Gans decided he’d take the risk. He’d bring the DVD back to his house, pop it into his player and see if the content could give him a clue to the addressee or the sender.

As was his custom, Gans left promptly at five, the damaged envelope containing the DVD in the pocket of his nylon ski jacket.

Sun in Amsterdam, rare in April, seldom brings warmth. As Gans walked the few hundred meters westward toward the entrance to the Central Station, a cool breeze was blowing from the east. He pulled up his hood, tightened the cord at his throat, and reflected that if the wind had been blowing earlier in the day they wouldn’t have recovered half of what they did.

He caught his usual train and disembarked in Haarlem at 5:31. He went to the rack at the back of the station, unlocked his bicycle, and pedaled home to his apartment on the Ambonstraat, arriving well before dark. He locked his bike in the storage shed and climbed the two flights of stairs. The television in the flat below was blaring in some unintelligible language. He thought it might be Turkish. His was a mixed neighborhood with more than its share of unassimilated immigrants. An exotic meal, something offensive to his sense of smell, was being prepared in the kitchen of the apartment next door. He wrinkled his nose.

Gans was a Haarlemer born and bred. He resented the invasion of his territory by swarthy-skinned foreigners, and he especially resented them after the events of the day. Noise, foul smells, and now a bomb on the streets of Amsterdam. Could it get any worse?

His immaculately clean little flat of just over forty-five square meters was divided into four spaces: a small bedroom, an even smaller kitchen, a truly tiny bathroom (with a shower, no bathtub), and a reasonably spacious living area with a balcony. The balcony he seldom used, because it was usually too cold and overlooked the playground of a school where the kids were always shouting at each other in whatever damned language they spoke back home in Northern Africa or wherever they came from.