Puppet on a Chain (7 page)

At a word from van Gelder, he led us to one of the big metal doors, opened it and pulled out a wheeled metal rack that ran smoothly on steel runners. A white-sheeted form lay on this rack.

'The canal he was found in is called the Croquiskade,' van Gelder said. He seemed quite unemotional about it. 'Not what you might call the Park Lane of Amsterdam -- it's down by the docks. Hans Gerber. Nineteen. I won't show you his face -- he's been too long in the water. The fire brigade found him when they were fishing out a car. He could have been there another year or two. Someone had twisted a few old lead pipes about his middle.'

He lifted a corner of the sheet to expose a flaccid emaciated arm. It looked for all the world as if someone had trodden all over it with spiked climbing boots. Curious purple lines joined many of those punctures and the whole arm was badly discoloured. Van Gelder covered it up without a word and turned away. The attendant wheeled the rack inside again, closed the door, led us to another door and repeated the performance of wheeling out another corpse, smiling hugely the while like a bankrupt English duke showing the public round his historic castle.

'I won't show you this one's face either.' van Gelder said. 'It is not nice to look on a boy of twenty-three who has the face of a man of seventy.' He turned to the attendant. 'Where was this one found?'

'The Oosterhook,' the attendant beamed. 'On a coal barge.'

Van Gelder nodded. That's right. With a bottle -- an empty bottle -- of gin beside him. The gin was all inside him. You know what a splendid combination gin and heroin is.' He pulled back the sheet to reveal an arm similar to the one I'd just seen. 'Suicide -- or murder?'

'It all depends.'

'On?'

'Whether he bought the gin himself. That would make it suicide -- or accidental death. Someone could have put the full bottle in his hand. That would make it murder. We had a case just like it last month in the Port of London. We'll never know.'

At a nod from van Gelder, the attendant led us happily to a slab in the middle of the room. This time van Gelder pulled back the sheet from the top. The girl was very young and very lovely and had golden hair.

'Beautiful, isn't she?' van Gelder asked. 'Not a mark on her face. Julia Rosemeyer from East Germany. All we know of her, all we will ever know of her. Sixteen, the doctors guess.'

'What happened to her?'

'Fell six stories to a concrete pavement.'

I thought briefly of the ex-floor-waiter and how much better he would have looked on this slab, then asked: 'Pushed?'

'Fell. Witnesses. They were all high. She'd been talking all night about flying to England. She had some obsession about meeting the Queen. Suddenly she scrambled on to the parapet of the balcony, said she was flying to see the Queen -- and, well, she flew. Fortunately, there was no one passing beneath at the time. Like to see more?'

'I'd like to have a drink at the nearest pub, if you don't mind.'

'No.' He smiled but there wasn't anything humorous about it. 'Van Gelder's fireside. It's not far. I have my reasons.'

'Your reasons?'

'You'l see.'

We said goodbye and thanks to the happily smiling attendant, who looked as if he would have liked to say, 'Haste ye back' but didn't. The sky had darkened since early morning and big heavy scattered drops of rain were beginning to fall. To the east the horizon was livid and purple, more than vaguely threatening and foreboding. It was seldom that a sky reflected my mood as accurately as this.

Van Gelder's fireside could have given points to most English pubs I knew: an oasis of bright cheerfulness compared to the sheeting rain outside, to the rippled waves of water running down the windows, it was warm and cosy and comfortable and homely, furnished in rather heavy Dutch furniture with over-stuffed armchairs, but I have a strong partiality for over-stuffed armchairs: they don't mark you so much as the understuffed variety. There was a russet carpet on the floor and the walls were painted in different shades of warm pastel colours. The fire was all a fire ever should be and van Gelder, I was happy to observe, was thoughtfully studying a very well-stocked glass liquor cupboard.

'Well,' I said, 'you took me to that damned mortuary to make your point. I'm sure you made it. What was it?'

'Points, not point. The first one was to convince you that we here are up against an even more vicious problem than you have at home. There's another half-dozen drug addicts in the mortuary there and how many of them died a natural death is anyone's guess. It's not always as bad as this, those deaths seem to come in waves, but it still represents an intolerable loss of life and mainly young life at that: and for every one there, how many hundred hopeless addicts are there in the streets?'

'Your point being that you have even more incentive than I to seek out and destroy those people -- and that we are attacking a common enemy, a central source of supply?'

'Every country has only one king.'

'And the other point?'

To reinforce Colonel de Graaf's warning. Those people are totally ruthless. Provoke them too much, get too close to them -- well, there's still a few slabs left in the mortuary.'

'How about that drink?' I said.

A telephone bell rang in the hallway outside. Van Gelder murmured an apology and went to answer it. Just as the door closed behind him a second door leading to the room opened and a girl entered. She was tall and slender and in her early twenties and was dressed in a dragon-emblazoned multi-hued housecoat that reached almost to her ankles. She was quite beautiful, with flaxen hair, an oval face and huge violet eyes that appeared to be at once humorous and perceptive, so striking in overall appearance that it was quite some time before I remembered what passed for my manners and struggled to my feet, no easy feat from the depths of that cavernous armchair.

'Hullo,' I said. 'Paul Sherman.' It didn't sound much but I couldn't think of anything else to say.

Almost as if embarrassed, the girl momentarily sucked the tip of her thumb, then smiled to reveal perfect teeth.

'I am Trudi. I do not speak good English.' She didn't either, but she'd the nicest voice for speaking bad English I'd come across in a long time. I advanced with my hand out, but she made no move to take it: instead she put her hand to her mouth and giggled shyly. I am not accustomed to have fully-grown girls giggle shyly at me and was more than a little relieved to hear the sound of the receiver being replaced and van Gelder's voice as he entered from the hall.

'Just a routine report on the airport business. Nothing to go on yet -- '

Van Gelder saw the girl, broke off, smiled and advanced to put his arm round her shoulders. 'I see you two have met each other.' 'Well,' I said, 'not quite -- ' then broke off in turn as Trudi reached up and whispered in his ear, glancing at me out of the corner of her eye. Van Gelder smiled and nodded and Trudi went quickly from the room. The puzzlement must have shown in my face, for van Gelder smiled again and it didn't seem a very happy smile to me.

'She'll be right back, Major. She's shy at first, with strangers. Just at first.'

As van Gelder had promised, Trudi was back almost immediately. She was carrying with her a very large puppet, so wonderfully made that at first glance it could have been mistaken for a real child. It was almost three feet in length with a white wimple hat covering flaxen curls of the same shade as Trudi's own and was wearing an ankle-length billowy striped silk dress and a most beautifully embroidered bodice. Trudi clasped this puppet as tightly as if it had been a real child. Van Gelder again put his arm round her shoulders.

'This is my daughter, Trudi. A friend of mine, Trudi. Major Sherman, from England.'

This time she advanced without any hesitation, put her hand out, made a small bobbing motion like the beginnings of a curtsy, and smiled.

'How do you do, Major Sherman?'

Not to be outdone in courtesy I smiled and bowed slightly. 'Miss van Gelder. My pleasure.'

'My pleasure.' She turned and looked enquiringly at van Gelder.

'English is not one of Trudi's Strong points,' van Gelder said apologetically. 'Sit down, Major, sit down.'

He took a bottle of Scotch from the sideboard, poured drinks for myself and himself, handed me mine and sank into his chair with a sigh. Then he looked up at his daughter, who was gazing steadily at me in a way that made me feel more than vaguely uncomfortable.

'Won't you sit down, my dear?'

She turned to van Gelder, smiled brightly, nodded and handed the huge puppet to him. He accepted it so readily that he was obviously used to this sort of thing.

'Yes, Papa,' she said, then without warning but at the same time as unaffectedly as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she sat down on my knee, put an arm around my neck and smiled at me. I smiled right back, though, for just that instant, it was a Herculean effort.

Trudi regarded me solemnly and said: 'I like you.'

'And I like you too, Trudi.' I squeezed her shoulder to show her how much I liked her. She smiled at me, put her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes. I looked at the top of the blonde head for a moment, then glanced in mild enquiry at van Gelder. He smiled, a smile full of sorrow.

'If I do not wound you, Major Sherman, Trudi loves everyone.'

'All girls of a certain age do.'

'You are a man of quite extraordinary perception.'

I didn't think it called for any great perception at all to make the remark I had just made, so I didn't answer, just smiled and turned again to Trudi. I said, very gently: Trudi?'

She said nothing. She just stirred and smiled again, a curiously contented smile that for some obscure reason made me feel more than a little of a fraud, closed her eyes even more tightly and snuggled close to me.

I tried again. 'Trudi. I'm sure you must have beautiful eyes. Can I see them?'

She thought this over for a bit, smiled again, sat up, held herself at straight arm's length with her hands on my shoulders, then opened her eyes very wide as a child would do on such a request.

The huge violet eyes were beautiful, no doubt about that. But they were something else also. They were glazed and vacant and did not seem to reflect the light: they sparkled, a sparkle that would have deceptively highlit any still photograph taken of her, for the sparkle was superficial only: behind lay a strange quality of opacity.

Still gently, I took her right hand from my shoulder and pushed the sleeve up as far as the elbow. If the rest of her were anything to go by it should have been a beautiful forearm but it wasn't: it was shockingly mutilated by the punctures left by a countless number of hypodermic needles. Trudi, her lips trembling, looked at me in dismay as if fearful of reproach, snatched down the sleeve of her dress, flung her arms about me, buried her face in my neck and started to cry. She cried as if her heart was breaking. I patted her as soothingly as one can pat anyone who seems bent on choking you and looked over at van Gelder.

'Now I know your reasons,' I said. 'For insisting I come here.'

'I'm sorry. Now you know.'

'You make a third point?'

'I make a third point. God alone knows I wish I didn't have to. But you will understand that in all fairness to my colleagues I must let them know these things.'

'De Graaf knows?'

'Every senior police officer in Amsterdam knows,' van Gelder said simply. 'Trudi!'

Trudi's only reaction was to cling even more tightly. I was beginning to suffer from anoxia.

'Trudi!' Van Gelder was more insistent this time. 'Your afternoon's sleep. You know what the doctor says. Bed I'

'No,' she sobbed. 'No bed.'

Van Gelder sighed and raised his voice: 'Herta!'

Almost as if she had been waiting for her cue -- which she probably had been, listening outside the door -- a most outlandish creature entered the room. As far as health farms were concerned, she was the challenge to end all challenges. She was a huge and enormously fat waddling woman -- to describe her method of locomotion as, walking would have been a gross inaccuracy -- dressed in exactly the same type of clothes as Trudi's puppet was wearing. Long blonde pigtails tied with bright ribbon hung down her massive front. Her face was old -- she had to be at least over seventy -- deeply trenched and had the texture and appearance of cracked brown leather. The contrast between the gaily hued clothes and the blonde pigtails on the one hand and the enormous old hag that wore them on the other, was bizarre, horrible, so grotesque as to be almost obscene, but the contrast appeared to evoke no such responses in either van Gelder or Trudi.

The old woman crossed the room -- for all her bulk and waddling gait she made ground quite quickly -- nodded a curt acknowledgment to me and, without saying a word, laid a kindly but firm hand on Trudi's shoulder. Trudi looked up at once, her tears gone as quickly as they had come, smiled, nodded docilely, disengaged her arms from my neck and rose. She crossed to van Gelder's chair, recovered her puppet, kissed him, crossed to where I was sitting, kissed me as unaffectedly as a child saying good night, and almost skipped from the room, the waddling Herta close behind. I exhaled a long sigh and just managed to refrain from mopping my brow.

'You might have warned me,' I complained. 'About Trudi and Herta. Who is she anyway -- Herta, I mean? A nurse?'

'An ancient retainer, you'd say in English.' Van Gelder took a large gulp of his whisky as if he needed it and I did the same for I needed it even more: after all he was used to this sort of thing. 'My parents' old housekeeper -- from the island of Huyler in the Zuider Zee. As you may have noticed, they are a little -- what do you say -- conservative in their dress. She's been with us for only a few months -- but, well, you can see how she is with Trudi.'

'And Trudi?'

'Trudi is eight years old. She has been eight years old for the past fifteen years, she always will be eight years old. Not my daughter, as you may have guessed -- but I could never love a daughter more. My brother's adopted daughter. He and I worked in Curacao until last year -- I was in narcotics, he was the security officer for a Dutch oil company. His wife died some years ago -- and then he and my wife were killed in a car crash last year. Someone had to take Trudi. I did. I didn't want her -- and now I couldn't live without her. She will never grow up, Mr Sherman.'