Packer still stood outside, holding the door open, while the Frenchman had already settled back into the corner, his thighs and buttocks filling more than half the space on the seat. Packer wondered, for one wild moment, whether the man were some eccentric private eye who had run amok on Dutch gin while employed by Sarah’s family to obstruct Packer in this feeble spasm of foreign pleasure.
He said to the fat man in French, ‘Will you please explain what this is all about? How you know about this girl and me, and why you’re following us both?’
Charles Pol patted the seat beside him. ‘All in good time, my friend! First we must find the lady.’
Reluctantly, and mostly because the rain had increased again, Packer climbed into the taxi. Pol grunted something unintelligible and the driver started the engine. Packer quickly opened the window to relieve the fumes from his companion, which he now recognized as a mixture of Bols and sour sweat. He was wondering when the Frenchman had last had a bath, when the taxi turned out on to the autobahn south to Utrecht. The driver kept to the outside lane, going very fast.
‘How far is this tulip nursery?’ Packer asked, feeling the first twinge of unease.
Monsieur Pol flapped a hand which was like a freshly peeled shrimp. ‘Do not disturb yourself, mon cher! You will soon be reunited with your loved one.’
‘This is bloody ridiculous,’ Packer muttered to himself; then, in French: ‘Did you follow us from the hotel, or the airport, or out from London?’
Pol put a fat forefinger to his cherry lips. ‘Shall we just say that I found the lady particularly attractive, as you say in English? That red beret is most coquettish. And so easy to follow!’ He gave his giggle and wiped a string of spittle from his mouth.
Owen Packer was leaning against the open window, his head and shoulders wet with rain, and was trying to look round the driver to see if there was a registered number somewhere on the dashboard. He was unfamiliar with Dutch taxis. But before he had time, he was hurled back into the corner of his seat as the driver pulled across the centre lane, cutting dangerously in front of a little Daf that squealed at them with headlamps flashing; then swerved into the slip road which ran out along an embankment above the lowlands.
Packer’s attention was momentarily distracted by a row of windmills on the horizon. He was relieved to see that the flat landscape was dotted with little houses and what looked like plots of vegetable garden.
‘Relax, Monsieur Packer! We are soon there.’
Packer swung round in his seat. ‘How do you know my name?’
Pol gave him a beady grin. ‘Let us say that you are not entirely a stranger to me, Monsieur Packer. Or should I, perhaps, call you Capitaine Packer?’ He sounded suddenly, disturbingly sober.
Packer was still trying to think of something to say when they pulled into a muddy space and stopped. He had his hand on the door catch, and was out of the taxi before the driver had time to switch off. He backed away a couple of paces and stood with his body flexed, hands at his sides, fingers stiff. Even if Pol were armed, in his present state he should present little difficulty. It was the driver who worried Packer. From what he’d seen of him he looked young and fit.
But the driver did not move. Packer watched Pol clamber out, almost sitting down in the mud as he did so, his egg-shaped face streaming with sweat; then he came squelching round to the front of the taxi and clutched hold of Packer’s arm, as though to steady himself from falling.
‘We have arrived!’ he gasped, and with his free hand he waved at a row of coaches parked next to a barn. Beyond, Packer could now see bright splashes of red and pink and yellow, and groups of people with umbrellas. Hardly the place for a quick showdown on the outskirts of Amsterdam, he thought. This was a civilized country, after all; which only made the intrusion of this drunk French ‘business consultant’, who had followed him here, and knew his name, even his former rank, all the more incongruous and mystifying.
‘Come, mon cher, now we start the hunt for your little friend!’ He was still holding Packer’s arm, with a surprisingly firm grip; and began leading him past the row of coaches to the tulip fields. They made slow progress, with Pol’s pear-shaped body wobbling and lurching on two tiny feet in what looked like ballet slippers, almost small enough for a child.
When they reached the edge of the field, Packer saw that it was not going to be easy to find Sarah. There were at least a hundred people moving among the tulip beds and her red beret would be lost in the blaze of colour. Even when he did find her, he wondered how the hell he was going to rid himself of this awful Frenchman. For Sarah possessed a particular aversion, which she did little to disguise, to all forms of both grossness and drunkenness. Even if Pol had been sober, Packer knew that she would hardly welcome him as a new-found holiday friend.
A moment later he realized that his anxieties would soon be settled, one way or the other. The rain had slackened to a drizzle, and Sarah’s small familiar figure stood alone, near the barn, the scarlet beret pulled down aggressively over one eye. She was staring at a bed of unnaturally large yellow tulips. Unfortunately, Pol saw her at the same time, and evidently recognized her. He let out a whooping shriek, and with his free hand pulled a stone bottle of Bols gin from his pocket.
Packer shook himself free and began striding down the path towards Sarah. She noticed him when he was some yards away. ‘Hallo. You were quick,’ she said, without enthusiasm. ‘What happened to the windmill?’
‘Lousy.’ He reached her and lowered his voice. ‘You were right — somebody was following both of us.’ He turned and nodded to where he had left Pol floundering on the edge of a tulip patch. ‘The fat man over there, with the beard — is that the one?’
She looked back at Pol and shrugged. ‘Never seen him before. He looks drunk.’
‘He is — smashed out of his skull. What’s more, he knows my name, and that I was a Captain, and he knows about you.’
As they both stood looking, Pol — with the grotesque abandon of a stage drunk — waved his bottle at them, unscrewed the top and began gulping from the neck.
‘Who did you think was following you?’ Packer persisted.
‘No one important. That man I was sitting next to in the boat — he was French too, or at least he spoke French. He’s gone now.’
She was interrupted by a yelp of laughter; and they both looked round in time to see Pol coming towards them at a lumbering, lurching trot, his open bottle held precariously aloft. He had covered half the distance when he came to grief. An unusually deep puddle tipped him off balance and sent him sprawling sideways into a bed of magnificent tulips. Many dozens of full-bodied blooms, each of which had been nursed from its earliest shoot to its present ripe maturity — to be bought and sold all over the world, to decorate great homes and palaces, to carry off prizes at international flower shows — now had their lush stems and fleshy petals crushed and flattened under the Frenchman’s colossal weight.
A number of tourists were near enough to see; but all they did was gape. Pol himself was the first to recover. It would be incorrect to say that he got to his feet, but rather to his hands and knees; and it was in this position, like a monstrously inflated baby with a false beard, that he began to scramble forward on all fours — not back to the path, but even deeper into the tulip bed. He seemed to be taking a direct short cut to where Sarah and Packer were standing, about fifty feet away. He paused only once, to take a swig from the bottle which he had somehow managed to keep upright. On and on he came, leaving a wide, dishevelled path of decapitated flowers.
Then, from the direction of the barn, came a guttural roar, and a man with white hair and a brown stringy face began sprinting down the path towards Packer and Sarah, turning sharply left when he reached the original trough of chaos left by Pol. He was shouting all the way, and carrying a stick of thick knotted wood. Pol evidently neither saw nor heard him; for at the moment that the Dutchman brought the stick down across his elephantine haunches, Pol was at his Bols. There was a lo
ud crack, followed by a snort, then a shrill yelping like an animal in pain.
Packer and Sarah watched the scene that followed with silent disbelief. Before the second blow could fall, Pol had rolled over on to his back and lashed out at the Dutchman’s legs with his stone bottle; then, with astounding agility, he scrambled to his feet and flung himself at the man’s throat. Although the Dutchman was a good foot taller, Pol quickly gained the advantage. The Dutchman tripped and fell over backwards, leaving Pol holding both the bottle and the stick. But instead of exploiting his advantage, the Frenchman turned away and began to run a berserk zigzag trail through the tulips, thrashing wildly about him with the stick. Petals, leaves, shredded stems and clots of mud flew around him like floral shrapnel. He must have destroyed several hundred flowers before his energy was spent.
In the meantime, the old Dutchman had recovered and run back to the barn — presumably to call the police.
Sarah began to laugh. Packer was all the more astonished, because not only was she a girl who rarely laughed, except when it was expected of her, but she had an almost fanatical love of flowers; and Pol was not merely gross, but had committed the two worst heresies in her book — he had massacred some of the finest blooms in the world, and was blind drunk to boot.
Pol reached them a moment later, his short fat arms flung out in welcome. He had thrown away the stick and the empty bottle somewhere in the wreckage behind him.
‘My friends! My dear, dear friends! My little tulip!’ he shrieked, and to Packer’s dismay flung both arms round Sarah’s neck and gave her a smacking kiss on each cheek. Packer grabbed him by the shoulder and steadied him, fearful that he would topple over again and squash Sarah. She seemed too surprised to be angry; for several seconds she just stood staring at Pol, inhaling the fumes of Dutch gin and bad breath, not noticing that his open mackintosh and stained suit had left traces of mud and verdant slime on her impeccable culottes.
‘Come on, let’s get out of here,’ Packer said to her. ‘He’s a bloody madman!’ He pushed Pol back and pulled her free of him. ‘Where’s the bus?’
She gestured vaguely towards the barn. ‘It’s not due to leave for another twenty minutes.’
‘The police will be here at any moment,’ Packer said, trying to lead her away from Pol.
‘You’re not afraid of the police, are you?’ she said. Her voice had a discreet veneer of insult that provoked in him a dull, powerless rage.
‘Don’t be bloody silly,’ he muttered. ‘But the Dutch’ll half murder him when they get him. What he’s done is like a foreigner crapping on a Union Jack outside Buckingham Palace.’
She drew in her breath with a hiss. ‘I do wish,’ she said, ‘that you wouldn’t be so fucking crude all the time.’
‘You’re one to talk,’ he growled.
‘I just can’t stand talk about shit,’ she said primly; then she glanced back again at Pol, and this time she smiled. He wiped his lips and smiled back, then hiccoughed. She said to Packer: ‘We can’t just leave him. After all, he brought you here — didn’t he?’
‘I don’t know anything anymore,’ said Packer. ‘I just know the fellow’s a load of trouble. And I don’t want him round our necks for the rest of the day.’ He turned away, knowing at once that it was a mistake. If he had shown even the smallest sign of taking Pol’s side, the girl would have turned on them both with the full venom of her disapproval. As it was, she turned and took Pol gently by the arm, and began to lead him back towards the taxi.
It was she, this time, who gave the driver the instructions, in English, to take them all back to the hotel. They had just reached the opposite carriageway of the autobahn, in the direction of Amsterdam, when they saw the police van with its flashing blue beacon turn on to the slip road towards the tulip nursery.
From his seat in the back, crushed up against Sarah, Pol let out a luxurious fart. ‘Ah, mes enfants! What an interesting afternoon — I haven’t done anything like that in years. In fact, the last time, I think, was when I smashed Admiral Guerin’s porcelain tea service aboard his flagship off Oran, in 1946.’
Sarah had turned her head away, and quickly rolled down the window.
CHAPTER 3
The speed and strategy which Owen Packer displayed in removing Charles Pol beyond the limits of Dutch law impressed even Sarah — although she was careful not to show it.
Packer’s eventual motives for deciding to befriend this gargantuan foreign intruder were twofold. Sarah was amused by the man — and even more amazing, she seemed to have taken a peculiar liking to him; and while Pol could not possibly prove a libidinous threat to Packer, he might yet prove to be a healing catalyst for him and Sarah. For Packer had come to realize that alone together their weekend in Amsterdam was doomed.
His second reason was curiosity. He wanted to find out why this grotesque, importuning Frenchman, who claimed to work from Geneva as a business consultant, should decide — while drunk in the middle of the morning — to follow him and Sarah on an expensive taxi ride into the country. Packer might have written the incident off as an alcoholic whim — inspired, perhaps, by Sarah’s blood-red lipstick and scarlet beret — had it not been for those two vital details. Charles Pol knew both Packer’s name and his former rank. And Packer was going to find out how and why.
The first stage of the rescue operation was to take Pol back to their hotel, where Packer paid off the taxi and bundled the Frenchman, dribbling and giggling, through the side entrance and up in the automatic lift, which was mercifully empty. They met no one in the corridor to their room. Inside, they lugged him unceremoniously into the bathroom; and while Sarah ordered black coffee from room service, Packer coaxed Pol into giving him the name of his own hotel.
They left him soaking in one of Sarah’s bubble baths, with instructions to answer the telephone, but not the door; hung a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign outside, went downstairs and took a taxi to the Frenchman’s hotel — the Amstel, one of the oldest and most select in Amsterdam. They entered the marble foyer — Sarah now dressed in casual Cardin and swinging a Gucci bag, Packer in suit and tie — and were told by Reception that Monsieur Pol had already settled his bill and was leaving that night.
Most of his luggage had been brought down; there remained only a few things in his suite, which he had intended to collect before two o’clock. The desk staff displayed an amiable deference, as soon as they found that the two of them were English; and while Sarah chatted to the ancient head porter, Packer explained to the desk clerk that Monsieur Pol had met with a slight but unfortunate accident. He would not be able to collect his luggage personally — but, of course, neither of them would be offended if one of the staff accompanied them upstairs, while they finished Pol’s packing.
As Packer suspected, Pol existed in a state of opulent chaos. A half-full magnum of Krug stood uncorked on a side table, next to an unopened bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, which Packer eyed enviously. Sarah, who had been systematically going through the drawers, gave a shout of delight. In the bedside table she had found a fat roll of one-hundred-guilder notes, together with 7800 French francs in various denominations. Packer strode over and peeled off two of the Dutch notes, and put them in his wallet. ‘That’ll do for taxi fares, for a start.’
She stood, still holding the bundles of notes in each hand. For a moment the two of them looked at each other without expression. She spoke first: ‘He’d never remember — he’s far too drunk.’
Packer glanced at the door, where the hotel clerk was waiting discreetly out of sight in the passage; then shook his head. ‘For a girl with your background, Sarah love, you seem pretty light fingered. Or maybe you’re just greedy?’
‘Why not? — if he gets drunk and leaves the stuff lying around everywhere?’
He took the notes from her hand and stuffed them into his inside pocket, next to his traveller’s cheques. ‘And he’d probably never counted them in the first place,’ he said; then smiled. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll let you have your
cut, after we’ve deducted expenses — and a fee. Harbouring tulip butchers from justice isn’t cheap, you know. He’ll get what’s left over — if there is any.’
‘Anyone could tell you’re a Welsh Jew,’ she said, smiling, ‘even if you don’t look like one.’
Packer now began himself to examine the drawer by the bed. He picked out a vellum folder stamped with the image of a bird with a snake’s head, talons and a blue and gold fanned tail. Inside was a first-class, open return ticket to Mamounia, capital of the second richest oil-producing nation in the Middle East. Pol was booked from Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, but Packer observed that the ticket had been issued by the state’s national airline in Zürich.
He put the folder into a monogrammed Louis Vuitton case, and rejoined Sarah in the bathroom where she was busily sweeping bottles of eau-de-cologne, deodorants, anti-perspirants, pills and patent medicines into a toilet case that was larger than Packer’s hold-all.
He was smiling at the idea of Pol actually being vain, when he saw something lying half hidden under a very dirty ivory comb. It was an opened envelope, with an English stamp, addressed to M. Charles Pol, c/o American Express, Amsterdam. The postmark was London, but Packer could not make out the date stamp.
He turned it over. On the torn flap, above a familiar crest, were the initials SMRTS. Packer looked up and gazed at his gaunt image in the mirror, and saw his passionless blue eyes light up with the dawning of a great excitement. The envelope was empty.
Carefully, making sure that Sarah could not see, he folded it once and placed it in the zipped-up inner compartment of his wallet.
He made a final, swift check through the room, before they rejoined the hotel clerk outside.
‘Thank God the Dutch are a trusting, English-loving people!’ Packer muttered, as they rode down in the lift.
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