A Long Silence (24 page)

A little while later, after the shops had closed, she was in the Leliegracht. She had followed a ‘young man'. Was that Saint? He seemed too young. Was it perhaps ‘Richard', ‘the boy'? He semed too old, or perhaps too sophisticated, a poised languid figure who had strolled negligently through the ten minutes of bridge and waterside between the two points, sniffing pleasantly at the freshness of a spring evening which has ‘turned out nice after the rain'.

Arlette found herself outside a sex shop. She glanced with a scrap of distaste, for she had really no desire to catch herself loitering outside a sex shop, and crossed the road. From there she glanced up at the windows above, and suddenly down at the shop again, for something had caught her eye. These places – in her limited experience – were generally given a name combining prudery and prurience; ‘Eros' or suchlike, culled from the superficial popularizations of Freud and Frazer with which they gave themselves an air of respectability. She grinned a little – these people and their classical myths! Really – the golden apples of the Hesperides: now that was affectation.

Suddenly the grin froze around her mouth: she turned
abruptly and walked with a quick, stiff action out of the street.

She had just discovered the stripped tree of the false apples.

She knew.

I know, she told herself, over and over, as she walked back towards the Ruysdaelskade. I know. What am I going to do?

*

She did not wish to tell her confederates at all. They had helped her, undoubtedly, immensely. They had comforted and quieted her, found out the material points and pointers without which she would not have known what to look for, crystallized her shapeless thoughts and canalized her turmoil of unbalanced emotion and uncontrolled wishes. They had surrounded her with an affectionate understanding and solidarity in a way that Ruth for instance, who was too close to her, could not do. They had shown her that the police work, however concentrated and carefully directed, could strike nothing but empty air, and that this was nobody's fault. Least of all that of the police. Why else had Van der Valk been so careful not to involve any police mechanisms in his ‘private experiment'?

She had, too, promised Bosboom to respect his confidence. Nobody should find out from her the things he had told her. She could use the things she had learned, but she must respect their source. Still, she could not let her confederates down. They had promised her true alliance, and given it. Dear old Bates, who had made her understand herself. Dan, who had understood and linked up all the scraps of writing and got it all right, before she had been given the thread, by Bosboom, that pulled everything together. And the extraordinary force of Willy and Trix, with their blind loyalty to ‘one of themselves' – it was that which had given the whole thing, a pretty tangled metaphysical argument in the mind of, say, Hilary, a direction and a dynamic.

‘Y'can't just let a thing like that go,' Willy had said, trying to understand his own instincts. ‘ 'S like the time of the occupation. Mean t'say, no names no packdrill now, but I
knew plenty who made their pile then and never looked back since. Played their cards clever, y'know? I was only a lad, but I can say, could have had my own business, had all I got now, near enough fifteen years ago. Or Jews – I mean, we didn't like Jews all that well. Used to make jokes, harmless like, but meaning it a bit too, about moneylenders an' pawnbrokers an' stuff – you know … And well, I mean, I was a butcher and Jews don't eat our stuff, pork and all, and they got their own slaughterhouse, I mean, what was it to me? The Moffen started rounding up all the Jews and there's nothing but grief for the likes of us to think about it, let alone interfere. Why, we didn't even have hardly any here in the quarter, those days. But it stuck in my gullet somehow. I dunno, in the occupiers' time, I can't say I thought much about patriotism or the Queen or the government. Queen never did anything for me, y'know what I mean, and bloody government, bloodsuckers – anyway they all run away to England, it was us that had to live with the occupation. So why not go with it, not necessarily collaborating, get me – but just ride it out, close your eyes, look after number one? I never did get to work out why I done some things – Willy – Charlie, that's what I should've been called because that's what I was. But I got nothing to regret, never had. Sod it, I just feel that way. If I can do something now about Piet, that's what I'm going to do and hell with the consequences, don't care if they put me in jail f'r it.'

Exhausted, he reached for beer, drank the whole bottle, breathed out heavily, and suddenly said, ‘I felt like a Jew myself, sometimes. Times I was a Jew, come to that.'

No, Arlette had responsibilities both ways. Not just to Bosboom. He had had a wrestle with his conscience, no doubt, but so had Trix, who was accustomed to adding up her comforts and her cash-desk, and arriving at a perfectly satisfactory existence. And she had made up her mind a good deal quicker!

‘D'ja find this Bosboom?' asked the committee.

‘Yes – wasn't much use. Just a confirmation that there was something about the jewellers' – he used to be the manager
there. The watch just came up by the way – he happened to have one. He knows nothing about the boy.'

‘Or Saint?'

‘Just knows he exists – he's a nephew of sorts, of old Spire. But I've got better. I went there myself, I found out what the poem means – the thing about the false apples that puzzled us.'

‘No!' said Dan, vastly excited.

*

The house of Louis Prins was lucky in its cleaning women. There were three of them, noisy and muscular Amsterdamse housewives, with tongues that went as fast as their hands; indefatigable climbers upon ladders, whackers of carpets, clat-terers of buckets. Louis had had them for many years, and was as proud of them as of anything in the shop. He was fond of telling long comic stories about their terrifying energy, their appalling zeal, their shattering tactlessness, the years it had taken him to prevent them taking the cat o' nine tails to his carpets, scrubbing all the patina off faience, or slapping great wads of polish on to eighteenth-century marquetry. The day Jopie tripped over an easel and spilt a bucket of hot soapy water over a Saenredam canvas, one of his church interiors – ‘she thought she was scrubbing the pavement – I think she was deceived by the perspective'. The day Rinie fell off the ladder clutching an Empire chandelier to her amazing pneumatic bosom. The black Monday when Willie found a piece of Boulle and decided to polish the brass inlays …

Dick stood in the centre of his kingdom, his fingers relishing the surface of a fifteenth-century piece of oak found by Louis in a country presbytery in Belgian Limbourg, a bit wormy, but very nice. A grin crept out on his face; he had done the same thing, his first month, with another piece, covered his fingers in dust, and bawled out Jopie – youngest, noisiest and quickest-tempered of the three. She had piled roaring in upon Louis, along the lines of ‘If that snot-nose is going to start teaching me my job …' The old man had been upset. ‘You're a good boy, Dickie, a very good boy, but if I had to choose between losing you and losing my Jopie …' But Dick had
learned quickly – he had learned everything quickly. Intelligent and sensitive, naturally attracted to objects of worth and beauty, he had attacked his own ignorance and inexperience with a heat of enthusiasm which had made him … well, he thought grinning, pretty near as indispensable as Jopie anyhow. He could handle more now than just tourists. True, the older customers insisted on ‘seeing Louis' just like the businessmen who insisted on seeing Larry. And while he had picked up a great deal, he still knew nothing when it came to the buying, linch-pin as he had understood of an antique business, and that was one thing which couldn't be learned in a hurry.

‘Takes years; years; there's no short cut,' as Louis said with his heavy, chesty sigh, ‘and who's to do that after I'm done with I can't tell. Larry's no good – he's not even interested.'

One saw little of Larry nowadays. He had taken a very small margin of time before handing over all the day-to-day routine. It was Dick now who performed the ritual of the keys and the cash float, checked the alarms, did the paperwork of stocktaking and invoicing, and handled all the modern stuff, the watches and knicknacks, reproduction jewellery and silver-smithery, and ‘managed' in rather more than name. He had used charm on the three ‘girls', made jokes with them, had them eating out of his hand … He had a proper salary now, and a percentage. He had acquired a pair of Cartier links for ‘an apple and an egg'; he had at last got some decent clothes. The Lindengracht had been left far behind. No more student lodgings! He had indeed moved into Larry's flat.

For Larry had been away for lengthening periods, culminating in an absence of three weeks, ‘in the Caribbean', he had said vaguely: certainly he had come back with a beautiful tan, light and unobtrusive, like everything of Larry's.

‘I'd really like you to keep the flat warmed and aired. I might even end by handing it over to you altogether, but that's all still in the womb of time, mm?' with a chuckle at ‘his phrase'. ‘You're doing very well, Dicky, very well. No, you needn't pay me rent. Just keep an eye on the little shop – yes, the Apples. I'll show you how; it's quite easy. It's nothing
very spectacular, but it earns me a very pretty little dividend: more silly young girls in the world than there are dirty old men, but both have their uses as you'll discover. In the good old phrase, crumpet sells when cotton and corn are a drag on the market. That girl I have running it is ideal – a real fanatic – women's lib,' with his easy light laugh. ‘A treasure. Go easy with her, Dicky boy; she has a fire in her belly, has our little sister Eileen.'

At times, thought Dick, standing dreamily feeling the primitively-smoothed surface with its amazing patina, I feel as though I were running a temperature. Almost like someone with TB or something. Bouts of feverish excitement. Learning to keep that easy cool evenness Larry has is the hardest of all, when one is a success, has one's foot on the ladder. I contrast myself now with what I was only a few months ago! Knowing nothing, able for nothing, totally empty-headed. Incredible! No wonder I feel the blood going to my head now and again …

It hadn't always been easy! In fact it had been very hard-bought, some of the winnings, taking fearful tolls of nerve, straining every atom of him. There had been Daisy – Lordy, what a fool she had made of him! The reminiscence was just one hot agonized blush. Worse than a tool – a toy he had been in her hard, cunning, oh-so-skilful fingers. Or the incident, as Larry had called it, the only time he had ever referred to it, at the time the heat had really been on, with plain-clothes policemen in pairs running around Holland checking everything they could think of and the papers were full of mysterious hints about their being hot on the trail of heaven only knew what. It had all blown over, exactly as Larry had prophesied. He had thought of everything! The incident had taken every scrap of nerve he had, as well as all the training Larry had been able to inject into him, but he had managed.

It wasn't a thing he liked to think about, even now. It was a damned unpleasant sore spot, only half-cicatrized despite everything. Still, he had to face it now and again, to show he was on top and wasn't letting it get him down. It had been Larry after all – his idea, his responsibility. His plan and his action in all save ‘the surgical detail'. ‘I can't hold the
scalpel for you, Dicky boy; that's the one thing one has to learn to do on one's own or the whole exercise is pointless – that's what separates the men from the boys.' Well yes, of course, he'd understood that and accepted it. It was over. That ghost wouldn't come back.

‘Mightn't it be a trick?' he had asked Larry tensely, after it had all disappeared from the press reports, when all the police activity both advertised and unadvertised had died away – Larry knew all about that; he had sources of information everywhere. ‘I mean, they always say they never close the file, never loosen the teeth.' A shrug. ‘Teeth have to have a grip, if we're insisting on these emotional metaphors. They've no hold anywhere; nothing at all.' And so it had proved. One couldn't ever relax vigilance, but that was just what Larry called ‘keeping in training'. ‘Never let yourself get out of training. Especially when – like me, my dear boy – you begin to approach middle-age. A real professional can't afford that mistake – gravest one of all, the temptation to get softened by comfort.'

And yet with it all Dick had what he could only describe to himself as a sort of uneasy nervous hunger. Very like that first day, which he often thought of, when he had been going to that absurd piddling job and stopped in the Spui to eat a sandwich from the snackbar at the corner! He hadn't needed that sandwich, yet he'd had to have it. The incident was a bit like that. To this day he was anguished by the thought of ‘not knowing' – had nobody, the police, or anyone else, ever had the wildest or most unconfirmable of ‘notions'? Larry said of course they couldn't. Quite out of the question. ‘There is of course always one tiny risk,' he had said. Before, not after. He had never spoken about it, after.

‘As in all surgery, even the most minor – always that one tiny risk. Naturally, one would never accept odds against – that in no circumstances. It's from the departure-point of even money that an intelligent man will consent just to look at an operation – any operation. He then works to narrow those odds further in his favour. He gets, let's say, nine-to-four on. At that point he might accept a bet. But he hedges it, Dick. He
lays off – by betting on every other possibility as well. Always back both sides, my boy, and that at a moment when the odds are right for you. Now here, owing to this lamentable blabbermouth of yours, you've stacked cards against you. You went to this man and you told him some silly things. Now the odds are still very considerably in your favour. Point one, the man is not on any active duty. Two, the things you told him are fundamentally so trivial as well as so silly that the probability of his disregarding or forgetting the whole thing is overwhelming. He wrote nothing down – you're certain of that. He began to, but stopped. There is no official move afoot, or we'd have learned of it long ago. No button has been pressed, no machinery set in movement. There's nothing except a curiosity aroused by a half-recalled piece of gossip. Those odds are still slightly too large for my liking. We narrow them by removing this awkward grain of sand. That the grain of sand may be followed by others through the same hole – we close the hole. That another grain, too microscopically small to be seen, has already got through – those are the odds now facing you. They are so small as to be negligible. If a surgeon did not neglect the odds on his patient being a dangerous active haemophiliac there would be no surgery – nobody would dare incise as much as a finger.'