At a neighboring table, a waitress is going around with a teapot with the beak of a tropical bird, a slender, curved spout at least a meter long, from which the woman refills teacups from a distance. John Tyronne, the young Stanford professor, beckons her with a flourish of his arm. Tyronne, talented but naïve, was brought aboard the task force with a certain amount of fanfare, primarily because of his early and technically well-argued papers on the millennium bug, but he’d gone overboard and had done himself more harm than good with his increasingly apocalyptic Y2K articles that had sprung up in American newspapers the previous year and where he had more or less predicted the end of the world. As Tyronne refused to set foot in an airplane after December 31st, 1999, the first meeting of 2000 had been postponed. “Ah, there’s our doomsday prophet,” smiled task force chairman Gao Jian at their first reunion in the unravaged world. “Still eating canned food?” This afternoon, during the paper Sigerius had presented on haptics, he teased Tyronne that he would never have to fly again. “Soon we’ll plug a rubber hand into your laptop, John, and when you squeeze it at home, your PC will send your pressure profile to a special rubber Johnny Tyronne task-force hand here in Shanghai: the cyberspace handshake! Minor problem with that fraction of a time delay, though”—and here he gave Tyronne, who was sitting up front, a dead-fish handshake. “Not so nice, is it?” A second later he squeezed—too hard.
“Wouldn’t a Japanese name be a better idea?” he says, trying to humor Obayashi. “Something other than Number Place?”
Obayashi mumbles an answer that escapes him entirely. For a moment he hears nothing, it’s that idiotic comment about the Go CD-ROMs that ignites, in delayed action, a phosphorus flame in his brain. Here he is, eating Peking duck, while his laptop is lying on his hotel bed. Maybe that CD is in the laptop bag. Maybe you’ve got the photos with you. He has to restrain himself from jumping up from the table, marching straight through the wall of seawater and lobsters, and making a beeline for the Okura. Instead he smiles at Obayashi, wipes off his greasy fingers on the paper napkin and closes his eyes. Think. That disc full of photos: is it in your laptop bag? No idea. He imagines himself in his study, the familiar smell of paper and fallen dust, the tranquillity of his monk’s cell. He pictures his desk in front of him. The disc could also be lying in a locked drawer.
He checks his watch, pulls his cell phone out of his inside pocket. Without looking at Obayashi any further he unlocks the keypad and stares pensively at the illuminated screen for a few seconds. “Excuse me,” he whispers, laying a hand on the pudgy Japanese wrist. Although he has only the contours of his pretext ready, he gets up and buttons his sport jacket. An image flashes through his mind: the police phone him here in China with the news that Wilbert has been decapitated. The shaft of an uncoupled trailer. Dead as a doornail. Without finishing the thought, he clears his throat and says: “Gentlemen … sorry to interrupt … but I’m afraid I have to be going. I’ve just received word that … something is up in Enschede.”
“Anshkieday?” shouts Tyronne, whom he perhaps teased too much this afternoon. “Ansh-kie-day … Sigerius, where is that university of yours, Atlantis?”
Gao Jian stubs out his cigarette and lights another, smoke escapes from the corners of his mouth. He looks inquisitively at Sigerius. “Colleague,” he says earnestly, “what seems to be the matter? Can I be of any assistance?”
“I’m afraid not,” Sigerius hears himself say, and, thinking of the torrent he is about to step into, says: “I’ve just heard that the campus has flooded. Terrible weather in the Netherlands, heavy rain—just like here, but worse.”
“You’ll miss the evening program.”
“Tomorrow’s another day. They’re expecting me to make a statement in Enschede concerning the, er, damage.”
The tepid downpour shades the Shanghai twilight. Gurgling, the rainwater seeks out drains and sewers, sloshing against the Huaihai Zhong Lu sidewalks, over which hundreds of Chinese tread hurriedly with precise steps, shielding their straight hair with umbrellas or briefcases. Occupied taxis spray fans of glistening water; shoppers, their arms ending in clusters of purchases, take cover under awnings or in doorways, staring into space or conversing in their secret language. The usually thriving, vibrant, pulsating avenue with its high-priced shops, malls, hotels, and restaurants almost looks covered, it is so dark.
Jaywalking against a red light, he crosses a flooded intersection, dodging the aggressively advancing taxis and rickshaws. His suit jacket is drenched, lukewarm rainwater soaks the toes of his shoes. He takes large strides, a curious disquiet steers him toward his hotel. On the one hand he believes his suspicions say more about himself than about Joni, that what he has seen is a projection of his own fears; but on the other hand he is just a bit too familiar with adversity to be entirely sure. As different as his daughters are from each other, he has never doubted their respectability, their decency: it is a question a man with a son in the Scheveningen penitentiary never gets around to asking. He would put his life on the line for Tineke’s daughters, Janis and Joni, whom he regards as his own—the elder, who has everything going for her, who will breeze through life: she is quick on the draw, witty, ambitious, above all engaging—“take the plunge with me,” it’s written on her forehead in glittering gold letters—and on top of it those damned good looks, her extraordinary beauty, so no, the father of a criminal does not worry about a daughter like Joni. If they have any worries about Tineke’s girls they are for Janis, who is altogether another matter. The younger daughter has made it her life’s work not to engage, she harbors a programmatic, often intolerable, loathing for everything that in her eyes is not genuine, she fights a one-woman guerrilla war against everything that is insincere, fake, hypocritical. That is why she refuses to diet, that is why she wears boys’ clothes, that is why she so vehemently abhors money, meat-eaters, Hollywood films, saddled horses, universities, vacations. She shreds Christmas cards sent by aunts and uncles. Deodorant: Tineke had to force her to use deodorant, as a teenager Janis insisted it was a lie to mask your own odor, it’s deceitful, deodorant is bourgeois. At least she’s honest, he and Tineke told each other.
The heavens open, downpour turns into hailstorm, the deafening drumroll is so loud that the traffic appears to glide noiselessly forward. Sigerius has no choice but to take refuge under a sodden awning. Packed together with other pedestrians, he picks up a scent that reminds him of the sweaty judo mats of long ago. One of the men points to the bouncing ice balls, maybe he’s never seen hail before, at least not on May 13th.
For a couple of years he was the jogging coach for Joni’s gymnastics class; after returning from America she joined a club in Enschede called Sportlust, and one day she asked if he felt like coaching them. Sounds good, he said, and it did sound good: a weekly run with thirteen thirteen-year-olds through the Drienerlo woods. Shortly before his summer holidays, the chairwoman and the head coach sat in his living room discussing the details; soon thereafter, every Wednesday evening the farmhouse overflowed with beanpoles with braces and tracksuits, an arrangement that Joni soon regretted because all the girls canceled now and again—homework, illness, being under the weather—something she could never get away with. He laid out a not-too-girlish route of about four kilometers. They ran southward down the Langenkampweg, cut across the campus, including the motorcycle club’s dune (“Oh, noooo, sir, not the loose sand!”), after which they continued through the woods until coming out at the farmhouse, where Tineke served them glasses of elderberry cordial.
Joni was still young enough to be proud of her athletic father, and he too would have looked back with pleasure on the training if it hadn’t been for that incident. Sportlust participated, as it did each year, in a door-to-door fund-raising drive for cancer research, and Joni and Miriam, a small but pert girl who jogged with her blond curls flattened under a headband, spent two long afternoons canvassing the houses and apartments in Boddenkamp for donations. “A neighborhood where you can expect them to be g
enerous, just like in previous years,” remarked the chairwoman the evening he phoned her because Joni had come home from try-outs and—first stammering, then crying—told him she’d been accused of stealing money out of the collection can.
While counting the takings, the woman told him, the Sportlust treasurer noticed that Miriam’s and Joni’s cans didn’t contain a single banknote, and that their proceeds were not only less than a quarter of the previous years’ but also the lowest of all the other cans, even the ones from what she called the grotty neighborhoods. Miriam was in the Tuesday evening gymnastics group; they took her aside and within ten seconds she had confessed. According to her, she and Joni managed to fish out all the paper money with a geometry triangle and then divided the loot—a little over 150 guilders—between them.
Joni was furious. What a bunch of lies. She had nothing to do with it! How could somebody be so mean. She hated that Miriam, she always knew she had a mean streak, she should never have trusted her. When they had finished their rounds, she told him through her tears, it was already dark and dinner time and Miriam had offered to turn both cans in to the treasurer at the central collection point, near where she lived.
Sigerius was livid. “My daughter is standing here in the living room bawling,” he said to the chairwoman. “I know Joni inside out, your accusations are premature and totally out of line. I guarantee you my daughter is not going around plundering charity collection cans.” They agreed that he and Joni would go together so she could tell her side of the story, a suggestion she accepted with a pout, but she backed out just as he was about to leave for the gym. She was afraid she’d burst into tears. Or explode in anger. So he went alone. It was an onerous meeting; the woman insisted that it was Miriam’s word against Joni’s, and he was adamant that Joni’s name be cleared. When he returned home at ten-thirty that night, he told Joni he’d given them the choice: either take her word for it, or that was the end of the training, and then we’d have to see whether she stayed in the club.
He can still remember exactly where they were standing: in the front hall, he with his coat still on, right foot on the open spiral stairs; Joni halfway, holding her toothbrush with toothpaste already on it. He’ll never forget the moment she broke. After he’d finished his report she went quiet. Then she slumped down onto a step, dropped the toothbrush, tick, tack, tock, onto the slate floor. She hid her face in her nightie and said with a drawn-out sigh: “Dad?”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Listen, Dad, don’t freak out or anything. I, um, what I mean is … well, actually, Miriam’s telling the truth.”
• • •
He walks under the dribbling plane trees toward the Okura. He deliberately bangs against the shoulder of a phoning businessman, steers clear of the vegetable stalls on the sagging sidewalk and the garbage bags ripped open by stray dogs. A little group of Chinese, maybe five of them, dart out of a side street and spread a large purple tarp on the sopping wet pavement. In a wink they’ve laid out their wares: leather bags, Ray-Ban sunglasses, Gucci pullovers, Adidas T-shirts, CDs, DVDs, video games. Fake. He pauses for a moment, his shorter leg—the scooter one—hurts, he massages his hamstring. One of the hawkers accosts him in snarly Mandarin.
“Fuck off,” he says with a smile.
What’s worse: selling imitation Gucci or robbing a collection can? What about the gray area? Is it logical or worthwhile to worry about Joni, about a hypothetical problem—as long as he doesn’t know for sure, it doesn’t exist—while he also knows that Wilbert is free? Navigating his way between cars, he crosses the four-lane Huaihai Zhong Lu, turns left forty yards farther on and passes in front of the ramshackle Art Deco façade of the Cathay Theatre, where a horde of Chinese cinema-goers is waiting to see Mission: Impossible 2. What will happen now that the kid is free? What does six years in the slammer do to a man like Wilbert Sigerius?
“Hitler knew the answer to that,” answered Rufus Koperslager back when he asked that question incessantly, though usually guardedly, to anyone he thought might offer him an educated answer. “Hitler saw prisons as a university for criminals. Didn’t you know that? An indoor gutter, where the rookies learn the trade from the pros.” He is reminded of his first private conversation with that eccentric Rufus, a meeting he would rather forget. “Do you know Hitler’s Table Talk?” No, he hadn’t got round to Hitler’s Table Talk yet. God, yes, Koperslager—a law enforcement chief with a knighthood and the petulant candor of a policeman—was made dean at Tubantia in late ’95. The appointment went against the grain, a cop on campus, a man perhaps a bit too straight-from-the-shoulder, impatient, used to giving orders and to a braidedsteel chain of command. But a realist. Sigerius pricked up his ears when Koperslager told them during the selection procedure he had been director of not one, but two prisons in the early ’80s, an achievement that intrigued him enough to take advantage of the sandwich reception to confide in his new colleague about his criminal son. He was like that back then. Heart on his sleeve. Wilbert had been in for just over a year and in that time Sigerius had developed a not-so-subtle obsession with everything that took place behind bars: he devoured every newspaper clipping, every book, every television documentary, anything that could tell him about correctional regimes and jailhouse norms. “I understand you have a prison background? My son, he’s doing time.”
“Where?” Koperslager also had a considerable affinity with the subject; a dark shroud fell over his policeman’s face, he touched his clean-shaven chin ever so slightly, Sigerius saw him descend into an underworld that excited him more than he would care to admit. Without twitching a muscle, Sigerius named the three penitentiary facilities where they had been stowing Wilbert thus far. “Transfers?” asked Koperslager.
“I believe so.”
“Do you want me to be frank with you?”
“Please,” he said, giving the go-ahead for Koperslager’s both convincing and dispiriting sketch of Wilbert’s “career,” which, in his humble opinion, Sigerius’s son was building up “on the inside.” “They only transfer the ringleaders,” he said. “Transfers are expensive and cumbersome, I was never keen on it, but sometimes you have no choice.” Wilbert was probably a kid with clout, was his analysis, a key player within his block, a power-broker, one of the “sharks.” We always plucked ’m out, Koperslager said, they’re the ones who undermine authority, intimidate and bribe the wardens, they’re forever making deals, both inside and out. “So they’re shunting your boy around. Sheesh. Maybe he’s got talent. Judging from his father: not at all stupid, physical and tough—yeah, he’ll be learning the tricks of the trade.”
Koperslager’s favorite criminologist had an interesting take on prisons. “Hitler repeatedly advocated corporal punishment over detention. You’re better off beating the crap out of a twenty-year-old, or cutting off his hand—he says that in 1942, and it’s probably true. Jail only hones their skills. Prisons, Siem, are criminal academies, aggression workshops, testosterone laboratories. Masculinity flows like water, it’s machismo at its meanest, everyone hates everyone else. Divide and conquer, 24/7. Gangs, protection. There’s no feminine perspective, there’s no such thing as consideration—only power. Blackmail, beatings, sexual abuse, it’s all part of the game. You go in as a weenie and you leave as a gangster. Chop off a guy’s foot, I say.”
It was just the nightmare scenario he had been tormenting himself with, and Koperslager was clearly not the man to allay his fears. Without telling a soul, as though he was going to a whore on a houseboat, Sigerius drove by the local prison every time he needed to be in The Hague, or Amsterdam, or wherever, on university business. It was an obsession: he stood in front of Scheveningen Prison at least five times, staring at the infamous gate with its medieval battlements, and felt awful, disheartened to the core—so miserable and depressed that one day he decided enough was enough. Quit wallowing. Basta! The penal dissertations, the magazine articles, the pamphlets full of prison stories, the video documentaries—he put all that par
anoid crap in a gray plastic garbage bag and dumped it on the curb.
And sure enough his mind cleared, sooner than he had expected. He appreciated the truth in “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He had to laugh at his readiness to accept Koperslager’s tall tales, at his latent Telegraaf-conservatism, and felt his faith in the rule of law return, his faith in mankind itself.
He is nearly there. It will be dark soon, the lanterns in the Okura’s formal French gardens are already lit. A hundred yards off, the hotel looms like a white stone-and-glass peacock, in front of it an unstaunchable fountain. (The student cafeteria at Tubantia has a cook who asks every student in his dishwashing room the same dead-serious question: Tell me, you’re the student, aren’t you afraid that one day the water will just run out?) He is still taken by the Art Deco grandeur, even though, in one of the hotel’s 1,000 rooms, a black box is waiting for him. On his way up to the fourteenth floor his body fills with the fervid hope that the CD-ROM is not in his bag. His stomach keeps rising even after the elevator has stopped.
His room smells of steamed towels. The bed, where he tossed and turned for a fruitless hour this morning, has been made, his shirt and the suit he wore on the plane are hanging in the open cupboard. The laptop is no longer on the bed, but on the oval desk next to the sitting area. He plugs it in. Hoping to quell the butterflies in his stomach, he takes a shower. He washes himself with gel from a purple packet he has to tear open with his teeth. Anything is possible, he’s well aware of that. You can be going to the Olympics and then not go after all. He dries himself with the largest of the three towels and puts on a bathrobe. You can father a rattlesnake.
Bonita Avenue Page 6