‘I’ll try not to make too much on the side. Have you anything else for me?’
‘Also in two minutes. Your car is bringing some information from the Records Office.’
Two minutes it was and a folder was delivered to de Graaf’s desk. He looked through some papers.
‘Astrid Lemay. Her real name, perhaps oddly enough. Dutch father, Grecian mother. He was a vice-consul in Athens, now deceased. Whereabouts of mother unknown. Twenty-four. Nothing known against her — nothing much known for her, either. Must say the background is a bit vague. Works as a hostess in the Balinova night-club, lives in a small flat near-by. Has one known relative, brother George, aged twenty. Ah! This may interest you. George, apparently, has spent six months as Her Majesty’s guest.’
‘Drugs?’
‘Assault and attempted robbery, very amateurish effort, it seems. He made the mistake of assaulting a plain-clothes detective. Suspected of being an addict — probably trying to get money to buy more. All we have.’ He turned to another paper. ‘This MOO 144 number you gave me is the radio call-sign for a Belgian coaster, the Marianne, due in from Bordeaux tomorrow. I have a pretty efficient staff, no?’
‘Yes.’
‘When does it arrive?’
‘Noon. We search it ?’
‘You wouldn’t find anything. But please don’t go near it. Any ideas on the other two numbers?’
‘Nothing, I’m afraid on 910020. Or on 2797.’ He paused reflectively. ‘Or could that be 797 twice — you know. 797797?’
‘Could be anything.’
De Graaf took a telephone directory from a drawer, put it away again, picked up a phone. ‘A telephone number,’ he said. ‘797797. Find out who’s listed under that number. At once, please.’
We sat in silence till the phone rang. De Graaf listened briefly, replaced the receiver.
‘The Balinova night-club,’ he said.
‘The efficient staff has a clairvoyant boss.’
‘And where does this clairvoyance lead you to?’
‘The Balinova night-club.’ I stood up. ‘I have a rather readily identifiable face, wouldn’t you say, Colonel?’
‘It’s not a face people forget. And those white scars. I don’t think your plastic surgeon was really trying.’
‘He was trying all right. To conceal his almost total ignorance of plastic surgery. Have you any brown stain in this HQ?’
‘Brown stain?’ He blinked at me, then smiled widely. ‘Oh no, Major Sherman! Disguise! In this day and age? Sherlock Holmes has been dead these many years.’
‘If I’d half the brains Sherlock had,’ I said heavily. ‘I wouldn’t be needing any disguise.’
CHAPTER SIX
The yellow and red taxi they’d given me appeared, from the outside, to be a perfectly normal Opel, but they seemed to have managed to put an extra engine into it. They’d put a lot of extra work into it too. It had a pop-up siren, a pop-up police light and a panel at the back which fell down to illuminate a ‘Stop’ sign. Under the front passenger seats were ropes and first-aid kits and tear-gas canisters: in the door pockets were handcuffs with keys attached. God alone knew what they had in the boot. Nor did I care. All I wanted was a fast car, and I had one.
I pulled up in a prohibited parking area outside the Balinova night-club, right opposite where a uniformed and be-holstered policeman was standing. He nodded almost imperceptibly and walked away with measured stride. He knew a police taxi when he saw one and had no wish to explain to the indignant populace why a taxi could get away with an offence that would have automatically got them a ticket.
I got out, locked the door, and crossed the pavement to the entrance of the night-club which had above it the flickering neon sign ‘Balinova’ and the outlined neon figures of two hula-hula dancers, although I failed to grasp the connection between Hawaii and Indonesia. Perhaps they were meant to be Balinese dancers, but if that were so they had the wrong kind of clothes on — or off. Two large windows were set one on either side of the entrance, and these were given up to an art exhibition of sorts which gave more than a delicate indication of the nature of the cultural delights and more esoteric scholarly pursuits that were to be found within. The occasional young lady depicted as wearing ear-rings and bangles and nothing else seemed almost indecently over-dressed. Of even greater interest, however, was the coffee-colourd countenance that looked back at me from the reflection in the glass: if I hadn’t known who I was, I wouldn’t have recognized myself. I went inside.
The Balinova, in the best time-honoured tradition, was small, stuffy, smoky and full of some indescribable incense, the main ingredient of which seemed to be burnt rubber, which was probably designed to induce in the customers the right frame of mind for the maximum enjoyment of the entertainment being presented to them but which had, in fact, the effect of producing olfactory paralysis in the space of a few seconds. Even without the assistance of the drifting clouds of smoke the place was deliberately ill-lit, except for the garish spot-light on the stage which, as was again fairly standard, was no stage at all but merely a tiny circular dance floor in the centre of the room.
The audience was almost exclusively male, running the gamut of ages from goggle-eyed teen-agers to sprightly and beady-eyed octogenarians whose visual acuity appeared to have remained undimmed with the passing of the years. Almost all of them were well-dressed, for the better-class Amsterdam night-clubs — those which still manage to cater devotedly to the refined palates of the jaded connoisseurs of certain of the plastic arts — are not for those who are on relief. They are, in a word, not cheap and the Balinova was very, very expensive, one of the extremely few clip joints in the city. There were a few women present, but only a few. To my complete lack of surprise, Maggie and Belinda were seated at a table near the door, with some sickly-coloured drinks before them. Both of them wore aloof expressions, although Maggie’s was unquestionably the more aloof of the two.
My disguise, at the moment, seemed completely superfluous. Nobody looked at me as I entered and it was quite clear that nobody even wanted to look at me, which was understandable, perhaps, in the circumstances, as the audience were almost splitting their pebble glasses in their eagerness to miss none of the aesthetic nuances or symbolic significances of the original and thought-compelling ballet performance taking place before their enraptured eyes, in which a shapely young harridan in a bubble-bath, to the accompaniment of the discordant thumpings and asthmatic wheezings of an excruciating band that would not otherwise have been tolerated in a boiler factory, endeavoured to stretch out for a bath-towel that had been craftily placed about a yard beyond her reach. The air was electric with tension as the audience tried to figure out the very limited number of alternatives that were open to the unfortunate girl. I sat down at the table beside Belinda and gave her what, in the light of my new complexion, must have been a pretty dazzling smile. Belinda moved a rapid six inches away from me, lifting her nose a couple of inches higher in the air.
‘Hoity-toity,’ I said. Both girls turned to stare at me and I nodded towards the stage. ‘Why doesn’t one of you go and help her?’
There was a long pause, then Maggie said with great restraint: ‘What on earth has happened to you?’
‘I am in disguise. Keep your voice down.’
‘But — but I phoned the hotel only two or three minutes ago,’ Belinda said.
‘And don’t whisper either. Colonel de Graaf put me on to this place. She came straight back here?’
They nodded.
‘And hasn’t gone out again?’
‘Not by the front door,’ Maggie said.
‘You tried to memorize the faces of the nuns as they came out? As I told you to?’
‘We tried,’ Maggie said.
‘Notice anything odd, peculiar, out of the ordinary about any of them?’
‘No, nothing. Except,’ Belinda added brightly, ‘that they seem to have very good-looking nuns in Amsterdam.’
‘So Maggie has already told me. And that’s all?’
They looked at each other, hesitating, then Maggie said: ‘There was something funny. We seemed to see a lot more people going into that church than came out.’
‘There were a lot more people in that church than came out,’ Belinda said. ‘I was there, you know.’
‘I know,’ I said patiently. ‘What do you mean by “a lot”?’
‘Well,’ Belinda said defensively, ‘a good few.’
‘Ha! So now we’re down to a good few. You both checked, of course, that the church was empty?’
It was Maggie’s turn to be defensive. ‘You told us to follow Astrid Lemay. We couldn’t wait.’
‘Has it occurred to you that some may have remained behind for private devotions? Or that maybe you’re not very good counters?’