Puppet on a Chain

Neither girl had ever been to Holland before, which was one of the main reasons why they were accompanying me there: apart from which, lovely young girls in our unlovely profession are rarer than fur coats in the Congo and hence all the more unlikely to attract the attention of the suspicious and the ungodly.

The DC 8 touched down, the undercarriage remained in one piece, so I opened my eyes and began to think of matters of more immediate urgency. Duclos. Jimmy Duclos was waiting to meet me at Schiphol Airport and Jimmy Duclos had something of importance and urgency to convey to me. Too important to send, even though coded, through normal channels of communication: too urgent to wait even for the services of a diplomatic courier from our embassy in The Hague. The probable content of the message I did not concern myself with: I’d know it in five minutes. And I knew it would be what I wanted. Duclos’s sources of information were impeccable, the information itself always precise and one hundred per cent accurate. Jimmy Duclos never made mistakes – not, at least, of this nature.

The DC 8 was slowing down now and I could already see the crocodile disembarkation tube angling out from the side of the main building ready to line up with the plane’s exit when it came to a halt. I unfastened my seatbelt, rose, glanced at Maggie and Belinda without expression or recognition and headed for the exit while the plane was still moving, a manoeuvre frowned upon by the airline authorities and certainly, in this case, by other passengers in the plane whose expressions clearly indicated that they were in the presence of a big-headed and churlish boor who couldn’t wait to take his turn along with the rest of long suffering and queueing mankind. I ignored them. I had long ago resigned myself to the realization that popularity was never to be my lot.

The stewardess smiled at me, though, but this was no tribute to either my appearance or personality. People smile at other people when they are impressed or apprehensive or both. Whenever I travel aboard a plane except when on holiday – which is about once every five years – I hand the stewardess a small sealed envelope for transmission to the plane’s captain and the captain, usually as anxious as the next man to impress a pretty girl, generally divulges the contents to her, which is a lot of fol-de-rol about complete priority under all circumstances and invariably wholly unnecessary except that it ensures one of impeccable and immediate lunch, dinner and bar service. Wholly necessary, though, was another privilege that several of my colleagues and I enjoyed – diplomatic-type immunity to Customs search, which was just as well as my luggage usually contained a couple of efficient pistols, a small but cunningly-designed kit of burglar’s tools and some few other nefarious devices generally frowned upon by the immigration authorities of the more advanced countries. I never wore a gun aboard a plane, for apart from the fact that a sleeping man can inadvertently display a shoulder-holstered gun to a seat companion, thereby causing a whole lot of unnecessary consternation, only a madman would fire a gun within the pressurized cabin of a modern plane. Which accounts for the astonishing success of the sky-jackers: the results of implosion tend to be very permanent indeed.

The exit door opened and I stepped out into the corrugated disembarkation tube. Two or three airport employees politely stood to one side while I passed by and headed for the far end of the tube which debouched on to the terminal floor and the two contra-moving platforms which brought passengers to and from the immigration area.

There was a man standing at the end of the outward-bound moving platform with his back to it. He was of middle height, lean and a great deal less than prepossessing. He had dark hair, a deeply-trenched swarthy face, black cold eyes and a thin slit where his mouth should have been: not exactly the kind of character I would have encouraged to come calling on my daughter. But he was respectably enough dressed in a black suit and black overcoat and – although this was no criterion of respectability – was carrying a large and obviously brand-new airline bag.

But non-existent suitors for non-existent daughters were no concern of mine. I’d moved far enough now to look up the outward-bound moving platform, the one that led to the terminal floor where I stood. There were four people on the platform and the first of them, a tall, thin, grey-suited man with a hairline moustache and all the outward indications of a successful accountant, I recognized at once. Jimmy Duclos. My first thought was that he must have considered his information to be of a vital and urgent nature indeed to come this length to meet me. My second thought was that he must have forged a police pass to get this far into the terminal and that made sense for he was a master forger. My third thought was that it would be courteous and friendly to give him a wave and a smile and so I did. He waved and smiled back.

The smile lasted for all of a second, then jelled almost instantly into an expression of pure shock. It was then I observed, almost sub-consciously, that the direction of his line of sight had shifted fractionally.

I turned round quickly. The swarthy man in the dark suit and coat no longer had his back to the travelator. He had come through 189° and was facing it now, his airline bag no longer dangling from his hand but held curiously high under his arm.

Still not knowing what was wrong, I reacted instinctively and jumped at the man in the black coat. At least, I started to jump. But it had taken me a whole long second to react and the man immediately – and I mean immediately – proceeded to demonstrate to both his and my total conviction that a second was what he regarded as being ample time to carry out any violent manoeuvre he wished. He’d been prepared, I hadn’t, and he proved to be very violent indeed. I’d hardly started to move when he swung round in a viciously convulsive quarter-circle and struck me in the solar plexus with the edge of his airline bag.

Airline bags are usually soft and squashy. This one wasn’t. I’ve never been struck by a pile-driver nor have any desire to be, but I can make a fair guess now as to what the feeling is likely to be. The physical effect was about the same. I collapsed to the floor as if some giant hand had swept my feet from beneath me, and lay there motionless. I was quite conscious. I could see, I could hear, I could to some extent appreciate what was going on around me. But I couldn’t even writhe, which was all I felt like doing at the moment. I’d heard of numbing mental shocks: this was the first time I’d ever experienced a totally numbing physical shock.

Everything appeared to happen in the most ridiculous slow motion. Duclos looked almost wildly around him but there was no way he could get off that travelator. To move backwards was impossible, for three men were crowded close behind him, three men who were apparently quite oblivious of what was going on – it wasn’t until later, much later, that I realized that they must be accomplices of the man in the dark suit, put there to ensure that Duclos had no option other than to go forward with that moving platform and to his death. In retrospect, it was the most diabolically cold-blooded execution I’d heard of in a lifetime of listening to stories about people who had not met their end in the way their Maker had intended.

I could move my eyes, so I moved them. I looked at the airline bag and at one end, from under the flap, there protruded the colander-holed cylinder of a silencer. This was the pile-driver that had brought about my momentary paralysis I –hoped it was momentary – and from the force with which he had struck me I wondered he hadn’t bent it into a U-shape. I looked up at the man who was holding the gun, his right hand concealed under the flap of the bag. There was neither pleasure nor anticipation in that swarthy face, just the calm certainty of a professional who knew how good he was at his job. Somewhere a disembodied voice announced the arrival of flight KL 132 from London – the plane we had arrived on. I thought vaguely and inconsequentially that I would never forget that flight number, but then it would have been the same no matter what flight I’d used for Duclos had been condemned to die before he could ever see me.

I looked at Jimmy Duclos and he had the face of a man condemned to die. His expression was desperate but it was a calm and controlled desperation as he reached deep inside the hampering folds of his coat. The three men behind him dropped to the moving platform and again it was not until much later that the significance of this came upon me. Duclos’s gun came clear of his coat and as it did there was a muted thudding noise and a hole appeared half-way down the left lapel of his coat. He jerked convulsively, then pitched forward and fell on his face: the travelator carried him on to the terminal area and his dead body rolled against mine.

I won’t ever be certain whether my total inaction in the few seconds prior to Duclos’s death was due to a genuine physical paralysis or whether I had been held in thrall by the inevitability of the way in which he died. It is not a thought that will haunt me for I had no gun and there was nothing I could have done. I’m just slightly curious, for there is no question that the touch of his dead body had an immediately revivifying effect upon me.

There was no miraculous recovery. Waves of nausea engulfed me and now that the initial shock of the blow was wearing off my stomach really started to hurt. My forehead ached, and far from dully, from where I must have struck my head on the floor as I had fallen. But a fair degree of muscular control had returned and I rose cautiously to my feet, cautiously because, due to the nausea and dizziness, I was quite prepared to make another involuntary return to the floor at any moment. The entire terminal area was swaying around in the most alarming fashion and I found that I couldn’t see very well and concluded that the blow to my head must have damaged my eyesight, which was very odd as it had appeared to work quite effectively while I was lying on the floor. Then I realized that my eyelids were gumming together and an exploratory hand revealed the reason for this: blood, what briefly but wrongly appeared to me to be a lot of blood, was seeping down from a gash just on the hairline of the forehead. Welcome to Amsterdam, I thought, and pulled out a handkerchief: two dabs and my vision was twenty-twenty again.

From beginning to end the whole thing could have taken no more than ten seconds but already there was a crowd of anxious people milling around as always happens in cases like this: sudden death, violent death, is to man what the opened honey-pot is to bees – the immediate realization of the existence of either calls them forth in spectacular numbers from areas which, seconds previously, appeared to be devoid of all life.

I ignored them, as I ignored Duclos. There was nothing I could do for him now nor he for me, for a search of his clothes would have revealed nothing: like all good agents Duclos never committed anything of value to paper or tape but just filed it away in a highly-trained memory.

The dark and deadly man with the deadly gun would have made good his escape by this time: it was purely the routine and now ingrained instinct of checking even the uncheckable that made me glance towards the immigration area to confirm that he had indeed disappeared.

The dark man had not yet made good his escape. He was about two-thirds of the way along towards the immigration area, ambling unconcernedly along the in-bound moving platform, casually swinging his airline bag, and seemingly unaware of the commotion behind him. For a moment I stared at him, not comprehending, but only for a moment: this was the way the professional made good his escape. The professional pickpocket at Ascot who has just relieved the grey-top-hatted gentleman by his side of his wallet doesn’t plunge away madly through the crowd to the accompaniment of cries of ‘Stop thief’ and the certainty of rapid apprehension: he is more likely to ask his victim his tip for the next race. A casual unconcern, a total normality, that was how the honours graduates in crime did it. And so it was with the dark man. As far as he was concerned I was the only witness to his action, for it was now that I belatedly realized for the first time the part the other three men had played in Duclos’s death they were still in the cluster of people round the dead man but there was nothing I or anybody else could ever prove against them. And, as far as the dark man knew, he’d left me in a state in which I’d be unable to provide him with any trouble for some considerable time to come.

I went after him.

My pursuit didn’t even begin to verge on the spectacular. I was weak, giddy and my midriff ached so wickedly that I found it impossible to straighten up properly, so that the combination of my weaving staggering run along that moving platform with my forward inclination of about thirty degrees must have made me look like nothing as much as a nonagenarian with lumbago in pursuit of God knows what.

I was half-way along the travelator, with the dark man almost at its end, when instinct or the sound of my running feet made him whirl round with the same catlike speed he’d shown in crippling me seconds before. It was immediately clear that he had no difficulty in distinguishing me from any nonagenarians he might have known, for his left hand immediately jerked up his airline bag while the right slid under the flap. I could see that what had happened to Duclos was going to happen to me the travelator would discharge me or what was left of me to the floor at the end of its track: an ignominious way to die.

I briefly wondered what folly had prompted me, an unarmed man, to come in pursuit of a proven killer with a silenced pistol and was on the point of throwing myself flat on the platform when I saw the silencer waver and the dark man’s unwinking gaze switch slightly to the left. Ignoring the probability of being shot in the back of the head, I swung round to follow his line of sight.

The group of people surrounding Duclos had temporarily abandoned their interest in him and transferred it to us: in view of what they must have regarded as my unhinged performance on the travelator it would have been odd if they hadn’t. From the brief glance I had of their faces, their expressions ranged from astonishment to bafflement: there were no traces of understanding. Not in that particular knot of people. But there was understanding in plenty and a chilling purposefulness in the faces of the three men who had followed Duclos to his death: they were now walking briskly up the in-bound travelator behind me, no doubt bent on following me to my death.

I heard a muffled exclamation behind me and turned again. The travelator had reached the end of its track, obviously catching the dark man off guard, for he was now staggering to retain his balance. As I would have expected of him by then he regained it very quickly, turned his back on me and began to run: killing a man in front of a dozen witnesses was a different matter entirely from killing a man in front of one unsupported witness, although I felt obscurely certain that he would have done so had he deemed it essential and the hell with the witnesses. I left the wondering why to later. I started to run again, this time with a deal more purpose, more like a lively septuagenarian.

The dark man, steadily outdistancing me, ran headlong through the immigration hall to the obvious confusion and consternation of the immigration officials, for people are not supposed to rush through immigration halls, they are supposed to stop, show their passports and give a brief account of themselves, which is what immigration halls are for. By the time it came to my turn to run the gamut, the dark man’s hurried departure combined with my weaving staggering run and blood-streaked face had clearly alerted them to the fact that there was something amiss, for two of the immigration officials tried to detain me but I brushed by them – ‘brushed’ was not the word they used in their later complaints – and passed through the exit door the dark man had just used.

At least, I tried to pass through it, but the damned door was blocked by a person trying to enter. A girl, that was all I’d the time or the inclination to register, just any girl. I dodged to the right and she dodged to the left, I dodged to my left, she dodged to her right. Check. You can see the same performance take place practically any minute on any city pavement when two overpolite people, each bent on giving the right of way to the other, side-step with such maladroit effectiveness that they succeed only in blocking each other’s way: given the right circumstances where two really super-sensitive souls encounter each other the whole embarrassing fandango can continue almost indefinitely.

I’m as quick an admirer of a well-executed pas de deux as the next man but I was in no mood to be detained indefinitely and after another bout of abortive side-stepping I shouted ‘Get out of my damned way’ and ensured that she did so by catching her by the shoulder and shoving her violently to one side. I thought I heard a bump and exclamation of pain, but I ignored it: I’d come back and apologize later.

I was back sooner than I expected. The girl had cost me not more than a few seconds, but those few seconds had been more than enough for the dark man. When I reached the concourse, the inevitably crowded concourse, there was no sign whatsoever of him, it would have been difficult to identify a Red Indian chief in full regalia among those hundreds of apparently aimlessly milling people. And it would be pointless to alert the airport security police, by the time I’d established my bona fides he’d be half-way to Amsterdam: even had I been able to get immediate action, their chances of apprehending the dark man would have been remote: highly skilled professionals were at work here, and such men always had the options on their escape routes wide open. I retraced my steps, this time at a leaden trudge, which was by now all I could muster. My head ached viciously but compared to the condition of my stomach I felt it would have been wrong to complain about my head. I felt awful and a glimpse of my pale and blood-smeared face in a mirror did nothing to make me feel any better.

I returned to the scene of my ballet performance where two large uniformed men, with holstered pistols, seized me purposefully by the arms.

‘You’ve got the wrong man,’ I said wearily, ‘so kindly take your damned hands off me and give me room to breathe.’ They hesitated, looked at each other, released me and moved away: they moved away nearly all of two inches. I looked at the girl who was being talked to gently by someone who must have been a very important airport official for he wasn’t wearing a uniform. I looked at the girl again because my eyes ached as well as my head and it was easier looking at her than at the man by her side.

She was dressed in a dark dress and dark coat with the white roll of a polo-necked jumper showing at the throat. She would have been about in her mid-twenties, and her dark hair, brown eyes, almost Grecian features and the olive blush to her complexion made it clear she was no native of those parts. Put her alongside Maggie and Belinda and you’d have to spend not only the best years of your life but also most of the declining ones to find a trio like them, although, admittedly, this girl was hardly looking at her best at that moment: her face was ashen and she was dabbing with a large white handkerchief, probably borrowed from the man at her side, at the blood oozing from an already swelling bruise on her left temple.

‘Good God!’ I said. I sounded contrite and I felt it for no more than the next man am I given to the wanton damaging of works of art. ‘Did I do that?’

‘Of course not.’ Her voice was low and husky but maybe that was only since I’d knocked her down. ‘I cut myself shaving this morning.’

‘I’m terribly sorry. I was chasing a man who’s just killed someone and you got in my way. I’m afraid he escaped.’

‘My name is Schroeder. I work here.’ The man by the girl’s side, a tough and shrewd-looking character in perhaps his mid-fifties, apparently suffered from the odd self-depreciation which unaccountably afflicts so many men who have reached positions of considerable responsibility. ‘We have been informed of the killing. Regrettable, most regrettable. That this should happen in Schiphol Airport!’

‘Your fair reputation,’ I agreed. ‘I hope the dead man is feeling thoroughly ashamed of himself.’

‘Such talk doesn’t help,’ Schroeder said sharply. ‘Did you know the dead men?’

‘How the hell should I? I’ve just stepped off the plane. Ask the stewardess, ask the captain, ask a dozen people who were aboard the plane. KL 132 from London, arrival time 1555.’ I looked at my watch. ‘Good God! Only six minutes ago.’

‘You haven’t answered my question.’ Schroeder not only looked shrewd, he was shrewd.

‘I wouldn’t know him even if I saw him now.’

‘Mm. Has it ever occurred to you, Mr – ah—’

‘Sherman.’

‘Has it ever occurred to you, Mr Sherman, that normal members of the public don’t set off in pursuit of an armed killer?’

‘Maybe I’m sub-normal.’

‘Or perhaps you carry a gun, too?’

I unbuttoned my jacket and held the sides wide.

‘Did you – by any chance – recognize the killer?’

‘No.’ But I’d never forget him, though. I turned to the girl. ‘May I ask you a question, Miss—’