep.

*

He woke at midday, and felt like being a detective. He was going to have a good dinner, and shake the ghosts off, think about his immediate problem: if Jean-Claude Marschal wanted to get out of Austria, how would he go about it?

There was a very good delicate sauerbraten, with almonds and raisins in it, not too vinegary. There were nice feathery mashed potatoes, and there was red cabbage with a very faint flavour of cinnamon … He felt a great deal better. A good many tourists had left, and the hotel staff, with the end of the season in sight, were feeling lighthearted.

They could have mixed with a crowd of tourists. It was possible and indeed had been done often enough, since nobody ever looked at tourists' passports; the most was to count and see if the number came out right … But those busloads were too obvious, and too many people would know, and the frontiers would not be quite as perfunctory as usual … Was there any other group where a person more or less, even two, would pass unnoticed? He dropped his napkin, bent to pick it up, and was unpleasantly reminded of a hard bumpy ski-slope and his bruised tender shoulder.

Those gangs of skiers that had been making such an uproar in the Kaisershof last night… There were crowds of characters that nobody thought about, accompanying a ski-team. Families and friends, hangers-on, as well as the technical boys, timekeepers and whatnot and the little man that measured the humidity of the snow. Jean-Claude had once been a competition skier. He ran to the police bureau. Bratfisch was not there, but he found another character.

‘How do the ski-teams travel? In a block, or do they scatter?'

‘I suppose they just dribble off home by car in bits and scraps. The French have a whole gang – the caravan as usual. Twenty or thirty autos, and of course their bus.'

‘Bus?'

‘They shovel all their material, the skis and so on, into an ordinary touring bus. Handiest way of getting it all around. Stays with them through the season.'

‘Which way did they go? Home, I know, but which way?'

‘Shortest way, I suppose – over the Arlberg, turn down towards the St Gotthard, Furka valley, Rhône valley, straight through to France.'

‘Raise the Feldkirch frontier station on the phone for me, will you?'

Yes, the caravan had passed. Check the passports? Good grief, they were all piled like corpses after the big party. Why bother? Everybody knew the ski-team; it spent half the year toing and froing between one end of the Alps and the other.

Switzerland confirmed that nobody would bother checking such well known passport photographs, and Van der Valk felt he was getting warm. It was too late, evidently; they were all back in dear old Chamonix by now. They had eaten at Andermatt, gay and in obstreperous holiday mood once woken up. The Swiss, more literal-minded than the Austrian, had a detail or two to add. There had been two caravans really, another row of twelve or fifteen autos after the first. What? Yes, of course; journalists, photographers, and the French radio commentators.

‘Yes, of course.' The ski-team was followed by its attendant circus of sports journalists, and that was another crowd that would be familiar to Mr Marschal. Indeed, now that he thought of it… ski competitors, managers and trainers followed one another in quick tempo – no results, no contract – whereas these specialized journalists had often covered the same big meetings for twenty years – and those tatty passports were as familiar to every frontier guard in the Alps as Sir Arnold Lunn's. It was so damn easy that he knew immediately that Marschal would have loved the notion, which had just the simplicity and impudence that appealed: no nerve-wracking creeping round Germany or Switzerland; one fell asleep in Austria and woke up in Chamonix as fresh as though one had gone straight through by the Arlberg Express.

What did he risk? Van der Valk took the night train, and stepped out himself in the sharp bright morning in Chamonix, where there was a station buffet with only a slightly different smell to the one in Innsbruck, and coffee only a scrap blacker and more bitter. He missed the fleshpots of Austria a bit, and gluttonously put first butter and then apricot jam on a huge piece of brioche. It was too early in the morning to go running about, so he sat comfortably in the warmth and had two cigarettes and some more coffee, and read the
Figaro
of the day before, with its report from a ‘special correspondent in Innsbruck' …He walked out into a blinding piercing
brilliant morning and took his hat off to the majestic, faintly boring silhouette of the Mont Blanc.

*

An hour after a visit to the Chamber of Commerce he was in a street on the outskirts of the town, a very French street leading up a hillside to nowhere made of gravel for drainage, the potholes and bumps nicely levelled with snow, and people's furnace clinker strewn about to keep it from getting too slidy. The Impasse des Roses, the roses were in people's front gardens, covered with little plastic sacks against frost.

The houses were French too, amusing and individual. Ridiculous mixtures of the Savoyard chalet, made of logs built out over the hillsides, and fantasies of prestressed concrete, with garages in the basement instead of cows. They all had glassed terraces and double windows, eccentric roofs, tremendous rockgardens and the kind of letterbox with a wooden bird of no known species that nods its beak when you shove an electricity bill in the slot.

The house he was looking for had a wrought-iron gate, crazy pavements, and a gothic front door. Outside the garage, where a vertiginous ramp dived into the earth's stressed-concrete bowels, a green Peugeot 404 was parked in a nosedive like a stuka. It was quite new-looking but much travel-stained; Van der Valk regarded it with affection. An aluminium plaque said ‘Serailler, Journalist': he rang the bell.

‘I've an idea he's still asleep but it's high time he got up anyway. Who shall I say? OK.' He could be a policeman from Amsterdam or from Timbuctoo; it was all in the day's work and left a journalist's wife indifferent. He was put in the living-room, offered a cigarette, and given time to look about.

Plenty of the usual paraphernalia – table with typewriter, shelves full of directories and reference dictionaries, rows of files with photos and cuttings, a tape recorder on the phone-table and an Italian majolica jar full of pencils. The big sunny room was untidy with souvenir dollies, more and more outrageous ashtrays, stuffed animals, and ski-ing trophies: there was a large and amazingly
miscellaneous collection of books, and Van der Valk was glad he had come. Mr Serailler looked like an amusing person. He was saved further speculation by the door opening and the man himself appearing, no more bothered by the police at nine in the morning than his wife had been.

A muscular forty-five, with a splendid mountain tan and the characteristic long fine wrinkles at the eyes. Short hair gone grey early, still wet from a comb held under the tap and run through it. Tight blue trousers that looked like denim but had cost a lot more money; a Mégève sweater whose sleeves he had tucked up above the elbows and which had a little spatter of toothpaste on the front. Hand-knitted socks and no shoes. He padded over the smooth wooden floor and shook hands amiably.

‘Really was high time I got out of bed.'

‘Just back from Innsbruck?'

‘That's it. Long drive but the roads weren't bad. What can I do for you?'

‘You've been around the circuit a good few years – not many people you don't know.'

‘Suppose not. Know most of them too well. Used to be a skier myself, but never all that good. Never got out of the business.'

‘Ever come across a man named Marschal?'

‘Probably, common name enough. Skier?'

‘Playboy style but pretty good I believe. Ten years ago or more like fifteen, might have been in the top twenty.'

‘Of course. Jean-Claude. Was fifth at Kitzbühel once when I was seventh. Well, well. Sure I remember. Didn't practise enough, like so many more. Might have been a champion otherwise. Wonder what happened to him? Had lots of money – no need to work for his living like us.'

The story had gone on too long; Van der Valk smiled a bit, secretly. It was all a little too casual.

‘He was in Innsbruck last week.'

‘You don't say. Wonder why I didn't run into him.'

‘He was in Chamonix yesterday.'

‘Well well. Old stamping ground. Nostalgic pilgrimage, perhaps.
Why the interest?' It was too casual; there was no doubt about it.

‘I just wondered whether it was you that gave him the lift.'

The journalist did not change his easy smile. He felt in his trouser pocket, brought out a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, and put them on his nose, from where he pushed them up on his forehead like snowgoggles. Gentian-blue eyes looked at Van der Valk curiously.

‘Whose business is it that you're making your business? – I'm not quite clear. Mine?'