I peered over the edge. I could see nothing, but I could smell something. Cigarette smoke, but not emanating from a cigarette made by one of the more reputable tobacco companies, who don’t include reefers among their marketable products. I leaned further out to almost the point of imbalance and then I could see things, not much, but enough: two pointed toe-caps and, for a moment, the arcing, glowing tip of a cigarette, obviously on the downswing of an arm.
I withdrew in caution and with silence, rose, re-crossed to the fire-escape, descended to the sixth-floor, let myself through the fire-escape door, locked it again, walked quietly along to the door of Room 616 and listened. Nothing. I opened the door quietly with the skeleton I’d tried earlier and went inside, closing the door as quickly as I could: otherwise indetectable draughts can eddy cigarette smoke in a way to attract the attention of the alert smoker. Not that junkies are renowned for their alertness.
This one was no exception. Predictably enough, it was the floor-waiter. He was sitting comfortably in an armchair, feet propped up on the balcony sill, smoking a cigarette in his left hand: his right lay loosely on his knee and cradled a gun.
Normally, it is very difficult to approach anyone, no matter how soundlessly, from behind without some form of sixth sense giving them warning of your approach: but many drugs have a depressive influence on this instinct and what the floor-waiter was smoking was one of them.
I was behind him with my gun at his right ear and he still didn’t know I was there. I touched him on the right shoulder. He swung round with a convulsive jerk of his body and cried out in pain as his movement gouged the barrel of my gun into his right eye. He lifted both hands to his momentarily injured eye and I took the gun from him without resistance, pocketed it, reached for his shoulder and jerked hard. The waiter catapulted over backwards, completing a somersault, and landing very heavily on his back and the back of his head. For maybe ten seconds he lay there, quite dazed, then propped himself up on one arm. He was making a curious hissing sound, his bloodless lips had vanished to reveal tobacco-stained teeth set in a vulpine snarl and his eyes were dark with hate. I didn’t see much chance of our having a friendly get-together.
‘We do play rough, don’t we?’ he whispered. Junkies are great patronizers of the violent cinema and their dialogue is faultless.
‘Rough?’ I was surprised. ‘Oh, dear me, no. Later we play rough. If you don’t talk.’ Maybe I went to the same cinema as he did. I picked up the cigarette that lay smouldering on the carpet, sniffed at it in disgust and squashed it out in an ashtray. The waiter rose unsteadily, still shaken and unsteady on his feet, and I didn’t believe any of it. When he spoke again, the snarl had gone from his face and voice. He had decided to play it cool, the calm before the storm, an old and worn-out script, maybe we should both start attending the opera instead.
‘What would you like to talk about?’ he asked.
‘About what you’re doing in my room for a start. And who sent you here.’
He smiled wearily. The law has already tried to make me tell things. I know the law. You can’t make me talk. I’ve got my rights. The law says so.’
‘The law stops right outside my front door here. This side of that door we’re both beyond the law. You know that. In one of the great civilized cities of the world you and I are living in our own little jungle. But there’s a law there too. Kill or be killed.’
Maybe it was my own fault for putting ideas in his head. He dived hard and low to get under my gun but not low enough for his chin to get under my knee. It hurt my knee quite badly and by that token should have laid him out, but he was tough, grabbed at the only leg I had left in contact with the ground and brought us both down. My gun went spinning and we rolled about on the floor for a bit, belabouring each other enthusiastically. He was a strong boy, too, as strong as he was tough, but he laboured under two disadvantages: a strict training on marijuana had blunted the honed edge of his physical fitness, and though he had a highly developed instinct for dirty fighting he’d never really been trained to it. By and by we were on our feet again with my left hand pushing his right wrist somewhere up between his shoulder-blades.
I pushed his wrist higher and he screamed as if in agony, which he might well have been as his shoulder was making a peculiar cracking noise, but I couldn’t be sure so I pushed a bit higher and removed all doubt, then thrust him out on to the balcony in front of me and forced him over the balustrade until his feet were clear of the ground and he was hanging on to the balustrade with his free left hand as if his life depended on it, which indeed it did.
‘You an addict or a pusher?’ I enquired.
He mouthed an obscenity in Dutch, but I know Dutch, including all the words I shouldn’t. I put my right hand over his mouth for the sort of sound he was about to make could be heard even above the roar of the traffic, and I didn’t want to alarm the citizens of Amsterdam unnecessarily. I eased the pressure and removed my hand.
‘Well?’
‘A pusher.’ His voice was a sobbing croak. ‘I sell them.’
‘Who sent you?’
‘No! No! No!’
‘Your decision. When they pick what’s left of you from the pavement there they’ll think you’re just another cannabis smoker who got too high and took a trip into the wild blue yonder.’
‘That’s murder!’ He was still sobbing, but his voice was only a husky whisper now, maybe the view was making him dizzy. ‘You wouldn’t — ‘
‘Wouldn’t I? Your people killed a friend of mine this afternoon. Exterminating vermin can be a pleasure. Seventy feet’s a long drop — and not a mark of violence. Except that every bone in your body will be broken. Seventy feet. Look!’
I heaved him a bit further over the balustrade so that he could have a better look and had to use both hands to haul him back again.
‘Talk?’
He made a hoarse sound in his throat, so I hauled him oif the balustrade and pushed him inside to the centre of the room. I said, ‘Who sent you?’
I’ve said he was tough, but he was a great deal tougher than I had ever imagined. He should have been fear-stricken and in agony, and I have no doubt that he was both, but that didn’t stop him from whirling round convulsively to his right in a full circle and breaking free from my grip. The sheer unexpectedness of it had caught me off guard. He came at me again, a knife that had suddenly appeared in his left hand curving upwards in a wicked arc and aimed for a point just below the breastbone. Normally, he would probably have done a nice job of carving but the circumstances were abnormal: his timing and reactions were gone. I caught and clamped his knife wrist in both my hands, threw myself backwards, straightened a leg under him as I jerked his arm down and sent him catapulting over me. The thud of his landing shook the room and probably quite a few adjacent rooms at that.
I twisted and got to my feet in one motion but the need for haste was gone. He was on the floor on the far side of the room, his head resting on the balcony sill. I lifted him by his lapels and his head lolled back till it almost touched his shoulder-blades. I lowered him to the floor again. I was sorry he was dead, because he’d probably had information that could have been invaluable to me, but that was the only reason I was sorry.
I went through his pockets, which held a good number of interesting articles but only two that were of interest to me: a case half full of handmade reefers and a couple of scraps of paper. One paper bore the typed letters and figures MOO 144, the other two numbers — 910020 and 2797. Neither meant a thing to me but on the reasonable assumption that the floor-waiter wouldn’t have seen carrying them on his person unless they had some significance for him I put them away in a safe place that had been provided for me by my accommodating tailor, a small pocket that had been let into the inside of the right trouser-leg about six inches above the ankle.