The Devil's Playground (36 page)

reeled back, fell off the sofa; she heard the dog grunt, then

saw Dominic coming towards her.

‘No.’ She realized she was on the verge of screaming,

slipping into hysteria.

“I want you so much,’ he said. She understood that

somehow she had caused this, she’d not been strong

enough to voice her feelings early on and now it had come

to this.

‘Jon’s no good for you, Suze. He’ll leave as soon as you

tell him about Jake. Please, we could have such an amazing

life together, I know.’

‘Stop it, Dominic’ She eyed the door, calculated distance,

speed and likely obstacles.

Ś“Why? Am I making you uncomfortable?’ His tone had

changed, sarcasm thickening those northern vowels, and he

moved closer towards her. ‘And you hate that, don’t you?

Hate having any kind of confrontation, anything that will

make you feel less than good. You lied to Jon, you lied to

me just to make your life easier. How do you think it feels

hearing you talk about him like that?’

And she realized he was right, or partly right or not right

at all, but still it was the way he felt and therefore had as

much validity as anything else. ‘I’m sorry, Dominic. I should

have been more sensitive.’ She knew she needed to say this,

that things were quickly moving out of control. ‘I hide from

things, I don’t mention them, but I’m trying, Dominic, I’m

really trying.’

He turned from her, walked towards the bedroom. ‘Please,

just go. Get out of here. Before anything happens,’ he said

and disappeared into the other room, shutting the door

behind him. She grabbed her things and left.

When she was gone, he went to the hollowed-out niche he

used for the video camera. He first made sure that the front

door was locked, that she wouldn’t burst in, having forgotten

her cigarettes. Then he took the camera and wired it to the

TV. He rewound the tape. Rolled himself a joint and

stretched out on the sofa. The weed was good. His mind

was spinning Instantly.

Yet what he saw wasn’t good. Not any more. Not for a

long time now. Not since the touch of the body. That slimy,

cold clasp of dead flesh. The sound of it hitting the canal

water. Its slow descent into the blackness. Shit. He had to

stop thinking about it. He rolled and sparked another joint.

Blew the images from his mind. Turned on the TV. Set the

tape to play, to replace the images in his head with ones

more desirable.

She’d been sitting dead in the eye of the camera’s lens.

Centred perfectly. If he’d staged it, he couldn’t have done a

better job. He was glad he’d set the zoom right.

Suze’s face danced on the screen, alternately crying, smiling,

angry and appalled. He lay back and butted the joint.

Slipped his zip slowly down and felt the hardness raging

underneath. He stared at her as she mutely retold her story

and he came, shuddering, almost falling off the sofa. He

wiped up, stopped the tape, put the camera back in position

and smoked another cigarette.

Later, he sat on the bed and began to think about Jon and

his place in all this. He needed something else to think about.

He felt as if his chest had collapsed, one of those bombs had

sucked the lungs out of his mouth. The whole room folding

over him. The work of the last few weeks, all the time since

Jake had died. He ground his foot down into the floor until

the pain made him scream. Then he felt a bit better.

Bill walked into the room, came to rest by him. Dominic

buried his face in the dog’s soft fur. If Jon was so intent on

playing the detective, well, there were ways that he could

deal him in, make him part of it. Of course, he already was

- he just didn’t know it yet. He should have told Suze, he

knew that, told her that Jon was in danger, that they all were,

everyone linked to the group, to the doctor. But something

held him back. Of course she suspected but not the full

extent of things. Not how far they’d gone. He knew she was

scared and he liked her like that. He stared up at his computers,

the flickering screens, the editing boxes, the projectors.

Jon would have to be careful, and if the time came, and

he was almost sure that it would, then Jon would be pulled

into this, used as a buffer. After all, Dominic thought, he

wants to know, he wants to be a part of it. It’s the least I can

do.

The next morning Jon woke up alone in his apartment. It

was another sunny day and his head felt as if an entire jazz

band had taken up residence inside it. He barely managed to

make himself some coffee, spilling the grounds all over the

floor, suck two cigarettes and take a couple of painkillers

before the pain became too much. He lay in bed, his head

pounding, and thought about the night before. He couldn’t

remember what he’d done after he got in. It didn’t really

matter, was probably best left forgotten anyway.

When the pills had shaved the edge off the pain he went

straight to his computer. He’d had an idea last night, miraculously still remembered it this morning. He recalled the day

Jake had gone, waking up to an empty flat, the computer

buzzing like an unwanted friend. And then it had struck him.

The computer shouldn’t have been on.

He smoked a cigarette while it booted, watched the icons

lining up in their usual positions, a Giant Sand record wheezing

in the background. He hit the Explorer button, scrolled

down to the History folder.

Clicked.

Double clicked.

Worked out the exact day that Jake had left, clicked again.

And there it was — a list of fifteen or so pages that Jake

had visited that morning. It had been there all along, like the

CDRs, waiting for him to discover it.

Jon started going through the list, clicking on the links,

making sure he wasn’t online, making sure he got the same

page that Jake had viewed and not an updated one. We are

all our own detectives, he thought, here on the net, we all

become that.

Sites detailing body-modification conventions.

Ebay. Items no longer available.

The Heathrow webpage, details of flights to Amsterdam.

But nothing that would have made Jake return, nothing

Jon could see. He kept going through the pages, slowly

scrutinizing every word, just in case it was the smallest of

things that drove Jake back. But there was nothing, absolutely

nothing.

Jon leaned forward, lit another cigarette, breathed out his

frustration. And then he realized. He hadn’t looked at it

because it was his default home page. But now he could see

that Jake had linked from it. He followed the trail of

addresses. Brought up the BBC News front page that Jake

had looked at — linked to the Northern European news

section, linked down from there, and there she was.

Beatrice. Unnamed, unseen, but lurking between the

words flickering on the screen. A small paragraph related the

discovery of another body thought to be linked to the current

string of murders that had been taking place in Amsterdam

since January. Jon read and re-read the article. The short

detailing of Van Hijn’s blunder in February. The-killing of

the suspect who happened not to be the suspect at all but

another freak, a rapist with a collection of mounted nipples.

But it had been Beatrice, the ghost of her lurking in those

tense, brittle words, that had drawn Jake back to Amsterdam.

Which means he must have known. Must have had some

idea at least. Though she hadn’t been named, he knew that

Jake had recognized her. There was no doubt about it in his

mind, though why Jake went back or what his involvement

was, Jon still hadn’t figured.

He saved the pages into his files. Turned off the CD

though Howe was still singing about being stuck in the

desert, comfort eroded by the dark night. He loaded the

CDR and fast-forwarded it until he reached the place where

he’d stopped the night before. He didn’t feel so bad towards

Jake this morning and when the old man’s face appeared he

felt a deep, thrusting sadness engulf him.

‘Dr Chaim Kaplan.

‘I should have known really. Should have known that this frail old man would become the pivot on which my new life turned. I sat in

on a few of the Council meetings, watched him, noticed how the

group obviously revered the old man, deferring to his opinions on a wide range of things.

‘I kept drinking, taking more and more drugs and walking around

the city, always finding myself at a monument to the war dead or

some neighbourhood my family had once walked through. I visited

the old house that had been detailed in the tax records. A grand

nineteenth-century gabled monster in the lush green calm of the

museum quarter. I stood there and watched a young family as they

arrived back from some kind of weekend trip. Father and mother

and three small children all gaily unloading the accessories of their lives. They joked with one another and promptly carried everything into the house, laughing and smiling. A couple of hours later, I saw them having dinner in the front room, and I watched transfixed as the man slowly carved the roast and served it to his family. There was such a sense of peace in that room that I would have given up

my life, right then, for a few seconds of its warmth.

‘I was staying with a friend of mine, a member of the Council. He left me to my own devices and was as gracious a host as one could hope for. He kept insisting that I should go and see the Doctor, that I should talk to the old man. That there were connections between the two of us that I had only guessed. He told me so many times that finally I said yes. And I admit, I was intrigued by what I’d heard and seen of the Doctor. His survival from the hell that had sucked my family down. The sense of him being a last link in that awful

chain.

‘The Doctor lived in a small, fifth-floor walk-up apartment just off the Rembrandtplein. The common parts of the building had once

been elegant but were now faded with years of neglect and the

whole place had that shabby European feel of something grand

gone rotten.

‘The old man opened the door and asked me in. He was always

polite, always the gentleman. It gave us a connection in those early meetings, an entry port into each other’s lives. We were both from a generation that still held on to those virtues of politeness and a stiff, respectful formality and, even though the Doctor was over

twenty years older than me, he still seemed closer in many ways than people twenty years younger, a generation I don’t really understand.

‘We talked about nothing at first. Comments about the weather

and state of the city. Sometimes we would talk over some of the

ideas we’d heard at a Council meeting, or about an article in the day’s paper. We were really only skirting around each other for the first two weeks. Afraid of what lay in the past, what lay waiting. We

played chess a lot, a silent game of unspoken friendship, sipping the Doctor’s exquisite coffee and eating his delicate Austrian pastries.

‘One night, I believe it was a holiday, we’d got very drunk on

expensive schnapps and smoked a few joints. The old man was really loose. I’d never seen him like that before, it was as if the alcohol and drugs had taken thirty years off him.

‘That’s enough of me talking though. My story ends here and this

is where his begins. I wanted to preserve some things in their original state. Things that would soon be gone. After he had told me his

story, I went back, I borrowed a video camera and turned it on him.

I made him tell it again. Naturally, he was glad to.’

The screen went blank and Jon lit a cigarette, shaking in

anticipation. He fast-forwarded. Still nothing. Feverishly, he

reached for the second CD, almost snapping it as he shoved

it into the tray, and waited.

An older man’s face appeared, slim and gaunt but filled

with life, with a certain animation that is absent from most

elderly people. He took a silver case out of his perfectly

pressed suit and extracted a thin, unfiltered cigarette. His

hands were small and delicate like a woman’s, extremely

clean and manicured. He put the cigarette to his mouth and

took a deep drag that made his cheekbones even more

prominent — almost a human skull, Jon thought, if he didn’t

have that fire in his eyes. He began speaking in slightly

accented English, in a stronger and deeper voice than his

body had suggested. ‘What, you want me to talk about my

childhood, my doggie and all that stuff?’

‘No.‘Jake’s clipped, English tones came from some place

off-screen, ‘just tell me some background.’

‘Okay, background you want.’ The Doctor took another

distressingly deep drag off the cigarette and continued.

‘I was born into a comfortably well-off family in 1922. My father had been a surgeon in the Great War and had lost a leg at Passchendaele.

It was always given that I would follow in his footsteps and I had no objections to this. But you know the rest. You know about the

Nuremberg laws, all that. My childhood, adolescence, all that means nothing. That was a former life, perhaps not even mine. My life