The Devil's Playground (55 page)

taken Jon ten minutes to get to Suze’s from his new flat, a

journey which usually took only two. He’d spent the day

with Mrs De Roedel, walking with her through the elegant,

silent halls of the Rijksmuseum, his anticipation slowly growing,

the evening looming, bursting with possibility.

Strange to think it had all happened over a month ago.

That awful night in the belly of the museum.

Suze had stayed overnight in the hospital, a minor concussion,

nothing more. A sexy scar like a wobbly eclipse the

only memory of that night. The detective had been in a

wheelchair for a while, his name appearing in all the tabloids,

revered as the saviour of Amsterdam. Deliverer of the city

from the notorious serial killer that had been stalking its

streets for so long. Beeuwers had found the handcuffed Quirk

and the secret room. The flash of cameras had captured the

chamber in all its gory delight. Close-ups of the devices were

splashed across the Sunday supplements; ‘Inside the world

of the dead’, ‘A look inside your local charnel house’, features

proclaimed. They found the video camera mounted behind

the wall, the halogen lights and the forensic smears of nail

and skin and hair.

If he could have had it his way, Beeuwers would not have

mentioned Van Hijn’s involvement at all but, as it was, they

needed the detective to tie up the links for them, which he

did in a way that he thought they would both understand

and accept as the way it really was. Which it wasn’t. But,

nevertheless, residents of the city felt they could walk along

the canals and alleys in the safe knowledge that the dreaded

beast of their nightmares had finally been caged.

No one mentioned the Doctor, still missing, or the dark

beginnings of the case in what was now another century. Quirk

was charged with the murders of the eight women. He was

found in his prison bunk, still on remand, with his genitals cut

and inserted into his mouth. His eyes had been removed. No

one had put him in protective custody. Karl and Greta were

charged with various crimes, among which the shooting of a

police officer made sure that neither would leave the country

for a good many years. And that was it. There was no need to

upset the public. Useless speculation and unresolved anxieties

were washed away like the winter leaves.

Van Hijn’s face was splashed across newspapers and TV

reports for the next couple of weeks and some closed-door

negotiations were held whose outcome was the reinstatement

of the detective to his full former position, a rising media

star that the department now could not afford to lose.

Jon himself couldn’t remember anything but waking up

in the hospital in a room full of cops. His lungs were fucked.

He wheezed and sputtered and thought that someone had

set small fires in his throat. He explained to the policemen

what had happened. He coughed and spat as they took notes.

They’d never got back to watching Jake’s last CD. He’d

left it at Suze’s and, for a few days after the incident at the

museum, they hadn’t talked about it. Both secretly dreading

watching this final piece of the puzzle.

They’d kept putting it off in the days after, always finding

something else to do, getting to know each other again,

walking the soaking streets, reading each morning the newspaper

write-ups and, of course, Dominic’s funeral.

Poor Dominic, Suze thought. They’d buried him a week

after the incident in a small churchyard outside Amsterdam. Apparently his parents had been informed but had declined to come. It had been a sad affair, rain-lashed and tortuous,

Bill whining constantly, Jon morose. It had seemed to her

then that things could only get worse and she scolded herself

for the pessimism she’d let herself slip into so easily. Shit,

there was enough of that already.

That was why she’d bought the tickets. She was waiting

till the stroke of midnight to tell him. Corny, she knew, but

she enjoyed the arbitrary symbolism of the event just as

much as he did. Things were definitely looking up, she

thought, there was a chance there somewhere, a chance for

something good, something new and uninherited.

She could sense that things were different between the two

of them. That, while he still fell into silences and sometimes

drifted beyond her reach, he found her distant too and that

these things were normal and shouldn’t be seen as portents

of doom.

That was why she’d bought the tickets to Phoenix. She

hadn’t told him, knowing how he would raise objections,

find reasons not to go, but she knew, deep in her heart, that

it was the right thing to do. They were leaving the day after

tomorrow, just enough time to recover from the New Year

but not enough to see the looming months ahead.

She wanted to show him the desert, to show him the

mini-mart where it all began twenty years before. She wanted

to climb high on the mesas with him, away from this city,

from the noise and light of civilization to somewhere gender;

the dark, brooding hills that had framed her youth, the

endless salt flats and dust devils of her dreams, that wild and

eerie country that was like no other on earth.

She wanted to go back home.

He returned from the toilet and looked through the mess

on her desk. ‘Are you sure you put the weed here?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she replied.

He ploughed through her papers and cuttings, looking for

the joint they’d rolled earlier. He picked up one of the pieces

of paper, looked at it. ‘This your thesis? I thought you’d quit

working on it?’

‘I have,’ she said. ‘That’s something new.’

He looked at the piece of paper, began reading:

++++++++++++++++++

SPRING, 1940. VILLEFRANCHE

Grandmother threw herself out of the window today.

The sun was brilliant like all the days before and the sea

quiet, like it knew what the hours would hold. We knew it

was coming. Grandpapa had joked about it often enough. I

had seen it in her eyes, in the way her breath slowly escaped

her mouth as if loath to do so, in the distant echoes of her

speech, her faded skin, the weight of the collapsing world.

‘I didn’t know Charlotte wrote a diary?’

Suze shook her head. ‘She didn’t. I did.’

‘Why?’ Jon looked down. He had taken it for genuine.

The tone of voice, the feel, everything about it. But Charlotte

had produced a visual diary, not a written one. ‘Is this part

of your thesis?’

‘No. That’s over. Boxed up and forgotten. It wasn’t going

anywhere. I couldn’t get at the truth in the thesis. Its parameters were too strict. I could only do that through fiction.

Through this diary. I understood that there would be more

truth in this lie than in the list of dates and places, the

ideological discussions, all that. So, I began to write her diary, the one she never had time to start.’ For now, she didn’t

want to say anything more.

‘Will you let me read it?’

‘In the New Year.’

He slumped back down into the sofa, drink in hand, the dog

curled up at his feet. Suze bent down to stroke Bill. The dog

would have been put down, she guessed, after Dominic’s

death, but Jon had said he would take him. She’d been scared

at first that Jon would go back to London after all that had

happened, but his acquisition of the dog seemed to her a

positive move towards staying in the city.

Jon took a deep breath of air. Let it sit in his lungs until

he was almost gagging, then exhaled, as Jake’s face appeared

once again.

‘Jon. It seems very different now that I know to whom I am addressing this.’

Jake spoke slowly, his voice coming through Suze’s small

speakers, looking recognizably like the version of Jake that

Jon had known. More bedraggled than in the earlier footage,

his tone slower, more contemplative.

Jon and Suze settled back. There was an unease in the air,

palpable in their sudden silence and hushed anticipation. It

would almost be better not to watch it, Jon thought, to keep

Jake as he was, but he knew that was not an option open to

him. That today was to be the day, a symbolic date perhaps

but a necessary one.

Jake continued, a slow rhythmic cadence more subdued

than the staccato delivery of the earlier footage.

‘If you are watching this, Jon, then I belatedly thank you for your hospitality, for your flat and for so much more. You see, I was in really bad shape when you met me in London. I had been there

three weeks, my old city, what for most of my life I had believed to be my birthplace and it seemed different, darker and I, the alien, shifting through its streets. I had to return though. Had to get away from Amsterdam. From the Doctor.

‘We’d been having our regular chess evenings and chats all

through the summer. He seemed pleased to have someone to tell

his stories to and me, you know, I’m a good listener.

‘And then I saw the film. And you can understand what a shock it

was and yet, somewhere deep inside I’d suspected it all along, even hoped it was true. You see, it was somehow more acceptable to me

for him to have been a Nazi and said all those things than if he was a Jew. And it was amazing how easily he slipped on that costume,

how with only the slightest of shifts he became a Jew. So, I went

back, played chess, kept this secret to myself, my power over him, or so I thought.

‘I often wondered if my family had followed the point of his finger.

I felt that the only thing left connecting me to them was the Doctor.

I don’t entirely expect you to understand that, I don’t entirely understand it myself, but I feel it to be true none the less. My father, my

fake father, always said, “Follow your gut, boy, your head will only cheat and deceive you, follow your gut and you won’t go too far

wrong.” Of course he died of stomach cancer so perhaps it wasn’t

such good advice but I’ve never been able to really shrug it off either.

‘I think the old bastard knew. I think he guessed that I had

discovered his secret. I noticed that he treated me differently, that he was no longer so couched and gnomic, small slivers of pride

leaking out of his smiles. So I confronted him. I told him about the reel of film I had found at the JHM. He laughed when I said that,

laughed and clapped his hands. “You are the first person to have

discovered me, Jakob, I truly respect that,” he said. I wanted to hit him. Kill him. Right then and there. And that’s when he told me

about the 49 reels.

‘He had filmed them all himself and they’d been meant as a record

of their achievements at Auschwitz. He knew that the films were a

great liability, an invitation to a hanging, but he kept them even after Eichmann had given the order to destroy all evidence pertaining to the Final Solution. He said he always knew that there would come a day when the films would be appreciated for what they were. I never asked him what that was, it didn’t bother me by then. I knew what I had to do.

‘I said, “Why don’t we watch them?” He told me his projector was

broken but that he had something better if that’s what interested

me. I just nodded, eager to see what he would come up with. He

put a tape into the video, and as soon as I saw the girl tied to that horrible device, I knew.

‘She was screaming, crying, pleading. Her scream reverberated

through my head long after the tape had been switched off. I

recognized the room. Quirk’s long bony fingers adjusting the ratchet.

And her scream slashing through red hair and eyes. When I go to

sleep her scream is the last thing I hear before sleep divests me.

The Doctor was smiling as we watched the video. Proud and

bashful as a teenage boy who’s just had his first fuck.

i looked back at the girl on the screen and I recognized her from

the papers, the fourth victim, Elena something, and I knew then what I should have guessed all along. My head was bursting. I could feel my heart sticky with hate. I walked out on him, that evening, without saying a word.

‘Perhaps you think I should have gone to the police, but it was far too late for that. For him and for me. I knew that our paths had

crossed for a reason and I now began to intuit what that was.

‘I look at the Doctor and I try to understand how someone from a

well-to-do family in a cultured, civilized country could have done what he did, and my father’s words keep coming back to me.

‘I hate the way Kaplan wraps himself in language as if that explains everything. I hate his little justifications, his bons mots and ancient quotations, and I hate their subversion of language, the way they

labelled the gas chambers “disinfecting showers”, the Jews as the

rotten appendix, the lie in the sign above the gates of Auschwitz. It should have been “Death liberates all” - the only axiom valid in such a place.

‘I think of the writers I loved as a child, I think of Goethe and

Schiller, the excitement of Spengler and Nietzsche, the drama of

Wagner, the intense intelligence and liberating philosophies of Heidegger and Hegel, and I wonder, was that a prelude, did that make it

all possible? Is it even possible that art can create such a hole in the nation’s soul, an ever widening hole that can be filled only with the machine-gun rattle and fury of the speech at the Nuremberg Rally, the funny little man with the moustache, whose last will and testament, written minutes before doing his final duty to his mistress, his dog and himself, ended with a proclamation for the German people to