The Negotiator

“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 pla

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 Qui

In their room Qui

It was a narrow alley, ru

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 a

“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 Qui

“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 Qui

The door led to a small washroom, whose window Qui

“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. Qui

“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 Qui

Sam checked under the counter.

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

Qui

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 co

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. Qui

It took three heaves from Qui

The other man in the cellar pointed his gun straight at Qui

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.