第 47 页

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 JansStraat was not listed. A number of citizens around the square shook their heads in ignorance. Even the street-corner po-liceman 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 theSkor-pion. 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?sback 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 uni-form 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 GrootZieken 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 PapaDe 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 mid-day. The weather being the way it was, the door would nor-mally 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 GerechtelijkLaborato-rium in Voorburg, the country?s central pathology labora-tory. Hearing it was a bullet wound, and a foreigner, they sent Dr. Veerman himself, and he was Holland?s leading fo-rensic pathologist.

In the afternoon Chief Inspector Dykstra listened pa-tiently to Quinn explaining that he had known Pretorius four-teen 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 coun-try?s BVD confirmed that the South African had been in Paris at that time; Quinn?sformer Hartford employers con-firmed 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 nei-ther 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 stake-out, 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.?

?No chance,? said the professor, rising. ?That man was dead no later than twoP.M. yesterday. If they were in Arn-hem, they?re innocent parties. Sorry. Facts.?

Dykstra swore. His sergeant must have mounted his stakeout within thirty minutes of the killer?s leaving the bar.

?My Arnhem colleagues tell me you were heading for the ferry at Vlissingen when you left yesterday,? he told Sam and Quinn as he released them in the small hours.

?That?s right,? said Quinn, collecting his much-examined luggage.

?I would be grateful if you would continue there,? said the Chief Inspector. ?Mr. Quinn, my country likes to wel-come foreign visitors, but wherever you go it seems the Dutch police are put to a lot of extra work.?

?I?m truly sorry,? said Quinn with feeling. ?Seeing as how we?ve missed the last ferry, and are hungry and tired, could we finish the night at our hotel and go in the morn-ing　

?Very well,? said Dykstra. ?I?ll have a couple of my men escort you out of town.?

?I?m beginning to feel like royalty,? said Sam as she went into the bathroom back at the Central Hotel. When she emerged, Quinn was gone. He returned at 5:00A.M ., stashed the Smith & Wesson back in the base of Sam?s vanity case, and caught two hours? sleep before the morning coffee arrived.

The drive to Flushing was uneventful. Quinn was deep in thought. Someone was wasting the mercenaries one after the other, and now he really had run out of places to go. Except maybe ... back to the archives. There might be something more to drag from them, but it was unlikely, very unlikely. With Pretorius dead, the trail was cold as a week-dead cod, and stank as badly.

A Flushing police car was parked near the ramp of the ferry for England. The two officers in it noted the Opel Ascona driving slowly into the hull of the roll-on roll-off car-carrier, but waited till the doors closed shut and the ferry headed out into the estuary of the Westerschelde before in-forming their headquarters.

The trip passed quietly. Sam wrote up her notes, now becoming a travelogue of European police stations; Quinn read the first London newspapers he had seen in ten days. He missed the paragraph that began: ?Major KGB Shake-up　 It was a Reuters report out of Moscow, alleging that the usual informed sources were hinting at forthcoming changes at the top of the Soviet secret police.

?

Quinn waited in the darkness of the small front garden in Carlyle Square, as he had for the previous two hours, immo-bile as a statue and unseen by anyone. A laburnum tree cast a shadow that shielded him from the light of the streetlamp; his black zip-up leather windbreaker and his immobility did the rest. People came past within a few feet but none saw the man in the shadows.

It was half past ten; the inhabitants of this elegant Chel-sea square were returning from their dinners in the restau-rants of Knightsbridge and Mayfair. David andCarina Frost went by in the back of their elderlyBentley toward their house farther up. At eleven the man Quinn waited for ar-rived.

He parked his car in a residents? bay across the road, mounted the three steps to his front door, and inserted his key in the lock. Quinn was at his elbow before it turned.

?Julian.?

Julian Hayman spun in alarm.

?Good God, Quinn, don?t do that. I could have flat-tened you.?

Hayman was still, years after leaving the regiment, a very fit man. But years of city living had blurred the old cutting edge, just a fraction. Quinn had spent those years toiling in vineyards beneath a blazing sun. He declined to suggest it might have been the other way around, if it ever came to it.

?I need to go back into your files, Julian.?

Hayman had quite recovered. He shook his head firmly.

?Sorry, old boy. Not again. No chance. Word is, you?re taboo. People have been muttering?on the circuit, you know?about the Cormack affair. Can?t risk it. That?s final.?

Quinn realized it was final. The trail had ended. He turned to go.

?By the way,? Hayman called from the top of the steps. ?I had lunch yesterday with Barney Simkins. Remember old Barney　

Quinn nodded. Barney Simkins, a director of Broderick-Jones, the Lloyd?s underwriters who had em-ployed Quinn for ten years all over Europe.

?He says someone?s been ringing in, asking for you.?

?Who　

?Dunno. Barney said the caller played it very close. Just said if you wanted to contact him, put a small ad in the International Herald Tribune, Paris edition, any day for the next ten, and sign it Q.?

?Didn?t he give any name at all　 asked Quinn.

?Only one, old boy. Odd name.Zack.?

Chapter 15

Quinn climbed into the car be-side Sam, who had been wait-ing around the corner in Mulberry Walk. He looked pensive.

?Won?t he play　

?Mmmm　

?Hayman. Won?t he let you go back into his files　

?No. That?s out. And it?s final. But it appears someone else does want to play.Zack has been phoning.?

She was stunned.

?Zack?What does he want　

?A meeting.?

?How the hell did he find you　

Quinn let in the clutch and pulled away from the curb.

?A long shot. Years ago there was an occasional men-tion of me when I worked for Broderick-Jones. All he had was my name and my job. Seems I?m not the only one who checks back through old newspaper clippings. By a fluke, Hayman was lunching with someone from my old company when the subject came up.?