The Devil's Playground (28 page)

And it was even better than Dante. It was well written and

more explicit and horrifying than any other books about the

camps I’d read, which was quite a few, due to my research

on Charlotte. The Doctor told of his time as a “volunteer”

for medical experiments; there were things in that book no

one else talks about, the trade in dead human flesh among

prisoners, rape and sex slayings, long technical passages

describing how they turned bodies into soap. That book

changed everything for us, it really galvanized and centred

us as a group.’

‘How?’ Back to the Holocaust, Jon thought, watching the

sights drift by, always, in this city, leading back to that.

‘I think it showed us that the only way was through representation, that the fear of wearing away the image like a bar of

cheap soap was something we had to confront, to confront

and break through. That we had to use images as bullets.

Bullets to be fired into the heart of apathy. There was such

courage in that book, such heartbreak and sadness — but most

of all there was the relentless necessity of telling. The desire

for memory, in the form of words and images, to be kept and

retold down the ages. We all felt swept along by the book, it

affected us very deeply, it was a terrible and necessary book.’

She looked at him aware that she’d said too much. That it was

too late now.

‘Necessary?’

‘So that people know what happened. If you don’t think

the bogeyman exists, you never get the chance to fight him.

That’s what my mother always said.’

The canal boat came to the end of its trip and they silently

alighted along with a group of elderly American women in

shell suits and sneakers, chatting and smoking cigarettes in

the night air.

‘We traced the author.’ Suze hesitated. It was too late to

back out now, whatever the consequences. ‘He was still alive.

Living here in Amsterdam.’

‘How’d you find him?’ Jon leaned forward, stopped

walking.

‘Dominic, one of the members of the Council, managed

to trace him somehow through the Internet. He invited him

along to meetings.’

‘Did he come?’ He was holding her arm. Squeezing. He

noticed it now.

‘Yes. He was an old man, still had a thick German accent.

His eyes were like the eyes of a goat, no feeling or empathy

- that always scared me. I said to myself, it’s because of what

he’s been through, but still, I never liked sitting next to

him. He would nod his head and listen to us talk. Answer

questions, very polite and reserved, an old-school gentlemen,

I guess, but those eyes …’

‘And?’

‘And that was it really, he came a couple of times and then

we never saw him again.’ She wanted to move away from

the subject, from where it was inevitably leading - she hadn’t

even thought about it recently and now it was coming back,

like a nightmare that refuses to die in the dawn, magnifying

in the bright light of day. She knew that she should tell him

everything but she couldn’t bring herself to. What would he

think of her then?

Jon didn’t think much about Jake during that time, didn’t

even look at the slip of numbers in his wallet that the

detective had insisted on him keeping, and it wasn’t until

Suze read the newspaper article one morning that it all

came back. A short, terse column which recounted in cold,

functional prose the victims of the supposed serial killer. A

round-up of facts, easily digestible nuggets of death, sparked

by the celebrity funeral of Beatrice’s father.

Jon made Suze read him the full article, her halting translation

releasing the sentences one at a time, letting them sink

deeply into his mind.

When she finished, she put the paper down and sipped

from her drink. He could sense her fading slightly from him,

nothing much, just a slight reduction.

‘I need to go and see her,’ he said, suddenly convinced.

‘Who?’ But it was obvious. ‘Do you really want to do this,

Jon? Have you asked yourself whether it can do any good?

What it’ll do to you?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, though he knew it did, and

he’d felt the slight shifts in him from the moment he’d

arrived in the city, shifts that now opened up new and hungry

spaces. ‘I need to see her.’

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,’ she said, but she could see

that his mind was made up and that she could only do further

damage by trying to make him stop. She bit her lip and

remained silent.

20

His pager had beeped an hour into the first film; he’d

forgotten to turn it off again. His day off. High Sierra and In

a Lonely Place. Double Bogart. A light lunch. Some cake for

the movie. The rain kept at bay for a while. And then his

pager had gone off.

He called the number.

‘AYN Technologies.’

‘It’s Van Hijn,’ he mumbled.

‘The preview’s just come online, detective. I think you

should come and see.’

He’d seen the Bogart film four times before. So it was no

great loss, and now he felt a curious excitement at the news

as he hurried through the drenched streets.

He’d thought it would be awful. Intolerable. This dredging

of the past, all the history that he’d purposefully forgotten,

but instead he felt a huge relief, to be able to move through

that history without collapsing under its weight. To accept

that it was never past, that it would always be here, a part of

him, a part of the city.

As he swept through the rain he had a sense that someone

was shadowing him, glimpses when he turned a corner or

stopped to light a cigarette, an old instinct that had never

left him. It wasn’t the first time he’d felt this and he walked

in circles, doubled back and bluffed, used side doors until he

was sure that he was alone.

‘You made it here quickly,’ Piet said, standing behind the

inner door.

Van Hijn smiled, smile number 46, humble yet interested,

not giving away too much, and followed him inside.

Unlike the time before there was no buzz of concerted

effort, no sequestering or hunched concentration, everyone

was gathered around the large computer monitor on Piet’s

desk watching a flickering black and white stream.

‘It was posted half an hour ago.’

‘Is it real?’ Van Hijn asked.

Piet nodded.

The others left them alone. Van Hijn sat down facing

the monitor. If it was real, then he was wrong. Totally and

utterly wrong. His theory fucked. He felt the floor sink, as if

he’d stepped in mud. The screen was blank. The Realplayer

was on.

‘It’s only a minute long.’

Van Hijn was about to say something when the screen

flickered and an image began to take shape. He sat and

watched the segment and when it was over he motioned for

Piet to run it again. He did this four times, each time couched

in silence, watching the film unfold, these horrors imagined

but unseen until now.

‘Is he really doing what I think he’s doing?’ Van Hijn

asked, pointing to the officer in the foreground.

‘You have a keen eye, detective. Yes, he is.’

‘Christ!’

‘Christ had nothing to do with it.’

‘Begs the question, doesn’t it?’

‘So they say.’

Van Hijn watched the clip again. He kept his face a mask

though what he saw on that screen turned everything upside

down. It was one thing to read and hear about these events,

but you never really got it, no, not until you’d seen it. He

turned away, stared out of the window, trying to flee from

their spell, the mesmerizing allure of filmed evil, of rare

history.

‘Quite a piece, huh, detective?’ Piet leaned over and clicked

the mouse a couple of times. The film disappeared and in its

place Snoopy bounced across the screen.

‘And there’s no doubt?’

Piet shook his head. ‘No doubt at all. Manny over there.’

He pointed to a small dark man hunched over a computer.

‘He ran the film through his software, blew up certain bits.

Here …’

He clicked twice. The screen filled with what Van Hijn

recognized as the top corner of the previous footage. The

operating table out of sight. A man walked quickly across

the frame, disappearing off its edges into the blackness. It

took him only a second or so to cross the room. In the normal

footage he was just a blip, a smudge in the background while

all eyes were pinned to what was happening on the table.

Now Van Hijn could see the man’s face, turning slightly to

acknowledge the scene in the foreground, a smile breaking

the strict geometry of his face, for only a second, before he

disappears.

‘You recognize him?’

‘He looks familiar, that’s all,’ Van Hijn conceded.

Piet laughed. ‘Familiar? That, detective, is perhaps the

only footage we have of Mengele at Auschwitz.’

‘Mengele.’ The name hung in the air, heavy and poisonous,

between them. The name that was almost a metonym for all

the horrors of the camp. The name of the man who sterilized

women with Barium.

‘Doesn’t look so evil, does he?’ Piet said, clicking back to

the screen saver. ‘It’s no coincidence that this piece was

chosen for the preview. Not just for its gruesomeness you

see, though prospective buyers will want to know that this

footage is of the import that is claimed. No, it wasn’t very

hard for us to spot Mengele.’

‘The film carries its own provenance.’ He felt deflated and

yet strangely exhilarated at the same time. So, perhaps Jake

had found the real films. Had been murdered for them.

There was what the old man of the museum had told him.

Jake rummaging in the basement. Jake being obsessed by

the filmed documentation of the time. The timing of the

49 reels’ appearance and that very visual texture of those

eight dead girls.

‘Exactly. This is what we’ve feared all along. That these

rumours are true. That these films exist.’

‘How many people have bid on it?’ He leaned back,

wanting to get away from the humming claw of the computer.

‘Forty-four so far. Current high bid’s around $110,000

though it will get far higher in the days to come. The web

counter shows over a quarter of a million hits already.’

‘People are watching this segment?’

‘All over the world.’

‘How? I had to come here. You said it couldn’t be accessed

without knowing a string of passwords.’

‘These things get out. They spread faster than is imaginable.

One person sees it, cuts and pastes the link and passwords,

sends it to thirty people on his list, a little note

attached, check this out, they watch and yes, perhaps they’re

horrified, disgusted, can’t believe what they’re seeing, that

anyone would put this kind of thing up on the net, and yet

they’ll still pass it on, what do you think of this, they add,

distancing themselves from the source, each of them to

another group of people. It grows exponentially and with

the kind of speed that was once unimaginable.’

They sat and talked some more and then Piet took him to

a large room off the back. Inside he showed him some of

the things that AYN had successfully bid on. ‘These are

things no one wants apart from as souvenirs - Naziana that’s

why we could afford them. The real stuff, the important

stuff, is far beyond our means.’

He showed him plates embossed with the Berchtesgaden

logo. ‘Heroes of the Reich’ playing cards. Van Hijn shuffled

through the deck. They were all there: Eichmann, dark

and scrawny, Himmler the junkie, Goebbels the gimp, the

hook-nosed and hunchbacked Brunner, below them their

attributes and scoring. Lampshades with nipples. Mengele’s

spectacles. The rug from the bunker that Adolf reputedly

chewed on in those last days. Faked postcards, train timetables,

a bottle of amphetamine tablets that belonged to the

Fiihrer.

Van Hijn picked up a paperback book. There was a stack

of them to his left. All identical. A thin, faded book with a barbed-wire fence on its cover. ‘What’s this?’ he asked.

Piet turned and looked at the detective. ‘The Garden of

Earthly Delights. It’s a Holocaust memoir. But one that is

very popular among collectors. Quite rare now,’ Piet said,

gnomically. Van Hijn took the book, checked behind him.

Piet had already walked on. The detective slipped it into his

jacket pocket.

‘This is only a small and insignificant part of a greater

whole.’ Piet stopped at the far end of the room. ‘But in my

years here, I don’t think there’s been anything as significant,

or as dangerous as these films on auction now.’

Van Hijn knew what was implied. Go and find them. Bury

them here or somewhere else. He knew it was what he should

do. Do what his father had never had the guts to. That

preview had been enough. What if the whole collection was

aired on the net? Or kept in a vault somewhere for a time

when its true ‘merits’ would be appreciated? He also understood