The Devil's Playground (26 page)

Jon asked.

She sipped at her coffee, shook her head. ‘No, it was more than that, I think. Just to know that these people could be so fucked up and yet produce such beautiful poetry, sentences

that could stop the world dead. To know that was

somehow a release.’

He nodded, understanding totally. ‘Lowell punching out policemen. Erickson working in a comic shop because he felt he had nothing left to say. Auden dying in his slippers.

They’re great stories.’

She looked up and the late-evening sun managed to catch

her eyes in a moment of perfect stillness, Jon held his breath,

and then just as quickly the moment was gone.

‘Do you still write?’ she asked.

He looked at her not sure what to say. He’d told her that

he’d written and edited a music magazine once but not what

had happened. ‘Not for a long time,’ he finally said.

She seemed to take it in the way she did most things,

turning it over in her mind, a few seconds of reflection,

allowing it to show itself in its full aspect before replying.

‘I have a feeling I might start again soon.’ He couldn’t

bear the silence, the waiting, as if that space held a judgement

upon him. He wanted to sound positive, to expand himself

in her presence. ‘Amsterdam seems to have pricked my

senses, I’ve started making notes.’

‘Notes?’

‘Just basic things. Simple things. The way the street curves

around the canal. The colour of the railings in the early

morning light. It’s a start.’

Sitting next to her, he stopped seeing himself from across

the room as another man, instead feeling inside his own

body, present and alert, a part of the moment. The dread of

the past few days, the fear, guilt and paranoia, was mitigated

by her body, her mouth and tender lips. And, in what she

didn’t say, in the spaces she left blank, he found a mystery

just as involving as that surrounding Jake, yet with promise

of a better resolution.

She told him more about Charlotte, took him to the

museum’s archives and showed him the whole collection,

narrated the story of the Jewish girl as if it was her own and

in a funny way, Jon thought, it probably was.

He told her about Jake. They sat in her flat one evening,

listening to Steve Wynn sing about burning the cornfield

down and he showed her the photograph that he’d borrowed

from the detective.

She stared at the grainy face and he thought he saw her

twitch as she slid it back across the table and apologized for

not being of any help. ‘I’m sorry, Jon.’

When she spoke, he heard the whole of America, the

endless ribbon highways, diamond deserts and great flat

plains, Mickey Mouse and Richard Nixon, Marilyn and Gacy

— and, although he’d never been there he knew it intimately

from a youth filled with American books and lyrics.

Whenever he mentioned Jake again or his search here in

Amsterdam, she would tell him to forget the past, that it

wasn’t doing him any good and then she would go quiet

and he liked her like that, stripped of all the trouble that

seemed to sit so heavily on her. All he wanted to do was take

her in his arms and brush away the sadness, erase it from her

life.

There were a couple of Council meetings over those days

and Suze went to them, leaving Jon watching television in a

language he didn’t understand. When she came back they

would make love again and then walk the deserted night

streets of the city. One morning he asked her.

‘The meetings?’

‘Tell me about them,’ he said.

She shifted on the bed, turned towards the table, picked

up a cigarette. Jon had quickly learned it was her way of

keeping separate, of distancing him and he wondered, not

for the first time, distancing him from what?

‘Well, it grew from the seminars we were doing. Several

people wanted to explore further the meaning of the atrocity

image, the shocking hungry face or burnt skin.’ She placed

the cigarette in the ashtray and cuddled up to him, pressing

her face into his stomach. She knew this was safe ground.

We wanted to know if these images can be used to politicize

people — does seeing the inside of a rape camp make you

want to do something about it? — balancing that against the

entertainment value of the image. We all stare at car crashes.

It’s pointless to deny it. Why do we do it? That’s the question.

Is it merely titillation or something more extreme?’

‘Seems to me like maybe it fulfils certain desires and

needs in us that we haven’t been able to fully articulate as

yet,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s a reaction to the good life we’ve

kidded ourselves into believing we’re leading.’ He watched

her. She made no remark. ‘Why call it the Revised Council

of Blood? Seems a bit sensationalist considering your

credo.’

Suze propped herself up, looked away. He knew she was

hiding something. She turned back and began speaking as if

reciting from a school textbook. ‘In 15 66, following a frenzy

of iconoclastic destruction in Amsterdam, Phillip II of Spain

sent the Duke of Alva, the Iron Duke, to the city to punish

the protestant heretics. The duke arrived in Amsterdam and

immediately formed his own death squad, the Council of

Blood, which carried out his orders with relish and abandon.

Mass executions became an everyday occurrence; the skyline

of the city silhouetted by dangling corpses and bodies floating

in the canals was a commonplace sight, so much so that the

city was nicknamed “Murderdam” during the period. We

thought it sounded good.’

Always that attempt at levity, as if she wasn’t quite convinced

of her own seriousness or had had it challenged too

often to take it for granted. ‘What does the group actually

do?’ he asked.

‘We talk a lot. We also produce a quarterly journal, containing

essays, that sort of thing and run a website. Nothing that

sinister really, just a bunch of boring academics who can’t

get enough.’

‘I never once said it was.’ She was hiding something, he

could tell from the rhythm of her speech, the way it kept

tumbling over itself.

‘No, but everyone always thinks that when they hear words

like council or group. Everyone’s obsessed with the idea that

there are myriad secret cabals existing just under the skin of

their lives, always there but seen only in flashes.’

‘I thought it was just Americans who believed that.’

‘You Europeans are just as bad.’ She got closer to him

and began kissing his neck. End of conversation, he knew,

right there and then. He moved his body into hers and let

her drape and fold into him, erasing all the words they said,

couching them in delicate silence.

‘Tie me up,’ she said, handing him the stockings, the clamps,

the instruments of her subjugation. Jon stared at them as if

she was holding a dead dog.

‘What?’ he blurted. What the hell was she talking about?

‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Please. It helps me relax. I need it.’ There

was such naked honesty in her reply that he gently took the

objects from her hand.

As soon as she was all tied up, he began to laugh, unable

to help himself, it just looked so funny, like something out

of a home-made porno mag. She didn’t mind however, even

joined in, and after he’d managed to suppress his giggles, he

did what she wanted.

And that was the strange thing, Jon would come to think

later, how easily he’d acceded to it, how without question

he’d followed her. For there was a problem he could sense,

something, perhaps just his own up-tightness, which made

the whole thing wrong. And yet, here in Amsterdam, like

everything else, wrong had been turned into right, and he

began to wonder why he didn’t protest more loudly, when it

was still possible, at the beginning of things. Why this thing

which he would have abhorred back in London had a strange

seduction to it here amongst all the noise and glitter. And

did he in some way enjoy it too, the mute bound body

beneath him?

She started to miss seminars, to neglect Charlotte, finding

herself having so much fun with Jon, not wanting to spend

any time away from him, from his legs and stomach, his

Botticelli mouth and circumcised cock. She kept asking herself

the same questions. Was he just a reaction to Wouter?

To being alone again? But the answers never came for he

seemed to exist in a different world, somewhere more serious.

She’d never thought she’d go for an Englishman, way too

cold and unadventurous she’d always assumed, and Dominic

was a good example; but Jon was different. He didn’t seem

so much of a fool like the rest of them, constantly having

to prove to themselves that they were men. She liked his

indifference to that, to all the rituals of possession and

infatuation that seemed to solidify so quickly around some

people.

But she was scared when he talked about Jake. Scared for

him and for her. She didn’t know how much he knew. What

Jake had told him and where it would lead. Christ! She

wanted to scream. She meets someone she likes and …

better not to think about it. Better to forget it all.

1

They’d been in the city an hour and already they were arguing.

Karl stared out of the window at the grey wash of canal.

Why think it would be any different? Just because they were

here to work? Was that it? How deluded he was becoming.

‘It’s fucking typical, isn’t it?’ Greta glared at him. He would

remember her like this, he knew, not smiling, no. He didn’t

even bother going for the bait any more.

‘I mean, of course you have to go alone. Of course it’s not a

woman thing. How many fucking times, Karl? Jesus, I really

hate you sometimes.’

He let her burn herself out. No, it was nothing to do with

that. She was seeing slights in every little thing now. It had

reached that point.

‘I’ll be back before dark,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose it’ll

even take that long.’

‘You bastard,’ she hissed.

He hit the streets feeling as if his stomach, head, arms, whatever, were going to erupt. As if something in her tone could

boil his blood. Fuck. And it was no holiday this time. Though

when he’d mentioned it to her, said the word ‘professional’,

she’d spat it back at him in the guise of denial and outright

fucking lying. But she did know how serious it was. Dieter had

left no doubt in their minds back in Frankfurt.

They’d always worked together, he and Greta, even before

they’d shared each other’s beds. Dieter, the local chapter

head, had recruited both, him from a battered and defunct

East German anti-Communist group and her from the

university of Munich. The early nineties, the fucking wall,

the burst dam and the ensuing flood of bad haircuts and

cheap denim. Yes. Those years SPAR grew from a dwindling

cadre of dying oldsters to the strong and vital corps that it

was today. The twenty-first century had them in mind.

They had worked together first. Then they had tasted each

other. It was encouraged that cells should be small and

self-sufficient. It was perfect for a while. Now it gnawed at

him like a fucking toothache.

He went into the McDonald’s situated at the next corner.

Straight to the toilets. Christ! He hadn’t meant to get fucked

up at all here in Amsterdam. Then why had he taken all that

coke across the border with him? Stupid fucking question,

he knew. His first major job, Dieter had smiled, said the time

comes but he’d also emphasized how important the films

were to SPAR — and how essential it was they retrieved them — fuck-ups would not be tolerated. The originals. Oh yes.

Two jagged lines and he bent down, the smell of urine,

disease and detergent entered his nostrils first followed by

the reverse avalanche of powder. Whoooosh. Fucking right.

He snorted, stared at himself in the mirror. That was

better. He felt like he looked now. Not scared. That was the

thing. And Greta knew it. How terrified he really was. She’d

picked her moment to fight and — stupid stupid — he’d told

her he had to go alone to the piercer’s because that was the

way it was, a woman could upset the balance, but really he’d

just wanted some time away so that he could retrieve his

courage from the wrap in which it was kept. That, and well,

fuck it, he had to admit, now that the stuff was flowing

through his blood, that it might be nice, on the way back of

course, to step into some lady’s window and well, hell, he

still had a lot of powder.

He leaned down and sniffed a mound of coke off his credit

card, then buzzed the unlabelled buzzer. Really, he hated

this. When he’d joined the society he’d had dreams of organizational leadership. Maps and movements. Tracking items.

The important stuff. Long-term strategy and five-year plans,

that sort of thing. And yet every fucking time they gave him

leg work, potatohead work. Like now. He should have been