We were silent for a time. He said: ‘‘But I’m still sailing without a chart. What do you propose to do when we get there?’’
‘‘I shall see Tholen first. Then if he——’’
‘‘That’s the man in charge of the case, is it? Does he know you’re coming?’’
‘‘No. I’ve a letter of introduction.’’
‘‘You’d do far better to give it to the seagulls. If you invite police help over this you might as well be back. selling jets.’’
‘‘I don’t see why.’’
‘‘Well, it’s obvious the police have already made up their minds in this case. If you go to them you’ll get their facts presented in their way. The Officer of Justice—or whatever he’s called over there—has made his findings, and the thing’s fixed so far as they are concerned. If you go along and start making the motions of unfixing it you’ll find someone blocking your approaches. I’ve been on their side once or twice, and I know how their minds work.’’
I thought of Powell’s attempt to put me off. ‘‘I’m open to suggestions.’’
He pushed back his black hair with that horizontal victory sign of his. ‘‘Not easy, I know. But I’ve one or two contacts dating from my last visit. Have you booked a hotel?’’
‘‘No.’’
‘‘Then I suggest we stay with a man called Boets if he’s still there. He keeps a little place off the Heerengracht— not luxurious but clean enough; they all are. The point is that during the war he ran part of the underground. He knows everything and everyone. I think it would be worth while.’’
‘‘The first thing I want to do is trace this Hermina Maas. I want to talk to her about what she says she saw.’’
‘‘Boets should be able to fix that.’’
We were losing height now, and the plane lurched disconcertingly as we hit the first cloud.
‘‘Whatever he can fix,’’ I said, ‘‘let him fix.’’
Christian Boets fanned himself with a menu card and said: ‘‘There will be no difficulty over that, please. It is in the newspaper of two weeks since, an account. I know a man who keeps the back papers. My son will get them. But for the rest, if the police fail … I am out of touch. In Holland when the war is over, we drop the war. We have better things to do. For years now I keep this hotel, nothing more.’’
‘‘I’ll write the names down for you,’’ said Martin Coxon, tapping his fingers on the table. ‘‘Jack Buckingham. And Leonie. Just Leonie. I see it’s hard and we shall have to pay.’’
‘‘Some things you cannot buy, for no one has them to sell.’’ Boets eased his great tight stomach against the table. The table creaked and the top of his trousers bulged over the rim like a meteorological balloon. ‘‘I will do what I can, please, but that is very small. You have others also who would help?’’
‘‘No one except the police,’’ I said.
Boets winced and Martin said sharply: ‘‘Of course there are others I can try, but I’m relying chiefly on you, Boets.’’
When he had waddled out Martin said: ‘‘ He’s always like this; pay no attention. It’s his way of putting up the price.’’
A few minutes later when we were on the terrace taking coffee and verkade, Boets came in with a few crumpled copies of the Handelsblad and read the brief account to us in guttural English that at a distance of a few yards would have sounded exactly like Dutch. There appeared to have been no formal inquest on the lines usual in England. Hermina Maas of Zolenstraat 12 had reported to the police that on the night of …
‘‘Zolenstraat,’’ I said. ‘‘Where is that?’’
Boets blew out a breath and his eyes closed as if the fat had squeezed them from below. ‘‘It is near the Oude Kerk in the district of the docks, perhaps a kilometre from here. It is a part of not good repute, known locally as De Walletjes. As you will turn over a bridge Zolenstraat is upon——’’
‘‘De Walletjes,’’ said Martin, ‘‘Isn’t that the red-light district? But of course it will be. This girl …’’
I was trying to read what it said in the newspaper under a photo of Grevil. ‘‘How far is this street from the Hotel Grotius where my brother stayed?’’
‘‘Oh, something less distant than from here. See.’’ Boets took up three coffee spoons. They looked like match-sticks in his fat fingers. ‘‘This for us. That for Grotius. Here for Zolenstraat Seven—eight hundred metres—or a little more. But it is not a place the visitor finds, nor even the resident if you understand me, but except he knows .the way.’’
Martin was staring at me. ‘‘It’s not a dainty district, Philip. I’ve been there once. Would your brother go there of his own accord?’’
I looked at the photo. Would Grevil go there of his own accord? I said: ‘‘You could find your way again?’’
‘‘It’s years … But Boets can briefs us.’’
‘‘I will tell you,’’ said Boets. ‘‘ But I do not wish to go with you.’’
‘‘We’d better try this; evening’’ I said, it as soon as it goes dark.’’
Martin Coxon snipped the end off his cigar and flipped: it over the edge of the bridge into the canal. His lighter showed up the long barrel of the cigar and his pale, thoughtful, disillusioned face. Then a cloud of blue smoke drifted before him in the gentle breeze. We had left the shopping streets behind—though not very far behind—and now were walking beside a canal lined with chestnut trees. It was quiet enough, and behind the gables, roofs and towers broke the edge of the evening sky.
He said: ‘‘I was in this part on my first visit in ’33, but I don’t recognise it yet. I remember the Zee Dyk and. the Oude Zijde cabarets. When you’re eighteen you’ve got more appetite than discrimination.’’
There was a barge moored against the side, and I looked down and saw that the walls of the canal were straight and brick-lined.
‘‘Not easy to get out if one fell in here,’’ I said. ‘‘And no railings.’’
‘‘Did he drink much?’’
‘‘No.’’
As we came round a corner, light flooded from a cheap café with a striped awning, wrinkled across cobbles and fell on the face of the dark quay. Martin stopped and asked the way. The respectable burgher who directed him looked a bit peculiar as he walked on.
Martin said: ‘‘ If his wife had been with him he’d have said he didn’t know where it was.’’
‘‘De Walletjes … I wonder what it means.’’
‘‘The Little Walls, according to Boets. It’s not an official name, but it’s a typical expression of the town. I don’t know what the significance is—if there’s any at all.’’
‘‘You sound depressed.’’
‘‘No.’’ He was silent a minute. ‘‘But I suppose coming here—to this district—is rather for me like trying to return to my lost youth. I wonder if when I was eighteen it occurred to me to suppose I should be back here .twenty-one: years later—with all that means in terms of waste and unachievement. Maybe from childhood one carries one’s middle age and one’s old age about with one, like a parcel not yet ready to open …’’
Now we were coming into the oldest part of the town. Narrow canals were bordered by sloping cobbled quays overhung by derricks, with twisted alleys leading off between crooked gabled houses like London before the Great Fire. At a street corner a crowd of young men argued in loud voices over some pigeons in cages.
‘‘We’re not far away now,’’ Martin said.
In two or three minutes we turned out upon a wider, canal with a quay on either bank. Tall old gabled houses flanked the canal. By now it was dark, and many of the lower windows of the houses were lighted, much more obviously lighted than any we’d passed up to now. Most of them had flimsy tattered curtains drawn well back, and only here and there a blind was down, showing the light through. All the blinds were red. In the distance someone was playing a mandolin.
‘‘This is it,’’ Martin said gently. ‘‘But we’re a bit early. Business is
n’t very brisk.’’
As you walked along the uneven cobbled street you could see into the rooms. Most of them were little bed-sitting-rooms with shaded lamps and a few cheap mirrors and cushions. A woman sat in each window. They were of assorted ages and variously dressed according to their estimate of what would be most likely to appeal the passer-by. Some combed their long hair and pretended to ignore us, others adjusted their garters or beckoned to us as we went past. One or two called after, us trying Dutch and English and German.
The light glimmered on the dark water, reflecting only innocence. The mandolin player was on the first floor. I drew back to look up, but a figure brushed past me and went in at the doorway. Presently the instrument stopped and someone pulled down the blind.
‘‘Maybe they’re moral walls,’’ Martin said. ‘‘The average Dutch burgher must have a lot of them to climb before he leaves his spotless shiny home and comes here for the first time.’’
I said: ‘‘I shouldn’t have thought the average Dutch burgher comes here any more than the average married man of Highgate visits the ladies of Frith Street.’’
‘‘Perhaps you’re right. That girl isn’t bad, you know, if one were not so far past the stage of liking the obvious … Now that fat one; if you launched her in a beam sea she’d be pooped in no time.’’
‘‘Zolenstraat 12,’’ I said. ‘‘Which way did Boets say?’’
‘‘Farther on, I think. You know how it is—like Harley Street All the specialists can’t get rooms there so they overflow into Wimpole Street.’’
At the bridge crossing to the other side I asked a young man in a reefer jacket. By now I was getting used to the, idea that everyone spoke English, but he was an exception. It took a minute or so for him to understand what we wanted, and then he pointed and hunched his shoulders and passed on.
We came to the corner on the other side of the bridge, but instead of turning back along the opposite bank of the canal I walked over to the corner house whose windows were lighted both overlooking the water and looking upon the narrow alley continuing the road from the bridge. On the brick wall Zolenstraat was painted in black.
So Hermina Maas was not far away. If this was the corner from which she had seen Grevil—if she had seen him—then near this bridge somewhere he had met: his death. I went back to the corner of the bridge and looked down into the water. All along, the canal glimmered with the reflected lights from both sides of the .stream. We might have been east of Suez. Perhaps the long Dutch tie-up with the Ear East had first brought this district in this way to their land. And Grevil—what had Grevil been doing here? To-night was overcast and a chill air blew in from the sea. Three weeks ago on this spot …
Behind me I could hear Coxon in talk with one of the ladies. Presently he joined me. ‘‘She says over there, that dark woman on the first floor.’’
I didn’t answer for a minute and he leaned on the parapet beside me. I said: ‘‘Now I see the place I can make sense of it less than ever.’’
He looked at me. ‘‘It’s always hard, however well you know a man, to measure up the motives for his actions. If he did come here for some special purpose, then maybe it was because some of his walls had gone down—unexpectedly. It’s what happens.’’
‘‘The metaphor’s a bit deep for me. Anyway, assuming he didn’t come here for the obvious purpose, what other could he possibly have had?’’
‘‘I don’t know. I’m only speculating. He was a man of integrity, wasn’t he? Capable of doing rash or dangerous things if the situation seemed to justify it? You remember that thing from Horace: ‘‘Hic murus aheneus esto; nil conscire sibi, nulla pallescere culpa.’’ Who knows what may happen to a man in a district like this in the dark hours of the night.’’
I stared at his shadowed face and wondered if he was reading into Grevil an attitude of mind more likely to be his own.
He said: ‘‘Anyway, we’re theorising out on a limb. Your brother may have come here out of curiosity, have stumbled on a stone and died without a thought in his head.’’ He flung away his cigar. The end spluttered when it hit the water. ‘‘It’s over there on the first floor. Let’s go.’’
‘‘I’ll try alone first.’’
‘‘I shouldn’t. There’s safety in numbers.’’
‘‘I want to try. Sometimes these things come off better alone.’’
‘‘She’ll be liable to misunderstand your motives.’’
‘‘Perhaps that’ll be an advantage. You don’t mind being left?’’
‘‘Oh, God, no. I was only trying to help. But if you want it that way I’ll sit on the bridge and keep watch.’’
‘‘Yes,’’ I said. ‘‘Keep watch.’’
Chapter Four
She was dark with a streak of hair dyed blonde like a caste mark, and big ear-rings that clinked. For her type she wasn’t bad looking and not as bold as some. She was wearing a shabby purple kimono, stockings that didn’t match and tarnished gold slippers. She yawned when she saw me and got up, stretching till you saw how tall she was; then she said something in Dutch and lifted a hand to the tassel of the blind.
I said: ‘‘ Do you speak English?’’
‘‘O.K. Sure. I speak English fine. Come in, big boy. Glad to know you.’’ She welcomed me like a dance-hall hostess towards the end of the evening.
I said: ‘‘Are you Hermina Maas?’’
‘‘Sure.’’ Then she looked at me more narrowly. This wasn’t quite the usual lead. ‘‘You been recommended?’’
‘‘No.’’
She fastened the blind down and turned again. ‘‘Hang up your coat. It is a peg behind that door. You got a cigarette?’’
The room was like a decorated cell, with too many brown flowers on the wallpaper and pink art-silk hangings round the bed. A cheval glass, cracked at one corner, reflected springs that were sticking out of the bottom of the red plush couch, and on the dressing-table were a few bits of bric-a-brac like trophies of a chase that never achieved the dignity of a chase. In a saucer were about a dozen cigarette butts, stained pink, and there were three empty Pilsener bottles. A single-bar electric-fire grinned beside the mirror, and on the wall above was a calendar with a snowy picture of a girl skating and the words: Vroolijk Kerstfeest. Somebody had pencilled in a moustache.
I lit the cigarette for her. As the light flickered over the mascaraed lids and the plucked eyebrows I said: ‘‘My name’s Philip Turner.’’
‘‘O. K. That’s swell. Now we’re——’’ She stopped and lifted her head. ‘‘Turner?’’
‘‘Yes. It was my brother who was drowned in your canal.’’
All the sketchy welcome went away from her face as quickly as my lighter snapped out. She said: ‘‘That’s over and finished, see? I quit. You go to the police. Maybe they tell you something. Not me.’’
‘‘I don’t want you to tell me anything. I came to thank you.’’
‘‘What is it you say?’’
I sat on the stronger end of the couch. ‘‘You did your best to save him, didn’t you? Everyone would not have done that. Certainly not everyone in your job. You must have known what it meant—coming before the police.’’
‘‘Huh! I did not know! If I had known——’’
‘‘I think you would have done the same.’’
Her eyes were narrow and cautious through the smoke. Anyway, it is over. And it did not save his life.’’
‘‘I was in America when it happened, when he died, so couldn’t be here for the inquiry. I flew home last week, that’s why I’m late in coming to thank you.’’
She shifted a bit, drew in smoke greedily, didn’t speak. I took out a hundred guilder note. ‘‘Perhaps you’ll accept this—with my .gratitude for what you did—even though in the end you couldn’t save him.’’
She watched me put the note on the dressing-table. She watched it very closely as if she expected it to move, and then she looked at me again. ‘‘What else is it that you want?’’
‘‘Nothing.’’
‘‘Then why do you give me this?’’
‘‘I’ve told you.’’
‘‘But what for? Do you want me for all tonight?’’
‘‘I came only to see you. It isn’t that in other circumstances—you understand …’’
‘‘Ah, so.’’ She shrugged indifferently. ‘‘It is not many; good-looking ones that we get here.’’
‘‘My brother was the good-looking one Don’t you think so?’’
‘‘I did not see him real dose He was out by the bridge. But he was much older than you, isn’t it? And thinner, not so strong, I guess.’’
‘‘He didn’t come in here, then?’’
‘‘Oh no.’’
‘‘We have not been able to trace the other people who were with him.’’
She flipped off the heel of her slipper and tapped ash into it. ‘‘What other people?’’
‘‘The man and the girl.’’
‘‘I saw no girl.’’
‘‘She may not have come this far. But the man was. with him surely.’’
She said: ‘‘Look, mister, I tell the police all I know. See? For nine hours they ask me questions, this way and that, all because I try to save a man’s life. You do not know our police. Since the war they have learn too much from the Germans. I wish to have never set eyes on your; brother. I wish to have kept my big mouth shut. I am sorry for you but I cannot help you now.’’
‘‘I’m not going near the police,’’ I said. ‘‘It’s the last thing I want to do. I want to settle this in my own time and my own way.’’
‘‘So.’’
‘‘And now that I have seen you I want next to see the man who was with my brother when he died. The man with the little beard, I mean.’’
She said: ‘‘I thought you came for nothing. I thought you give me a hundred guilders for nothing.’’
‘‘So I have. Don’t tell me anything that you don’t want to.’’
She smoked for a minute or so. Then she pushed back the sleeve of her dressing-gown to scratch her elbow. ‘‘ If you think it is only the police I have to be afraid of, then you are not born yet.’’
The Little Walls Page 4