Puppet on a Chain

CHAPTER 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 2797. Neither meant a thing to me but on the reasonable assumption that the floor-waiter wouldn't have seen 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 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 verv 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 co-operation 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. 'Ah 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 understuffed 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 I'

'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.

'You might have warned me,' I complained. 'About Trudi and Herta. Who is she anyway — Herta, I mean? A nurse?'

'An ancient retainer, you'd say in English.' Van Gelder took a large gulp of his whisky as if he needed it and I did the same for I needed it even more: after all he was used to this sort of thing. 'My parents' old housekeeper — from the island of Huyler in the Zuider Zee. As you may have noticed, they are a little — what do you say — conservative in their dress. She's been with us for only a few months — but, well, you can see how she is with Trudi.'

'And Trudi?'

'Trudi is eight years old. She has been eight years old for the past fifteen years, she always will be eight years old. Not my daughter, as you may have guessed — but I could never love a daughter more. My brother's adopted daughter. He and I worked in Curacao until last year — I was in narcotics, he was the security officer for a Dutch oil company. His wife died some years ago — and then he and my wife were killed in a car crash last year. Someone had to take Trudi. I did. I didn't want her — and now I couldn't live without her. She will never grow up, Mr Sherman.'

And all the time his subordinates probably thought that he was just their lucky superior with no other thought or concern in his mind than to put as many malefactors behind bars as possible. Sympathetic comment and commiseration were never my forte, so I said: 'This addiction — when did it start?'

'God knows. Years ago. Years before my brother found out.'

'Some of those hypo punctures are recent.'

'She's on withdrawal treatment. Too many injections, you would say?'

'I would say.'

'Herta watches her like a hawk. Every morning she takes her to the Vondel Park — she loves to feed the birds. In the afternoon Trudi sleeps. But sometimes in the evening Herta gets tired — and I am often from home in the evening.'

'You've had her watched?'

'A score of times. I don't know how it's done.'

'They get at her to get at you?'

'To bring pressure to bear on me. What else? She has no money to pay for fixes. They are fools and do not realize that I must see her die slowly before my eyes before I can compromise myself. So they keep trying.'

'You could have a twenty-four-hour guard placed on her.'

'And then that would make it official. Such an official request is brought to the automatic notice of the health authorities. And then?'

'An institution,' I nodded. 'For the mentally retarded. And she'd never come out again.'

'She'd never come out again.'

I didn't know what to say except goodbye, so I did that and left.