Puppet on a Chain

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘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?’

  Belinda’s mouth tightened angrily but Maggie put a hand on hers.

  ‘That’s not fair, Major Sherman.’ And this was Maggie talking. ‘We may make mistakes, but that’s not fair.’ When Maggie talked like that, I listened.

  ‘I’m sorry, Maggie. I’m sorry, Belinda. When cowards like me get worried they take it out on people who can’t hit back.’ They both at once gave me that sweetly sympathetic smile that would normally have had me climbing the walls, but which I found curiously affecting at that moment, maybe that brown stain had done something to my nervous system. ‘God only knows I make more mistakes than you do.’ I did, and I was making one of my biggest then: I should have listened more closely to what the girls were saying.

  ‘And now?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘Yes, what do we do now?’ Belinda said.

  I was clearly forgiven. ‘Circulate around the night-clubs hereabouts. Heaven knows there’s no shortage of them. See if you can recognize anyone there – performer, staff, maybe even a member of the audience – who looks like anyone you saw in the church tonight.’

  Belinda stared at me in disbelief. ‘Nuns in a night-club?’

  ‘Why not? Bishops go to garden parties, don’t they?’

  ‘It’s not the same thing—’

  ‘Entertainment is entertainment the world over,’ I said pontifically. ‘Especially check for those who are wearing long-sleeved dresses or those fancy elbow-length gloves.’

  ‘Why those?’ Belinda asked.

  ‘Use your head. See – if you do find anyone if you can find out where they live. Be back in your hotel by one o’clock. I’ll see you there.’

  ‘And what are you going to do?’ Maggie asked.

  I looked leisurely around the club. ‘I’ve got a lot of research to do here yet.’

  ‘I’ll bet you have,’ Belinda said.

  Maggie opened her mouth to speak but Belinda was saved the inevitable lecture by the reverential ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ and gasps of unstinted admiration, freely given, that suddenly echoed round the club. The audience were almost out of their seats. The distressed artiste had resolved her dreadful dilemma by the simple but ingenious and highly effective expedient of tipping the tin bath over and using it, tortoise-shell fashion, to conceal her maidenly blushes as she covered the negligible distance towards the salvation of the towel. She stood up, swathed in her towel, Venus arising from the depths, and bowed with regal graciousness towards the audience, Madame Melba taking her final farewell of Covent Garden. The ecstatic audience whistled and called for more, none more so than the octogenarians, but in vain: her repertoire exhausted, she shook her head prettily and minced off the stage, trailing clouds of soap-bubbles behind her.

  ‘Well, I never!’ I said admiringly. ‘I’ll bet neither of you two would have thought of that.’

  ‘Come, Belinda,’ Maggie said. ‘This is no place for us.’

  They rose and left. As Belinda passed she gave a twitch of her eyebrows which looked suspiciously like a wink, smiled sweetly, said, ‘I rather like you like that,’ and left me pondering suspiciously as to the meaning of her remark. I followed their progess to the exit to see if anyone followed them, and followed they were, first of all by a very fat, very heavily built character with enormous jowls and an air of benevolence, but this was hardly of any significance as he was immediately followed by several dozen others. The highlight of the evening was over, great moments like those came but seldom and the summits were to be rarely scaled again – except three times a night, seven nights a week – and they were off to greener pastures where hooch could be purchased at a quarter of the price.

  The club was half-empty now, the pall of smoke thinning and the visibility correspondingly improving. I looked around but in this momentary lull in the proceedings saw nothing of interest. Waiters circulated. I ordered a Scotch and was given a drink that rigorous chemical analysis might have found to contain a trace element of whisky. An old man mopped the tiny dance floor with the deliberate and stylized movements of a priest performing sacred rites. The band, mercifully silent, enthusiastically quaffed beer presented them by some tone-deaf customer. And then I saw the person I’d come to see, only it looked as if I wouldn’t be seeing her for very long.

  Astrid Lemay was standing in an inner doorway at the back end of a room, pulling a wrap around her shoulders while another girl whispered in her ear; from their tense expressions and hurried movements it appeared to be a message of some urgency. Astrid nodded several times, then almost ran across the tiny dance floor and passed through the front entrance. Somewhat more leisurely, I followed her.

  I closed up on her and was only a few feet behind as she turned into the Rembrandtplein. She stopped. I stopped, looked at what she was looking at and listened to what she was listening to.

  The barrel-organ was parked in the street outside a roofed-in, overhead-heated but windowless sidewalk café. Even at that time of night the café was almost full and the suffering customers had about them the look of people about to pay someone large sums of money to move elsewhere. This organ appeared to be a replica of the one outside the Rembrandt, with the same garish colour scheme, multi-coloured canopy and identically dressed puppets dancing at the end of their elasticized strings, although this machine was clearly inferior, mechanically and musically, to the Rembrandt one. This machine, too, was manned by an ancient, but this one sported a foot-long flowing grey beard that had neither been washed nor combed since he’d stopped shaving and who wore a stetson hat and a British Army great-coat which fitted snugly around his ankles. Amidst the clankings, groanings and wheezings emitted by the organ I thought I detected an excerpt from La Bohème, although heaven knew that Puccini never made the dying Mimi suffer the way she would have suffered had she been in the Rembrandtplein that night.

  The ancient had a close and apparently attentive audience of one. I recognized him as being one of the group I had seen by the organ outside the Rembrandt. His clothes were threadbare but neatly kept, his lanky black hair tumbled down to his painfully thin shoulders, the blades of which protruded through his jacket like sticks. Even at that distance of about twenty feet I could see that his degree of emaciation was advanced. I could see only part of one side of the face, but that little showed a cadaverously sunken cheek with skin the colour of old parchment.

  He was leaning on the end of the barrel-organ, but not from any love of Mimi. He was leaning on the barrel-organ because if he hadn’t leaned on something he would surely have fallen down. He was obviously a very sick young man indeed with total collapse only one unpremeditated move away. Occasionally his whole body was convulsed by uncontrollable spasms of shaking: less frequently he made harsh sobbing or guttural noises in his throat. Clearly the old man in the great-coat did not regard him as being very good for business for he kept hovering around him indecisively, making reproachful clucking noises and ineffectual movements of his arms, very much like a rather demented hen. He also kept glancing over his shoulder and apprehensively round the square as if he were afraid of something or someone.

  Astrid walked quickly towards the barrel-organ with myself close behind. She smiled apologetically at the bearded ancient, put her arm around the young man and pulled him away from the organ. Momentarily he tried to straighten up and I could see that he was a pretty tall youngster, at least six inches taller than the girl: his height served only to accentuate his skeleton frame. His eyes were staring and glazed and his face the face of a man dying from starvation, his che
eks so incredibly hollowed that one would have sworn that he could have no teeth. Astrid tried to half lead, half carry him away, but though his emaciation had reached a degree where he could scarcely be any heavier than the girl, if at all, his uncontrollable lurching made her stagger across the pavement.

  I approached them without a word, put my arm round him – it was like putting my arm round a skeleton – and took his weight off Astrid. She looked at me and the brown eyes were sick with anxiety and fear. I don’t suppose my sepia complexion gave her much confidence either.

  ‘Please!’ Her voice was beseeching. ‘Please leave me. I can manage.’

  ‘You can’t. He’s a very sick boy, Miss Lemay.’

  She stared at me. ‘Mr Sherman!’

  ‘I’m not sure if I like that,’ I said reflectively. ‘An hour or two ago you’d never seen me, never even knew my name. But now that I’ve gone all sun-tanned and attractive – Oops!’

  George, whose rubbery legs had suddenly turned to jelly, had almost slipped from my grip. I could see that the two of us weren’t going to get very far waltzing like this along the Rembrandtplein, so I stooped down to hoist him over my shoulder in a fireman’s lift. She caught my arm in panic.

  ‘No! Don’t do that! Don’t do that!’

  ‘Why ever not?’ I said reasonably. ‘It’s easier this way.’

  ‘No, no! If the police see you they will take him away.’

  I straightened, put my arm around him again and tried to maintain him as near to the vertical as was possible. ‘The hunter and the hunted,’ I said. ‘You and van Gelder both.’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘And of course, brother George is—’

  ‘How do you know his name?’ she whispered.

  ‘It’s my business to know things,’ I said loftily. ‘As I was saying, brother George is under the further disadvantage of not being exactly unknown to the police. Having an ex-convict for a brother can be a distinct disadvantage.’

  She made no reply. I doubt if I’ve ever seen anyone who looked so completely miserable and defeated.

  ‘Where does he live?’ I asked.

  ‘With me, of course.’ The question seemed to surprise her. ‘It’s not far.’

  It wasn’t either, not more than fifty yards down a sidestreet – if so narrow and gloomy a lane could be called a street – past the Balinova. The stairs up to Astrid’s flat were the narrowest and most twisted I had ever come across, and with George slung over my shoulder I had difficulty in negotiating them. Astrid unlocked the door to her flat, which proved to be hardly larger than a rabbit-hutch, consisting, as far as I could see, of a tiny sitting-room with an equally tiny bedroom leading off it. I went through to the bedroom, laid George on the narrow bed, straightened and mopped my brow.

  ‘I’ve climbed better ladders than those damned stairs of yours,’ I said feelingly.

  ‘I’m sorry. The girls’ hostel is cheaper, but with George … They don’t pay very highly at the Balinova.’

  It was obvious from the two tiny rooms, neat but threadbare like George’s clothes, that they paid very little. I said: ‘People in your position are lucky to get anything.’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘Not so much of the “please” stuff. You know damned well what I mean. Don’t you. Miss Lemay – or may I call you Astrid?’

  ‘How do you know my name?’ Off-hand I couldn’t ever recall having seen a girl wring her hands but that’s what she was doing now. ‘How – how do you know things about me?’

  ‘Come off it,’ I said roughly. ‘Give some credit to your boy-friend.’

  ‘Boy-friend? I haven’t got a boy-friend.’

  ‘Ex-boy-friend, then. Or does “late boy-friend” suit you better?’

  ‘Jimmy?’ she whispered.

  ‘Jimmy Duclos,’ I nodded. ‘He may have fallen for you – fatally fallen for you – but he’d already told me something about you. I even have a picture of you.’

  She seemed confused. ‘But – but at the airport—’

  ‘What did you expect me to do – embrace you? Jimmy was killed at the airport because he was on to something. What was that something?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t help you.’

  ‘Can’t? Or won’t?’

  She made no reply.

  ‘Did you love him, Astrid? Jimmy?’

  She looked at me dumbly, her eyes glistening. She nodded slowly.

  ‘And you won’t tell me?’ Silence. I sighed and tried another tack. ‘Did Jimmy Duclos tell you what he was?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘But you guessed?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And told someone what you guessed.’

  This got her. ‘No! No! I told nobody. Before God, I told nobody!’ She’d loved him, all right, and she wasn’t lying.

  ‘Did he ever mention me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you know who I am?’

  She just looked at me, two big tears trickling slowly down her cheeks.

  ‘You know damn well that I run Interpol’s narcotics bureau in London.’

  More silence. I caught her shoulders and shook her angrily. ‘Well, don’t you?’

  She nodded. A great girl for silences.

  ‘Then if Jimmy didn’t tell you, who did?’

  ‘Oh God! Please leave me alone!’ A whole lot of other tears were chasing the first two down her cheeks now. It was her day for crying and mine for sighing, so I sighed and changed my tack again and looked through the door at the boy on the bed.

  ‘I take it,’ I said, ‘that George is not the breadwinner of the family?’

  ‘George cannot work.’ She said it as if she were stating a simple law of nature. ‘He hasn’t worked for over a year. But what has George to do with this?’

  ‘George has everything to do with it.’ I went and bent over him, looked at him closely, lifted an eyelid and dropped it again. ‘What do you do for him when he’s like this?’

  ‘There is nothing one can do.’

  I pushed the sleeve up George’s skeleton-like arm. Punctured, mottled and discoloured from innumerable injections, it was a revolting sight: Trudi’s had been nothing compared to this. I said: ‘There’s nothing anyone will ever be able to do for him. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I know that.’ She caught my speculative look, stopped dabbing her face with a lace handkerchief about the size of a postage stamp and smiled bitterly. ‘You want me to roll up my sleeve.’

  ‘I don’t insult nice girls. What I want to do is to ask you some simple questions that you can answer. How long has George been like this?’

  ‘Three years.’

  ‘How long have you been in the Balinova?’

  ‘Three years.’

  ‘Like it there?’

  ‘Like it?’ This girl gave herself away every time she opened her mouth. ‘Do you know what it is to work in a night-club – a night-club like that? Horrible, nasty, lonely old men leering at you—’

  ‘Jimmy Duclos wasn’t horrible or nasty or old.’

  She was taken aback. ‘No. No, of course not. Jimmy—’

  ‘Jimmy Duclos is dead, Astrid. Jimmy is dead because he fell for a night-club hostess who’s being blackmailed.’

  ‘Nobody’s blackmailing me.’

  ‘No? Then who’s putting the pressure on you to keep silent, to work at a job you obviously loathe? And why are they putting pressure on you? Is it because of George here? What has he done or what do they say he has done? I know he’s been in prison, so it can’t be that. What is it, Astrid, that made you spy on me? What do you know of Jimmy Duclos’s death? I know how he died. But who killed him and why?’

  ‘I didn’t know he’d be killed!’ She sat down on the bed-sofa, her hands covering her face, her shoulders heaving. ‘I didn’t know he would be killed.’

  ‘All right, Astrid.’ I gave up because I was achieving nothing except a mounting dislike for myself. She’d probably loved Duclos, he was only a day dead and
here was I lacerating bleeding wounds. ‘I’ve known too many people walk in the fear of death to even try to make you talk. But think about it, Astrid, for God’s sake and your own sake, think about it. It’s your life, and that’s all that’s left for you to worry about now. George has no life left.’

  ‘There’s nothing I can do, nothing I can say.’ Her face was still in her hands. ‘Please go.’

  I didn’t think there was anything more I could do or say either, so I did as she asked and left.

  Clad only in trousers and singlet I looked at myself in the tiny mirror in the tiny bathroom. All traces of the stain seemed to have been removed from my face, neck and hands, which was more than I could say for the large and once-white towel I held in my hands. It was sodden and stained beyond recovery to a deep chocolate colour.

  I went through the door into the bedroom that was hardly big enough to take the bed and the bed-settee it contained. The bed was occupied by Maggie and Belinda, both sitting upright, both looking very fetching in very attractive nightdresses which appeared to consist mainly of holes. But I’d more urgent problems on my mind at the moment than the way in which some night-wear manufacturers skimped on their material.

  ‘You’ve ruined our towel,’ Belinda complained.

  ‘Tell them you were removing your make-up.’ I reached for my shirt, which was a deep russet colour all round the inside of the neck-band, but there was nothing I could do about that. ‘So most of the night-club girls live in this Hostel Paris?’

  Maggie nodded. ‘So Mary said.’

  ‘So Mary said.’

  ‘Mary?’

  ‘This nice English girl working in the Trianon.’

  ‘There are no nice English girls working in the Trianon, only naughty English girls. Was she one of the girls in church?’ Maggie shook her head. ‘Well, that at least bears out what Astrid said.’

  ‘Astrid?’ Belinda said. ‘You spoke to her?’

  ‘I passed the time of day with her. Not very profitably, I’m afraid. She wasn’t communicative.’ I told them briefly how uncommunicative she’d been, then went on: ‘Well, it’s time you two started doing a little work instead of hanging about night-clubs.’ They looked at each other, then coldly at me. ‘Maggie, take a stroll in the Vondel Park tomorrow. See if Trudi is there you know her. Don’t let her see you she knows you. See what she does, if she meets anyone, talks to anyone: it’s a big park but you should have little difficulty in locating her if she’s there she’ll be accompanied by an old dear who’s about five feet round the middle. Belinda, keep tabs on that hostel tomorrow evening. If you recognize any girl who was in the church, follow her and see what she’s up to.’ I shrugged into my very damp jacket. ‘Good night.’