Brother Death Read online

  Dan poured out three glasses of Piper-Heidsieck.

  “Well, Eric, here’s luck,” said the girl. “I hear that you’re leaving us.”

  “You heard quite correctly,” said Rumbold. He sipped his champagne, remembering that he had eaten no lunch.

  “I think I have some business upstairs,” said Dan. He ascended the ladder which led to the bar. They watched the oscillations of his buttocks.

  “What a bastard you are, aren’t you?” said the girl.

  “The question is debatable,” said Rumbold. He gazed at the girl’s nose, which he himself had broken. The nose now lay supine, its bulb casting a shadow across the freckled upper lip. She was a big girl, a Brynhilda, not really very young but with a profusion of flesh upon chest and hip which, cushion-like, would always lure the jaded head.

  “What a bastard you are,” she repeated.

  “Here,” said Rumbold, and from his wallet he removed thousand-franc notes to the number of ten. He laid them fanwise on the ruptured champagne case.

  The girl watched him for a moment, then seized the first two notes. She began to tear them.

  “Not like that,” said Rumbold. “Tear straight across. You’ll find them easier to repair.”

  He walked up the stairs. “Where’s the copper?” he said to Dan.

  Dan nodded towards the corner of the bar, beside the band. Rumbold advanced. A face clutching a pipe between false teeth sprang out at him.

  “Hullo! Archambaud,” he said. “Your coffee looks cold.”

  “I get no expenses on this job,” said the detective. “You may order me a Fine à l’eau.”

  Rumbold sat down.

  “Been waiting long?” he enquired politely.

  “Two hours,” said the detective.

  “You must be very ill-informed,” said Rumbold. “I have been at my consulate half the morning.” He shouted to Dan, who came over from the bar bearing a tray and two drinks. “Thank you, Dan,” said Rumbold. Behind him the orchestra were packing their instruments. The musical part of the audition was over, and the stage was now occupied by a young man telling dirty stories in rhyme.

  “So you are leaving us at last,” said the detective Archambaud. “We shall miss you.”

  “It’s funny you should say that,” said Rumbold. “Quite a number of people have said it and—do you know—I think that some of them actually mean it.”

  “It is but good manners to express regret at your departure,” said Archambaud.

  Rumbold grinned. “Yet for you it’s something more than good manners, is it not?” he said. “For you, it is a matter for relief.”

  Archambaud said nothing. Rumbold considered the man with amusement. It always amused him to consider Archambaud for he knew so much about him. In appearance, the detective was squat, broad-shouldered, bow-legged, with dark hair, a low forehead and heavy eyebrows. He resembled a caricature of Daladier in the role of Bonaparte, and, like the politician, he had been born in the Vaucluse. Archambaud had not always been attached to the squad dealing with Black Market activities. Before the war he had been in the drug squad, specialising in the arrest and interrogation of Chinese seamen. Archambaud had been very good at interrogations. After the armistice, his zeal and efficiency had been brought to the attention of the Vichy authorities with the result that Archambaud had been transferred to duties connected with the suppression of patriotic and anti-German activity. As a politically enlightened citizen, with an eye for the main chance, Archambaud had of course realised that the precarious political equilibrium of Pétain’s last years was unlikely to endure. He had taken his precautions, and in Resistance circles the thought had been pretty general (encouraged by a couple of spectacular escapes) that Archambaud was a good fellow, who merely pretended to do his duty, and who, in secret, was a friend of the free.

  At the liberation, Archambaud had been awarded the rosette of the Légion d’honneur. Life had appeared to smile upon him, and life, indeed, might have continued to smile upon him, because dead men tell no tales. Unfortunately, two of the men whom Archambaud had reason to believe buried beneath six inches of lime were alive, and in singularly robust health.

  These men had been friends—colleagues even—of Rumbold’s. We cannot, at this early stage in a long book, go into the details of their relationship here, but take my word for it that it existed, that it was close, binding, and that in consequence of it Rumbold knew a great deal more about Archambaud than Archambaud would have preferred.

  For Archambaud had no desire . . . no desire whatever to be arrested, to be tried upon a charge of collaboration, to spend twenty years at Clairvaux, or . . . more dreadful alternative . . . to take hesitant steps in the dawn between a cell and the guillotine.

  Rumbold, the knowledge in his possession, had been quick to point out the situation to Archambaud; and Archambaud, who was, after all, no fool, had acquiesced. And this is why it always amused Rumbold so intensely merely to look at Archambaud, for he considered it ineffably funny that the detective, who should have arrested him months before for the distribution of forged food tickets, was unable to do so through fear of the counter-accusations which Rumbold might make.

  Rumbold thought all this very droll indeed. He considered it even more droll that he was now about to extract—under a vow of eternal silence, and conditional upon his departure—the sum of 90,000 francs from Archambaud, who, having no private income of his own, had almost certainly stolen the money from the Police Pension fund.

  He liked to think (for few men had a more acute sense of justice than Rumbold) of the day, eighteen months, perhaps two years hence, when Archambaud would be arrested and suspended from his duties for the defalcation of public funds.

  “Have you brought the money?” he said now pleasantly.

  “I have brought it,” said Archambaud.

  “Converted into pesetas, I hope,” said Rumbold.

  “Converted into pesetas,” said Archambaud.

  “I have been thinking,” said Rumbold. “The journey to the Spanish frontier is a long one. I would not like anything untoward . . . my arrest, for example . . . to take place upon that journey!”

  “Nothing untoward will occur,” said Archambaud.

  “I am grateful for that assurance,” said Rumbold.

  Archambaud leant forward. He knocked over his Fine à l’eau. “Nothing will happen, Rumbold,” he said. “But I, too, need an assurance. You have persecuted me long enough. I must be certain that I shall never set eyes upon you again.”

  “Pass over the cash, will you?” said Rumbold. Archambaud did so. Rumbold pocketed the envelope. “But, my dear fellow,” he said, “with the best will in the world, how can I give you such a guarantee? Circumstances may throw us together again. Marseilles is a big city. It is always possible that I shall revisit it.”

  And he gazed at the detective mockingly. Archambaud decided to essay another argument.

  “The Gentlemen in London will be glad to see you, I expect,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t count on that if I were you, Archambaud,” said Rumbold. “Long-distance treachery very seldom succeeds. The affair is, I can assure you, purely domestic. It is between me and them. I am not, as I have several times warned you, an ordinary deserter. If you attempt to harm me when I am gone it is yourself who will be destroyed, and that very speedily.”

  “You are a cunning devil, aren’t you?” said the detective.

  “A compliment such as that, from you,” said Rumbold, “deserves a drink. Shall we have one?”

  He waved to Dan. “The Inspector looks tired, Dan,” he said. “I think you should mix him one of your specials.”

  “I am always glad to do anything for the Inspector,” said Dan. “The Inspector and I are good friends . . . aren’t we good friends, Inspector?”

  “
Oh, by the way, Dan,” said Rumbold, “I shall be leaving a sealed envelope with you. Here it is. It concerns the Inspector. Break the seal sometime and show him the contents, I’m sure he will find them most interesting.”

  “Anything you say, Eric,” said Dan. He took the envelope, winking.

  “Yes,” said Rumbold, when Dan had withdrawn. “Yes, I hate to leave with a guilty conscience, Inspector. The thought, in fact, is most distasteful to me.”

  “Is that so?” said Archambaud.

  “It is very much so,” said Rumbold. “For example, I would not like to think that, when I am gone, you might proceed to the arrest of certain of my late and now defenceless confederates.”

  “And what makes you think that?” said Archambaud.

  Rumbold grinned. “Because you earn quite a large salary, my friend, and are obliged to justify it by results . . . even at some small risk to yourself.”

  “What is in that letter?” said Archambaud.

  “Oh, never fear: Dan is most discreet. He would never stoop to blackmail, which is why I have chosen him in preference to our mutual friend, Max. No . . . Dan will be a kind of trustee for me, Inspector. That’s all.”

  “Rumbold,” said Archambaud heavily. “There is no man in Marseilles whom I would better like to kill than you.”

  “Interrogate, Inspector . . . you mean ‘interrogate’, surely? Ah, here are the drinks. You’d better have mine as well as yours. I’m in a hurry. No . . . don’t get up. Let our farewell be as informal as our long association. Goodbye, Dan; look me up in London sometime . . . and Inspector, not too many plain clothes men on the station, please. You know I prefer to travel incognito.”

  He rose. He shook hands with Dan, and smiled at the Inspector, who scowled in return. He left the room. On the stage the young raconteur paused in the middle of an obscene poem to watch him leave.

  “Flack.” As he parted the curtains which led to the vestibule, the girl, Odette, stepped forward. The blow was neatly delivered. An embossed ring on her finger grazed his nose. He stepped back, surveying her.

  “A Spitfire to the last, I see,” he said. With his handkerchief he dabbed at the trickle of blood upon his nostrils. He moved over to the counter, handed across his check, received in return his valise from the commissionaire.

  The girl stood watching him. Her fists were clenched.

  “Have you succeeded in piecing the torn notes together yet?” he said. “I can recommend stamp paper. It’s admirably adhesive . . . like yourself, dear.”

  “You’re very pleased with yourself now,” she said. “But you’ll come to a bad end one day.”

  “You think so, dear? I disagree. I fear that I have flourished too long to be easily uprooted.”

  He stepped out upon the pavement. Behind him the swing doors of the club circulated lazily. A passing taxi slowed down, its driver touting for custom. Rumbold waved the man away. The station lay near-by and his valise was not heavy.

  At the corner of the Cours Devilliers he stood looking for a moment at the church of St. Vincent de Paul. On the steps of the church a great fir-tree had been set up in preparation for Christmas, and even now, in the last light of the murky afternoon, children were decorating the tree with silver streamers, with Chinese lanterns and with globes of many colours.

  Rumbold watched the children for a while; then he ascended the steps and entered the porch of the church. A priest was standing in the porch, making pencil corrections to a notice. Rumbold nudged him.

  “Is there anywhere I can leave my bag for a moment?” he said.

  “You may leave it here, my son,” said the priest. “No one will steal it.”

  “Well, I’ll take a chance,” said Rumbold. “I’m sure you believe what you’re saying.”

  He set down his bag and entered the church. The hour for Benediction was drawing near, and over the altar, far away, two vergers fussed about a pile of sacred accoutrements. On the right of the church, in the Lady Chapel, the Crèche had been set up, and a workman under the supervision of two ladies was unloading a sack of straw and spreading it artistically about the Manger. Rumbold moved slowly down the aisle, stepping carefully to avoid two women kneeling before the seventh Station of the Cross. A cluster of seated penitents, who were awaiting confession, eyed him furtively, fearful lest he might forestall them with their chosen confessors.

  Rumbold installed himself two or three pews behind these people. He sat quietly, not kneeling, listening to the murmur of voices from the confessionals. Several priests were evidently in session. From the nearest box, only a few yards away, the conversation was quite audible:

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. . . .”

  “In what did your sin consist, my son?”

  Resolutely, determined not to hear, Rumbold turned away his head. His eyes met those of St. Joseph, who, bearded, soberly clad, and holding the Child in his arms, looked down at Rumbold from a niche.

  “Courage,” said Rumbold, “Courage.” He returned the stare of St. Joseph with distaste.

  Two

  At the beginning of the Second World War there lived in the little town of Hasselt, in Belgium, a furniture maker named Sluys, his English wife and their eighteen-year-old son.

  Denis Sluys, the father, a man of Flemish stock, who spoke French only with difficulty and always unwillingly, had served with some distinction in the Belgian Army during the First Great War. Wounded, he had been evacuated to England, where, passing from one convalescent camp to another, he had stayed long enough at last in Yorkshire to enable him to court and to marry a Miss Colclough, the not unattractive daughter of a Bradford baker.

  The war at an end, the couple had returned to Hasselt, where, assisted by some slight transfer of capital from Yorkshire, the husband had set himself up firmly, and to his growing advantage, in the furniture trade.

  He was never to become a rich man, but he did achieve that small degree of affluence and that position of respectability to which his talents entitled him and his circumstances demanded of him.

  In 1932 the old man, the Yorkshire baker, died from a cancer of the throat after a lingering illness, to be followed to the crematorium by his wife, not six months later. Up to this time, the visits of the Belgian family to England had been fulfilled as an annual duty. Now, however, though they did not cease altogether, they became more infrequent, for the baker having spawned no other child save this one who had married the foreigner, surviving relatives of the English line were scarce: consisting, indeed, only of some second cousins and an aunt.

  So far, so good. These are facts, easily verified, and verified, indeed, some years later when a Court of Inquiry was established . . . by which time both Sluys and his wife were dead in their turn, and their son Pieter was also about to die: though this not of his own free will.

  The rest, particularly in regard to the character of the son, and of the motives which inspired him, must remain a matter of speculation. It is easy to believe that he was shocked by the threat to his mother, for example, but this in no way explains his subsequent actions nor the zeal with which he performed them.

  In 1940, at the time of the German occupation of the Netherlands and Belgium, Pieter Sluys was reaching manhood. Sexually he had reached what he believed to be manhood very much earlier . . . at the achievement of puberty, perhaps. A fumbler beneath servant girls’ skirts, a ripper of waitresses’ bodices, he revealed himself in these, as in other, pursuits a savage. With that extreme blondness, almost whiteness, of hair which the Germans admire, but which the Flemings distrust; with his squat but sturdy and far from ungainly body, his blue eyes, Pieter even then had admirers who believed that butter could not melt in his mouth.

  One day, not very long after the German invasion, and following a check through the registers of the Town Hall—a check which had resulted in the discovery of
his mother’s English birth—young Pieter Sluys was summoned to the Kommandantur. Here he met a certain Colonel von Krebs, a man, it would seem, of many parts and much initiative. What passed between the pair is not known, but a few days later Pieter, who had in the meantime been spending money freely, approached his father with the information that, Belgium proving unbearable under the German occupation, he intended to make his way immediately to England.

  The father, who was certainly no Germanophile, approved of this intention, overcame the natural scruples of his wife, and provided the boy with a considerable sum in ready money. Poor man, he did not know, and thanks to his early death he never did know, of the true facts behind his son’s decision.

  In August of 1940 young Pieter left Hasselt on foot for the French frontier. Beyond the confines of the town, however, a car drew up beside him, and he stepped into it. This car took young Pieter to Givet, on the French frontier of the Ardennes. At Givet, Pieter transferred to a second car, which took him to Paris, and in Paris, after a night of exuberance in the Rue Mouffetard, Pieter joined a third car which took him by easy stages as far as St. Jean-Pied-de-Port, on the Spanish frontier, where, after receiving, reading and returning the contents of an envelope, he was left to his own devices. All the cars in which he had taken passage had been German.

  The intelligence, the cunning and the wiliness of the Germans in this matter of Pieter Sluys deserve great praise. Yet this praise will not easily be accorded by the reader unless he is first made aware of certain facts.

  In the first years of that war the German organisation in England was competent and widespread; yet, at the same time, timid, unadventurous and easily “blown”. The reasons for this were twofold. First, agents had been established in their territory too long in advance of the outbreak of war, with the result that the opposition had got to know of the presence of some, who, shadowed, had revealed the presence of others. Secondly, all the men employed (with three exceptions of very inferior capabilities) were German by birth, having in consequence to add the pretence of being English to the pretence of being book-keepers, newsagents or whatever role had been allotted to them.