SIX

Castang yawned and shifted his backside on the stiff, slippery railway cushions. The train was travelling fast with a steady driving rhythm, through a shower of rain that blurred upon the windows. He looked at his watch, rubbing his wrist where the handcuff bit into it. Over halfway. He looked at his prisoner, curled up and sleeping peacefully, tucked into his corner like a hermit crab, a sort of grin on his face; happy as… as a moth in a ragbag, as Sabine said. In that dusty dishevelled house she pottered around in, full of all that art she never looked at. Very like this fellow here in his storeroom full of rags, doing crossword puzzles: Sabine too cut out bits of paper and strewed them around. They made a pair, didn’t they, both uneasy and alert for surprise or treachery, both of them wanting peace and not getting it. Even if the resemblance ended there, it was still striking enough. He looked at his passenger with quite a friendly eye. Shooting at me this morning, though nobody would think it to look at you now. An uncomplicated, straightforward relationship: we understand one another. Whereas Sabine… the thought of her had niggled at him then, and still niggled at him, even now. Like sticky resin on one’s hand; the more you try to brush it off, the worse it gets.

     ‘We aren’t any further,’ he had told Richard. ‘Not that it was a waste of time. And it’s real enough, and not just her fantasies. Nothing of course that we could do about it even if we wanted to.’

     He remembered the conversation as having been carried on in bits and pieces.

     He had got back just in time to pick Richard up at the PJ office and go with him to the court. It had been an unofficial visit, and not a thing for which wearisome reports would have to get written.

     Instead, a series of little sketches made standing in a lavatory doorway while Richard was scrubbing his fingernails; in the car stopped at a red light on the way over to the Palais; on a bench in a draughty corridor, outside the courtroom.

     ‘It’s a nice house all right; be really good if it was tidied up a bit. Inside and out, like the nest of one of those animals children have. A hamster, is it? They tear everything up.

     ‘Place is full of antiques, valuable enough, too, by the look of them. Strewn about everywhere as though they’d no importance. Well of course, to her, they haven’t.

     ‘She told him I was a dealer. Plausible enough, but just the wrong thing to say. Put the boy’s back up straight away. He really might be frightened of her selling the place, over his head. Certainly curious and suspicious, obsessively so. Looked at me as though I were going to take his lollipop away, just for being there. No exaggeration on her side there.

     ‘Peculiar tactlessness she has. Gift for putting everyone’s back up. One could easily sympathise with the boy, if he’d let you. This woodshed key – I’m sure he hid it. At the same time I could easily imagine her hiding it. Not out of malice, of course. Some vague idea of putting it in a safe place and then forgetting. Done so stupidly that you could believe it was malice, that she was lying, being contrariwise. They’re at odds, so each little step puts them more at variance and drives them further apart. One can get a divorce for things like that, but one can’t divorce Ma.’

     ‘What’s the boy like?’ asked Richard.

     ‘Quite bright perhaps, but pretty futile. Wouldn’t want to say more, on that acquaintance.’

     ‘What’s it he does?’

     ‘Administration something, in local government. She told me but she’s vague herself. She hardly knows, you could guess, partly because she’s not much interested and perhaps even more because she’s humiliated about it. She had big ambitions and they came to nothing.’

     ‘Reading too much into it,’ said Richard.

     ‘I don’t think so; it’s consequent enough. The boy had a lot of promise but didn’t live up to it. The father, she told me, pulled a string to get him a job in bureaucracy, and I’d say the boy was just the type to be frustrated about that. A familiar type, no, the ones who are always getting brilliant schemes in their heads but can’t carry anything out. We see plenty of them.’

     ‘You saying this boy is a potential criminal?’ asked Richard with no enthusiasm. At that rate, his voice meant, you’d need a police force the size of the Russian army.

     ‘Not that daft,’ jogging Richard’s elbow as the usher appeared in the courtroom doorway.

     Castang looked at his watch, such a commonplace thing as not to be worth mentioning, except that if your watch-wrist is chained to a person asleep whom you don’t want to wake, it takes more trouble.

     It was the very stupidity of it all which made it interesting – the ability of someone like Sabine to get into a tangle. Who could be threatening Sabine? The boy? When such a thing was directly against his own interest?

     And even if the boy was annoying, driven by obscure psychological needs and torments, why had she so little common sense? She had only to say, more or less, ‘This is mine and stays mine, and now leave me alone with this clearly understood: after my death you can do as you please.’ Some agent had offered her a tempting buy, so that she would be hesitating between snapping it up or holding on in the belief that land prices would go higher yet.

     The tragedy, as far as there was one, was her inability to do one thing or the other. He shrugged. Artists…!

     It wasn’t ‘police work’, not as the public understood that phrase anyhow. Reassuring muddled old ladies didn’t sound like the criminal brigade. Not exactly the casual drawl telling the press that we’ve this minute put our unerring finger on ten kilos of heroin. Still, if a few more commissaires were like Richard the cops might do better.

     Few were. Much more numerous were the technicians, aseptic and sterilised, talking about the ‘underworld’ as though it were germs. Castang, though a youngish cop with a university degree, didn’t think much of his more pasteurised colleagues. He knew too that Richard was right in saying that there was small use in pontificating about crime. A cop was there to obey orders.

     Castang did though talk about the subject, sometimes, with a few of his colleagues, with Vera, with a few friends, one or two of whom were in the business too, like Colette Delavigne who was a juvenile court magistrate. They had to take the ‘underworld’ literally. No use discussing its deprived childhood: it was motivated by nothing but money. Brutish, sometimes vicious savages like this one chained to him, distorted by greed. Nibelungs, swarming out of black smoky fissures in the earth’s crust.

     You couldn’t talk about crime – said Vera, said Colette, said even he himself when not being too blunt and cop-like – without defining it, getting rid of the confusion, the never-drying stream of cant upon the subject. Look – he said – there is crime, which is a technical infringement of a formal code. It can be combated by technical means, a technician’s mentality. And there is evil, which is an abstract idea but real, and technicians, except the gifted ones (who are rare in the ill-paid and ill-considered ranks of the police) cannot cope with an ethical abstraction.

     There was even a doubled confusion. A lot of highly educated and intelligent people would say that the penal code, being based on Christian and Jewish ethics, was artificial nonsense, criminals being the faulty product of an imperfect society and evil being a superstition.

     Castang didn’t know a single cop who’d be starry-eyed enough to go for that one.

     He did know a few who went to the other extreme, equally barbarian, which was to claim that everything which was a breach of the code must automatically be evil. This, the guillotine-and-treadmill brigade, vociferous about indulgent judges, was as bad as the other but less, perhaps, to be blamed. They’d been mugged, quite often.

     Castang thought about it, a good deal, but didn’t let it get him down. He paraphrased Goethe, who said that if you saw things done, persistently in the wrong way, you must not complain, but continue, in the measure of your capacities, to do things the right way. Even if this maxim was of small comfort, like most other maxims, to cops. Goethe should have been in the police!

     Castang was pretty lucky in his superior. Richard could go on a lot about a disciplined body, but he gave responsibility to subordinates. This is a rare trait in bureaucrats, whose central weakness is not wanting to stick their neck out, for fear of official disapproval further up the hierarchy. Too many commissaires were just too frightened, whereas Richard would call you in and chuck a folder across the desk.

     ‘Seems a complicated affair, this. I haven’t looked at it; don’t propose to, either. Do as you think best.’ After getting your feet in your mouth a few times, you learned to do quite well.

     Richard would stay in his provincial corner too, probably, for a long time. Higher authority deplored this state of affairs, but preferred not to do anything about it. Cops still got promoted for twenty years of imbecile subservience and craven entrenchment behind the regulations, but Castang still liked his job. And Richard was an ally, in difficult situations where a peace-loving policeman might feel uneasily exposed; to some evil-minded magistrate, to tart editorials in the local paper, or to Paris, pointing out to the Prefect that the electoral district was wobbly and don’t let the cops just sit on their hands.

     Why had Richard allowed time to be spent on Sabine? Castang thought he would never know. Probably just eccentricity; caprice.

     The train slowed. He was home.