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.’
And all the time his subordinates probably thought that he was just their lucky superior with no other thought or concern in his mind than to put as many malefactors behind bars as possible. Sympathetic comment and commiseration were never my forte, so I said: ‘This addiction — when did it start?’
‘God knows. Years ago. Years before my brother found out.’
‘Some of those hypo punctures are recent.’
‘She’s on withdrawal treatment. Too many injections, you would say?’
‘I would say.’
‘Herta watches her like a hawk. Every morning she takes her to the Vondel Park — she loves to feed the birds. In the afternoon Trudi sleeps. But sometimes in the evening Herta gets tired — and I am often from home in the evening.’
‘You’ve had her watched?’
‘A score of times. I don’t know how it’s done.’
‘They get at her to get at you?’
‘To bring pressure to bear on me. What else? She has no money to pay for fixes. They are fools and do not realize that I must see her die slowly before my eyes before I can compromise myself. So they keep trying.’
‘You could have a twenty-four-hour guard placed on her.’
‘And then that would make it official. Such an official request is brought to the automatic notice of the health authorities. And then?’
‘An institution,’ I nodded. ‘For the mentally retarded. And she’d never come out again.’
‘She’d never come out again.’
I didn’t know what to say except goodbye, so I did that and left.
CHAPTER FOUR
I spent the afternoon in my hotel room going over the carefully documented and cross-indexed files and case histories which Colonel de Graaf’s office had given me. They covered every known case of drug-taking and drug prosecutions, successful or not, in Amsterdam in the past two years. They made very interesting reading if, that is, your interest lay in death and degradation and suicide and broken homes and ruined careers. But there was nothing in it for me. I spent a useless hour trying to rearrange and reassemble the various cross-indexes but no significant pattern even began to emerge. I gave up. Highly trained minds like de Graaf’s and van Gelder’s would have spent many, many hours in the same fruitless pastime, and if they had failed to establish any form of pattern there was no hope for me.
In the early evening I went down to the foyer and handed in my key. The smile of the assistant manager behind the desk lacked a little of the sabre-toothed quality of old, it was deferential, even apologetic: he’d obviously been told to try a new tack with me.
‘Good evening, good evening, Mr Sherman.’ An affable ingratiation that I cared for even less than his normal approach. ‘I’m afraid I must have sounded a little abrupt last evening, but you see — ‘
‘Don’t mention it, my dear fellow, don’t mention it.’ I wasn’t going to let any old hotel manager outdo me in affability. ‘It was perfectly understandable in the circumstances. Must have come as a very great shock to you.’ I glanced through the foyer doors at the falling rain. ‘The guide-books didn’t mention this.’
He smiled widely as if he hadn’t heard the same inane remark a thousand times before, then said cunningly: ‘Hardly the night for your English constitutional, Mr Sherman.’
‘No chance anyway. It’s Zaandam for me tonight.’ ‘Zaandam.’ He made a face. ‘My commiserations, Mr Sherman.’ He evidently knew a great deal more about Zaandam than I did, which was hardly surprising as I’d just picked the name from a map.