Puppet on a Chain

  ‘Fiddlesticks!’ I drained my Scotch, finished hers off for her and took her back to her hotel. We stood in the foyer entrance for a moment, sheltering from the now heavily falling rain and she said: ‘I’m sorry. I was such a fool. And I’m sorry for you too.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘I can see now why you’d rather have puppets than people working for you. One doesn’t cry inside when a puppet dies.’

  I said nothing. I was beginning to lose my grip on this girl, the old master-pupil relationship wasn’t quite what it used to be.

  ‘Another thing,’ she said. She spoke almost happily.

  I braced myself.

  ‘I won’t ever be afraid of you any more.’

  ‘You were afraid? Of me?’

  ‘Yes, I was. Really. But it’s like the man said—’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘Shylock, wasn’t it. You know, cut me and I bleed—’

  ‘Oh, do be quiet!’

  She kept quiet. She just gave me that devastating smile again, kissed me without any great haste, gave me some more of the same smile and went inside. I watched the glass swing-doors until they came to a rest. Much more of this, I thought gloomily, and discipline would be gone to hell and back again.

  FIVE

  I walked two or three hundred yards till I was well clear of the girls’ hotel, picked up a taxi and was driven back to the Rembrandt. I stood for a moment under the foyer canopy, looking at the barrel-organ across the road. The ancient was not only indefatigable but apparently also impermeable, rain meant nothing to him, nothing except an earthquake would have stopped him from giving his evening performance. Like the old trouper who feels that the show must go on, he perhaps felt he had a duty to his public, and a public he incredibly had, half a dozen youths whose threadbare clothes gave every indication of being completely sodden, a group of acolytes lost in the mystic contemplation of the death agonies of Strauss, whose turn it was to be stretched on the rack tonight. I went inside.

  The assistant manager caught sight of me as I turned from hanging up my coat. His surprise appeared to be genuine.

  ‘Back so soon? From Zaandam?’

  ‘Fast taxi,’ I explained and passed through to the bar, where I ordered a jonge Genever and a Pils and drank both slowly while I considered the relationship between fast men with fast guns and pushers and sick girls and hidden eyes behind puppets and people and taxis who followed me everywhere I went and policemen being blackmailed and venal managers and door-keepers and tinny barrel-organs. It all added up to nothing. I wasn’t, I felt sure, being provocative enough and was coming to the reluctant conclusion that there was nothing else for it but a visit to the warehouse again later that night – without, of course, ever letting Belinda know about it – when I happened to look up for the first time at the mirror in front of me. I wasn’t prompted by instinct or anything of the kind, it was just that my nostrils had been almost unconsciously titillated for some time past by a perfume that I’d just identified as sandalwood, and as I am rather partial to it, I just wanted to see who was wearing it. Sheer old-fashioned nosiness.

  The girl was sitting at a table directly behind me, a drink on the table before her, a paper in her hand. I could have thought that I imagined that her eyes dropped to the paper as soon as I had glanced up to the mirror, but I wasn’t given to imagining things like that. She had been looking at me. She seemed young, was wearing a green coat and had a blonde mop of hair that, in the modern fashion, had every appearance of having been trimmed by a lunatic hedge-cutter. Amsterdam seemed to be full of blondes who were forced on my attention in one way or another.

  I said ‘The same again’ to the bartender, placed the drinks on a table close to the bar, left them there and walked slowly towards the foyer, passed the girl like one deep lost in thought, not even looking at her, went through the front door and out into the street. Strauss had succumbed but not the ancient, who to demonstrate his catholicity of taste was now giving a ghoulish rendering of ‘The bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond’. If he tried that lot on in Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow both he and his barrel-organ would be but a faded memory inside fifteen minutes. The youthful acolytes had vanished, which could have meant that they were either very anti-Scottish or very pro-Scottish indeed. In point of fact their absence, as I was to discover later, meant something else entirely: the evidence was all there before me and I missed it and because I missed it, too many people were going to die.

  The ancient saw me and registered his surprise.

  ‘Mynheer said that he—’

  ‘He was going to the opera. And so I did.’ I shook my head sadly. ‘Prima-donna reaching for a high E. Heart attack.’ I clapped him on the shoulder. ‘No panic. I’m only going as far as the phone-box there.’

  I dialled the girls’ hotel. I got through to the desk immediately and then, after a long wait, to the girls’ room. Belinda sounded peevish.

  ‘Hullo. Who is it?’

  ‘Sherman. I want you over here at once.’

  ‘Now?’ Her voice was a wail. ‘But I’m in the middle of a bath.’

  ‘Regrettably, I can’t be in two places at once. You’re clean enough for the dirty work I have in hand. And Maggie.’

  ‘But Maggie’s asleep.’

  ‘Then you’d better wake her up, hadn’t you? Unless you want to carry her.’ Injured silence. ‘Be here at my hotel in ten minutes. Hang about outside, about twenty yards away.’

  ‘But it’s bucketing rain!’ She was still at the wailing.

  ‘Ladies of the street don’t mind how damp they get. Soon there’ll be a girl leaving here. Your height, your age, your figure, your hair—’

  ‘There must be ten thousand girls in Amsterdam who—’

  ‘Ah – But this one is beautiful. Not as beautiful as you are, of course, but beautiful. She’s also wearing a green coat – to go with her green umbrella – sandalwood perfume and, on her left temple, a fairly well camouflaged bruise that I gave her yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘A fairly well you didn’t tell us anything about assaulting girls.’

  ‘I can’t remember every irrelevant detail. Follow her. When she gets to her destination, one of you stay put, the other report back to me. No, you can’t come here, you know that. I’ll be at the Old Bell at the far corner of the Rembrandtplein.’

  ‘What will you be doing there?’

  ‘It’s a pub. What do you think I’ll be doing?’

  The girl in the green coat was still sitting there at the same table when I returned. I went to the reception desk first, asked for and got some notepaper and took it across to the table where I’d left my drinks. The girl in green was no more than six feet away, at right angles, and so should have had an excellent view of what I was doing while herself remaining comparatively free from observation.

  I took out my wallet, extracted my previous night’s dinner bill, smoothed it out on the table before me and started to make notes on a piece of paper. After a few moments I threw my pen down in disgust, screwed up the paper and flung it into a convenient waste-basket. I started on another sheet of paper and appeared to reach the same unsatisfactory conclusion. I did this several times more, then screwed my eyes shut and rested my head on my hands for almost five minutes, a man, it must have seemed, lost in the deepest concentration. The fact was, that I wasn’t in too much of a hurry. Ten minutes, I’d said to Belinda, but if she managed to get out of a bath, get dressed and be across here with Maggie in that time, I knew even less than I thought I did about women.

  For a time I resumed the scribbling, the crumpling and the throwing away and by that time twenty minutes had elapsed. I finished the last of my drink, rose, said goodnight to the barman and went away. I went as far as the wine plush curtains that screened the bar from the foyer and waited, peering cautiously round the edge of the curtain. The girl in green rose to her feet, crossed to the bar, ordered herself another drink and then casually sat down in the chair I had just vacated, her back to me
. She looked around, also casually, to make sure that she was unobserved, then just as casually reached down into the waste-basket and picked up the top sheet of crumpled paper. She smoothed it out on the table before her as I moved soundlessly up to her chair. I could see the side of her face now and I could see that it had gone very still. I could even read the message she had smoothed out on the table. It read: ONLY NOSY YOUNG GIRLS LOOK IN WASTEPAPER BASKETS.

  ‘All the other papers have the same secret message,’ I said. ‘Good evening, Miss Lemay.’

  She twisted round and looked up at me. She’d camouflaged herself pretty well to conceal the natural olive blush of her complexion, but all the paint and powder in the world was useless to conceal the blush that spread from her neck all the way up to the forehead.

  ‘My word,’ I said. ‘What a charming shade of pink.’

  ‘I am sorry. I do not speak English.’

  I very gently touched the bruise and said kindly: ‘Concussive amnesia. It’ll pass. How’s the head, Miss Lemay?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I—’

  ‘Do not speak English. You said that. But you understand it well enough, don’t you? Especially the written word. My word, for an ageing character like myself it’s refreshing to see that the young girls of today can blush so prettily. You do blush prettily, you know.’

  She rose in confusion, twisting and crushing the papers in her hand. On the side of the ungodly she might be – and who but those on the side of the ungodly would have tried, as no question she had tried, to block my pursuit in the airport – but I couldn’t hold back a twinge of pity. There was something forlorn and defenceless about her. She could have been a consummate actress, but then consummate actresses would have been earning a fortune on the stage or screen. Then, unaccountably, I thought of Belinda. Two in the one day were two too many. I was going soft in the head. I nodded at the papers.

  ‘You may retain those, if you wish,’ I said nastily.

  ‘Those.’ She looked at the papers. ‘I don’t want to—’

  ‘Ha! The amnesia is wearing off.’

  ‘Please, I—’

  ‘Your wig’s slipped, Miss Lemay.’

  Automatically her hands reached up and touched her hair, then she slowly lowered them to her sides and bit her lip in chagrin. There was something close to desperation in the brown eyes. Again I had the unpleasant sensation of not feeling very proud of myself.

  ‘Please leave me,’ she said, so I stepped to one side to let her pass. For a moment she looked at me and I could have sworn there was a beseeching look in her eyes and her face was puckering slightly almost as if she were about to cry, then she shook her head and hurried away. I followed more slowly, watched her run down the steps and turn in the direction of the canal. Twenty seconds later Maggie and Belinda passed by in the same direction. Despite the umbrellas they held, they looked very wet indeed and most unhappy. Maybe they’d got there in ten minutes after all.

  I went back to the bar which I’d had no intention of leaving in the first place although I’d had to convince the girl that I was. The bar-tender, a friendly soul, beamed, ‘Good evening again, sir. I thought you had gone to bed.’

  ‘I wanted to go to bed. But my taste-buds said, No, another jonge Genever.’

  ‘One should always listen to one’s taste-buds, sir,’ the bar-tender said gravely. He handed over the little glass. ‘Prost, sir!’ I lifted my glass and got back to my thinking. I thought about naïveté and how unpleasant it was to be led up garden paths and whether young girls could blush to order. I thought I’d heard of certain actresses that could but wasn’t sure, so I called for another Genever to jog my memory.

  The next glass I lifted in my hand was of a different order altogether, a great deal heavier and containing a great deal darker liquid. It was, in fact, a pint pot of Guinness, which might seem to be a very odd thing to find in a continental tavern, as indeed it was. But not in this one, not in the Old Bell, a horse-brass-behung hostelry more English than most English hostelries could ever hope to be. It specialized in English beers – and, as my glass testified, Irish stout.

  The pub was well patronized but I had managed to get a table to myself facing the door, not because I have any Wild West aversion to sitting with my back to the door but because I wanted to spot Maggie or Belinda, whichever it was, when she came in. In the event it was Maggie. She crossed to my table and sat down. She was a very bedraggled Maggie and despite scarf and umbrella her raven hair was plastered to her cheeks.

  ‘You all right?’ I asked solicitously.

  ‘If you call all right being soaked to the skin, then yes.’ It wasn’t at all like my Maggie to be as waspish as this: she must be very wet indeed.

  ‘And Belinda?’

  ‘She’ll survive too. But I think she worries too much about you.’ She waited pointedly until I’d finished taking a long satisfying swig at the Guinness. ‘She hopes you aren’t overdoing things.’

  ‘Belinda is a very thoughtful girl.’ Belinda knew damn well what I was doing.

  ‘Belinda’s young,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Yes, Maggie.’

  ‘And vulnerable.’

  ‘Yes, Maggie.’

  ‘I don’t want her hurt, Paul.’ This made me sit up, mentally, anyway. She never called me ‘Paul’ unless we were alone, and even then only when she was sufficiently lost in thought or emotion to forget about what she regarded as the proprieties. I didn’t know what to make of her remark and wondered what the hell the two of them might have been talking about. I was beginning to wish I’d left the two of them at home and brought along a couple of Dobermann Pinschers instead. At least a Dobermann would have made short work of our lurking friend in Morgenstern and Muggenthaler’s.

  ‘I said—’ Maggie began.

  ‘I heard what you said.’ I drank some more stout. ‘You’re a very dear girl, Maggie.’

  She nodded, not to indicate any agreement with what I said, just to show that for some obscure reason she found this a satisfactory answer and sipped some of the sherry I’d got for her. I skated swiftly back on to thick ice.

  ‘Now. Where is our other lady-friend that you’ve been following?’

  ‘She’s in church.’

  ‘What!’ I spluttered into my tankard.

  ‘Singing hymns.’

  ‘Good God! And Belinda?’

  ‘She’s in church, too.’

  ‘Is she singing hymns?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t go inside.’

  ‘Maybe Belinda shouldn’t have gone in either.’

  ‘What safer place than a church?’

  ‘True. True.’ I tried to relax but felt uneasy.

  ‘One of us had to stay.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Belinda said you might like to know the name of the church.’

  ‘Why should I—’ I stared at Maggie. ‘The First Reformed Church of the American Huguenot Society?’ Maggie nodded. I pushed back my chair and rose. ‘Now you tell me. Come on.’

  ‘What? And leave all that lovely Guinness that is so good for you?’

  ‘It’s Belinda’s health I’m thinking of, not mine.’

  We left, and as we left it suddenly occurred to me that the name of the church had meant nothing to Maggie. It had meant nothing to Maggie because Belinda hadn’t told her when she got back to the hotel and she hadn’t told her because Maggie had been asleep. And I’d wondered what the hell the two of them might have been talking about. They hadn’t been talking about anything. Either this was very curious or I wasn’t very clever. Or both.

  As usual it was raining and as we passed along the Rembrandtplein by the Hotel Schiller, Maggie gave a well-timed shiver.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘There’s a taxi. In fact, lots of taxis.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that there’s not a taxi in Amsterdam that’s not in the pay of the ungodly,’ I said with feeling, ‘but I wouldn’t bet a nickel on it. It’s not far.’

  Neither was it – by taxi. By f
oot it was a very considerable way indeed. But I had no intention of covering the distance on foot. I led Maggie down the Thorbeckeplein, turned left, right and left again till we came out on the Amstel. Maggie said: ‘You do seem to know your way around, don’t you, Major Sherman?’

  ‘I’ve been here before.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I forget. Last year, sometime.’

  ‘When last year?’ Maggie knew or thought she knew all my movements over the past five years and Maggie could be easily piqued. She didn’t like what she called irregularities.

  ‘In the spring, I think it was.’

  ‘Two months, maybe?’

  ‘About that.’

  ‘You spent two months in Miami last spring,’ she said accusingly. ‘That’s what the records say.’

  ‘You know how I get my dates mixed up.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ She paused. ‘I thought you’d never seen Colonel de Graaf and van Gelder before?’

  ‘I hadn’t.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I didn’t want to bother them.’ I stopped by a phone-box. ‘A couple of calls to make. Wait here.’

  ‘I will not!’ A very heady atmosphere, was Amsterdam’s. She was getting as bad as Belinda. But she had a point the slanting rain was sheeting down very heavily now. I opened the door and let her precede me into the booth. I called a near-by cab company whose number I knew, started to dial another number.

  ‘I didn’t know you spoke Dutch,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Neither do our friends. That’s why we may get an honest taxi-driver.’

  ‘You really don’t trust anyone, do you?’ Maggie said admiringly.

  ‘I trust you, Maggie.’

  ‘No, you don’t. You just don’t want to burden my beautiful head with unnecessary problems.’

  ‘That’s my line,’ I complained. De Graaf came on the phone. After the usual courtesies I said: ‘Those scraps of paper? No luck yet? Thank you, Colonel de Graaf, I’ll call back later.’ I hung up.

  ‘What scraps of paper?’ Maggie asked.