Alistair MacLean - Puppet on a Chain

I walked two or three hundred yards till I was well clear of the girls' hotel, picked up a taxi and was driven back to the Rembrandt. I stood for a moment under the foyer canopy, looking at the barrel-organ across the road. The ancient was not only indefatigable but apparently also impermeable, rain meant nothing to him, nothing except an earthquake would have stopped him from giving his evening performance. Like the old trouper who feels that the show must go on, he perhaps felt he had a duty to his public, and a public he incredibly had, half a dozen youths whose threadbare clothes gave every indication of being completely sodden, a group of acolytes lost in the mystic contemplation of the death agonies of Strauss, whose turn it was to be stretched on the rack tonight. I went inside.

The assistant manager caught sight of me as I turned from hanging up my coat. Has surprise appeared to be genuine.

'Back so soon? From Zaandam?'

'Fast taxi,' I explained and passed through to the bar, where I ordered a jonge Genever and a Pils and drank both slowly while I considered the relationship between fast men with fast guns and pushers and sick girls and hidden eyes behind puppets and people and taxis who followed me everywhere I went and policemen being blackmailed and venal managers and door-keepers and tinny barrel-organs. It all added up to nothing. I wasn't, I felt sure, being provocative enough and was coming to the reluctant conclusion that there was nothing else for it but a visit to the warehouse again later that night — without, of course, ever letting Belinda know about it — when I happened to look up for the first time at the mirror in front of me. I wasn't prompted by instinct or anything of the kind, it was just that my nostrils had been almost unconsciously titillated for some time past by a perfume that I'd just identified as sandalwood, and as I am rather partial to it, I just wanted to see who was wearing it. Sheer old-fashioned nosiness.

The girl was sitting at a table directly behind me, a drink on the table before her, a paper in her hand. I could have thought that I imagined that her eyes dropped to the paper as soon as I had glanced up to the mirror, but I wasn't given to imagining things like that. She had been looking at me. She seemed young, was wearing a green coat and had a blonde mop of hair that, in the modern fashion, had every appearance of having been trimmed by a lunatic hedge-cutter. Amsterdam seemed to be full of blondes who were forced on my attention in one way or another.

I said 'The same again' to the bar-tender, placed the drinks on a table close to the bar, left them there and walked slowly towards the foyer, passed the girl like one deep lost in thought, not even looking at her, went through the front door and out into the street. Strauss had succumbed but not the ancient, who to demonstrate his catholicity of taste was now giving a ghoulish rendering of 'The bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond'. If he tried that lot on in Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow both he and his barrel-organ would be but a faded memory inside fifteen minutes. The youthful acolytes had vanished, which could have meant that they were either very anti-Scottish or very pro-Scottish indeed. In point of fact their absence, as I was to discover later, meant something else entirely: the evidence was all there before me and I missed it and because I missed it, too many people were going to die.

The ancient saw me and registered his surprise.

'Mynheer said that he — '

'He was going to the opera. And so I did.' I shook my head sadly. 'Prima-donna reaching for a high E. Heart attack.' I clapped him on the shoulder. 'No panic. I'm only going as far as the phone-box there.'

I dialled the girls' hotel. I got through to the desk immediately and then, after a long wait, to the girls' room. Belinda sounded peevish.

'Hullo. Who is it?'

'Sherman. I want you over here at once.'

'Now?' Her voice was a wail. 'But I'm in the middle of a bath.'

'Regrettably, I can't be in two places at once. You're clean enough for the dirty work I have in hand. And Maggie.'

'But Maggie's asleep.'

Then you'd better wake her up, hadn't you? Unless you want to carry her.' Injured silence. 'Be here at my hotel in ten minutes. Hang about outside, about twenty yards away.'

'But it's bucketing rain!' She was still at the wailing.

'Ladies of the street don't mind how damp they get. Soon there'll be a girl leaving here. Your height, your age, your figure, your hair — '

'There must be ten thousand girls in Amsterdam who — '

'Ah — But this one is beautiful. Not as beautiful as you are, of course, but beautiful. She's also wearing a green coat — to go with her green umbrella — sandalwood perfume and, on her left temple, a fairly well camouflaged bruise that I gave her yesterday afternoon.'

'A fairly well — you didn't tell us anything about assaulting girls.'

'I can't remember every irrelevant detail. Follow her. When she gets to her destination, one of you stay put, the other report back to me. No, you can't come here, you know that. I'll be at the Old Bell at the far corner of the Rembrandtplein.'

'What will you be doing there?'

'It's a pub. What do you think I'll be doing?'

The girl in the green coat was still sitting there at the same table when I returned. I went to the reception desk first, asked for and got some notepaper and took it across to the table where I'd left my drinks. The girl in green was no more than six feet away, at right angles, and so should have had an excellent view of what I was doing while herself remaining comparatively free from observation.

I took out my wallet, extracted my previous night's dinner bill, smoothed it out on the table before me and started to make notes on a piece of paper. After a few moments I threw my pen down in disgust, screwed up the paper and flung it into a convenient waste-basket. I started on another sheet of paper and appeared to reach the same unsatisfactory conclusion. I did this several times more, then screwed my eyes shut and rested my head on my hands for almost five minutes, a man, it must have seemed, lost in the deepest concentration. The fact was, that I wasn't in too much of a hurry. Ten minutes, I'd said to Belinda, but if she managed to get out of a bath, get dressed and be across here with Maggie in that time, I knew even less than I thought I did about women.

For a time I resumed the scribbling, the crumpling and the throwing away and by that time twenty minutes had elapsed. I finished the last of my drink, rose, said good night to the barman and went away. I went as far as the wine plush curtains that screened the bar from the foyer and waited, peering cautiously round the edge of the curtain. The girl in green rose to her feet, crossed to the bar, ordered herself another drink and then casually sat down in the chair I had just vacated, her back to me. She looked around, also casually, to make sure that she was unobserved, then just as casually reached down into the waste-basket and picked up the top sheet of crumpled paper. She smoothed it out on the table before her as I moved soundlessly up to her chair. I could see the side of her face now and I could see that it had gone very still. I could even read the message she had smoothed out on the table. It read: ONLY NOSY YOUNG GIRLS LOOK IN WASTEPAPER BASKETS.

'All the other papers have the same secret message,' I said. 'Good evening, Miss Lemay.'

She twisted round and looked up at me. She'd camouflaged herself pretty well to conceal the natural olive blush of her complexion, but all the paint and powder in the world was useless to conceal the blush that spread from her neck all the way up to the forehead.

'My word,' I said. 'What a charming shade of pink.'