Packer was still trying to think of something to say when they pulled into a muddy space and stopped. He had his hand on the door catch, and was out of the taxi before the driver had time to switch off. He backed away a couple of paces and stood with his body flexed, hands at his sides, fingers stiff. Even if Pol were armed, in his present state he should present little difficulty. It was the driver who worried Packer. From what he’d seen of him he looked young and fit.
But the driver did not move. Packer watched Pol clamber out, almost sitting down in the mud as he did so, his egg-shaped face streaming with sweat; then he came squelching round to the front of the taxi and clutched hold of Packer’s arm, as though to steady himself from falling.
‘We have arrived!’ he gasped, and with his free hand he waved at a row of coaches parked next to a barn. Beyond, Packer could now see bright splashes of red and pink and yellow, and groups of people with umbrellas. Hardly the place for a quick showdown on the outskirts of Amsterdam, he thought. This was a civilized country, after all; which only made the intrusion of this drunk French ‘business consultant’, who had followed him here, and knew his name, even his former rank, all the more incongruous and mystifying.
‘Come, mon cher, now we start the hunt for your little friend!’ He was still holding Packer’s arm, with a surprisingly firm grip; and began leading him past the row of coaches to the tulip fields. They made slow progress, with Pol’s pear-shaped body wobbling and lurching on two tiny feet in what looked like ballet slippers, almost small enough for a child.
When they reached the edge of the field, Packer saw that it was not going to be easy to find Sarah. There were at least a hundred people moving among the tulip beds and her red beret would be lost in the blaze of colour. Even when he did find her, he wondered how the hell he was going to rid himself of this awful Frenchman. For Sarah possessed a particular aversion, which she did little to disguise, to all forms of both grossness and drunkenness. Even if Pol had been sober, Packer knew that she would hardly welcome him as a new-found holiday friend.
A moment later he realized that his anxieties would soon be settled, one way or the other. The rain had slackened to a drizzle, and Sarah’s small familiar figure stood alone, near the barn, the scarlet beret pulled down aggressively over one eye. She was staring at a bed of unnaturally large yellow tulips. Unfortunately, Pol saw her at the same time, and evidently recognized her. He let out a whooping shriek, and with his free hand pulled a stone bottle of Bols gin from his pocket.
Packer shook himself free and began striding down the path towards Sarah. She noticed him when he was some yards away. ‘Hallo. You were quick,’ she said, without enthusiasm. ‘What happened to the windmill?’
‘Lousy.’ He reached her and lowered his voice. ‘You were right — somebody was following both of us.’ He turned and nodded to where he had left Pol floundering on the edge of a tulip patch. ‘The fat man over there, with the beard — is that the one?’
She looked back at Pol and shrugged. ‘Never seen him before. He looks drunk.’
‘He is — smashed out of his skull. What’s more, he knows my name, and that I was a Captain, and he knows about you.’
As they both stood looking, Pol — with the grotesque abandon of a stage drunk — waved his bottle at them, unscrewed the top and began gulping from the neck.
‘Who did you think was following you?’ Packer persisted.
‘No one important. That man I was sitting next to in the boat — he was French too, or at least he spoke French. He’s gone now.’
She was interrupted by a yelp of laughter; and they both looked round in time to see Pol coming towards them at a lumbering, lurching trot, his open bottle held precariously aloft. He had covered half the distance when he came to grief. An unusually deep puddle tipped him off balance and sent him sprawling sideways into a bed of magnificent tulips. Many dozens of full-bodied blooms, each of which had been nursed from its earliest shoot to its present ripe maturity — to be bought and sold all over the world, to decorate great homes and palaces, to carry off prizes at international flower shows — now had their lush stems and fleshy petals crushed and flattened under the Frenchman’s colossal weight.
A number of tourists were near enough to see; but all they did was gape. Pol himself was the first to recover. It would be incorrect to say that he got to his feet, but rather to his hands and knees; and it was in this position, like a monstrously inflated baby with a false beard, that he began to scramble forward on all fours — not back to the path, but even deeper into the tulip bed. He seemed to be taking a direct short cut to where Sarah and Packer were standing, about fifty feet away. He paused only once, to take a swig from the bottle which he had somehow managed to keep upright. On and on he came, leaving a wide, dishevelled path of decapitated flowers.
Then, from the direction of the barn, came a guttural roar, and a man with white hair and a brown stringy face began sprinting down the path towards Packer and Sarah, turning sharply left when he reached the original trough of chaos left by Pol. He was shouting all the way, and carrying a stick of thick knotted
