Puppet on a Chain

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘That was all? You’re off?’ Maggie seemed faintly surprised.

  ‘My, you are in a hurry,’ Belinda said.

  ‘Tomorrow night,’ I promised, ‘I’ll tuck you both in and tell you all about Goldilocks and the three bears. Tonight I have things to attend to.’

  SEVEN

  I parked the police car on top of a ‘No parking’ sign painted on the road and walked the last hundred yards to the hotel. The barrel-organ had gone to wherever barrel-organs go in the watches of the night, and the foyer was deserted except for the assistant manager who was sitting dozing in a chair behind the desk. I reached over, quietly unhooked the key and walked up the first two flights of stairs before taking the lift in case I waked the assistant manager from what appeared to be a sound – and no doubt well-deserved – sleep.

  I took off my wet clothes – which meant all of them – showered, put on a dry outfit, went down by lift and banged my room key noisily on the desk. The assistant manager blinked himself awake, looked at me, his watch and the key in that order.

  ‘Mr Sherman. I – I didn’t hear you come in.’

  ‘Hours ago. You were asleep. This quality of childlike innocence—’

  He wasn’t listening to me. For a second time he peered fuzzily at his watch.

  ‘What are you doing, Mr Sherman?’

  ‘I am sleep-walking.’

  ‘It’s half-past two in the morning!’

  ‘I don’t sleep-walk during the day,’ I said reasonably. I turned and peered through the vestibule. ‘What? No doorman, no porter, no taxi-man, no organ-grinder, not a tail or shadow in sight. Lax. Remiss. You will be held to account for this negligence.’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of admiralty.’

  ‘I do not understand.’

  ‘I’m not sure I do either. Are there any barbers open at this time of night?’

  ‘Are there any – did you say—’

  ‘Never mind. I’m sure I’ll find one somewhere.’

  I left. Twenty yards from the hotel I stepped into a doorway, cheerfully prepared to clobber anyone who seemed bent on following me, but after two or three minutes it became clear that no one was. I retrieved my car and drove down towards the docks area, parking it some distance and two streets away from the First Reformed Church of the American Huguenot Society. I walked down to the canal.

  The canal, lined with the inevitable elm and lime trees, was dark and brown and still and reflected no light at all from the dimly-lit narrow streets on either side. Not one building on either side of the canal showed a light. The church looked more dilapidated and unsafe than ever and had about it that strange quality of stillness and remoteness and watchfulness that many churches seem to possess at night. The huge crane with its massive boom was silhouetted menacingly against the night sky. The absence of any indication of life was total. All that was lacking was a cemetery.

  I crossed the street, mounted the steps and tried the church door. It was unlocked. There was no reason why it should have been locked but I found it vaguely surprising that it wasn’t. The hinges must have been well-oiled for the door opened and closed soundlessly.

  I switched on the torch and made a quick 360° traverse. I was alone. I made a more methodical inspection. The interior was small, even smaller than one would have guessed from outside, blackened and ancient, so ancient that I could see that the oaken pews had originally been fashioned by adzes. I lifted the beam of the torch but there was no balcony, just half-a-dozen small dusty stained-glass windows that even on a sunny day could have admitted only a minimal quantity of light. The entrance door was the only external door to the church. The only other door was in a corner at the top end of the church, half-way between the pulpit and an antique bellows-operated organ.

  I made for this door, laid my hand on the knob and switched off the torch. This door creaked, but not loudly. I stepped forward cautiously and softly and it was as well that I did for what I stepped on was not another floor beyond but the first step in a flight of descending stairs. I followed those steps down, eighteen of them in a complete circle and moved forward gingerly, my hand extended in front of me to locate the door which I felt must be in front of me. But there was no door in front of me. I switched on my torch.

  The room I found myself in was about half the size of the church above. I made another quick circuit with the torch. There were no windows here, just two naked overhead lights. I located the switch and switched it on. The room was even more blackened than the church proper. The rough wooden floor was filthy with the trampled dirt of countless years. There were some tables and chairs in the centre of the room and the two side walls were lined with half-booths, very narrow and very high. The place looked like a medieval cafe.

  I felt my nostrils twitch involuntarily at a well-remembered and unloved smell. It could have come from anywhere but I fancied it came from the row of booths on my right. I put my torch away, took my pistol from its felt underarm holster, dug in a pocket for a silencer and screwed it on. I walked cat-footed across the room and my nose told me that I was heading in the right direction. The first booth was empty. So was the second. Then I heard the sound of breathing. I moved forward with millimetric stealth and my left eye and the barrel of the pistol went round the corner of the third booth at the same instant.

  My precautions were unnecessary. No danger offered here. Two things rested on the narrow deal table, an ashtray with a cigarette end burnt away to the butt, and the arms and head of a man who was slumped forward, sound asleep, his face turned away from me. I didn’t have to see his face. George’s gaunt frame and threadbare clothes were unmistakable. Last time I’d seen him I’d have sworn that he would have been unable to stir from his bed for the next twenty-four hours – or I would have sworn, had he been a normal person. But junkies in an advanced state of addiction are as far from normal as any person can ever become and are capable of astonishing if very brief feats of recovery. I left him where he was. For the moment, he presented no problem.

  There was a door at the end of this room between the two rows of booths. I opened it, with rather less care than previously, went inside, located a switch and pressed it.

  This was a wide but very narrow room, running the full width of the church but no more than ten feet across. Both sides of the room were lined with shelves and those shelves were stacked high with Bibles. It came as no surprise to discover that they were replicas of those I had examined in the warehouse of Morgenstern and Muggenthaler, the ones that the First Reformed Church handed out with such liberality to the Amsterdam hotels. There didn’t seem to be anything to be gained by having another look at them so I stuck my gun in my belt and went ahead and looked at them anyway. I picked several at random from the front row on a shelf and flicked through them: they were as innocuous as Bibles can be, which is as innocuous as you can get. I jerked into the second row and the same cursory examination yielded up the same result. I pushed part of the second row to one side and picked up a Bible from the third row.

  This copy may or may not have been innocuous, depending upon your interpretation of the reason for its savagely multilated state, but as a Bible as such it was a complete failure because the hole that had been smoothly scooped out from its centre extended almost the entire width of the book: the hole itself was about the size and shape of a large fig. I examined several more Bibles from the same row: all had the same hollowed out centre, obviously machine-made. Keeping one of the mutilated copies to one side, I replaced the other Bibles as I had found them and moved towards the door opposite the one by which I’d entered the narrow room. I opened it and pressed the light switch.

  The First Reformed Church, I had to admit, had certainly done their level and eminently successful best to comply with the exhortations of the avant-garde clergy of today that it was the Church’s duty to keep abreast with and participate in the technological age in which we live. Conceivably, they might have expected to be taken a degree less lit
erally, but then unspecified exhortation, when translated into practice, is always liable to a certain amount of executive misdirection, which appeared to be what had happened in this case: this room, which took up nearly half the basement area of the church, was, in fact, a superbly equipped machine shop.

  To my untrained eye, it had everything – lathes, milling machines, presses, crucibles, moulds, a furnace, a large stamping machine and benches to which were bolted a number of smaller machines whose purpose was a mystery to me. One end of the floor was covered with what appeared to be brass and copper shavings, for the main part lying in tightly twisted coils. In a bin in one corner lay a large and untidy heap of lead pipes, all evidently old, and some rolls of used lead roof sheathing. Altogether, a highly functional place and one clearly devoted to manufacture: what the end products were was anyone’s guess for certainly no examples of them were lying around.

  I was half-way along the room, walking slowly, when I as much imagined as heard the very faintest sensation of sound from about the area of the doorway I’d just passed through: and I could feel again that uncomfortable tingling sensation in the back of my neck: someone was examining it, and with no friendly intent, from a distance of only a very few yards.

  I walked on unconcernedly, which is no easy thing to do when the chances are good that the next step you take may be anticipated by a .38 bullet or something equally lethal in the base of the skull, but walk I did, for to turn round armed with nothing but a hollowed-out Bible in my left hand – my gun was still in my belt – seemed a sure way of precipitating that involuntary pressure of the nervous trigger-finger. I had behaved like a moron, with a blundering idiocy for which I would have bawled out anyone else, and it looked very much as if I might pay the moron’s price. The unlocked main door, the unlocked door leading to the basement, the access free and open to anyone who might care to investigate bespoke only one thing: the presence of a quiet man with a gun whose job it was not to prevent entry but to prevent departure in the most permanent way. I wondered where he had been hiding, perhaps in the pulpit, perhaps in some side door leading off the stairs, the existence or otherwise of which I’d been too careless to investigate.

  I reached the end of the room, glanced slightly to my left behind the end lathe, made a slight murmur of surprise and stooped low behind the lathe. I didn’t stay in that position for more than two seconds for there seemed little point in postponing what I knew must be inevitable: when I lifted the top of my head quickly above the lathe, the barrel of my silenced gun was already lined up with my right eye.

  He was no more than fifteen feet away, advancing on soundless rubber moccasins, a wizened, rodent-faced figure of a man, with a paper-white face and glowing dark-coal eyes. What he was pointing in the general direction of the lathe in front of me was far worse than any .38 pistol, it was a blood-chilling whippet, a double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun sawn off at both barrels and stock, probably the most lethally effective shortrange weapon ever devised.

  I saw him and squeezed the trigger of my gun in the same moment, for if anything was certain it was that I would never be given a second moment.

  A red rose bloomed in the centre of the wizened man’s forehead. He took one step back, the reflex step of a man already dead, and crumpled to the floor almost as soundlessly as he had been advancing towards me, the whippet still clutched in his hand. I switched my eyes towards the door but if there were any reinforcements to hand they were prudently concealing the fact. I straightened and went quickly across the room to where the Bibles were stored, but there was no one there nor was there in any of the booths in the next room where George was still lying unconscious across his table.

  I hauled George none too gently from his seat, got him over my shoulder, carried him upstairs to the church proper and dumped him unceremoniously behind the pulpit where he would be out of sight of anyone who might glance in casually from the main door, although why anyone should take it into his head to glance in at that time of night I couldn’t imagine. I opened the main door and glanced out, although far from casually, but the canal street was deserted in both directions.

  Three minutes later I had the taxi parked not far from the church. I went inside, retrieved George, dragged him down the steps and across the road and bundled him into the back seat of the taxi. He promptly fell off the seat on to the floor and as he was probably safer in that position I left him there, quickly checked that no one was taking any interest in what I was doing and went back inside the church again.

  The dead man’s pockets yielded nothing except a few homemade cigarettes which accorded well enough with the fact that he had obviously been hopped to the eyes when he had come after me with the whippet. I took the whippet in my left hand, seized the dead man by the collar of his coat – any other method of conveying him from there would have resulted in a blood-stained suit and this was the only serviceable suit I’d left – and dragged him across the basement and up the stairs, closing doors and putting out lights as I went.

  Again the cautious reconnaissance at the church main door, again the deserted street. I dragged the man across the street into what little cover was offered by the taxi and lowered him into the canal as soundlessly as he would doubtless have lowered me if he’d been a bit handier with the whippet, which I now lowered into the canal after him. I went back to the taxi and was about to open the driver’s door when a door of the house next to the church swung wide and a man appeared, who looked around uncertainly and then made his way across to where I was standing.

  He was a big, burly character dressed in what appeared to be some kind of voluminous nightgown with a bathing wrap over it. He had rather an impressive head, with a splendid mane of white hair, a white moustache, a pink-cheeked healthy complexion and, at that moment, an air of slightly bemused benevolence.

  ‘Can I be of help?’ He had the deep resonant modulated voice of one obviously accustomed to hearing quite a lot of it. ‘Is there something wrong?’

  ‘What should be wrong?’

  ‘I thought I heard a noise coming from the church.’

  ‘The church?’ It was my turn to look bemused.

  ‘Yes. My church. There.’ He pointed to it in case I couldn’t recognize a church when I saw one. ‘I’m the pastor. Goodbody. Dr Thaddeus Goodbody. I thought some intruder was perhaps moving around—’

  ‘Not me, Reverend. I haven’t been inside a church for years.’

  He nodded as if he weren’t at all surprised. ‘We live in a godless age. A strange hour to be abroad, young man.’

  ‘Not for a taxi-driver on the night shift.’

  He looked at me with an unconvinced expression and peered into the back of the taxi. ‘Merciful heavens. There’s a body on the floor.’

  ‘There isn’t a body on the floor. There’s a drunken sailor on the floor and I’m taking him back to his ship. He just fell to the floor a few seconds ago so I stopped to get him back on his seat again. I thought,’ I added virtuously, ‘that it would be the Christian thing to do. With a corpse, I wouldn’t bother.’

  My professional appeal availed nothing. He said, in the tone which he presumably kept for reproaching the more backsliding of his flock: ‘I insist on seeing for myself.’

  He pressed firmly forward and I pressed him firmly back again. I said: ‘Don’t make me lose my licence. Please.’

  ‘I knew it! I knew it! Something is far amiss. So I can make you lose your licence?’

  ‘Yes. If I throw you into the canal then I’ll lose my licence. If, that is,’ I added consideringly, ‘you manage to climb back out again.’

  ‘What! The canal! Me? A man of God? Are you threatening me with violence, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Dr Goodbody backed off several rapid paces.

  ‘I have your licence, sir. I shall report you—’

  The night was wearing on and I wanted some sleep before the morning, so I climbed into the car and drove off. He was shaking his fist at me in a fashion that didn’
t say much for his concept of brotherly love and appeared to be delivering himself of some vehement harangue but I couldn’t hear any of it. I wondered if he would lodge a complaint with the police and thought that the odds were against it.

  I was getting tired of carrying George up stairs. True, he weighed hardly anything at all, but what with the lack of sleep and dinner I was a good way below par and, moreover, I’d had my bellyful of junkies. I found the door to Astrid’s tiny flat unlocked, which was what I would have expected to find if George had been the last person to use it. I opened it, switched on the light, walked past the sleeping girl, and deposited George none too gently on his own bed. I think it must have been the noise the mattress made and not the bright overhead light in her room that wakened Astrid: in any event, she was sitting up in her bed-settee and rubbing eyes still bemused from sleep as I returned to her room. I looked down at her in what I hoped was a speculative fashion and said nothing.

  ‘He was asleep, then I went to sleep,’ she said defensively. ‘He must have got up and gone out again.’ When I treated this masterpiece of deduction with the silence it deserved she went on almost desperately: ‘I didn’t hear him go out. I didn’t. Where did you find him?’

  ‘You’d never guess, I’m sure. In a garage, over a barrel-organ, trying to get the cover off. He wasn’t making much progress.’

  As she had done earlier that night, she buried her face in her hands: this time she wasn’t crying, although I supposed drearily that it would be only a matter of time.