‘Why not?
‘Because I’d advise him against it. He knows I wouldn’t do that without
reason. Where can I contact you?’
‘I’ll contact you. At the Trianon.’
‘I won’t make any comments about how touching your trust in me is.
Tomorrow morning.’
‘Tonight. Ten o’clock.’
‘You are in a hurry. No point, I suppose, in asking you the compelling
nature of this deadline you so obviously have to meet. Besides, I told
you, I have a nine-thirty appointment.’
‘Ten o’clock.’ Agnelli rose. ‘You will of course try to see your friend
immediately. I’ll put a car at your disposal.’
‘Please, Mr Agnelli. Don’t be so naive.’
168
Seven
‘That’s an Esfahan rug you’re standing on,’ Colonel de Graaf said. ‘Very
rare, very expensive.’
‘I’ve got to drip on to something,’ van Effen said reasonably. He was
standing before the fire in the Colonel’s luxuriously furnished library,
steam gently rising from his saturated clothing. ‘Not for me a door-to-door
chauffeur-driven limousine. I have to cope with taxis that go home to roost
when the first drop of rain falls and with people who seemed anxious to
know where I was going. It didn’t seem clever to let them know that I was
going to the house ofthe Chief of Police.’
‘Your friend Agnelli doesn’t trust you?’
‘Difficult to say. Oh, sure, it was Agnelli who had me followed – couldn’t
have been anyone else. But I’m not sure that he’s suspicious of me – I
think that, on principle, he just doesn’t trust anyone. Difficult character
to read. You’d probably like him. Seems friendly and likeable enough – you
really have to make an effort to associate him with anything like blackmail
and torture – and even then you find it difficult to convince yourself.
Which means nothing. I assume you had a comfortable evening, sir – that you
didn’t have to cope with the elements or the thought that you might be shot
in the back at any moment.’
De Graaf made a dismissive gesture which could have meant either that such
considerations were irrelevant trifles or that they could not possibly
apply to him in the first place. ‘An interesting meeting, but only to a
limited extent. I’m afraid Bernhard wasn’t in a particularly receptive or
cooperative frame of mind.’ Bernhard was Bernhard Dessens, the Minister of
justice.
‘A dithering old woman, scared to accept responsibility,
i6q
unwilling to commit himself and looking to pass the buck elsewhere?’
‘Exactly. I couldn’t have put – I’ve told you before, Peter, that’s no way
to talk about cabinet ministers. There were two of them. Names Riordan and
Samuelson. One – person calling himself Riordan – could have been in
disguise. The other had made no attempt at any such thing which can only
mean that he’s pretty confident about something or other. Riordan had long
black hair – shoulder-length, in fact, I thought that ludicrous style had
gone out of fashion ten years ago – was deeply tanned, wore a Dutch bargee
cap and sun-glasses.’
‘Anything so obvious has to be a disguise.’Van Effen thought for a moment.
‘He wasn’t by any chance very tall and preternaturally thin?’
De Graaf nodded. ‘I thought that would occur to you at once. The fellow who
commandeered that canal boat from – who was it?’
‘At Schiphol? Dekker.’
‘Dekker. This must be the man Dekker described. And damned if I don’t agree
with your bizarre suggestion that this fellow – Riordan or whatever – is an
albino. Dark glasses. Heavy tan to hide an alabaster complexion. Black hair
to hide white. Other fellow – Samuelson – had white hair, thick and very
wavy, white moustache and white goatee beard. No albino, though – blue
eyes. All that white hair would normally bespeak advanced years but his
face was almost completely unlined. But, then, he was very plump, which may
account for the youthful skin. Looked like a cross between an idealized
concept of a US Senator and some bloated plutocrat, oil billionaire or
something like that.’
‘Maybe he’s got a better make-up rnsin than Riordan.’
‘It’s possible. Both men spoke in English, from which I assumed that
Samuelson couldn’t speak Dutch. Both made a point of stating that they were
Irish-Americans and I have no doubt they were. I don’t have to be Hector or
one of his professorial friends to know that – the north-east or New York
accent was very strong. Riordan did nearly all the talking-
170
‘He asked – no, he demanded – that we contact the British government.
More exactly, he demanded we act as intermediaries between the FFF ‘ and
Whitehall on the basis that Whitehall would be much more likely to
negotiate with another government than with an unknown group such as they
were. When Bernhard asked what on earth they could possibly want to
discuss with Whitehall they said they wanted to have a dialogue about
Northern Ireland, but refused to elaborate further until the Dutch
Goverrument agreed to cooperate.’ De Graaf sighed. ‘Whereupon, alas, our
Minister of justice, seething and fulminating, while at the same time
knowing damn well that they had him over a barrel, climbed on to his high
horse and said it was inconceivable, unthinkable, that a sovereign nation
should negotiate on behalf of a band of terrorists. He carried on for
about five minutes in this vein, but I’ll spare you all the parliamentary
rhetoric. He ended up by saying that he, personally, would die first.
‘Riordan said that he very much doubted that Dessens would go to such
extraordinary lengths and further said that he was convinced that
fourteen million Dutchmen would take a diametrically opposite point of
view. Then he became rather unpleasantly personal and threatening. He
said it didn’t make the slightest damn difference to anything if he,
Dessens, committed suicide on the spot, for the Oostlijk-Flevoland dyke
in the vicinity of Lelystad would go at midnight if the government didn’t
agree to talk terms by ten o’clock tonight. He then produced a paper with
a List of places which, he said, were in immediate danger of going at any
moment. He didn’t say whether or not mines had already been placed in
those areas -the usual uncertainty technique.
‘Among the places he listed – there were so many that I forget half of
them – were Leeuwarden, the Noordoost polder in the vicinity of Urk, the
Amstclmeer, the Wieringermeer, Putten, the polder south of Petten,
Schouwen, Duiveland and Walcheren – did we remember what happened to
Walcheren during the war? Both the Eastern and Western Scheldt estuaries
were on their list, he said – did we remember what happened there in
February 1953 – while Noord and Sud Holland offered a
T7T
positive embarrassment of riches. That’s only a representative sample.
Riordan then started to make very sinister remarks about the weather, had
we noticed how high the level of the North Sea had risen, how the
strengthening wind had gone to the north and that the spring tides were
at hand – while the levels of the Rhine, Waal, Maas and Scheldt were near
an all-time low – so reminiscent of February 1953, didn’t Dessens think?
‘He then demanded that they talked to a minister or ministers with the
power and courage to make decisions and not a snivelling time-server bent
only on preserving his own miserable political career, which was, I
thought, a bit hard on Bernhard.
‘Riordan then said that, to display their displeasure at this wholly
unnecessary hiatus in negotiations, they would detonate one of several
devices they had placed in public buildings in the capital. Here the two
of them had a whispered conference and then Riordan announced that they
had chosen the royal palace and defied anyone to find the explosives
before they went off. No lives, he said, were at risk in this explosion,
which would occur within five minutes of their departure. He added,
almost as an afterthought, that any attempt to restrain them, hinder
their departure or have them followed would inevitably mean that the
Oostlijk-Flevoland dyke would go not at midnight but at nine o’clock this
evening. On this happy note, they left. The palace explosion, as you may
know, duly occurred.’
‘So I believe.’ It seemed the wrong moment to tell de Graaf that it was
he, van Effen, who had, pressed the button. He shivered and moved to a
less damp patch on the Esfahan. ‘I think I’m getting pneumonia.’
‘There’s brandy.’ De Graaf waved a hand at once indicative of
preoccupation and irritation that one should be unaware of the universal
specifics against pneumococci. ‘Schnapps, scotch -‘He broke off ‘as a
knock came on the library door and a uniformed policeman admitted George
and Vasco who were, if anything, even more saturated than van Effen had
been. ‘Two more advanced cases, I suppose.’
George said: ‘I beg your pardon, Colonel?’
172
‘Pneumonia. Help yourselves. I must say I wasn’t expecting you gentlemen.’
‘The Lieutenant said