The Devil's Playground (27 page)

back in Berlin, or at least Frankfurt, co-ordinating. Not this

fucking errand that any idiot could do. Immigrant work. That

was what it was. Punishment for being born in the Sudeten,

a fucking Czech to all intents and purposes though his

parents had been German. So, everywhere he went, they

looked in his face and saw the slav, the slave … but maybe,

he thought, taking another long snort off the card, maybe

this time, these items — yes, retrieve these and then refuse to

hand them over until Dieter promoted him. Karl smiled. Felt

better. Warm rush through the veins and the thomping

whack whack of a heart all ready for action.

Some greasy fucking kid opened the door. Looked at him

like he was some kind of … Karl didn’t quite know what.

‘Where’s Quirk?’ he asked.

‘He went out for cigarettes,’ the boy replied.

Karl walked past him and sat down in the waiting room.

His feet tapped the tiled floor to an imagined beat. He

flicked through the raggedy magazines. Where the hell was

the old man?

Dieter had directed them to Quirk. Quirk was a well

known sympathizer, a useful source of information. Was in

at the ground floor on this one, Dieter had said. A little

cantankerous but what the fuck, he’s useful, right? Winking

at Karl, handing him the small, bland business card.

‘Yes?’ Quirk said.

Karl looked up. Quirk didn’t even bother to smile. The

fucking kid hung around like a cold sore. ‘What was it you

wanted?’ The old man was thin and gaunt but with all the

muscled tension and tightness of a well-trained hound. He

stared coldly into Karl’s eyes as if nothing could mean much

to him any more.

‘Let’s talk in there,’ Karl said, feeling the coke rush down

the back of his throat, coating it in numbness. Anmotherfuckingtarctica.

Quirk nodded once and led Karl into the piercing gallery.

The old man locked the door behind them, then felt for the

knife he kept on his belt. The German was shaking, looked

whacked out on drugs. Piercing was getting to be a dangerous

profession these days. ‘Yes, what exactly is it you want?’

‘An address.’ Karl smiled. He felt good now. In control.

Thinking about his promotion. ‘Dieter sent me.’ He watched

as the old man visibly relaxed, moving his hand away from

the blade that Karl had recognized glinting in the harsh,

white light of the room.

‘Ah, yes. He said there would be two.’

‘My partner was sick.’

‘Ah.’ Quirk moved away from Karl. He could dispatch

the German right here, he knew. The room was soundproofed.

Karl had surely underestimated his speed. They all

did. He’d know about the blade but only once he felt it

breathe cold against his throat. Then Quirk would have the

films all to himself. It felt so tempting he had to bite his lip,

hard pain to distract him. So tempting, only the one of them,

like a fucking pleading to do this. But no, he couldn’t however

much he wanted to. Because others would come. Of that

there was no doubt. Dieter would know almost immediately

and how long would Quirk last? Not long he knew, not

unless he went on the run, but what was the point in having

the films if you couldn’t watch them? He wanted to scream.

they come all the way from Germany and think they can

just pick them up like that. The films should belong to him,

after all…

‘Come on, old man, I haven’t got all fucking day,’ Karl

said. He wanted to hit something, hard. He wondered if the

old man would let him punch the boy.

‘Fifty-five years and he says he hasn’t got all day. You

stupid young fuck.’ Quirk turned round. His mouth was

ringed by a thin layer of white stuff. Karl noticed the old

man was shaking. ‘It’s a fucking wonder you don’t rush out

of your own skin, so eager to have it all now, right this

minute. Well, you’ll have to wait. Because it’s not so easy. It

doesn’t work like that. I will know in the next few days.’ He

smiled, enjoying the scene now but the German didn’t look

too disappointed. Well, fuck him. ‘Come back in a couple of

days. Once the preview is up, it will be easier. The possibilities will narrow, you see. I will have the address then.’

Karl thought, well, that’s not such a surprise after the

fucked-up way the whole day had so far gone but what the

fuck, more time in Amsterdam. Dieter said it might take

them a few days, wanted them in place early. More time to

argue; well, fuck that too. ‘You got a toilet I can use?’

Afterwards he told Quirk he’d be back in a couple of days.

More assertive now, not feeling so cowed by the old man’s

rudeness. Feeling better, as he entered the daylight again and

the girls all tapped their nails against the window for him

and he smiled at them like any tourist would until he finally

saw one that looked sadder than the rest and as he walked

around the circuit a few times he invented a history for her,

eastern European, that was easy to see. And the story came

easily, as it always did for him, this whole elaborate scam

that co-opted her from the cold bosom of mother Latvia,

promising her a waitressing job, a guard at the museum,

promising anything and then chaining her and feeding her

drugs and letting men fuck her every which way they wanted.

Kept like a slave. The years ahead. Her life — that’s what he

rifled on. The cruelty and disappointment. The sad fucking

waste and how it glowed from her fucking eyeballs.

And she was the one he picked.

On the eve of their first week together Jon and Suze took a

canal boat cruise, enjoying the tacky anonymity of being inside

a group of tourists, slowly sliding past the streets, watching

everything from a different level, relaxed by the swell and roll

of the boat, the dark, smudgy pit-pat of the tunnels.

‘Tell me more about the Council,’ he said as they passed

by the sex clubs and neon lights of the District. He was

fascinated by the parts of her life that were still a mystery to

him, by her youth in Arizona, the Sonoran dreams she’d

feverishly recounted and the nights when she lay awake,

inscrutable and all the more beautiful for it.

‘The Council? I’ve already told you.’

‘You haven’t told me much. What made you get into it?’

He could hear the canal water lap against the boat, slurp,

slurp, slurp, and he realized that this was the only time he

felt Diamonds are Forever or the sense of being submerged

in an Alistair MacLean book. The real Amsterdam experience

as the side of the boat so judiciously declared.

‘Just happened to deal with things I was using in my thesis.

It’s a good place to talk, share stuff, work through your own

ideas.’

‘But why are you so fascinated with violence?’

She turned away from him then, inched along the canal

boat’s seat. He grabbed her hand.

The boat swelled and rocked as they entered the sea, the

Ij, in all its uncaged wildness, even the driver dropping his

mobile phone, alert now, and as Jon looked up and out he

could see the whole city fall away. Suddenly there was only

the horizon and the swell and torment of the waves breaking

against their boat. ‘Why?’ he asked her again.

‘What do you want me to say? Because I find it thrilling?

Appalling?’ She breathed out. ‘All those things and more.

Am I really so unusual?’ She lit a cigarette, drawing angry

looks from the other passengers. Her voice softened. ‘When

I was eight I saw a man killed,’ she said and told him about

the incident at the mini-mart. ‘My mum began to drink after

that, my father to spend nights away from the house. I don’t

think it was the actual fact of what we’d witnessed but there

was something about that day — something I think my parents

could never recover from.’

He moved closer to her, felt her breath on his cheek. Her

hand trembled on his knee. He remembered the breath of

his mother and his body felt as if it had just exploded, a huge

force entering and then, just as abruptly, leaving him. ‘And

you?’ he asked Suze.

‘I didn’t think about it for years. It never seemed to affect

me. Perhaps now I know better. Perhaps not.’ She didn’t like

to talk about it. She wanted everything to be perfect between

them. To be normal, and yet he seemed to have a knack for

poking at those spots she thought were most hidden, and it

frightened her. She wondered: if he knew everything would

he still sit so close to her?

‘And so the Council fits into all that?’

‘I don’t know. I guess so. I hadn’t really thought about it.’

Though Jon could tell that she had, but he kept it to himself,

aware that any stray thought could lead to the discovery of a

chasm too wide to cross.

She laughed as the boat rocked gently over the canal, black

and shiny like silk. ‘You know, we originally had this naive

idea of resuscitating the image.’

‘Resuscitating it from what?’ He knew she was changing

the subject but he went along with it.

‘From its current invisibility. You know the basic idea that

once you reproduce a certain image a number of times, its

power weakens until finally it becomes blank, impotent? You

know how the first time you saw a starving Ethiopian it really

got to you and by the time that image is on a Benetton poster

it’s lost all its shock value?’

‘Yes, but if we didn’t see the picture in the first place we

wouldn’t even know there was such a thing as a starving

Ethiopian kid, not in real terms, we might hear about them

but surely it’s always the image that brings it home.’

‘The reality signifier?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Well that’s exactly where the Council was split. There’s a

faction which believes that no matter how short-lived the

shock value of the image is, that it’s still a powerful and

important tool, a very necessary tool in making us aware of

what these things actually are. While others were totally

against the representation of more horror arguing that —

somewhat like American Indians believing a photo of them

stole a part of their soul — these images of atrocity are actually draining those actual things of their meanings.’

‘And you? Where do you stand?’

‘I don’t know, I agree to some extent with both viewpoints.

It’s not as simple as saying which side you’re on any more. The

sides aren’t there, only the areas in between. It becomes a

moral question. How do you represent violence? Can you do

it in a way that doesn’t glorify it, a way that will bring home to an audience just how sickening and brutal it really is? That will

cause them to abhor it? To want to do something about it?

That’s the objective, to try to do it in a way that will educate

and hopefully eradicate the very violence that’s represented.’

They passed by what seemed a city of bicycles or, maybe,

a graveyard. Jon craned his neck at the sight, hundreds upon

hundreds of bicycles stacked against each other like people

crammed into trains, four massive levels stretching up to the

dull sky, metal and brass blinking in the muggy light. ‘What

about images from the Holocaust?’ he asked her, thinking

about what the detective had said, Jake’s visits to the museum,

his obsession with the footage there. The films. Thinking

also about his own reactions to those images, the way they

made you shrink a little bit, the way they took something

from you.

‘The Holocaust somehow stands outside. I don’t know

why and it’s dangerous to claim uniqueness, though of

course, every historical “event” is always already both unique

and symbolic, but there’s something about those images,

those living skeletons and piles of bodies, naked women and

children shivering in a pit standing on top of layers of

their dead. Something about the way the images are so

professionally composed.’

Jon listened to her and watched the walls of the canal

slowly move across his line of vision. He understood that

her passion was a product of the pain and sadness that

engulfed her, her method of trying to reason her way out of

it. He knew then that he wanted to be with her more than

anything else, that it was stupid and childish and that that

made it even better. What was it the detective had said about

the things that remain?

‘You know, funnily enough it was the Holocaust that

brought us back together as a group.’ She took the cigarette

he offered her and crouched down into the wind to light it

before continuing. ‘One of our members found this book in

a secondhand bookshop in the south of the city. It was a

Holocaust memoir by a former Jewish prisoner-doctor called

The Garden of Earthly Delights. No one had ever heard of it

before.

‘It began by quoting Dante. The author, Dr Chaim Kaplan,

recounted how in the middle of the journey of his life, in a

dark forest on the edge of Byelorussia, he was arrested by

roving SS guards and put on a train, destination Auschwitz.