The Devil's Playground (18 page)

the surface of the culture. The bits that have filtered out. It’s

all fashion. Your friend in the photos was doing it for entirely

different reasons.’

‘Sexual?’ Van Hijn thought about the way the female

victims had been tortured. The time and care that had been

taken in their mutilation. It was a good bet that the perpetrator

had enjoyed himself and it made him wonder again

about Jake’s involvement. He remembered what he’d said to

Jon: either Jake was a victim of the same killer as those girls

or he was the killer himself.

‘Sexual is only a small part. That’s what almost everybody

thinks but it’s way deeper than that.’

What kind of man would do this to himself?’ Van Hijn

asked.

Women do it too, you know,’ she said, sharply. ‘You ask

what kind of man, but in most non-western cultures they’d

ask the opposite. In a lot of places it’s the norm.’

‘But this was someone who grew up in western Europe.’

She shrugged, as if conceding the point. ‘I don’t really

know is the answer, all I’m saying is that it’s perhaps not as

unusual or unnatural as you think. What I do know is that

this is many years’ hard discipline and study.’ She pulled

out a photo from the stack. ‘This man’s body is like the

Michelangelo of modificationists.’

‘Or the Jackson Pollock,’ he said, swallowing her earlier

comment with a grin.

She smiled. A wide, open, unaffected sweetheart of a smile.

‘Or the Jackson Pollock.’ She pulled out another of the

photos. Pointed to a small rippled bit of flesh from Jake’s

chest. It looked like satellite imagery of a mountain range.

‘See those marks?’

Van Hijn nodded.

‘Play piercing. The skin gets like that. Like old leather.’

‘Play piercing?’

‘Just making holes. The holes seal up and they do it again.

They’re not interested in the piercings, just the act of piercing.

Not many practitioners who’ll do that. I won’t. Too destructive.

People want to do it, they can do it themselves as far as

I’m concerned. There’s no skill in play piercing.’

‘So, it’s a whole different level.’

She nodded. ‘A whole different level.’

‘You don’t by any chance know of anyone in the city who

would do this?’

‘Most likely the man did it to himself. Otherwise try Rijn’s

in the Jordaan or Quirk’s by the Old Church.’

‘The Old Church?’ Van Hijn could feel his heart beat at

his ribs. Pressure in his ears.

‘His place doesn’t have a name but it’s below the Skull &

Roses tattoo parlour. You know where that is?’

Van Hijn nodded. ‘I didn’t even know there was a piercing

parlour below there.’

‘One of many things you don’t know, I’m sure.’

He was wondering how to answer her when the phone

rang again. Van Hijn reached for it. ‘Hello, Bone Palace

Piercings, can I help you? Mmmm? I’ll put you through to

the piercer, just hold for a second, please.’

He passed her the phone. She was smiling. She mimed

‘Thank you’, nodded once and took the mouthpiece. ‘Good

afternoon,’ she said as Van Hijn turned and moved towards

the window. He pulled back the screen a touch. The man

was still there, waiting on the other side of the street. He’d

been following the detective all day. Van Hijn thought about

taking a back door but there was no point. Better to find out

who it was. He turned, waved to Annabelle and walked out

into the rain.

Jon lit a cigarette, picked up the guide book and forced

himself to read the dry descriptions of architectural interest.

It was no good, the words didn’t mean anything. Didn’t

connect. He looked at the photos of gabled facades and saw

the scars on Jake’s cheeks. The receipts for human cargo so neatly written out. The men staring into the camera that will be their last witness on earth. The unavoidable persistence

of the past.

He put the book down. Rubbed his eyes and checked his

watch. The plane was taking off about now. The thought

made him smile. He stared out of his window, the small

sliver of canal that the view afforded, the milling, spilling

rush of people in the street below. He needed to get out. A

walk. The room was closing in.

The detective had mentioned where Jake’s body had been

discovered. Jon had found the place on the map. The only

spot of green in the whole area. Had to be that. Right by the

Old Church, smack in the heart of the red-light district.

Outside it had stopped raining and the dark sky had cleared

to let a smattering of stars through: tiny, bright points that

seemed extremely flimsy and dull as he made his way down

Warmoesstraat. He passed two bicycles chained together so

closely that he felt he was intruding on some intimate scene.

The streets were gradually filling up, teenagers, backpacked

and stoned, strolled around, cops, dealers, tourists lost or

scared. It amazed him how crowded the city could become,

how the small streets managed to hold everyone.

He’d been chewing painkillers all day and was starting to

become immune to their effects. It was as if a sharp knife

was being ground into his ankle every time he put too much

weight on it. He used his umbrella as a crutch, preferring to

get wet than risk the embarrassment of falling over. The

streets were still soaked and the pavements were pockmarked

with small craters and water traps.

Soon his mood was distracted by the bright flickering

neon and bustling streets of the red-light district. He stopped

in a coffee shop — the first one he came to that wasn’t shaking

with dance music — found a seat, a small table by the window,

watching everyone go by. He bought some grass and rolled

a joint. Tourists walking the streets stared at him and he

realized how he’d become a tourist attraction, safely pinned

behind the glass front of the shop, the strange feeling of

doing these things out in the open. He smoked the joint and

listened to the second side of the first Springsteen album

on the house system. To his left was a message-board.

Handwritten pieces of paper pleading for jobs, accommodation,

money, hung like discarded dreams. One of the pieces

had a photo on it. A young man, goateed, with long hair and

lost eyes. Jon squinted to read the text. ‘Please come home,

Carl,’ it said and the shakiness of the handwriting, the slop

and slack of the letters seemed to make it all the more

poignant. ‘Les has had a breakdown, Denise loves you.

Daddy forgives. Please come back to us. We love you.’

There was something there, in the language of public

facsimile, the syntax of cliche and nuclear family, that almost

undid him. He turned away. What had happened to him that

he could be so easily moved by such things? He stared back

out of the window. By the second joint, the whole place

seemed more comfortable, the pain had gradually subsided

to a gentle throb and he felt himself sinking into the barstool.

He still had no idea as to why Jake had come back to

Amsterdam or what had made him leave the shelter of a

warm flat. Had it really been because of his intrusion that

night? Jake was gone the next morning and it had been the

first thing Jon thought of. Or was that just the catalyst?

Underneath Jake’s polite manner, Jon had felt the rippling

of something much deeper and he wondered whether

Jake had come back here to purge that shadow self, or to

indulge it.

Sitting there, he began to feel paranoid, sensing that it was

not just coincidence that everyone in the place was of North

African extraction but him. Young men played pool and

smoked reefers, their faces sharp as daggers, others huddled

around tables, shrouded in serious discussion, their arms

agitatedly flapping about. He realized that it was one of the

few times in his life when he really felt Jewish, here among

people who probably would have stuck a knife in his heart

had they known. And he thought, isn’t it funny how being

alone in a strange city can make you detach from yourself,

make you see yourself in a way you never can when you’re

with a group of people, as if watching from across the room,

another vantage point, the obvious stranger.

He got up, not knowing whether they were staring at him

because they’d guessed or just because he looked scared. He

resented the fact that something so random as his faith could

leave him dead in a bar-room toilet, a knife in the heart, but

nevertheless he acceded to it and left, feeling their cold eyes

penetrating him even when he’d turned the corner and was

back in the melee of tourists and whoremongers.

He walked through the narrow, winding streets, aware of

the way his limp drew the same kind of looks that having

‘child molester’ tattooed on his forehead would have. Marking

him out as a freak. His money belt chafed at his stomach,

so full and bulging. He’d debated whether to leave everything

in the room. But he didn’t trust that. Better to carry everything

with you, feel it scratch up against your belly, know

it’s there.

He tried to make sense of the map but it was like a picture

drawn by someone on a very bad acid trip, all squiggles and

concentric circles that, on closer inspection, were irregular

as hell, an upside down fingerprint, and yet he felt a growing

certainty that he had to see the last place that Jake had lain.

Men sidled up to him whispering ‘Coka, Ecstasee’ in

strange and disturbing accents, sex-show barkers called out,

promising a night unlike any other, hustling here and there,

surrounding him with noise and light, dream and desire. The

steady flow of people shunting down the streets. The bright

lights spelling strange, incomprehensible, possibly compounded

words and those that just said sex and girls and

made everything clear.

He hadn’t been to Amsterdam since he was fifteen. A

two-week holiday with his parents that had felt like a prison

sentence. He couldn’t remember much about it apart from

the arguments his parents had all the time. It was the summer

before his mother’s death, when the altercations between the

two of them were fierce and frequent and no longer kept

hidden from ‘the child’.

He remembered the visit to the Anne Frank house, his

mother’s half-hearted attempts to teach him something about

his culture and history. His father’s scowls and impatient

foot tapping. It meant nothing to him then and even now, like for many others, Anne Frank existed in his mind only as an easy-to-swallow metonym for the Holocaust. A beacon

of light that illuminated all the horror.

Now, at the age of thirty-five, he felt like a kid on his first visit to Disneyland. The magic fucking kingdom. The garden of earthly delights. The place of dead roads, where leaving is

no longer an option and all dreams are accounted for and

fulfilled for the smallest of prices. Sex and drugs on the

surface and everything that congregates around them, the

bottom-feeders and vampires that buy and sell lives as if they

were prison cigarettes.

He walked around stunned, drawn by the procession of

delights as he turned through the winding streets of the

District, buzzing on weed and excitement. The closeness of

the streets held him, their illogical design intrigued him,

leading him further into its heart then looping around, always

back to the same place.

He stopped in front of a sex shop, drawn by the bouquet

of dildoes in the window, strange brutal things of all shapes,

colours and permutations, that seemed more like instruments

of torture than any kind of pleasure devices that he could

imagine. Not so unusual for Jon who, while enjoying girls

and fumbled moments as much as anyone, never really found

that sex was the great big thing that mitigated all the horrors

of life as everyone else seemed to think. Not to say he didn’t

enjoy it, he almost always did, it was just that it was nothing

special, no fireworks, no moving earth, none of the above.

It was eleven o’clock and the streets of the District were

packed and pulverized by strollers, drug dealers, husbands

holding on tightly to their wives, sneaking surreptitious

glances at the girls preening and pouting behind their

windows, businessmen and drinking buddies on a lost weekend

and cops walking their beat. Jon let himself flow with

the mass of people, unaware of where he was going and not

caring too much either, happy to be entertained for the time

being by the sights and smells, the movable feast of flesh

and neon that decorated the streets. There was a tightness

to the roads in Amsterdam that was entirely lacking in

London, a sense of clustered communality that he found

strangely comforting.

He walked along a narrow alley, only about three-foot

wide, with rows of windows on either side. He found himself

sneaking glances, too embarrassed to catch the eyes of the

women, avoiding the staccato beat of fingernails tapping on