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‘My word,’ I said. ‘You are well informed.’
‘Here, in Amsterdam, we are all subject to the law.’ He might not have heard me. ‘Myself included. You are no exception.’
‘Nor would I expect to be,’ I said virtuously. ‘Well then, co-operation. The purpose of my visit. When can I talk to you?’
‘My office, ten o’clock.’ He looked around the restaurant without enthusiasm. ‘Here is hardly the time and place.’
I raised an eyebrow.
‘The Hotel Rembrandt,’ said de Graaf heavily, ‘is a listening-post of international renown.’
‘You astonish me,’ I said.
De Graaf left. I wondered why the hell he thought I’d chosen to stay in the Hotel Rembrandt.
Colonel de Graaf’s office wasn’t in the least like the Hotel Rembrandt. It was a large enough room, but bleak and bare and functional, furnished mainly with steel-grey filing cabinets, a steel-grey table and steel-grey seats which were as hard as steel. But at least the decor had the effect of making you concentrate on the matter on hand: there was nothing to distract the mind or eye. De Graaf and I, after ten minutes preliminary discussion, were concentrating, although I think it came more easily to de Graaf than it did to me. I had lain awake to a late hour the previous night and am never at my best at ten a.m. on a cold and blustery morning.
‘All drugs,’ de Graaf agreed. ‘Of course we’re concerned with all drugs – opium, cannabis, amphetamine, LSD, STP, cocaine, amyl acetate – you name it, Major Sherman, and we’re concerned in it. They all destroy or lead on to destruction. But in this instance we are confining ourselves to the really evil one – heroin. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’ The deep incisive voice came from the doorway. I turned round and looked at the man who stood there, a tall man in a well-cut dark business suit, cool penetrating grey eyes, a pleasant face that could stop being pleasant very quickly, very professional-looking. There was no mistaking his profession. Here was a cop and not one to be taken lightly either.
He closed the door and walked across to me with the light springy step of a man much younger than one in his middle forties, which he was at least. He put out his hand and said: ‘Van Gelder. I’ve heard a lot about you, Major Sherman.’
I thought this one over, briefly but carefully, decided to refrain from comment. I smiled and shook his hand.
‘Inspector van Gelder,’ de Graaf said. ‘Head of our narcotics bureau. He will be working with you, Sherman. He will offer you the best cooperation possible.’
‘I sincerely hope we can work well together.’ Van Gelder smiled and sat down. ‘Tell me, what progress your end? Do you think you can break the supply ring in England?’
‘I think we could. It’s a highly organized distributive pipeline, very highly integrated with almost no cut-offs – and it’s because of that that we have been able to identify dozens of their pushers and the half-dozen or so main distributors.’
‘You could break the ring but you won’t. You’re leaving it strictly alone?’
‘What else, Inspector? We break them up and the next distribution ring will be driven so far underground that we’ll never find it. As it is, we can pick them up when and if we want to. The thing we really want to find out is how the damned stuff gets in – and who’s supplying it.’
‘And you think – obviously, or you wouldn’t be here – that the supplies come from here? Or hereabouts?’
‘Not hereabouts. Here. And I don’t think. I know. Eighty per cent of those under surveillance – and I refer to the distributors and their intermediaries – have links with this country. To be precise, with Amsterdam – nearly all of them. They have relatives here, or they have friends. They have business contacts here or personally conduct business here or they come here on holiday. We’ve spent five years on building up this dossier.’
De Graaf smiled. ‘On this place called “here”.’
‘On Amsterdam, yes.’
Van Gelder asked: ‘There are copies of this dossier?’
‘One.’
‘With you?’
‘Yes.’
‘On you?’
‘In the only safe place.’ I tapped my head.
‘As safe a place as any,’ de Graaf approved, then added thoughtfully: ‘As long, of course, that you don’t meet up with people who might be inclined to treat you the way you treat them.’
‘I don’t understand, Colonel.’
‘I speak in riddles,’ de Graaf said affably. ‘All right, I agree. At the moment the finger points at the Netherlands. Not to put too fine a point on it, as you don’t put too fine a point on it, at Amsterdam. We, too, know our unfortunate reputation. We wish it was untrue. But it isn’t. We know the stuff comes in in bulk. We know it goes out again all broken up – but from where or how we have no idea.’
‘It’s your bailiwick,’ I said mildly.
‘It’s what?’
‘It’s your province. It’s in Amsterdam. You run the law in Amsterdam.’
‘Do you make many friends in the course of a year?’ van Gelder enquired politely.
‘I’m not in this business to make friends.’
‘You’re in this business to destroy people who destroy people,’ de Graaf said pacifically. ‘We know about you. We have a splendid dossier on you. Would you like to see it?’
‘Ancient history bores me.’
‘Predictably.’ De Graaf sighed. ‘Look, Sherman, the best police forces in the world can come up against a concrete wall. That’s what we have done – not that I claim we’re the best. All we require is one lead – one single solitary lead … Perhaps you have some idea, some plan?’
‘I arrived only yesterday.’ I fished inside the inside of my lower right trouser-leg and gave the Colonel the two scraps of paper I’d found in the dead floor waiter’s pockets. ‘Those figures. Those numbers. They mean anything to you?’
De Graaf gave them a cursory glance, held them up before a bright desk-lamp, laid them down on the desk. ‘No.’
‘Can you find out? If they have any meaning?’
‘I have a very able staff. By the way, where did you get these?’
‘A man gave them to me.’
‘You mean you got them from a man.’
‘There’s a difference?’
‘There could be a very great difference,’ De Graaf leaned forward, face and voice very earnest. ‘Look, Major Sherman, we know about your technique of getting people off balance and keeping them there. We know about your propensity for stepping outside the law—’
‘Colonel de Graaf!’
‘A well-taken point. You’re probably never inside it to start with. We know about this deliberate policy admittedly as effective as it is suicidal – of endless provocation, waiting for something, for somebody to break. But please, Major Sherman, please do not try to provoke too many people in Amsterdam. We have too many canals.’
‘I won’t provoke anyone,’ I said. ‘I’ll be very careful.’
‘I’m sure you will.’ De Graaf sighed. ‘And now, I believe, van Gelder has a few things to show you.’
Van Gelder had. He drove me in his own black Opel from the police HQ in the Marnixstraat to the city mortuary and by the time I left there I was wishing he hadn’t.
The city mortuary lacked the old-world charm, the romance and nostalgic beauty of old Amsterdam. It was like the city mortuary in any big town, cold – very cold – and clinical and inhuman and repelling. The central block had down its centre two rows of white slabs of what appeared to be marble and almost certainly wasn’t, while the sides of the room were lined with very large metal doors. The principal attendant here, resplendent in an immaculately starched white coat, was a cheerful, rubicund, genial character who appeared to be in perpetual danger of breaking out into gales of laughter, a very odd characteristic indeed, one would have thought, to find in a mortuary attendant until one recalled that more than a handful of England’s hangmen in the past were reckoned to be the most rollicking tavern companions one could ever hope to have.
At a word from van Gelder, he led us to one of the big metal doors, opened it and pulled out a wheeled metal rack that ran smoothly on steel runners. A white-sheeted form lay on this rack.
‘The canal he was found in is called the Croquiskade,’ van Gelder said. He seemed quite unemotional about it. ‘Not what you might call the Park Lane of Amsterdam – it’s down by the docks. Hans Gerber. Nineteen. I won’t show you his face – he’s been too long in the water. The fire brigade found him when they were fishing out a car. He could have been there another year or two. Someone had twisted a few old lead pipes about his middle.’
He lifted a corner of the sheet to expose a flaccid emaciated arm. It looked for all the world as if someone had trodden all over it with spiked climbing boots. Curious purple lines joined many of those punctures and the whole arm was badly discoloured. Van Gelder covered it up without a word and turned away. The attendant wheeled the rack inside again, closed the door, led us to another door and repeated the performance of wheeling out another corpse, smiling hugely the while like a bankrupt English duke showing the public round his historic castle.
‘I won’t show you this one’s face either,’ van Gelder said. ‘It is not nice to look on a boy of twenty-three who has the face of a man of seventy.’ He turned to the attendant. ‘Where was this one found?’
‘The Oosterhook,’ the attendant beamed. ‘On a coal barge.’
Van Gelder nodded. ‘That’s right. With a bottle – an empty bottle – of gin beside him. The gin was all inside him. You know what a splendid combination gin and heroin is.’ He pulled back the sheet to reveal an arm similar to the one I’d just seen. ‘Suicide – or murder?’
‘It all depends.’
‘On?’
‘Whether he bought the gin himself. That would make it suicide – or accidental death. Someone could have put the full bottle in his hand. That would make it murder. We had a case just like it last month in the Port of London. We’ll never know.’
At a nod from van Gelder, the attendant led us happily to a slab in the middle of the room. This time van Gelder pulled back the sheet from the top. The girl was very young and very lovely and had golden hair.
‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’ van Gelder asked. ‘Not a mark on her face. Julia Rosemeyer from East Germany. All we know of her, all we will ever know of her. Sixteen, the doctors guess.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘Fell six stories to a concrete pavement.’
I thought briefly of the ex-floor-waiter and how much better he would have looked on this slab, then asked: ‘Pushed?’
‘Fell. Witnesses. They were all high. She’d been talking all night about flying to England. She had some obsession about meeting the Queen. Suddenly she scrambled on to the parapet of the balcony, said she was flying to see the Queen – and, well, she flew. Fortunately, there was no one passing beneath at the time. Like to see more?’
‘I’d like to have a drink at the nearest pub, if you don’t mind.’
‘No.’ He smiled but there wasn’t anything humorous about it. ‘Van Gelder’s fireside. It’s not far. I have my reasons.’
‘Your reasons?’
‘You’ll see.’
We said goodbye and thanks to the happily smiling attendant, who looked as if he would have liked to say, ‘Haste ye back’ but didn’t. The sky had darkened since early morning and big heavy scattered drops of rain were beginning to fall. To the east the horizon was livid and purple, more than vaguely threatening and foreboding. It was seldom that a sky reflected my mood as accurately as this.
Van Gelder’s fireside could have given points to most English pubs I knew: an oasis of bright cheerfulness compared to the sheeting rain outside, to the rippled waves of water running down the windows, it was warm and cosy and comfortable and homely, furnished in rather heavy Dutch furniture with over-stuffed armchairs, but I have a strong partiality for over-stuffed armchairs: they don’t mark you so much as the under-stuffed variety. There was a russet carpet on the floor and the walls were painted in different shades of warm pastel colours. The fire was all a fire ever should be and van Gelder, I was happy to observe, was thoughtfully studying a very well-stocked glass liquor cupboard.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you took me to that damned mortuary to make your point. I’m sure you made it. What was it?’
‘Points, not point. The first one was to convince you that we here are up against an even more vicious problem than you have at home. There’s another half-dozen drug addicts in the mortuary there and how many of them died a natural death is anyone’s guess. It’s not always as bad as this, those deaths seem to come in waves, but it still represents an intolerable loss of life and mainly young life at that: and for every one there, how many hundred hopeless addicts are there in the streets?’
‘Your point being that you have even more incentive than I to seek out and destroy those people – and that we are attacking a common enemy, a central source of supply?’
‘Every country has only one king.’
‘And the other point?’
‘To reinforce Colonel de Graaf’s warning. Those people are totally ruthless. Provoke them too much, get too close to them – well, there’s still a few slabs left in the mortuary.’
‘How about that drink?’ I said.
A telephone bell rang in the hallway outside. Van Gelder murmured an apology and went to answer it. Just as the door closed behind him a second door leading to the room opened and a girl entered. She was tall and slender and in her early twenties and was dressed in a dragon-emblazoned multi-hued housecoat that reached almost to her ankles. She was quite beautiful, with flaxen hair, an oval face and huge violet eyes that appeared to be at once humorous and perceptive, so striking in overall appearance that it was quite some time before I remembered what passed for my manners and struggled to my feet, no easy feat from the depths of that cavernous armchair.
‘Hullo,’ I said. ‘Paul Sherman.’ It didn’t sound much but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Almost as if embarrassed, the girl momentarily sucked the tip of her thumb, then smiled to reveal perfect teeth.
‘I am Trudi. I do not speak good English.’ She didn’t either, but she’d the nicest voice for speaking bad English I’d come across in a long time. I advanced with my hand out, but she made no move to take it: instead she put her hand to her mouth and giggled shyly. I am not accustomed to have fully-grown girls giggle shyly at me and was more than a little relieved to hear the sound of the receiver being replaced and van Gelder’s voice as he entered from the hall.
‘Just a routine report on the airport business. Nothing to go on yet—’
Van Gelder saw the girl, broke off, smiled and advanced to put his arm round her shoulders.
‘I see you two have met each other.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘not quite—’ then broke off in turn as Trudi reached up and whispered in his ear, glancing at me out of the corner of her eye. Van Gelder smiled and nodded and Trudi went quickly from the room. The puzzlement must have shown in my face, for van Gelder smiled again and it didn’t seem a very happy smile to me.
‘She’ll be right back, Major. She’s shy at first, with strangers. Just at first.’
As van Gelder had promised, Trudi was back almost immediately. She was carrying with her a very large puppet, so wonderfully made that at first glance it could have been mistaken for a real child. It was almost three feet in length with a white wimple hat covering flaxen curls of the same shade as Trudi’s own and was wearing an ankle-length billowy striped silk dress and a most beautifully embroidered bodice. Trudi clasped this puppet as tightly as if it had been a real child. Van Gelder again put his arm round her shoulders.
‘This is my daughter, Trudi. A friend of mine, Trudi. Major Sherman, from England.’
This time she advanced without any hesitation, put her hand out, made a small bobbing motion like the beginnings of a curtsy, and smiled.
‘How do you do, Major Sherman?’
Not to be outdone in courtesy I smiled and bowed slightly. ‘Miss van Gelder. My pleasure.’
‘My pleasure.’ She turned and looked enquiringly at van Gelder.
‘English is not one of Trudi’s strong points,’ van Gelder said apologetically. ‘Sit down, Major, sit down.’
He took a bottle of Scotch from the sideboard, poured drinks for myself and himself, handed me mine and sank into his chair with a sigh. Then he looked up at his daughter, who was gazing steadily at me in a way that made me feel more than vaguely uncomfortable.
‘Won’t you sit down, my dear?’
She turned to van Gelder, smiled brightly, nodded and handed the huge puppet to him. He accepted it so readily that he was obviously used to this sort of thing.
