Puppet on a Chain (17 page)

'Well, now.' He was suddenly more reasonable, as if he wanted to help. 'Astrid Lemay? Working here.' He frowned thoughtfully. 'We have many girls, of course -- but that name?' He shook his head.

'But friends of hers told me,' I protested.

'Some mistake. Marcel?'

The snakelike man smiled his contemptuous smile. 'No one of that name here.'

'Or ever worked here?'

Marcel shrugged, walked across to a filing cabinet, produced a folder and laid it on the desk, beckoning to me. 'All the girls who work here or have done in the past year. Look for yourself.'

I didn't bother looking. I said: 'I've been misinformed. My apologies for disturbing you.'

'I suggest you try some of the other nightclubs.' Durrell, in the standard tycoon fashion, was already busy making notes on a sheet of paper to indicate that the interview was over. 'Good day, Mr Harrison.'

Marcel had already moved to the doorway. I followed, and as I passed through, turned and smiled apologetically. 'I'm really sorry -- '

'Good day.' He didn't even bother to lift his head. I did some more uncertain smiling, then courteously pulled the door to behind me. It looked a good solid soundproof door.

Marcel, standing just inside the passageway, gave me his warm smile again and, not even condescending to speak, contemptuously indicated that I should precede him down the passageway. I nodded, and as I walked past him I hit him in the middle with considerable satisfaction and a great deal of force, and although I thought that was enough I hit him again, this time on the side of the neck. I took out my gun, screwed on the silencer, took the recumbent Marcel by the collar of his jacket and dragged him towards the office door which I opened with my gun-hand.

Durrell looked up from his desk. His eyes widened as much as eyes can widen when they're almost buried in folds of fat. Then his face became very still, as faces become when the owners want to conceal their thoughts or intentions.

'Don't do it,' I said. 'Don't do any of the standard clever things. Don't reach for a button, don't press any switches on the floor, and don't, please, be so naive as to reach for the gun which you probably have in the top right-hand drawer, you being a right-handed man.'

He didn't do any of the standard clever things,

'Push your chair back two feet.'

He pushed his chair back two feet. I dropped Marcel to the floor, reached behind me, closed the door, turned the very fancy key in the lock, then pocketed the key. I said: 'Get up.'

Durrell got up. He stood scarcely more than five feet high. In build, he closely resembled a bullfrog. I nodded to the nearer of the two large safes.

'Open it.'

'So that's it.' He was good with his face but not so good with his voice. He wasn't able to keep that tiny trace of relief out of his voice. 'Robbery, Mr Harrison.'

'Come here,' I said. He came. 'Do you know who I am?'

'Know who you are?' A look of puzzlement. 'You just told me -- '

'That my name is Harrison. Who am I?'

'I don't understand.'

He screeched with pain and fingered the already bleeding welt left by the silencer of my gun.

'Who am I?'

'Sherman.' Hate was in the eyes and the thick voice. 'Interpol.'

'Open that door.'

'Impossible. I have only half the combination. Marcel here has -- '

The second screech was louder, the weal on the other cheek comparably bigger.

'Open that door.'

He twiddled with the combination and pulled the door open. The safe was about 30 inches square, of a size to hold a great deal of guilders, but then, if all the tales about the Balinova were true, tales that whispered darkly of gaming-rooms and much more interesting shows in the basement and the brisk retail of items not commonly found in ordinary retail shops, the size was probably barely adequate.

I nodded to Marcel. 'Junior, here. Shove him inside.'

'In there?' He looked horrified.

'I don't want him coming to and interrupting our discussion.'

'Discussion?'

'Open up.'

'He'll suffocate. Ten minutes and -- '

'The next time I have to ask it will be after I put a bullet through your kneecap so that you'll never walk without a stick again. Believe me?'

He believed me. Unless you're a complete fool, and Durrell wasn't, you can always tell when a man means something. He dragged Marcel inside, which was probably the hardest work he'd done in years, because he had to do quite a bit of bending and pushing to get Marcel to fit on the tiny floor of the safe in such a way that the door could be closed. The door was closed.

I searched Durrell. He'd no offensive weapon on him. The right-hand drawer of his desk predictably yielded up a large automatic of a type unknown to me, which was not unusual as I'm not very good with guns except when aiming and firing them.

'Astrid Lemay,' I said. 'She works here.'

'She works here.'

'Where is she?'

'I don't know. Before God, I don't know.' The last was almost in a scream as I'd lifted the gun again.

'You could find out?'

'How could I find out?'

'Your ignorance and reticence do you credit,' I said. 'But they are based on fear. Fear of someone, fear of something. But you'll become all knowledgeable and forthcoming when you learn to fear something else more. Open that safe.'

He opened the safe. Marcel was still unconscious.

'Get inside.'

'No.' The single word came out like a hoarse scream. 'I tell you, it's airtight, hermetically sealed. Two of us in there -- we'll be dead in minutes if I go in there.'

'You'll be dead in seconds if you don't.'

He went inside. He was shaking now. Whoever this was, he wasn't one of the king-pins: whoever masterminded the drug racket was a man -- or men -- possessed of a toughness and ruthlessness that was absolute and this man was possessed of neither.

I spent the next five minutes without profit in going through every drawer and file available to me. Everything I examined appeared to be related in one way or another to legitimate business dealing, which made sense, for Durrell would be unlikely to keep documents of a more incriminating nature where the office cleaner could get her hands on them. After five minutes I opened the safe door.

Durrell had been wrong about the amount of breathable air available inside that safe. He'd overestimated. He was semi-collapsed with his knees resting on Marcel's back, which made it fortunate for Marcel that he was still unconscious. At least, I thought he was unconscious. I didn't bother to check. I caught Durrell by the shoulder and pulled. It was like pulling a bull moose out of a swamp, but he came eventually and rolled out on to the floor. He lay there for a bit, then pushed himself groggily to his knees. I waited patiently until the laboured stertorous whooping sound dropped to a mere gasping wheeze and his complexion ran through the spectrum from a bluish-violet colour to what would have been a becomingly healthy pink had I not known that his normal complexion more resembled the colour of old newspaper. I prodded him and indicated that he should get to his feet and he managed this after a few tries.

'Astrid Lemay?' I said.

'She was here this morning.' His voice came as a hoarse whisper but audible enough all the same. 'She said that very urgent family matters had come up. She had to leave the country.'

'Alone?'

'No, with her brother.'

'He was here?'

'No.'

'Where did she say she was going?'

'Athens. She belonged there.'

'She came here just to tell you this?'

'She had two months' back pay due. She needed it for the fare.'

I told him to get back inside the safe. I had a little trouble with him, but he finally decided that it offered a better chance than a bullet, so he went. I didn't want to terrify him any more. I just didn't want him to hear what I was about to say.

I got through to Schiphol on a direct line, and was finally connected with the person I wanted.

'Inspector van Gelder, Police HQ here,' I said. 'An Athens flight this morning. Probably KLM. I want to check if two people, names Astrid Lemay and George Lemay, were on board. Their descriptions are as follows -- what was that?'

The voice at the other end told me that they had been aboard. There had been some difficulty, apparently, about George being allowed on the flight as his condition was such that both medical and police authorities at the airport had questioned the wisdom of it, but the girl's pleading had prevailed. I thanked my informant and hung up.

I opened the door of the safe. It hadn't been shut more than a couple of minutes this time and I didn't expect to find them in such bad shape and they weren't. Durrell's complexion was no more than puce, and Marcel had not only recovered consciousness but recovered it to the extent of trying to lug out his underarm gun, which I had carelessly forgotten to remove. As I took the gun from him before he could damage himself with it, I reflected that Marcel must have the most remarkable powers of recuperation. I was to remember this with bitter chagrin on an occasion that was to be a day or so later and very much more inauspicious for me.

I left them both sitting on the floor, and as there didn't seem to be anything worthwhile to say none of the three of us said it. I unlocked the door, opened it, closed and locked it behind me, smiled pleasantly at the faded blonde and dropped the key through a street grille outside the Balinova. Even if there wasn't a spare key available, there were telephones and alarm bells still operating from inside that room and it shouldn't take an oxyacetylene torch more than two or three hours to open it. There should be enough air inside the room to last that time. But it didn't seem very important one way or another.

I drove back to Astrid's flat and did what I should have done in the first place -- asked some of her immediate neighbours if they had seen her that morning. Two had, and their stories checked. Astrid and George with two or three cases had left two hours previously in a taxi.

Astrid had skipped and I felt a bit sad and empty about it, not because she had said she would help me and hadn't but because she had closed the last escape door open to her.

Her masters hadn't killed her for two reasons. They knew I could have tied them up with her death and that would be coming too close to home. And they didn't have to because she was gone and no longer a danger to them: fear, if it is sufficiently great, can seal lips as effectively as death.

I'd liked her and would have liked to see her happy again. I couldn't blame her. For her, all the doors had been closed.

CHAPTER NINE

The view from the top of the towering Havengebouw, the skyscraper in the harbour, is unquestionably the best in Amsterdam. But I wasn't interested in the view that morning, only in the facilities this vantage point had to offer. The sun was shining, but it was breezy and cool at that altitude and even at sea-level the wind was strong enough to ruffle the blue-grey waters into irregular wavy patterns of white horses.

The observation platform was crowded with tourists, for the most part with wind-blown hair, binoculars and cameras, and although I didn't carry any camera I didn't think I looked different from any other tourist. Only my purpose in being up there was.

I leaned on my elbows and gazed out to sea. De Graaf had certainly done me proud with those binoculars, they were as good as any I had ever come across and with the near-perfect visibility that day the degree of definition was all that I could ever have wished for.

The glasses were steadied on a coastal steamer of about a thousand tons that was curving into harbour. Even when I first picked her up I could detect the large rust-streaked patches on the hull and see that she was flying the Belgian flag. And the time, shortly before noon, was right. I followed her progress and it seemed to me that she was taking a wider sweep than one or two vessels that had preceded her and was going very close indeed to the buoys that marked the channel: but maybe that was where the deepest water lay.

I followed her progress till she closed on the harbour and then I could distinguish the rather scarred name on the rusty bows. Marianne the name read. The captain was certainly a stickler for punctuality, but whether he was such a stickler for abiding by the law was another question.

I went down to the Havenrestaurant and had lunch. I wasn't hungry but meal-times in Amsterdam, as my experience had been since coming there, tended to be irregular and infrequent. The food in the Havenrestaurant is well spoken of and I've no doubt it merits its reputation: but I don't remember what I had for lunch that day.

I arrived at the Hotel Touring at one-thirty. I didn't really expect to find that Maggie and Belinda had returned yet and they hadn't. I told the man behind the desk that I'd wait in the lounge, but I don't much fancy lounges, especially when I had to study papers like the papers I had to study from the folder we'd taken from Morgenstern and Muggenthaler's, so I waited till the desk was momentarily unmanned, took the lift to the fourth floor and let myself into the girls' room. It was a fractionally better room than the previous one they'd had, and the couch, which I immediately tested, was fractionally softer, but there wasn't enough in it to make Maggie and Belinda turn cartwheels for joy, apart from the fact that the first cartwheel in any direction would have brought them up against a solid wall.

I lay on that couch for over an hour, going through all the warehouse's invoices and a very unexciting and innocuous list of invoices they turned out to be. But there was one name among all the others that turned up with surprising frequency and as its products matched with the line of my developing suspicions, I made a note of its name and map location.

A key turned in the lock and Maggie and Belinda entered. Their first reaction on seeing me seemed to be one of relief, which was quickly followed by an unmistakable air of annoyance. I said mildly: 'Is there something up, then?'

'You had us worried,' Maggie said coldly. 'The man at the desk said you were waiting for us in the lounge and you weren't there.'