Free Puppet on a Chain by Alistair MacLean Page B

smoke?'
    'None. Only you're not smoking. You know the Police HQ in the Marnixstraat?' The sudden lack of enthusiasm in his expression made it quite clear that he knew it all too well. 'I suggest you go there and ask for either Colonel de Graaf or Inspector van Gelder and tell them that you have a complaint to lodge about Paul Sherman, Room 616, Hotel Excelsior.'
    'Complaint?' he said warily. What complaint?'
    'Tell them that he took the car keys from your ignition and threw them into the canal.' I took the car keys from the ignition and threw them into the canal and a very satisfactory plop they made too as they vanished for ever into the depths of the Prinsengracht. 'Don't follow me around,' I said and closed the door in a manner befitting the end of our brief interview, but Mercedes are well made cars and the door didn't fall off.
    Back in my own taxi I waited till we were back on the main road again, then stopped the taxi. 'I've decided to walk,' I said and paid what was owing.
    'What! To Schiphol?'
    I gave him the sort of tolerant smile one might expect to receive from a long-distance walker whose prowess has been called in question, waited till he had moved from sight, hopped on a 16 tram and got off at the Dam. Belinda, dressed in a dark coat and with a dark scarf over her blonde hair, was waiting for me in the tram shelter. She looked damp and cold.
    'You're late,' she said accusingly.
    'Never criticize your boss, even by implication. The managerial classes always have things to attend to.'
    We crossed the square, retracing the steps the grey man and I had taken the previous night, down the alley by the Krasnapolsky and along the tree-lined Oudezijds Voorburgwal, an area that is one of the cultural highlights of Amsterdam, but Belinda seemed in no mood for culture. A mercurial girl, she seemed withdrawn and remote that night, and the silence was hardly companionable. Belinda had something on her mind and if I were beginning to become any judge of Belinda my guess was that she would let me know about it sooner rather than later. I was right.
    She said abruptly: 'We don't really exist for you, do we?'
    'Who doesn't exist?'
    'Me, Maggie, all the people who work for you. We're just ciphers.'
    'Well, you know how it is,' I said pacifically. 'Ship's captain never mingles socially with the crew.'
    That's what I mean. That's what I say -- we don't really exist for you. We're just puppets to be manipulated so that the master puppeteer can achieve certain ends. Any other puppets would do as well.'
    I said mildly: 'We're here to do very nasty and unpleasant jobs and achieving that end is all that matters. Personalities don't enter into it. You forget that I am your boss, Belinda. I really don't think that you should be talking to me like that.'
    'I'll talk to you any way I like.' Not only mercurial but a girl of spirit; Maggie would never have dreamed of talking to me like that. She considered her last remark, then said more quietly: 'I'm sorry. I shouldn't have spoken like that. But do you have to treat us in this -- this detached and remote fashion and never make contact with us? We are people, you know -- but not for you. You'd pass me in the street tomorrow and not recognize me. You don't notice us.'
    'Oh, I notice all right. Take yourself, for instance.' I carefully refrained from looking at her as we walked along although I knew she was observing me pretty closely. 'New girl to Narcotics. Limited experience Deuxieme Bureau, Paris. Dressed in navy coat, navy scarf spotted with little white edelweiss, knitted white knee-stockings, sensible flat-heeled navy shoes, buckled, five feet four, a figure, to quote a famous American writer, to make a bishop kick a hole through a stained-glass window, a quite beautiful face, platinum blonde hair that looks like spun silk when the sun shines through it, black eyebrows, green eyes, perceptive and, best of all, beginning to worry about her boss, especially his lack of humanity. Oh, I