Puppet on a Chain

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘Scraps of paper I gave him.’

  ‘Where did you get them from?’

  ‘A chap gave them to me last night.’

  Maggie gave me her old-fashioned resigned look but said nothing. After a couple of minutes a taxi came along. I gave him an address in the old city and when we got there walked with Maggie down a narrow street to one of the canals in the dock area. I stopped at the corner.

  This is it?’

  ‘This is it,’ said Maggie.

  ‘This’ was a little grey church about fifty yards away along the canal bank. It was an ancient sway-backed crumbling edifice that appeared to be maintained in the near-vertical by faith alone, for to my untrained eye it looked to be in imminent danger of toppling into the canal. It had a short square stone tower, at least five degrees off the perpendicular, topped by a tiny steeple that leaned dangerously in the other direction. The time was ripe for the First Reformed Church of the American Huguenot Society to launch a major fund-raising drive.

  That some of the adjacent buildings had been in even greater danger of collapse was evidenced by the fact that a large area of building on the canal side beyond the church had already been demolished: a giant crane, with the most enormous boom I had ever seen almost lost in the darkness above, stood in the middle of this cleared lot where rebuilding had already reached the stage of the completion of the reinforced foundations.

  We walked slowly along the canal side towards the church. Clearly audible now was the sound of organ music and of women singing. It sounded very pleasant and safe and homely and nostalgic, the music drifting out over the darkened waters of the canal.

  ‘The service seems to be still in progress,’ I said. ‘You go in there—’

  I broke off and did a double-take at a blonde girl in a belted white raincoat who was just walking by.

  ‘Hey!’ I said.

  The blonde girl had it all buttoned up about what to do when accosted by strange men in a lonely street. She took one look at me and started to run. She didn’t get very far. She slipped on the wet cobbles, recovered, but only made another two or three paces before I caught up with her. She struggled briefly to escape, then relaxed and flung her arms about my neck. Maggie joined us, that old puritanical look on her face again.

  ‘A very old friend, Major Sherman?’

  ‘Since this morning. This is Trudi. Trudi van Gelder.’

  ‘Oh.’ Maggie laid a reassuring hand on Trudi’s arm but Trudi ignored her, tightened her grip around my neck and gazed admiringly into my face from a distance of about four inches.

  ‘I like you,’ Trudi announced. ‘You’re nice.’

  ‘Yes, I know, you told me. Oh hell!’

  ‘What to do?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘What to do. I’ve got to get her home. I’ve got to take her home. Put her in a taxi and she’d skip at the first traffic lights. A hundred to one the old battle-axe who’s supposed to be guarding her has dozed off and by this time her father’s probably scouring the town. He’d find it cheaper to use a ball and chain.’

  I unlocked Trudi’s arms, not without some difficulty, and pushed up the sleeve of her left arm. I looked first of all at her arm, then at Maggie whose eyes widened and then lips pursed as she saw the unlovely pattern left by the hypodermic needles. I pulled down the sleeve – instead of breaking into tears as she had done last time Trudi just stood there and giggled as if it were all great fun – and examined the other forearm. I pulled that sleeve down too.

  ‘Nothing fresh,’ I said.

  ‘You mean there’s nothing fresh that you can see,’ Maggie said.

  ‘What do you expect me to do? Make her stand here in this icy rain and do a strip-tease on the banks of the canal to that organ music? Wait a moment.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to think,’ I said patiently.

  So I thought, while Maggie stood there with an expression of dutiful expectation on her face and Trudi clutched my arm in a proprietorial fashion and gazed adoringly up at me. Finally, I said:

  ‘You haven’t been seen by anybody in there?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘But Belinda has, of course.’

  ‘Of course. But not so she would be recognized again. All the people in there have their heads covered. Belinda’s wearing a scarf and the hood of her coat and she’s sitting in shadow I saw that from the doorway.’

  ‘Get her out. Wait till the service is over, then follow Astrid. And try to memorize the faces of as many as possible of those who are attending the service.’

  Maggie looked doubtful. ‘I’m afraid that’s going to be difficult.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, they all look alike.’

  ‘They all what are they, Chinese or something?’

  ‘Most of them are nuns, carrying Bibles and those beads at their waists, and you can’t see their hair, and they have those long black clothes and those white—’

  ‘Maggie—’ I restrained myself with difficulty – ‘I know what nuns look like.’

  ‘Yes, but there’s something else. They’re nearly all young and good-looking some very good-looking—’

  ‘You don’t have to have a face like a bus smash to be a nun. Phone your hotel and leave the number of wherever you happen to finish up. Come on, Trudi. Home.’

  She went with me docilely enough, by foot first and then by taxi, where she held my hand all the time and talked a lot of bright nonsense in a very vivacious way, like a young child being taken out on an unexpected treat. At van Gelder’s house I asked the taxi to wait.

  Trudi was duly scolded by both van Gelder and Herta with that vehemence and severity that always cloaks profound relief, then Trudi was led off, presumably to bed. Van Gelder poured a couple of drinks with the speed of a man who feels he requires one and asked me to sit down. I declined.

  ‘I’ve a taxi outside. Where can I find Colonel de Graaf at this time of night? I want to borrow a car from him, preferably a fast one.’

  Van Gelder smiled. ‘No questions from me, my friend. You’ll find the Colonel at his office I know he’s working late tonight.’ He raised his glass. ‘A thousand thanks. I was a very, very worried man.’

  ‘You had a police alert out for her?’

  ‘An unofficial police alert.’ Van Gelder smiled again, but wryly. ‘You know why. A few trusted friends but there are nine hundred thousand people in Amsterdam.’

  ‘Any idea why she was so far from home?’

  ‘At least there’s no mystery about that. Herta takes her there often – to the church, I mean. All the Huyler people in Amsterdam go there. It’s a Huguenot church – there’s one in Huyler as well, well, not so much a church, some sort of business premises they use on Sundays as a place of worship. Herta takes her there too – the two of them go out to the island often. The churches and the Vondel Park – those are the only outings the child has.’

  Herta waddled into the room and van Gelder looked at her anxiously. Herta, with what might conceivably have passed for an expression of satisfaction on her leathery features, shook her head and waddled out again.

  ‘Well, thank God for that.’ Van Gelder drained his glass. ‘No injections.’

  ‘Not this time.’ I drained my glass in turn, said goodbye and left.

  I paid off the taxi in the Marnixstraat. Van Gelder had phoned ahead to say I was coming and Colonel de Graaf was waiting for me. If he was busy, he showed no signs of it. He was engaged in his usual occupation of overflowing the chair he was sitting in, the desk in front of him was bare, his fingers were steepled under his chin and as I entered he brought his eyes down from a leisured contemplation of infinity.

  ‘One assumes you make progress?’ he greeted me.

  ‘One assumes wrongly, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What? No vistas of broad highways leading to the final solution?’

  ‘Cul-de-sacs only.’

  ‘Something about a car, I understand from the Inspector.’

  ‘Pleas
e.’

  ‘May one enquire why you wish this vehicle?’

  ‘To drive up the cul-de-sacs. But that’s not really what I came to ask you about.’

  ‘I hardly thought it was.’

  ‘I’d like a search warrant.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To make a search,’ I said patiently. ‘Accompanied by a senior officer or officers, of course, to make it legal.’

  ‘Who? Where?’

  ‘Morgenstern and Muggenthaler. Souvenir warehouse. Down by the docks I don’t know the address.’

  ‘I’ve heard of them.’ De Graaf nodded. ‘I know nothing against them. Do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what makes you so curious about them?’

  ‘I honest to God don’t know. I want to find out why I am so curious. I was in their place tonight—’

  ‘They’re closed at night-time, surely.’

  I dangled a set of skeleton keys in front of his eyes.

  ‘You know it’s a felony to be in possession of such instruments,’ de Graaf said severely.

  I put the keys back in my pocket. ‘What instruments?’

  ‘A passing hallucination,’ de Graaf said agreeably.

  ‘I’m curious about why they have a time-lock on the steel door leading to their office. I’m curious about the large stocks of Bibles carried on their premises.’ I didn’t mention the smell of cannabis or the lad lurking behind the puppets. ‘But what I’m really interested in getting hold of is their list of suppliers.’

  ‘A search warrant we can arrange on any pretext,’ de Graaf said. ‘I’ll accompany you myself. Doubtless you’ll explain your interest in greater detail in the morning. Now about this car. Van Gelder has an excellent suggestion. A specially-engined police car, complete with everything from two-way radio to handcuffs, but to all appearance a taxi, will be here in two minutes. Driving a taxi, you understand, poses certain problems.’

  ‘I’ll try not to make too much on the side. Have you anything else for me?’

  ‘Also in two minutes. Your car is bringing some information from the Records Office.’

  Two minutes it was and a folder was delivered to de Graaf’s desk. He looked through some papers.

  ‘Astrid Lemay. Her real name, perhaps oddly enough. Dutch father, Grecian mother. He was a vice-consul in Athens, now deceased. Whereabouts of mother unknown. Twenty-four. Nothing known against her – nothing much known for her, either. Must say the background is a bit vague. Works as a hostess in the Balinova night-club, lives in a small flat near-by. Has one known relative, brother George, aged twenty. Ah! This may interest you. George, apparently, has spent six months as Her Majesty’s guest.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘Assault and attempted robbery, very amateurish effort, it seems. He made the mistake of assaulting a plain-clothes detective. Suspected of being an addict – probably trying to get money to buy more. All we have.’ He turned to another paper. ‘This MOO 144 number you gave me is the radio call-sign for a Belgian coaster, the Marianne, due in from Bordeaux tomorrow. I have a pretty efficient staff, no?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When does it arrive?’

  ‘Noon. We search it?’

  ‘You wouldn’t find anything. But please don’t go near it. Any ideas on the other two numbers?’

  ‘Nothing, I’m afraid on 910020. Or on 2798.’ He paused reflectively. ‘Or could that be 797 twice – you know. 797797?’

  ‘Could be anything.’

  De Graaf took a telephone directory from a drawer, put it away again, picked up a phone. ‘A telephone number,’ he said. ‘797797. Find out who’s listed under that number. At once, please.’

  We sat in silence till the phone rang. De Graaf listened briefly, replaced the receiver.

  ‘The Balinova night-club,’ he said.

  ‘The efficient staff has a clairvoyant boss.’

  ‘And where does this clairvoyance lead you to?’

  ‘The Balinova night-club.’ I stood up. ‘I have a rather readily identifiable face, wouldn’t you say, Colonel?’

  ‘It’s not a face people forget. And those white scars. I don’t think your plastic surgeon was really trying.’

  ‘He was trying all right. To conceal his almost total ignorance of plastic surgery. Have you any brown stain in this HQ?’

  ‘Brown stain?’ He blinked at me, then smiled widely. ‘Oh no, Major Sherman! Disguise! In this day and age? Sherlock Holmes has been dead these many years.’

  ‘If I’d half the brains Sherlock had,’ I said heavily. ‘I wouldn’t be needing any disguise.’

  SIX

  The yellow and red taxi they’d given me appeared, from the outside, to be a perfectly normal Opel, but they seemed to have managed to put an extra engine into it. They’d put a lot of extra work into it too. It had a pop-up siren, a pop-up police light and a panel at the back which fell down to illuminate a ‘Stop’ sign. Under the front passenger seats were ropes and first-aid kits and tear-gas canisters: in the door pockets were handcuffs with keys attached. God alone knew what they had in the boot. Nor did I care. All I wanted was a fast car, and I had one.

  I pulled up in a prohibited parking area outside the Balinova night-club, right opposite where a uniformed and be-holstered policeman was standing. He nodded almost imperceptibly and walked away with measured stride. He knew a police taxi when he saw one and had no wish to explain to the indignant populace why a taxi could get away with an offence that would have automatically got them a ticket.

  I got out, locked the door, and crossed the pavement to the entrance of the night-club which had above it the flickering neon sign ‘Balinova’ and the outlined neon figures of two hula-hula dancers, although I failed to grasp the connection between Hawaii and Indonesia. Perhaps they were meant to be Balinese dancers, but if that were so they had the wrong kind of clothes on – or off. Two large windows were set one on either side of the entrance, and these were given up to an art exhibition of sorts which gave more than a delicate indication of the nature of the cultural delights and more esoteric scholarly pursuits that were to be found within. The occasional young lady depicted as wearing ear-rings and bangles and nothing else seemed almost indecently overdressed. Of even greater interest, however, was the coffee-coloured countenance that looked back at me from the reflection in the glass: if I hadn’t known who I was, I wouldn’t have recognized myself. I went inside.

  The Balinova, in the best time-honoured tradition, was small, stuffy, smoky and full of some indescribable incense, the main ingredient of which seemed to be burnt rubber, which was probably designed to induce in the customers the right frame of mind for the maximum enjoyment of the entertainment being presented to them but which had, in fact, the effect of producing olfactory paralysis in the space of a few seconds. Even without the assistance of the drifting clouds of smoke the place was deliberately ill-lit, except for the garish spot-light on the stage which, as was again fairly standard, was no stage at all but merely a tiny circular dance floor in the centre of the room.

  The audience was almost exclusively male, running the gamut of ages from goggle-eyed teenagers to sprightly and beady-eyed octogenarians whose visual acuity appeared to have remained undimmed with the passing of the years. Almost all of them were well-dressed, for the better-class Amsterdam night-clubs those which still manage to cater devotedly to the refined palates of the jaded connoisseurs of certain of the plastic arts – are not for those who are on relief. They are, in a word, not cheap and the Balinova was very, very expensive, one of the extremely few clip joints in the city. There were a few women present, but only a few. To my complete lack of surprise, Maggie and Belinda were seated at a table near the door, with some sickly-coloured drinks before them. Both of them wore aloof expressions, although Maggie’s was unquestionably the more aloof of the two.

  My disguise, at the moment, seemed completely superfluous. Nobody looked at me as I entered and it was quite clear that nobody even wanted to look at me,
which was understandable, perhaps, in the circumstances, as the audience were almost splitting their pebble glasses in their eagerness to miss none of the aesthetic nuances or symbolic significances of the original and thought-compelling ballet performance taking place before their enraptured eyes, in which a shapely young harridan in a bubble-bath, to the accompaniment of the discordant thumpings and asthmatic wheezings of an excruciating band that would not otherwise have been tolerated in a boiler factory, endeavoured to stretch out for a bath-towel that had been craftily placed about a yard beyond her reach. The air was electric with tension as the audience tried to figure out the very limited number of alternatives that were open to the unfortunate girl. I sat down at the table beside Belinda and gave her what, in the light of my new complexion, must have been a pretty dazzling smile. Belinda moved a rapid six inches away from me, lifting her nose a couple of inches higher in the air.

  ‘Hoity-toity,’ I said. Both girls turned to stare at me and I nodded towards the stage. ‘Why doesn’t one of you go and help her?’

  There was a long pause, then Maggie said with great restraint: ‘What on earth has happened to you?’

  ‘I am in disguise. Keep your voice down.’

  ‘But – but I phoned the hotel only two or three minutes ago,’ Belinda said.

  ‘And don’t whisper either. Colonel de Graaf put me on to this place. She came straight back here?’

  They nodded.

  ‘And hasn’t gone out again?’

  ‘Not by the front door,’ Maggie said.

  ‘You tried to memorize the faces of the nuns as they came out? As I told you to?’

  ‘We tried,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Notice anything odd, peculiar, out of the ordinary about any of them?’

  ‘No, nothing. Except,’ Belinda added brightly, ‘that they seem to have very good-looking nuns in Amsterdam.’

  ‘So Maggie has already told me. And that’s all?’

  They looked at each other, hesitating, then Maggie said: ‘There was something funny. We seemed to see a lot more people going into that church than came out.’

  ‘There were a lot more people in that church than came out,’ Belinda said. ‘I was there, you know.’