The Devil's Playground (8 page)

had he afforded it? He must have had money. It seemed

important that he should know. That if he could understand

the old man’s last movements, it would all make sense. There

was no promise of absolution, Jon understood that, but there

was the reassurance of maybe knowing why and, perhaps,

that would be enough.

He knew that he would go to Amsterdam to identify

Jake’s body. Work and the project could go to hell. He had

committed himself already. When he had invited Jake in,

he’d started something that he now knew he had to finish.

To forget about him would be just another layer of distance,

another way to mitigate the world, another failure to follow

through. Using work as an excuse was weak and undignified.

The idea of not even calling Dave to tell him was strangely

thrilling, like skipping class or stealing an unrequited kiss,

and the more he thought about it, the more he knew it was

the right thing to do. And he thought about his mother too,

how it would be a way to show her the kind of man he’d

become.

As he drove, buoyed by newfound resolution, he couldn’t

get the image of Jake’s scarred and torn feet out of his head.

He had guessed it was some disease, from living on the

streets, but Jake had been out there only three weeks and

besides that didn’t explain what he’d seen in the bathroom.

He’d checked the bin the next day. Felt repelled and sick

when he saw the bloody tissues. Relief that the old man

hadn’t slaughtered him in his sleep. Awareness of what could

have happened. And what about the cries that he heard

through the walls some nights, assuming it was the old man

fighting demons in his sleep? Now all these things became

magnified, craving meaning and yet refusing to yield any.

Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to realize how different they were,

how different we all are from the people we pretend to

be. He went over everything that Jake had said, trying to

remember a telling detail, something that would open things

up, explain, make sense of, but all he could think about was

Jake’s face, the soft lines etched around his mouth, the

straggly beard, the way he always wanted three and a half

sugars in his coffee — so specific, Jon thought, and laughed,

remembering how he too had once been like that until those

things, one day, just didn’t seem to matter any more. He lit

another cigarette, flipped over the tape of Flying Shoes and

pressed down on the accelerator, enjoying the little sliver of

pain that wound around his ankle as, below him, the motorway

vaulted the city, past the red brick ugliness of the BBC

building, empty basketball courts and the grey columns of

council estates towering like accusatory fingers pointing up

at the sky.

‘The fuck-up’ they called him. Whispered in corridors and

lunchrooms throughout the department. In the eyes of his

commanding officers and the unspoken reproaches of the

young recruits. In the stories that people tell to ease the

tension before a bust, department legends, cautionary tales

dragged into gossip, gradually stratifying into myth.

But Van Hijn was used to worse. This was just the latest

in a long line of events that had gone only slightly wrong,

had at some point sheared away from their original intentions

and taken shape as something much less explainable let

alone excusable. He wasn’t sorry that he’d killed the man.

Sometimes you were given a chance and you had to take it —

how many more women would he have mutilated? — but he

was sorry that it had been the wrong man, that this fiend was

still on the loose.

But finding the old man had been a break. A sudden flash

of hope in the darkness of the case. A shift in patterns.

Experience had taught him that it was these changes that

would eventually yield meaning, clues, perhaps even resolution.

That he had been given a singular chance to, if not

erase, then at least make up for the events in February. The

ones that earned him the sobriquet of ‘the fuck-up’.

Detective Ronald van Hijn had been the star pupil of his

year at the police academy. Even the other students, usually

so resentful of these things, had to demur to his obvious

brilliance in all fields of police work. His teachers had

predicted a bright future, there were whispers of city commissioner and mayor even and, on his graduation, everyone

agreed that great things were in store.

It seemed more than a lifetime ago.

As he sat in his office waiting for the Englishman, he

wondered about where it had started to go wrong. What had

happened? He unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and

took out a joint that he’d prepared earlier in the men’s toilets.

He was supposed to be giving up. But hadn’t he said that at

least once a year for the last ten years? It didn’t matter. This

year he was going to do it. He was getting older, things were

starting to go wrong and he wanted to stack the odds as

much in his favour as he could. The cigarettes would have

to go too, but those were harder, almost a necessary part of

the job sometimes, he thought, placing the joint back into

the drawer, allowing himself to feel a moment’s virtue from

this small denial.

The phone rang. It was Captain Beeuwers.

‘Ronald. What’s this I hear about an Englishman coming

to see you?’

Damn. So someone had told him, leaked the news in hope

of future appraisal, a remembered payback. ‘I called him,’

was all he said, wary not to let slip anything more.

The captain was breathing heavily, as if he’d just come

back from a gruelling run. ‘Ronald, there’s really no point in

you interviewing him. Let Zeeman do it. There needs to be

some continuity.’

He hated how his first name was used to patronize him.

His father’s son. Still. ‘That’s why I thought it’d be best for

me to do it,’ he replied, trying not to let his anger show, not

to give Beeuwers the satisfaction.

‘Pass it over to Zeeman, Ronald. I promised him this case.

You do that and I’ll make sure the board awards you the full

pension, not the discriminatory one.’

Van Hijn leaned back in the chair. The captain was

unusually eager to get him off the case. It had been partly the

captain’s vote that had prejudiced his pension appeal. He

thought about it. Drop the case and triple the settlement.

Enough money to go to America on. Retire early. Enough

not to have to worry.

,„ . ‘Well, Ronald. I need a decision now,’ the captain said,

” breathy and urgent.

‘Goodbye, Captain. I’ll see you at the hearing.’ He

slammed down the phone. Tried to take a deep breath. He

could feel his nerves twitch, his body humming and snapping

with crackle. The drawer rolled open. He took out the joint,

lit it, cursing his weakness, exhaling into the waiting grille of

the air-conditioner.

Sucking on the warm smoke he remembered the night of

his graduation, twenty years earlier, him only twenty-seven

then, drunk with the recognition, the backslaps and the sheer

wonder of a whole life still ahead. He’d spent the night with

his lover, Elizabeth, telling her of his plans, how he could

fast track through this and that division, the whole intricate

career path that he’d devised for himself so rigorously and

seriously.

He almost coughed on the smoke when he thought about

Elizabeth. She’d been his girlfriend since the first week of

the academy and he’d loved her with a more insane rush and

intensity of feeling than anyone before or since, the kind of

whirlwind that swallows you only once in your life and which

you spend the rest of your time trying to recapture. They’d

married a week after their graduation and had decided to

take their honeymoon in California, a place neither of them

had ever been to, but whose allure, through movies and

media, had gripped both of them since childhood.

They never went.

Jan van Hijn, Ronald’s father, had been dead twenty-two

years; a hero of the war, a fearless anti-Nazi and freedom

fighter in city legend. Van Hijn had walked through the

police academy forever in the old man’s shadow. People

looked at him and noted the facial resemblance to his father,

strangers in bars would tell him stories about his dad and

everyone treated him with a certain respect which he had

grown comfortably accustomed to.

And then the article had come out. Published in Der Stern three weeks after his graduation. The article that brought to light newly discovered documents relating to dark deeds that

took place in occupied Holland. Correcting the false Anne

Frank-fostered belief that the city was good to its Jews,

detailing how it had the lowest rate of survival in Europe,

only one in sixteen ever made it back from the East or stayed

undiscovered in rotten basements. The article that named

his father, Jan van Hijn, as the Gestapo’s most acclaimed

collaborator in the Low Countries.

The facts were irrefutable, backed up by facsimiles that

held his father’s signature, a shaky, familiar hand that also

inscribed his son’s books with little quotations, and Van

Hijn, feeling sicker and sicker, had read the piece listing the

people his father had betrayed, the Jews wrenched out of

hiding places and shot or burned alive in their synagogues,

the resistance leaders given up.

He tried to remember his father and he couldn’t reconcile

what he read with the man he knew and yet there was no

way to deny that everything they said was true. That he had

been both the man that Ronald thought he was and the man that they accused him of being.

That was the hardest thing to grasp, not that he did what

he did during the war, any man is capable of that, not even

that his legend was what it was, these things happen, Van

Hijn thought. No, the single greatest problem that he faced

was that his father had been both these men; a loving and

generous parent and, at the same time, a seller of men’s lives.

People had started gathering outside his house after the

article came out. A swastika had been crudely spray-painted

on his car. Gangs of neo-Nazis sent him letters and offers of

money trying to recruit him to their cause. ‘Blood Will Out’

they often wrote, he was his father’s son and they too saw

great things in store for him.

Elizabeth couldn’t take it. Her mother had been a Dutch

Jew who had somehow survived Auschwitz. The fear of

what was inside her husband was too much for Elizabeth

and she left. He felt betrayed by her, by his father and by the

friends who had stopped calling and who now exchanged

only perfunctory greetings with him each morning at work,

somehow unable to break the lines of continuity that had

been drawn. The fact that he hadn’t known about his father

did not seem to matter. His father was dead, they couldn’t

hang him for his crimes, and so they turned to his only son

and exacted their revenge on him.

The years passed and people forgot like they always do.

But Van Hijn hadn’t and he still felt bitter at the way things

had turned out; it wasn’t so much the promising career at

Interpol that he missed, as her, Elizabeth. The way she would

make him coffee in the morning and light his cigarette or a

half-turn in the late-summer light that would leave him

breathless. The way she smiled when she knew he was lying,

the little looks and nuances that had been made unavailable

to him after her departure.

He stared at his hands. Old and gnarled now though he

was only just past the midway point of an expected life. The

nails torn and scuffed, the skin dry and cracked. Once he had

been proud of his hands — Elizabeth had called them a

musician’s hands — but time had left its mark on them just

as surely as on everything else. He made a note to get some

moisturizer later, to try to care about these things. He stared

at his cheap wristwatch. The Englishman was late. He

shuffled in his chair. Looked at his notes, the photographs

of the dead. He had felt something, squatting down in the

rain, staring at the old man, something he’d not experienced

for a long time: a little shiver and rush of blood, the coming

together of disparate lines. He knew he didn’t have much

time left.

He checked his watch again. He was looking forward to

getting home. A package of videos and CDs had arrived that

morning but he hadn’t had time to open it. It was better to

have something to come back to. He spent most of his

evenings watching videos, preferring the passivity of screen

people to their real counterparts. He collected and taped

films and music with a passion that had been excised from

the rest of his life, and his flat was collapsing under the

weight of shelving units that held everything from the dark

glare of Robert Mitchum to the astounding, inflamed beauty

of the young Shirley Maclaine. He especially liked the films