by John Irving
"I knew it," Marja-Liisa's husband said. "You're Jack Burns. Marja-Liisa said she saw you at the gym."
"She's not here," Jack told him.
The unhappy husband looked past Jack into the disheveled room. The little boy wanted his dad to pick him up; the child was wearing slipper-socks with reindeer on them, and a ski parka over his pajamas. Jack stepped back into the room and the father carried his son inside. The pillows and bedcovers were all in a heap; the young husband stared at the bed as if he could discern the imprint of his pregnant wife's body on the rumpled sheets.
Marja-Liisa had told her husband that she had a late-night aerobics class at the gym, but he found her gym bag in her closet after he'd put the four-year-old to bed; he had been tidying up the apartment and went to her closet to put some article of her clothing away, and there was the gym bag.
The young man showed Jack the piece of paper he'd found in the bag--Jimmy Stronach, Hotel Torni--but he'd guessed all along that Jimmy Stronach was Jack Burns.
"She kept telling me, 'There's a movie star in the gym, and I look like a whale!' You're not even her favorite movie star, but I suppose that doesn't matter," her husband said.
The four-year-old wanted to get down; his father looked distressed to see the boy climb onto the bed and burrow under the mound of pillows.
"She didn't want a second child," Marja-Liisa's husband told Jack. "The pregnancy was an accident, but she blames me for it because I wanted to have more children."
The four-year-old was sleepy-looking, but he had found a way to amuse himself with the feather quilt and all the pillows; the little boy moved in circles on all fours, like an animal trying to bury itself. Jack assumed that the child didn't speak English, and therefore couldn't understand them--not that the boy would have paid any closer attention to his dad and Jack if they'd been speaking in Finnish.
He's only four, Jack kept thinking. Jack hoped that the child wouldn't remember this adventure--being woken up and taken to a hotel in the middle of the night in his pajamas. Or perhaps the boy would remember no more than what he was told about this night, and why would his parents ever talk about it to him? (Maybe only if the night became a turning point in his family's history, which Jack hoped it wouldn't.)
"She's probably gone home, or she was on her way home and you just passed each other," Jack told Marja-Liisa's husband, who was looking more and more distraught. The four-year-old was completely hidden from view, under all the pillows and bedcovers. In a muffled voice, the little boy asked his father something.
"He wants to use the bathroom," the husband told Jack.
"Sure," Jack said.
There was more Finnish--both the language and the barrier of the bedcovers making the exchange incomprehensible. Jack could see that Marja-Liisa's husband didn't want to touch the bed, so Jack helped the little boy get untangled from the feather quilt and all the pillows.
The four-year-old left the bathroom door open while he was peeing; the boy was also talking to himself and singing. Thus Jack must have followed his mother through those North Sea ports, peeing with the bathroom doors open, talking to himself and singing, remembering next to nothing--or only what his mom told him had happened, what she wanted him to remember.
"I'm sorry," Jack said to the unhappy husband and father. Jack wasn't going to make it worse for the poor man by telling him that his wife had told Jack her husband was dead, or that she was pregnant this time with the help of an anonymous sperm donor.
"Who is Jimmy Stronach?" the young man asked Jack.
Jack explained that it was the name of a character in the movie he hoped to make next; he didn't mention the porn-star part, or that he was not just an actor in this movie but also the screenwriter.
The little boy came out of the bathroom; Jack hadn't heard the toilet flush, and the four-year-old was disturbed about something. It appeared he had peed in the left-inside pocket of his ski parka. His father said some reassuring-sounding things to him in Finnish. ("Oh, we all pee in our parka pockets from time to time!" Jack imagined.)
Possibly Jack Burns had been a more aware four-year-old than Marja-Liisa's little boy, but Jack doubted it.
The little boy wanted his father to pick him up again, which his dad did; the child snuggled his face against his father's neck and closed his eyes, as if he were going to fall asleep right there. It was late; no doubt the boy could have fallen asleep almost anywhere.
Jack opened the hotel-room door for them--hoping the husband wouldn't give one last look at the landscape of the abused bed, but of course the betrayed man did.
As they were leaving, the husband said to Jack: "I guess Jimmy Stronach is the bad guy in this movie." Then they went down the hall, with the little boy singing a song in Finnish.
Jack went into the bathroom and flushed the toilet, noting that the four-year-old had peed all over the toilet seat; like a lot of four-year-olds, he'd not lifted the seat before he peed. Jack kept telling himself that if Marja-Liisa's son was a normal four-year-old, and he certainly had behaved normally, the boy would never remember this awful night--not a moment of it.
Jack had to look everywhere for the piece of paper with Marja-Liisa's name and cell-phone number on it. When he managed to find it, he called the number. Jack thought he should forewarn her that her husband and small son had paid him a visit. When Marja-Liisa answered the phone, she was at home and already knew that her husband and child were missing; she sounded frantic.
Jack told her that her husband had been visibly distressed but extremely well behaved. Jack also told her that her little boy had looked sleepy, but that the child had seemed to understand none of it.
"I wish you'd told me the truth," Jack said.
"The truth!" she cried. "What do you know about the truth?"
It was dark all the way from the Hotel Torni to the airport, which was some distance from Helsinki. It was very early in the morning, but it looked like the middle of the night; naturally, it was raining. A little after dawn, when the plane took off, Jack could see patches of what looked like snow in the woods.
He was thinking that there was nothing more he wanted to know; he'd already learned too much about what had happened. No more truth, Jack kept thinking--he'd had enough truth for a lifetime. He didn't really want to go to Amsterdam, but that's where the plane was going.
30
The Deal
Jack's second time in Amsterdam, he stayed at the Grand--a good hotel on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, about a two-minute walk from the red-light district. The rain had followed him from Finland. He walked through the district in the late-morning drizzle; the tourists appeared to be discouraged by the rain.
The blatancy of the prostitutes--in their underwear, in their windows and doorways--made their business plain. Yet, despite the obviousness of the undressed women, the four-year-old whom Jack had recently met in Helsinki could have been persuaded that the women were advice-givers. (As Jack himself had been persuaded.)
No one was singing a hymn or chanting a prayer; not one of the women had the appearance of a first-timer, or of someone who planned on being a prostitute for only one day.
The women would beckon to Jack, and smile, but if their smiles weren't instantly returned--if he just kept walking or wouldn't meet their gaze--they quickly looked away. He heard his name a few times, only once as a question. "Jack Burns?" one of the prostitutes asked, as he passed by. He didn't turn his head or otherwise respond. Usually the Jack Burns seemed to be part of a declarative sentence, but one he couldn't understand--in Dutch, or in some other language that wasn't English. (Not many of the women were Dutch.)
Jack walked as far north as the Zeedijk, just to see for himself that Tattoo Theo's old shop, De Rode Draak--the departed Red Dragon--was indeed gone. He easily found the small St. Olofssteeg, but Tattoo Peter's basement shop had moved many years ago to the Nieuwebrugsteeg, a nearby street. Jack saw the new tattoo parlor, but he didn't go in. When he asked one of the prostitutes what she knew about the
shop, she said that someone named Eddie was in charge--Tattoo Peter's second son, Jack thought she said.
"Oh, you mean Eddie Funk," someone else would later tell Jack, suggesting that the Eddie in the new shop wasn't actually related to Tattoo Peter. But what did it matter? Whoever Eddie was, he couldn't help Jack.
Tattoo Peter--Eddie's father or not--had died on St. Patrick's Day, 1984. Or so Jack had read in an old tattoo magazine when he and Leslie Oastler were cleaning out Daughter Alice in Toronto.
"Listen to this," he remembered saying to Mrs. Oastler. "Tattoo Peter was born in Denmark. I never knew he was a Dane! He actually worked for Tattoo Ole before moving to Amsterdam."
"So what?" Leslie had said.
"I never knew any of this!" Jack had cried. "He drove a Mercedes-Benz? I never saw it! He walked with a cane--I never saw the cane! I never saw him walk! His wife was French, a Parisian singer? People compared her to Edith Piaf!"
"I think Alice told me he stepped on a mine," Mrs. Oastler had said. "That's how he lost his leg."
"But she never told me!" he'd shouted.
"She never told you fuck-all, Jack," he remembered Leslie saying.
Jack walked around the Oude Kerk in the falling rain, but he didn't go inside. He didn't know why he was procrastinating. The kindergarten next to the Old Church looked fairly new. There were more prostitutes than he remembered on the Oudekerksplein, but the kindergarten children hadn't been there when Jack and his mom had traipsed through the district.
Jack had no difficulty finding the police station on the Warmoesstraat, but he didn't go inside the station, either. He wasn't ready to talk to Nico Oudejans, assuming Nico was still a policeman and Jack could find him.
Jack walked on the Warmoesstraat in the direction of the Dam Square, pausing at the corner of the Sint Annenstraat--exactly where he and his mom and Saskia and Els had encountered Jacob Bril, who had the Lord's Prayer tattooed on his chest. There was a tattoo of Lazarus leaving his grave on Bril's stomach. There were some things you didn't forget, no matter how young you were when you saw them.
"In the Lord's eyes, you are the company you keep!" Jacob Bril had told Alice.
"What would you know about the Lord's eyes?" Els had asked him. Or so Jack remembered--if any of it was true!
The Tattoo Museum on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal--maybe a minute's walk from Jack's hotel--was a warm and cozy place with more paraphernalia and memorabilia from the tattoo world than Jack had seen in any other tattoo parlor. He met Henk Schiffmacher at noon, when the museum opened, and Henk showed him around. Henk's tattoo shop was also there--Hanky Panky's House of Pain, as it was called. Whoever Eddie was, in the new Tattoo Peter, Henk Schiffmacher was the Tattoo Peter of his day; everyone in the ink-and-pain business knew Hanky Panky.
Henk was a big, heavy guy with a biker's beard and long hair. A female death's head, with what looked like a single breast on her forehead, was breathing fire on his left biceps. A spool of film was unwinding on his right forearm. Of course Hanky Panky had other tattoos; his body was a road map of his travels. But Jack would remember these two best.
He watched Henk give a Japanese guy an irezumi of a cockroach on his neck. (Irezumi means tattoo in Japanese.) Hanky Panky had traveled everywhere: Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Bangkok, Sumatra, Nepal, Samoa.
While Henk tattooed the cockroach on the Japanese guy's neck, Jack listened to Johnny Cash sing "Rock of Ages" on the CD player. A good tattoo shop was a whole universe, he'd heard his mother say. "A place where every desire is forgiven," Henk Schiffmacher said. Why, then, couldn't Jack's mom forgive his dad? And how had William managed to forgive Alice, or had he? (Jack thought that he couldn't forgive her.)
"Is a guy named Nico Oudejans still a cop in the district?" Jack asked Hanky Panky.
"Nico? He's still the best cop in the district," Henk said. "Nico's a frigging brigadier."
On Jacob Bril's bony back was his favorite tattoo, the Ascension--Christ departing this world in the company of angels. As Jack walked through the red-light district to the Warmoesstraat police station, he remembered Bril's version of Heaven as a dark and cloudy place. It had stopped raining, but the cobblestones were greasy underfoot and the sky--like Jacob Bril's Heaven--remained dark and cloudy.
Jack Burns heard his name a few more times. Wherever they were from, some of the women in the windows and doorways were moviegoers--or they had been moviegoers in a previous life.
Jack crossed the bridge over the canal by the Old Church and came upon the small, foul-smelling pissoir--a one-man urinal--where he remembered peeing as a child. It had been dark; his mom had stood outside the barrier while he peed. She kept telling him to hurry up. She probably didn't want to be seen standing alone in the area of the Oudekerksplein at night. Jack could hear drunken young men singing as he peed; they must have been singing in English or he wouldn't have remembered some of the words in their song.
They were English football fans, his mother would tell him later. "They're the worst," she'd said. There'd been a football game, which the English team had either lost or won; it seemed to make no difference, in regard to how their fans behaved in the red-light district. They were "filthy louts," Jack remembered Saskia saying; filthy louts wasn't in his mom's vocabulary.
Jack walked around the Oude Kerk once more, on the side where the new kindergarten shared the street with the whores. Someone was following him; a man had fallen into step behind him at the corner of the Stoofsteeg, almost as soon as Jack had left the Tattoo Museum and the House of Pain. When Jack slowed down, the man slowed down, too--and when Jack sped up, the man picked up his pace again.
A fan, Jack thought. He hated it when they followed him. If they came up and said, "Hi, I like your movies," and then shook his hand, and went on their way--well, that was fine. But the followers really irritated Jack; they were usually women.
Not this one. He was a tough-looking guy with a dirty-blond beard, wearing running shoes and a windbreaker; his hands were shoved into the pockets of the windbreaker as he walked, his shoulders thrust forward as if it were still raining or he was cold. A guy in his fifties, maybe--late forties, anyway. The man didn't make the slightest effort to pretend he wasn't following Jack; it was as if he were daring Jack to turn around and face him.
Jack doubted that the bastard would have the balls to follow him into the police station, so he just kept walking.
Jack was one small street away from the Warmoesstraat when a brown-skinned prostitute stepped out of her doorway in her underwear and high heels; she almost touched him. "Hey, Jack--I've seen you in the movies," she said. She had a Spanish-sounding accent; she might have been Dominican or Colombian.
When she saw the man who was trailing Jack, she immediately put up her hands as if the man were pointing a gun at her; she quickly stepped back inside her doorway. That was when Jack knew that the man following him was a cop. Clearly the Dominican or Colombian woman knew who the cop was; she didn't want any trouble with him.
Jack stopped walking and turned to face the policeman, whose eyes were still a robin's-egg blue, and high on one cheekbone was the small, identifying scar like the letter L. The beard had fooled Jack. When the cop had been in his late twenties or early thirties, when Jack had first met him, Nico Oudejans didn't have a beard. Jack had always thought that Nico was a nice guy; he'd been very nice to Jack when the boy was four. Now, in his fifties, Nico looked just plain tough.
"I've been expecting you, Jack. For a few years now, I've had my eye out for you. I keep telling the ladies," Nico said, with a nod to the Dominican or Colombian prostitute, who was smiling in her doorway, " 'One day Jack Burns, the actor, will show up. Give me a call when you see him,' I keep telling them. Well," Nico said, shaking Jack's hand, "I got half a dozen calls today. I knew at least one of the ladies had to be right."
When they turned onto the Warmoesstraat, the policeman put his hand on Jack's shoulder and steered him to the right--almost as if Nico didn't trust Jack to rememb
er where the police station was. "Were you coming to see me, Jack?"
"Yes, I was," Jack said.
"So your mom's dead?" Nico asked.
Jack assumed that Nico had read about Alice's death; because she was Jack Burns's mother, her death had been reported in most of the movie magazines. But Nico Oudejans didn't read those magazines. The policeman had just guessed that Jack wouldn't have come back to Amsterdam if Alice were still alive.
"Why?" Jack asked him.
"I'll bet your mom would have talked you out of coming," Nico said. "She sure would have tried."
They went into the Warmoesstraat station and climbed the stairs to a bare, virtually empty office on the second floor. There was just a table and three or four chairs, and Jack sat across the table from the policeman; it was as if Jack were going to be questioned about a crime. Jack thought it was funny that Nico left the office door open, as if they couldn't possibly have had anything private to discuss. Jack got the feeling that every cop in the building not only knew in advance everything he might ask Nico Oudejans--they had all the answers, too.
Maybe because he was with a cop, Jack just started talking. He told Nico everything. (As if all the deceits and deceptions of Jack's childhood were his crime, not his mother's; as if what he'd only recently learned was a story Jack had somehow concealed from himself.)
Jack didn't even pause, or interrupt himself, when another policeman came into the office and put some money on the table in front of Nico; after that cop left, a second and a third policeman came in and did the same thing. Maybe five or six cops did this--some in uniform, others in plainclothes like Nico--before Jack even got to the Amsterdam part of the story.
When Jack finally got to the Amsterdam part, he was pretty worked up. While Jack had talked, Nico had hand-rolled a few cigarettes. He had some dark-looking tobacco in a pouch, and he went on carefully rolling the cigarettes as if he were alone. Jack had the impression that putting a cigarette together mattered more to Nico than smoking it. But now Nico stopped making cigarettes. There were not more than three or four cigarettes on the table; the policeman hadn't lit one yet.