Free The Devil's Playground by Stav Sherez

work,
    somehow unable to break the lines of continuity that had
    been drawn. The fact that he hadn’t known about his father
    did not seem to matter. His father was dead, they couldn’t
    hang him for his crimes, and so they turned to his only son
    and exacted their revenge on him.
    The years passed and people forgot like they always do.
    But Van Hijn hadn’t and he still felt bitter at the way things
    had turned out; it wasn’t so much the promising career at
    Interpol that he missed, as her, Elizabeth. The way she would
    make him coffee in the morning and light his cigarette or a
    half-turn in the late-summer light that would leave him
    breathless. The way she smiled when she knew he was lying,
    the little looks and nuances that had been made unavailable
    to him after her departure.
    He stared at his hands. Old and gnarled now though he
    was only just past the midway point of an expected life. The
    nails torn and scuffed, the skin dry and cracked. Once he had
    been proud of his hands — Elizabeth had called them a
    musician’s hands — but time had left its mark on them just
    as surely as on everything else. He made a note to get some
    moisturizer later, to try to care about these things. He stared
    at his cheap wristwatch. The Englishman was late. He
    shuffled in his chair. Looked at his notes, the photographs
    of the dead. He had felt something, squatting down in the
    rain, staring at the old man, something he’d not experienced
    for a long time: a little shiver and rush of blood, the coming
    together of disparate lines. He knew he didn’t have much
    time left.
    He checked his watch again. He was looking forward to
    getting home. A package of videos and CDs had arrived that
    morning but he hadn’t had time to open it. It was better to
    have something to come back to. He spent most of his
    evenings watching videos, preferring the passivity of screen
    people to their real counterparts. He collected and taped
    films and music with a passion that had been excised from
    the rest of his life, and his flat was collapsing under the
    weight of shelving units that held everything from the dark
    glare of Robert Mitchum to the astounding, inflamed beauty
    of the young Shirley Maclaine. He especially liked the films
    made in Hollywood in the late forties and early fifties, with
    their gritty realism and urgent lighting, their storms and
    subjugated passions, where the roles of hero and villain
    became undifferentiated and good men were stretched and
    torn like canvas by the vagaries of fate and their own small,
    shoddy mistakes.
    It was raining when he got on the plane at Heathrow and it
    was raining when he got off at Schiphol. In between, Jon had
    read a Zevon interview in Uncut, forty pages of the new Kitty
    Carson mystery, eventually got bored and ended up staring
    out of the scratched plastic window to his left, sipping a
    Bloody Mary and wishing for a cigarette, watching the flat
    and perforated land below slowly coming into view.
    As the pilot announced their imminent arrival, Jon finished
    his drink, tightened his seatbelt and tried to read some more
    of the magazine. His legs throbbed and he wondered whether
    it was possible to get deep-vein thrombosis on such a short
    flight. Almost certainly. Every day there were new ways to
    die, named and marked, new fears, new anxieties to eat at
    your content. He tried to stretch his legs as you’re supposed
    to do but that made the pain worse. Like marbles squeezing
    slowly through his veins. He looked out of the window.
    Nothing but clouds. Tried to read his magazine again.
    The man sitting next to him was asleep and at some point
    during the flight his head had rolled ninety degrees and was
    now resting on Jon’s shoulder. Jon tried to move but the
    narrowness of the seats gave him little room. It irritated
    him in a way that he couldn’t rationalize. He felt his fists
    clenching and couldn’t stop them. He looked at the magazine
    but all the words were jumbled and the