The King of the Rainy Country Read online

  Back in Innsbruck a bit of hustling among files showed the chalet to be the property of an Italian business man: probably turn out to be a pal of Marschal’s – and quite likely someone with something to do with the Sopex! Whether he had been there or not, there would be nothing suspect or unusual to him about Jean-Claude’s turning up with a girl.

  ‘They’ll try to get out of Austria, now.’

  ‘Well, there aren’t all that many ways of getting out,’ said Bratfisch comfortably. ‘We’ve got the red Fiat, so they’d have to get another auto – and we’ve warned all garages and filling stations. Plane is right out, and I’ve got men on every train leaving Austria. He’s got to follow the valleys and what choice does that give him? Back towards Salzburg, the other way into the Vorarlberg and over towards Constance, up towards Germany, Mittenwald and Garmisch, or south over the Brenner. That looks likeliest, with the place belonging to this whatsisname from Torino, but hell, it’s easy enough to block the Brenner!’

  ‘What about the high passes? He seems to be useful on skis.’

  Bratfisch laughed.

  ‘You don’t know much about mountains, do you? First, there’s an enormous amount of snow everywhere, and all but the main road passes are blocked. Second, there’s a föhn blowing. Avalanche weather. Nobody with one penny’s worth of sense is going to do any boy scout stuff on any mountains in these conditions, and anyone with no sense but a bad conscience would get stuck in a drift before he was up five hundred metres. Or might, very easily, get killed. This chap of yours wouldn’t do anything like that. No, wait twenty-four hours and we have him in a bag, girl and all.’

  Van der Valk, feeling slightly curious, passed the Kaisershof on his way back to supper. There was an uproarious party going on; the French ski-team, with a crowd of trainers and hangers-on from ski and wax manufacturers, as many journalists, and a good many of the Austrian equivalents, were having a whoopee for the end of the competition season. There had been a big prizegiving and speechmaking already, with a good many banalities from the burgomaster and the President of the International Federation, and the five National Federations, and the Alpine Club, and … Anne-Marie was gone. She had packed her skis on to her hired car, and driven off earlier that afternoon, the porter said. No, she had been alone. No, she had had no messages or telephone calls, nor had she made any. No, she had seemed quite calm and sunny.

  It was easy enough to check. Anne-Marie, alone, yes, quite alone, yes, they were quite sure, had passed the border at Füssen half an hour ago, in the hired car still, with the skis on top. They had noticed her particularly – yes, naturally.

  Where the hell was Füssen? He had heard of it – they had an ice hockey team there. After a minute’s hunting on the map he found it, a little town just over the German border, thirty kilometres or so west of Garmisch. It didn’t have to mean anything. Anne-Marie had lost her taste for mountains and perhaps felt like a nice flat plain – Holland, for instance.

  *

  He couldn’t sleep. He was overtired and overtense, and his shoulder was swollen, had stiffened, and was so painful that he could not lie on it. At midnight he was still wandering about Innsbruck. Competition skiers, whose batteries take a lot of recharging, sleep twelve hours when they can get it, but the season was over, and the revelry still in full blast. After months of being forbidden to drink, forbidden to smoke, forbidden to eat toffees, after months on a gloomy diet of grapefruit, raw carrots and underdone steak, the girls were letting down furiously. He wasn’t surprised; they were kept as overwound as he was himself for months on end. He was in no mood for squeakers and balloons and dancing the surf; he found a little bar where he could do some nice neurotic solitary drinking.

  There was Wien of course, a powerful magnet. But Jean-Claude could not know how seriously the Austrian police might be inclined to take people that jumped around in government helicopters – the most valuable tools of the mountain rescue brigades. A helicopter is a sacred cow in the Alps – there are too many places where the air is the only bridge between life and death.

  There was Zürich; he was quite sure that the millionaire side of Marschal had not neglected to keep a few bolivars in Zurich – the town of Marshal Masséna!

  Which way would the cat jump? Surely not Germany, with every bum policeman there looking for the tanzmariechen, and Heinz Stössel’s highpowered machine. The Jugoslav and Czech and Hungarian borders appeared unlikely for obvious reasons: no, it must surely be Switzerland or Italy. And trains would be out, for Marschal would surely know that the passports on a train are easily checked if anyone cares to take the trouble. The answer lay on the roads, hiding on a lorry or something. Naturally, but he had to consider Marschal’s character as well as those huge packets of banknotes: skulking like a refugee across the Curtain wasn’t his style. He would find it more in his nature to try something impudent, a gay piece of bluff, the riskier the better: if he was caught, then it would be time to try a bribe. He could see Marschal sailing across the Italian frontier in a huge Rolls Royce, bowing slightly from side to side, with Ethiopian flags flying from the wings…

  It was no use; he still couldn’t sleep, even with half a bottle of brandy inside him. At four in the morning he was hunting again through the unsympathetic streets in search of humanity. Experience told him the only place he would find warmth was the railway station.

  The humanity was only just out of bed, perfunctorily washed, and not talkative: a smell of damp clothes quarrelled with that of fresh bread and coffee. The man next door had a powerful agricultural flavour of mouldy hay about him, had disdained shaving, and had given himself early-morning courage by putting rum in his coffee. The föhn was blowing and a thick fog hung in the station. It was horribly cold, but not freezing; on the mountains thick wet nasty snow was drizzling down. The winter sports, he thought with relief, were over.

  He had the prickling eyes and tender skin that come from not sleeping. His neighbour – how that damp loden coat smelt! – slept happily, waking miraculously at the exact moment his train came in: there, no doubt, he could have another little snooze between here and Salzburg, jolting to and fro with his mouth open in a sickly waft of rum.

  Van der Valk smoked and meditated, the kind of philosophical meditation one does have on workmen’s trains at five in the morning. It was still pitchblack out, blue and orange lights glaring livid through sleet, the mountains huge unguessable shapes brooding out there like statues on Easter Island. Van der Valk thought about passion.

  There are two kinds, he was thinking. There is the northern kind, that thinks it is high on emotion and is only high on imagination. That is us: me, the Germans, the Scandinavians, the English, the Americans. Much given to misty unreality and sobbing gulping melodrama; we don’t have passions, but we imagine them so strongly we delude ourselves that we are ready for any grand dramatic gesture. That is our romance, which is not romance at all, but romanticism. We weep buckets over passion, but we don’t have it; we commit suicide all the time, and it is from pure self-pity. Our grand gestures are prompted by a moist and profuse sense of theatre.

  Real passion belongs to Latin peoples. Read the newspaper in France or Italy. The crime of passion is a commonplace, whereas in Northern Europe it is extremely rare. For a man to shoot his wife, perhaps, and then himself, is a thing regarded as reasonable and psychologically probable. A man utterly lacking in imagination, a shop assistant, a traveller in chemical manure, will strangle his mistress, who has taken up with a sales-manager, walk into the local police station, and not cause even a lifted eyebrow.

  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 b
lood. 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 h
e 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.