Puppet on a Chain

by Alistair MacLean

  I got out at the sixth floor. Inset in a small alcove directly opposite the lift gates was a small table with a telephone on it, and, behind the table, a chair with a young man with gold-embroidered livery in it. He was an unprepossessing young man, with about him that vague air of indolence and insolence which is impossible to pin down and about which complaint only makes one feel slightly ridiculous: such youths are usually highly-specialized practitioners in the art of injured innocence.

  ‘Six-one-six?’ I asked.

  He crooked a predictably languid thumb. ‘Second door along.’ No ‘sir’, no attempt to get to his feet. I passed up the temptation to clobber him with his own table and instead promised myself the tiny, if exquisite, pleasure of dealing with him before I left the hotel.

  I asked: ‘You the floor-waiter?’

  He said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and got to his feet. I felt a twinge of disappointment.

  ‘Get me some coffee.’

  I’d no complaints with 616. It wasn’t a room, but a rather sumptuous suite. It consisted of a hall, a tiny but serviceable kitchen, a sitting-room, bedroom and bathroom. Both sitting-room and bedroom had doors leading on to the same balcony. I made my way out there.

  With the exception of an excruciating, enormous and neon-lit monstrosity of a sky-high advertisement for an otherwise perfectly innocuous cigarette, the blaze of coloured lights coming up over the darkening streets and skline of Amsterdam belonged to something out of a fairy tale, but my employers did not pay me – and give me that splendid expense allowance – just for the privilege of mooning over any city skyline, no matter how beautiful. The world I lived in was as remote from the world of fairy tales as the most far-flung galaxy on the observable rim of the universe. I turned my attention to more immediate matters.

  I looked down towards the source of the far from muted traffic roar that filled all the air around. The broad highway directly beneath me – and about seventy feet beneath me – appeared to be inextricably jammed with clanging tramcars, hooting vehicles and hundreds upon hundreds of motor-scooters and bicycles, all of whose drivers appeared to be bent on instant suicide. It appeared inconceivable that any of those two-wheeled gladiators could reasonably expect any insurance policy covering a life expectancy of more than five minutes, but they appeared to regard their imminent demise with an insouciant bravado which never fails to astonish the newcomer to Amsterdam. As an afterthought, I hoped that if anyone was going to fall or be pushed from the balcony it wasn’t going to be me.

  I looked up. Mine was obviously – as I had specified the top storey of the hotel. Above the brick wall separating my balcony from that of the suite next door, there was some sort of stonecarved baroque griffin supported on a stone pier. Above that again – perhaps thirty inches above – ran the concrete coaming of the roof. I went inside.

  I took from the inside of the case all the things I’d have found acutely embarrassing to be discovered by other hands. I fitted on a felt-upholstered underarm pistol which hardly shows at all if you patronize the right tailor, which I did, and tucked a spare magazine in a back trouser pocket. I’d never had to fire more than one shot from that gun, far less have to fall back on the spare magazine, but you never know, things were getting worse all the time. I then unrolled the canvas-wrapped array of burglarious instruments this belt again, and with the help of an understanding tailor again, is invisible when worn round the waist – and from this sophisticated plethora extracted a humble but essential screwdriver. With this I removed the back of the small portable fridge in the kitchen – it’s surprising how much empty space there is behind even a small fridge – and there cached all I thought it advisable to cache. Then I opened the door to the corridor. The floorwaiter was still at his post.

  ‘Where’s my coffee?’ I asked. It wasn’t exactly an angry shout but it came pretty close to it.

  This time I had him on his feet first time out.

  ‘It come by dumb-waiter. Then I bring.’

  ‘You better bring fast.’ I shut the door. Some people never learn the virtues of simplicity, the dangers of over-elaboration. His phoney attempts at laboured English were as unimpressive as they were pointless.

  I took a bunch of rather oddly shaped keys from my pocket and tried them, in succession, on the other door. The third fitted – I’d have been astonished if none had. I pocketed the keys, went to the bathroom and had just turned the shower up to maximum when the outer doorbell rang, followed by the sound of the door opening. I turned off the shower, called to the floor-waiter to put the coffee on the table and turned the shower on again. I hoped that the combination of the coffee and the shower might persuade whoever required to be persuaded that here was a respectable guest unhurriedly preparing for the leisurely evening that lay ahead but I wouldn’t have bet pennies on it. Still, one can but try.

  I heard the outer door close but left the shower running in case the waiter was leaning his ear against the door – he had the look about him of a man who would spend much of his time leaning against doors or peering through keyholes. I went to the front door and stooped. He wasn’t peering through this particular keyhole. I opened the door fractionally, taking my hand away, but no one fell into the hallway, which meant that either no one had any reservations about me or that someone had so many that he wasn’t going to run any risks of being found out: a great help either way. I closed and locked the door, pocketed the bulky hotel key, poured the coffee down the kitchen sink, turned off the shower and left via the balcony door: I had to leave it wide open, held back in position by a heavy chair: for obvious reasons, few hotel balcony doors have a handle on the outside.

  I glanced briefly down to the street, across at the windows of the building opposite, then leaned over the concrete balustrade and peered to left and right to check if the occupants of the adjoining suites were peering in my direction. They weren’t. I climbed on to the balustrade, reached for the ornamental griffin so grotesquely carved that it presented a number of excellent handholds, then reached for the concrete coaming of the roof and hauled myself up top. I don’t say I liked doing it but I didn’t see what else I could do.

  The flat grass-grown roof was, as far as could be seen, deserted. I rose and crossed to the other side, skirting TV aerials, ventilation outlets and those curious miniature green-houses which in Amsterdam serve as skylights, reached the other side and peered cautiously down. Below was a very narrow and very dark alley, for the moment, at least, devoid of life. A few yards to my left I located the fire-escape and descended to the second floor. The escape door was locked, as nearly all such doors are from the inside, and the lock itself was of the double-action type, but no match for the sophisticated load of ironmongery I carried about with me.

  The corridor was deserted. I descended to the ground floor by the main stairs because it is difficult to make a cautious exit from a lift which opens on to the middle of the reception area. I needn’t have bothered. There was no sign of the assistant manager, the bell-boy or the doorman and, moreover, the hall was crowded with a new batch of plane arrivals besieging the reception desk. I joined the crowd at the desk, politely tapped a couple of shoulders, reached an arm through, deposited my room key on the desk, walked unhurriedly to the bar, passed as unhurriedly through it and went out by the side entrance.

  Heavy rain had fallen during the afternoon and the streets were still wet, but there was no need to wear the coat I had with me so I carried it slung over my arm and strolled along hatless, looking this way and that, stopping and starting again as the mood took me, letting the wind blow me where it listeth, every inch, I hoped, the tourist sallying forth for the first time to savour the sights and sounds of night-time Amsterdam.

  It was while I was ambling along the Herengracht, dutifully admiring the façades of the houses of the merchant princes of the seventeenth century, that I first became sure of this odd tingling feeling in the back of the neck. No amount of training or experience will ever develop this feeling. Maybe it has something to do wit
h ESP. Maybe not. Either you’re born with it or you aren’t. I’d been born with it.

  I was being followed.

  The Amsterdamers, so remarkably hospitable in every other way, are strangely neglectful when it comes to providing benches for their weary visitors – or their weary citizens, if it comes to that – along the banks of their canals. If you want to peer out soulfully and restfully over the darkly gleaming waters of their night-time canals the best thing to do is to lean against a tree, so I leaned against a convenient tree and lit a cigarette.

  I stood there for several minutes, communing, so I hoped it would seem, with myself, lifting the cigarette occasionally, but otherwise immobile. Nobody fired silenced pistols at me, nobody approached me with a sandbag preparatory to lowering me reverently into the canal. I’d given him every chance but he’d taken no advantage of it. And the dark man in Schiphol had had me in his sights but hadn’t pulled the trigger. Nobody wanted to do away with me. Correction. Nobody wanted to do away with me yet. It was a crumb of comfort, at least.

  I straightened, stretched and yawned, glancing idly about me, a man awakening from a romantic reverie. He was there all right, not leaning as I was with my back to the tree but with his shoulder to it so that the tree stood between him and myself, but it was a very thin tree and I could clearly distinguish his front and rear elevations.

  I moved on and turned right into the Leidestraat and dawdled along this doing some inconsequential window-shopping as I went. At one point I stepped into a shop doorway and gazed at some pictorial exhibits of so highly intrinsic an artistic nature that, back in England, they’d have had the shop-owner behind bars in nothing flat. Even more interestingly, the window formed a near-perfect mirror. He was about twenty yards away now, peering earnestly into the shuttered window of what might have been a fruit shop. He wore a grey suit and a grey sweater and that was all that could be said about him: a grey nondescript anonymity of a man.

  At the next corner I turned right again, past the flower market on the banks of the Singel canal. Half-way along I stopped at a stall, inspected the contents, and bought a carnation: thirty yards away the grey man was similarly inspecting a stall but either he was mean-souled or hadn’t an expense account like mine, for he bought nothing, just stood and looked.

  I had thirty yards on him and when I turned right again into the Vijzelstraat I strode along very briskly indeed until I came to the entrance of an Indonesian restaurant. I turned in, closing the door behind me. The doorman, obviously a pensioner, greeted me civilly enough but made no attempt to rise from his stool.

  I looked through the door and within just a few seconds the grey man came by. I could see now that he was more elderly than I had thought, easily in his sixties, and I must admit that for a man of his years he was putting up a remarkable turn of speed. He looked unhappy.

  I put on my coat and mumbled an apology to the doorman. He smiled and said ‘Good night’ as civilly as he had said ‘Good evening’. They were probably full up anyway. I went outside, stood in the doorway, took a folded trilby from one pocket and a pair of wire spectacles from the other and put them both on. Sherman, I hoped, transformed.

  He was about thirty yards distant now, proceeding with a curious scuttling action, stopping every now and again to peer into a doorway. I took life and limb in hand, launched myself across the street and arrived at the other side intact but unpopular. Keeping a little way behind, I paralleled the grey man for about another hundred yards when he stopped. He hesitated, then abruptly began to retrace his steps, almost running now, but this time stopping to go inside every place that was open to him. He went into the restaurant I’d so briefly visited and came out in ten seconds. He went in the side entrance of the Hotel Carlton and emerged from the front entrance, a detour that could not have made him very popular as the Hotel Carlton does not care overmuch for shabby old men with roll-neck sweaters using their foyer as a short cut. He went into another Indonesian restaurant at the end of the block and reappeared wearing the chastened expression of a man who has been thrown out. He dived into a telephone-box and when he emerged he looked more chastened than ever. From there he took up his stance on the central reservation tram stop on the Muntplein. I joined the queue.

  The first tram along, a three-coach affair, bore the number ‘16’ and the destination board ‘Central Station’. The grey man boarded the first coach. I entered the second and moved to the front seat where I could keep a watchful eye on him, at the same time positioning myself so as to present as little as possible of myself to his view should he begin to interest himself in his fellow passengers. But I needn’t have worried; his lack of interest in his fellow passengers was absolute. From the continual shift and play of expression, all unhappy, on his face, and the clasping and unclasping of his hands, here clearly was a man with other and more important things on his mind, not least of which was the degree of sympathetic understanding he could expect from his employers.

  The man in grey got off at the Dam. The Dam, the main square in Amsterdam, is full of historical landmarks such as the Royal Palace and the New Church which is so old that they have to keep shoring it up to prevent it from collapsing entirely, but neither received as much as a glance from the grey man that night. He scuttled down a side-street by the Hotel Krasnapolsky, turned left, in the direction of the docks, along the Oudezijds Voorburgwal canal, then turned right again and dipped into a maze of side-streets that obviously penetrated more and more deeply into the warehouse area of the town, one of the few areas not listed among the tourist attractions of Amsterdam. He was the easiest man to follow I’d ever come across. He looked neither to left nor right, far less behind him. I could have been riding an elephant ten paces behind him and he’d never have noticed.

  I stopped at a corner and watched him make his way along a narrow, ill-lit and singularly unlovely street, lined exclusively by warehouses on both sides, tall five-storey buildings whose gabled roofs leaned out towards those on the other side of the street, lending an air of claustrophobic menace, of dark foreboding and brooding watchfulness which I didn’t much care for at all.

  From the fact that the grey man had now broken into a shambling run I concluded that this excessive demonstration of zeal could only mean that he was near journey’s end, and I was right. Half-way along the street he ran up a set of handrailed steps, produced a key, opened a door and disappeared inside a warehouse. I followed at my leisure, but not too slowly, and glanced incuriously at the nameplate above the door of the warehouse: ‘Morgenstern and Muggenthaler’, the legend read. I’d never heard of the firm, but it was a name I’d be unlikely to forget. I passed on without breaking step.

  It wasn’t much of a hotel room, I had to admit, but then it wasn’t much of a hotel to begin with. Just as the outside of the hotel was small and drab and paint-peeling and unprepossessing, so was the interior of the room. The few articles of furniture the room contained, which included a single bed and a sofa which obviously converted into a bed, had been sadly overtaken by the years since the long-dead days of their prime, if they’d ever had a prime. The carpet was threadbare, but nowhere near as threadbare as the curtains and bed coverlet: the tiny bathroom leading off the room had the floor space of a telephone-box. But the room was saved from complete disaster by a pair of redeeming features that would have lent a certain aura of desirability to even the bleakest of prison cells. Maggie and Belinda, perched side by side on the edge of the bed, looked at me without enthusiasm as I lowered myself wearily on to the couch.

  ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee.’ I said. ‘All alone in wicked Amsterdam. Everything all right?’

  ‘No.’ There was a positive note in Belinda’s voice.

  ‘No?’ I let my surprise show.

  She gestured to indicate room. ‘Well, I mean, look at it.’

  I looked at it. ‘So?’

  ‘Would you live here?’

  ‘Well, frankly, no. But then five-star hotels are for managerial types like myself. For a couple
of struggling typists these quarters are perfectly adequate. For a couple of young girls who are not the struggling typists they appear to be this provides about as complete a degree of anonymity of background as you can hope to achieve.’ I paused. ‘At least, I hope. I assume you’re both in the clear. Anyone on the plane you recognized?’

  ‘No.’ They spoke in unison with an identical shake of the head.

  ‘Anyone in Schiphol you recognized?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anyone take any particular interest in you at Schiphol?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘This room bugged?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Been out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Been followed?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Room searched in your absence?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You look amused, Belinda,’ I said. She wasn’t exactly giggling but she was having a little difficulty with her facial muscles. ‘Do tell. I need cheering up.’

  ‘Well.’ She was suddenly thoughtful, perhaps recalling that she hardly knew me at all. ‘Nothing. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry about what, Belinda?’ An avuncular and encouraging tone which had the odd effect of making her wriggle uncomfortably.

  ‘Well, all those cloak-and-dagger precautions for a couple of girls like us. I don’t see the need—’

  ‘Do be quiet, Belinda!’ That was Maggie, quicksilver as ever in the old man’s defence though God knew why. I’d had my professional successes that, considered by themselves, totted up to a pretty impressive list but a list that, compared to the quota of failures, paled into a best-forgotten insignificance. ‘Major Sherman,’ Maggie went on severely, ‘always knows what he is doing.’

  ‘Major Sherman,’ I said frankly, ‘would give his back teeth to believe in that.’ I looked at them speculatively. ‘I’m not changing the subject, but how about some of the old commiseration for the wounded master?’

  ‘We know our place,’ Maggie said primly. She rose, peered at my forehead and sat down again. ‘Mind you, it does seem a very small piece of sticking plaster for what seemed such a lot of blood.’