Colonel de Graaf’s office wasn’t in the least like the Hotel Rembrandt. It was a large enough room, but bleak and bare and functional, furnished mainly with steel-grey filing cabinets, a steel-grey table and steel-grey seats which were as hard as steel. But at least the decor had the effect of making you concentrate on the matter on hand: there was nothing to distract the mind or eye. De Graaf and I, after ten minutes preliminary discussion, were concentrating, although I think it came more easily to de Graaf than it did to me. I had lain awake to a late hour the previous night and am never at my. best at ten a.m. on a cold and blustery morning.
‘All drugs,’ de Graaf agreed. ‘Of course we’re concerned with all drugs — opium, cannabis, amphetamine, LSD, STP, cocaine, amyl acetate — you name it, Major Sherman, and we’re concerned in it. They all destroy or lead on to destruction. But in this instance we are confining ourselves to the really evil one — heroin. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’ The deep incisive voice came from the doorway. I turned round and looked at the man who stood there, a tall man in a well-cut dark business suit, cool penetrating grey eyes, a pleasant face that could stop being pleasant very quickly, very professional-looking. There was no mistaking his profession. Here was a cop and not one to be taken lightly either.
He closed the door and walked across to me with the light springy step of a man much younger than one in his middle forties, which he was at least. He put out his hand and said: ‘Van Gelder. I’ve heard a lot about you, Major Sherman.’
I thought this one over, briefly but carefully. decided to refrain from comment. I smiled and shook his hand.
‘Inspector van Gelder,’ de Graaf said. ‘Head of our narcotics bureau. He will be working with you, Sherman. He will offer you the best co-operation possible.’
‘I sincerely hope we can work well together.’ Van Gelder smiled and sat down. ‘Tell me, what progress your end? Do you think you can break the supply ring in England?’
‘I think we could. It’s a highly organized distributive pipeline, very highly integrated with almost no cut-offs — and it’s because of that that we have been able to identify dozens of their pushers and the half-dozen or so main distributors.’
‘You could break the ring but you won’t. You’re leaving it strictly alone?’
‘What else, Inspector? We break them up and the next distribution ring will be driven so far underground that we’ll never find it. As it is, we can pick them up when and if we want to. The thing we really want to find out is how the damned stuff gets in — and who’s supplying it.’
‘And you think — obviously, or you wouldn’t be here — that the supplies come from here? Or hereabouts?’
‘Not hereabouts. Here. And I don’t think. I know. Eighty per cent of those under surveillance — and I refer to the distributors and their intermediaries — have links with this country. To be precise, with Amsterdam — nearly all of them. They have relatives here, or they have friends. They have business contacts here or personally conduct business here or they come here on holiday. We’ve spent five years on building up this dossier.’
De Graaf smiled. ‘On this place called “here”.’
‘On Amsterdam, yes.’
Van Gelder asked: ‘There are copies of this dossier?’
‘One.’
‘With you?’
‘Yes.’
‘On you?’
‘In the only safe place.’ I tapped my head.
‘As safe a place as any,’ de Graaf approved, then added thoughtfully: ‘As long, of course, that you don’t meet up with people who might be inclined to treat you the way you treat them.’
‘I don’t understand, Colonel.’
‘I speak in riddles,’ de Graaf said affably. ‘Ah right, I agree. At the moment the finger points at the Netherlands. Not to put too fine a point on it, as you don’t put too fine a point on it, at Amsterdam. We, too, know our unfortunate reputation. We wish it was untrue. But it isn’t. We know the stuff comes in in bulk. We know it goes out again all broken up — but from where or how we have no idea.’
‘It’s your bailiwick,’ I said mildly.
‘It’s what?’
‘It’s your province. It’s in Amsterdam. You run the law in Amsterdam.’
‘Do you make many friends in the course of a year?’ van Gelder enquired politely.
‘I’m not in this business to make friends.’
‘You’re in this business to destroy people who destroy people,’ de Graaf said pacifically. ‘We know about you. We have a splendid dossier on you. Would you like to see it?’
‘Ancient history bores me.’
‘Predictably.’ De Graaf sighed. ‘Look, Sherman, the best police forces in the world can come up against a concrete wall. That’s what we have done — not that I claim we’re the best. All we require is one lead — one single solitary lead . . . Perhaps you have some idea, some plan?’
‘I arrived only yesterday.’ I fished inside the inside of my lower right trouser-leg and gave the Colonel the two scraps of paper I’d found in the dead floor-waiter’s pockets. ‘Those figures. Those numbers. They mean anything to you?’
De Graaf gave them a cursory glance, held them up before a bright desk-lamp, laid them down on the desk. ‘No.’
‘Can you find out? If they have any meaning?’
‘I have a very able staff. By the way, where did you get these?’
‘A man gave them to me.’
‘You mean you got them from a man.’
‘There’s a difference?’
‘There could be a very great difference,’ De Graaf leaned forward, face and voice very earnest. ‘Look, Major Sherman, we know about your technique of getting people off balance and keeping them there. We know about your propensity for stepping outside the law –‘
‘Colonel de Graaf!’
‘A well-taken point. You’re probably never inside it to start with. We know about this deliberate policy — admittedly as effective as it is suicidal — of endless provocation, waiting for something, for somebody to break. But please, Major Sherman, please do not try to provoke too many people in Amsterdam. We have too many canals.’
‘I won’t provoke anyone,’ I said. ‘I’ll be very careful.’
‘I’m sure you will.’ De Graaf sighed. ‘And now, I believe, van Gelder has a few things to show you.’
Van Gelder had. He drove me in his own black Opel from the police HQ in the Marnixstraat to the city mortuary and by the time I left there I was wishing he hadn’t.
The city mortuary lacked the old-world charm, the romance and nostalgic beauty of old Amsterdam. It was like the city mortuary in any big town, cold — very cold — and clinical and inhuman and repelling. The central block had down its centre two rows of white slabs of what appeared to be marble and almost certainly wasn’t, while the sides of the room were lined with very large metal doors. The principal attendant here, resplendent in an immaculately starched white coat, was a cheerful, rubicund, genial character who appeared to be in perpetual danger of breaking out into gales of laughter, a very odd characteristic indeed, one would have thought, to find in a mortuary attendant until one recalled that more than a handful of England’s hangmen in the past were reckoned to be the most rollicking tavern companions one could ever hope to have.
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?’