THE DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND by STAV SHEREZ When the body of a tramp, Jake Colby, is found in a secluded Amsterdam park, Dutch police detective Ronald Van Hijn believes that this is the ninth victim of the serial killer stalking the city. Yet, all previous victims were young, female and beautiful. What could have made the killer change his MO? On the corpse Van Hijn finds contact details for Jon Reed, an Englishman who befriended Jake in London shortly before the murder. Van Hijn summons Jon to Amsterdam to identify the body and so sets him on his own journey of discovery. Was Jake really a tramp? What revelation about his identity led him to a life on the streets? And did his fate lie not in the hands of a serial killer but in the horror of the Holocaust death camps some 60 years before? The Devil's Playground is a thought-provoking debut crime thriller from a stunning new young talent.   'A razor sharp thriller ... a heady brew of stylish prose . . . Like Robert Harris with a better record collection, Sherez has an immaculate sense of pace; experdy propelling the story along with a perfect drip-feed of clues and vivid imagery. Gripping to the end, The Devil's Playground is a powerful first novel that heralds a fresh and invigorating talent in the world of thriller writing' Jack Magazine 'Stav Sherez is a gifted writer, as good at evoking the heart of a piece of music or the dank smell of a city as he is at juggling several thought-provoking themes at once. The Devil's Playgrounddeserves to be the thriller of the summer' Economist 'A hypnotic page-turner' City Life 'A page-turner of a thriller' Metro 'Totally and utterly gripping . . . It's actually the best depiction of Amsterdam I've read since the novels of the late Nicholas Freeling. For a first novel this is extraordinarily ambitious and extraordinarily accomplished. All you want when you close the last page is to wait for the next novel by Stav Sherez. Now that's as good as a first novel gets' Classic FM 'Demonstrating rare intelligence, brilliandy structured, beautifully written, The Devil's Playground'is the finest first novel I have read in some time. It is altogether extraordinary, and introduces a major talent' James Sallis 'Remarkably ambitious' Sunday Times 'Sherez is hunting big game. He takes the most frightening atrocities of the twentieth century and explores them in a way you'll never forget. The most exciting, compelling and clever thriller I've ever read' Matt Thorne 'Juggernaut pace and moral-twisting narrative' The Ust 'A dark crime thriller that begins with an act of kindness, and ends with every moral certainty having been burned away . . . The Devil's Playground is appropriately named. A highly charged, plausible and disturbing piece of work' Big Issue 'Thought-provoking and incredibly atmospheric crime debut' Publishing News ' The Devil's Playground leads us willingly into the darkest parts of Amsterdam, where the past invades the present and not even your own identity is certain. A taut thriller which dissects the legacy of a frightful history with intelligence and care' Louise Welsh 'A brilliant and disturbing book. As an investigation of human perversity, it is fascinating; as a thriller, it stands comparison with the very best. Mesmerising' Toby Litt 'This book probes so relentlessly, fearlessly and deeply into the unspeakable darkness that it manages to work its way through to some impossible and redemptive light. I've read it twice and I'm sure I'll read it again' Steve Wynn PENGUIN BOOKS ABOUT THE AUTHOR Stav Sherez is a freelance journalist and music critic. The Devil's Playground was his critically acclaimed debut novel. He is currently working on his second novel, entitled The Ruins. He lives in West London. Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, So Strand, London wczb ori-, Kngland Penguin Group (ITSA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 1 to 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), enr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa www.penguin.com First published by Michael Joseph 2004 Published in Penguin Books 2005 To my Father and Mother with love For Alice Copyright © Stav Sherez, 2004 All rights reserved The moral right of the author has been asserted Set by Rowland Photo typesetting Ltd, Bury St Kdmunds, Suffolk Printed in Kngland by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser Acknowledgements To my wonder-agent Lesley Shaw and super-editor Beverley Cousins -- without the two of you this book would still exist in a small room. Thanks: James Sallis, Steve Wynn, Matt Dornan and Leo Hollis. I am indebted to Mary Lowenthal Felstiner's biography To Paint Her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Na%i Era (Harper Perennial). Author Note As anyone with knowledge of Amsterdam might guess, I have moved things around to suit my purposes and will put them back together one of these days. All characters are fictional -- even the real ones. 'The screams were so horrible because life was beautiful. He, the dullard, needed to be haunted by screaming throughout his life, so that the fear, agony and grief at losing life which they evoked would remind him to cherish it in himself and others' - William T. Vollmann 'Conscience is a Jewish invention' -- Adolf Hitler, near the end Prologue Amsterdam is full of butch dogs. Lean, tough beasts who can weather out any frozen Baltic wind or spray that assails them as they slouch along the canals. But not this one. This one is small and wiry and shivering in the pelting rain. All he wants to do is find some shelter. He runs ahead. A compact, dripping bundle of fur and legs, pulling his master along, the leash outspinning, past the Old Church and into the park. His muzzle breaks through a tangle of bushes and he sees the old man lying there, barefoot and face-down. Yet it is not for him to make sense of this but for his master, who comes puffing along, out of breath and ready to be annoyed, ready to shout, to blame the dog for all this rain and discomfort, when he too sees it. It doesn't take him long. It is a scene intimately familiar from movies he has watched, books and plays. All this stuff crammed into his head is finally of use. He calls the police from his mobile phone and, as he's waiting for someone to answer, he's thinking about whether they'll want to interview him for the evening news. The thought of this makes him smile. The rain refuses to pause for the scene. It has been raining for weeks. The canals are high and turbulent and a strange fatalism has crept into the minds of the city's inhabitants. Unnoticed, the beagle wanders off, bored by the whole scene, trying to find some shelter from the awful rain. His master stands guard beside the body. He doesn't look down. It is the police's problem now, not his. The Oude Kerk keeps off the worst of the weather. It is the oldest building in the city but the man takes no account of this, he walks by it every day and it is no more to him than a shape, something to delineate the streets and canals. Instead he watches the window-girls standing in their booths, smiling and trying to entice through the rain. A line of tourists waits patiently at the gated entrance to the church, their second-day-in enthusiasm and protective mountain-wear more than enough to make up for the weather. But the man is more concerned with his dog. He feels the hard jerk against his wrist. He reels the leash in and smiles at the window-girls as he hears the approaching police sirens, straightening his hair and wishing he'd worn his new burgundy jacket. He doesn't like the idea of people seeing him in his jogging gear. Van Hijn watched as Christ was airlifted out of Rome. The great open-armed statue wobbling precariously in the wind under the insect chop and buzz of the helicopter, leaving the city to bikinied sunbathers waving from rooftops and the snarl and flash of hungry journalists. Then the beeper on his hip went off. The other five people in the cinema turned towards him and, even in the dark, he could see their angry stares. The pulse echoing through the almost empty room, disturbing the immersion of the film, that wonderful longed-for loss of control. All gone now. He let it ring a couple of times more, then pressed the small black button, got up, adjusted his trousers, sighed and said goodbye to La Dolce Vita. He'd left his umbrella at the cinema and by the time he got to the scene he was soaked and in a bad mood. He'd intended to spend the afternoon locked away in the shelter of the screen; a Fellini double bill, a thermos of coffee and a slice of blackcurrant cheesecake. There was nothing else to do on such days. Days when the rain seemed like a dark cloud, permanently orbiting the city. 'Detective Van Hijn.' Someone was calling him but he was still thinking about the face of Anouk Aimee, the way her eyes seemed to dance when she spoke, the small upcurl of her top lip. 'Detective!' He saw the lieutenant approaching hesitantly and he made an effort to smile, to pretend he was glad to see him. Jan was one of the few officers who didn't laugh behind his back these days. Who had seen the incident at the canal as just a stupid accident, nothing more. The kind of thing that happened to all cops, even the best ones. 'What is it this time, Jan?' He looked towards the park, the hedges glistening with rain, the huddle of people staring at something on the ground. 'Take a look.' The lieutenant shrugged. Van Hijn could see he was tired. 'He was found, by a dog, half an hour ago,' Jan added. 'A dog? Did this dog also call us and report it?' Immediately he felt bad about this but it was too much to say sorry in the rain, too much just now, and he let it ride. 'No. His owner's over there. Seems eager to talk about it.' 'Aren't they all?' Van Hijn wiped the rain from his eyebrows. 'Get him off the scene. Take his statement and send him home.' Van Hijn watched as the lieutenant turned away and disappeared into the rain. He saw the gradually forming pack of spectators, all whisper and expectancy, standing on the other side of the road. He didn't understand these people who congregated around murder scenes and accidents, straining for a glimpse, taking home-movies, popping flashbulbs, impersonating journalists. They were like the dark twins of those birth addicts who roam hospitals pretending to be expectant fathers, shivering and sweating in anticipation of glimpsing the shuddering bloody expulsion that brings us all into this life. It aw like watching something being born, he had to admit to himself. But as he got older he was becoming less and less tolerant of these people and the way they interfered with his work. Their foolish belief that they could learn something in observing death. Their hunger for tragedy. He lit a cigarette, postponing things for at least another few minutes. He managed to smoke it a third of the way down before the rain got to that too. The man lay face-down between two sets of bushes in a small hedged-in space, a pinprick of green amid the purples and blues of Amsterdam's red-light district. Van Hijn took a deep breath that tasted of diesel and sweat and approached the body. The dead man wore a dirty brown overcoat, once expensive perhaps but now rubbed and lined with street debris, mud and rain. Blue jeans that were no longer blue but a shade Van Hijn had never seen before, somewhere between stone white and the colour of sea mist in late Ruisdael. No shoes or socks. Van Hijn knelt down and had a closer look. He felt the cheesecake coming up and had to turn away, take a deep breath of wet air, before he was able to continue. He cursed the fact that he'd put a new battery in his beeper that morning. Should have just let the damn thing run out. There was something wrong about the man's feet. The dark and callused skin. The white flash of scars running up and down, disappearing into the cuffs of his jeans. Van Hijn took a sharp swallow of air, felt it crease into his stomach -- not just another dead tramp then, but something else. He looked back down. Took note. Small black spots that he knew would prove, when measured, to be the exact diameter of a cigarette end. He took out his pen and used it to lift the trouser cuff. The marks continued up the man's hairless leg. Van Hijn remembered the body of the girl they'd recently found near the Heineken factory. A similar pattern of marks had decorated her body too. And there were others, as every newspaper reader in the city knew, a whole row of faces and mutilations stretching back nine months. His hand was shaking. The pen clattered to the ground. Another one then, he thought, and lit a cigarette to cover the smell that was coming off the corpse and still his shaking hands. The ninth so far. A man. The first time the killer had chosen a man. Van Hijn noted the position of the body. Its relation to the shrubs that surrounded it. To the tiny park that it lay in and the shadows of the Old Church beyond. He sketched out the crime scene in a small notebook and then leaned down once again, braced himself, and turned the body over. He'd expected someone older from the withered state of the feet, small husks wrinkled and torn, but the man lying on the ground was only in his early sixties. Maybe younger. Van Hijn drew back. A flutter of something echoed through his chest, rumbling palpitations whispering: this is it, the quirk, the crack and shift that would mark the break in this case. A man. An old man this time. Maybe now they would believe him. He looked down. The white beard which had been smeared across the man's face by the rain held in it an assortment of leaves and twigs, the wind's things. The man's eyes were closed and his skin was blue. He put his gloves on, stretching his fingers to loosen the latex and carefully undid the buttons on the dead man's coat. A warm, dark smell came from underneath the cloth, a smell of basements and stagnant water. He searched for a wallet, some identification, but there was nothing. The inside left pocket, the one covering the heart, had been cut out. It was when he pulled the coat back together that he noticed the book. A tiny glint of white peeking from the outside pocket, almost totally submerged in that brown funk. He cautiously pulled it out, brushed some of the dirt and leaves away. He called over one of the policemen and asked him to hold up his umbrella while he studied the book. It was an old Faber edition of Pound's Selected Cantos. Worn, ribbed by water damage, it seemed as dead as the man on the ground. Van Hijn carefully opened it. He felt a slight surge in his belly. On the inside front cover he saw a name and a phone number. He could just make them out although the rain had smudged the ink. The number wasn't local. The name wasn't Dutch. He flicked through the rest of the book, feeling the wet bend and droop of the pages under the rubber skin of his glove. On the third page, sunk halfway down, was a plain white bookmark, a string of numbers written on it by a shaky hand. They didn't seem to mean anything but they were too precise, too neatly spaced to have meant nothing, an idle doodle while waiting for the phone to ring or the train to pull in. He forced himself not to think about these things. It was too early. Nothing had any context. There was no point in speculating. Evidence had to be gathered first, sifted and comprehended. He jotted the two sets of numbers down in his notebook, then called over for an evidence bag and sealed the book and bookmark away. It was time for others to take over. The ones who would study the dirt with magnifying glasses. Spray chemicals and fill test-tubes. Photograph the scene before clearing it away. He could already see them making their way towards the enclosure in their white boiler suits and plastic gloves, the forensics team, setting up borders, marking their territory like a ragged troop of Arctic explorers. There was nothing else he could do at the scene. Some of the younger officers were whispering, their eyes flicking in Van Hijn's direction every now and then. He knew what they were saying. He'd heard it ever since the canal incident; at the station, in a bar, passing on the street. The whole gamut of Dirty Harry jokes. At times, it seemed as though the whole of Amsterdam knew. Yet, it had never reached the papers. The man had been given a cheap burial. No one mentioned that he'd been killed by mistake. The fact of his crimes was enough to keep things quiet and discreet. The whole thing was buried. Elections were close and bad publicity was bad publicity. No one wanted that kind of thing to besmirch the department as a whole. They'd struck a deal: a quiet transfer, a pension hearing, a desk -- the prospects of a belly, a bad back and endless cups of cheap coffee awaited him. 'Detective. I'm surprised to see you here.' Van Hijn turned and saw Captain Beeuwers approaching, shaking off the rain like an annoyed dog, trailing young fresh-faced replacements in his stream. 'I got the call,' Van Hijn replied, wishing he hadn't, wondering how much of the film he'd missed. 'That's all fine, but you'll hand the case over to Zeeman now that he's here.' The captain's eyes seemed to shift over Van Hijn's face, as if scanning for any weakness, ready to target. Van Hijn smiled. Perhaps it was just as well he'd had to miss the film. Perhaps this little encounter would be worth it. 'I'm still the one in charge until the transfer comes through,' he said. The captain's face seemed to freeze almost as if someone had pressed a button. 'A deal was made, and besides, we don't want you going off all half-cocked again. It doesn't look good for the department.' 'The man wasn't innocent,' Van Hijn drily replied. He knew he was falling for the captain's bait but every time it came up he felt the need to explain himself anew. Beeuwers spat into the rain. 'He wasn't the guy we were looking for. You seem to have forgotten that. We can't just go out shooting people hoping that, after the fact, they'll turn out to be guilty of something. Everyone's guilty but not everyone deserves to be gunned down in the street. He was only a rapist. There's no death penalty for rape.' 'There should be,' Van Hijn replied, remembering that peculiar, yet vaguely familiar smell, unsettling somehow, when they entered the dead man's flat. And how the man with him, a uniform, started vomiting and collapsed on to the floor almost immediately. Not that you could really tell what constituted the floor. That was the thing. The man had wallpapered his whole flat with porn, torn from magazines, jagged edge of flesh overlapping flesh, creating monstrosities and freaks unbelievable and disturbing. A tableau like something from the tormented mind of Hieronymous Bosch. But it wasn't just the walls. That wouldn't have made the uniform so sick, nor given Van Hijn a dizzying nauseous headache like the constant spinning after stepping off a fairground ride. No, it was the fact that everything had been wallpapered. All the surfaces had been meticulously covered with porn: the ceiling, totally covered, the chairs and the tables and the table legs, the phone, the whole border and back of the TV, everything but the screen. Within a couple of minutes Van Hijn had lost all sense of perspective and depth. The room seemed to pulsate, the floor to float. He reached out for objects that turned out to be much further away than he anticipated. Eyes followed him around the room. A woman with six legs and thirteen breasts seemed to smile. And he remembered the keepsakes that the rapist had mounted on a porn-splashed altar, the reason for that smell, all thirty of them, tagged and dated, with names and small photos attached to each. They had to carry him out of there. Van Hijn snapped out of the dark tangle of his memories and stared at Beeuwers. The rain made him look like a piece of discarded furniture. Van Hijn stepped forward and leaned into the captain's sweating face. 'This is my case, always has been, since the first body and I'm not going to let your goon take over. I don't care what the fuck you think about it.' 'In that case you'll find your transfer coming sooner than even you anticipated, I assure you.' The captain tried to smile, to show him that yes, he was still in control, but he couldn't make it, his lips refusing to rise. He knew that the detective had got the better of him this time. He would have to do something about that. Van Hijn winked at the captain. A faint smile, barely discernible in the rain. He turned away before the captain could answer. He didn't care. There was nothing left to lose. He hit the streets hard, his feet splashing the puddled rain, his head hunched down, fists stuffed into his pockets. The dialogue with the captain had angered him more than he'd realized. Hadn't demoting him been enough? Yet, there was always this tendency to push home the further humiliation, to consolidate the gain and destroy the enemy. He shouldn't have been surprised, or only at his own naivete perhaps. He could go back to the cinema, catch the last hour of the film, pretend he'd been there all along. No, somehow he didn't think that was going to work today. He could still see the man's scarred feet and the way the passers-by had wrestled with each other to get a glimpse of the body before it was carried away. His mouth felt dry and bitter, his head heavy. He stopped at a cafe, ate two pieces of chocolate pecan cheesecake, too fast, and stared at a poster advertising a forthcoming fashion show. The redhead looked at him from its surface, smiling, saying, who cares about all that and what does it matter anyway? When the sugar hit, he felt his whole body relax, deflate and soften like an old sponge soaked in a bath. He smoked a cigarette and headed back to the station, back to life and to the phone call that he has to make. This is how it begins. With Jon staring out of his window at the space where the tramp once stood. Wondering where the old man was. If he would come back again to this spot. If he would come back at all. He turned to the empty room, bare except for the clutter and murmur of the accusing computer, the deadline looming, the work still undone. His mind was filled not with paragraphs and grammar but with thoughts of Jake, the short snap of time they'd spent together, the meagre two weeks that the old man had stayed in Jon's flat. The aching throb of the space where someone used to sit. Jon stared at the flickering screen of the computer monitor, the impossibly complex rendering of a man's body overlaid by meridian lines snaking and spiralling like telephone cables connecting the parts, keeping the system in flow. He could feel a headache's claw creeping up the back of his neck, spreading wider, like a ratcheting of the skull, and he closed his eyes and saw Jake's face once again, the straggly beard and high forehead, the eyes wide and alive, and he forced himself not to think of these things, squeezed his eyelids down hard as if that would be enough to expunge this vision. And it almost was. Jon rubbed his ankle. Dante could not have found words to describe this pain. Maybe the doctor had been mistaken. It seemed to be getting worse rather than better, a slow and dull throb that had become all insistent making him feel as if he was wearing an iron boot. He'd taken some painkillers M and now, as he stared out at the people withdrawing money, huddling around the cashpoint like conspirators sharing a secret, he felt so angry, so ashamed for what had happened that morning. He'd been on the bus, standing on the exposed edge of the Routemaster, when he'd seen Jake, the tramp, walking along Oxford Street, or at least thought he'd seen him. Looking back on it now he realized that the man had been shorter, moved in a different way. Jon had jumped off the bus, hit the ground and went flying, face-down in the street. The bus behind screeched to a stop. He could smell the black smoke spewing from its front and hear the driver cursing. Everyone was staring at him. The constantly moving mass of pedestrians had stopped dead in their tracks and was watching with an unnerving intensity, a sort of group spirit that seizes people in the vicinity of an accident. He smiled, tried to get up and collapsed straight back on to the asphalt, unable to stifle unmanly screams of pain. His ankle felt broken. He was sure of it. He tried again. Arrows of pain shot up his legs, his stomach lurched, the earth shifted and spun. This is what happens when you black out, he thought and slumped back down, surrendering to gravity. He lay on the road, paralysed by pain and embarrassment, hoping the police, or someone -- anyone -- would come and get him out of this. The doctor had said the ankle was only sprained but it felt like it was broken. The doctor had suggested a pair of crutches, ease the weight off it for a couple of days, but Jon had refused, horrified at the thought of trying to navigate London on anything but two good legs. Had he really thought it was Jake? Or only hoped so much, desired it to such an extent that it had become real? For the first time, he understood how much he wanted it to have been the old man. The way he'd spent the past week searching the faces of the crumpled figures on the streets for him, wondering if he'd driven him out or if it was something else, one of the demons that haunted his past, hoping somehow, against everything, that he'd still come back, ring the buzzer, act as though nothing had . . . The phone made him jump. He peeled himself away from the window, eyes squinting at the light. He fumbled for the receiver. He had put his phone number in a book he'd given Jake. Perhaps the old man was calling him. 'Jon Reed.' Breathless with an underlay of expectancy, a slight tremulous uplift of tone. 'It's me, Jon. Just calling to check on progress.' Jon exhaled, his heart slowed, he reached for his cigarettes. He couldn't tell his editor that he hadn't started yet. Not with the deadline at noon tomorrow. He couldn't begin to explain. 'It's going fine,' he said, lighting a cigarette. 'That's good to hear. And how are you?' There was always this rigmarole of genial inquiry following the reminder. 'I'm fine,' he replied, disappointed, though he knew there was no chance that Jake would call, but disappointed none the less. *You still have your guest staying?' His boss had a way of turning even the most innocuous word, 'guest' for instance, into a pejorative oozing loathing, bile and suspicion. 'No.' 'Good. Crazy thing, Jon. Could have got yourself killed. Or worse. Think about it. Drugged, raped and video-taped. Before you know it you're big in Bangkok. A star in Singapore. Maybe it's already happened. Maybe you didn't even realize.' 'Thanks, Dave, but I don't need you to make me any more paranoid than I already am.' He wanted to get off the phone, check the window again. 'I still don't understand you, Jon. What did you think you were trying to achieve?' 'I thought that. . .' 'What? I can't hear you.' He was mumbling. He coughed, spoke again. 'I was drunk. I thought it would be a good thing to do. Something that I found hard, that would challenge me. I didn't want to just give money every now and then. I wanted to see if I really was what I believed myself to be.' 'For someone so cynical, Jon, you really are endearingly naive.' Dave chuckled to himself. 'Tomorrow noon. Don't blow this one.' Jon put the receiver down. His fists were clenched and his jaw tight. Why did such an act as inviting an old man off the streets cause such astonishment in people? Shouldn't it have been the other way around? He tried to breathe deeply but that didn't work. It only made his chest hurt. He smoked a cigarette down fast and that was better. The job was a massive task of sub-editing, link-checking and laying out of a to-be-launched-tomorrow website for a derivation of Shiatsu called Seiki. He lit another cigarette and stared at the page in front of him. Japanese characters and dense little packets of text. Tiny annotated diagrams. The body mapped and reduced to a flow-chart. Many hyper-links. His head spun. Everything began to merge. Lines slipped over and under each other, entwined. Photos blurred, ran down the page like water. He forced himself to concentrate. He had chosen this after all, he had to keep reminding himself, and it was better than writing. There was no responsibility involved here, he was a gardener pruning and tidying up someone else's creation. He was the invisible ghost that lived in the spaces between. And that was good, that was the way he liked it. There were only the hard, sure rules of grammar and apostrophe, the tight strictures of syntax, like the cloistered halls of a cathedral, there to keep everything in check. Once he had written. Oh yeah. Published a small, hexagonal quarterly music journal that had been read by the industry and perhaps no one else. He'd prided himself on the integrity of content, the eschewing of fads, the reliance on treating each record on its own merits. And then he'd written that review. Nothing much, at the time. Three hundred words about a bad country album that was getting good press. The review mentioned medieval torture devices and Noriega. The review was funny. It was honest and straight, though he would now admit that there was a certain relish in the rhetoric of the piece. He received a one-line email from the artist thanking him for his knowledgeable and erudite review. He received a small and scrunched-up newspaper clipping, a fortnight later, from the man's wife, now widow, after the singer had hanged himself in an EconoLodge two blocks away from his own home. Everyone told him it wasn't his fault. These things happen. They cited examples. They bought him drinks and said fuck it. But he couldn't and so, quietly and without much fuss, he folded the magazine and retired to the indoor life, the pull of a small room, the way it feels almost like an extra layer of clothing protecting you from the world. He'd cut out the review and had pressed it under the glass of a cheap clip-frame, sometimes, he thought, to remind him of the smallness of this thing that had loomed so large, as if there, framed and sequestered, it had been made discrete, answerable only to itself. But at other times he looked at it and it winked back, a confirmation of his worst and darkest fears. But that was four years ago, he thought, tapping his fingers on the desk, looking for a way into this grid of blinking pixels. Four years, and he somehow understood that those years, that era even, as he could now call it, had come to an end the day he had invited a homeless man called Jake into his flat. Jake had always stood by the cashpoint. A tall, bearded man in a blue lumberjack shirt and a pair of faded jeans, barefoot, whispering almost inaudibly out of the side of his mouth, never seeming to ask for change from the blank-faced passers-by. Jon hadn't even noticed him at first, so used to avoiding unnecessary glances in the London streets that the tramp made no impression. When he did begin to notice him, he was amused at how the man so resembled Hemingway, as if he were a strayed contestant from one of those lookalike competitions held annually in Florida. As the long days of sunlight dragged through the first part of September, he grew more and more intrigued with the tramp. He'd been giving him money whenever he went past, he couldn't help doing that, was always doing that, and they were now on nodding terms; a brief hello, a morning smile. Jake was so different from the other homeless men, almost Dickensian characters crouched in doorways, defeated and bent, or swaying drunkenly in front of shops full of gleaming objects. There was a certain dignity to Jake, in his rake-like posture and eyes that always met yours, that even the streets had not managed to scrape off. Jon began to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about him. He would get up from the computer and sneak peeks through the net curtains. Watch as the man arrived every morning, always carrying a pile of books and a notepad, though he'd never seen him using them. He speculated, spun stories, and imagined a spectrum of possibilities as he strolled through his own dull daily life. It was a way of writing, invisible writing that harmed no one, a way of passing the time. He had him as an undercover police agent, a former man of good standing gone to pot after the death of a spouse, an escaped child molester, and sometimes, in his most fuzzy late-night haze, he convinced himself that it was indeed the ghost of old Hem come back to beg in the London streets. Then the weather turned. Brooding black skies spread overhead and the rain began its endless onslaught. The gutters overflowed, clotted and sticky with dead leaves. The days got shorter and harsher. Jon found himself becoming - well, sometimes he admitted it - a little obsessed, though he passed it off as just one of those things that happens when nothing else happens. His morning strolls were punctuated by the smile of the old man, by his bare feet and by the faces of the people who passed him by oblivious. When he walked up Notting Hill, he saw the face of the tramp in every homeless person, on every street corner, in their gap-toothed smiles and resigned pleas, their ragged clothes and sad-eyed dogs. Jon even started to feel disappointed when he looked out in the morning and the tramp wasn't there; it was as if his day were incapable of starting without the old man. He had got as used to seeing him as he was to his morning cigarette, his first espresso. Like those things, the old man had somehow become esssential to Jon's life, an underlying recurrent, something to hold it all together by, and he felt strangely resentful of the tramp at times, as if his sole purpose was to ensnare him in this need. But he found himself returning to the window time and again, unable to keep away, promising himself he would just check and then get back to the TV, invariably spending the night watching, wondering Who are you? Why do you draw me like this? Are you a ghost? As the weather worsened it tested his resolve. The thought of inviting the old man to stay had, at first, seemed rash, idealistic, the kind of thing his twelve-year-old self would have done. He'd dismissed it instantly and given the old man a fiver the next time he'd passed. But he kept watching from the window. The rain constant and dark. The old man like a statue standing still in the wet soup. And slowly the idea took shape in his head. It had a certain clarity to it that he found seductive. It was something so unusual, a wild leap, and he knew that only such an act, such an un-Jon-like act, could break through the ice he'd been petrified in these past few years. And he was scared. Absolutely terrified. He thought about the old man slaughtering him in his sleep. He remembered stories splashed across newspapers and TV discussions, heads nodding in patronizing they-should-have-known better gestures. Or how about: the old man stealing his favourite CDs; the old man inviting a crew of juiceheads to wreck the place; the old man burning down the flat. He chided himself for thinking like this, for the spew and sputter of images that seemed to come so readily. And this was another reason to do it. Disprove all this bullshit once and for all. Yes. He unconsciously inventoried his flat, appraising what there was of value. After the seventh day of torrential rain, Jon's resolve and paranoia finally broke and all the reasons for not inviting the tramp in were washed away like the summer leaves. He'd been thinking about it so much, it had swallowed up his life and he knew that there was only one thing to do. He got drunk. Stared at the wet old man two floors below. Drank more. Went out into the rain, shouted over the noise of the thunder. Made his offer. Now, staring at the empty space, rubbing his engorged ankle, Jon could understand a little better the reasons that had made him invite the old man to stay. At the time, he only vaguely pressed against the surface of his motivation, afraid that probing it too deeply might make it wilt. And he was glad that he had done it, even if Jake was back on the streets. His mother would have been proud. She'd always taught him to think about the men who lived on the fringes of life. She had taken him to parts of town that his father hadn't even known existed. She'd led him through small, crowded, smelly streets that for the twelve-year-old boy were like a window, a gateway into a world that bubbled under the surface of this one. The first time he had cried so much that his mother apologized. He'd told her that it wasn't fair that they were going home to dinner while these men and women had to sleep in cardboard boxes. His mother just nodded sadly, and something in the world had shifted slightly. At first the tramp had mumbled and demurred, but Jon insisted, the rain hissed and splattered, and they walked back into the building together, dripping and cold, exchanging names and wet handshakes as they waited for the lift. They sat opposite each other in the living room and didn't say a thing. Jon stared at his bookcases, crushed by a sudden feeling that he'd made a terrible mistake. He'd invited a stranger into his house. More than a stranger. A tramp. Who was to say he hadn't come from an institution? Or prison? Jon suddenly realized that he knew nothing about this man, that all his assumptions and speculations were just that. He tried to think of something to say, but nothing came. There was a tired smell exuding from Jake, like the whiff of old books or attic-rescued toys. He just sat there, almost a part of the armchair, his head bowed, his hand running through the straggle of his beard. Jon tried not to stare at Jake's feet. He was barefoot, as always, but it was only now in the small confined light of the room that he could see that the marks and patterns on the old man's feet were not just from sleeping rough. His feet were dark and sunburned, crisscrossed with tiny white lines, the flesh sometimes folded over itself, sometimes stretched tight to the bone, a latticework of streets and alleys carved into the skin or an ancient map of places still unseen. They looked hard and worn like an athlete's feet, as if the flesh was slowly turning to leather. He glanced up and noticed that Jake was watching him. He shivered, a real body snap and jerker, the kind that makes you feel as if too volts have just surged through your system. He coughed to make it seem like something else, hoping Jake hadn't caught it, thinking of exiled Chilean academics he'd seen in a documentary once and the torture scars they carried like a secret tattoo beneath their clothes. 'I wonder if I could have a bath.' Jon jumped. Then laughed, or tried to, but it came out wrong and Jake didn't smile back or make things any easier. His face held still like the face of a man carved in stone. 'It's been a couple of weeks. I must smell awful.' Yes he did, Jon thought, but he'd been way too polite, too embarrassed, to say anything. 'There's towels in the racks and you can use whatever soaps, shampoos I've got,' he said, trying not to let the relief show in his voice. 'Thank you,' Jake replied and got up, leaving big wet, soggy footprints on the faded carpet. When the door closed, Jon felt a sudden surge of relief, a welcome spasm of privacy. What had he done? But it was too late for that now, of course. He couldn't ask him to leave. Couldn't change his mind. That would be worse, and more difficult. He suddenly remembered his toothbrush, wondering whether Jake would use it, it was the only one he had, and he made a decision to buy a new one tomorrow, but one that was identical so that the old man wouldn't feel insulted. Jon lit a cigarette and put the first side of Zappa's Waka/ Jawaka on the stereo. As the horns began blasting the melody, reaching ever higher, counter-phrasing and spinning across the wild, propulsive beat, he went to the kitchen, buoyed by the screaming trumpets, and started to make an omelette, figuring the old man must be hungry, wanting to do something for him, even if it was just this. He thought about his father's funeral while the eggs slowly turned opaque in the pan. The sound of the sizzling fat like the rain on the roofs of the cars that morning . . . another grey rain-lashed day ... his inability to look anyone in the eye, hiding behind the cortege of hearses; a small child again, weeping for a father that he'd hated in life, filled with shame, regret and the massiveness of all that had been left unresolved. He took out the milk and made some coffee, hearing the pipes squeak and whisde as Jake ran his bath. Thinking about his father again made Jon's body tense up and he spilled sugar all over the floor, cursing himself and the way his memory always lay in wait like a densely packed minefield, impossible to avoid, fracturing the present. It made his ankle throb. Thinking about his father, about the past, Jake's disappearance, all the things that were still raw and painful. He didn't want to think about any of that. He got up, poured another drink. Stared out at the cashpoint, deserted now. He was glad that he'd invited Jake in. It was the one thing in his life he was unmitigatedly proud of. The one time when he overcame his fears and quibbles and actually did something without reservation. Not that it had made any difference. The old man was gone. Jon thought about the tissues on the floor, the unexpected sight of the old man naked, but surely it was more than that. The thought that he'd somehow driven him off was not something he wanted to contend with. Not now. Not with all this work still to be done, this flickering mass of pixelated crap. He pulled the curtains shut, drained the scotch, shut down the computer and turned on the dying minutes of a football game. Took a couple more painkillers. His headache had settled behind his eyes, fine white pins of pain piercing his retinas. The phone rang. It sounded like something snapping inside his head. Each ring seemed to get louder. Dave checking he was working. Dave hassling him. He almost didn't pick it up. But what if it was Jake? He picked up, said, 'Hello', trying not to slur, to sound too drunk or drugged. 'Mr Jon Reed?' 'Yes?' he said, muting the TV. 'My name is Detective Ronald van Hijn, Amsterdam police.' There was a pause in which the detective seemed to be lost for words. Jon stared blankly at the mute players dancing across the brilliant green. The detective coughed. His voice sounded thin and far away. 'I'm afraid I have some bad news for you, Mr Reed.' Wouter tied her to the four corners of the bed using pairs of tights he had taken out of her drawer. The arms came first; small wrists covered by smooth Lycra, pinioned to the brass ends of the headboard. When he was satisfied that her arms were safely pinned, he began tying her feet, wrapping the tights around her ankles, ankles he dearly loved, and pulling them across to either side of the bed. Suze said nothing, didn't struggle, let him continue with his slow seduction as she stared at the black of the blindfold that covered her eyes and saw the desert appear in front of her. It was a good image. An image drawn from the vast repository of her youth. Before things had turned bad. Before . . . She focused on the lone mesa in the distance, black and mysterious in the corners of her memory, as she heard him taking off clothes, coughing, getting on top of the bed and mumbling something in Dutch. She told him to hit play on the deck. The sound of the Geraldine Fibbers' second album, Butch, alternatingly soft and savage, saturated the room. She felt his tongue, warm and sticky, slide up her thigh, and though it was almost like being tickled, she tried not to move or squirm, instead letting the creeping sensitivity drown her as it raced across her body making nipples stand cold and rosy, skin prick up as if expecting an unexpected guest. He noticed this and began to play with her breast, grabbing the nipple slightly between his teeth, tightening the grip and gently releasing as he heard her moan. He lit a cigarette, reached over to the bedside table and picked the two clothes pegs off it. She felt the cold plastic clamp her nipple and the warm trickle of pleasure that coursed up through her neck and down her thighs. She saw the desert, the hands of her mother shaking in an alcoholic rage, the sound of her father on an answering machine, the closest she got to him for many years, that disembodied crackle and pulse of humming lines and whispered, breathy urgencies that could only be expressed in the close confines of a faraway telephone booth - she saw all that and then it was blown away, scattered and gone. He placed the other clothes peg, twisted it so that her nipple seemed almost to blush as the blood engorged it, darkening the already dark skin there. He felt her move, gyrate slightly, though he could sense that in some essential way she was no longer with him, that somehow in her restraints she'd managed to escape to somewhere small and private, and he entered her then, feeling himself ready to explode, the cigarette slowly burning down in the ashtray beside the bed. *Now that wasn't too hard, was it?' Suze said as he undid the tights and carefully took off her blindfold. 'It was kinda fun,' he replied in that quasi-American accent that she found so sexy in Dutch men, as if they'd all learned how to speak English from movies, giving them a brusquer, more commanding tone than they would have ever learned in pronunciation class. He lit her a cigarette and then one for himself. She wiped the blood that had begun to dry and crack on his chin. 'Did you enjoy it?' she asked him, placing her hand on his shoulder, feeling the still hot flesh of his urgency. 'I guess so.' He took a drag of the cigarette and lightly placed it in the ashtray. 'Not that I've done this kind of thing before but it's good to try something different.' And it was, he had to admit to himself, more fun than he'd expected it to be. When he tied her up, he felt as he had with the twins, lost in a world of his own imagining, able to leap whatever barriers. 'But I want to know if you enjoyed it. If you really enjoyed it.' She looked at him, suddenly serious. 'No, not really. Not of itself.' He lied, ashamed of the lust that had stirred within him. 'Being with you, yes but this, no.' She moved away from him. 'I thought all you Dutch boys were into kinky sex.' 'Why do you think that?' he replied. He liked the way Americans managed to generalize and place everything in a box from which understanding could then be gleaned. It made life so much simpler. 'I don't know, it's just the common impression,' she replied, not having really thought about it; but, now that she did, it seemed to make a whole lot of sense. 'You have this legalized sex and drugs industry -- I mean hell, Wouter, you yourself run three sex shops.' She smiled, sensing that he didn't find the paradox quite as entertaining as she did. 'And you know, to us foreigners, you Dutch seem so straight and -- forgive me -- boring, that we twisted Americans have got it into our heads that you must all be perverts of some kind. C'mon Wouter, underneath that prim Protestant exterior something darker must lurk.' 'I don't think that's quite the case.' 'I was just joking.' She grabbed him and squeezed his hand, thinking God, I wish he had a sense of humour, but then he'd be pretty much perfect and Suze knew there was no such thing, not for her anyway. She got up, took off the Fibbers and put on Waits, Foreign Affairs, sensing the moment required something mellow. They sat and smoked silently for the length of the album. 'I used to go to prostitutes.' It was later, they were drinking coffee and Suze almost spilled her cup, it was just so sweet the way he'd said it. 'Is there any adolescent boy here who doesn't?' she replied, looking at him, wondering why he'd chosen this moment to tell her. 'Not many, I think. We don't really attach the same kind of stigma to it as you do in your more enlightened land.' So, he can be sarcastic, she thought -- well, that was progress at least, most of the Dutch men she'd met so far had seemed to be severely lacking in any kind of charisma or passion, but damn, did they look good. 'I used to go see these twins, every fortnight or so for about seven years.' He lit another cigarette. 'Hilda and Helena, though of course those weren't their real names. I never knew their real names. They came from Belgium and always worked together. I was about sixteen when I met them.' She took the cigarette from his hand and pulled two quick drags before giving it back. 'I had gone to whores before, yes, and while it was always fun to fuck someone new, I never really got much pleasure from it after that initial thrill. And then I met the twins and, of course, sex suddenly had many new possibilities. Permutations I had not conceived of, but which they took me through methodically and diligently as if my fortnightly visits were some kind of education, a what-do-you-call-it cor . . . ?' 'A curriculum.' 'Yes, a curriculum to be followed. I never missed a lesson. I would come on a Wednesday evening, pay my money and spend the rest of the night learning from them.' 'Sounds like a great education,' Suze said, wishing life in the States had been that uncomplicated. 'Of course as time went on our relationship grew to be more than that of client and whore. Like a fool I fell madly in love with them.' 'What, both?' she asked, faking incredulity, though she knew that this was the way all such stories ended. 'Yes, both. While they were identical twins in every physical way, psychologically they were two totally different people and I guess that kind of turned me on. The fact that they looked the same but weren't.' He pulled down the bedsheets and moved closer to her. Some sadness had entered his face and Suze was almost surprised, it was something she'd never glimpsed in the four short months that she'd been seeing him. 'What happened to them? Do you still keep in contact?' she asked. He took another cigarette, lit it, and coughed. 'No. They were murdered two years ago. The police didn't find the killer, they never do in prostitute killings. Someone, a client, had stabbed them both through the heart with a carving fork. Decapitated them and swapped the heads around. The police never knew. It was in the papers, I guess a photographer had got to the scene before the cops. They had different tattoos, that's how I could tell. Christ, they buried them in separate graves with the wrong heads loosely reattached by the coroner. That's what kills me, not so much that they never found the murderer but that to this day they're lying underground with each other's head.' 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'There's nothing to be sorry about, that's life. You Americans apologize for everything, things you have no control over, I do not understand that.' 'I apologized for bringing the subject up.' 'You didn't know.' *No, I didn't.' Suze was sitting on the edge of the bed. Her eyes stared into the wall. She knew that if she stared long enough, the patterns would begin to move, shift and squeeze into new designs. 'What's wrong?' he asked. He thought perhaps the story had disgusted her, made her think less of him and, in fact, in the retelling he had glimpsed how it could look from another side and he hadn't liked what he'd seen. "Your story reminded me of that girl they found last week.' 'The canal killer?' He'd been following the case for the last eight months though it was something that he wouldn't admit to, even to her. Yet, perversely, he felt a twitch of excitement, an uncalled-for snap of charge, every time he opened the paper and saw that there had been another one. In some way, he thought, at least this would bring the issue, the danger, to the surface. 'I just don't really understand it.' Suze shrugged and turned back towards him. She saw that he was smiling. 'Not here, not with all the sex that's legally available.' 'I don't think that's quite what turns this killer's crank.' She laughed, surprised out of herself. 'Where did you learn that phrase?' she said. 'One of your American TV shows. We get those here too, you know, like serial killers - you export the good and bad.' She didn't answer him. She was used to his little games and, as an American abroad, she'd learned how she was always a representative of her native country, embroiled in all its horrors and wonders. She'd got so tired of defending herself that she'd given up. 'I once saw someone get killed,' she whispered. It came out without her planning. It was something she rarely talked about and she was surprised to have found it let loose in this setting, though she knew that there was a bond between their bodies, a sort of carnal contract, that allowed them to explore these things that you never could with someone you really cared about. 'Only one?' he replied, smiling, to show that he didn't mean her any harm. That it was just his way of expressing things. 'I thought you were supposed to have seen something like six thousand by the time you're ten.' 'That's TV. This was real.' He nodded, as if that made all the difference. 'How old were you?' 'Eight,' she said, and realized that she was going to talk about it. She had promised herself not to. But she had promised herself many other things too -- in Amsterdam, none of that meant anything any more. 'I was in a gas station with my parents.' She lit a cigarette and sucked on it hard. *We were going to the Superstition Mountains for a holiday. Outside of Phoenix. We were buying food and gas for the trip when this man walked in and marched straight up to the counter. My parents were face deep in the soft-drink cooler but I saw it. I saw the attendant's startled look as the man pointed the shotgun at him. Then everything exploded. The sound shook the racks of sweets. I remember screaming. Brightly coloured wrappers rainbowed the floor. The back wall exploded in blood. I can still hear the sound it made. I ran to my parents. There was another blast. More splatter. Glass breaking, heavy breathing. And the man who'd come in with the shotgun collapsed on the floor, the gun shearing away from him and clattering on the linoleum.' 'Shit, you have a good memory,' he said, not sure what else there was to say, not even sure how much of it was true though there was a seriousness to her now. 'I didn't understand what was happening. I screamed but I think I enjoyed it too. To a certain extent. Or maybe I only remember thinking that, maybe that happened afterwards, I don't know. But there was something there. The smell of the gun, that sharp tang following the blast, like a glimpse into another world, the sound and noise and fury, something that was appealing to me, not knowing what it really meant, what it signified. It was spectacular.' 'What happened afterwards?' he asked, finding himself turned on by this side of her. She moved away from him, looked at the wall, waiting for the patterns to change. 'I don't want to talk about that, Wouter.' 'But you brought it up.' He sounded exasperated she thought, wondering why he was so fascinated though she had to admit it was a fascinating thing, seen from the outside. 'Let's not spoil this moment,' she whispered. 'But this is why you're so interested in Charlotte, no?' He saw her flinch slightly. He didn't like it when she tensed herself up this way. It was like a closing of doors, a folding into herself that left him on the outside. But she liked to talk about Charlotte Salomon. It was why she'd come here. To write about the Jewish painter who died in the poison showers of Auschwitz. 'No, it's not. That's just cheap psychology. I like her art. That's all,' she replied, but even as the words left her mouth she could feel their uselessness hanging in the stale after sex air. 'And I suppose your work with the Council has nothing to do with it either?' She smiled, saw that he was playing with her, little postcoital murmurs and teases. She enjoyed him most when he was like this. When the walls of seriousness came down. 'The Revised Council of Blood, it's called. I wish you'd get the name right,' she replied, almost sticking out her tongue but then thinking better of it, giving him a friendly kick instead. 'Big name for a debating society.' He liked to tease her about it because she never told him anything. It was one of the few secrets they kept. She knew that to speak about the Council would be to betray its basic beliefs. She knew too that he wouldn't understand the full scope of it and that words, uttered from her mouth, would just be a reducing of things, a way to disfigure their intentions. -. 'It's more than a debating society, I told you that. We have a purpose, a goal.' ¦You keep its secrets like they were gold.' We all need to keep secrets from each other, Wouter, otherwise life would just be way too damn predictable.' Like the secrets you have to keep when living with divorced parents, she thought. You know the ones. Not saying that yes, Mum might be drinking too much because you don't want to hear your father saying again what a worthless, aimless woman she always was and not telling her that yes, Dad has a new girlfriend and yes, she's another of his students and then listening to your mum spill forth her own repressed years and rages. No, secrets were good. They kept the world apart, discrete and manageable. Sometimes the less people knew about each other the better. That evening she taught him how to fashion stronger knots, how to not let the pegs slip off and how to restrain himself until the final moment. He followed silently, afraid of his own pleasure, but the American girl seemed to enjoy it so he did what she wanted and, while he was fucking her, he pretended that she was one of the twins, untied and looselimbed, wrapping herself around him -- but when he opened his eyes to look at her face all he could see were the badly spaced stitch marks that went around her neck. The detective wanted him to go to Amsterdam to identify the body. He'd made it clear that Jon's assistance would be of great benefit to the investigation. He'd made it sound as if the whole thing depended on his arrival. Jon put the phone down. His head rattled with blood, pounding in his ears like a fist. He took a deep breath, feeling the air press against his ribcage. Jake was dead. That was what the detective had said. Found face-down in a park with a copy of the book that Jon had lent him. Murder, the detective had said. He grabbed his lighter and lit a cigarette. There was a high-pitched buzzing in his left ear, a kiss of feedback. His hands were shaking, he was out of breath. The room got ^darker as if someone had just sucked the air out of it. He drew in the smoke and felt a light coating of sweat form all over his body, sticky and cold. Amsterdam. That city again. It was ridiculous. He had his project to finish. They were launching tomorrow and he hadn't started subbing it yet. The dead screen glared at him. There was so much still to do. There was no way he could go. It was crazy. He knew that if he didn't get it in on time he'd be out of a job. Dave's phone call had made that clear. It was crazy. Just pack and go. It terrified and thrilled him at the same time. The same feeling he'd had when peering over the rim of the Grand Canyon one summer, staring down into the swirling abyss of rock, that wonderful tingling of pull and release, the welcome, wilful surrender to forces outside yourself. But no, he couldn't think like that. He'd promised Dave. He couldn't give it all up just to chase a ghost. It had been just over a week since he'd seen the old man and yet it seemed as if he'd only left yesterday. He could still feel him occupying certain spaces in the flat, still remember the way he'd had to change the espresso machine filter from a single to a double. The way space takes on a new dimension, a fullness and depth that you were previously unaware of. He looked at the TV but the football was over, he'd missed the final score. There was a straggly, skinny, tired-eyed labrador on the screen, head hanging down, droopy jowls, something terribly wrong with its legs and, even with the sound off, Jon knew this was an animal charity ad. And then he began to cry. Looking at the dog, feeling as if the whole building was caving in on him, it was something so unexpected, something that he couldn't stop. He felt palpitations rumble and rage through his chest like a rattling train, he tried to catch his breath, his eyes stinging with tears. The next time he looked up the news was on. Fires raged, people screamed and fell to the ground, pride and dignity a luxury they could no longer afford. He turned it off, stubbed his cigarette, burning himself in the process and grabbed his car keys. He was drunk. He knew this because his ankle didn't hurt that much. Over the limit. He got into the car and tested his foot against the pedal. It seemed okay. So what if they stopped him? So fucking what? Jake was dead. He'd thought he could help him. Thought that taking him in might mean something. Jake's death felt like a negation of all that he'd tried to achieve, a lightning bolt from above if you were a religious man. He missed Jake, more than he ever thought he would a stranger, someone off the streets. He missed him like one misses a dream lover whose perfection is only an index of the dream and whose disappearance when waking leaves you emptier and sadder than any flesh and blood woman ever could. That strange, quiet man had upset every story Jon had made up to explain him and he now understood how it is we look back on things we miss, things that are never apparent in their moment but exist only in reflection, a messy stirring of memory and desire. He drove up on to the Westway, the great concrete snake that straddled the west of the city, vaulting across housing estates and parks, heading into the black occlusion of night, Townes Van Zandt on the stereo and London passing invisibly by. In the dark cramp of the car he blamed himself for not having given Jake more money, though he'd tried once and the old man had just refused in that polite yet inarguable way of his. But he should have been more insistent or perhaps just sneakier, slipping it into Jake's clothes when he wasn't there. But what would that have achieved? Was money really the problem? He didn't think so. Jake had never asked for any, even when he was out on the street. At first Jon had thought the old man was still holding on to whatever dignity was left but now he realized that Jake had made it back to Amsterdam and that he'd had money all along. He clung to the idea that the detective had made a mistake. That it was some other man lying extinguished on a slab somewhere. He wondered if he would have to go to Amsterdam just to ascertain for himself whether Jake was actually dead. Did he really want to know? Maybe it was better to leave the possibility open. But he knew how remote that was, knew that there was no doubt about it and perhaps the only real surprise had been the Dutch detective. That and the location of death. Amsterdam. But even that wasn't really a surprise. No, not at all. At the time, he'd thought it was just a story, a way the old man used to get a point across. Amsterdam. The place where Jake was born. It had a seductive symmetry to it, Jon admitted, but was that all? He hadn't thought about it again, not in the intervening period, and so the question of whether Jake had told him the truth was one that he'd never asked, but which the Dutch detective had nevertheless answered. Jake had been in the flat a week. He spoke little and always kept his room tidy and clean. He spent most of his time in there, reading, writing, Jon never knew. After the awkwardness of the first night Jon thought it would get better, but the old man stayed the same, accepting food and drink with a nod or a shrug but rarely saying anything apart from the most basic syllabic units, no and yes. The space between them seemed further than the few metres of carpet broken by black coffee table. Jon had tried to engage him, pull him into dialogue, but Jake had said nothing. The silence made Jon uneasy. He put on music to fill it. He played the old man CDs, asked him what he thought, did he like this one or that one, but Jake didn't answer and Jon fumbled with another CD so as not to drop into awful silence again. He spent more time outdoors, avoiding the silent accusation that hummed through the flat. He started to wonder if he was losing his mind; perhaps asking Jake to stay had been the breaking point, the first unreasoned act that would bring down the deluge. He forced himself to go back to the flat, entered its unwelcome space, Jake lodged in his room like some autistic monk. He checked to see if anything was missing then made the old man coffee and tea, not sure which he'd prefer. He hid things from Jake, then, in spasms of guilt, put them back in their places. He'd told a few friends and they'd laughed at him and somehow that had reaffirmed his initial act, for it was in their disapproval that he saw the glint of the good he was doing, or at least thought he was. Those first few days the only thing Jake ever said apart from yes or no was, 'It's a botch. It's all been a botch.' He said it several times, perhaps thinking Jon out of earshot, a steady rhythmic canto repeated to himself, the window, the stale and empty air, and Jon never knew whether Jake was talking of his life or of something else. 'It's my birthday today.' Jon stared at him, stunned. It was more than he'd said all week. Jake stood in his bathrobe wrapped tight, always wrapped so tight, Jon noticed, and smiled. 'I thought it would be a good day to go for a walk.' Jon tried to say something but the words stopped in his throat. He nodded, unwilling and unable to utter anything lest it destroy the moment. They walked through Hyde Park, watching the skaters and ducks gliding by, the cold precision of September that made everything look as if it were in hyper-focus, carved discrete and sharp by the icy, brittle air. They didn't say anything, nothing much, Jon tried to mention the good weather but the old man just smiled that smile of his, impenetrable as a slab of granite. They walked back to the flat as the rain began to cloak the sky. Listened to a Grateful Dead concert from November 1973. It was the one thing they had in common and though Jake changed the subject every time Jon mentioned a certain show, there was something there, some memory of a different time. Jake nodded along to the November 7th 'Dark Star' and commented on the recording. 'I always had a bad one,' he said. Jon looked at him, unsure what to say. 'Lots of hiss and tape generations. This sounds clean.' 'You should hear the remastered Cow Palace show from '76.' Jon moved forward, encouraged. Jake nodded. 'Yes, that's a great one. Haven't listened to any Dead for a long time. I feel like a different person now. Different from the one who used to listen to all this. It's strange.' Jon had caught Jake checking out his CDs one evening. His first thought was that the old man was going to take them and sell them. He was appalled by how quickly the thought had appeared. He made a vow to be kinder to Jake, to not lock his bedroom door as he had been doing the past few nights, stealthily, carefully turning the key so that it wouldn't echo down the empty hall. To stop watching Jake as if he was a thief. He tried not to think about these things. But they came. Especially late at night, lying in bed, in the dark, when he heard the floorboards creak and the careful creeping of tired feet. When the music was over they sat in silence, staring at the floor. Sometimes Jake seemed in another world; though his eyes were open they were scanning some wider horizon than the room afforded. It made Jon feel uneasy in his own flat and he picked up a book, something to distract him from the silence. 'When was the last time you were in a synagogue?' Jake asked, making Jon flinch, the book dropping from his hand to the floor. It was the first unsolicited comment from the old man since that morning. He couldn't remember when he'd last been. How did Jake even know he was Jewish? 'I don't know,' he replied shifting in his seat. 'My father was never a religious man.' He glanced down. Jake's eyes bored into him. It was as if he were a machine that had been running on standby only now switching to normal power, unleashing its potential. Jake frowned. *We are all religious, one way or another.' He took a sip of scotch. 'You liked your father?' 'No,'Jon replied, surprised by Jake's aggressive tone and by this intensely personal probing. He looked so serene from the outside and yet his voice trembled with a dark and ruinous sonority, a bitter, heavy sound that seemed to fill every space in the flat. The neither. Mine was a bastard.' He stayed on the Western Avenue watching the dull suburban houses roll by like flimsy backgrounds in a B-movie. He remembered the sculpted tone of Jake's voice, the sound of country boarding schools and old universities, so incompatible with the man's beard and borrowed clothes. The way he'd opened up that evening. And he thought about the way their fathers' deaths had changed their lives irrevocably.