Page 13 of The Amsterdam Enigma (The Continental Capers of Melody Chesterton #3)
E arly the following morning, Rat crossed Prins Hendrikkade, dodging a cart stacked with milk churns, and headed east along the Oude Schans canal.
The city was awakening; shopkeepers opened their shutters, market vendors began laying out their wares, and the occasional sweep brushed horse dung into the gutter.
As Rat rounded Montelbaanstoren, he passed its crooked clock tower and cut south along Uilenburgerstraat, the old Jewish quarter.
He kept his flat cap low as he crossed the Nieuwe Herengracht, which appeared to be a rather fancy part of town with its stone-faced townhouses and iron balconies, before turning east onto Sarphatistraat.
A steam tram hissed past him. It was tempting to hop on it, but Rat decided against it at the last moment.
He aimed to enter the docks as inconspicuously as possible.
If his narrative was desperation for work, Rat didn’t want to do anything to reveal that as a ruse.
Soon enough, he reached Kadijksplein, where the air was thick with coal smoke and tannin.
A flock of seagulls ahead was his first clue that he was almost at the water.
The next indication was the noise. Even though it was barely past dawn, chains were already clanking, the gulls were screeching, and a constant sound of yelling filled the air.
Then there was the smell: old salt, coal smoke, rope, and something sharp and spicy .
The old customs house loomed nearby. Beyond that, he could see the cranes and warehouses of the Entrepotdok, rising like a city of iron.
He reached the gate where a line of men stood, hoping for a day’s work. Rat joined the queue and by the time the foreman shouted “Naam?” Rat had one made up: Ernie Thumbull.
Ernie Thumbull was someone Rat had known in his Whitechapel days.
He always seemed to be down on his luck and had a sob story prepared about why he didn’t have the coin to pay for his drinks in The Cock.
Ernie’s saving grace was his good humour; he always had an amusing tale to share and appeared to accept his lot in life with equanimity.
Rat thought he would be the perfect person to pretend to be for the day.
Rat hadn’t had to fall back on his cockney accent in a very long time.
In fact, he had spent so much time and energy trying not to drop his aitches that he was a little worried he wouldn’t be able to revert convincingly.
But then he reminded himself that a Dutch foreman was unlikely to be an expert on how someone from Whitechapel should sound.
He just hoped there wasn’t anyone at the docks that day who might be more knowledgeable.
As he waited in line, Rat noted his surroundings.
There was something quite impressive about the Entrepotdok.
It seemed to stretch on indefinitely. Long lines of warehouses, brick and iron, jutted out over the water.
Trams clattered by, flatbeds stacked high with crates marked in painted letters that resembled the markings Rat had seen on the scrap of the manifest.
Surrounding him, Dutchmen, also seeking a day’s work, muttered and coughed into their scarves, stamping their boots against the cobbles of the quay. He didn’t understand the words, but the tone was familiar – grumbling about work, weather, and wages, the universal language of the labouring poor.
A bell tolled from within the yard, and the heavy gate creaked open.
The queue lurched forward. The foreman, a stout man in a wool coat and oil-stained cap, stood just beyond, flanked by two younger clerks with ledgers.
The foreman had a face resembling a butcher’s block: scarred, weathered, and indifferent.
One by one, the men stepped forward, gave their names, and were waved in or turned away .
Rat shuffled forward with the others, keeping his gaze fixed on the ground.
When his turn arrived, the foreman scrutinised him as if he were a butcher assessing a side of beef.
Rat detected a flicker of suspicion in the man’s eyes and compelled himself to cough, hacking as though he had spent the last month sleeping in alleys.
“Sprak je Nederlands?” the foreman asked.
Rat gave a vague shake of his head and mimed lifting something heavy with a grunt. The clerk chuckled. The foreman sighed, marked something on the ledger.
The foreman said something to one of the clerks, who asked, “Can you read?”
Rat nodded. “Yeah, I can read good, I can.” The clerk said something back to the foreman, who jerked a thumb over his shoulder.
“Magazijn zeven. Kisten lossen,” he muttered.
The man jotted something down on a piece of paper and handed it to Rat. “Give this to the clerk over in Warehouse Seven.”
It didn’t take long for the foreman to attend to all the men in the line. Rat followed the others through the gate and made his way towards Warehouse Seven.
At the warehouse, Rat and the other day labourers were greeted by another clerk. Rat approached and handed the man the piece of paper he’d been given. The clerk grunted and indicated that Rat should make his way to the right side of the warehouse.
An hour later, Rat was hard at work. The task he’d been assigned seemed simple enough, though hard on the back.
He was to help unload a shipment from the SS Prins Hendrik , a freighter just in from the Dutch East Indies.
The crates bore stamps from Batavia and Palembang and were stacked precariously on a splintered wooden pallet inside Warehouse Seven.
His job, along with three other men, was to ease them down from the wagon, shift them onto a handcart, and wheel them to the far end of the shed where the clerks recorded the contents.
However, unlike the others, Rat had been assigned an additional task because he could read.
When the foreman saw his slip and grunted something about “schoolmeester,” he handed Rat a stub of pencil and a list, motioning for him to check the labels before the crates were shifted.
While Rat couldn’t read Dutch, all that was required was to match what was on the crate with what was on the list and confirm the city of origin and the supposed contents—coffee, rubber, tin, spices—against the manifest tags.
It was meant to prevent errors in sorting, especially now with the increased volume coming in from the colonies.
It was dull, repetitive work, but it provided Rat with what he needed: time and proximity.
Each crate had a paper manifest nailed to the top, listing the goods scribbled in Dutch. Rat wasn’t certain what he was searching for, but he assumed there was some sort of pattern indicating the manifests that were part of the German operation.
Rat recalled the marking that had appeared on the piece of manifest he had decoded: ZKL-3.
The cypher key was poly-alphabetic, with “ZKL” serving as the key to the cypher, and “3” denoting a starting row, shift value, or column.
While Rat was convinced this wasn’t the only pertinent marking, it was the one he recognised, and so he kept a lookout for it.
The morning dragged on with nothing suspicious occurring. Rat realised he might be overlooking manifests because he didn’t recognise the markings, but that couldn’t be helped.
The men were given a brief break for lunch.
Rat was glad he’d had the foresight to buy a bread roll filled with ham and cheese from one of the street vendors.
He’d tucked it in his pocket, and now, as the other men sat in groups and chatted while they ate, Rat sat alone on a crate, hungrily munching on his food.
He’d barely had time to finish chewing his last bite when the men were hurried back to work. A new ship was being unloaded, and Rat returned to the monotonous labour. It was all he could do to pay enough attention not to miss anything.
Rat had left his fancy pocket watch back at the hotel, so he had no idea what the time was.
However, it seemed as if he’d been working for many hours; his back and shoulders ached, which made Rat realise how soft he had become over the years since he’d left Whitechapel.
While he had always been scrawny as a child, he’d been nimble and quite strong for his age and weight.
Not anymore. He hoped he could uncover something that day, because he didn’t relish the idea of returning day after day and doing this kind of work.
A new batch of crates was being unloaded from the ship, and the wagons were rolling into the warehouse. It took Rat a few moments of glancing at the manifest to realise that all these crates bore the marking ZKL, followed by a number. Was this what he was searching for?
Rat crouched by the stack of crates, pretending to retie his boot. The paper he’d glimpsed inside the foreman’s open ledger had that same marking: ZKL, followed by a number. A fresh shipment. Four crates. All marked for Rotterdam. All listed at exactly 58,2 kilos.
It was all too neat and tidy. Rat had seen enough to know something was amiss.
If he left without a record, the manifest could be gone by the following day, and he couldn’t anticipate when the next relevant batch of shipments would arrive.
Rat couldn’t believe his fortunate timing in having even stumbled across one of them.
As Rat and the others unloaded the crates, the clerk entered the details into a ledger.
Rat was uncertain about what had happened, either to the original manifest or the ledger.
It wasn’t until some hours later, as the day seemed to wind down, that he saw the clerk take the ledger into the foreman’s shack, leaving without it a few moments later.
This was his chance.
Rat rose, moved behind a nearby crate for cover, and ducked into the foreman’s shack under the pretence of needing a fresh pencil for time-tickets. The door creaked. No one called after him.
Inside, the stench of stale tobacco lingered in the air. The ledger lay open on the desk, next to a stub of pencil.
ZKL-4. Kist 2187. 58,2 kg. Huis Jansen. He continued to scan down the page of the manifest. There was a second entry, followed by a third. All starting with ZKL and all destined for Huis Jansen.
His heart raced. He ripped a blank receipt from the edge of a stack and copied the manifest as swiftly as possible.
2187 - Rubber - 58,2 kg - Huis Jansen - ZKL-4
2191 - Tin - 58,2 kg - Huis Jansen - ZKL-10
2192 - Dekens - 58,2 kg - Huis Jansen - ZKL-2
He heard a footstep outside, and Rat’s chest tightened.
He jotted down the remainder of the manifest as swiftly as he could.
Someone cursed. The door handle twitched.
Rat slipped the copy into his cap, flicked the ledger shut with one hand, and picked up a blank time slip as if he’d been searching for it all along .
The door opened. A large man stood there, his face unreadable beneath his cap.
He looked quizzically at Rat, who held up the blank time slip and grinned.
Whatever the large man thought, he seemed to decide he didn’t care enough to question Rat.
He went over to the desk, opened one of the drawers, took out a sheet of paper with something printed on it in Dutch, grunted again, and left.
Rat was tempted to take the paper and leave the docks immediately. However, he might want to return for work another time, so it made more sense to finish the day’s tasks.