Floodgate

by Alistair MacLean

‘And that’s all?’ van der Kuur said.

  ‘That’s all.’

  ‘No reasons, no explanations for those damned outrages? No demands? Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I still say we’re up against a bunch of raving maniacs.’

  ‘And I say that we’re up against clever and very calculating criminals who are more than content to let us stew in our own juice for the time being. I wouldn’t worry about the demands, if I were you. These will come in due time—their time. Well, nothing more we can achieve here—not, on reflection, that we have achieved anything. I bid you good day, Mr de Jong, and hope that you’ll be back in operational services some time tomorrow. It’ll take days, I suppose, to replace the machinery ruined in your basements.’

  On their way out, van Effen made a gesture to de Graaf to hold back. He looked casually around to make sure that no one was within earshot and said: ‘I’d like to put tails on a couple of gentlemen who were in that room.’

  ‘Well, you don’t waste time, I will say. You have, of course, your reasons.’

  ‘I was watching them when you broke the news of the proposed Texel breach. It hit them. Most of them just stared away into space and those who didn’t were studying the floor. All of them, I assume, were considering the awful implications. Two did neither. They just kept on looking at you. Maybe they didn’t react because it didn’t come as any news to them.’

  ‘Straws. You’re just clutching at straws.’

  ‘Isn’t that what a drowning man is supposed to do?’

  ‘With all the water that’s around, present and promised, you might have picked a less painful metaphor. Who?’

  ‘Alfred van Rees.’

  ‘Ah. The Rijkswaterstaat’s Locks, Weirs and Sluices man. Preposterous. Friend of mine. Honest as the day’s long.’

  ‘Maybe the Mr Hyde in him doesn’t come out until after sunset. And Fred Klassen.’

  ‘Klassen! Schiphol’s security chief. Preposterous.’

  ‘That’s twice. Or is he a friend of yours, too?’

  ‘Impossible. Twenty years’ unblemished service. The security chief?’

  ‘If you were a criminal and were given the choice of subverting any one man in a big organization, who would you go for?’

  De Graaf looked at him for a long moment, then walked on in silence.

  TWO

  Bakkeren and Dekker were the names of the two boat-owners who had been involuntarily deprived of their vessels during the previous night. As it turned out, they were brothers-in-law. Bakkeren was phlegmatic about the borrowing of his boat and not particularly concerned by the fact that he had not yet been allowed to examine his boat to see what damage, if any, had been done to it. Dekker, by contrast and understandably, was seething with rage: he had, as he had informed de Graaf and van Effen within twenty seconds of their arrival at his suburban home, been rather roughly handled during the previous evening.

  ‘Is no man safe in this godforsaken city?’ He didn’t speak the words, he shouted them, but it was reasonable to assume that this was not his normal conversational custom. ‘Police, you say you are, police! Ha! Police! A fine job you do of guarding the honest citizens of Amsterdam. There I was, sitting in my own boat and minding my own business when those four gangsters—’

  ‘Moment,’ van Effen said. ‘Were they wearing gloves?’

  ‘Gloves!’ Dekker, a small dark, intense man, stared at him in outraged disbelief. ‘Gloves! Here am I, the victim of a savage assault, and all you can think of—’

  ‘Gloves.’

  Something in van Effen’s tone had reached through the man’s anger, one could almost see his blood pressure easing a few points. ‘Gloves, eh? Funny, that. Yes, they were. All of them.’

  Van Effen turned to a uniformed sergeant. ‘Bernhard.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ll tell the finger-print men to go home.’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Dekker. Tell it your way. If there was anything that struck you as unusual or odd, let us know.’

  ‘It was all bloody odd,’ Dekker said morosely. He had been, as he had said, minding his own business in his little cabin, when he had been hailed from the bank. He’d gone on deck and a tall man—it was almost dark and his features had been indistinguishable—had asked him if he could hire the boat for the night. He said he was from a film company and wanted to shoot some night scenes and offered a thousand guilders. Dekker had thought it extremely odd that an offer of that nature should have been made at such short notice and with night falling: he had refused. Next thing he knew, three other men had appeared on the scene, he’d been dragged from the boat, bundled into a car and driven to his home.

  Van Effen said: ‘Did you direct them?’

  ‘Are you mad?’ Looking at the fiery little man it was impossible to believe that he would volunteer information to anyone.

  ‘So they’ve been watching your movements for some time. You weren’t aware that you were under surveillance at any time?’

  ‘Under what?’

  ‘Being watched, followed, seeing the same stranger an unusual number of times?’

  ‘Who’d watch and follow a fishmonger? Well, who would think they would? So they hauled me into the house—’

  ‘Didn’t you try to escape at any time?’

  ‘Would you listen to the man?’ Dekker was justifiably bitter. ‘How far would you get with your wrists handcuffed behind your back?’

  ‘Handcuffs?’

  ‘I suppose you thought that only police used those things. So they dragged me into the bathroom, tied my feet with a clothes line and taped my mouth with Elastoplast. Then they locked the door from the outside.’

  ‘You were completely helpless?’

  ‘Completely.’ The little man’s face darkened at the recollection. ‘I managed to get to my feet and a hell of a lot of good that did me. There’s no window in the bathroom. If there had been I don’t know of any way I could have broken it and even if I had there was no way I could shout for help, was there? Not with God knows how many strips of plaster over my mouth.

  ‘Three or four hours later—I’m not sure how long it was—they came back and freed me. The tall man told me they’d left fifteen hundred guilders on the kitchen table—a thousand for the hire of the boat and five hundred for incidental expenses.’

  ‘What expenses?’

  ‘How should I know?’ Dekker sounded weary. ‘They didn’t explain. They just left.’

  ‘Did you see them go? Type of car, number, anything like that?’

  ‘I did not see them go. I did not see their car, far less its number.’ Dekker spoke with the air of a man who is exercising massive restraint. ‘When I say they freed me, I meant that they had unlocked and removed the handcuffs. Took me a couple of minutes to remove the strips of Elastoplast and damnably painful it was, too. Took quite a bit of skin amd my moustache with it too. Then I hopped through to the kitchen and got the bread knife to the ropes round my ankles. The money was there, all right and I’d be glad if you’d put it in your police fund because I won’t touch their filthy money. Almost certainly stolen anyway. They and their car, of course, were to hell and gone by that time.’

  Van Effen was diplomatically sympathetic. ‘Considering what you’ve been through, Mr Dekker, I think you’re being very calm and restrained. Could you describe them?’

  ‘Ordinary clothes. Rain-coats. That’s all.’

  ‘Their faces?’

  ‘It was dark on the canal bank, dark in the car and by the time we reached here they were all wearing hoods. Well, three of them. One stayed on the boat.’

  ‘Slits in the hoods, of course.’ Van Effen wasn’t disappointed, he’d expected nothing else.

  ‘Round holes, more like.’

  ‘Did they talk among themselves?’

  ‘Not a word. Only the leader spoke.’

  ‘How do you know he was the leader?’

  ‘Leaders give orders, don’t they?’

  ‘I suppose. Would you recognize the voi
ce again?’

  Dekker hesitated. ‘I don’t know. Well, yes, I think I would.’

  ‘Ah. Something unusual about his voice?’

  ‘Yes. Well. He talked funny Dutch.’

  ‘Funny?’

  ‘It wasn’t—what shall I say—Dutch Dutch.’

  ‘Poor Dutch, is that it?’

  ‘No. The other way around. It was very good. Too good. Like the news-readers on TV and radio.’

  ‘Too precise, yes? Book Dutch. A foreigner, perhaps?’

  ‘That’s what I would guess.’

  ‘Would you have any idea where he might have come from?’

  ‘There you have me, Lieutenant. I’ve never been out of the country. I hear often enough that many people in the city speak English or German or both. Not me. I speak neither. Foreign tourists don’t come to a fishmonger’s shop. I sell my fish in Dutch.’

  ‘Thanks, anyway. Could be a help. Anything else about this leader—if that’s what he was?’

  ‘He was tall, very tall.’ He tried his first half-smile of the afternoon. ‘You don’t have to be tall to be taller than I am but I didn’t even reach up to his shoulders. Ten, maybe twelve centimetres taller than you are. And thin, very very thin: he was wearing a long rain-coat, blue it was, that came way below his knees and it fell from his shoulders like a coat hanging from a coat-hanger.’

  ‘The hoods had holes, you say, not slits. You could see this tall man’s eyes?’

  ‘Not even that. This fellow was wearing dark eye-glasses.’

  ‘Sun-glasses? I did ask you to tell me if there was anything odd about those people. Didn’t you think it odd that a person should be wearing a pair of sun-glasses at night?’

  ‘Odd? Why should it be odd? Look, Lieutenant, a bachelor like me spends a lot of time watching movies and TV. The villains always wear dark glasses. That’s how you can tell they’re villains.’

  ‘True, true.’ Van Effen turned to Dekker’s brother-in-law. ‘I understand, Mr Bakkeren, that you were lucky enough to escape the attentions of those gentlemen.’

  ‘Wife’s birthday. In town for a dinner and show. Anyway, they could have stolen my boat any time and I would have known nothing about it. If they were watching Maks here, they would have been watching me and they’d know that I only go near my boat on weekends.’

  Van Effen turned to de Graaf. ‘Would you like to see the boats, sir?’

  ‘Do you think we’ll find anything?’

  ‘No. Well, might find out what they’ve been doing. I’ll bet they haven’t left one clue for hardworking policemen to find.’

  ‘Might as well waste some more time.’

  The brothers-in-law went in their own car, the two policemen in van Effen’s, an ancient and battered Peugeot with a far from ancient engine. It bore no police distinguishing marks whatsoever and even the radio telephone was concealed. De Graaf lowered himself gingerly into the creaking and virtually springless seat.

  ‘I refrain from groaning and complaining, Peter. I know there must be a couple of hundred similar wrecks rattling about the streets of Amsterdam and I appreciate your passion for anonymity, but would it kill you to replace or re-upholster the passenger seat?’

  ‘I thought it lent a nice touch of authenticity. But it shall be done. Pick up anything back in the house there?’

  ‘Nothing that you didn’t. Interesting that the tall thin man should be accompanied by a couple of mutes. It has occurred to you that if the leader, as Dekker calls him, is a foreigner then his henchmen are also probably foreigners and may very well be unable to speak a word of Dutch?’

  ‘It had occurred and it is possible. Dekker said that the leader gave orders which would give one to understand that they spoke, or at least understood, Dutch. Doesn’t necessarily follow, of course. The orders may have been meaningless and given only to convince the listener that the others were Dutch. Pity that Dekker has never ventured beyond the frontiers of his own homeland. He might—I say just might—have been able to identify the country of origin of the owner of that voice. I speak two or three languages, Peter, you even more. Do you think, if we’d heard this person speaking, we’d have been able to tell his country?’

  ‘There’s a chance. I wouldn’t put it higher than that. I know what you’re thinking, sir. The tape-recording that this newspaper sub-editor made of the phone call they received. Chances there would be much poorer—you know how a phone call can distort a voice. And they don’t strike me as people who would make such a fairly obvious mistake. Besides, even if we did succeed in guessing at the country of origin, how the hell would that help us in tracking them down?’

  De Graaf lit up a very black cheroot. Van Effen wound down his window. De Graaf paid no attention. He said: ‘You’re a great comforter. Give us a few more facts—or let’s dig up a few more—and it might be of great help to us. Apart from the fact, not yet established, that he may be a foreigner, all we know about this lad is that he’s very tall, built along the lines of an emaciated garden rake and has something wrong with his eyes.’

  ‘Wrong? The eyes, I mean, sir? All we know for certain is that he wears sun-glasses at night-time. Could mean anything or nothing. Could be a fad. Maybe he fancies himself in them. Maybe, as Dekker suggested, he thinks sun-glasses are de rigueur for the better class villain. Maybe, like the American President’s Secret Service body-guards, he wears them because any potential malefactor in a crowd can never know whether the agent’s eyes are fixed on him or not, thereby inhibiting him from action. Or he might be just suffering from nyctalopia.’

  ‘I see. Nyctalopia. Every schoolboy knows, of course. I am sure, Peter, that you will enlighten me at your leisure.’

  ‘Funny old word to describe a funny old condition. I am told it’s the only English language word with two precisely opposite meanings. On the one hand, it means night-blindness, the recurrent loss of vision after sunset, the causes of which are only vaguely understood. On the other hand, it can be taken to mean day-blindness, the inability to see clearly except by night, and here the causes are equally obscure. A rare disease, whatever meaning you take, but its existence has been well attested to. The sun-glasses, as we think of them, may well be fitted with special correctional lenses.’

  ‘It would appear to me that a criminal suffering from either manifestation of this disease would be labouring under a severe occupational handicap. Both a house-breaker, who operates by daylight, and a burglar, who operates by night, would be a bit restricted in their movements if they were afflicted, respectively, by day or night blindness. Just a little bit too far-fetched for me, Peter. I prefer the old-fashioned reasons. Badly scarred about the eyes. Cross-eyed. Maybe he’s got a squint. Maybe an eye whose iris is streaked or particoloured. Maybe wall-eyed, where the iris is so light that you can hardly distinguish it from the white or where the pupils are of two different colours. Maybe a sufferer from exophthalmic goitre, which results in very protuberant eyes. Maybe he’s only got one eye. In any event, I’d guess he’s suffering from some physical abnormality by which he would be immediately identifiable without the help of those dark glasses.’

  ‘So now all we’ve got to do is to ask Interpol for a list, world-wide, of all known criminals with eye defects. There must be tens of thousands of them. Even if there were only ten on the list, it still wouldn’t help us worth a damn. Chances are good, of course, that he hasn’t even got a criminal record.’ Van Effen pondered briefly. ‘Or maybe they could give us a list of all albino criminals on their books. They need glasses to hide their eyes.’

  ‘The Lieutenant is pleased to be facetious,’ de Graaf said morosely. He puffed on his cheroot, then said, almost wonderingly: ‘By Jove, Peter. You could be right.’

  Ahead, Dekker had slowed to a stop and now van Effen did also. Two boats were moored alongside a canal bank, both about eleven or twelve metres in length, with two cabins and an open poop deck. The two policemen joined Dekker aboard his boat: Bakkeren boarded his own which lay immediately ahead. Dek
ker said: ‘Well, gentlemen, what do you want to check first?’

  De Graaf said: ‘How long have you had this boat?’

  ‘Six years.’

  ‘In that case, I don’t think Lieutenant van Effen or I will bother to check anything. After six years, you must know every corner, every nook and cranny on this boat. So we’d be grateful if you’d do the checking. Just tell us if there is anything here, even the tiniest thing, that shouldn’t be here: or anything that’s missing that should be here. You might, first, be so good as to ask your brother-in-law to do the same aboard his boat.’

  Some twenty minutes later the brothers-in-law were able to state definitely that nothing had been left behind and that, in both cases, only two things had been taken: beer from the fridges and diesel from the tanks. Neither Dekker nor Bakkeren could say definitely how many cans of beer had been taken, they didn’t count such things: but both were adamant that each fuel tank was down by at least twenty litres.

  ‘Twenty litres each?’ van Effen said. ‘Well, they wouldn’t have used two litres to get from here to the airport canal bank and back. So they used the engine for some other purpose. Can you open the engine hatch and let me have a torch?’

  Van Effen’s check of the engine-room battery was cursory, seconds only, but sufficient. He said: ‘Do either of you two gentlemen ever use crocodile clips when using or charging your batteries—you know, those spring-loaded grips with the serrated teeth? No? Well, someone was using them last night. You can see the indentations on the terminals. They had the batteries in your two boats connected up, in parallel or series, it wouldn’t have mattered, they’d have been using a transformer, and ran your engines to keep the batteries charged. Hence the missing forty litres.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Dekker said, ‘that was what that gangster meant by incidental costs.’

  ‘I suppose it was.’

  De Graaf lowered himself, not protesting too much, into the springless, creaking passenger seat of the ancient Peugeot just as the radio telephone rang. Van Effen answered then passed the phone across to de Graaf who spoke briefly then returned the phone to its concealed position.