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It is seven months earlier, during the first venture, and someone is in the canal. This causes some commotion as a few bystanders turn into a reasonable crowd of over-lookers. At first their questions are of concern, any explanations proffered of a tourist too under the influence to keep his footing.
Except this guy refuses to come out, even when the police show up.
To have said to the first few police on the scene: “sorry guys, too much to drink, you know,” might have made him an idiot and cost him a fine or a night in jail, but once he starts to run from the cops (gathering en masse) it is clear his moments of freedom will foreshorten, even if his celebrity grows in the moment.
--This is a Spy vs. Spy-Self confusion, his plan foolproof, or highly volatile.
First the cops shout to the guy. No go. Then they shine some lights at him. He swims under the bridge. Then they commandeer a boat (a little like “Live and Let Die”) on which locals are partying, their new assignment to help usher the escapee along, where-ever he is exactly, a strategy that causes him to emerge long enough for the audience to see him disappear under the houseboats that line the other side of this canal. (In fact these are not houses, but stores, the stores that make up the flower market and are filled with various forms of tulip-like jungle.)
But now it is time to send in the divers.
However quaint it may be to skate on the canals in winter (they freeze less often than they did), and however impressive it is that you can fall into these without actually dying, swimming in these canals under any conditions, even protected by a wet suit, probably lacks much appeal, at least judging by the faces of those cops now charged with jumping in.
But soon, followed by the divers, the would be Steve McQueen re-appears wearing only wet jeans. And he makes this reappearance at the start of what appears to be a fairly difficult assent up a pole that runs the vertical height of one of the boat stores under which he has been hiding. An in shape kid of twenty, his abs and biceps suit him and his new role as he pulls himself up to the roof and begins to look around at his feet (a little as does Indiana Jones on top of that German sub). This brings a round of applause from the small crowd that has been watching. Having found a way in, he drops through the roof, gone for a few moments, the lights the cops shine in from the other side giving his shadow away as he tries to move through the plants inside. Suddenly the whole scene has gone all Apocalypse Now! and shortly thereafter he is grabbed and cuffed by a female officer.
That it is a female officer who cuffs him is info learned during the second venture, seven months later in the (Vondel . . . Vondel) park where . . .