The name was on the door, as Mr Upwater had said, of a narrow-fronted three-storied brick building in a narrow street of similar buildings behind the Rijksmuseum: “HENDRIK JONKHEER,” and in smaller letters under it, “ Diamantslijper ” From the weathered stone of the doorstep to the weathered tile of the peaked roof, the house had a solid air of permanence and tradition. The only feature that distinguished it from its equally solid neighbors was the prison-like arrangement of iron bars over the two muslin-curtained ground floor windows. Definitely it bore no stigma of a potentially flashy or fly-by-night operation.
Simon tugged at the old-fashioned bell-pull, and heard it clang somewhere in the depths of the building. Presently the door opened, no more than a foot, to the limit of a chain fastened inside, and a thin young man in a knee-length gray overall coat looked out.
“May I see Mr Jonkheer?” Simon said.
“Your business, sir?”
“I’m a magazine writer, doing an article on the diamond business. I thought a man of Mr Jonkheer’s standing could give me some valuable information.”
The young man unfastened the chain and let him in to a bare narrow hall. There were doors on one side and another at the back, and a flight of uncarpeted wooden stairs led upwards. On a hard chair beside the stairs, with a newspaper on his lap and one hand under the paper, sat a burly man with blond close-cropped hair who stared at the Saint woodenly.
“One moment, please,” said the young man.
He disappeared through the door at the end of the hall. The burly man continued to stare motionlessly at the Saint, as if he were stuffed. In a little while the young man came back.
“This way, please.”
The back room was a homely sort of office, the only possible sanctum of an individualistic old-world craftsman who needed no front for his skill. It contained an ancient roll-top desk with dusty papers overflowing from its pigeonholes and littered over its surfaces, a battered swivel chair at the desk, and two overstuffed armchairs whose leather upholstery was dark and shiny with age. There were china figures and family photographs in gilt frames on the marble mantelpiece over a black iron coal fireplace. The safe stood under another barred window, and massive though it was, it would not have offered much more resistance than a matchbox to a modern cracksman.