Puppet on a Chain

  ‘Oh, I notice all right. Take yourself, for instance.’ I carefully refrained from looking at her as we walked along although I knew she was observing me pretty closely. ‘New girl to Narcotics. Limited experience Deuxième Bureau, Paris. Dressed in navy coat, navy scarf spotted with little white edelweiss, knitted white knee-stockings, sensible flat-heeled navy shoes, buckled, five feet four, a figure, to quote a famous American writer, to make a bishop kick a hole through a stained-glass window, a quite beautiful face, platinum blonde hair that looks like spun silk when the sun shines through it, black eyebrows, green eyes, perceptive and, best of all, beginning to worry about her boss, especially his lack of humanity. Oh, I forgot. Cracked finger-nail polish, third finger, left hand, and a devastating smile enhanced – if, that is to say, that’s possible – by a slightly crooked left upper eye-tooth.’

  ‘Wow!’ She was at a momentary loss for words, which I was beginning to guess was not at all in character. She glanced at the finger-nail in question and the polish was cracked, then turned to me with a smile that was just as devastating as I’d said it was. ‘Maybe you do at that.’

  ‘Do at what?’

  ‘Care about us.’

  ‘Of course I care.’ She was beginning to confuse me with Sir Galahad and that could be a bad thing. ‘All my operatives, Category Grade I, young, female, good-looking, are like daughters to me.’

  There was a long pause, then she murmured something, very sotto voce indeed, but it sounded to me very like ‘Yes, Papa.’

  ‘What was that?’ I asked suspiciously.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’

  We turned into the street which housed the premises of Morgenstern and Muggenthaler. This, my second visit to the place, more than confirmed the impression I had formed the previous night. It seemed darker than ever, bleaker and more menacing, cobbles and pavement more cracked than before, the gutters more choked with litter. Even the gabled houses leaned closer towards one another: this time tomorrow and they would be touching.

  Belinda stopped abruptly and clutched my right arm. I glanced at her. She was staring upwards, her eyes wide, and I followed her gaze where the gabled warehouses marched away into the diminishing distance, their hoisting beams clearly silhouetted against the night sky. I knew she felt there was evil abroad: I felt it myself.

  This must be the place,’ she whispered. ‘I know it must be.’

  ‘This is the place,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘What’s wrong?’

  She snatched her hand away as if I had just said something wounding, but I regained it, tucked her arm under mine and held on firmly to her hand. She made no attempt to remove it.

  ‘It’s – it’s so creepy. What are those horrible things sticking out under the gables?’

  ‘Hoisting beams. In the old days the houses here were rated on the width of the frontage, so the thrifty Dutch made their houses uncommonly narrow. Unfortunately, this made their staircases even narrower still. So, the hoisting beams for the bulky stuff – grand pianos up, coffins down, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Stop it!’ She lifted her shoulders and shuddered involuntarily. ‘This is a horrible place. Those beams – they’re like the gallows they hang people from. This is a place where people come to die.’

  ‘Nonsense, my dear girl,’ I said heartily. I could feel stiletto-tipped fingers of ice play Chopin’s Death March up and down my spine and was suddenly filled with longing for that dear old nostalgic music from the barrel-organ outside the Rembrandt: I was probably as glad to hang on to Belinda’s hand as she was to mine. ‘You mustn’t fall prey to those Gallic imaginings of yours.’

  ‘I’m not imagining things,’ she said sombrely, then shivered again. ‘Did we have to come to this awful place?’ She was shivering violently now, violently and continuously, and though it was cold it wasn’t as cold as all that.

  ‘Can you remember the way we came?’ I asked. She nodded, puzzled and I went on: ‘You make your way back to the hotel and I’ll join you later.’

  ‘Back to the hotel?’ She was still puzzled.

  ‘I’ll be all right. Now, off you go.’

  She tore her hand free from mine and before I could realize what was happening she was gripping both my lapels in her hands and giving me a look that was clearly designed to shrivel me on the spot. If she was shaking now it was with anger: I’d never realized that so beautiful a girl could look so furious. ‘Mercurial’ was no word for Belinda, just a pale and innocuous substitute for the one I really wanted. I looked down at the fists gripping my lapels. The knuckles were white. She was actually trying to shake me.

  ‘Don’t ever say anything like that to me again.’ She was furious, no doubt about it.

  There was a brief but spirited conflict between my ingrained instinct for discipline and the desire to put my arms round her: discipline won, but it was a close run thing. I said humbly: ‘I’ll never say anything like that to you again.’

  ‘All right.’ She released my sadly crushed lapels and grabbed my hand instead. ‘Well, come on, then.’ Pride would never let me say that she dragged me along but to the detached onlooker it must have seemed uncommonly like it.

  Fifty paces further along and I stopped. ‘Here we are.’

  Belinda read the nameplate: ‘Morgenstern and Muggenthaler.’

  ‘Topping the bill at this week’s Palladium.’ I climbed the steps and got to work on the lock. ‘Watch the street.’

  ‘And then what do I do?’

  ‘Watch my back.’

  A determined wolf-cub with a bent hairpin would have found that lock no deterrent. We went inside and I closed the door behind us. The torch I had was small but powerful: it didn’t have much to show us on that first floor. It was piled almost ceiling high with empty wooden boxes, paper, cardboard, bales of straw and baling and binding machinery. A packing station, nothing else.

  We climbed up the narrow winding wooden steps to the next floor. Half-way up I glanced round and saw that Belinda, too, was glancing apprehensively behind her, her torch swivelling and darting in a dozen different directions.

  The next floor was given over entirely to vast quantities of Dutch pewter, windmills, dogs, pipes and a dozen other articles associated solely with the tourist souvenir trade. There were tens of thousands of those articles, on shelves along the walls or on parallel racks across the warehouse, and although I couldn’t possibly examine them all, they all looked perfectly innocuous to me. What didn’t look quite so innocuous, however, was a fifteen by twenty room that projected from one corner of the warehouse, or, more precisely, the door that led into that room, although obviously it wasn’t going to lead into that room tonight. I called Belinda over and shone my torch on the door. She stared at it, then stared at me and I could see the puzzlement in the reflected wash of light.

  ‘A time-lock,’ she said. ‘Why would anyone want a time-lock on a simple office door?’

  ‘It’s not a simple office door,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s made of steel. By the same token you can bet those simple wooden walls are lined with steel and that the simple old rustic window overlooking the street is covered with close-meshed bars set in concrete. In a diamond warehouse, yes, you could understand it. But here? Why, they’ve nothing to hide here.’

  ‘It looks as if we may have come to the right place,’ Belinda said.

  ‘Did you ever doubt me?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Very demure. ‘What is this place, anyway?’

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it – a wholesaler in the souvenir trade. The factories or the cottage industries or whatever send their goods in bulk for storage here and the warehouse supplies the shops on demand. Simple, isn’t it? Harmless, isn’t it?’

  ‘But not very hygienic.’

  ‘How’s that again?’

  ‘It smells horrible.’

  ‘Cannabis does to some people.’

  ‘Cannabis!’

  ‘You and your sheltered life. Come on.’

  I led the way up to the third fl
oor, waited for Belinda to join me. ‘Still guarding the master’s back?’ I enquired.

  ‘Still guarding the master’s back,’ she said mechanically. True to form, the fire-breathing Belinda of a few minutes ago had disappeared. I didn’t blame her. There was something inexplicably sinister and malevolent about this old building. The sickly smell of cannabis was even stronger now but there appeared to be nothing on this floor even remotely connected with it. Three sides of the entire floor, together with a number of transverse racks, were given over entirely to pendulum clocks, all of them, fortunately, stopped. They covered the whole gamut of shape, design and size and varied in quality from small, cheap, garishly-painted models for the tourist trade, nearly all made from yellow pine, to very large, beautifully made and exquisitely designed metal clocks that were obviously very old and expensive, or modern replicas of those, which couldn’t have been all that much cheaper.

  The fourth side of the floor came, to say the least, as a considerable surprise. It was given up to, of all things, row upon row of Bibles. I wondered briefly what on earth Bibles were doing in a souvenir warehouse, but only briefly: there were too many things I didn’t understand.

  I picked one of them up and examined it. Embossed in gold on the lower half of the leather cover were the words The Gabriel Bible … I opened it and on the fly-leaf was the printed inscription: ‘With the Compliments of the First Reformed Church of the American Huguenot Society.’

  ‘There’s one of those in our hotel room,’ Belinda said.

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if there’s one of those in most of the hotel rooms in the city. Question is, what are they doing here? Why not in a publisher’s or stationer’s warehouse, where you would expect to find them? Queer, isn’t it?’

  She shivered. ‘Everything here is queer.’

  I clapped her on the back. ‘You’ve got a cold coming on, that’s what it is. I’ve warned you before about these mini-skirts. Next floor.’

  The next floor was given over entirely to the most astonishing collection of puppets imaginable. Altogether, their number must have run into thousands. They ranged in size from tiny miniatures to models even bigger than the one Trudi had been carrying: all, without exception, were exquisitely modelled, all beautifully dressed in a variety of traditional Dutch costumes. The bigger puppets were either free-standing or supported by a metal stay: the smaller ones dangled by strings from overhead rails. The beam of my torch finally focused on a group of dolls all dressed in the same particular costume.

  Belinda had forgotten about the importance of minding my back: she’d resumed her arm-clutching again.

  ‘It’s – it’s so eerie. They’re so alive, so watchful.’ She looked at the dolls spot-lit by the beam of my torch. ‘Something special about those?’

  ‘There’s no need to whisper. They may be looking at you but I assure you they can’t hear you. Those puppets there. Nothing special really, just that they come from the island of Huyler out in the Zuider Zee. Van Gelder’s housekeeper, a charming old beldam who’s lost her broomstick, dresses like that.’

  ‘Like that?’

  ‘It’s hard to imagine,’ I admitted. ‘And Trudi has a big puppet dressed in exactly the same way.’

  ‘The sick girl?’

  ‘The sick girl.’

  ‘There’s something terribly sick about this place.’ She let go of my arm and got back to the business of minding my back again. Seconds later I heard the sound of her sharply indrawn breath and turned round. She had her back to me, not more than four feet away, and as I watched she started to walk slowly and silently backwards, her eyes evidently lined up on something caught in the beam of her torch, her free hand reaching out gropingly behind her. I took it and she came close to me, still not turning her head.

  She spoke in an urgent whisper.

  ‘There’s somebody there. Somebody watching.’

  I glanced briefly along the beam of her torch but could see nothing, but then hers wasn’t a very powerful torch compared to the one I carried. I looked away, squeezed her hand to attract her attention, and when she turned round I looked questioningly at her.

  ‘There is someone there.’ Still the same insistent whisper, the green eyes wide. ‘I saw them. I saw them.’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘Eyes. I saw them!’

  I never doubted her. Imaginative girl she might be, but she’d been trained and highly trained not to be imaginative in the matter of observation. I brought up my own torch, not as carefully as I might have done, for the beam struck her eyes in passing, momentarily blinding her and as she raised a reflex hand to her eyes I settled the beam on the area she just indicated. I couldn’t see any eyes, but what I did see was two adjacent puppets swinging so gently that their motion was almost imperceptible. Almost, but not quite – and there wasn’t a draught, a breath of air, stirring in that fourth floor of the warehouse.

  I squeezed her hand again and smiled at her. ‘Now, Belinda—’

  ‘Don’t you “now Belinda” me!’ Whether this was meant to be a hiss or a whisper with a tremor in it I couldn’t be sure. ‘I saw them. Horrible staring eyes. I swear I saw them. I swear it.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, Belinda—’

  She moved to face me, frustration in the intent eyes as if she suspected me of sounding as if I were trying to humour her, which I was. I said, ‘I believe you, Belinda. Of course I believe you.’ I hadn’t changed my tone.

  ‘Then why don’t you do something about it?’

  ‘Just what I’m going to do. I’m going to get the hell out of here.’ I made a last unhurried inspection with my torch, as if nothing had happened, then turned and took her arm in a protective fashion. ‘Nothing for us here and we’ve both been too long in here. A drink, I think, for what’s left of our nerves.’

  She stared at me, her face reflecting a changing pattern of anger and frustration and incredulity and, I suspected, more than a little relief. But the anger was dominant now: most people become angry when they feel they are being disbelieved and humoured at the same time.

  ‘But I tell you—’

  ‘Ah ah!’ I touched my lips with my forefinger. ‘You don’t tell me anything. The boss, remember, always knows best …’

  She was too young to go all puce and apoplectic, but the precipitating emotions were there all the same. She glared at me, apparently decided that there were no words to meet the situation, and started off down the stairs, outrage in every stiff line of her back. I followed and my back wasn’t quite normal either, it had a curious tingling feeling to it that didn’t go away until I had the front door to the warehouse safely locked behind me.

  We walked quickly up the street, keeping about three feet apart: it was Belinda who maintained the distance, her attitude clearly proclaiming that the hand-holding and the arm-clutching were over for the night and more likely for keeps. I cleared my throat.

  ‘He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day.’

  She was so seething with anger that she didn’t get it.

  ‘Please don’t talk to me,’ she snapped so I didn’t, not, at least, till I came to the first tavern in the sailors’ quarter, an unsalubrious dive rejoicing in the name of ‘The Cat o’ Nine Tails’. The British Navy must have stopped by here once. I took Belinda’s arm and guided her inside. She wasn’t keen, but she didn’t fight about it.

  It was a smoky airless drinking den and that was about all you could say about it. Several sailors, resentful of this intrusion by a couple of trippers of what they probably rightly regarded as their own personal property, scowled at me when I came in, but I was in a much better scowling mood than they were and after the first disparaging reception they left us strictly alone. I led Belinda to a small table, a genuine antique wooden table whose original surface hadn’t been touched by soap or water since time immemorial.

  ‘I’m having Scotch,’ I said. ‘You?’

  ‘Scotch,’ she said huffily.

  ‘But you don’t drink
Scotch.’

  ‘I do tonight.’

  She was half right. She knocked back half of her glass of neat Scotch in a defiant swig and then started spluttering, coughing and choking so violently that I saw I could have been wrong about her developing symptoms of apoplexy. I patted her helpfully on the back.

  ‘Take your hand away,’ she wheezed.

  I took my hand away.

  ‘I don’t think I can work with you any more, Major Sherman,’ she said after she’d got her larynx in working order again.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘I can’t work with people who don’t trust me, who don’t believe me. You not only treat us like puppets, you treat us like children.’

  ‘I don’t regard you as a child,’ I said pacifically. I didn’t either.

  ‘“I believe you, Belinda,”’ she mimicked bitterly. ‘“Of course I believe you, Belinda”. You don’t believe Belinda at all.’

  ‘I do believe Belinda,’ I said. ‘I do believe I care for Belinda after all. That’s why I took Belinda out of there.’

  She stared at me. ‘You believe – then why—’

  ‘There was someone there, hidden behind that rack of puppets. I saw two of the puppets sway slightly. Someone was behind the rack, watching, waiting to see, I’m certain, what, if anything, we found out. He’d no murderous intent or he’d have shot us in the back when we were going down the stairs. But if I’d reacted as you wanted me to, then I’d have been forced to go look for him and he’d have gunned me down from his place of concealment before I’d even set eyes on him. And then he’d have gunned you down, for he couldn’t have any witnesses, and you’re really far too young to die yet. Or maybe I could have played hide-and-seek with him and stood an even chance of getting him – if you weren’t there. But you were, you haven’t a gun, you’ve no experience at all in the nasty kind of games we play and you were as good as a hostage to him. So I took Belinda out of there. There now, wasn’t that a nice speech?’

  ‘I don’t know about the speech.’ Mercurial as ever, there were tears in her eyes. ‘I only know it’s the nicest thing anybody ever said about me.’