Puppet On A Chain Part 5

'It's -- it's so eerie. They're so alive, so watchful.' She looked at the dolls spot-lit by the beam of my torch. 'Something special about those?' They're so alive, so watchful.' She looked at the dolls spot-lit by the beam of my torch. 'Something special about those?'

'There's no need to whisper. They may be looking at you but I a.s.sure you they can't hear you. Those puppets there. Nothing special really, just that they come from the island of Huyler out in the Zuider Zee. Van Gelder's housekeeper, a charming old beldam who's lost her broomstick, dresses like that.'

'Like that?'

'It's hard to imagine,' I admitted. 'And Trudi has a big puppet dressed in exactly the same way.'

'The sick girl?'

'The sick girl.'

'There's something terribly sick about this place.' She let go of my arm and got back to the business of minding my back again. Seconds later I heard the sound of her sharply indrawn breath and turned round. She had her back to me, not more than four feet away, and as I watched she started to walk slowly and silently backwards, her eyes evidently lined up on something caught in the beam of her torch, her free hand reaching out gropingly behind her. I took it and she came close to me, still not turning her head.

She spoke in an urgent whisper.

'There's somebody there. Somebody watching.'

I glanced briefly along the beam of her torch but could see nothing, but then hers wasn't a very powerful torch compared to the one I carried. I looked away, squeezed her hand to attract her attention, and when she turned round I looked questioningly at her.

'There is someone there.' Still the same insistent whisper, the green eyes wide. 'I saw them. I saw them.'

Them?'

'Eyes. I saw them!'

I never doubted her. Imaginative girl she might be, but she'd been trained and highly trained not to be imaginative in the matter of observation. I brought up my own torch, not as carefully as I might have done, for the beam struck her eyes in pa.s.sing, momentarily blinding her and as she raised a reflex hand to her eyes I settled the beam on the area she just indicated. I couldn't see any eyes, but what I did see was two adjacent puppets swinging so gently that their motion was almost imperceptible. Almost, but not quite -- and there wasn't a draught, a breath of air, stirring in that fourth floor of the warehouse.

I squeezed her hand again and smiled at her. 'Now, Belinda -- '

'Don't you "now Belinda" me!' Whether this was meant to be a hiss or a whisper with a tremor in it I couldn't be sure. 'I saw them. Horrible staring eyes. I swear I saw them. I swear it.'

'Yes, yes, of course, Belinda -- '

She moved to face me, frustration in the intent eyes as if she suspected me of sounding as if I were trying to humour her, which I was. I said, 'I believe you, Belinda. Of course I believe you.' I hadn't changed my tone.

'Then why don't you do something about it?'

'Just what I'm going to do. I'm going to get the h.e.l.l out of here.' I made a last unhurried inspection with my torch, as if nothing had happened, then turned and took her arm in a protective fas.h.i.+on. 'Nothing for us here -- and we've both been too long in here. A drink, I think, for what's left of our nerves.'

She stared at me, her face reflecting a changing pattern of anger and frustration and incredulity and, I suspected, more than a little relief. But the anger was dominant now: most people become angry when they feel they are being disbelieved and humoured at the same time.

'But I tell you -- '

'Ah -- ah!' I touched my lips with my forefinger. 'You don't tell me anything. The boss, remember, always knows best . . .'

She was too young to go all puce and apoplectic, but the precipitating emotions were there all the same. She glared at me, apparently decided that there were no words to meet the situation, and started off down the stairs, outrage in every stiff line of her back. I followed and my back wasn't quite normal either, it had a curious tingling feeling to it that didn't go away until I had the front door to the warehouse safely locked behind me.

We walked quickly up the street, keeping about three feet apart: it was Belinda who maintained the distance, her att.i.tude clearly proclaiming that the handholding and the arm-clutching was over for the night and more likely for keeps. I cleared my throat.

'He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day.'

She was so seething with anger that she didn't get it.

'Please don't talk to me,' she snapped so I didn't, not, at least, till I came to the first tavern in the sailors' quarter, an unsalubrious dive rejoicing in the name of The Cat o' Nine Tails'. The British Navy must have stopped by here once. I took Belinda's arm and guided her inside. She wasn't keen, but she didn't fight about it.

It was a smoky airless drinking den and that was about all you could say about it. Several sailors, resentful of this intrusion by a couple of trippers of what they probably rightly regarded as their own personal property, scowled at me when I came in, but I was in a much better scowling mood than they were and after the first disparaging reception they left us strictly alone. I led Belinda to a small table, a genuine antique wooden table whose original surface hadn't been touched by soap or water since time immemorial.

'I'm having Scotch,' I said. 'You?'

'Scotch,' she said huffily.

'But you don't drink Scotch.'

'I do tonight.'

She was half right. She knocked back half of her gla.s.s of neat Scotch in a defiant swig and then started spluttering, coughing and choking so violently that I saw I could have been wrong about her developing symptoms of apoplexy. I patted her helpfully on the back.

Take your hand away,' she wheezed.

I took my hand away.

'I don't think I can work with you any more, Major Sherman,' she said after she'd got her larynx in working order again.

'I'm sorry to hear that.'

'I can't work with people who don't trust me, who don't believe me. You not only treat us like puppets, you treat us like children.'

'I don't regard you as a child,' I said pacifically. I didn't either.

'"I believe you, Belinda", she mimicked bitterly. "Of course I believe you, Belinda". "You don't believe Belinda at all."'

'I do believe Belinda,' I said. 'I do believe I care for Belinda after all. That's why I took Belinda out of there.'

She stared at me. 'You believe -- then why -- '

'There was someone there, hidden behind that rack of puppets. I saw two of the puppets sway slightly. Someone was behind the rack, watching, waiting to see, I'm certain, what, if anything, we found out. He'd no murderous intent or he'd have shot us in the back when we were going down the stairs. But if I'd reacted as you wanted me to, then I'd have been forced to go look for him and he'd have gunned me down from his place of concealment before I'd even set eyes on him. And then he'd have gunned you down, for he couldn't have any witnesses, and you're really far too young to die yet. Or maybe I could have played hide-and-seek with him and stood an even chance of getting him -- if you weren't there. But you were, you haven't a gun, you've no experience at all in the nasty kind of games we play and you were as good as a hostage to him. So I took Belinda out of there. There now, wasn't that a nice speech?'

'I don't know about the speech.' Mercurial as ever, there were tears in her eyes. 'I only know it's the nicest thing anybody ever said about me.'

'Fiddlesticks!' I drained my Scotch, finished hers off for her and took her back to her hotel. We stood in the foyer entrance for a moment, sheltering from the now heavily falling rain and she said: 'I'm sorry. I was such a fool. And I'm sorry for you too.'

'For me?'

'I can see now why you'd rather have puppets than people working for you. One doesn't cry inside when a puppet dies.'

I said nothing. I was beginning to lose my grip on this girl, the old master-pupil relations.h.i.+p wasn't quite what it used to be.

'Another thing,' she said. She spoke almost happily.

I braced myself.

'I won't ever be afraid of you any more.'

'You were afraid? Of me?'

'Yes, I was. Really. But it's like the man said -- '

'What man?'

'Shylock, wasn't it. You know, cut me and I bleed -- '

'Oh, do be quiet!'

She kept quiet. She just gave me that devastating smile again, kissed me without any great haste, gave me some more of the same smile and went inside. I watched the gla.s.s swing-doors until they came to a rest. Much more of this, I thought gloomily, and discipline would be gone to h.e.l.l and back again.

CHAPTER FIVE.

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 a.s.sistant 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 pa.s.sed through to the bar, where I ordered a jonge Genever and a Pils and drank both slowly while I considered the relations.h.i.+p 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 t.i.tillated 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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, pa.s.sed 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 succ.u.mbed 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 a.s.saulting 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 un.o.bserved, 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.'

'I am sorry. I do not speak English.'

I very gently touched the bruise and said kindly: 'Concussive amnesia. It'll pa.s.s. How's the head, Miss Lemay?'

'I'm sorry, I -- '

'Do not speak English. You said that. But you understand it well enough, don't you? Especially the written word. My word, for an ageing character like myself it's refres.h.i.+ng to see that the young girls of today can blush so prettily. You do blush prettily, you know.'

She rose in confusion, twisting and crus.h.i.+ng the papers in her hand. On the side of the unG.o.dly she might be -- and who but those on the side of the unG.o.dly would have tried, as no question she had tried, to block my pursuit in the airport -- but I couldn't hold back a twinge of pity. There was something forlorn and defenceless about her. She could have been a consummate actress, but then consummate actresses would have been earning a fortune on the stage or screen. Then, unaccountably, I thought of Belinda. Two in the one day were two too many. I was going soft in the head. I nodded at the papers.

'You may retain those, if you wish,' I said nastily.

'Those.' She looked at the papers. 'I don't want to --'

'Ha! The amnesia is wearing off.'