Bonita Avenue (8 page)

For a couple of years he was the jogging coach for Joni’s gymnastics class; after returning from America she joined a club in Enschede called Sportlust, and one day she asked if he felt like coaching them. Sounds good, he said, and it did sound good: a weekly run with thirteen thirteen-year-olds through the Drienerlo woods. Shortly before his summer holidays, the chairwoman and the head coach sat in his living room discussing the details; soon thereafter, every Wednesday evening the farmhouse overflowed with beanpoles with braces and tracksuits, an arrangement that Joni soon regretted because all the girls canceled now and
again—homework, illness, being under the weather—something she could never get away with. He laid out a not-too-girlish route of about four kilometers. They ran southward down the Langenkampweg, cut across the campus, including the motorcycle club’s dune (“Oh,
noooo
, sir, not the loose sand!”), after which they continued through the woods until coming out at the farmhouse, where Tineke served them glasses of elderberry cordial.

Joni was still young enough to be proud of her athletic father, and he too would have looked back with pleasure on the training if it hadn’t been for that incident. Sportlust participated, as it did each year, in a door-to-door fund-raising drive for cancer research, and Joni and Miriam, a small but pert girl who jogged with her blond curls flattened under a headband, spent two long afternoons canvassing the houses and apartments in Boddenkamp for donations. “A neighborhood where you can expect them to be generous, just like in previous years,” remarked the chairwoman the evening he phoned her because Joni had come home from try-outs and—first stammering, then crying—told him she’d been accused of stealing money out of the collection can.

While counting the takings, the woman told him, the Sportlust treasurer noticed that Miriam’s and Joni’s cans didn’t contain a single banknote, and that their proceeds were not only less than a quarter of the previous years’ but also the lowest of all the other cans, even the ones from what she called the grotty neighborhoods. Miriam was in the Tuesday evening gymnastics group; they took her aside and within ten seconds she had confessed. According to her, she and Joni managed to fish out all the paper money with a geometry triangle and then divided the loot—a little over 150 guilders—between them.

Joni was furious. What a bunch of lies. She had nothing to do with it! How could somebody be
so
mean. She
hated
that Miriam,
she always knew she had a mean streak, she should never have trusted her. When they had finished their rounds, she told him through her tears, it was already dark and dinner time and Miriam had offered to turn both cans in to the treasurer at the central collection point, near where she lived.

Sigerius was livid. “My daughter is standing here in the living room bawling,” he said to the chairwoman. “I know Joni inside out, your accusations are premature and totally out of line. I guarantee you my daughter is not going around plundering charity collection cans.” They agreed that he and Joni would go together so she could tell her side of the story, a suggestion she accepted with a pout, but she backed out just as he was about to leave for the gym. She was afraid she’d burst into tears. Or explode in anger. So he went alone. It was an onerous meeting; the woman insisted that it was Miriam’s word against Joni’s, and he was adamant that Joni’s name be cleared. When he returned home at ten-thirty that night, he told Joni he’d given them the choice: either take her word for it, or that was the end of the training, and then we’d have to see whether she stayed in the club.

He can still remember exactly where they were standing: in the front hall, he with his coat still on, right foot on the open spiral stairs; Joni halfway, holding her toothbrush with toothpaste already on it. He’ll never forget the moment she broke. After he’d finished his report she went quiet. Then she slumped down onto a step, dropped the toothbrush, tick, tack, tock, onto the slate floor. She hid her face in her nightie and said with a drawn-out sigh: “Dad?”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Listen, Dad, don’t freak out or anything. I, um, what I mean is … well, actually, Miriam’s telling the truth.”

• • •

He walks under the dribbling plane trees toward the Okura. He deliberately bangs against the shoulder of a phoning businessman, steers clear of the vegetable stalls on the sagging sidewalk and the garbage bags ripped open by stray dogs. A little group of Chinese, maybe five of them, dart out of a side street and spread a large purple tarp on the sopping wet pavement. In a wink they’ve laid out their wares: leather bags, Ray-Ban sunglasses, Gucci pullovers, Adidas T-shirts, CDs, DVDs, video games. Fake. He pauses for a moment, his shorter leg—the scooter one—hurts, he massages his hamstring. One of the hawkers accosts him in snarly Mandarin.

“Fuck off,” he says with a smile.

What’s worse: selling imitation Gucci or robbing a collection can? What about the gray area? Is it logical or worthwhile to worry about Joni, about a hypothetical problem—as long as he doesn’t know for sure, it doesn’t exist—while he also knows that Wilbert is free? Navigating his way between cars, he crosses the four-lane Huaihai Zhong Lu, turns left forty yards farther on and passes in front of the ramshackle Art Deco façade of the Cathay Theatre, where a horde of Chinese cinema-goers is waiting to see
Mission: Impossible 2
. What will happen now that the kid is free? What does six years in the slammer do to a man like Wilbert Sigerius?

“Hitler knew the answer to that,” answered Rufus Koperslager back when he asked that question incessantly, though usually guardedly, to anyone he thought might offer him an educated answer. “Hitler saw prisons as a university for criminals. Didn’t you know that? An indoor gutter, where the rookies learn the trade from the pros.” He is reminded of his first private conversation with that eccentric Rufus, a meeting he would rather forget. “Do you know Hitler’s Table Talk?” No, he hadn’t got round to Hitler’s Table Talk yet. God, yes, Koperslager—a law enforcement chief with a knighthood and the petulant candor of a policeman—was
made dean at Tubantia in late ’95. The appointment went against the grain, a cop on campus, a man perhaps a bit too straight-from-the-shoulder, impatient, used to giving orders and to a braidedsteel chain of command. But a realist. Sigerius pricked up his ears when Koperslager told them during the selection procedure he had been director of not one, but two prisons in the early ’80s, an achievement that intrigued him enough to take advantage of the sandwich reception to confide in his new colleague about his criminal son. He was like that back then. Heart on his sleeve. Wilbert had been in for just over a year and in that time Sigerius had developed a not-so-subtle obsession with everything that took place behind bars: he devoured every newspaper clipping, every book, every television documentary, anything that could tell him about correctional regimes and jailhouse norms. “I understand you have a prison background? My son, he’s doing time.”

“Where?” Koperslager also had a considerable affinity with the subject; a dark shroud fell over his policeman’s face, he touched his clean-shaven chin ever so slightly, Sigerius saw him descend into an underworld that excited him more than he would care to admit. Without twitching a muscle, Sigerius named the three penitentiary facilities where they had been stowing Wilbert thus far. “Transfers?” asked Koperslager.

“I believe so.”

“Do you want me to be frank with you?”

“Please,” he said, giving the go-ahead for Koperslager’s both convincing and dispiriting sketch of Wilbert’s “career,” which, in his humble opinion, Sigerius’s son was building up “on the inside.” “They only transfer the ringleaders,” he said. “Transfers are expensive and cumbersome, I was never keen on it, but sometimes you have no choice.” Wilbert was probably a kid with clout, was his analysis, a key player within his block, a power-broker, one of
the “sharks.” We always plucked ’m out, Koperslager said, they’re the ones who undermine authority, intimidate and bribe the wardens, they’re forever making deals, both inside and out. “So they’re shunting your boy around. Sheesh. Maybe he’s got talent. Judging from his father: not at all stupid, physical and tough—yeah, he’ll be learning the tricks of the trade.”

Koperslager’s favorite criminologist had an interesting take on prisons. “Hitler repeatedly advocated corporal punishment over detention. You’re better off beating the crap out of a twenty-year-old, or cutting off his hand—he says that in 1942, and it’s probably true. Jail only hones their skills. Prisons, Siem, are criminal academies, aggression workshops, testosterone laboratories. Masculinity flows like water, it’s machismo at its meanest, everyone hates everyone else. Divide and conquer, 24/7. Gangs, protection. There’s no feminine perspective, there’s no such thing as consideration—only power. Blackmail, beatings, sexual abuse, it’s all part of the game. You go in as a weenie and you leave as a gangster. Chop off a guy’s foot, I say.”

It was just the nightmare scenario he had been tormenting himself with, and Koperslager was clearly not the man to allay his fears. Without telling a soul, as though he was going to a whore on a houseboat, Sigerius drove by the local prison every time he needed to be in The Hague, or Amsterdam, or wherever, on university business. It was an obsession: he stood in front of Scheveningen Prison at least five times, staring at the infamous gate with its medieval battlements, and felt awful, disheartened to the core—so miserable and depressed that one day he decided enough was enough. Quit wallowing. Basta! The penal dissertations, the magazine articles, the pamphlets full of prison stories, the video documentaries—he put all that paranoid crap in a gray plastic garbage bag and dumped it on the curb.

And sure enough his mind cleared, sooner than he had expected.
He appreciated the truth in “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He had to laugh at his readiness to accept Koperslager’s tall tales, at his latent
Telegraaf
-conservatism, and felt his faith in the rule of law return, his faith in mankind itself.

He is nearly there. It will be dark soon, the lanterns in the Okura’s formal French gardens are already lit. A hundred yards off, the hotel looms like a white stone-and-glass peacock, in front of it an unstaunchable fountain. (The student cafeteria at Tubantia has a cook who asks every student in his dishwashing room the same dead-serious question: Tell me, you’re the student, aren’t you afraid that one day the water will just run out?) He is still taken by the Art Deco grandeur, even though, in one of the hotel’s 1,000 rooms, a black box is waiting for him. On his way up to the fourteenth floor his body fills with the fervid hope that the CD-ROM is not in his bag. His stomach keeps rising even after the elevator has stopped.

His room smells of steamed towels. The bed, where he tossed and turned for a fruitless hour this morning, has been made, his shirt and the suit he wore on the plane are hanging in the open cupboard. The laptop is no longer on the bed, but on the oval desk next to the sitting area. He plugs it in. Hoping to quell the butterflies in his stomach, he takes a shower. He washes himself with gel from a purple packet he has to tear open with his teeth. Anything is possible, he’s well aware of that. You can be going to the Olympics and then not go after all. He dries himself with the largest of the three towels and puts on a bathrobe. You can father a rattlesnake.

He adjusts the air conditioning to nineteen degrees. Takes the laptop case and sits on the edge of the bed. He feels around in the side pockets and digs out an etui with just three CD-ROMs in it.
Two of them are clean as a whistle, on the third is written in black felt-tip: “Minutes, U Council.” Bingo. That’s the one. He takes a deep breath and clenches his hands. He gets up, goes over to the window, draws the heavy curtains, sits back down and inserts the CD-ROM into the drive. Windows start-up is complete, he enters his password, at first incorrectly, he fumbles with the capital letters. The program asks if he wants a slide show. No, no slide show. Windows lines up the JPEG images, icons of a small black sailboat drifting off into an orange sunset. There are lots of them, maybe 400. About a quarter of them are ones he scrounged from various free sites, the rest are from some Russian site and from lindaloveslace.com—it’s that last one he’s after. He clicks randomly on one of the icons and sees the Russian girl sitting on a sofa with her legs spread. He feels a vague thrill well up, an echo of the familiar horniness, the horniness of a moth-eaten old ape.

Come on, where are they? He decides a slide show is more efficient, clicking through the pictures for speed. First he races like a madman through the forest of free pictures, then the Russian girl whizzes by, kneeling, bending, lying, squatting, fingering—yes, there she is, he recoils at the first photo he sees. She is standing with one foot on a curly-backed chair, elbow on her knee, lips pursed, breasts in a soft pink bra. Gasping with shock, he shoves the computer off his lap. The resemblance is more insidious than he thought. He goes over to the minibar and takes out a can of Budweiser. You already knew there was a resemblance. He paces across the soft wall-to-wall carpeting. The beer is so cold that his eyes water. You have to look at it analytically. Like a scientist. Like a detective. How well does he know Joni’s figure? Slender, healthy girls under twenty-five are hard to tell apart. But that face …

He sits back down. Analyze. Luckily he is already familiar with the pictures; he can therefore examine them coolly. The first series
is shot in a hotel room. He has to find that recurring room, he seems to remember one location that keeps coming back. A boat? Yes, there’s a ship’s cabin too … A series of thirteen photos taken in the same room, clearly not a hotel room, in the background a computer, a full bookcase, houseplants, a poster of two kittens in a beach chair, Celine Dion, a skylight …

Linda. Linda from Tennessee, or Kentucky, or Utah, or who knows which obscure state. The session starts in a Roaring Twenties outfit, a short, straight-cut green dress and one of those floppy round hats pulled down over her ears, white satin elbow-length gloves, bright red lips—God, she does look like Joni. Then off comes the dress, she’s standing in the middle of the room in black pumps with a ribbon on the toe, white garters, caramel-colored nylons. In the next picture she’s sitting on a chair, hands covering her bare breasts, hat off, the jet-black hair hanging loosely, it looks dyed, so black it’s nearly blue. Could be a wig. Certainly. Next photo, the panties have come off, she sits on that chair with her legs spread, she …