The Devil's Playground (32 page)

Darkness came. A medieval darkness. But he could still feel

the rain and he wondered how it had got through the shield

of houses. Everything moved slowly but he knew that when

it came, it would come fast and out of nowhere.

He walked back through the busy shopping canyon of

Kalverstraat, the only one going against the flow of bodies,

and he saw that the zombie-like stream of consumers was

trying to show him something. As the people passed him,

they turned their arms around so that he could see them.

Old ladies and young children showed him their numbers; a

group of mentally retarded kids passed by, their smiling

marshmallow faces looking up at him as they too exposed

their camp tattoos. And he didn’t want to look. Knew what

he would find. And when he did look, he saw the numbers,

messily etched out on his own wrist.

He kept checking his pockets, certain that they’d been perused,

felt and emptied, but miraculously his new wallet was

still there. The Doctor’s book was also in his. pocket. He’d

forgotten all about it, or perhaps had not been quite ready

to read it yesterday. He stopped in the street and stared at

the cover, flicked through the yellowed pages. He thought

of the book as a wound: writing the slow, sinewy movements

of the scalpel through the white pulpy body but, he sensed,

it was also a way out of the wound. Both one and the other

and always at the same time, continuously pushing and

nuzzling like two bloodied hounds in a fight to the death.

He stared up at the engorged street, slipped the book back

in his pocket. The pain had now moved up to his neck and

he was sure that he was about to have a heart attack.

He passed a coffee shop near the Rijksmuseum and heard

the sound of the Grateful Dead spilling out, Jerry Garcia’s

guitar lines like the tentacles of some prehistoric sea monster

reaching out of the place, snapping and coiling, wrapping

themselves around him in the street. He felt a deep empty

ache in his stomach, a memory of that autumn day listening

with Jake to the Dead. It seemed almost another lifetime.

He went inside, sat at a table, managed to order a drink,

his eyes focused on the speakers above.

Jon sat listening to Garcia as the guitar emerged, roaring

through the mix, and the bass came rumbling, hungry and

fast, quickly behind it. Then everything exploded. The Dead

had slowly built up a wall of noise that unleashed the Tiger

Jam, Jerry’s unique circular feedback noise solo, peaking in

intensity, the man picking more notes, cleaner and faster

than anyone else had ever done.

As the song came cascading down, the spaces between

the notes becoming elastic, Jon tried to remember which

version this was. He knew that Jerry had used the Tiger over a small stretch of years and he tried to slot his mind back into position as the Dead effortlessly segued into the

fast polka step of Marty Robbins’s cowboy death ballad, ‘El

Paso’, and he realized then that this was none other than the

legendary Creamery benefit at the Veneta County Fairgrounds,

Kesey’s place, in Oregon, 27 August 1972. The

ultimate performance of ‘Dark Star’ according to most

Deadheads, a swelling apocalyptic maelstrom that was unique

to this performance.

The waitress had been watching Jon staring emptily at the

speaker, when he suddenly leapt up, sprung like a jack-in-the

box. She watched as he frantically emptied his pockets,

throwing cigarette packets, tissues, crumpled notes and a

paperback book on to the table. Poor tourist got pick

pocketed, she thought, and went back to her work.

He nearly had a heart attack when the wallet wasn’t where

it was supposed to be and then he remembered that he’d

moved it around different pockets just in case anyone had

been following him and noted where it was. He upended the

whole thing on the table, pulling out receipts and banknotes

until he found the small strip of photocopied paper.

It was so fucking obvious. It had been staring at him all

along, hidden in plain sight.

3117171 - 3/1/67

American dates, of course.

s - n - 71

The Dead at the Veneta County Fairgrounds, Oregon.

‘I just awaken the barbaric, the prehistoric demons,

to a new Godless life.’

— Werner Herzog

‘I have talked to you about the difficulty of being Jewish, which

is the same as the difficulty of writing.

For Judaism and writing are but the same waiting, the same

hope, the same wearing out.’

— Edmond Jabes

3

G1

The Dead at the Fillmore West, San Francisco.

All classic performances. All part of his collection of live

Grateful Dead CDs. Back in London. The ones Jake had

listened to.

He walked up to the waitress, asked her where the phone

was. She smiled, pointed. He dialled Suze’s number, hoping

it would be the answering machine, hoping he could just

leave a message and not be drawn into anything more.

‘Jon, I’m so glad you called, I’m sorry …’

‘Suze, I have to go to London. I can’t talk now. I’ll call

you when I get back,’ he said, and hung up the phone before

she could reply.

Boarding the plane, hung over, wishing he was back in bed,

he wondered again, what exactly did he think he was doing?

Buckling himself into the miniature seat that pressed and

prodded him from all sides, it seemed he’d made a dreadful

mistake. Everyone else on board was smiling with the initial

rush of holiday adrenalin or the warm smugness of finally

going home. But for him it was neither of these things. Not

coming or going but somehow still suspended in the spaces

in between. Secretly dreading his return to London lest he

end up staying.

It was stupid to think those numbers meant anything, that

they would somehow clear everything away like a quick wipe

to the inside of a steamed-up windscreen, and all the way to

the airport he’d been having second thoughts, big bad doubts

about his hallucinogenic satori. He’d left the cafe immediately

after calling Suze, checked out of the hotel and headed for

the airport. It was only at Schiphol, with twenty minutes to

go till his flight, that he realized he’d left The Garden of Earthly Delights on the coffee-shop table. It made him feel terrible.

Beatrice’s book and all for what, for a string of numbers, a

flash of fake insight.

But the old man had liked the Grateful Dead and the

bookmark with the code had been in his book after all.

He felt that he needed this, so as not to give up hope and

consign Jake’s death to being just another unsolved murder.

There were too many of those, too many bodies without

stories, both here in the present and in the texts and photos

at the Jewish museum.

He knew that the detective would probably give up soon

enough or be transferred to another case. If and when the

killer was caught, all that mattered to anyone would be how many he’d killed, not who, just the bare statistics. Not much would be said about Jake, nor about Beatrice, and murder

would just be the word MURDER, nothing behind it at all

— no screaming, pleading, crying, torture, rape — none of the

gritty stuff, the small, horrible details that make you choke

and curse humanity. No, none of that, just the fact that he

killed this number of people and where does he rate in the

taxonomy of killers, the Nilsen ratings, above or below

Dahmer? Manson?

The plane took off and Jon began to sweat, hope and failure

swirling in his mind. He drank two Bloody Marys and looked

out over the English Channel, a small smudge of grey,

thousands of feet below. He scratched his emergent beard,

enjoying the strange feel of hair on his skin. Maybe it would

be good to get out of Amsterdam for the weekend, he

thought. Maybe it was Suze, maybe that was the real reason

he’d decided to fly back to London.

Getting away from her or from himself? Or from the part

of himself that opened up in her presence? He’d enjoyed

making love to her the other night, bound and tied, enjoyed

it too much perhaps, and though she’d asked for it, he knew

that he too was getting a certain pleasure from inflicting the

soft hurts which she so deeply desired. The whole thing had

made him uneasy.

And then she’d come up with that request. And he wondered,

if he’d surrendered to her desires would there be any

possibility for them? Or was it his reluctance to step into

that arena which precluded a future? He thought of her

Colorado eyes, her little-girl stare which always made him

laugh and the small, serpentine smiles that crept from her

mouth at the most unexpected of times. Why the hell couldn’t

she just be normal and not want to be hit, tied up? Why does

everyone want what’s so bad for them?

Stupid question, he thought, stupid fucking question.

Better he should think of those eyes and that look of hers,

keep that in mind.

London was perversely sunny for October and he stood for

a few minutes, eyes closed, outside Terminal 4, just letting

the weak winter sun bathe him with whatever heat it had to

give. He took a taxi home, trying to avoid making any

conversation with the driver as they inched along the M4

early-evening rush.

Cruising through Chiswick, Jon felt the anticipation growing

in his stomach, and he tried to tell himself that it might

all be for nothing, trying not to get too worked up, too

excited — after all, what the hell could Jake have put inside a

double-CD case?

He paid the driver, picked up his mail and went straight

to the flat. It looked smaller somehow as he turned on the

light and watched the dust scatter through the air. Smaller

and darker than he remembered it to be, and he suddenly

felt a crushing sensation as though someone had just stamped

on his ribcage. The flat was so empty and it was only now

that he realized it, like walking out of a smoky room, coming

back, and only then smelling the smoke. He stood there for

a few minutes feeling everything draw away from him. He

looked at the sofa where Jake had sat and he felt furious for

having let the old man go. He wanted to scream at the room

for not telling him. For not realizing what he’d meant to him

while he was still alive. The dumbest of mistakes, used to

prop up countless Hollywood movies and he’d fallen for it.

‘I’m not going to let you slip away this time,’ he said to

the empty room. ‘I’ll follow it through.’

He went to the kitchen and poured himself a scotch,

ripped open a pack of Marlboros and sat down facing the

television. He picked up the framed review, that review,

which took pride of place on top of the TV. Stared at it,

skim-reading the derisive paragraphs. He undipped the

frame, pulled out the cutting and crumpled it in his fist. It

gave so easily, he was surprised. He put the empty frame

back in its place then smoked two cigarettes, letting the

anticipation course through him, watching the black screen.

He got up and went over to his CD cabinet. It had

originally been a shallow cupboard but Jon had removed the

door and mouldings and put up shelves so that it became a

neat indented bookcase for his live Grateful Dead CDs. He

had about 200 of them, live concerts burned on to disc from

across the group’s history, mostly triples, this being the

length of an average Dead show.

He took out the two concerts. The boxes didn’t feel any

heavier or substantially different. He’d somehow thought

that when he got here, he would know immediately. He

prepared himself for the worst.

He opened the cases. Everything looked normal. As it

should be.

A dizzying rush of disappointment swept through him.

What had he thought Jake had left anyway, the name of his

killer? The thing that would make his death okay for Jon?

He’d wanted something, yes, some magic talisman that

would explain and absolve everything, and instead he’d followed

a bad trail, the old man probably just jotted down his

favourite Dead concerts while waiting for a bus, nothing

more. Jon stared, deflated, at his reflection in the CDs, his

face coming back thin and far away. And that was when he

noticed it.

He’d always used one type of blank CD for his recordings.

Discs 1 and 3 were of this brand but disc 2 was a TDK.

He’d never used those.

Excitement bubbled up in his brain as he frantically

opened the other case and found that the Fillmore East set

also had an anomalous second disc sitting on top of the

original.

He sat staring at them for a while, not quite knowing what

to do, or not quite daring, just staring at this face that stared

back, bearded and dull — his own - and he thought that

maybe he should just leave, get back in a cab, back to