'I thought it lent a nice touch of authenticity. But it shall be done. Pick up anything back in the house there?'

'Nothing that you didn't. Interesting that the tall thin man should be accompanied by a couple of mutes. It has occurred to you that if the leader, as Dekker calls him, is a foreigner then his henchmen are also probably foreigners and may very well be unable to speak a word of Dutch?' 'It had occurred and it is possible. Dekker said that the leader gave orders which would give one to understand that they spoke, or at least understood, Dutch. Doesn't necessarily follow, of course. The orders may have been meaningless and given only to convince the listener that the others were Dutch. Pity that Dekker has never ventured beyond the frontiers of his own homeland. He might - I say just might - have been able to identify the country of origin of the owner of that voice. I speak two or three languages, Peter, you even more. Do you think, if we'd heard this person speaking, we'd have been able to tell his country?' 'There's a chance. I wouldn't put it higher than that. I know what you're thinking, sir. The tape-recording that this newspaper sub-editor made of the phone call they received. Chances there would be much poorer - you know how a phone call can distort a voice. And they don't strike me as people who would make such a fairly obvious mistake. Besides, even if we did succeed in guessing at the country of origin, how the h.e.l.l would that help us in tracking them down?'

De Graaf lit up a very black cheroot. Van Effen wound down his window. De Graaf paid no attention. He said: 'You're a great comforter. Give us a few more facts - or let's dig up a few more - and it might be of great help to us. Apart from the fact, not yet established, that he may be a foreigner, all we know about this lad is that he's very tall, built along the lines of an emaciated garden rake and has something wrong with his eyes.' 'Wrong? The eyes, I mean, sir? All we know for certain is that he wears sun-gla.s.ses at. night-time. Could mean anything or nothing. Could be a fad. Maybe he fancies himself in them. Maybe, as Dekker suggested, he thinks sun-gla.s.ses are de rigueur for the better cla.s.s villain. Maybe, like the American President's Secret Service body-guards, he wears them because any potential malefactor in a crowd can never know whether the agent's eyes are fixed on him or not, thereby inhibiting him from action. Or he might be just suffering from nyctalopia.'

'I see. Nyctalopia. Every schoolboy knows, of course. I am sure, Peter, that you will enlighten me at your leisure.'

'Funny old word to describe a funny old condition. I am told it's the only English language word with two precisely opposite meanings. On the one hand, it means night-blindness, the recurrent loss of vision after sunset, the causes of which are only vaguely understood. On the other hand, it can be taken to

day-blindness, the inability to see clearly except by night, and here the causes are equally obscure. A rare disease, whatever meaning you take, but its existence has been well attested to.

The sun-gla.s.ses, as we think of them, may well be fitted with special correctional lenses.'

'It would appear to me that a criminal suffering from either manifestation of this disease would be labouring under a severe occupational handicap. Both a house-breaker, who operates by daylight, and a burglar, who operates by night, would be a bit restricted in their movements if they were afflicted, respectively, by day or night blindness. just a little bit too far-fetched for me, Peter. I prefer the old-fashioned reasons. Badly scarred about the eyes. Cross-eyed. Maybe he's got a squint. Maybe an eye whose iris is streaked or parti-coloured. Maybe wall-eyed, where the iris is so light that you can hardly distinguish it from the white or where the pupils are of two different colours. Maybe a sufferer from exophthalmic goitrc, which results in very protuberant eyes. Maybe he's only got one eye. In any event, I'd guess he's suffering from some physical abnormality by which he would be immediately identifiable without the help of those dark gla.s.ses.'

'So now all we've got to do is to ask Interpol for a list, world-wide, of all known criminals with eye defects. There must be tens of thousands of them. Even if there were only ten on the list, it still wouldn't help us worth a d.a.m.n. Chances are good, of course, that he hasn't even got a criminal record.' Van Effen pondered briefly. 'Or maybe they could give us a list of all albino criminals on their books. They need gla.s.ses to hide their eyes.

'The Lieutenant is pleased to be facetious,' de Graaf said morosely. He puffed on his cheroot, then said, almost wonderingly: 'By Jove, Peter. You could be right.'

Ahead, Dekker had slowed to a stop and now van Effen did also. Two boats were moored alongside a ca.n.a.l bank, both about eleven or twelve metres in length, with two cabins and an open p.o.o.p deck. The two policemen joined Dekker aboard his boat: Bakkeren boarded his own which lay immediately ahead. Dekker said: 'Well, gentlemen, what do you want to check first?' De Graaf said: 'How long have you had this boat?'

'Six years.'

'In that case, I don't think Lieutenant van Effen or I will bother to check anything. After six years, you must know every comer, every nook and cranny on this boat. So we'd be grateful if you'd do the checking. just tell us if there is anything here, even the tiniest thing, that shouldn't be here: or anything that's missing that should be here. You might, first, be so good as to ask your brother-in-law to do the same aboard his boat.'

Some twenty minutes later the brothers-in-law were able to state definitely that nothing had been left behind and that, in both cases, only two things had been taken: beer from the fridges and diesel from the tanks. Neither Dekker nor Bakkeren could say definitely how many cans of beer had been taken, they didn't count such things: but both were adamant that each fuel tank was down by at least twenty litres. 'Twenty litres each?' van Effen said. 'Well, they wouldn't have used two litres to get from here to the airport ca.n.a.l bank and back. So they used the engine for some other purpose. Can you open the engine hatch and let me have a torch?'

Van Effen's check of the engine-room battery was cursory, seconds only, but sufficient. He said: 'Do either of you two gentlemen ever use crocodile clips when using or charging your batteries - you know, those spring-loaded grips with the serrated teeth? No? Well, someone was using them last night. You can see the indentations on the terminals. They had the batteries in your two boats connected up, in parallel or series, it wouldn't have mattered, they'd have been using a transformer, and ran your engines to keep the batteries charged. Hence the missing forty litres.'

'I suppose,' Dekker said, 'that was what that gangster meant by incidental costs.'

'I suppose it was.'

De Graaf lowered himself, not protesting too much, into the springless, creaking pa.s.senger seat of the ancient Peugeot just as the radio telephone rang. Van Effen answered then pa.s.sed the phone across to de Graaf who spoke briefly then returned the phone to its concealed position. 'I feared this,' de Graaf said. He sounded weary. 'My minister wants me to fly up with him to Texel. Taking half the cabinet with him, I understand.'

'Good G.o.d! Those rubber-necking clowns. What on earth do they hope to achieve by being up there? They'll only get in everyone's way, gum up the works and achieve nothing: but, then, they're very practised in that sort of thing.'

'I would remind you, Lieutenant van Effen, that you are talking about elected Ministers of the Crown .'If the words were intended as a reprimand, de Graaf's heart wasn't in it.

'A useless and incompetent bunch. Make them look important, perhaps get their name in the papers, might even be worth a vote or two among the more backward of the electorate. Still, I'm sure you'll enjoy it, sir.' De Graaf glowered at him then said hopefully: 'I don't suppose you'd like to come, Peter?'

'You don't suppose quite correctly, sir. Besides, I have things to do. '

'Do you think I don't?' De Graaf looked and sounded very gloomy. 'Ah! But I'm only a cop. You have to be a cop and a diplomat. I'll drop you off at the office.'

'Join me for lunch?'

'Like to, sir, but I'm having lunch at an establishment, shall we say, where Amsterdam's Chief of Police wouldn't be seen dead. La Caracha it's called. Your wife and daughters wouldn't approve, sir.' 'Business, of course?'

'Of course. A little talk with a couple of our friends in the Krakers. You asked me a couple of months ago to keep a discreet, apart from an official, eye on them. They report occasionally, usually at La Caracha.' 'Ah! The Krakers. Haven't had much time to think of them in the past two months. And how are our disenchanted youth, the anti-everything students, the flower men, the hippies, the squatters?'

'And the drug-pushers and gun-runners? Keeping a suspiciously low profile, these days. I must say I feel happier, no that's not the word, less worried when they're heaving iron bars and bricks at our uniformed police and overturning and burning the odd car, because then we know where we are: with this unusual peace and quiet and uncharacteristic inactivity, I feel there's trouble brewing somewhere.' 'You're not actually looking for trouble, Peter?'

'I've got the nasty feeling I'm going to find it anyway. Looking will be quite unnecessary. Yesterday afternoon, when that call came from the FFF, I sent two of our best people into the area. They might come across something. An off-chance. But the crime in Amsterdam is becoming more and more centralized in the Kraker area. The FFF would you say qualify as criminals?'

'Birds of a feather? Well, maybe. But the FFF seem like pretty smart boys, maybe too smart to a.s.sociate with the Krakers, who could hardly be called the intellectual t.i.tans of crime.'

'The FFF. So far we've got a pretty tall fellow, with maybe something wrong with his eyes and maybe of foreign extraction. We've practically got it all wrapped up.'

'Sarcasm ill becomes you. All right, all right, no stone unturned, any action is better than nothing. What's the food like at La Caracha?' 'For that area, surprisingly good. I've had a few meals -' He broke off and looked at de Graaf. 'You are going to honour us at the table, sir?' 'Well, I thought, I mean, as Chief of Police

'Of course, of course. Delighted.'

'And no one will know where I am. 'De Graaf seemed cheered at the prospect. 'That d.a.m.ned radio phone can ring its head off for all I care. I won't be able to hear it.'

'n.o.body else will be able to hear it either. That d.a.m.ned phone, as you call it, will be switched off the moment we park. How do you think the dockland citizens are going to react when they hear a phone go off in this relic?' They drove off. By and by de Graaf fit another cheroot, van Effen lowered his window and de Graaf said: 'You have, of course, checked up on the proprietor of La Caracha. What's he called?'

'He prefers to be known just as George. I know him moderately well. He's held in high regard among the local people.'

'A kindly man? A do-gooder? Charitable? An upstanding citizen, you would say?'

'He's reputed to be a ranking member of three, perhaps four, successful criminal organizations. Not drugs, not prost.i.tution, he despises those and won't touch them: robbery, it is said, is his forte, usually armed, with or without violence according to the amount of resistance offered. He, himself, can be extremely violent. I can testify to that personally. The violence, of course, was not directed at me: you have to be out of your mind to attack a police lieutenant and George is very far from being out of his mind.'

'You do have a genius for picking your friends, a.s.sociates, or whatever you call them, Peter.' De Graaf puffed at his cheroot and if he was ruffled in any way he didn't show it. 'Why isn't this menace to society behind bars?' 'You can't arrest, charge, try and convict a man on hearsay. I can't very well go up to George with a pair of handcuffs and say: "People have been telling me stories and I have to take you in." Besides, we're friends.' 'You've said yourself that he can be excessively violent. You can pull him in on that.'

'No. He's ent.i.tled to eject any person who is drunk, abusive, uses foul language or is guilty of causing an affray. That's the limit of George's violence. Ejection. Usually two at a time. The law says he can. We are the law.'

'Sounds an interesting character. Unusual, one might say. Two at a time, eh?'

'Wait till you see George.'

'And how do you propose to introduce me?'

'No need to emphasize the police connections. Just Colonel de Graaf. This is, shall we say, a semi-official visit.'

'I may be recognized.'

'Colonel, there isn't a self-respecting criminal in this city who wouldn't recognize you at a distance of half a kilometre. When their kids are misbehaving they probably whip out your picture, show it to their offspring and tell them if they don't mend their ways - the bogeyman will come and get them.'

'Extremely witty. You're not exactly unknown yourself, Peter. I'd be curious to know what the - ah - criminal element hereabouts think about you.'

'You don't have to be curious. They think I'm bent.' The unprepossessing entrance to La Caracha was located halfway down a lane so narrow that not even a car could enter it. The cracker plaster of the tiny entrance porch, the fading and peeling paint belied the bar room that lay beyond. This was well lit and clean, with gleaming knotted-pine walls, half-a-dozen tables, each with four small armchairs instead of the usual metal or plastic seats, a semi-circular bar flanked by fixed stools and, beyond the bar, the barman. When one looked at him one forgot about the rest of the room.

He was huge. Very tall and very broad he probably weighed in about a hundred and thirty kilos. He wore a rather splendid Mexican sombrero - one a.s.sumed there was some connection between the barman's headgear and the vaguely Latin American name of the restaurant - a white shirt, a black string tie, an open black waistcoat and black leather trousers. The absence of a gun-belt and a holstered Peacemaker Colt struck a discordant note. The eyes were dark, the bushy eyebrows black and the equally black moustache, equally bushy, luxuriant and dropping down past the corners of his mouth, perfectly complemented the spectacular sombrero. The craggy face appeared to have been hacked from granite by an enthusiastic but ungifted stone-mason. He was the epitome of all those 'wanted' portraits that used to adorn the walls of nineteenth century western American saloons.

'That's George?' Van Effen didn't bother. to answer the superfluous question. 'When he ejects them two at a time I a.s.sume he uses only one hand.'

George caught sight of them and hurried round the corner of the bar, a wide, welcoming smile revealing startlingly white teeth. The nearer he approached, the bigger he seemed to become. His hand was out-stretched while he was still quite some distance away.