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Puppet on a Chain
Alistair MacLean


From the acclaimed master of action and suspense. The all time classic.Paul Sherman of Interpol's Narcotics Bureau flies to Amsterdam on the trail of a dope king.With enormous skill the atmosphere is built up: Amsterdam with its canals and high houses; stolid police; psychopaths; women in distress and above all – murder.










ALISTAIR MACLEAN


Puppet on a Chain











Copyright (#ulink_139eb90a-370e-5840-80fc-9d9469611cdd)


Harper An imprint of HarperCollinspublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)

First published in Great Britain by

Collins 1969

Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1969

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780006157519

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007289370

Version: 2018-08-31


To Fred and Ina




Contents


Cover (#u9dbda735-dff6-50a8-b700-531d2cd7c996)

Title Page (#u757cee8a-1638-5b29-9349-b674e76f3084)

Copyright (#ueea6459c-fbf1-56cb-8c9f-ecfb0747085d)

Dedication (#ue4998170-9350-53eb-be2b-a6f796c30f47)

ONE (#u29a05ab2-ddac-5b41-b73b-7f2c48367f3a)

TWO (#uce09acf2-f1b6-5317-acd4-315acdeb58b1)

THREE (#u9cf46873-86c2-5e57-9c88-f4232bb94d62)

FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)

THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

By Alistair MacLean (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




ONE (#ulink_04f259d9-70da-5ed2-9669-b761084ddb25)


‘We shall be arriving in Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, in just a few minutes.’ Mellifluous, accentless, the Dutch stewardess’s voice could have been precisely duplicated on any of a dozen European airlines. ‘Please fasten your seatbelts and extinguish your cigarettes. We hope you have enjoyed your flight: we are sure you will enjoy your stay in Amsterdam.’

I’d spoken briefly to the stewardess on the way across. A charming girl, but given to a certain unwarranted optimism in her outlook on life in general and I had to take issue with her on two points: I hadn’t enjoyed the flight and I didn’t expect to enjoy my stay in Amsterdam. I hadn’t enjoyed the flight because I hadn’t enjoyed any flight since that day two years ago when the engines of a DC 8 had failed only seconds after take-off and led to the discovery of two things: that an unpowered jet has the gliding characteristics of a block of concrete and that plastic surgery can be very long, very painful, very expensive and occasionally not very successful. Nor did I expect to enjoy Amsterdam even though it is probably the most beautiful city in the world with the friendliest inhabitants you’ll find anywhere: it’s just that the nature of my business trips abroad automatically precludes the enjoyment of anything.

As the big KLM DC 8 I’m not superstitious, any plane can fall out of the sky sank down, I glanced round its crowded interior. The bulk of the passengers, I observed, appeared to share my belief in the inherent madness of flying: those who weren’t using their finger-nails to dig holes in KLM’s upholstery were either leaning back with excessive nonchalance or chattering with the bright gay animation of those brave spirits who go to their impending doom with a quip on their smiling lips, the type who would have waved cheerfully to the admiring throngs as their tumbril drew up beside the guillotine. In short, a pretty fair cross-section of humanity. Distinctly law abiding. Definitely non-villainous. Ordinary: even nondescript.

Or perhaps that’s unfair the nondescript bit, I mean. To qualify for that rather denigrating description there must exist comparative terms of reference to justify its use: unfortunately for the remainder of the passengers there were two others aboard that plane who would have made anyone look nondescript.

I looked at them three seats behind me on the other side of the aisle. This was hardly a move on my part to attract any attention as most of the men within eyeing distance of them had done little else but look at them since leaving Heathrow Airport: not to have looked at them at all would have been an almost guaranteed method of attracting attention.

Just a couple of girls sitting together. You can find a couple of girls sitting together almost anywhere but you’d have to give up the best years of your life to the search of finding a couple like those. One with hair as dark as a raven’s wing, the other a shining platinum blonde, both clad, albeit marginally, in mini-dresses, the dark one in an all-white silk affair, the blonde all in black, and both of them possessed as far as one could see and one could see a great deal of figures that demonstrated clearly the immense strides forward made by a select few of woman-kind since the days of Venus di Milo. Above all, they were strikingly beautiful, but not with that vapid and empty brand of unformed good looks which wins the Miss World contest: curiously alike, they had the delicately formed bone structure, the cleanly cut features, and the unmistakable quality of intelligence which would keep them still beautiful twenty years after the faded Miss Worlds of yesterday had long since given up the unequal competition.

The blonde girl smiled at me, a smile at once pert and provocative, but friendly. I gave her my impassive look, and as the trainee plastic surgeon who had worked his will on me hadn’t quite succeeded in matching up the two sides of my face, my impassive expression is noticeably lacking in encouragement, but still she smiled at me. The dark girl nudged her companion, who looked away from me, saw the reproving frown, made a face and stopped smiling. I looked away.

We were less than two hundred yards from the end of the runway now and to take my mind off the near-certainty of the undercarriage crumpling as soon as it touched the tarmac, I leaned back, closed my eyes and thought about the two girls. Whatever else I lacked, I reflected, no one could claim that I picked my assistants without regard to some of the more aesthetic aspects of life. Maggie, the dark girl, was twenty-seven and had been with me for over five years now: she was clever to just short of the point of being brilliant, she was methodical, painstaking, discreet, reliable and almost never made a mistake in our business there is no such thing as a person who never makes mistakes. More important, Maggie and I were fond of each other and had been for years, an almost essential qualification where a momentary loss of mutual faith and interdependence could have consequences of an unpleasant and permanent nature: but we weren’t, so far as I knew, too fond of each other, for that could have been equally disastrous.

Belinda, blonde, twenty-two, Parisian, half French, half English, on her first operational assignment, was an almost totally unknown quantity to me. Not an enigma, just unknown as a person: when the Sûreté lend you one of their agents, as they had lent Belinda to me, the accompanying dossier on that agent is so overwhelmingly comprehensive that no relevant fact in that person’s background or past is left unmentioned. On a personal basis all I had been able to gather so far was that she was markedly lacking in that respect – if not unstinted admiration – that the young should accord to their elders and professional superiors, which in this case was myself. But she had about her that air of quietly resourceful competence which more than outweighed any reservations she might hold about her employer.

Neither girl had ever been to Holland before, which was one of the main reasons why they were accompanying me there: apart from which, lovely young girls in our unlovely profession are rarer than fur coats in the Congo and hence all the more unlikely to attract the attention of the suspicious and the ungodly.

The DC 8 touched down, the undercarriage remained in one piece, so I opened my eyes and began to think of matters of more immediate urgency. Duclos. Jimmy Duclos was waiting to meet me at Schiphol Airport and Jimmy Duclos had something of importance and urgency to convey to me. Too important to send, even though coded, through normal channels of communication: too urgent to wait even for the services of a diplomatic courier from our embassy in The Hague. The probable content of the message I did not concern myself with: I’d know it in five minutes. And I knew it would be what I wanted. Duclos’s sources of information were impeccable, the information itself always precise and one hundred per cent accurate. Jimmy Duclos never made mistakes – not, at least, of this nature.

The DC 8 was slowing down now and I could already see the crocodile disembarkation tube angling out from the side of the main building ready to line up with the plane’s exit when it came to a halt. I unfastened my seatbelt, rose, glanced at Maggie and Belinda without expression or recognition and headed for the exit while the plane was still moving, a manoeuvre frowned upon by the airline authorities and certainly, in this case, by other passengers in the plane whose expressions clearly indicated that they were in the presence of a big-headed and churlish boor who couldn’t wait to take his turn along with the rest of long suffering and queueing mankind. I ignored them. I had long ago resigned myself to the realization that popularity was never to be my lot.

The stewardess smiled at me, though, but this was no tribute to either my appearance or personality. People smile at other people when they are impressed or apprehensive or both. Whenever I travel aboard a plane except when on holiday – which is about once every five years – I hand the stewardess a small sealed envelope for transmission to the plane’s captain and the captain, usually as anxious as the next man to impress a pretty girl, generally divulges the contents to her, which is a lot of fol-de-rol about complete priority under all circumstances and invariably wholly unnecessary except that it ensures one of impeccable and immediate lunch, dinner and bar service. Wholly necessary, though, was another privilege that several of my colleagues and I enjoyed – diplomatic-type immunity to Customs search, which was just as well as my luggage usually contained a couple of efficient pistols, a small but cunningly-designed kit of burglar’s tools and some few other nefarious devices generally frowned upon by the immigration authorities of the more advanced countries. I never wore a gun aboard a plane, for apart from the fact that a sleeping man can inadvertently display a shoulder-holstered gun to a seat companion, thereby causing a whole lot of unnecessary consternation, only a madman would fire a gun within the pressurized cabin of a modern plane. Which accounts for the astonishing success of the sky-jackers: the results of implosion tend to be very permanent indeed.

The exit door opened and I stepped out into the corrugated disembarkation tube. Two or three airport employees politely stood to one side while I passed by and headed for the far end of the tube which debouched on to the terminal floor and the two contra-moving platforms which brought passengers to and from the immigration area.

There was a man standing at the end of the outward-bound moving platform with his back to it. He was of middle height, lean and a great deal less than prepossessing. He had dark hair, a deeply-trenched swarthy face, black cold eyes and a thin slit where his mouth should have been: not exactly the kind of character I would have encouraged to come calling on my daughter. But he was respectably enough dressed in a black suit and black overcoat and – although this was no criterion of respectability – was carrying a large and obviously brand-new airline bag.

But non-existent suitors for non-existent daughters were no concern of mine. I’d moved far enough now to look up the outward-bound moving platform, the one that led to the terminal floor where I stood. There were four people on the platform and the first of them, a tall, thin, grey-suited man with a hairline moustache and all the outward indications of a successful accountant, I recognized at once. Jimmy Duclos. My first thought was that he must have considered his information to be of a vital and urgent nature indeed to come this length to meet me. My second thought was that he must have forged a police pass to get this far into the terminal and that made sense for he was a master forger. My third thought was that it would be courteous and friendly to give him a wave and a smile and so I did. He waved and smiled back.

The smile lasted for all of a second, then jelled almost instantly into an expression of pure shock. It was then I observed, almost sub-consciously, that the direction of his line of sight had shifted fractionally.

I turned round quickly. The swarthy man in the dark suit and coat no longer had his back to the travelator. He had come through 189° and was facing it now, his airline bag no longer dangling from his hand but held curiously high under his arm.

Still not knowing what was wrong, I reacted instinctively and jumped at the man in the black coat. At least, I started to jump. But it had taken me a whole long second to react and the man immediately – and I mean immediately – proceeded to demonstrate to both his and my total conviction that a second was what he regarded as being ample time to carry out any violent manoeuvre he wished. He’d been prepared, I hadn’t, and he proved to be very violent indeed. I’d hardly started to move when he swung round in a viciously convulsive quarter-circle and struck me in the solar plexus with the edge of his airline bag.

Airline bags are usually soft and squashy. This one wasn’t. I’ve never been struck by a pile-driver nor have any desire to be, but I can make a fair guess now as to what the feeling is likely to be. The physical effect was about the same. I collapsed to the floor as if some giant hand had swept my feet from beneath me, and lay there motionless. I was quite conscious. I could see, I could hear, I could to some extent appreciate what was going on around me. But I couldn’t even writhe, which was all I felt like doing at the moment. I’d heard of numbing mental shocks: this was the first time I’d ever experienced a totally numbing physical shock.

Everything appeared to happen in the most ridiculous slow motion. Duclos looked almost wildly around him but there was no way he could get off that travelator. To move backwards was impossible, for three men were crowded close behind him, three men who were apparently quite oblivious of what was going on – it wasn’t until later, much later, that I realized that they must be accomplices of the man in the dark suit, put there to ensure that Duclos had no option other than to go forward with that moving platform and to his death. In retrospect, it was the most diabolically cold-blooded execution I’d heard of in a lifetime of listening to stories about people who had not met their end in the way their Maker had intended.

I could move my eyes, so I moved them. I looked at the airline bag and at one end, from under the flap, there protruded the colander-holed cylinder of a silencer. This was the pile-driver that had brought about my momentary paralysis I –hoped it was momentary – and from the force with which he had struck me I wondered he hadn’t bent it into a U-shape. I looked up at the man who was holding the gun, his right hand concealed under the flap of the bag. There was neither pleasure nor anticipation in that swarthy face, just the calm certainty of a professional who knew how good he was at his job. Somewhere a disembodied voice announced the arrival of flight KL 132 from London – the plane we had arrived on. I thought vaguely and inconsequentially that I would never forget that flight number, but then it would have been the same no matter what flight I’d used for Duclos had been condemned to die before he could ever see me.

I looked at Jimmy Duclos and he had the face of a man condemned to die. His expression was desperate but it was a calm and controlled desperation as he reached deep inside the hampering folds of his coat. The three men behind him dropped to the moving platform and again it was not until much later that the significance of this came upon me. Duclos’s gun came clear of his coat and as it did there was a muted thudding noise and a hole appeared half-way down the left lapel of his coat. He jerked convulsively, then pitched forward and fell on his face: the travelator carried him on to the terminal area and his dead body rolled against mine.

I won’t ever be certain whether my total inaction in the few seconds prior to Duclos’s death was due to a genuine physical paralysis or whether I had been held in thrall by the inevitability of the way in which he died. It is not a thought that will haunt me for I had no gun and there was nothing I could have done. I’m just slightly curious, for there is no question that the touch of his dead body had an immediately revivifying effect upon me.

There was no miraculous recovery. Waves of nausea engulfed me and now that the initial shock of the blow was wearing off my stomach really started to hurt. My forehead ached, and far from dully, from where I must have struck my head on the floor as I had fallen. But a fair degree of muscular control had returned and I rose cautiously to my feet, cautiously because, due to the nausea and dizziness, I was quite prepared to make another involuntary return to the floor at any moment. The entire terminal area was swaying around in the most alarming fashion and I found that I couldn’t see very well and concluded that the blow to my head must have damaged my eyesight, which was very odd as it had appeared to work quite effectively while I was lying on the floor. Then I realized that my eyelids were gumming together and an exploratory hand revealed the reason for this: blood, what briefly but wrongly appeared to me to be a lot of blood, was seeping down from a gash just on the hairline of the forehead. Welcome to Amsterdam, I thought, and pulled out a handkerchief: two dabs and my vision was twenty-twenty again.

From beginning to end the whole thing could have taken no more than ten seconds but already there was a crowd of anxious people milling around as always happens in cases like this: sudden death, violent death, is to man what the opened honey-pot is to bees – the immediate realization of the existence of either calls them forth in spectacular numbers from areas which, seconds previously, appeared to be devoid of all life.

I ignored them, as I ignored Duclos. There was nothing I could do for him now nor he for me, for a search of his clothes would have revealed nothing: like all good agents Duclos never committed anything of value to paper or tape but just filed it away in a highly-trained memory.

The dark and deadly man with the deadly gun would have made good his escape by this time: it was purely the routine and now ingrained instinct of checking even the uncheckable that made me glance towards the immigration area to confirm that he had indeed disappeared.

The dark man had not yet made good his escape. He was about two-thirds of the way along towards the immigration area, ambling unconcernedly along the in-bound moving platform, casually swinging his airline bag, and seemingly unaware of the commotion behind him. For a moment I stared at him, not comprehending, but only for a moment: this was the way the professional made good his escape. The professional pickpocket at Ascot who has just relieved the grey-top-hatted gentleman by his side of his wallet doesn’t plunge away madly through the crowd to the accompaniment of cries of ‘Stop thief’ and the certainty of rapid apprehension: he is more likely to ask his victim his tip for the next race. A casual unconcern, a total normality, that was how the honours graduates in crime did it. And so it was with the dark man. As far as he was concerned I was the only witness to his action, for it was now that I belatedly realized for the first time the part the other three men had played in Duclos’s death they were still in the cluster of people round the dead man but there was nothing I or anybody else could ever prove against them. And, as far as the dark man knew, he’d left me in a state in which I’d be unable to provide him with any trouble for some considerable time to come.

I went after him.

My pursuit didn’t even begin to verge on the spectacular. I was weak, giddy and my midriff ached so wickedly that I found it impossible to straighten up properly, so that the combination of my weaving staggering run along that moving platform with my forward inclination of about thirty degrees must have made me look like nothing as much as a nonagenarian with lumbago in pursuit of God knows what.

I was half-way along the travelator, with the dark man almost at its end, when instinct or the sound of my running feet made him whirl round with the same catlike speed he’d shown in crippling me seconds before. It was immediately clear that he had no difficulty in distinguishing me from any nonagenarians he might have known, for his left hand immediately jerked up his airline bag while the right slid under the flap. I could see that what had happened to Duclos was going to happen to me the travelator would discharge me or what was left of me to the floor at the end of its track: an ignominious way to die.

I briefly wondered what folly had prompted me, an unarmed man, to come in pursuit of a proven killer with a silenced pistol and was on the point of throwing myself flat on the platform when I saw the silencer waver and the dark man’s unwinking gaze switch slightly to the left. Ignoring the probability of being shot in the back of the head, I swung round to follow his line of sight.

The group of people surrounding Duclos had temporarily abandoned their interest in him and transferred it to us: in view of what they must have regarded as my unhinged performance on the travelator it would have been odd if they hadn’t. From the brief glance I had of their faces, their expressions ranged from astonishment to bafflement: there were no traces of understanding. Not in that particular knot of people. But there was understanding in plenty and a chilling purposefulness in the faces of the three men who had followed Duclos to his death: they were now walking briskly up the in-bound travelator behind me, no doubt bent on following me to my death.

I heard a muffled exclamation behind me and turned again. The travelator had reached the end of its track, obviously catching the dark man off guard, for he was now staggering to retain his balance. As I would have expected of him by then he regained it very quickly, turned his back on me and began to run: killing a man in front of a dozen witnesses was a different matter entirely from killing a man in front of one unsupported witness, although I felt obscurely certain that he would have done so had he deemed it essential and the hell with the witnesses. I left the wondering why to later. I started to run again, this time with a deal more purpose, more like a lively septuagenarian.

The dark man, steadily outdistancing me, ran headlong through the immigration hall to the obvious confusion and consternation of the immigration officials, for people are not supposed to rush through immigration halls, they are supposed to stop, show their passports and give a brief account of themselves, which is what immigration halls are for. By the time it came to my turn to run the gamut, the dark man’s hurried departure combined with my weaving staggering run and blood-streaked face had clearly alerted them to the fact that there was something amiss, for two of the immigration officials tried to detain me but I brushed by them – ‘brushed’ was not the word they used in their later complaints – and passed through the exit door the dark man had just used.

At least, I tried to pass through it, but the damned door was blocked by a person trying to enter. A girl, that was all I’d the time or the inclination to register, just any girl. I dodged to the right and she dodged to the left, I dodged to my left, she dodged to her right. Check. You can see the same performance take place practically any minute on any city pavement when two overpolite people, each bent on giving the right of way to the other, side-step with such maladroit effectiveness that they succeed only in blocking each other’s way: given the right circumstances where two really super-sensitive souls encounter each other the whole embarrassing fandango can continue almost indefinitely.

I’m as quick an admirer of a well-executed pas de deux as the next man but I was in no mood to be detained indefinitely and after another bout of abortive side-stepping I shouted ‘Get out of my damned way’ and ensured that she did so by catching her by the shoulder and shoving her violently to one side. I thought I heard a bump and exclamation of pain, but I ignored it: I’d come back and apologize later.

I was back sooner than I expected. The girl had cost me not more than a few seconds, but those few seconds had been more than enough for the dark man. When I reached the concourse, the inevitably crowded concourse, there was no sign whatsoever of him, it would have been difficult to identify a Red Indian chief in full regalia among those hundreds of apparently aimlessly milling people. And it would be pointless to alert the airport security police, by the time I’d established my bona fides he’d be half-way to Amsterdam: even had I been able to get immediate action, their chances of apprehending the dark man would have been remote: highly skilled professionals were at work here, and such men always had the options on their escape routes wide open. I retraced my steps, this time at a leaden trudge, which was by now all I could muster. My head ached viciously but compared to the condition of my stomach I felt it would have been wrong to complain about my head. I felt awful and a glimpse of my pale and blood-smeared face in a mirror did nothing to make me feel any better.

I returned to the scene of my ballet performance where two large uniformed men, with holstered pistols, seized me purposefully by the arms.

‘You’ve got the wrong man,’ I said wearily, ‘so kindly take your damned hands off me and give me room to breathe.’ They hesitated, looked at each other, released me and moved away: they moved away nearly all of two inches. I looked at the girl who was being talked to gently by someone who must have been a very important airport official for he wasn’t wearing a uniform. I looked at the girl again because my eyes ached as well as my head and it was easier looking at her than at the man by her side.

She was dressed in a dark dress and dark coat with the white roll of a polo-necked jumper showing at the throat. She would have been about in her mid-twenties, and her dark hair, brown eyes, almost Grecian features and the olive blush to her complexion made it clear she was no native of those parts. Put her alongside Maggie and Belinda and you’d have to spend not only the best years of your life but also most of the declining ones to find a trio like them, although, admittedly, this girl was hardly looking at her best at that moment: her face was ashen and she was dabbing with a large white handkerchief, probably borrowed from the man at her side, at the blood oozing from an already swelling bruise on her left temple.

‘Good God!’ I said. I sounded contrite and I felt it for no more than the next man am I given to the wanton damaging of works of art. ‘Did I do that?’

‘Of course not.’ Her voice was low and husky but maybe that was only since I’d knocked her down. ‘I cut myself shaving this morning.’

‘I’m terribly sorry. I was chasing a man who’s just killed someone and you got in my way. I’m afraid he escaped.’

‘My name is Schroeder. I work here.’ The man by the girl’s side, a tough and shrewd-looking character in perhaps his mid-fifties, apparently suffered from the odd self-depreciation which unaccountably afflicts so many men who have reached positions of considerable responsibility. ‘We have been informed of the killing. Regrettable, most regrettable. That this should happen in Schiphol Airport!’

‘Your fair reputation,’ I agreed. ‘I hope the dead man is feeling thoroughly ashamed of himself.’

‘Such talk doesn’t help,’ Schroeder said sharply. ‘Did you know the dead men?’

‘How the hell should I? I’ve just stepped off the plane. Ask the stewardess, ask the captain, ask a dozen people who were aboard the plane. KL 132 from London, arrival time 1555.’ I looked at my watch. ‘Good God! Only six minutes ago.’

‘You haven’t answered my question.’ Schroeder not only looked shrewd, he was shrewd.

‘I wouldn’t know him even if I saw him now.’

‘Mm. Has it ever occurred to you, Mr – ah—’

‘Sherman.’

‘Has it ever occurred to you, Mr Sherman, that normal members of the public don’t set off in pursuit of an armed killer?’

‘Maybe I’m sub-normal.’

‘Or perhaps you carry a gun, too?’

I unbuttoned my jacket and held the sides wide.

‘Did you – by any chance – recognize the killer?’

‘No.’ But I’d never forget him, though. I turned to the girl. ‘May I ask you a question, Miss—’

‘Miss Lemay,’ Schroeder said shortly.

‘Did you recognize the killer? You must have had a good look at him. Running men invariably attract attention.’

‘Why should I know him?’

I didn’t try to be shrewd as Schroeder had been. I said: ‘Would you like to have a look at the dead man? Maybe might recognize him?’

She shuddered and shook her head.

Still not being clever, I said: ‘Meeting someone?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Your standing at the immigration exit.’

She shook her head again. If a beautiful girl can look ghastly, then she looked ghastly.

‘Then why be here? To see the sights? I should have thought the immigration hall in Schiphol was the most unsightly place in Amsterdam.’

‘That’ll do.’ Schroeder was brusque. ‘Your questions are without point and the young lady is clearly distressed.’ He gave me a hard look to remind me that I was responsible for her distress. ‘Interrogation is for police officers.’

‘I am a police officer.’ I handed over my passport and warrant card and as I did Maggie and Belinda emerged from the exit. They glanced in my direction, broke step and stared at me with a mixture of concern and consternation as well they might considering the way I felt and undoubtedly looked, but I just scowled at them, as a self conscious and injured man will scowl at anyone, who stares at him, so they hurriedly put their faces straight again and moved on their way. I returned my attention to Schroeder, who was now regarding me with a quite different expression on his face.

‘Major Paul Sherman, London Bureau of Interpol. This makes a considerable difference, I must say. It also explains why you behaved like a policeman and interrogate like a policeman. But I shall have to check your credentials, of course.’

‘Check whatever you like with whoever you like,’ I said, assuming that Mr Schroeder’s English grammar wouldn’t be up to picking faults in my syntax. ‘I suggest you start with Colonel Van de Graaf at the Central HQ.’

‘You know the Colonel?’

‘It’s just a name I picked out of my head. You’ll find me in the bar.’ I made to move off, then checked as the two big policemen made to follow me. I looked at Schroeder. ‘I’ve no intention of buying drinks for them.’

‘It’s all right,’ Schroeder said to the two men. ‘Major Sherman will not run away.’

‘Not as long as you have my passport and warrant card,’ I agreed. I looked at the girl. ‘I am sorry, Miss Lemay. This must have been a great shock to you and it’s all my fault. Will you come and have a drink with me? You look as if you need one.’

She dabbed her cheek some more and looked at me in a manner that demolished all thoughts of instant friendship.

‘I wouldn’t even cross the road with you,’ she said tonelessly. The way she said it indicated that she would willingly have gone half-way across a busy street with me and then abandoned me there. If I had been a blind man.

‘Welcome to Amsterdam,’ I said drearily and trudged off in the direction of the nearest bar.




TWO (#ulink_0064d5a4-045c-5241-a919-52a35b6e7cd5)


I don’t normally stay at five-star hotels for the excellent reason that I can’t afford to, but when I’m abroad I have a practically unlimited expense account about which questions are seldom asked and never answered, and as those foreign trips tend to be exhausting affairs I see no reason to deny myself a few moments of peace and relaxation in the most comfortable and luxurious hotels possible.

The Hotel Rembrandt was undoubtedly one such. It was rather a magnificent if somewhat ornate edifice perched on a corner of one of the innermost ring canals of the old city: its splendidly carved balconies actually overhung the canal itself so that any careless sleepwalker could at least be reassured that he wouldn’t break his neck if he toppled over the edge of his balcony – not, that is, unless he had the misfortune to land on top of one of the glass-sided canal touring boats which passed by at very frequent intervals: a superb eye-level view of those same boats could be had from the ground-floor restaurant which claimed, with some justification, to be the best in Holland.

My yellow Mercedes cab drew up at the front door and while I was waiting for the doorman to pay the cab and get my bag my attention was caught by the sound of ‘The Skaters’ Waltz’ being played in the most excruciatingly off-key, tinny and toneless fashion I’d ever heard. The sound emanated from a very large, high, ornately painted and obviously very ancient mechanical barrelorgan parked across the road in a choice position to obstruct the maximum amount of traffic in that narrow street. Beneath the canopy of the barrelorgan, a canopy which appeared to have been assembled from the remnants of an unknown number of faded beach umbrellas, a row of puppets, beautifully made and, to my uncritical eye, exquisitely gowned in a variety of Dutch traditional costumes, jiggled up and down on the ends of rubber-covered springs: the motive power for the jiggling appeared to derive purely from the vibration inherent in the operation of this museum piece itself.

The owner, or operator, of this torture machine was a very old and very stooped man with a few straggling grey locks plastered to his head. He looked old enough to have built the organ himself when he was in his prime, but not, obviously, when he was in his prime as a musician. He held in his hand a long stick to which was attached a round tin can which he rattled continuously and was as continuously ignored by the passers-by he solicited, so I thought of my elastic expense account, crossed the street and dropped a couple of coins in his box. I can’t very well say that he flashed me an acknowledging smile but he did give me a toothless grin and, as token of gratitude, changed into high gear and started in on the unfortunate Merry Widow. I retreated in haste, followed the porter and my bag up the vestibule steps, turned on the top step and saw that the ancient was giving me a very old-fashioned look indeed: not to be outdone in courtesy I gave him the same look right back and passed inside the hotel.

The assistant manager behind the reception desk was tall, dark, thin-moustached, impeccably tail-coated and his broad smile held all the warmth and geniality of that of a hungry crocodile, the kind of smile you knew would vanish instantly the moment your back was half-turned to him but which would be immediately in position, and more genuinely than ever, no matter how quickly you turned to face him again.

‘Welcome to Amsterdam, Mr Sherman,’ he said. ‘We hope you will enjoy your stay.’

There didn’t seem any ready reply to this piece of fatuous optimism so I just kept silent and concentrated on filling in the registration card. He took it from me as if I were handing him the Cullinan diamond and beckoned to a bell-boy, who came trotting up with my case, leaning over sideways at an angle of about twenty degrees.

‘Boy! Room 616 for Mr Sherman.’

I reached across and took the case from the hand of the far from reluctant ‘boy’. He could have been – barely – the younger brother of the organ-grinder outside.

‘Thank you.’ I gave the bell-boy a coin. ‘But I think I can manage.’

‘But that case looks very heavy, Mr Sherman.’ The assistant manager’s protesting solicitude was even more sincere than his welcoming warmth. The case was, in fact, very heavy, all those guns and ammunition and metal tools for opening up a variety of things did tot up to a noticeable poundage, but I didn’t want any clever character with clever ideas and even cleverer keys opening up and inspecting the contents of my bag when I wasn’t around. Once inside an hotel suite there are quite a few places where small objects can be hidden with remote risk of discovery and the search is seldom assiduously pursued if the case is left securely locked in the first place …

I thanked the assistant manager for his concern, entered the near-by lift and pressed the sixth-floor button. Just as the lift moved off I glanced through one of the small circular peephole windows inset in the door. The assistant manager, his smile now under wraps, was talking earnestly into a telephone.

I got out at the sixth floor. Inset in a small alcove directly opposite the lift gates was a small table with a telephone on it, and, behind the table, a chair with a young man with gold-embroidered livery in it. He was an unprepossessing young man, with about him that vague air of indolence and insolence which is impossible to pin down and about which complaint only makes one feel slightly ridiculous: such youths are usually highly specialized practitioners in the art of injured innocence.

‘Six-one-six?’ I asked.

He crooked a predictably languid thumb. ‘Second door along.’ No ‘sir’, no attempt to get to his feet. I passed up the temptation to clobber him with his own table and instead promised myself the tiny, if exquisite, pleasure of dealing with him before I left the hotel.

I asked: ‘You the floor-waiter?’

He said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and got to his feet. I felt a twinge of disappointment.

‘Get me some coffee.’

I’d no complaints with 616. It wasn’t a room, but a rather sumptuous suite. It consisted of a hall, a tiny but serviceable kitchen, a sitting-room, bedroom and bathroom. Both sitting-room and bedroom had doors leading on to the same balcony. I made my way out there.

With the exception of an excruciating, enormous and neon-lit monstrosity of a sky-high advertisement for an otherwise perfectly innocuous cigarette, the blaze of coloured lights coming up over the darkening streets and skyline of Amsterdam belonged to something out of a fairy tale, but my employers did not pay me – and give me that splendid expense allowance – just for the privilege of mooning over any city skyline, no matter how beautiful. The world I lived in was as remote from the world of fairy tales as the most far-flung galaxy on the observable rim of the universe. I turned my attention to more immediate matters.

I looked down towards the source of the far from muted traffic roar that filled all the air around. The broad highway directly beneath me – and about seventy feet beneath me – appeared to be inextricably jammed with clanging tramcars, hooting vehicles and hundreds upon hundreds of motor-scooters and bicycles, all of whose drivers appeared to be bent on instant suicide. It appeared inconceivable that any of those two-wheeled gladiators could reasonably expect any insurance policy covering a life expectancy of more than five minutes, but they appeared to regard their imminent demise with an insouciant bravado which never fails to astonish the newcomer to Amsterdam. As an afterthought, I hoped that if anyone was going to fall or be pushed from the balcony it wasn’t going to be me.

I looked up. Mine was obviously – as I had specified the top storey of the hotel. Above the brick wall separating my balcony from that of the suite next door, there was some sort of stone carved baroque griffin supported on a stone pier. Above that again – perhaps thirty inches above – ran the concrete coaming of the roof. I went inside.

I took from the inside of the case all the things I’d have found acutely embarrassing to be discovered by other hands. I fitted on a felt-upholstered underarm pistol which hardly shows at all if you patronize the right tailor, which I did, and tucked a spare magazine in a back trouser pocket. I’d never had to fire more than one shot from that gun, far less have to fall back on the spare magazine, but you never know, things were getting worse all the time. I then unrolled the canvas wrapped array of burglarious instruments this belt again, and with the help of an understanding tailor again, is invisible when worn round the waist – and from this sophisticated plethora extracted a humble but essential screwdriver. With this I removed the back of the small portable fridge in the kitchen – it’s surprising how much empty space there is behind even a small fridge – and there cached all I thought it advisable to cache. Then I opened the door to the corridor. The floor waiter was still at his post.

‘Where’s my coffee?’ I asked. It wasn’t exactly an angry shout but it came pretty close to it.

This time I had him on his feet first time out.

‘It come by dumb-waiter. Then I bring.’

‘You better bring fast.’ I shut the door. Some people never learn the virtues of simplicity, the dangers of over-elaboration. His phoney attempts at laboured English were as unimpressive as they were pointless.

I took a bunch of rather oddly shaped keys from my pocket and tried them, in succession, on the other door. The third fitted – I’d have been astonished if none had. I pocketed the keys, went to the bathroom and had just turned the shower up to maximum when the outer doorbell rang, followed by the sound of the door opening. I turned off the shower, called to the floor-waiter to put the coffee on the table and turned the shower on again. I hoped that the combination of the coffee and the shower might persuade whoever required to be persuaded that here was a respectable guest unhurriedly preparing for the leisurely evening that lay ahead but I wouldn’t have bet pennies on it. Still, one can but try.

I heard the outer door close but left the shower running in case the waiter was leaning his ear against the door – he had the look about him of a man who would spend much of his time leaning against doors or peering through keyholes. I went to the front door and stooped. He wasn’t peering through this particular keyhole. I opened the door fractionally, taking my hand away, but no one fell into the hallway, which meant that either no one had any reservations about me or that someone had so many that he wasn’t going to run any risks of being found out: a great help either way. I closed and locked the door, pocketed the bulky hotel key, poured the coffee down the kitchen sink, turned off the shower and left via the balcony door: I had to leave it wide open, held back in position by a heavy chair: for obvious reasons, few hotel balcony doors have a handle on the outside.

I glanced briefly down to the street, across at the windows of the building opposite, then leaned over the concrete balustrade and peered to left and right to check if the occupants of the adjoining suites were peering in my direction. They weren’t. I climbed on to the balustrade, reached for the ornamental griffin so grotesquely carved that it presented a number of excellent handholds, then reached for the concrete coaming of the roof and hauled myself up top. I don’t say I liked doing it but I didn’t see what else I could do.

The flat grass-grown roof was, as far as could be seen, deserted. I rose and crossed to the other side, skirting TV aerials, ventilation outlets and those curious miniature green-houses which in Amsterdam serve as skylights, reached the other side and peered cautiously down. Below was a very narrow and very dark alley, for the moment, at least, devoid of life. A few yards to my left I located the fire-escape and descended to the second floor. The escape door was locked, as nearly all such doors are from the inside, and the lock itself was of the double-action type, but no match for the sophisticated load of ironmongery I carried about with me.

The corridor was deserted. I descended to the ground floor by the main stairs because it is difficult to make a cautious exit from a lift which opens on to the middle of the reception area. I needn’t have bothered. There was no sign of the assistant manager, the bell-boy or the doorman and, moreover, the hall was crowded with a new batch of plane arrivals besieging the reception desk. I joined the crowd at the desk, politely tapped a couple of shoulders, reached an arm through, deposited my room key on the desk, walked unhurriedly to the bar, passed as unhurriedly through it and went out by the side entrance.

Heavy rain had fallen during the afternoon and the streets were still wet, but there was no need to wear the coat I had with me so I carried it slung over my arm and strolled along hatless, looking this way and that, stopping and starting again as the mood took me, letting the wind blow me where it listeth, every inch, I hoped, the tourist sallying forth for the first time to savour the sights and sounds of night-time Amsterdam.

It was while I was ambling along the Herengracht, dutifully admiring the façades of the houses of the merchant princes of the seventeenth century, that I first became sure of this odd tingling feeling in the back of the neck. No amount of training or experience will ever develop this feeling. Maybe it has something to do with ESP. Maybe not. Either you’re born with it or you aren’t. I’d been born with it.

I was being followed.

The Amsterdamers, so remarkably hospitable in every other way, are strangely neglectful when it comes to providing benches for their weary visitors – or their weary citizens, if it comes to that – along the banks of their canals. If you want to peer out soulfully and restfully over the darkly gleaming waters of their night-time canals the best thing to do is to lean against a tree, so I leaned against a convenient tree and lit a cigarette.

I stood there for several minutes, communing, so I hoped it would seem, with myself, lifting the cigarette occasionally, but otherwise immobile. Nobody fired silenced pistols at me, nobody approached me with a sandbag preparatory to lowering me reverently into the canal. I’d given him every chance but he’d taken no advantage of it. And the dark man in Schiphol had had me in his sights but hadn’t pulled the trigger. Nobody wanted to do away with me. Correction. Nobody wanted to do away with me yet. It was a crumb of comfort, at least.

I straightened, stretched and yawned, glancing idly about me, a man awakening from a romantic reverie. He was there all right, not leaning as I was with my back to the tree but with his shoulder to it so that the tree stood between him and myself, but it was a very thin tree and I could clearly distinguish his front and rear elevations.

I moved on and turned right into the Leidestraat and dawdled along this doing some inconsequential window-shopping as I went. At one point I stepped into a shop doorway and gazed at some pictorial exhibits of so highly intrinsic an artistic nature that, back in England, they’d have had the shop-owner behind bars in nothing flat. Even more interestingly, the window formed a near perfect mirror. He was about twenty yards away now, peering earnestly into the shuttered window of what might have been a fruit shop. He wore a grey suit and a grey sweater and that was all that could be said about him: a grey nondescript anonymity of a man.

At the next corner I turned right again, past the flower market on the banks of the Singel canal. Half-way along I stopped at a stall, inspected the contents, and bought a carnation: thirty yards away the grey man was similarly inspecting a stall but either he was mean-souled or hadn’t an expense account like mine, for he bought nothing, just stood and looked.

I had thirty yards on him and when I turned right again into the Vijzelstraat I strode along very briskly indeed until I came to the entrance of an Indonesian restaurant. I turned in, closing the door behind me. The doorman, obviously a pensioner, greeted me civilly enough but made no attempt to rise from his stool.

I looked through the door and within just a few seconds the grey man came by. I could see now that he was more elderly than I had thought, easily in his sixties, and I must admit that for a man of his years he was putting up a remarkable turn of speed. He looked unhappy.

I put on my coat and mumbled an apology to the doorman. He smiled and said ‘Good night’ as civilly as he had said ‘Good evening’. They were probably full up anyway. I went outside, stood in the doorway, took a folded trilby from one pocket and a pair of wire spectacles from the other and put them both on. Sherman, I hoped, transformed.

He was about thirty yards distant now, proceeding with a curious scuttling action, stopping every now and again to peer into a doorway. I took life and limb in hand, launched myself across the street and arrived at the other side intact but unpopular. Keeping a little way behind, I paralleled the grey man for about another hundred yards when he stopped. He hesitated, then abruptly began to retrace his steps, almost running now, but this time stopping to go inside every place that was open to him. He went into the restaurant I’d so briefly visited and came out in ten seconds. He went in the side entrance of the Hotel Carlton and emerged from the front entrance, a detour that could not have made him very popular as the Hotel Carlton does not care overmuch for shabby old men with roll-neck sweaters using their foyer as a short cut. He went into another Indonesian restaurant at the end of the block and reappeared wearing the chastened expression of a man who has been thrown out. He dived into a telephone-box and when he emerged he looked more chastened than ever. From there he took up his stance on the central reservation tram stop on the Muntplein. I joined the queue.

The first tram along, a three-coach affair, bore the number ‘16’ and the destination board ‘Central Station’. The grey man boarded the first coach. I entered the second and moved to the front seat where I could keep a watchful eye on him, at the same time positioning myself so as to present as little as possible of myself to his view should he begin to interest himself in his fellow passengers. But I needn’t have worried; his lack of interest in his fellow passengers was absolute. From the continual shift and play of expression, all unhappy, on his face, and the clasping and unclasping of his hands, here clearly was a man with other and more important things on his mind, not least of which was the degree of sympathetic understanding he could expect from his employers.

The man in grey got off at the Dam. The Dam, the main square in Amsterdam, is full of historical landmarks such as the Royal Palace and the New Church which is so old that they have to keep shoring it up to prevent it from collapsing entirely, but neither received as much as a glance from the grey man that night. He scuttled down a side-street by the Hotel Krasnapolsky, turned left, in the direction of the docks, along the Oudezijds Voorburgwal canal, then turned right again and dipped into a maze of side-streets that obviously penetrated more and more deeply into the warehouse area of the town, one of the few areas not listed among the tourist attractions of Amsterdam. He was the easiest man to follow I’d ever come across. He looked neither to left nor right, far less behind him. I could have been riding an elephant ten paces behind him and he’d never have noticed.

I stopped at a corner and watched him make his way along a narrow, ill-lit and singularly unlovely street, lined exclusively by warehouses on both sides, tall five-storey buildings whose gabled roofs leaned out towards those on the other side of the street, lending an air of claustrophobic menace, of dark foreboding and brooding watchfulness which I didn’t much care for at all.

From the fact that the grey man had now broken into a shambling run I concluded that this excessive demonstration of zeal could only mean that he was near journey’s end, and I was right. Half-way along the street he ran up a set of handrailed steps, produced a key, opened a door and disappeared inside a warehouse. I followed at my leisure, but not too slowly, and glanced incuriously at the nameplate above the door of the warehouse: ‘Morgenstern and Muggenthaler’, the legend read. I’d never heard of the firm, but it was a name I’d be unlikely to forget. I passed on without breaking step.

It wasn’t much of an hotel room, I had to admit, but then it wasn’t much of an hotel to begin with. Just as the outside of the hotel was small and drab and paint-peeling and unprepossessing, so was the interior of the room. The few articles of furniture the room contained, which included a single bed and a sofa which obviously converted into a bed, had been sadly overtaken by the years since the long-dead days of their prime, if they’d ever had a prime. The carpet was threadbare, but nowhere near as threadbare as the curtains and bed coverlet: the tiny bathroom leading off the room had the floor space of a telephone-box. But the room was saved from complete disaster by a pair of redeeming features that would have lent a certain aura of desirability to even the bleakest of prison cells. Maggie and Belinda, perched side by side on the edge of the bed, looked at me without enthusiasm as I lowered myself wearily on to the couch.

‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee.’ I said. ‘All alone in wicked Amsterdam. Everything all right?’

‘No.’ There was a positive note in Belinda’s voice.

‘No?’ I let my surprise show.

She gestured to indicate room. ‘Well, I mean, look at it.’

I looked at it. ‘So?’

‘Would you live here?’

‘Well, frankly, no. But then five-star hotels are for managerial types like myself. For a couple of struggling typists these quarters are perfectly adequate. For a couple of young girls who are not the struggling typists they appear to be this provides about as complete a degree of anonymity of background as you can hope to achieve.’ I paused. ‘At least, I hope. I assume you’re both in the clear. Anyone on the plane you recognized?’

‘No.’ They spoke in unison with an identical shake of the head.

‘Anyone in Schiphol you recognized?’

‘No.’

‘Anyone take any particular interest in you at Schiphol?’

‘No.’

‘This room bugged?’

‘No.’

‘Been out?’

‘Yes.’

‘Been followed?’

‘No.’

‘Room searched in your absence?’

‘No.’

‘You look amused, Belinda,’ I said. She wasn’t exactly giggling but she was having a little difficulty with her facial muscles. ‘Do tell. I need cheering up.’

‘Well.’ She was suddenly thoughtful, perhaps recalling that she hardly knew me at all. ‘Nothing. I’m sorry.’

‘Sorry about what, Belinda?’ An avuncular and encouraging tone which had the odd effect of making her wriggle uncomfortably.

‘Well, all those cloak-and-dagger precautions for a couple of girls like us. I don’t see the need—’

‘Do be quiet, Belinda!’ That was Maggie, quicksilver as ever in the old man’s defence though God knew why. I’d had my professional successes that, considered by themselves, totted up to a pretty impressive list but a list that, compared to the quota of failures, paled into a best-forgotten insignificance. ‘Major Sherman,’ Maggie went on severely, ‘always knows what he is doing.’

‘Major Sherman,’ I said frankly, ‘would give his back teeth to believe in that.’ I looked at them speculatively. ‘I’m not changing the subject, but how about some of the old commiseration for the wounded master?’

‘We know our place,’ Maggie said primly. She rose, peered at my forehead and sat down again. ‘Mind you, it does seem a very small piece of sticking plaster for what seemed such a lot of blood.’

‘The managerial classes bleed easily, something to do with sensitive skins, I understand. You heard what happened?’

Maggie nodded. ‘This dreadful shooting, we heard you tried—’

‘To intervene. Tried, as you so rightly said.’ I looked at Belinda. ‘You must have found it terribly impressive, first time out with your new boss and he gets clobbered the moment he sets loot in a foreign country.’

She glanced involuntarily at Maggie, blushed platinum blondes of the right sort blush very easily – and said defensively: ‘Well, he was too quick for you.’

‘He was all of that,’ I agreed. ‘He was also too quick for Jimmy Duclos.’

‘Jimmy Duclos?’ They had a gift for speaking in unison.

‘The dead man. One of our very best agents and a friend of mine for many years. He had urgent and, I assume, vital information that he wished to deliver to me in person in Schiphol. I was the only person in England who knew he would be there. But someone in this city knew. My rendezvous with Duclos was arranged through two completely unconnected channels, but someone not only knew I was coming but also knew the precise flight and time and so was conveniently on hand to get to Duclos before he could get to me. You will agree, Belinda, that I wasn’t changing the subject? You will agree that if they knew that much about me and one of my associates, they may be equally well informed about some other of my associates.’

They looked at each other for a few moments, then Belinda said in a low voice: ‘Duclos was one of us?’

‘Are you deaf?’ I said irritably.

‘And that we – Maggie and myself, that is—’

‘Precisely.’

They seemed to take the implied threats to their lives fairly calmly, but then they’d been trained to do a job and were here to do a job and not fall about in maidenly swoons. Maggie said: ‘I’m sorry about your friend.’

I nodded.

‘And I’m sorry if I was silly,’ Belinda said. She meant it too, all contrition, but it wouldn’t last. She wasn’t the type. She looked at me, extraordinary green eyes under dark eyebrows and said slowly: ‘They’re on to you, aren’t they?’

‘That’s my girl,’ I said approvingly. ‘Worrying about her boss. On to me? Well, if they’re not they have half the staff at the Hotel Rembrandt keeping tabs on the wrong man. Even the side entrances are watched: I was tailed when I left tonight.’

‘He didn’t follow you far.’ Maggie’s loyalty could be positively embarrassing.

‘He was incompetent and obvious. So are the others there. People operating on the fringes of junky-land frequently are. On the other hand they may be deliberately trying to provoke a reaction. If that’s their intention, they’re going to be wildly successful.’

‘Provocation?’ Maggie sounded sad and resigned. Maggie knew me.

‘Endless. Walk, run, or stumble into everything. With both eyes tightly shut.’

‘This doesn’t seem a very clever or scientific way of investigation to me,’ Belinda said doubtfully. Her contrition was waning fast.

‘Jimmy Duclos was clever. The cleverest we had. And scientific. He’s in the city mortuary.’

Belinda looked at me oddly. ‘You will put your neck under the block?’

‘On the block, dear,’ Maggie said absently. ‘And don’t go on telling your new boss what he can and can’t do.’ But her heart wasn’t in her words for the worry was in her eyes.

‘It’s suicide,’ Belinda persisted.

‘So? Crossing the streets in Amsterdam is suicide – or looks like it. Tens of thousands of people do it every day.’ I didn’t tell them that I had reason to believe that my early demise did not head the list of the ungodly priorities, not because I wished to improve my heroic image, but because it would only lead to the making of more explanations which I did not at the moment wish to make.

‘You didn’t bring us here for nothing,’ Maggie said.

‘That’s so. But any toe-tramping is my job. You keep out of sight. Tonight, you’re free. Also tomorrow, except that I want Belinda to take a walk with me tomorrow evening. After that, if you’re both good girls, I’ll take you to a naughty nightclub.’

‘I come all the way from Paris to go to a naughty night-club?’ Belinda was back at being amused again. ‘Why?’

‘I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you some things about nightclubs you don’t know. I’ll tell you why we’re here. In fact,’ I said expansively, ‘I’ll tell you everything.’ By ‘everything’ I meant everything I thought they needed to know, not everything there was to tell: the differences were considerable. Belinda looked at me with anticipation. Maggie with a wearily affectionate scepticism, but then Maggie knew me. ‘But first, some Scotch.’

‘We have no Scotch, Major.’ Maggie had a very puritanical side to her at times.

‘Not even au fait with the basic principles of intelligence. You must learn to read the right books.’ I nodded to Belinda. The phone. Get some. Even the managerial classes must relax occasionally.’

Belinda stood up, smoothing down her dark dress and looking at me with a sort of puzzled disfavour. She said slowly: ‘When you spoke about your friend in the mortuary I watched and you showed nothing. He’s still there and now you are – what is the word – flippant. Relaxing, you say. How can you do this?’

‘Practice. And a siphon of soda.’




THREE (#ulink_4cec6e0b-a2a6-5358-8179-ce29fdcaac45)


It was classical night that night at the Hotel Rembrandt with the barrel-organ giving forth a rendition of an excerpt from Beethoven’s Fifth that would have had the old composer down on his knees giving eternal thanks for his almost total deafness. Even at fifty yards, the distance from which I was prudently observing through the now gently drizzling rain, the effect was appalling: it was an extraordinary tribute to the tolerance of the people of Amsterdam, city of music-lovers and home of the world-famous Concertgebouw, that they didn’t lure the elderly operator into a convenient tavern and, in his absence, trundle his organ into the nearest canal. The ancient was still rattling his can at the end of his stick, a purely reflex action for there was no one about that night, not even the doorman, who had either been driven inside by the rain or was a music-lover.

I turned down the side-street by the bar entrance. There was no figure lurking about adjacent doorways or in the entrance to the bar itself, nor had I expected to find any. I made my way round to the alley and the fire-escape, climbed up to the roof, crossed it and located the stretch of coaming that directly overhung my own balcony.

I peered over the edge. I could see nothing, but I could smell something. Cigarette smoke, but not emanating from a cigarette made by one of the more reputable tobacco companies, who don’t include reefers among their marketable products. I leaned further out to almost the point of imbalance and then I could see things, not much, but enough: two pointed toe-caps and, for a moment, the arcing, glowing tip of a cigarette, obviously on the downswing of an arm.

I withdrew in caution and with silence, rose, re-crossed to the fire-escape, descended to the sixth-floor, let myself through the fire-escape door, locked it again, walked quietly along to the door of Room 616 and listened. Nothing. I opened the door quietly with the skeleton I’d tried earlier and went inside, closing the door as quickly as I could: otherwise indetectable draughts can eddy cigarette smoke in a way to attract the attention of the alert smoker. Not that junkies are renowned for their alertness.

This one was no exception. Predictably enough, it was the floor-waiter. He was sitting comfortably in an armchair, feet propped up on the balcony sill, smoking a cigarette in his left hand: his right lay loosely on his knee and cradled a gun.

Normally, it is very difficult to approach anyone, no matter how soundlessly, from behind without some form of sixth sense giving them warning of your approach: but many drugs have a depressive influence on this instinct and what the floor waiter was smoking was one of them.

I was behind him with my gun at his right ear and he still didn’t know I was there. I touched him on the right shoulder. He swung round with a convulsive jerk of his body and cried out in pain as his movement gouged the barrel of my gun into his right eye. He lifted both hands to his momentarily injured eye and I took the gun from him without resistance, pocketed it, reached for his shoulder and jerked hard. The waiter catapulted over backwards, completing a somersault, and landing very heavily on his back and the back of his head. For maybe ten seconds he lay there, quite dazed, then propped himself up on one arm. He was making a curious hissing sound, his bloodless lips had vanished to reveal tobacco-stained teeth set in a vulpine snarl and his eyes were dark with hate. I didn’t see much chance of our having a friendly get-together.

‘We do play rough, don’t we?’ he whispered. Junkies are great patronizers of the violent cinema and their dialogue is faultless.

‘Rough?’ I was surprised. ‘Oh, dear me, no. Later we play rough. If you don’t talk.’ Maybe I went to the same cinema as he did. I picked up the cigarette that lay smouldering on the carpet, sniffed at it in disgust and squashed it out in an ashtray. The waiter rose unsteadily, still shaken and unsteady on his feet, and I didn’t believe any of it. When he spoke again, the snarl had gone from his face and voice. He had decided to play it cool, the calm before the storm, an old and worn-out script, maybe we should both start attending the opera instead.

‘What would you like to talk about?’ he asked.

‘About what you’re doing in my room for a start. And who sent you here.’

He smiled wearily. ‘The law has already tried to make me tell things. I know the law. You can’t make me talk. I’ve got my rights. The law says so.’

‘The law stops right outside my front door here. This side of that door we’re both beyond the law. You know that. In one of the great civilized cities of the world you and I are living in our own little jungle. But there’s a law there too. Kill or be killed.’

Maybe it was my own fault for putting ideas in his head. He dived hard and low to get under my gun but not low enough for his chin to get under my knee. It hurt my knee quite badly and by that token should have laid him out, but he was tough, grabbed at the only leg I had left in contact with the ground and brought us both down. My gun went spinning and we rolled about on the floor for a bit, belabouring each other enthusiastically. He was a strong boy, too, as strong as he was tough, but he laboured under two disadvantages: a strict training on marijuana had blunted the honed edge of his physical fitness, and though he had a highly developed instinct for dirty fighting he’d never really been trained to it. By and by we were on our feet again with my left hand pushing his right wrist somewhere up between his shoulder-blades.

I pushed his wrist higher and he screamed as if in agony, which he might well have been as his shoulder was making a peculiar cracking noise, but I couldn’t be sure so I pushed a bit higher and removed all doubt, then thrust him out on to the balcony in front of me and forced him over the balustrade until his feet were clear of the ground and he was hanging on to the balustrade with his free left hand as if his life depended on it, which indeed it did.

‘You an addict or a pusher?’ I enquired.

He mouthed an obscenity in Dutch, but I know Dutch, including all the words I shouldn’t. I put my right hand over his mouth for the sort of sound he was about to make could be heard even above the roar of the traffic, and I didn’t want to alarm the citizens of Amsterdam unnecessarily. I eased the pressure and removed my hand.

‘Well?’

‘A pusher.’ His voice was a sobbing croak. ‘I sell them.’

‘Who sent you?’

‘No! No! No!’

‘Your decision. When they pick what’s left of you from the pavement there they’ll think you’re just another cannabis smoker who got too high and took a trip into the wild blue yonder.’

‘That’s murder!’ He was still sobbing, but his voice was only a husky whisper now, maybe the view was making him dizzy. ‘You wouldn’t—’

‘Wouldn’t I? Your people killed a friend of mine this afternoon. Exterminating vermin can be a pleasure. Seventy feet’s a long drop and not a mark of violence. Except that every bone in your body will be broken. Seventy feet. Look!’

I heaved him a bit further over the balustrade so that he could have a better look and had to use both hands to haul him back again.

‘Talk?’

He made a hoarse sound in his throat, so I hauled him off the balustrade and pushed him inside to the centre of the room. I said, ‘Who sent you?’

I’ve said he was tough, but he was a great deal tougher than I had ever imagined. He should have been fear-stricken and in agony, and I have no doubt that he was both, but that didn’t stop him from whirling round convulsively to his right in a full circle and breaking free from my grip. The sheer unexpectedness of it had caught me off guard. He came at me again, a knife that had suddenly appeared in his left hand curving upwards in a wicked arc and aimed for a point just below the breastbone. Normally, he would probably have done a nice job of carving but the circumstances were abnormal: his timing and reactions were gone. I caught and clamped his knife wrist in both my hands, threw myself backwards, straightened a leg under him as I jerked his arm down and sent him catapulting over me. The thud of his landing shook the room and probably quite a few adjacent rooms at that.

I twisted and got to my feet in one motion but the need for haste was gone. He was on the floor on the far side of the room, his head resting on the balcony sill. I lifted him by his lapels and his head lolled back till it almost touched his shoulder blades. I lowered him to the floor again. I was sorry he was dead, because he'd probably had information that could have been invaluable to me, but that was the only reason I was sorry.

I went through his pockets, which held a good number of interesting articles but only two that were of interest to me: a case half full of handmade reefers and a couple of scraps of paper. One paper bore the typed letters and figures MOO 144, the other two numbers – 910020 and 2789. Neither meant a thing to me but on the reasonable assumption that the floor-waiter wouldn't have been carrying them on his person unless they had some significance for him I put them away in a safe place that had been provided for me by my accommodating tailor, a small pocket that had been let into the inside of the right trouser-leg about six inches above the ankle.

I tidied up what few signs of struggle there had been, took the dead man’s gun, went out on the balcony, leaned out over the balustrade and spun the gun upwards and to the left. It cleared the coaming and landed soundlessly on the roof about twenty feet away. I went back inside, flushed the reefer end down the toilet, washed the ashtray and opened every door and window to let the sickly smell evaporate as soon as possible. Then I dragged the waiter across to the tiny hall and opened the door on to the passage.

The hallway was deserted. I listened intently, but could hear nothing, no sound of approaching footfalls. I crossed to the lift, pressed the button, waited for the lift to appear, opened the door a crack, inserted a matchbox between jamb and door so that the latter couldn’t close and complete the electrical circuit then hurried back to my suite. I dragged the waiter across to the lift, opened the door, dumped him without ceremony on the lift floor, withdrew the matchbox and let the door swing to. The lift remained where it was: obviously, no one was pressing the button of that particular lift at that particular moment.

I locked the outside door to my suite with the skeleton and made my way back to the fire-escape, by now an old and trusted friend. I reached street level unobserved and made my way round to the main entrance. The ancient at the barrel-organ was playing Verdi now and Verdi was losing by a mile. The operator had his back to me as I dropped a guilder into his tin can. He turned to thank me, his lips parted in a toothless smile, then he saw who it was and his jaw momentarily dropped open. He was at the very bottom of the heap and no one had bothered to inform him that Sherman was abroad. I gave him a kindly smile and passed into the foyer.

There were a couple of uniformed staff behind the desk, together with the manager, whose back was at the moment towards me. I said loudly: ‘Six-one-six, please.’

The manager turned round sharply, his eyebrows raised high but not high enough. Then he gave me his warmhearted crocodile smile.

‘Mr Sherman. I didn’t know you were out.’

‘Oh yes, indeed. Pre-dinner constitutional. Old English custom, you know.’

‘Of course, of course.’ He smiled at me archly as if there was something vaguely reprehensible about this old English custom, then allowed a slightly puzzled look to replace the smile. He was as phoney as they come. ‘I don’t remember seeing you go out.’

‘Well, now,’ I said reasonably, ‘you can’t be expected to attend to all of your guests all of the time, can you?’ I gave him his own phoney smile back again, took the key and walked towards the bank of lifts. I was less than half-way there when I was brought up short, as a piercing scream cut through the foyer and brought instant silence, which lasted only long enough for the woman who had screamed to draw a deep breath and start in again. The source of this racket was a middle-aged, flamboyantly dressed female, a caricature of the American tourist abroad, who was standing in front of a lift, her mouth opened in a rounded ‘O’, her eyes like saucers. Beside her a portly character in a seer-sucker suit was trying to calm her, but he didn’t look any too happy himself and gave the impression that he wouldn’t have minded doing a little screaming himself.

The assistant manager rushed past me and I followed more leisurely. By the time I reached the lift the assistant manager was on his knees, bent over the sprawled-out form of the dead waiter.

‘My goodness,’ I said. ‘Is he ill, do you think?’

‘Ill? Ill?’ The assistant manager glared at me. ‘Look at the way his neck is. The man’s dead.’

‘Good God, I do believe you’re right.’ I stooped and peered more closely at the waiter. ‘Haven’t I seen this man somewhere before?’

‘He was your floor-waiter,’ the assistant manager said, which is not an easy remark to make with your teeth clamped together.

‘I thought he looked familiar. In the midst of life—’ I shook my head sadly. ‘Where’s the restaurant?’

‘Where’s the – where’s the—’

‘Never mind,’ I said soothingly, ‘I can see you’re upset. I’ll find it myself.’

The restaurant of the Hotel Rembrandt may not be, as the owners claim, the best in Holland, but I wouldn’t care to take them to court on a charge of misrepresentation. From the caviare to the fresh out-of-season strawberries – I wondered idly whether to charge this in the expense account as entertainment or bribes – the food was superb. I thought briefly, but not guiltily, about Maggie and Belinda, but such things had to be. The red plush sofa on which I was sitting was the ultimate in dining comfort, so I leaned back in it, lifted my brandy glass and said, ‘Amsterdam!’

‘Amsterdam!’ said Colonel Van de Graaf. The Colonel, deputy head of the city’s police, had joined me, without invitation, only five minutes previously. He was sitting in a large chair which seemed too small for him. A very broad man of only medium height, he had iron-grey hair, a deeply-trenched, tanned face, the unmistakable cast of authority and an air about him of almost dismaying competence. He went on dryly: ‘I’m glad to see you enjoying yourself, Major Sherman, after such an eventful day.’

‘Gather ye rosebuds while you may, Colonel life is all too short. What events?’

‘We have been unable to discover very much about this man, James Duclos, who was shot and killed at the airport today.’ A patient man and not one to be easily drawn, was Colonel de Graaf. ‘We know only that he arrived from England three weeks ago, that he checked into the Hotel Schiller for one night and then disappeared. He seems, Major Sherman, to have been meeting your plane. Was this, one asks, just coincidence?’

‘He was meeting me.’ De Graaf was bound to find out sooner or later. ‘One of my men. I think he must have got hold of a forged police pass from somewhere – to get past immigration, I mean.’

‘You surprise me.’ He sighed heavily and didn’t seem in the least surprised. ‘My friend, it makes it very difficult for us if we don’t know those things. I should have been told about Duclos. As we have instructions from Interpol in Paris to give you every possible assistance, don’t you think it would be better if we can work together? We can help you – you can help us.’ He sipped some brandy. His grey eyes were very direct. ‘One would assume that this man of yours had information – and now we have lost it.’

‘Perhaps. Well, let’s start by you helping me. Can you see if you have a Miss Astrid Lemay on your files? Works in a night-club but she doesn’t sound Dutch and she doesn’t look Dutch so you may have something on her.’

‘The girl you knocked down at the airport? How do you know she works in a night-club.’

‘She told me,’ I said unblushingly.

He frowned. ‘The airport officials made no mention of any such remark to me.’

‘The airport officials are a bunch of old women.’

‘Ah!’ It could have meant anything. ‘This information I can obtain. Nothing more?’

‘Nothing more.’

‘One other little event we have not referred to.’

‘Tell me.’

‘The sixth-floor waiter – an unsavoury fellow about whom we know a little – was not one of your men?’

‘Colonel!’

‘I didn’t for a moment think he was. Did you know that he died of a broken neck?’

‘He must have had a very heavy fall,’ I said sympathetically.

De Graaf drained his brandy and stood up.

‘We are not acquainted with you, Major Sherman, but you have been too long in Interpol and gained too much of a European reputation for us not to be acquainted with your methods. May I remind you that what goes in Istanbul and Marseilles and Palermo – to name but a few places – does not go in Amsterdam?’

‘My word,’ I said. ‘You are well informed.’

‘Here, in Amsterdam, we are all subject to the law.’ He might not have heard me. ‘Myself included. You are no exception.’

‘Nor would I expect to be,’ I said virtuously. ‘Well then, co-operation. The purpose of my visit. When can I talk to you?’

‘My office, ten o’clock.’ He looked around the restaurant without enthusiasm. ‘Here is hardly the time and place.’

I raised an eyebrow.

‘The Hotel Rembrandt,’ said de Graaf heavily, ‘is a listening-post of international renown.’

‘You astonish me,’ I said.

De Graaf left. I wondered why the hell he thought I’d chosen to stay in the Hotel Rembrandt.

Colonel de Graaf’s office wasn’t in the least like the Hotel Rembrandt. It was a large enough room, but bleak and bare and functional, furnished mainly with steel-grey filing cabinets, a steel-grey table and steel-grey seats which were as hard as steel. But at least the decor had the effect of making you concentrate on the matter on hand: there was nothing to distract the mind or eye. De Graaf and I, after ten minutes preliminary discussion, were concentrating, although I think it came more easily to de Graaf than it did to me. I had lain awake to a late hour the previous night and am never at my best at ten a.m. on a cold and blustery morning.

‘All drugs,’ de Graaf agreed. ‘Of course we’re concerned with all drugs – opium, cannabis, amphetamine, LSD, STP, cocaine, amyl acetate – you name it, Major Sherman, and we’re concerned in it. They all destroy or lead on to destruction. But in this instance we are confining ourselves to the really evil one – heroin. Agreed?’

‘Agreed.’ The deep incisive voice came from the doorway. I turned round and looked at the man who stood there, a tall man in a well-cut dark business suit, cool penetrating grey eyes, a pleasant face that could stop being pleasant very quickly, very professional-looking. There was no mistaking his profession. Here was a cop and not one to be taken lightly either.

He closed the door and walked across to me with the light springy step of a man much younger than one in his middle forties, which he was at least. He put out his hand and said: ‘Van Gelder. I’ve heard a lot about you, Major Sherman.’

I thought this one over, briefly but carefully, decided to refrain from comment. I smiled and shook his hand.

‘Inspector van Gelder,’ de Graaf said. ‘Head of our narcotics bureau. He will be working with you, Sherman. He will offer you the best cooperation possible.’

‘I sincerely hope we can work well together.’ Van Gelder smiled and sat down. ‘Tell me, what progress your end? Do you think you can break the supply ring in England?’

‘I think we could. It’s a highly organized distributive pipeline, very highly integrated with almost no cut-offs – and it’s because of that that we have been able to identify dozens of their pushers and the half-dozen or so main distributors.’

‘You could break the ring but you won’t. You’re leaving it strictly alone?’

‘What else, Inspector? We break them up and the next distribution ring will be driven so far underground that we’ll never find it. As it is, we can pick them up when and if we want to. The thing we really want to find out is how the damned stuff gets in – and who’s supplying it.’

‘And you think – obviously, or you wouldn’t be here – that the supplies come from here? Or hereabouts?’

‘Not hereabouts. Here. And I don’t think. I know. Eighty per cent of those under surveillance – and I refer to the distributors and their intermediaries – have links with this country. To be precise, with Amsterdam – nearly all of them. They have relatives here, or they have friends. They have business contacts here or personally conduct business here or they come here on holiday. We’ve spent five years on building up this dossier.’

De Graaf smiled. ‘On this place called “here”.’

‘On Amsterdam, yes.’

Van Gelder asked: ‘There are copies of this dossier?’

‘One.’

‘With you?’

‘Yes.’

‘On you?’

‘In the only safe place.’ I tapped my head.

‘As safe a place as any,’ de Graaf approved, then added thoughtfully: ‘As long, of course, that you don’t meet up with people who might be inclined to treat you the way you treat them.’

‘I don’t understand, Colonel.’

‘I speak in riddles,’ de Graaf said affably. ‘All right, I agree. At the moment the finger points at the Netherlands. Not to put too fine a point on it, as you don’t put too fine a point on it, at Amsterdam. We, too, know our unfortunate reputation. We wish it was untrue. But it isn’t. We know the stuff comes in in bulk. We know it goes out again all broken up – but from where or how we have no idea.’

‘It’s your bailiwick,’ I said mildly.

‘It’s what?’

‘It’s your province. It’s in Amsterdam. You run the law in Amsterdam.’

‘Do you make many friends in the course of a year?’ van Gelder enquired politely.

‘I’m not in this business to make friends.’

‘You’re in this business to destroy people who destroy people,’ de Graaf said pacifically. ‘We know about you. We have a splendid dossier on you. Would you like to see it?’

‘Ancient history bores me.’

‘Predictably.’ De Graaf sighed. ‘Look, Sherman, the best police forces in the world can come up against a concrete wall. That’s what we have done – not that I claim we’re the best. All we require is one lead – one single solitary lead … Perhaps you have some idea, some plan?’

‘I arrived only yesterday.’ I fished inside the inside of my lower right trouser-leg and gave the Colonel the two scraps of paper I’d found in the dead floor waiter’s pockets. ‘Those figures. Those numbers. They mean anything to you?’

De Graaf gave them a cursory glance, held them up before a bright desk-lamp, laid them down on the desk. ‘No.’

‘Can you find out? If they have any meaning?’

‘I have a very able staff. By the way, where did you get these?’

‘A man gave them to me.’

‘You mean you got them from a man.’

‘There’s a difference?’

‘There could be a very great difference,’ De Graaf leaned forward, face and voice very earnest. ‘Look, Major Sherman, we know about your technique of getting people off balance and keeping them there. We know about your propensity for stepping outside the law—’

‘Colonel de Graaf!’

‘A well-taken point. You’re probably never inside it to start with. We know about this deliberate policy admittedly as effective as it is suicidal – of endless provocation, waiting for something, for somebody to break. But please, Major Sherman, please do not try to provoke too many people in Amsterdam. We have too many canals.’

‘I won’t provoke anyone,’ I said. ‘I’ll be very careful.’

‘I’m sure you will.’ De Graaf sighed. ‘And now, I believe, van Gelder has a few things to show you.’

Van Gelder had. He drove me in his own black Opel from the police HQ in the Marnixstraat to the city mortuary and by the time I left there I was wishing he hadn’t.

The city mortuary lacked the old-world charm, the romance and nostalgic beauty of old Amsterdam. It was like the city mortuary in any big town, cold – very cold – and clinical and inhuman and repelling. The central block had down its centre two rows of white slabs of what appeared to be marble and almost certainly wasn’t, while the sides of the room were lined with very large metal doors. The principal attendant here, resplendent in an immaculately starched white coat, was a cheerful, rubicund, genial character who appeared to be in perpetual danger of breaking out into gales of laughter, a very odd characteristic indeed, one would have thought, to find in a mortuary attendant until one recalled that more than a handful of England’s hangmen in the past were reckoned to be the most rollicking tavern companions one could ever hope to have.

At a word from van Gelder, he led us to one of the big metal doors, opened it and pulled out a wheeled metal rack that ran smoothly on steel runners. A white-sheeted form lay on this rack.

‘The canal he was found in is called the Croquiskade,’ van Gelder said. He seemed quite unemotional about it. ‘Not what you might call the Park Lane of Amsterdam – it’s down by the docks. Hans Gerber. Nineteen. I won’t show you his face – he’s been too long in the water. The fire brigade found him when they were fishing out a car. He could have been there another year or two. Someone had twisted a few old lead pipes about his middle.’

He lifted a corner of the sheet to expose a flaccid emaciated arm. It looked for all the world as if someone had trodden all over it with spiked climbing boots. Curious purple lines joined many of those punctures and the whole arm was badly discoloured. Van Gelder covered it up without a word and turned away. The attendant wheeled the rack inside again, closed the door, led us to another door and repeated the performance of wheeling out another corpse, smiling hugely the while like a bankrupt English duke showing the public round his historic castle.

‘I won’t show you this one’s face either,’ van Gelder said. ‘It is not nice to look on a boy of twenty-three who has the face of a man of seventy.’ He turned to the attendant. ‘Where was this one found?’

‘The Oosterhook,’ the attendant beamed. ‘On a coal barge.’

Van Gelder nodded. ‘That’s right. With a bottle – an empty bottle – of gin beside him. The gin was all inside him. You know what a splendid combination gin and heroin is.’ He pulled back the sheet to reveal an arm similar to the one I’d just seen. ‘Suicide – or murder?’

‘It all depends.’

‘On?’

‘Whether he bought the gin himself. That would make it suicide – or accidental death. Someone could have put the full bottle in his hand. That would make it murder. We had a case just like it last month in the Port of London. We’ll never know.’

At a nod from van Gelder, the attendant led us happily to a slab in the middle of the room. This time van Gelder pulled back the sheet from the top. The girl was very young and very lovely and had golden hair.

‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’ van Gelder asked. ‘Not a mark on her face. Julia Rosemeyer from East Germany. All we know of her, all we will ever know of her. Sixteen, the doctors guess.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘Fell six stories to a concrete pavement.’

I thought briefly of the ex-floor-waiter and how much better he would have looked on this slab, then asked: ‘Pushed?’

‘Fell. Witnesses. They were all high. She’d been talking all night about flying to England. She had some obsession about meeting the Queen. Suddenly she scrambled on to the parapet of the balcony, said she was flying to see the Queen – and, well, she flew. Fortunately, there was no one passing beneath at the time. Like to see more?’

‘I’d like to have a drink at the nearest pub, if you don’t mind.’

‘No.’ He smiled but there wasn’t anything humorous about it. ‘Van Gelder’s fireside. It’s not far. I have my reasons.’

‘Your reasons?’

‘You’ll see.’

We said goodbye and thanks to the happily smiling attendant, who looked as if he would have liked to say, ‘Haste ye back’ but didn’t. The sky had darkened since early morning and big heavy scattered drops of rain were beginning to fall. To the east the horizon was livid and purple, more than vaguely threatening and foreboding. It was seldom that a sky reflected my mood as accurately as this.

Van Gelder’s fireside could have given points to most English pubs I knew: an oasis of bright cheerfulness compared to the sheeting rain outside, to the rippled waves of water running down the windows, it was warm and cosy and comfortable and homely, furnished in rather heavy Dutch furniture with over-stuffed armchairs, but I have a strong partiality for over-stuffed armchairs: they don’t mark you so much as the under-stuffed variety. There was a russet carpet on the floor and the walls were painted in different shades of warm pastel colours. The fire was all a fire ever should be and van Gelder, I was happy to observe, was thoughtfully studying a very well-stocked glass liquor cupboard.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you took me to that damned mortuary to make your point. I’m sure you made it. What was it?’

‘Points, not point. The first one was to convince you that we here are up against an even more vicious problem than you have at home. There’s another half-dozen drug addicts in the mortuary there and how many of them died a natural death is anyone’s guess. It’s not always as bad as this, those deaths seem to come in waves, but it still represents an intolerable loss of life and mainly young life at that: and for every one there, how many hundred hopeless addicts are there in the streets?’

‘Your point being that you have even more incentive than I to seek out and destroy those people – and that we are attacking a common enemy, a central source of supply?’

‘Every country has only one king.’

‘And the other point?’

‘To reinforce Colonel de Graaf’s warning. Those people are totally ruthless. Provoke them too much, get too close to them – well, there’s still a few slabs left in the mortuary.’

‘How about that drink?’ I said.

A telephone bell rang in the hallway outside. Van Gelder murmured an apology and went to answer it. Just as the door closed behind him a second door leading to the room opened and a girl entered. She was tall and slender and in her early twenties and was dressed in a dragon-emblazoned multi-hued housecoat that reached almost to her ankles. She was quite beautiful, with flaxen hair, an oval face and huge violet eyes that appeared to be at once humorous and perceptive, so striking in overall appearance that it was quite some time before I remembered what passed for my manners and struggled to my feet, no easy feat from the depths of that cavernous armchair.

‘Hullo,’ I said. ‘Paul Sherman.’ It didn’t sound much but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Almost as if embarrassed, the girl momentarily sucked the tip of her thumb, then smiled to reveal perfect teeth.

‘I am Trudi. I do not speak good English.’ She didn’t either, but she’d the nicest voice for speaking bad English I’d come across in a long time. I advanced with my hand out, but she made no move to take it: instead she put her hand to her mouth and giggled shyly. I am not accustomed to have fully-grown girls giggle shyly at me and was more than a little relieved to hear the sound of the receiver being replaced and van Gelder’s voice as he entered from the hall.

‘Just a routine report on the airport business. Nothing to go on yet—’

Van Gelder saw the girl, broke off, smiled and advanced to put his arm round her shoulders.

‘I see you two have met each other.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘not quite—’ then broke off in turn as Trudi reached up and whispered in his ear, glancing at me out of the corner of her eye. Van Gelder smiled and nodded and Trudi went quickly from the room. The puzzlement must have shown in my face, for van Gelder smiled again and it didn’t seem a very happy smile to me.

‘She’ll be right back, Major. She’s shy at first, with strangers. Just at first.’

As van Gelder had promised, Trudi was back almost immediately. She was carrying with her a very large puppet, so wonderfully made that at first glance it could have been mistaken for a real child. It was almost three feet in length with a white wimple hat covering flaxen curls of the same shade as Trudi’s own and was wearing an ankle-length billowy striped silk dress and a most beautifully embroidered bodice. Trudi clasped this puppet as tightly as if it had been a real child. Van Gelder again put his arm round her shoulders.

‘This is my daughter, Trudi. A friend of mine, Trudi. Major Sherman, from England.’

This time she advanced without any hesitation, put her hand out, made a small bobbing motion like the beginnings of a curtsy, and smiled.

‘How do you do, Major Sherman?’

Not to be outdone in courtesy I smiled and bowed slightly. ‘Miss van Gelder. My pleasure.’

‘My pleasure.’ She turned and looked enquiringly at van Gelder.

‘English is not one of Trudi’s strong points,’ van Gelder said apologetically. ‘Sit down, Major, sit down.’

He took a bottle of Scotch from the sideboard, poured drinks for myself and himself, handed me mine and sank into his chair with a sigh. Then he looked up at his daughter, who was gazing steadily at me in a way that made me feel more than vaguely uncomfortable.

‘Won’t you sit down, my dear?’

She turned to van Gelder, smiled brightly, nodded and handed the huge puppet to him. He accepted it so readily that he was obviously used to this sort of thing.

‘Yes, Papa,’ she said, then without warning but at the same time as unaffectedly as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she sat down on my knee, put an arm around my neck and smiled at me. I smiled right back, though, for just that instant, it was a Herculean effort.

Trudi regarded me solemnly and said: ‘I like you.’

‘And I like you too, Trudi.’ I squeezed her shoulder to show her how much I liked her. She smiled at me, put her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes. I looked at the top of the blonde head for a moment, then glanced in mild enquiry at van Gelder. He smiled, a smile full of sorrow.

‘If I do not wound you, Major Sherman, Trudi loves everyone.’

‘All girls of a certain age do.’

‘You are a man of quite extraordinary perception.’

I didn’t think it called for any great perception at all to make the remark I had just made, so I didn’t answer, just smiled and turned again to Trudi. I said, very gently: ‘Trudi?’

She said nothing. She just stirred and smiled again, a curiously contented smile that for some obscure reason made me feel more than a little of a fraud, closed her eyes even more tightly and snuggled close to me.

I tried again. “Trudi. I’m sure you must have beautiful eyes. Can I see them?’

She thought this over for a bit, smiled again, sat up, held herself at straight arm’s length with her hands on my shoulders, then opened her eyes very wide as a child would do on such a request.

The huge violet eyes were beautiful, no doubt about that. But they were something else also. They were glazed and vacant and did not seem to reflect the light: they sparkled, a sparkle that would have deceptively highlit any still photograph taken of her, for the sparkle was superficial only: behind lay a strange quality of opacity.

Still gently, I took her right hand from my shoulder and pushed the sleeve up as far as the elbow. If the rest of her were anything to go by it should have been a beautiful forearm but it wasn’t: it was shockingly mutilated by the punctures left by a countless number of hypodermic needles. Trudi, her lips trembling, looked at me in dismay as if fearful of reproach, snatched down the sleeve of her dress, flung her arms about me, buried her face in my neck and started to cry. She cried as if her heart was breaking. I patted her as soothingly as one can pat anyone who seems bent on choking you and looked over at van Gelder.

‘Now I know your reasons,’ I said. ‘For insisting I come here.’

‘I’m sorry. Now you know.’

‘You make a third point?’

‘I make a third point. God alone knows I wish I didn’t have to. But you will understand that in all fairness to my colleagues I must let them know these things.’

‘De Graaf knows?’

‘Every senior police officer in Amsterdam knows,’ van Gelder said simply. ‘Trudi!’

Trudi’s only reaction was to cling even more tightly. I was beginning to suffer from anoxia.

‘Trudi!’ Van Gelder was more insistent this time. ‘Your afternoon’s sleep. You know what the doctor says. Bed!’

‘No,’ she sobbed. ‘No bed.’

Van Gelder sighed and raised his voice: ‘Herta!’

Almost as if she had been waiting for her cue – which she probably had been, listening outside the door – a most outlandish creature entered the room. As far as health farms were concerned, she was the challenge to end all challenges. She was a huge and enormously fat waddling woman – to describe her method of locomotion as walking would have been a gross inaccuracy – dressed in exactly the same type of clothes as Trudi’s puppet was wearing. Long blonde pigtails tied with bright ribbon hung down her massive front. Her face was old – she had to be at least over seventy – deeply trenched and had the texture and appearance of cracked brown leather. The contrast between the gaily hued clothes and the blonde pigtails on the one hand and the enormous old hag that wore them on the other, was bizarre, horrible, so grotesque as to be almost obscene, but the contrast appeared to evoke no such responses in either van Gelder or Trudi.

The old woman crossed the room – for all her bulk and waddling gait she made ground quite quickly – nodded a curt acknowledgment to me and, without saying a word, laid a kindly but firm hand on Trudi’s shoulder. Trudi looked up at once, her tears gone as quickly as they had come, smiled, nodded docilely, disengaged her arms from my neck and rose. She crossed to van Gelder’s chair, recovered her puppet, kissed him, crossed to where I was sitting, kissed me as unaffectedly as a child saying good night, and almost skipped from the room, the waddling Herta close behind. I exhaled a long sigh and just managed to refrain from mopping my brow.




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