The Devil's Playground (20 page)

a koan throughout his thirties: why had his father done it?

Had he done it because he was a weak man, a coward who

realized that collaboration was the only safeguard? Or was

he just ruthless? Maybe he didn’t care about the Jews, maybe

he saw in it only a way to attain power, to climb to the top

of the pole? Van Hijn was tormented between the two,

between the idea of his father as a gudess collaborator and

the idea of him as a machiavellian schemer. Which was worse

ethically? To do something out of fear and cowardice or to

do it out of greed and ambition?

He saw the old man was back. Though ‘old man’ was an

incredible understatement. Van Hijn was sure he’d never

seen anyone that ancient. The man looked far more of a relic

than most of the objects on display.

Van Hijn showed him his badge.

‘I was wondering what you were looking for,’ the man

said.

‘You were watching me?’

‘I was. Eating my lunch and watching people go round.

You were looking for something, I think, not a tourist.’

Van Hijn felt slightly taken aback. He’d assumed a doddering

fool when he’d seen him. Didn’t expect to have the

tables turned on him.

“You’re surely too old to be sitting here doing that,’

he said.

The man laughed, a slow descending release. ‘Too old?

What, you think it’s better I sit at home and stare at the

wallpaper?’

‘Forget it,’ Van Hijn replied, taking out the photo of Jake.

He placed it on the table in front of the man. Moshe took

the photo gently in his hands. The detective watched him

smooth thin, brittle fingers over its surface.

‘I read about it in the newspaper. Very sad.’ He put the

photo back down as if holding it for too long was somehow

wrong.

‘So you knew him?’ Van Hijn suddenly felt a surge of

adrenalin. That old familiar feeling.

Moshe nodded. ‘I don’t know how well you could say I

knew him but, yes, he used to come here a lot. Often we

talked.’

Van Hijn moved closer, sat down on the chair by the man.

What about?’

Moshe shrugged. What do old men talk about? Our pains,

the things we missed, fear. What else is there?’

What was he doing here?’

‘Looking for his family, at first. Then he used to come

and help out.’

‘Help out?’

‘In the archives. We have many manuscripts, unlabelled

texts, unknown footage — we don’t have the resources to

hire anyone to catalogue it. Jakob helped with that. He used

to come almost every day. We’d talk for a bit, smoke a

cigarette or two, drink coffee and then he’d go down to

the basement and watch all those films and videos. Sorted

through documents we had.’

‘Films? What was he up to?’ Van Hijn moved closer to

the old man.

‘Up to? Why do you think he was up to something? I

think it is obvious why he would want to do that, no?’

Van Hijn nodded though it was not all that obvious

to him.

‘You know, when he first started coming here, I asked

myself the same question. He didn’t look Jewish. Came every

day and just wandered round staring at the displays. At first

I thought he was one of those people.’

What people?’

The old man looked at him, a sad and elegant face, Van

Hijn thought, unscathed by age or life. ‘You know there’s

nothing we can do. We set up the exhibition to remind

people, to leave a memory of those that are gone. But we

cannot control who comes and sees it. Many come from the

other side. They too appreciate the way we’ve handled things

— but you can see it in their eyes. Pride.

‘They see the exhibition, the constantly running films of

the transportations from Westerbork, the dark rust-smeared

trains that clawed their way across Europe to Auschwitz.

They read the statistics, the lists of the dead and they feel a

warm glow inside. It is like church for them. They watch

with pride and awe as handsomely dressed officers corral the

streaming mass of people into the cattiecars, appreciating

the logistical genius of the whole thing, the scale and purpose

of it. They see the museum as a shrine to a better time. For

them these are the artefacts of their glory. You can see it in

their eyes. And what can we do? We can’t stop them. Can’t

only allow Jews in here.’

‘And Jake?’ Van Hijn didn’t like the direction in which the

conversation was heading.

‘At first I thought he was one of these people — to my

shame.’

‘And you have no idea why anyone would want to kill

him?’ It was the old stock question and it felt tired and

useless as he said it.

Moshe shook his head. ‘Not more than anyone else,’ he

said. ‘Do you mind if I keep the photo?’

Van Hijn saw the man’s left hand, wiry like a bird’s foot, gently resting on the photograph. ‘Of course,’ he replied.

Moshe smiled, took the photo and placed it in the breast

pocket of his shirt.

‘You know, someone was asking about him just yesterday.’

Van Hijn had got up, ready to leave. He snapped back, sat

down. ‘Tell me.’

‘British. Quite young, very polite. Asked about him. I

didn’t say anything of course. You can never tell who you’re

talking to.’

Jon.

Van Hijn felt a smudge of irritation. So, he hadn’t listened.

Had gone ahead and tried to investigate. They read three

detective novels and think they can do better themselves.

And yet, he also felt a curious appreciation. He hadn’t

thought Jon would go against him, had believed him too

weak, too stuck in his own problems. This new information

made him smile, not quite sure exactly why, but smile none

the less.

‘One has to be careful. Especially these days,’ Moshe

continued. He stared up at Van Hijn. A pause. ‘I assume

you’re aware of the films currently up for auction? That

you’re investigating this?’

Van Hijn shook his head. He had no idea what the man

was talking about.

‘Maybe it is something that would be worth your while

checking out?’

What films?’ He got closer to the old man. Tried to

control his breathing.

‘These things, you know, there’s always rumours they

exist. No one believes them and yet they do at some other

level. Well, it seems this time they’re true. Someone’s put up

for sale on the Internet 49 reels of concentration camp

footage; 8 mm.’

‘Real?’ It felt as if the chair couldn’t contain him.

‘Apparently so, though my knowledge is limited.’

Van Hijn stared at the old man. It all came rushing in.

Nine months of fruitless leads coalesced around this point.

Finally he had more than a feeling, more than a hunch. The

snuff films were out there and he wondered, had he set this

in motion? It was almost too symmetrical. He realized that

until this moment he hadn’t really believed it himself, the

theory about snuff, had only accepted that it explained more

than a serial killer. But now he felt the cold, dryness in his

mouth, the uncontrollable heartbeat. He leaned forward.

‘Okay, okay. You want to follow this up. Go here.’ Moshe

took out a small pencil and wrote an address on the back of

a museum welcome card. ‘Go and see these people. They

know more about this than me. It is what they do.’

Van Hijn took the card, looked at the address, South

Amsterdam, placed it in his pocket. ‘You’ve been very helpful,

thank you.’

‘No need to thank me. You find these films, make sure

they don’t get into the wrong hands, it’ll be me thanking

you.’

He got home just before the rain started again. His head

buzzing with the things that the old man had told him. He’d

had a sudden attack of nerves on the way out, wondering

whether Moshe had recognized him — his photo had

appeared in countless newspaper articles after the Der Stern piece. It wasn’t just paranoia and he hated feeling guilty for something which he hadn’t done or even had knowledge of.

He decided not to think about it. To think about Jon instead

and what he really knew about Jake. Whether he’d told him

the whole truth. What was he doing here and had he actually

gone back on his flight?

Van Hijn could now see that there were layers and layers

to this case, stretching back to the first murder, layers whose

existence he’d only just been afforded a glimpse of and yet

which had possibly defined the shape of events so thoroughly

as to have wiped out their own traces.

He was dying for a joint. Something that would stop the

tangle of thoughts. He nearly went for it but then recalled

the toffee cheesecake that he’d bought that morning; sweet

sticky toffee, dark, almost loamy chocolate, crispy pecans

and thick, sugary cream. That would be better, he decided,

though over the last few weeks he’d begun to feel his waist

pushing up against his trousers and he knew that substituting

cheesecake had its own pitfalls.

And then he remembered the box set.

He’d been too tired to open it yesterday. Had forgotten

about it during the course of the day. Now he felt a giddying

sense of excitement as he picked up the heavy grey Amazon

box and ripped open the packaging to reveal the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music box set.

For the last ten years Van Hijn had developed a growing

obsession with early American folk and country music, dark,

scratchy voices from the twenties and thirties. Those massive

box sets produced by the Bear Family, chunks of history,

bound and annotated, complete and chronological, a riposte

to the history he himself knew, the fragmented nonsensical

blur of the past.

There was something about the music of that period that

seduced him, something about the quality of the recordings.

The crackles and surface noise like history snaps, situating it

in a time before magnetic tape. It was music that sounded as

if it came from a totally different world, saturated with tales

of murder, adultery, crime and soul-selling. Often sung by a

lone voice over minimal accompaniment, it embraced a

certain darkness and narrative sensibility that made it quite

unlike anything else. It was music that scared him, left him

shivering sometimes. Music that had to be played in the dark.

Alone.

There was something about the dip of oblivion when the

needle drops down, Dock Boggs’ haunted voice pleading, Oh Death, Please spare me for another year of the impossibly high, lonesome sound of Roscoe Holcomb singing ‘Omie Wise.’

He had in fact stopped listening to most other forms of

music, finding them all lacking the depth and substance that

he found in early American folk music. These CDs were

like spaceships jetting him off to other worlds, distant and

different from his, worlds of stark brutality and compromised

choices; whalers, coalminers, bank robbers, murderers, union

men, adulterers and yet, sometimes it seemed as if this

tradition and these songs were nothing but a blueprint for

his day-to-day work, for the moral composure of the early

twenty-first century.

He lay back on the sofa, drink in hand and listened to the

first CD. Every now and then he would exclaim ‘Fuck!’ or

‘Yeah!’, if there was a particularly choice turn of phrase or

vocal quirk that caught his heart. Does this make up for all

the shit I go through? Does this make it all worthwhile, even

the things I saw today, he asked himself, and pouring another

whiskey, just as Mississippi John Hurt launched into

‘Frankie’, he thought, yes it does. Yes it does.

Because it has to.

The room was strangling him. Boxing and battering him. But

it didn’t move. He knew that. It only felt as if it was crushing

the space slowly, surely, contracting and compacting until it

would reach his body. The view was no good. It was too

small and too dark. The rain covered up the sky. The room

became every room he’d ever inhabited. Each one getting

smaller, darker. A life lived in small rooms. A life barely

lived.

Rooms of rage and rooms of gloom, where the ceilings

hung down like an overattentive mother, rooms filled with

doom and headaches and the fear of going out, of leaving

your room, rooms full of sleep and bad memories and the

solitary sound of your heart exploding in the emptiness.

He was waiting for his credit card. The replacement.

They’d assured him it would be there in the morning. It

wasn’t. So he sat and waited, and he understood that this

was a test, the last attempt of gravity to pull him back to

London, which itself sometimes resembled a small room

with many dark corners. But if this was a test, he was

determined to pass it, to fight the lustrous pull of an easy

life, a quiet life. And it somehow seemed easier, here in this

city, with its canals and constant rain, its strange layout and

soft feel, easier to fight all that, to step away from it.

The card arrived just after lunch, though of course he

hadn’t had anything to eat having waited all morning and as