Assignment - Lowlands Read Online Free PDF Page B

taxi stand at the corner. Durell followed. Her path was no longer indirect. She headed for Thorbeckeplein, an area of cheap bars and honkytonk cafes notorious in Amsterdam for its women, gin, thieves’ nests, and its danger to unwary tourists. The girl got out of the cab presently and dismissed it to walk alone down a narrow street of red-light houses. Women sat on the steps in the shadowed heat of evening and looked in dull-eyed resentment at the girl’s passage, then perked up as Durell went by and solicited him in a number of overt ways. When the girl turned into a passageway entrance beside a souvenir shop on the edge of an old, baroque apartment house, he paused, gave her a certain amount of time, and then went in, too.
    Just inside the doorway he stopped, considering his next move. The girl in the bright Indonesian dress did not belong here, not by any stretch of the imagination. Her poise and looks all indicated a class and status far above this place. Yet she seemed familiar enough with the environment.
    He went on through the entryway.
    A flight of dark stairs led up toward a buttery radiance. The woodwork was dark, greasy to the touch. Durell mounted the steps silently. He heard a radio playing loudly somewhere. A man said something dim and indistinct from behind a closed door up ahead. At the top of the first flight, Durell halted again. He felt he was being led up into a crude and deliberate trap. But he was ready for it when it happened.
    The girl’s voice drifted down to him from the landing above. “Mynheer, you have been following me?”
    He looked up as she leaned over the balustrade of this tenement house above a souvenir shop. She was smiling.
    “Yes,” he said.
    “Come up, please. We can do business, I think.”
    He had a sudden misgiving that perhaps the girl belonged to Amsterdam’s red-light district, after all. It could have been an innocent coincidence that had taken her into Piet Van Horn’s house earlier. But Durell tended to discount coincidence. He went up to meet her.
    She seemed to be alone. There were other doors in the corridor, brown and shabby, but they were all tightly closed, and no sounds came from behind them. The door directly behind the blonde girl stood ajar, however, and he glimpsed a dingy room with a big Dutch brass bed, an angular dresser, and a window with a black shade drawn down tightly to the sill. There was a smell of coffee, of cooking, of stale perfume and stale love affairs. A single garish electric bulb shed a harsh light behind the girl, outlining the sensual, exaggerated pose of her hip as she waited for him. It served to keep her face in the shadow as she stood with her back to the light, and all he could see was the hint of a mocking smile, the gleam of moisture in her long eyes. He had a sudden impression of the Orient, somehow, perhaps brought to him by a large brass Balinese idol that stood out against the shabby decor of the girl’s bedroom. But Holland was full of Indonesian art, relics of a lost island empire in the Far East. He could have been mistaken about the slight hint of it in the girl’s face. It seemed to him, when she spoke in Dutch, that there were accents of German in it; but he wasn’t sure. And she quickly switched to English after her first words.
    “Well?” she said. “You stare at me enough, I think. Aren’t you satisfied? Why have you followed me all over town? Or are you one of the shy ones, afraid to do business openly?”
    “That depends on your business,” Durell rejoined.
    She laughed. “Do you have any doubt what it is?” She came toward him in the hallway, hands on hips in an overt invitation. “You will be pleased with me, I am sure. You do like me, no? Otherwise you would not follow me, to be sure. I was very annoyed with you, you know. You could have spoken to me much sooner—perhaps bought my dinner for me. Tell me, are you an American?”
    “Are you German?” Durell asked. 
    She looked startled. “Do I sound