The Devil's Playground (19 page)

glass that tried to entice him. People walked slowly, surveying

the girls, checking out their figures and wondering whether

to lay their Euros down. Comparison shopping. Jon watched

it all, thinking about Jake, wondering if the old man had

spent his time walking these streets too.

He went to the nearest bar and ordered a coffee. He took

out his last few Euros, paid. Then went into the toilet so he

could take more out of his money belt.

It was gone.

All gone.

He checked and rechecked, undid his shirt, looked down

his trousers, tried pockets and crevices, all the while the

inevitability of it zooming up inside him. He cursed in

the empty toilet. He wanted to scream. Hit something. How

the fuck … ? He gathered himself, walked back into the bar,

trying to keep a straight face, not sure if they’d heard him

cursing in there.

Passport. Credit cards. Cash.

All gone.

He sat and sipped his coffee and felt as though the ground

had swallowed him up. The coffee tasted like mud. He

couldn’t breathe. It had suddenly got so hot. He had perhaps

50 Euros left, that was all.

He tried to tell himself that it was all replaceable. A matter

of a quick phone call. But that didn’t make him feel any

better.

‘Hi there.’ A young man, pony-tailed, Deep Purple T-shirt,

sat next to him. ‘Thought you looked like you wanted some

company.’

Jon stared at him. Had he seen him before? ‘Fuck off.

Leave me alone,’ he said.

The man said something in Dutch, got up and walked

back into the darkness of the bar.

Jon felt bad about it. But he didn’t want company. Not

now. He lit a cigarette and tried to think about something

else as the house stereo blasted out the closing gasps of Dark

Side of the Moon and moved seamlessly into the first Beatles

album. The music disgusted him. He left.

His head felt loose, clouded by smoke, failure and loneliness,

his ankle was playing up again and he knew that he

looked an open invitation to violence. So he tried to appear

straight, to open his eyes wide and look as if he meant

business. He didn’t know if it was working but at least it was

something else to think about.

‘You want coke? Coka? Ecstasee?’ A gnarled old man, the

shade of weak coffee, approached him, ‘Coka, my man?’

‘No.’ He tried brushing the dealer off but found he couldn’t

muster up the right level of confidence to do it.

‘I can get you a girl too. Blonde. Very nice. Big.’ His hands

traced the shape of a pair of breasts.

Why would I want a girl off you?’ Jon replied tersely. ‘I

can get my pick round the corner.’

‘Yes, that is very true, sir, but they only give you fifteen

minutes, twenty if you’re lucky. This girl you can have for

good.’

‘No.’ Firmer this time. Hearing the adenoidal weakness in

his voice, wishing he had a stronger tone, something brusque

and boardroom businesslike. He took out his map. ‘That’s

not what I want. I want to find this,’ he said, pointing to the

small red dot that he’d marked on the paper.

The dealer flicked his lighter and viewed the map in its

quivering glare. ‘Two lefts, then right.’

‘Thank you,’ Jon replied, taking the map and folding it

into his pocket.

‘You sure you don’t want a girl?’

He found the park easily enough, though it was stretching

the definition of a park to call this tiny enclosure of hedges

and grass that. It lay between a canal and the Old Church.

Apartment buildings looked down upon it, their lights like

winking eyes. There were fewer people here and those who

passed had an urgency to their manner not seen elsewhere.

A few window-girls beckoned him but he ignored them. He

walked towards the green space. He couldn’t think why it

was there. Like an island breaking up the asphalt. It was too

small to be enjoyed as a park and too big to be just some

place for dogs to do their business.

Jon walked up to the entrance, a gap cut between the

hedges. Inside it was dark and cool like a walled-off room or

, a city within a city. There was nothing to show that a man

had died there. No police tape, no sign. Death lasts a few

minutes and then things go on. Jon tried to imagine Jake

lying here, dead or still dying, knowing that this patch of sky

would be the last he’d see. He took a deep breath, felt the

past few days stick in his lungs.

That’s when he heard it. Something in the bushes.

A faint rustling. Breathing?

He looked around, saw nothing but arboreal shapes.

Then another sound.

And he saw him.

The man just stood there, off to the side, enmeshed in the foliage, looking at him. Jon stopped breathing. He lit a cigarette, his hand shaking, the lighter failing, and in the spark of light he saw the man

again, standing behind the main ring of hedges, watching

him.

Who are you?’ Jon shouted. What the fuck do you want?’

His voice faded into the wind. The shape didn’t move. It

didn’t say anything. Jon walked towards it. There was a flash

of light, sudden and terrible, and then he couldn’t see. He

pushed his arms in front of him, clawing the rough edges

of the hedgerow. Panic and blindness consumed him. A

sudden terror.

Then light began leaking back into his eyes, blurred and

watery. He heard the man walk away. He tried to follow but

stumbled straight into the hedge, cursing himself. His heart

could be heard all over Amsterdam.

He’d walked back into the main canal ring, got lost trying

to find the hotel, found himself instead going in circles, the

map absolutely no use. He saw the dealer who had directed

him to the park. The man smiled, exposing a black hole and

one crooked tooth. Jon walked faster. His ankle screamed.

The weed was wearing off and it throbbed like a racing

heartbeat.

He stepped into the Sex Palace, a large department store

of sex and fun. There was a peep-show, video booths, private

booths, self-charging cards from a machine, a pornucopia of

illicit pleasures. He changed his last note at the desk and

stepped into one of the many video booths, thinking that at

least this way he could drop out of sight a while. Gather

himself.

As soon as he closed the door the light came on, like in

an aeroplane lavatory, and he sat down in the plastic armchair

that faced the screen. In front of him were numerous buttons,

levers and joysticks — it looked like the flight capsule of the

space shuttle — and it took him a good few minutes to find

the slot for the coins. The screen flickered on and Jon was

greeted with one of the most disturbing, and in his state,

frankly horrifying things that he’d seen in his life up to then.

There was a blonde woman and a horse. All the things

one heard about as a kid but never really imagined were true,

urban legends for frustrated fourteen-year-olds, whispered

in school playgrounds and assembly halls across the country.

He tried the button pad and joystick on the console, finding

that the buttons switched through the channels while the

stick allowed you to fast forward or rewind to pertinent

scenes. It seemed he had struck a band of animal channels

as he flicked through horses, dogs, cats, hamsters and scorpions,

all in the throes of copulation with a selection of pretty

women.

‘You got any normal sex channels in there?’ he asked the

guy at the change counter, a pimple-faced youth reading

Balzac.

‘There are over a thousand channels, mister, I’m sure

you’ll eventually find something you like.’ He looked up from

his book, ‘Just keep flicking, I can tell you like to watch.’

Jon didn’t feel like going outside. Not yet. The choice was

more animal favourites or the peep-show. He chose the

peep-show. Actually, a hexagonal structure of booths placed

around a small revolving stage where a girl would strip, dance

and press her parts against the viewing screen while the timer

in the booth counted down the money. He watched as she

did some kind of intermediate callisthenics on the stage, then

moved up towards the occupied booths and pressed the soft

flesh of her labia right up to his screen, leaving a smeared

residue of sex on the glass. He could see the ghostly shapes

of other men, across the stage, hunched, moving, twitching,

staring. Inside, the booth was pitch black and weirdly comforting

as if the closeness of the place precluded any wayward

thoughts, anything but the viewing itself. He stood there

watching for about five minutes, the strange theatricality of

it taking his mind off more serious matters.

When his money ran out, he fished in his pocket for some

more change which he then managed to drop on to the floor

in the process of negotiating the coin slot. As he bent down

to pick it up, he felt the cold, sticky substance that coated

the floor and squeezed itself between his fingers and he knew

immediately what it was. He left the booth, money still on

the floor, swimming in that saline sea, and headed out of

there feeling dirty and disgusted with himself.

He walked back to the hotel, thinking about the incident

in the park, the lost wallet and passport. Totally freaked.

Knowing the weed wasn’t helping. Jumping at shadows, at

anyone who strayed too closely into his path.

Had he stumbled on some sex deviant? Something else?

He was pretty sure that what blinded him had been a camera

flash. That someone had taken his photo. He didn’t know

what that meant. He didn’t want to guess. The only thing he

knew was that he couldn’t go home yet. That there was

something here, in the streets and canals, the faces of the

people, the buildings and the flash of the camera. Something

that had found Jake too. Something that would not let him go.

Van Hijn spent the afternoon going around the relics of

Amsterdam’s Jewry. He had a photo of Jake and an uneasy

sense of the past coming to assail him as he trudged through

the rain from the Anne Frank Huis to the Hollandse Schouwburg to the Joods Historisch. He had shown the photo, asked the right questions but no one seemed to remember anything.

The sight of a pretty blonde at the Hollandse made him feel

a bit better and he went for lunch at a small restaurant by

the Plantage Parklaan.

At the Joods Historisch he was told to return later by an

American girl. She told him the old man who’d know would

be back then. He thanked her, wishing he was fifteen years

younger, and wandered around the museum, happy to get

away from the rain for a while.

As he stared at the photos and letters, pinned behind glass

like rare butterflies, he felt an overwhelming sense of despair

and dread and he had to turn away so as not to embarrass

himself in front of the tourists. He was crying, his chest

wrenched by the onrushing past. As he looked at the faces

of the men and women boarding the trains, he wondered

whether his father had sent them this way. Was he even in

one of these pictures, wearing Nazi uniform?

He hadn’t thought about it all for so long, had left it there,

somewhere in his memory, clouded over by days and years

that passed, by alcohol and weed, music and films. It had

stolen his youth. The ages between twenty-five and forty

when the world is yours, when everything seems possible

and imminent. His father had robbed him of that, after his

death, and he now felt only a sort of detached bitterness

towards the man who had always cuddled him before

bedtime.

That was the hardest thing. His father had always been so gentle, so kind to him - a measured, respected man who would sometimes, out of the blue, surprise Ronald with a

present or the news that they were going off on holiday that

very evening. How can he have been that person and at the

same time the one who sent these people to their graves?

And why had he made himself into the opposite, into a war

hero when he could easily have slipped back into anonymity?

Van Hijn knew that these questions had no answers. He

had spent years asking them, over and over again, all to no

avail. It was as if the article had stolen his father from him,

leaving him bitter and frustrated, cheated of the completion

that he needed to continue his life. He had gone on the best

he could but there was always a hole in his past, a disjuncture

that continually threatened to rip the present apart. Only by

forgetting, by persuading himself that he didn’t care, had he

been able to carry on. And now it was all coming back to

him, because of that damn tramp and it probably didn’t even

have any bearing on the actual case, the man was murdered

plain and simple. Part of the snuff ring or an actor used once

and easily disposed of.

He was dying for a cigarette, dying to get out of this

enclosed space that pressed itself around him. But that old

question came back, that chestnut that had haunted him like