I won’t dwell on the journey to Marseilles. It was my first flight, and it was out of the question to enjoy the experience, imprisoned in a portable cage in the luggage hold. I howled for the first time in years. I knew no one could hear me or do anything about it, but sometimes you just have to howl to give adequate expression to your feelings. When I was relieved from captivity in Marseilles I spent the first hour throwing reproachful looks at Svein, who eventually twigged what I was trying to say.
“It’s rules and regulations, old boy,” he said. “You know all about them, having been a police dog.”
From that point on, things began to look up. We stayed at an unpretentious hotel that allowed dogs in the rooms and where the cooking was excellent. I wasn’t taken with truffles, which struck me as the sort of thing I wouldn’t mind digging up and playing with, but certainly not using as food. Otherwise the things that Svein brought up to my room from the restaurant were more than acceptable, particularly as right from the start Svein made one of his most sensible decisions: This was to begin his investigations of the brothel areas of the town at the top end of the range.
He based this decision on his perception that Mrs. Humbleby, if she had ever been involved in the trade, had to have been a class act. He got in to see a young policeman by flashing his old Bergen Police ID, and he got a list of the streets where the customers were of the highest standing: aristocrats, local politicians, big businessmen, and friends of Jacques Chirac. I got the impression that the policeman had all this info at his fingertips not through the call of duty, but through that of the flesh.
I will spare you the details of our activities. Svein hawked his picture around substantial houses, once-respectable family houses, and other places pretending to be elite hotels. Usually he left me outside, which for once I found entirely acceptable. “Cherchez la chienne,” the motto of the macho philosopher dog Hamsun in the 1960s, was the order of the day for me. Prostitutes often have delightful dogs, just as rich women do, to enhance their charms. Probably they find them much more devoted and faithful than the male humans they meet in the course of business. Anyway, I had the time of my life.
It was in the morning of the second day that Svein hit a bull’s-eye. It was at a rather run-down establishment in the Avenue Victor Hugo, where the past-his-prime doorkeeper had plenty of time on his hands, morning customers being restricted to men on nights and merchant seamen with only a limited time on shore. He stood there, his arms folded in a tough pose, at his feet a sleeping bitch long past her smell-by date. I went outside in disgust, but Svein did his usual spiel about not being a policeman and not investigating a crime, and the man recognised the photograph at once.
“That’s Mme. de Stael — Chantal was her real name. She was in the Hôtel de Nuit, the star attraction.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Oh, until a year or two ago. Lovely person, though she knew her worth. I was a sturdy chap when she started. I could throw three or four troublemakers out single-handed. But I never scored with her, or even made the suggestion. She only took the class customers. Not that she was a snob. It was the fact that she knew her worth. She had the looks and she had the technique to give a man a good time, and she was the soul of discretion. School headmasters, MPs, civil servants from Brussels, priests, diplomats — they were all safe with her. She worked half the hours of the other girls but earned twice the money. When they gave me the push because they said I was past it she talked about all the girls going on strike, but everyone knew she was going to get married so nothing came of it.”
“Who was she going to marry?”
“Oh, some priest or other with a funny name. I don’t get these religions. France is supposed to be a secular state, but you wouldn’t think so, the airs these priests give themselves.”
“What nationality was he?”
“Oh, British. They’re the worst. They’re always worrying whether they should give a tip.”
And that was all we got out of him. Svein tried at the Hôtel de Nuit further up the road but a tank-like doorman threatened to throw him off a pier and we both retreated in confusion.
“We’ve got what we wanted, Loyd old son,” he said. He even decided not to fly home, but to take the train to Hamburg and then the boat. I don’t think this was for my comfort but because airline meals were below even his standards of culinary acceptability. We had an excellent trip, I made my contentment known, and as soon as we were home to our flat in Minde, Svein took me out to renew acquaintanceship with the smells and the leavings of my friends and enemies in that suburb.
My mind, though, was on other things.
I don’t know about you, but I always think reading, writing, and even talking are much overrated by our two-footed friends. Most of them use talking as an alternative to actually experiencing. I didn’t need much in the way of conversation with les chiennes de Marseilles. Still, as we walked along in the rain of Bergen past gardens soaked to an autumnal dinginess, past the last falling roses on their second flowering, I wondered how to communicate my unease to Svein. I was afraid he would just pass on our discoveries to the bishop, send in his bill, and leave it at that. But how to communicate what needed to be done? So often it became nothing more than a game of “I spy with my little eye,” and this is what happened. Because in the end all I could think of to do was to look at a flower bush, look at Svein meaningfully, and bark.
“What’s up, Loyd? Nothing’s wrong here.”
So we’d walk along a bit further till we came to another bush, and I’d do the stop, the meaningful look, and the loaded bark all over again. Finally Svein banged his forehead.
“I’ve got it. You’re right, Loyd. I must do a bit more work on that one.”
And it happened that when we got back to the flat and really began to settle back in Svein found on his answer machine a message from Chantal Humbleby: “I think we should arrange a meeting. Will you ring me?” Svein stayed up surfing the Internet, and in the morning he had his breakfast with a distinct air of self-satisfaction.
Svein made an appointment to meet Chantal at the vicarage the next day. She said that her husband was on a visit to Alesund and Kristiansund, so she would be alone. Svein said he did not take this as a reversion to her old profession, and he was obviously relieved that it didn’t. When we arrived that evening promptly at seven Chantal welcomed me ecstatically, Svein decorously, and she poured gin and tonics for them and put down a bowl of freshly boiled stewing steak for me. A woman who knew how to please men! I gobbled it down in thirty seconds flat and went back to the living room.
“So you see, Edwin was getting rather worried. ’E talked to Stan, who told ’im the drift of your conversation, ’e thought about the visit you made ’ere, the business of the glove, and ’e thought: We are being investigated. Everyone in Bergen, naturally, has heard of Loyd. So ’oo is paying? What is their interest in this? What are they trying to do to us?”
“I think I can answer that,” said Svein. “They are trying to get rid of you.”
“But why? We love it ’ere. Bergen is the most beautiful place in the world when it don’t rain. I ’ave a lovely stepdaughter and we are good friends as long as she don’t cook. Everyone ’as been very welcoming to me. So ’oo is doing this?... You ’ave been to France, ’ave you not?”