Puppet on a Chain

by Alistair MacLean

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

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

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

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

  ‘I see you two have met each other.’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘How do you do, Major Sherman?’

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

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

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

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

  ‘Won’t you sit down, my dear?’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘All girls of a certain age do.’

  ‘You are a man of quite extraordinary perception.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I’m sorry. Now you know.’

  ‘You make a third point?’

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

  ‘De Graaf knows?’

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

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

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

  ‘No,’ she sobbed. ‘No bed.’

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

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

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

  ‘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?’

&nb
sp; ‘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 Curaçao 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.

  FOUR

  I spent the afternoon in my hotel room going over the carefully documented and cross-indexed files and case histories which Colonel de Graaf’s office had given me. They covered every known case of drug-taking and drug prosecutions, successful or not, in Amsterdam in the past two years. They made very interesting reading if, that is, your interest lay in death and degradation and suicide and broken homes and ruined careers. But there was nothing in it for me. I spent a useless hour trying to rearrange and reassemble the various cross-indexes but no significant pattern even began to emerge. I gave up. Highly trained minds like de Graaf’s and van Gelder’s would have spent many, many hours in the same fruitless pastime, and if they had failed to establish any form of pattern there was no hope for me.

  In the early evening I went down to the foyer and handed in my key. The smile of the assistant manager behind the desk lacked a little of the sabre-toothed quality of old, it was deferential, even apologetic: he’d obviously been told to try a new tack with me.

  ‘Good evening, good evening, Mr Sherman.’ An affable ingratiation that I cared for even less than his normal approach. ‘I’m afraid I must have sounded a little abrupt last evening, but you see—’

  ‘Don’t mention it, my dear fellow, don’t mention it.’ I wasn’t going to let any old hotel manager outdo me in affability. ‘It was perfectly understandable in the circumstances. Must have come as a very great shock to you.’ I glanced through the foyer doors at the falling rain. ‘The guide-books didn’t mention this.’

  He smiled widely as if he hadn’t heard the same inane remark a thousand times before, then said cunningly: ‘Hardly the night for your English constitutional, Mr Sherman.’

  ‘No chance anyway. It’s Zaandam for me tonight.’

  ‘Zaandam.’ He made a face. ‘My commiserations, Mr Sherman.’ He evidently knew a great deal more about Zaandam than I did, which was hardly surprising as I’d just picked the name from a map.

  I went outside. Rain or no rain, the barrel-organ was still grinding and screeching away at the top of its form. It was Puccini who was on the air tonight and he was taking a terrible beating. I crossed to the organ and stood there for some time, not so much listening to the music, for there was none to speak of, but looking without seeming to look at a handful of emaciated and ill-dressed teen-agers – a rare sight indeed in Amsterdam where they don’t go in for emaciation very much – who leaned their elbows on the barrel-organ and seemed lost in rapture. My thoughts were interrupted by a gravelly voice behind me.

  ‘Mynheer likes music?’ I turned. The ancient was smiling at me in a tentative sort of fashion.

  ‘I love music.’

  ‘So do I, so do I.’ I peered at him closely, for in the nature of things his time must be close and there could be no forgiveness for that remark. I smiled at him, one music-lover to the other.

  ‘I shall think of you tonight. I’m going to the opera.’

  ‘Mynheer is kind.’

  I dropped two coins in the tin can that had mysteriously appeared under my nose.

  ‘Mynheer is too kind.’

  Having the suspicions I did about him, I thought the same myself, but I smiled charitably and, recrossing the street, nodded to the doorman: with the masonic legerdemain known only to doormen, he materialized a taxi out of nowhere. I told him ‘Schiphol Airport’ and got inside.

  We moved off. We did not move off alone. At the first traffic lights, twenty yards from the hotel, I glanced through the tinted rear window. A yellow-striped Mercedes taxi was two cars behind us, a taxi I recognized as one that habitually frequented the rank not far from the hotel. But it could have been coincidence. The lights turned to green and we made our way into the Vijzelstraat. So did the yellow-striped Mercedes.

  I tapped the driver on the shoulder. ‘Stop here, please. I want to buy some cigarettes.’ I got out. The Mercedes was right behind us, stopped. No one got in, no one got out. I went into an hotel foyer, bought some cigarettes I didn’t need and came out again. The Mercedes was still there. We moved off and after a few moments I said to the driver: ‘Turn right along the Prinsengracht.’

  He protested. ‘That is not the way to Schiphol.’

  ‘It’s the way I want to go. Turn right.’

  He did and so did the Mercedes.

  ‘Stop.’ He stopped. The Mercedes stopped. Coincidence was coincidence but this was ridiculous. I got out, walked back to the Mercedes and opened the door. The driver was a small man with a shiny blue suit and a disreputable air. ‘Good evening. Are you for hire?’

  ‘No.’ He looked me up and down, trying out first the air of easy insouciance, then that of insolent indifference, but he wasn’t right for either part.

  ‘Then why are you stopped?’

  ‘Any law against a man stopping for a smoke?’

  ‘None. Only you’re not smoking. You know the Police HQ in the Marnixstraat?’ The sudden lack of enthusiasm in his expression made it quite clear that he knew it all too well. ‘I suggest you go there and ask for either Colonel de Graaf or Inspector van Gelder and tell them that you have a complaint to lodge about Paul Sherman, Room 616, Hotel Excelsior.’

  ‘Complaint?’ he said warily. ‘What complaint?’

  ‘Tell them that he took the car keys from your ignition and threw them into the canal.’ I took the car keys from the ignition and threw them into the canal and a very satisfactory plop they made too as they vanished for ever into the depths of the Prinsengracht. ‘Don’t follow me around,’ I said and closed the door in a manner befitting the end of our brief interview, but Mercedes are well made cars and the door didn’t fall off.

  Back in my own taxi I waited till we were back on the main road again, then stopped the taxi. ‘I’ve decided to walk,’ I said and paid what was owing.

  ‘What! To Schiphol?’

  I gave him the sort of tolera
nt smile one might expect to receive from a long-distance walker whose prowess has been called in question, waited till he had moved from sight, hopped on a 16 tram and got off at the Dam. Belinda, dressed in a dark coat and with a dark scarf over her blonde hair, was waiting for me in the tram shelter. She looked damp and cold.

  ‘You’re late,’ she said accusingly.

  ‘Never criticize your boss, even by implication. The managerial classes always have things to attend to.’

  We crossed the square, retracing the steps the grey man and I had taken the previous night, down the alley by the Krasnapolsky and along the tree-lined Oudezijds Voorburgwal, an area that is one of the cultural highlights of Amsterdam, but Belinda seemed in no mood for culture. A mercurial girl, she seemed withdrawn and remote that night, and the silence was hardly companionable. Belinda had something on her mind and if I were beginning to become any judge of Belinda my guess was that she would let me know about it sooner rather than later. I was right.

  She said abruptly: ‘We don’t really exist for you, do we?’

  ‘Who doesn’t exist?’

  ‘Me, Maggie, all the people who work for you. We’re just ciphers.’

  ‘Well, you know how it is,’ I said pacifically. ‘Ship’s captain never mingles socially with the crew.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. That’s what I say — we don’t really exist for you. We’re just puppets to be manipulated so that the master puppeteer can achieve certain ends. Any other puppets would do as well.’

  I said mildly: ‘We’re here to do very nasty and unpleasant jobs and achieving that end is all that matters. Personalities don’t enter into it. You forget that I am your boss, Belinda. I really don’t think that you should be talking to me like that.’

  ‘I’ll talk to you any way I like.’ Not only mercurial but a girl of spirit; Maggie would never have dreamed of talking to me like that. She considered her last remark, then said more quietly: ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have spoken like that. But do you have to treat us in this – this detached and remote fashion and never make contact with us? We are people, you know – but not for you. You’d pass me in the street tomorrow and not recognize me. You don’t notice us.’