‘This must be the place,’ she whispered. ‘I know it must be.’
‘This is the place,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘What’s wrong?’
She snatched her hand away as if I had just said something wounding, but I regained it, tucked her arm under mine and held on firmly to her hand. She made no attempt to remove it.
‘It’s — it’s so creepy. What are those horrible things sticking out under the gables?’
‘Hoisting beams. In the old days the houses here were rated on the width of the frontage, so the thrifty Dutch made their houses uncommonly narrow. Unfortunately, this made their staircases even narrower still. So, the hoisting beams for the bulky stuff — grand pianos up, coffins down, that sort of thing.’
‘Stop it!’ She lifted her shoulders and shuddered involuntarily. ‘This is a horrible place. Those beams — they’re like the gallows they hang people from. This is a place where people come to die.’
‘Nonsense, my dear girl,’ I said heartily. I could feel stiletto-tipped fingers of ice play Chopin’s Death March up and down my spine and was suddenly filled with longing for that dear old nostalgic music from the barrel-organ outside the Rembrandt: I was probably as glad to hang on to Belinda’s hand as she was to mine. ‘You mustn’t fall prey to those Gallic imaginings of yours.’
‘I’m not imagining things,’ she said somberly, then shivered again. ‘Did we have to come to this awful place?’ She was shivering violently now, violently and continuously, and though it was cold it wasn’t as cold as all that.
‘Can you remember the way we came?’ I asked. She nodded, puzzled and I went on: ‘You make your way back to the hotel and I’ll join you later.’
‘Back to the hotel?’ She was still puzzled, ‘I’ll be all right. Now, off you go.’
She tore her hand free from mine and before I could realize what was happening she was gripping both my lapels in her hands and giving me a look that was clearly designed to shrivel me on the spot. If she was shaking now it was with anger: I’d never realized that so beautiful a girl could look so furious. ‘Mercurial’ was no word for Belinda, just a pale and innocuous substitute for the one I really wanted. I looked down at the fists gripping my lapels. The knuckles were white. She was actually trying to shake me.
‘Don’t ever say anything like that to me again.’ She was furious, no doubt about it.
There was a brief but spirited conflict between my ingrained instinct for discipline and the desire to put my arms round her: discipline won, but it was a close run thing. I said humbly: ‘111 never say anything like that to you again.’
‘All right.’ She released my sadly crushed lapels and grabbed my hand instead. ‘Well, come on, then.’ Pride would never let me say that she dragged me along but to the detached onlooker it must have seemed uncommonly like it.
Fifty paces further along and I stopped. ‘Here we are.’
Belinda read the nameplate: ‘Morgenstern and Muggenthaler.’
Topping the bill at this week’s Palladium.’ I climbed the steps and got to work on the lock. ‘Watch the street.’
‘And then what do I do?’
‘Watch my back.’
A determined wolf-cub with a bent hairpin would have found that lock no deterrent. We went inside and I closed the door behind us. The torch I had was small but powerful: it didn’t have much to show us on that first floor. It was piled almost ceiling high with empty wooden boxes, paper, cardboard, bales of straw and baling and binding machinery. A packing station, nothing else.
We climbed up the narrow winding wooden steps to the next floor. Half-way up I glanced round and saw that Belinda, too, was glancing apprehensively behind her, her torch swiveling and darting in a dozen different directions.
The next floor was given over entirely to vast quantities of Dutch pewter, windmills, dogs, pipes and a dozen other articles associated solely with the tourist souvenir trade. There were tens of thousands of those articles, on shelves along the walls or on parallel racks across the warehouse, and although I couldn’t possibly examine them all, they all looked perfectly innocuous to me. What didn’t look quite so innocuous, however, was a fifteen by twenty room that projected from one corner of the warehouse, or, more precisely, the door that led into that room, although obviously it wasn’t going to lead into that room tonight. I called Belinda over and shone my torch on the door. She stared at it, then stared at me and I could see the puzzlement in the reflected wash of light.
‘A time-lock,’ she said. ‘Why would anyone want a time-lock on a simple office door?’
‘It’s not a simple office door,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s made of steel. By the same token you can bet those simple wooden walls are lined with steel and that the simple old rustic window overlooking the street is covered with close-meshed bars set in concrete. In a diamond warehouse, yes, you could understand it. But here? Why, they’ve nothing to hide here.’
‘It looks as if we may have come to the right place,’ Belinda said.
‘Did you ever doubt me?’
‘No, sir.’ Very demure. ‘What is this place, anyway?’
‘It’s obvious, isn’t it — a wholesaler in the souvenir trade. The factories or the cottage industries or whatever send their goods in bulk for storage here and the warehouse supplies the shops on demand. Simple, isn’t it? Harmless, isn’t it?’
‘But not very hygienic.’
‘How’s that again?’
‘It smells horrible.’
‘Cannabis does to some people.’
‘Cannabis!’
‘You and your sheltered life. Come on.’
I led the way up to the third floor, waited for Belinda to join me. ‘Still guarding the master’s back?’ I enquired.
‘Still guarding the master’s back,’ she said mechanically. True to form, the fire-breathing Belinda of a few minutes ago had disappeared. I didn’t blame her. There was something inexplicably sinister and malevolent about this old building. The sickly smell of cannabis was even stronger now but there appeared to be nothing on this floor even remotely connected with it. Three sides of the entire floor, together with a number of transverse racks, were given over entirely to pendulum clocks, all of them, fortunately, stopped. They covered the whole gamut of shape, design and size and varied in quality from small, cheap, garishly-painted models for the tourist trade, nearly all made from yellow pine, to very large, beautifully made and exquisitely designed metal clocks that were obviously very old and expensive, or modern replicas of those, which couldn’t have been all that much cheaper.
The fourth side of the floor came, to say the least, as a considerable surprise. It was given up to, of all things, row upon row of Bibles. I wondered briefly what on earth Bibles were doing in a souvenir warehouse, but only briefly: there were too many things I didn’t understand.
I picked one of them up and examined it. Embossed in gold on the lower half of the leather cover were the words The Gabriel Bible. … I opened it and on the fly-leaf was the printed inscription: ‘With the Compliments of the First Reformed Church of the American Huguenot Society.’ ‘There’s one of those in our hotel room,’ Belinda said. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if there’s one of those in most of the hotel rooms in the city. Question is, what are they doing here? Why not in a publisher’s or stationer’s warehouse, where you would expect to find them? Queer, isn’t it?’
She shivered. ‘Everything here is queer.’ I clapped her on the back. ‘You’ve got a cold coming on, that’s what it is. I’ve warned you before about these mini-skirts. Next floor.’
The next floor was given over entirely to the most astonishing collection of puppets imaginable. Altogether, their number must have run into thousands. They ranged in size from tiny miniatures to models even bigger than the one Trudi had been carrying: all, without exception, were exquisitely modeled, all beautifully dressed in a variety of traditional Dutch costumes. The bigger puppets were either free-standing or supported by a metal stay: the smaller ones dangled by strings from overhead rails. The beam of my torch finally focused on a group of dolls all dressed in the same particular costume.
Belinda had forgotten about the importance of minding my back: she’d resumed her arm-clutching again.
‘It’s — it’s so eerie. They’re so alive, so watchful.’ She looked at the dolls spot-lit by the beam of my torch. ‘Something special about those?’
‘There’s no need to whisper. They may be looking at you but I assure you they can’t hear you. Those puppets there. Nothing special really, just that they come from the island of Huyler out in the Zuider Zee. Van Gelder’s housekeeper, a charming old beldam who’s lost her broomstick, dresses like that.’