Frederick Forsyth - The Negotiator

“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.

It was the sergeant who asked to stake out the bar a little longer, and Dykstra had agreed. It had paid dividends; the American arrived twenty-four hours later.

Dykstra sent a message to the Gerechtelijk Laboratorium in Voorburg, the country’s central pathology laboratory. Hearing it was a bullet wound, and a foreigner, they sent Dr. Veerman himself, and he was Holland’s leading forensic pathologist.

In the afternoon Chief Inspector Dykstra listened patiently to Quinn explaining that he had known Pretorius fourteen years ago in Paris and had hoped to look him up for old times’ sake while touring Holland. If Dykstra disbelieved the story, he kept a straight face. But he checked. His own country’s BVD confirmed that the South African had been in Paris at that time; Quinn’s former Hartford employers confirmed that, yes, Quinn had been heading their Paris office in that year.

The rented car was brought around from the Central Hotel and thoroughly searched. No gun. Their luggage was retrieved and searched. No gun. The sergeant admitted neither Quinn nor Sam had had a gun when he found them in the cellar. Dykstra believed Quinn had killed the South African the previous day, just before his sergeant mounted the stakeout, and had come back because he had forgotten something that might be in the man’s pockets. But if that were the case, why had the sergeant seen him trying to gain access via the front door? If he had locked the door after him following the killing of the South African, he could have let himself back in. It was puzzling. Of one thing Dykstra was certain: He did not think much of the Paris connection as a reason for the visit.

Professor Veerman arrived at six and was finished by midnight. He crossed the road and took a coffee with a very tired Chief Inspector Dykstra.

“Well, Professor?”

“You’ll have my full report in due course,” said the doctor.

“Just the outline, please.”

“All right. Death from massive laceration of the brain caused by a bullet, probably nine millimeter, fired at close range through the left temple, exiting through the right. I should look for a hole in the woodwork somewhere in that bar.”

Dykstra nodded. “Time of death?” he asked. “I am holding two Americans who discovered the body, supposedly on a friendly visit. Though they broke into the bar to find it.”

“Midday yesterday,” said the professor. “Give or take a couple of hours. I’ll know more later, when the tests have been analyzed.”

“But the Americans were in Arnhem police station at midday yesterday,” said Dykstra. “That’s unarguable. They crashed their car at ten and were released to spend the night at the Rijn Hotel at four. They could have left the hotel in the night, driven here, done it, and got back by dawn.”