“You going to tell the politicians?” asked Gur Arieh.

The Director thought of them squabbling away up in the Knesset, splitting semantic and theological hairs while his service tried to tell them on which side of the sky the sun rose. April was a long way off still. There would be a leak if he did. He closed the report.

“Not yet,” he said. “We have too little. When we have more I will tell them.”

Privately, he had decided to sit on it.

Lest they fall asleep, visitors to Den Bosch are met with a quiz game devised by the town’s planners. It is called Find a Way to Drive into the Town Center. Win, and the visitor finds Market Square and a parking space. Lose, and a labyrinthine system of one-way streets dumps him back on the ring road.

The city center is a triangle: Along the northwest runs the Dommel river; along the northeast, the Zuid-Willemsvaart canal; and along the southern third side, the city wall. Sam and Quinn beat the system at the third attempt, reached the market, and claimed their prize: a room at the Central Hotel on Market Square.

In their room Quinn consulted the telephone directory. It listed only one Golden Lion bar, on a street called Jans Straat. They set off on foot. The hotel reception desk had provided a line-drawing map of the town center, but Jans Straat was not listed. A number of citizens around the square shook their heads in ignorance. Even the street-corner policeman had to consult his much-thumbed town plan. They found it eventually.

It was a narrow alley, running between the St. Jans Singel, the old towpath along the Dommel, and the parallel Molenstraat. The whole area was old, most of it dating back three hundred years. Much of it had been tastefully restored and renovated, the fine old brick structures retained, along with their antique doors and windows, but fitted out with smart new apartments inside. Not so the Jans Straat.

It was barely a car’s width wide and the buildings leaned against each other for support. There were two bars in it, for at one time the bargemen plying their trade up the Dommel and along the canals had moored here to quench their thirst.

The Gouden Leeuw was on the south side of the street, twenty yards from the towpath, a narrow-fronted two-story building with a faded sign that announced its name. The ground floor had a single bow window whose small panes were of opaque and colored glass. Beside it was the single door giving access to the bar. It was locked. Quinn rang the bell and waited. No sound, no movement. The other bar in the street was open. Every bar in Den Bosch was open.

“Now what?” asked Sam. Down the street a man in the window of the other bar lowered his paper, noted them, and raised the paper again. Beside the Golden Lion was a six-foot-high wooden door apparently giving access to a passage to the rear.

“Wait here,” said Quinn. He went up and over the gate in a second and dropped into the passage. A few minutes later Sam heard the tinkling of glass, the pad of footsteps, and the bar’s front door opened from inside. Quinn stood there.

“Get off the street,” he said. She entered and he closed the door behind her. There were no lights. The bar was gloomy, lit only by the filtered daylight through the colored bay window.

It was a small place. The bar was L-shaped around the bay window. From the door a gangway ran along the bar, then around the corner of the L to become a larger drinking area near the back. Behind the bar was the usual array of bottles; upturned beer glasses were in rows on a towel on the bar top, along with three Delft-china beer-pump handles. At the very back was a door, through which Quinn had entered.

The door led to a small washroom, whose window Quinn had broken to get in. Also to a set of stairs leading to an apartment upstairs.

“Maybe he’s up there,” said Sam. He was not. It was a studio apartment, very small, just a bed-sitting room with a kitchenette in an alcove and a small bathroom/lavatory. There was a picture of a scene that could have been the Transvaal on one wall; a number of African memorabilia, a television set, an unmade bed. No books. Quinn checked every cupboard and the tiny loft above the ceiling. No Pretorius. They went downstairs.

“Since we’ve broken into his bar, we might as well have a beer,” suggested Sam. She went behind the counter, took two glasses, and pulled one of the china pump handles. The foaming ale ran into the glasses.

“Where’s that beer come from?” asked Quinn.

Sam checked under the counter.

“The tubes run straight through the floor,” she said.

Quinn found the trapdoor under a rug at the end of the room. Wooden steps led downward, and beside them was a light switch. Unlike the bar, the cellars were spacious.

The whole house and its neighbors were supported by the vaulted brick arches that created the cellars. The tubes that led upward to the beer pumps above them came from modern steel beer barrels, evidently lowered through the trapdoor before being connected. It had not always been so.

At one end of the cellars was a tall and wide steel grille. Beyond it flowed the Dieze Canal, which ran out under Molenstraat. Years before, men had poled the great beer vats in shallow boats along the canal, to roll them through the grille and into position beneath the bar. That was in the days when potboys had to scurry up and down the stairs bringing pitchers of ale to the customers above.

There were still three of these antique barrels standing on their brick plinths in the largest hall created by the arches, each with a spigot tap at its base. Quinn idly flicked one of the spigots; a gush of sour old beer ran into the lamplight. The second was the same. He kicked the third with his toe. The liquid ran a dull yellow, then changed to pink.

It took three heaves from Quinn to turn the beer vat on its side. When it fell, it came with a crash and the contents tumbled onto the brick floor. Some of those contents were the last two gallons of ancient beer that had never reached the bar upstairs. In a puddle of the beer lay a man, on his back, open eyes dull in the light from the single bulb, a hole through one temple and a pulped exit wound at the other. From his height and build, Quinn estimated, he could be the man behind him in the warehouse, the man with the Skorpion. If he was, he had chopped down a British sergeant and two American Secret Service men on Shotover Plain.

The other man in the cellar pointed his gun straight at Quinn’s back and spoke in Dutch. Quinn turned. The man had come down the cellar steps, his treads masked by the crash of the falling barrel. What he actually said was: “Well done, mijnheer. You found your friend. We missed him.”

Two others were descending the steps, both in the uniform of the Dutch Community Police. The man with the gun was in civilian clothes, a sergeant in the Recherche.

“I wonder,” said Sam as they were marched into the police station on Tolbrug Straat, “whether there is a market for the definitive anthology of Dutch precinct houses?”

By chance the Den Bosch police station is right across the street from the Groot Zieken Gasthaus-literally the Big Sick Guesthouse-to whose hospital morgue the body of Jan Pretorius was taken to await autopsy.

Chief Inspector Dykstra had thought little of Papa De Groot’s warning call of the previous morning. An American trying to look up a South African did not necessarily spell trouble. He had dispatched one of his sergeants in the lunch hour. The man had found the Golden Lion bar closed and had reported back.

A local locksmith had secured them entry, but everything had seemed in order. No disturbance, no fight. If Pretorius wished to lock up and go away, he had the right to do so. The proprietor of the bar across and down the street said he thought the Golden Lion had been open until about midday. The weather being the way it was, the door would normally be closed. He had seen no customers enter or leave the Golden Lion, but that was not odd. Business was slack.