The Devil's Playground (21 page)

soon as he’d signed the papers he was back out on the street,

drifting unavoidably west. He wondered about his passport,

most probably already sold - what shadowy twin had now

been born, carrying his name and vital statistics, had they

passed each other in the street or would they cross sometime

in the future, one mistaken for the other?

The sun hit him as he entered Nieuwmarkt. He was still

amazed by the explosion of space and he began to understand

how the city trembled to a rhythmic dialectic of concealment

and revelation, how every dark, imposing street eventually

funnelled out into big empty squares from which the only

exit was to crouch back into another small street, darkened

by tall buildings, until that too ended in another grey, concrete

square, another opening.

He took a different route this time and found himself in

Wertheim Park, walking past the rich foliage and shrubbery

of the gardens, and he looked at the great greenhouses, the

reflected sun, the silky canal water and he felt good. Smiling.

Not knowing why, not questioning it, just, damn it, smiling,

that was all.

He wanted to go back to the museum and yet felt a

momentary trepidation. What was he scared of? The past?

Surely there was nothing there that could harm him any

more, he thought, not even his father could do that now. So

what else?

He wanted to question the old man again. He was certain

that he knew something. Jake had been more than a ghost.

He’d left his mark on that page, had walked through those

rooms. Jon cursed himself. He’d been too meek the first

time, taken no for an answer too easily. Absolutely typical

his father would say, but his father was just a dream now, no

need to listen to him. No, this time he would assert himself.

This time he wouldn’t leave without finding something out.

He stood across the road from the museum, watching a

party of schoolchildren lining up, bored, chewing gum,

gabbing and swaying, waiting for the day to be over. He took

a joint out of his pocket. That would make it easier, he knew,

easier to not be so hesitant and accepting. He watched the

schoolkids clumsily entering the museum, fourteen-, fifteenyear-olds.

What did they take away from this, he wondered,

smoking the joint, feeling things slot into their proper places.

He crushed the butt under his shoe and was about to cross

the road when he saw Van Hijn coming out of the museum.

A scowl on the detective’s face, that long droopy face,

emerging from the front entrance, black raincoat swirling

around his heels, and Jon slipped back into the doorway of

a house, hoping the detective hadn’t seen him.

Jon stepped out, about to cross the road when he saw the

other man. Emerging from behind the museum, following

Van Hijn. A tall man who moved too fast for Jon to notice

his features. The man looked behind him, making sure perhaps,

then set off after the detective. Jon watched and waited

until both of them, pursuer and pursued, were gone.

‘How are you today, Suze?’ Moshe took her bag and smiled.

‘Good, you?’ She didn’t want to tell him how she really

felt and she knew, deep down, that talking about things only

made them worse, brought inchoate feelings into the world,

made them concrete and real and far more terrifying than if

left unspoken.

‘Great for my age!’ he said and they both laughed, uneasily,

drawing surprised looks from the few people who’d got there

early.

In the small back room she carefully leafed through some

of the gouaches, trying to imagine what it had been like for

Charlotte, exiled in the South of France, remembering her

life on to paper. She found it awe-inspiring that Charlotte

could have created these thousand or so paintings from

memory, there was such a wealth of detail and setting, each

painting quite often being a compression of several story

lines running across the page like those early Mannerist

paintings she’d so admired in her first-year studies at Berkeley.

The paintings were so populous, alive and electric and

yet there was also an economy to Charlotte’s work, an

uncluttered sense of space and peace that was perhaps only

the result of her knowing that time was running out.

Suze was beginning to see in Charlotte’s art a way of

working through her ideas. For such a long time she’d

thought she’d failed. She was so scared of that. But Charlotte

was not going to let herself be the straw-woman Suze had

set up to expound her own ideas about political representation,

the need for brutal images, for the artist to comment

directly on his or her times — no, Charlotte evaded that with

the skill and subtlety of her work. That had been a fairy-tale,

Suze now recognized, a childish assumption on her part,

reductive as hell, which had blinded her to the most important

aspects of Charlotte’s work: the light streaming in

through the windows, the stunning Cote d’Azur colours and

small exchanges that people managed between themselves,

the shared moments of peace and hope — after all it was

those things that had initially spoken to her, drawn her into

Charlotte’s world — unaware still of the hideous fate that

awaited her.

She’d almost given up on finding the lost sections. She’d

spent too many days going through old documentation looking

for clues, a mention here, an allusion there. And she had

found the clues; they were always there to find. In a way

she’d felt like a detective, searching for the missing section

through the traces left, and perhaps that had been the

seduction itself, not the actual lost paintings but the foraging

for them, the unravelling of the past, the accumulation of

data. She’d let herself get sucked in, distracting her from the

real work at hand, from coming to terms with what was there

rather than trying to understand it through what was missing.

The old man wasn’t there. A sign said please deposit the

entrance fee in the box. He walked around but there seemed

to be no one in charge, no one to show the photo to, only

bored security guards who didn’t look Jewish. He felt a

punch of disappointment, a low swinging feeling like finding

out you hadn’t passed the exam you were so sure you had.

So he walked up to the small enclosure. Looked at the

self-portrait of the artist and thought, I could have fallen in

love with her so easily. He stared transfixed by the painting

and then, walking around, by the others, slowly being introduced

to Charlotte’s circle of characters, picking up her

rhythms, the dense nature of the work, littered with allusions

to things he only remotely knew, foreign tales and dramatizations

that added to the mystique that he found so pleasing.

He came back to the self-portrait and stared. Her lips were

so beautiful, her mouth so elegant, so intelligent. He moved

closer to the painting, noticed the smudged fingerprints and

it suddenly made it all so immediate, intimate, these left-over

signs that now were all that was left. He wanted to touch the

paper there, press his thumb against Charlotte’s. Feel the

actual grain of the paper and paint.

Her eyes were staring at him. Whichever way he looked

at the painting, they seemed to follow him around, a proud

and resigned sadness drooping the right eye ever so slightly,

a portrait of indecision, worry, fret and anxiety. He moved

closer, wanting to see the swirl of her lips, the full bottom

lip sensuous and sexy, and he got closer, wanting to fall into

the painting, to drown in her lips, her nose, moving nearer,

seeing small details otherwise unobserved, edging forward,

was that a mistake or had she intentionally left that part…

closer still, the eyes drawing him in, yes sadness, sadness and

pride mixed together and those fine eyebrows so delicate he

could almost count the individual hairs, and if he could just

get a bit closer …

The sound of the alarm ripped him out of his reverie.

A shrill, piercing repeating tone that bounced around the

high walls of the synagogue, getting louder, the space

between pulses narrowing, loud and petulant, screaming,

screaming, screaming and the men coming towards him, the

security guards.

He didn’t move. Didn’t turn or run though he knew they

were coming for him. That he’d got too close. Tripped the

alarm.

He tried to smile but they grabbed his arms and though

he protested, said it was an accident, they pulled him through

the museum, in front of all the schoolkids, awake and excited

now, the trip suddenly better than they had expected, all

gawping at him being carried away.

She’d been watching him staring at the Salomon paintings.

He stared so intently that she couldn’t help but watch him.

She traced his reactions, the way he smiled. He looked like a

man falling away. And then she’d turned, walked towards

the entrance, but Moshe was at lunch, she’d forgotten, and

returning, acceding to the darkness of the small room, the

limits of the page, she’d heard the alarm buzz through the

museum, watched as everyone woke out of their staring

slumbers, looked around, tried to isolate, see where the

trouble was.

And then she saw him, being led away by the two guards,

looking dishevelled, scared and lost and she knew that she

had to do something.

‘What happened?’ She stopped in front of the guards.

They knew her. Smiled at her in the mornings and wished

her well at night.

‘Nothing to concern yourself with,’ the taller man said, his

hand gripping Jon’s arm, holding him like you would a

toddler who has a fondness for straying. ‘Just the usual.’

She looked at the man. His eyes refused to meet hers and

she understood his embarrassment, the public spectacle that

was being enacted here.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

‘Take him outside. Tell him not to come back.’

‘Let me do it.’ Though not quite sure of her motives, she

felt better for saying it, taking the man’s arm, feeling the

guard’s grip loosen.

‘You sure?’

She nodded. ‘Don’t worry,’ she replied and looked at Jon,

his face lifting, his eyes meeting hers. She smiled and saw

him smile back.

‘You okay?’ she asked as the security guards peeled away

and returned to their posts.

Jon stared at her. Surprised that she was an American; her

Dutch had deceived him. He nodded. ‘Are you going to

chuck me out too?’ he asked.

Suze laughed. ‘No. I thought maybe you needed a coffee,

some cake, sugar, you look a little woozy.’

Jon smiled. ‘That would be great.’

She offered her hand. ‘I’m Suze.’ Was she blushing? He

couldn’t tell under the artificial light. ‘That’s with an E not

a Y, my dad was a big Dylan fan.’

She spoke so fast that he didn’t know what she was talking

about but he smiled back, introduced himself.

‘I saw you looking at the paintings,’ she said.

‘That’s what got me in trouble. I wanted to sink into

them.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘There’s a gravity there, most people

don’t see.’

‘I think so,’ he answered, his heartbeat pounding like a

drum track.

‘I’m doing a thesis on her.’ She pointed at the self-portrait

behind them, nervous, wishing she hadn’t said that, was she

trying to impress him?

‘That sounds fascinating.’ He bit down on his lip. Had he

just said that? Christ, he thought.

They sat in the museum coffee shop. Empty apart from a

cleaner hunched over a mop, another woman organizing

food behind the counter. The place smelled of coffee and

bleach. He sat at a table and waited as Suze went up to the

counter.

‘I’m sorry for what happened,’ he said as she came back,

balancing a tray, putting it down.

‘Don’t worry about it. The alarms get tripped all the time.

Gives the security something to do. Here.’ She placed a small

plate containing a round whorl of pastry in front of him.

‘Specialty of the museum. Get your blood sugar back up to

normal’

He took the cake, set it before him, waited a couple of

seconds, then broke its surface with the edge of his fork,

releasing a steaming vapour smelling of almonds and butter,

long days and endless afternoons.

Wow,’ was all he said, juggling the piece in his mouth,

trying not to burn himself, thinking of mouth cancer, voice

boxes and how her hands, holding the coffee cup, were so

delicate and precise that nothing else seemed to matter. Only

the warm, delicious taste of the cake and the sight of those

hands.

‘So, what are you doing in Amsterdam?’ she asked and he

almost told her the truth — almost.

‘Just another dumb tourist,’ he replied. ‘The sights, the

weed, the museums.’

‘You knew about her before?’

Jon shook his head.

‘But you liked it?’