Puppet on a Chain

by Alistair MacLean

  It was years since I’d been on a bicycle, and though I was in no fit state to recapture that first fine careless rapture I got the hang of it again quickly enough, and while I hardly enjoyed the trip it was at least better than walking and had the effect of getting some of my red corpuscles on the move again.

  I parked the bicycle in the tiny village square where I’d left the police taxi – it was still there – and looked thoughtfully first at the telephone-box, then at my watch: I decided it was still too early, so I unlocked the car and drove off.

  Half a mile along the Amsterdam road I came to an old Dutch barn standing well apart from its farm-house. I stopped the car on the road in such a position that the barn came between it and anyone who might chance to look out from the farm-house. I unlocked the boot, took out the brown paper parcel, made for the barn, found it unlocked, went inside and changed into a completely dry set of clothing. It didn’t have the effect of transforming me into a new man, I still found it impossible to stop shivering, but at least I wasn’t sunk in the depths of that clammily ice-cold misery that I’d been in for hours past.

  I went on my way again. After only another half-mile I came to a roadside building about the size of a small bungalow whose sign defiantly claimed that it was a motel. Motel or not, it was open, and I wanted no more. The plump proprietress asked if I wanted breakfast, but I indicated that I had other and more urgent needs. They have in Holland the charming practice of filling your glass of jonge Genever right to the very brim and the proprietress watched in astonishment and considerable apprehension as my shaking hands tried to convey the liquid to my mouth. I didn’t lose more than half of it in spillage, but I could see she was considering calling either police or medical aid to cope with an alcoholic with the DT’s or a drug addict who had lost his hypodermic, whichever the case might be, but she was a brave woman and supplied me with my second jonge Genever on demand. This time I didn’t lose more than a quarter of it, and third time round not only did I spill hardly a drop but I could distinctly feel the rest of my layabout red corpuscles picking up their legs and giving themselves a brisk workout. With the fourth jonge Genever my hand was steady as a rock.

  I borrowed an electric razor, then had a gargantuan breakfast of eggs and meat and ham and cheeses, about four different kinds of bread and half a gallon, as near as dammit, of coffee. The food was superb. Fledgling motel it might have been, but it was going places. I asked to use the phone.

  I got through to the Hotel Touring in seconds, which was a great deal less time than it took for the desk to get any reply from Maggie’s and Belinda’s room. Finally, a very sleepy-voiced Maggie said: ‘Hullo. Who is it?’ I could just see her standing there, stretching and yawning.

  ‘Out on the tiles last night, eh?’ I said severely.

  ‘What?’ She still wasn’t with me.

  ‘Sound asleep in the middle of the day.’ It was coming up for eight a.m. ‘Nothing but a couple of mini-skirted layabouts.’

  ‘Is it – is it you?’

  ‘Who else but the lord and master?’ The jonge Genevers were beginning to make their delayed effect felt.

  ‘Belinda! He’s back!’ A pause. ‘Lord and master, he says.’

  ‘I’m so glad!’ Belinda’s voice. ‘I’m so glad. We—’

  ‘You’re not half as glad as I am. You can get back to your bed. Try to beat the milkman to it tomorrow morning.’

  ‘We didn’t leave our room.’ She sounded very subdued. ‘We talked and worried and hardly slept a wink and we thought—’

  ‘I’m sorry. Maggie? Get dressed. Forget about the foam baths and breakfast. Get—’

  ‘No breakfast? I’ll bet you had breakfast.’ Belinda was having a bad influence on this girl.

  ‘I had.’

  ‘And stayed the night in a luxury hotel?’

  ‘Rank hath its privileges. Get a taxi, drop it on the outskirts of the town, phone for a local taxi and come out towards Huyler.’

  ‘Where they make the puppets?’

  ‘That’s it. You’ll meet me coming south in a yellow and red taxi.’ I gave her the registration number. ‘Have your driver stop. Be as fast as you can.’

  I hung up, paid up and went on my way. I was glad I was alive. Glad to be alive. It had been the sort of night that didn’t look like having any morning, but here I was and I was glad. The girls were glad. I was warm and dry and fed, the jonge Genever was happily chasing the red corpuscles in a game of merry-go-round, all the coloured threads were weaving themselves into a beautiful pattern and by day’s end it would be over. I had never felt so good before.

  I was never to feel so good again.

  Nearing the suburbs I was flagged down by a yellow taxi. I stopped and crossed the road just as Maggie got out. She was dressed in a navy skirt and jacket and white blouse and if she’d spent a sleepless night she certainly showed no signs of it. She looked beautiful, but then she always looked that way: there was something special about her that morning.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ she said. ‘What a healthy-looking ghost. May I kiss you?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ I said with dignity. ‘Relationships between employer and employed are—’

  ‘Do be quiet, Paul.’ She kissed me without permission. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Go out to Huyler. Plenty of places down by the harbour where you can get breakfast. There’s a place I want you to keep under fairly close but not constant surveillance.’ I described the window-barred building and its location. ‘Just try to see who goes in and out of that building and what goes on there. And remember, you’re a tourist. Stay in company or as close as you can to company all the time. Belinda’s still in her room?’

  ‘Yes.’ Maggie smiled. ‘Belinda took a phone call while I was dressing. Good news, I think.’

  ‘Who does Belinda know in Amsterdam?’ I said sharply. ‘Who called?’

  ‘Astrid Lemay.’

  ‘What in God’s name are you talking about? Astrid’s skipped the country. I’ve got proof.’

  ‘Sure she skipped it.’ Maggie was enjoying herself. ‘She skipped it because you’d given her a very important job to do and she couldn’t do it because she was being followed everywhere she went. So she skipped out, got off at Paris, got a refund on her Athens ticket and skipped straight back in again. She and George are staying in a place outside Amsterdam with friends she can trust. She says to tell you she followed that lead you gave her. She says to tell you she’s been out to the Kasteel Linden and that—’

  ‘Oh my God!’ I said. ‘Oh my God!’ I looked at Maggie standing there, the smile slowly dying on her lips and for one brief moment I felt like turning savagely on her, for her ignorance, for her stupidity, for her smiling face, for her empty talk of good news, and then I felt more ashamed of myself than I had ever done in my life, for the fault was mine, not Maggie’s, and I would have cut off my hand sooner than hurt her, so instead I put my arm round her shoulders and said: ‘Maggie, I must leave you.’

  She smiled at me uncertainly. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand.’

  ‘Maggie?’

  ‘Yes, Paul?’

  ‘How do you think Astrid Lemay found out the telephone number of your new hotel?’

  ‘Oh, dear God!’ she said, for now she understood.

  I ran across to my car without looking back, started up and accelerated through the gears like a man possessed, which I suppose I really was. I operated the switch that popped up the blue flashing police light and turned on the siren, then clamped the earphones over my head and started fiddling desperately with the radio control knobs. Nobody had ever shown me how to work it and this was hardly the time to learn. The car was full of noise, the high-pitched howling of the over-stressed engine, the clamour of the siren, the static and crackle of the earphones and, what seemed loudest of all to me, the sound of my harsh and bitter and futile swearing as I tried to get that damned radio to work. Then suddenly the crackling ceased and I heard a calm assured voice.
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  ‘Police headquarters,’ I shouted. ‘Colonel de Graaf. Never mind who the hell I am. Hurry, man, hurry!’ There was a long and infuriating silence as I weaved through the morning rush-hour traffic and then a voice on the earphones said: ‘Colonel de Graaf is not in his office yet.’

  ‘Then get him at home!’ I shouted. Eventually they got him at home. ‘Colonel de Graaf? Yes, yes, yes. Never mind that. That puppet we saw yesterday. I have seen a girl like that before. Astrid Lemay.’ De Graaf started to ask questions but I cut him short. ‘For God’s sake, never mind that. The warehouse – I think she’s in desperate danger. We’re dealing with a criminal maniac. For God’s sake, hurry.’

  I threw the earphones down and concentrated on driving and cursing myself. If you want a candidate for easy outwitting, I thought savagely, Sherman’s your man. But at the same time I was conscious that I was being at least a degree unfair to myself: I was up against a brilliantly directed criminal organization, that was for sure, but an organization that contained within it an unpredictable psychopathic element that made normal prediction almost impossible. Sure, Astrid had sold Jimmy Duclos down the river, but it had been Duclos or George, and George was a brother. They’d sent her to get to work on me, for she herself could have had no means of knowing that I was staying at the Rembrandt, but instead of enlisting my aid and sympathy she’d chickened out at the last moment and I’d had her traced and that was when the trouble had begun, that was when she had begun to become a liability instead of an asset. She had begun seeing me – or I her – without their ostensible knowledge. I could have been seen taking George away from that barrel-organ in the Rembrandtplein or at the church or by those two drunks outside her flat who weren’t drunks at all.

  They’d eventually decided that it was better to have her out of the way, but not in such a fashion that would make me think that harm had come to her because they probably thought, and rightly, that if I thought she’d been taken prisoner and was otherwise in danger I’d have abandoned all hope of achieving my ultimate objective and done what they knew now was the very last thing I wanted to do – go to the police and lay before them all I knew, which they probably suspected was a great deal. This, too, was the last thing they wanted me to do because although by going to the police I would have defeated my own ultimate ends, I could so severely damage their organization that it might take months, perhaps years, to build it up again. And so Durrell and Marcel had played their part yesterday morning in the Balinova while I had overplayed mine to the hilt and had convinced me beyond doubt that Astrid and George had left for Athens. Sure they had. They’d left all right, been forced off the plane at Paris and forced to return to Amsterdam. When she’d spoken to Belinda, she’d done so with a gun at her head.

  And now, of course, Astrid was no longer of any use to them. Astrid had gone over to the enemy and there was only one thing to do with people like that. And now, of course, they need no longer fear any reaction from me, for I had died at two o’clock that morning down in the barge harbour. I had the key to it all now, because I knew why they had been waiting. But I knew the key was too late to save Astrid.

  I hit nothing and killed no one driving through Amsterdam, but that was only because its citizens have very quick reactions. I was in the old town now, nearing the warehouse and travelling at high speed down the narrow one-way street leading to it when I saw the police barricade, a police car across the street with an armed policeman at each end of it. I skidded to a halt. I jumped out of the car and a policeman approached me.

  ‘Police,’ he said, in case I thought he was an insurance salesman or something. ‘Please go back.’

  ‘Don’t you recognize one of your own cars?’ I snarled. ‘Get out of my damned way.’

  ‘No one is allowed into this street.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ De Graaf appeared round the corner and if I hadn’t known from the police car the expression on his face would have told me. ‘It’s not a very pleasant sight. Major Sherman.’

  I walked past him without speaking, rounded the comer and looked upwards. From this distance the puppet-like figure swinging lazily from the hoisting beam at the top of Morgenstern and Muggenthaler’s warehouse looked hardly larger than the puppet I had seen yesterday morning, but then I had seen that one from directly underneath, so this one had to be bigger, much bigger. It was dressed in the same traditional costume as had been the puppet that had swayed to and fro there only so short a time ago: I didn’t have to get any closer to know that the puppet’s face of yesterday would be a perfect replica of the face that was there now. I turned away and walked round the corner, de Graaf with me.

  ‘Why don’t you take her down?’ I asked. I could hear my own voice coming as if from a distance, abnormally, icily calm and quite toneless.

  ‘It’s a job for a doctor. He’s gone up there now.’

  ‘Of course.’ I paused and said: ‘She can’t have been there long. She was alive less than an hour ago. Surely the warehouse was open long before—’

  ‘This is Saturday. They don’t work on Saturdays.’

  ‘Of course,’ I repeated mechanically. Another thought had come into my head, a thought that struck an even deeper fear and chill into me. Astrid, with a gun at her head, had phoned the Touring. But she had phoned with a message for me, and that message had been meaningless and could or should have achieved nothing, for I was lying at the bottom of the harbour. It could only have had a purpose if the message had been relayed to me. It would have only been made if they knew I was still alive. How could they have known I was still alive? Who could have conveyed the information that I was still alive? Nobody had seen me – except the three matrons on Huyler. And why should they concern themselves—

  There was more. Why should they make her telephone me and then put themselves and their plans in jeopardy by killing Astrid after having been at such pains to convince me that she was alive and well? Suddenly, certainly, I knew the answer. They had forgotten something. I’d forgotten something. They forgot what Maggie had forgotten, that Astrid did not know the telephone number of their new hotel: and I’d forgotten that neither Maggie nor Belinda had ever met Astrid or heard her speak. I walked back round the corner. Below the gable of the warehouse the chain and hook still stirred slightly: but the burden was gone.

  I said to de Graaf: ‘Get the doctor.’ He appeared in two minutes, a youngster, I should have thought, fresh out of medical school and looking paler, I suspected, than he normally did.

  I said harshly: ‘She’s been dead for hours, hasn’t she?’

  He nodded. ‘Four, five, I can’t be sure.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I walked away back round the corner, de Graaf accompanying me. His face held a score of unasked questions, but I didn’t feel like answering any of them.

  ‘I killed her,’ I said. ‘I think I may have killed someone else, too.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ de Graaf said.

  ‘I think I have sent Maggie to die.’

  ‘Maggie?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t tell you. I had two girls with me, both from Interpol. Maggie was one of them. The other is at the Hotel Touring.’ I gave him Belinda’s name and telephone number. ‘Contact her for me, will you, please? Tell her to lock her door and stay there till she hears from me and that she is to ignore any phone or written message that does not contain the word “Birmingham”. Will you do it personally, please?’

  ‘Of course.’

  I nodded at de Graaf’s car. ‘Can you get through on the radio telephone to Huyler?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Then police headquarters, please.’ As de Graaf spoke to his driver, a grim-faced van Gelder came round the corner. He had a handbag with him.

  ‘Astrid Lemay’s?’ I asked. He nodded. ‘Give it to me, please.’

  He shook his head firmly. ‘I can’t do that. In a case of murder—’

  ‘Give it to him,’ de Graaf said.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to de Graaf: �
��Five feet four, long black hair, blue eyes, very good-looking, navy skirt and jacket, white blouse and white handbag. She’ll be in the area—’

  ‘One moment.’ De Graaf leaned towards his driver, then said: ‘The lines to Huyler appear to be dead. Death does seem to follow you around, Major Sherman.’

  ‘I’ll call you later this morning,’ I said, and turned for my car.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ van Gelder said.

  ‘You have your hands full here. Where I’m going I don’t want any policemen.’

  Van Gelder nodded. ‘Which means you are going to step outside the law.’

  ‘I’m already outside the law. Astrid Lemay is dead. Jimmy Duclos is dead. Maggie may be dead. I want to talk to people who make other people dead.’

  ‘I think you should give us your gun,’ van Gelder said soberly.

  ‘What do you expect me to have in my hands when I talk to them? A Bible? To pray for their souls? First you kill me, van Gelder, then you take away the gun.’

  De Graaf said: ‘You have information and you are withholding it from us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is not courteous, wise or legal.’

  I got into my car. ‘As for the wisdom, you can judge later. Courtesy and legality no longer concern me.’

  I started the engine and as I did van Gelder made a move towards me and I heard de Graaf saying: ‘Leave him be. Inspector, leave him be.’

  ELEVEN

  I didn’t make many friends on the way back out to Huyler but then I wasn’t in the mood for making friends. Under normal circumstances, driving in the crazy and wholly irresponsible way I did, I should have been involved in at least half a dozen accidents, all of them serious, but I found that the flashing police light and siren had a near-magical effect of clearing the way in front of me. At a distance up to half a mile approaching vehicles or vehicles going in the same direction as I was would slow down or stop, pulling very closely into the side of the road. I was briefly pursued by a police car that should have known better, but the police driver lacked my urgency of motivation and he was clearly and sensibly of the opinion that there was no point in killing himself just to earn his weekly wage. There would be, I knew, an immediate radio alert, but I had no fear of road blocks or any such form of molestation: once the licence plate number was received at HQ I’d be left alone.