Puppet On A Chain Part 17

'I was coming to this bit,' I said apologetically. 'I was just on the point of telling you why you've made so little progress yourselves in tracing the source of those drugs. Your trusted lieutenant, Inspector van Gelder, made good and sure that no progress was made.'

'Van Gelder?' De Graaf, even with all the physical evidence to the contrary before him, still couldn't conceive of a senior police officer's treachery. 'How can this be? It can't be.'

'That's not a lollipop he's pointing at you,' I said mildly. Van Gelder's the boss, van Gelder's the brain. He's the Frankenstein, all right: Goodbody's just the monster that's run out of control. Right, van Gelder?'

'Right!' The baleful glance van Gelder directed at Goodbody didn't augur too well for Goodbody's future, although I didn't believe he had one anyway.

I looked at Trudi without affection. 'And as for your little Red Riding-hood, van Gelder, this sweet little mistress of yours -- '

'Mistress?' De Graaf was so badly off balance that he no longer even looked stunned.

'You heard. But I think van Gelder has rather fallen out of love with her, haven't you, van Gelder? She has, shall we say, become too much of a psychopathic soulmate for the Reverend here.' I turned to de Graaf. 'Our little rosebud is no addict. Goodbody knows how to make those marks on her arms look real. He told me so. Her mental age is not eight, it's older than sin itself. And twice as evil.'

'I don't know.' De Graaf sounded tired. 'I don't understand -- '

'She served three useful purposes,' I said. 'With van Gelder having a daughter like that, who would ever doubt that he was a dedicated enemy of drugs and all the evil men who profit by them? She was the perfect go-between for van Gelder and Goodbody -- they never made contact, not even on the phone. And, most important, she was the vital link in the drug supply line. She took her puppet out to Huyler, switched it there for one loaded with heroin, took it back to the puppet van in the Vondel Park and switched it again. The van, of course, brought it here when it returned for more supplies. She is a very endearing child, is our Trudi. But she shouldn't have used belladonna to give her eyes that glazed addict look. I didn't catch on at the time, but give me time and clobber me over the head with a two-by-four and eventually I'll catch on to anything. It wasn't the right look, I've talked to too many junkies who had the right look. And then I knew.'

Trudi giggled again and licked her lips. 'Can I shoot him now? In the leg. High up?' High up?'

'You're a charming little morsel,' I said, 'but you should get your priorities right. Why don't you look around you?'

She looked around her. Everybody looked around him. I didn't, I just looked straight at Belinda, then nodded almost imperceptibly at Trudi, who was standing between her and the open loading doors. Belinda, in turn, glanced briefly at Trudi and I knew she understood.

'You fools!' I said contemptuously. 'How do you think I got all my information? I was given it! I was given it by two people who got scared to death and sold you down the river for a free pardon. Morgenstern and Muggenthaler.'

There were some pretty inhuman characters among those present, no doubt about that, but they were all human in their reactions. They all stared in consternation at Morgenstern and Muggenthaler, who stood there with unbelieving eyes and mouths agape and it was with mouths agape that they died, for they were both carrying guns and the gun I now had in my hand was very small and I couldn't afford just to wound them. In the same moment of time Belinda flung herself back against an off-guard Trudi, who staggered backwards, teetered on the edge of the loading sill, then fell from sight.

Her thin wailing scream had not yet ended when de Graaf reached up desperately for van Gelder's gun hand, but I'd no time to see how de Graaf made out, for I'd pushed myself to my toes, still in a crouching position and launched myself in a low dive for Goodbody, who was struggling to get his gun out. Goodbody pitched backwards with a crash that spoke well for the basic soundness of the warehouse floors, which remained where they were, and a second later I'd twisted round behind his back and had him making strange croaking noises in his throat, because I'd my arm hooked around his neck as if I were trying to make the front and back ends meet.

De Graaf was lying on the floor, blood streaming from a cut on his forehead. He was moaning a little. Van Gelder led a struggling Belinda in front of him, using her as a s.h.i.+eld, just as I was using Goodbody as a s.h.i.+eld. Van Gelder was smiling. Both our guns were pointing at each other.

'I know the Shermans of this world.' Van Gelder's tone was calm, conversational. 'They'd never risk hurting an innocent person -- especially a girl so lovely as this. As for Goodbody there, I don't care if he's shot as full of holes as a colander. I make a point?'

I looked at the right side of Goodbody's face, which was the only part of it I could see. Its colour varied between purple and mauve, and whether this was because he was being slowly strangled by me or because of his reaction to his erstwhile partner's ready and callous abandonment of him was difficult to say. Why I looked at him I don't know, the last thought in my mind was to weigh up the respective value of Belinda and Goodbody as hostages: as long as van Gelder had Belinda as a hostage he was as safe as a man in a church. Well, any church, that was, except the Reverend Goodbody's.

'You make a point,' I said.

'I make another point,' van Gelder went on. 'You have a pop-gun there. I have a police Colt.' I nodded. 'So, my safe-conduct.' He began to move towards the head of the stairs, keeping Belinda between us. 'There's a blue police van at the foot of the street. My van. I'm taking that. On the way there I'm going to smash the office telephones. If, when I reach the van, I do not see you at the loading door there, then I shall no longer require her. You understand?'

'I understand. And if you kill her wantonly, you will never be able to sleep easy again. You know that.'

He said, 'I know that,' and disappeared walking backwards down the stairs, dragging Belinda behind him. I paid no attention to his going. I saw de Graaf sitting up and taking a handkerchief to his bleeding forehead, so apparently he was still able to fend for himself. I released my throttling grip on Goodbody's neck, reached over and took his gun away, then, still seated behind him, brought out the handcuffs and secured both his wrists, one to the wrist of the dead Morgenstern, the other to the wrist of the dead Muggenthaler. I then rose, walked round to the front of Goodbody and helped a very shaky de Graaf to a chair. I looked back at Goodbody, who was staring at me with a face carved in a rictus of terror. When he spoke his normally deep, pontifical voice was almost an insane scream.

'You're not going to leave me like this!'

I surveyed the two ma.s.sive merchants to whom he was chained.

'You can always tuck one under either arm and make good your escape.'

'In G.o.d's name, Sherman -- '

'You put Astrid on a hook. I told her I would help her and you put her on a hook. You had Maggie pitchforked to death. My Maggie. You were going to hang Belinda on a hook. My Belinda. You're the man who loves death. Try it at close quarters for a change.' I moved towards the loading door, checked and looked at him again. 'And if I don't find Belinda alive, I'm not coming back.' You were going to hang Belinda on a hook. My Belinda. You're the man who loves death. Try it at close quarters for a change.' I moved towards the loading door, checked and looked at him again. 'And if I don't find Belinda alive, I'm not coming back.'

Goodbody moaned like some stricken animal and gazed with a horrified and shuddering revulsion at the two dead men who made him prisoner. I walked to the loading doors and glanced down.

Trudi was lying spreadeagled on the pavement below. I didn't spare her a second glance. Across the street van Gelder was leading Belinda towards the police van. At the door of the van he turned, looked up, saw rne, nodded and opened the door.

I turned away from the loading doors, crossed to the still groggy de Graaf, helped him to his feet and towards the head of the stairs. There, I turned and looked back at Goodbody. His eyes were staring in a fear-crazed face and he was making strange hoa.r.s.e noises deep in his throat. He looked like a man lost for ever in a dark and endless nightmare, a man pursued by fiends and knowing he can never escape.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

Darkness had almost fallen on the streets of Amsterdam. The drizzle was only light, but penetratingly cold as it was driven along by the high gusting wind. In the gaps between the wind-torn clouds the first stars winked palely: the moon was not yet up.

I sat waiting behind the driving wheel of the Opel, parked close to a telephone-box. By and by the box door opened and de Graaf, dabbing with his handkerchief at the blood still oozing from the gash on his forehead, came out and entered the car. I glanced up at him interrogatively.

The area will be completely cordoned within ten minutes. And when I say cordoned, I mean escape-proof. Guaranteed.' He mopped some more blood. 'But how can you be so sure -- '

'h.e.l.l be there.' I started the engine and drove off. 'In the first place, van Gelder will figure it's the last place in Amsterdam we'd ever think of looking for him. In the second place Goodbody, only this morning, removed the latest supply of heroin from Huyler. In one of those big puppets, for a certainty. The puppet wasn't in his car out at the castle, so it must have been left in the church. He'd no time to take it anywhere else. Besides, there's probably another fortune of the stuff lying about the church. Van Gelder's not like Goodbody and Trudi. He's not in the game for the kicks. He's in it for the money -- and he's not going to pa.s.s up all that lovely lolly.'

'Lolly?'

'Sorry. Money. Maybe millions of dollars' worth of the stuff.'

'Van Gelder.' De Graaf shook his head very slowly. 'I can't believe it. A man like that! With a magnificent police record.'

'Save your sympathy for his victims,' I said harshly. I hadn't meant to speak like that to a sick man but I was still a sick man myself: I doubted whether the condition of my head was even fractionally better than that of de Graaf. 'Van Gelder's worse than any of them. You can at least say for Goodbody and Trudi that their minds were so sick and warped and diseased that they were no longer responsible for their actions. But van Gelder isn't sick that way. He does it all cold-bloodedly for money. He knows the score. He knew what was going on, how his psychopathic pal Goodbody was behaving. And he tolerated it. If he could have kept the racket going on for ever, he'd have tolerated Goodbody's lethal aberrations for ever. I looked at de Graaf speculatively. 'You know that his brother and wife were killed in a car smash in Curacao?'

De Graaf paused before replying. 'It was not a tragic accident?'

'It was not a tragic accident. Well never prove it, but I'd wager my pension that it was caused by a combination of his brother, who* was a trained security officer, finding out too much about him and van Gelder's desire to be rid of a wife who was coming between him and Trudi -- in the days before Trudi's more lovable qualities came to the surface. My point is that the man's an ice-cold calculator, quite ruthless and totally devoid of what we'd regard as normal human feelings.'

'You'll never live to collect your pension,' de Graaf said somberly.

'Maybe not. But I was right about one thing.' We'd turned into the ca.n.a.l street of Goodbody's church and there, directly ahead, was the plain blue police van. We didn't stop, but drove past it, parked at the door of the church and got out. A uniformed sergeant came down the steps to greet us and any reactions he had caused by the sight of the two crocks in front of him he hid very well.

'Empty, sir,' he said. 'We've even been up the belfry.' De Graaf turned away and looked at the blue van.

'If Sergeant Gropius says there's no one there, then there's no one there.' He paused, then said slowly: 'Van Gelder's a brilliant man. We know that now. He's not in the church. He's not in Goodbody's house. My men have both sides of the ca.n.a.l and the street sealed off. So, he's not here. He's elsewhere.'

'He's elsewhere, but he's here,' I said. 'If we don't find him, how long will you keep the cordon in position?'

'Till we've searched and then double-checked every house in the street. Two hours, maybe three.'

'And then he could walk away?'

'He could. If he was here.'

'He's here,' I said with certainty. 'It's Sat.u.r.day evening. Do the building workers turn out on Sundays?'

'No.'

'So that gives him thirty-six hours. Tonight, even tomorrow night, he comes down and walks away.'

'My head.' Again de Graaf dabbed at his wound. 'Van Gelder's gun b.u.t.t was very hard. I'm afraid -- '

'He's not down here,' I said patiently. 'Searching the house is a waste of time. And I'm d.a.m.ned certain he's not at the bottom of the ca.n.a.l holding his breath all the time. So where can he be?'

I looked speculatively up into the dark and wind-torn sky. De Graaf followed my line of sight. The shadowy outline of the towering crane seemed to reach up almost to the clouds, the tip of its ma.s.sive horizontal boom lost in the surrounding darkness. The great crane had always struck me as having a weirdly menacing atmosphere about it: tonight -- probably because of what I had in mind -- it looked awesome and forbidding and sinister to a degree.

'Of course,' de Graaf whispered. 'Of course.'

I said: 'Well, then, I'd better be going.'

'Madness! Madness! Look at you, look at your face. You're not well.'

'I'm well enough.'

'Then I'm coming with you,' de Graaf said determinedly.

'No.'

'I have young, fit police officers -- '

'You haven't the moral right to ask any of your men, young and fit or not, to do this. Don't argue. I refuse. Besides, this is no case for a frontal a.s.sault. Secrecy, stealth -- or nothing.'

'He's bound to see you.' Unwillingly or not, de Graaf was coming round to my point of view.

'Not bound to. From his point of view everything below must be in darkness.'

'We can wait,' he urged. 'He's bound to come down. Some time before Monday morning he's bound to come down.'

'Van Gelder takes no delight in death. That we know. But he's totally indifferent to death. That we know also. Lives -- other people's lives -- mean nothing to him.' 'So?'

'Van Gelder is not down here. But neither is Belinda. So she's up there with him -- and when he does come down he'll bring his living s.h.i.+eld with him. I won't be long.'

He made no further effort to restrain me. I left him by the church door, crossed into the building lot, reached the body of the crane and began to climb the endless series of diagonally placed ladders located within the lattice framework of the crane. It was a long climb and one that, in my present physical condition, I could well have done without, but there was nothing particularly exhausting or dangerous about it. Just a long and very tiring climb: the dangerous bit still lay ahead. About three quarters of the way up I paused to catch my breath and looked down.

There was no particular impression of height for the darkness was too complete, the faint street lamps along the ca.n.a.l were only pinpoints of light and the ca.n.a.l itself but a dully gleaming ribbon. It all seemed so remote, so unreal. I couldn't make out the shape of any of the individual houses: all I could discern was the weatherc.o.c.k on the tip of the church steeple and even that was a hundred feet beneath me.

I looked up. The control cabin of the crane was still fifty feet above me, a vaguely seen rectangular darkness against a sky almost as dark. I started to climb again.

Ten feet only separated me from the trapdoor inset in the floor of the cabin when a gap appeared in the clouds and a low moon shone through, a half-moon only, but the contrasting brightness bathed the yellow-painted crane and its ma.s.sive boom in an oddly garish flood of light that highlit every girder and cross-member of the structures. It also highlit me and had the peculiar effect of making me feel as aircraft pilots feel when caught up in a search-light, of being pinned to a wall. I looked up again and could see every rivet-head in the trapdoor and the thought occurred to me that if I could see so well upwards anyone inside could see just as well downwards, and as the more time spent in that exposed position increased the chances of discovery I took my gun from its holster and crept silently up the last few steps of the ladder. I was less than four feet away when the trapdoor lifted a little and a long and very ugly-looking gun barrel protruded through the crack. I should, I know, have felt the chagrin and sickness which comes with the despair of the knowledge of ultimate defeat, but I'd been through too much that day, I'd used up all my emotions, and I accepted the inevitable with a fatalism that surprised even myself. It wasn't any question of willing submission, give me half a chance and I'd have shot it out with him. But I had no chance at all and I just accepted that.

'This is a twenty-four-shot riot gun,' van Gelder said. His voice had a metallically cavernous ring to it with sepulchral overtones that didn't seem at all out of place. 'You know what that means?' 'I know what that means.' 'Let me have your gun, b.u.t.t first.'

I handed over my gun with the good grace and expertise that came from long experience of handing over guns. 'Now that little gun in your sock.'

I handed over the little gun in my sock. The trapdoor opened and I could see van Gelder quite clearly in the moonlight s.h.i.+ning through the cabin windows. 'Come in,' he said. 'There's plenty of room.' I clambered up into the cabin. As van Gelder had said, there was plenty of room, the cabin could have accommodated a dozen people at a pinch. Van Gelder, his usual calm and unruffled self, carried a shoulder-slung and very unpleasant-looking automatic gun. Belinda sat on the floor in a corner, pale-faced and exhausted, with a large Huyler puppet lying beside her. Belinda tried to smile at me but her heart wasn't in it: she had that defenceless and forlorn air about her that near as a toucher had me at van Gelder's throat, gun or no gun, but sanity and a swift estimate of the distance involved made me settle for lowering the trapdoor gently and straightening up in an equally circ.u.mspect manner. I looked at the gun.

'I suppose you got that from the police car?' I said.

'You suppose right.'

'I should have checked on that.'

'You should.' Van Gelder sighed. 'I knew you would come, but you've come a long way for nothing. Turn round.'

I turned round. The blow that struck the back of my head was delivered with nothing like the vigour and the pride in his handiwork that Marcel had displayed, but it was still enough to stun me for a moment and bring me to my knees. I was vaguely conscious of something cold and metallic encircling my left wrist and when I began to take an active interest in what was going on around me again I found that I was sitting almost shoulder to shoulder with Belinda, handcuffed to her right wrist and with the chain pa.s.sing through the metal hand grip above the trapdoor. I rubbed the back of my head tenderly: what with the combined efforts of Marcel and Goodbody and now van Gelder, it had had a rough pa.s.sage that day and ached abominably just about wherever a head could ache.

'Sorry about the head,' van Gelder said. 'But I'd as soon have put handcuffs on a conscious tiger. Well, the moon's almost obscured. One minute and I'll be gone. Three minutes and I'll be on terra firma.'

I stared at him in disbelief. 'You're going down?'

'What else? But not quite in the way you imagine. I've seen the police cordon getting in position -- but no one seems to have caught on to the fact that the tip of the crane extends over the ca.n.a.l and at least sixty feet beyond the cordon. I have already lowered the hook to ground level.'

My head hurt too much for me to come up with a suitable comment: in the circ.u.mstances, there probably was none. Van Gelder slung his gun crosswise over one shoulder and secured the puppet with cord over his other shoulder. Then he said softly: 'Ah, the moon is gone.'

It was. Van Gelder was only a vaguely seen shadow as he crossed to the door let into the front of the cabin near the control panel, opened it and stepped outside.

'Goodbye, van Gelder,' I said. He said nothing. The door closed and we were alone. She caught my handcuffed hand.

'I knew you would come,' she whispered, then, with a flash of the old Belinda: 'But you did take your time about it didn't you?'

'It's like I told you -- the managerial cla.s.ses always have things to attend to.'

'And did you -- did you have to say goodbye to a man like that?'

'I thought I'd better -- I'll never see him again. Not alive.' I fumbled in my right-hand pocket. 'Who would have thought it? Van Gelder, his own executioner.'

'Please?'

'It was his idea to lend me a police taxi -- so that I would be instantly recognizable and easily tailed wherever I went. I had handcuffs -- I used them to secure Goodbody. And keys for the handcuffs. These.'

I unlocked the handcuffs, rose and crossed to the front of the cabin. The moon was behind a cloud, true enough, but van Gelder had overestimated the density of the cloud: admittedly, there was no more than a pale wash of light in the sky but enough to let me see van Gelder, about forty feet out now, the tails of his jacket and the gown of the puppet being tugged by the high wind, as he scuttled like a giant crab across the lattice framework of the boom.

My pencil flash was one of the few things that hadn't been taken from me that day. I used it to locate an overhead breaker and pulled the lever down. Lights glowed in the control panel and I studied it briefly. I was aware that Belinda was now standing by my side.

'What are you going to do?' She was back at her whispering again.

'Do I have to explain?'

'No! No! You can't!' I don't think she knew exactly what I intended to do, but from what must have been some element of irrevocable finality in my voice she clearly guessed that the results of whatever action I took would be of a very permanent nature. I looked again at van Gelder, who was by now three quarters of the way out towards the tip of the boom, then turned to Belinda and put my hands on her shoulders.