I went outside. Rain or no rain, the barrel-organ was still grinding and screeching away at the top of its form. It was Puccini who was on the air tonight and he was taking a terrible beating. I crossed to the organ and stood there for some time, not so much listening to the music, for there was none to speak of, but looking without seeming to look at a handful of emaciated and ill-dressed teen-agers — a rare sight indeed in Amsterdam where they don’t go in for emaciation very much — who leaned their elbows on the barrel-organ and seemed lost in rapture. My thoughts were interrupted by a gravelly voice behind me.
‘Mynheer likes music?’ I turned. The ancient was smiling at me in a tentative sort of fashion. ‘I love music.’
‘So do I, so do I.’ I peered at him closely, for in the nature of things his time must be close and there could be no forgiveness for that remark. I smiled at him, one music-lover to the other.
‘I shall think of you tonight. I’m going to the opera.’ ‘Mynheer is kind.’
I dropped two coins in the tin can that had mysteriously appeared under my nose. ‘Mynheer is too kind.’
Having the suspicions I did about him, I thought the same myself, but I smiled charitably and, recrossing the street, nodded to the doorman: with the masonic legerdemain known only to doormen, he materialized a taxi out of nowhere. I told him ‘Schiphol Airport’ and got inside.
We moved off. We did not move off alone. At the first traffic lights, twenty yards from the hotel, I glanced through the tinted rear window. A yellow-striped Mercedes taxi was two cars behind us, a taxi I recognized as one that habitually frequented the rank not far from the hotel. But it could have been coincidence. The lights turned to green and we made our way into the Vijzelstraat. So did the yellow-striped Mercedes.
I tapped the driver on the shoulder. ‘Stop here, please. I want to buy some cigarettes.’ I got out. The Mercedes was right behind us, stopped. No one got in, no one got out. I went into an hotel foyer, bought some cigarettes I didn’t need and came out again. The Mercedes was still there. We moved off and after a few moments I said to the driver: Turn right along the Prinsengracht.’
He protested. ‘That is not the way to Schiphol.’
‘It’s the way I want to go. Turn right.’
He did and so did the Mercedes.
‘Stop.’ He stopped. The Mercedes stopped. Coincidence was coincidence but this was ridiculous. I got out, walked back to the Mercedes and opened the door. The driver was a small man with a shiny blue suit and a disreputable air. ‘Good evening. Are you for hire?’
‘No.’ He looked me up and down, trying out first the air of easy insouciance, then that of insolent indifference, but he wasn’t right for either part.
‘Then why are you stopped?’
‘Any law against a man stopping for a smoke?’
‘None. Only you’re not smoking. You know the Police HQ in the Marnixstraat?’ The sudden lack of enthusiasm in his expression made it quite clear that he knew it all too well. ‘I suggest you go there and ask for either Colonel de Graaf or Inspector van Gelder and tell them that you have a complaint to lodge about Paul Sherman, Room 616, Hotel Excelsior.’
‘Complaint?’ he said warily. What complaint?’
‘Tell them that he took the car keys from your ignition and threw them into the canal.’ I took the car keys from the ignition and threw them into the canal and a very satisfactory plop they made too as they vanished for ever into the depths of the Prinsengracht. ‘Don’t follow me around,’ I said and closed the door in a manner befitting the end of our brief interview, but Mercedes are well made cars and the door didn’t fall off.
Back in my own taxi I waited till we were back on the main road again, then stopped the taxi. ‘I’ve decided to walk,’ I said and paid what was owing.
‘What! To Schiphol?’
I gave him the sort of tolerant smile one might expect to receive from a long-distance walker whose prowess has been called in question, waited till he had moved from sight, hopped on a 16 tram and got off at the Dam. Belinda, dressed in a dark coat and with a dark scarf over her blonde hair, was waiting for me in the tram shelter. She looked damp and cold.
‘You’re late,’ she said accusingly.
‘Never criticize your boss, even by implication. The managerial classes always have things to attend to.’
We crossed the square, retracing the steps the grey man and I had taken the previous night, down the alley by the Krasnapolsky and along the tree-lined Oudezijds Voor-burgwal, an area that is one of the cultural highlights of Amsterdam, but Belinda seemed in no mood for culture. A mercurial girl, she seemed withdrawn and remote that night, and the silence was hardly companionable. Belinda had something on her mind and if I were beginning to become any judge of Belinda my guess was that she would let me know about it sooner rather than later. I was right.
She said abruptly: ‘We don’t really exist for you, do we?’
‘Who doesn’t exist?’
‘Me, Maggie, all the people who work for you. We’re just ciphers.’
‘Well, you know how it is,’ I said pacifically. ‘Ship’s captain never mingles socially with the crew.’
That’s what I mean. That’s what I say — we don’t really exist for you. We’re just puppets to be manipulated so that the master puppeteer can achieve certain ends. Any other puppets would do as well.’
I said mildly: ‘We’re here to do very nasty and unpleasant jobs and achieving that end is all that matters. Personalities don’t enter into it. You forget that I am your boss, Belinda. I really don’t think that you should be talking to me like that.’
‘I’ll talk to you any way I like.’ Not only mercurial but a girl of spirit; Maggie would never have dreamed of talking to me like that. She considered her last remark, then said more quietly: ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have spoken like that. But do you have to treat us in this — this detached and remote fashion and never make contact with us? We are people, you know — but not for you. You’d pass me in the street tomorrow and not recognize me. You don’t notice us.’
‘Oh, I notice all right. Take yourself, for instance.’ I carefully refrained from looking at her as we walked along although I knew she was observing me pretty closely. ‘New girl to Narcotics. Limited experience Deuxieme Bureau, Paris. Dressed in navy coat, navy scarf spotted with little white edelweiss, knitted white knee-stockings, sensible flat-heeled navy shoes, buckled, five feet four, a figure, to quote a famous American writer, to make a bishop kick a hole through a stained-glass window, a quite beautiful face, platinum blonde hair that looks like spun silk when the sun shines through it, black eyebrows, green eyes, perceptive and, best of all, beginning to worry about her boss, especially his lack of humanity. Oh, I forgot. Cracked finger-nail polish, third finger, left hand, and a devastating smile enhanced — if, that is to say, that’s possible — by a slightly crooked left upper eye-tooth.’
‘Wow!’ She was at a momentary loss for words, which I was beginning to guess was not at all in character. She glanced at the finger-nail in question and the polish was cracked, then turned to me with a smile that was just as devastating as I’d said it was. ‘Maybe you do at that.’
‘Do at what?’
‘Care about us.’
‘Of course I care.’ She was beginning to confuse me with Sir Galahad and that could be a bad thing. ‘All my operatives, Category Grade 1, young, female, good-looking, are like daughters to me.’
There was a long pause, then she murmured something, very sotto voice indeed, but it sounded to me very like ‘Yes, Papa.’
‘What was that?’ I asked suspiciously.
‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’
We turned into the street which housed the premises of Morgenstern and Muggenthaler. This, my second visit to the place, more than confirmed the impression I had formed the previous night. It seemed darker than ever, bleaker and more menacing, cobbles and pavement more cracked than before, the gutters more choked with litter. Even the gabled houses leaned closer towards one another: this time tomorrow and they would be touching.
Belinda stopped abruptly and clutched my right arm. I glanced at her. She was staring upwards, her eyes wide, and I followed her gaze where the gabled warehouses marched away into the diminishing distance, their hoisting beams clearly silhouetted against the night sky. I knew she felt there was evil abroad: I felt it myself.