“Another Prince,” he said. “Not one of the brothers. More likely the younger generation. They’re greedy. However many billions they skim through the Oil Quota Commission, they want more. No, it may be they want it all. And of course the younger men tend to be more ... modern, more Westernized. It could be for the better. It is time the old men went.”
It was not the thought of a younger man ruling in Riyadh that intrigued ben Shaul. It was what the Palestinian technician who had given the orders to Gur Arieh’s source had let slip. Next year, he had gloated, we Palestinians will have the right to become naturalized citizens here.
If that was true, if that was what the unnamed conspirators had in mind, the perspectives were astounding. Such an offer by a new Saudi government would suck a million homeless and landless Palestinians out of Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon to a new life far in the South. With the Palestinian sore cauterized, Israel, with her energy and technology, could enter into a relationship with her neighbors that could be beneficial and profitable. It had been the dream of the founders, back to Weizmann and Ben-Gurion. Ben Shaul had been taught the dream as a boy, never thought to see it happen. But ...
“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.”