Puppet on a Chain

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

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.