Peter Buwalda - Bonita Avenue

“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 paranoid 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.

He adjusts the air conditioning to nineteen degrees. Takes the laptop case and sits on the edge of the bed. He feels around in the side pockets and digs out an etui with just three CD-ROMs in it. Two of them are clean as a whistle, on the third is written in black felt-tip: “Minutes, U Council.” Bingo. That’s the one. He takes a deep breath and clenches his hands. He gets up, goes over to the window, draws the heavy curtains, sits back down and inserts the CD-ROM into the drive. Windows start-up is complete, he enters his password, at first incorrectly, he fumbles with the capital letters. The program asks if he wants a slide show. No, no slide show. Windows lines up the JPEG images, icons of a small black sailboat drifting off into an orange sunset. There are lots of them, maybe 400. About a quarter of them are ones he scrounged from various free sites, the rest are from some Russian site and from lindaloveslace.com — it’s that last one he’s after. He clicks randomly on one of the icons and sees the Russian girl sitting on a sofa with her legs spread. He feels a vague thrill well up, an echo of the familiar horniness, the horniness of a moth-eaten old ape.

Come on, where are they? He decides a slide show is more efficient, clicking through the pictures for speed. First he races like a madman through the forest of free pictures, then the Russian girl whizzes by, kneeling, bending, lying, squatting, fingering — yes, there she is, he recoils at the first photo he sees. She is standing with one foot on a curly-backed chair, elbow on her knee, lips pursed, breasts in a soft pink bra. Gasping with shock, he shoves the computer off his lap. The resemblance is more insidious than he thought. He goes over to the minibar and takes out a can of Budweiser. You already knew there was a resemblance. He paces across the soft wall-to-wall carpeting. The beer is so cold that his eyes water. You have to look at it analytically. Like a scientist. Like a detective. How well does he know Joni’s figure? Slender, healthy girls under twenty-five are hard to tell apart. But that face …

He sits back down. Analyze. Luckily he is already familiar with the pictures; he can therefore examine them coolly. The first series is shot in a hotel room. He has to find that recurring room, he seems to remember one location that keeps coming back. A boat? Yes, there’s a ship’s cabin too … A series of thirteen photos taken in the same room, clearly not a hotel room, in the background a computer, a full bookcase, houseplants, a poster of two kittens in a beach chair, Celine Dion, a skylight …

Linda. Linda from Tennessee, or Kentucky, or Utah, or who knows which obscure state. The session starts in a Roaring Twenties outfit, a short, straight-cut green dress and one of those floppy round hats pulled down over her ears, white satin elbow-length gloves, bright red lips — God, she does look like Joni. Then off comes the dress, she’s standing in the middle of the room in black pumps with a ribbon on the toe, white garters, caramel-colored nylons. In the next picture she’s sitting on a chair, hands covering her bare breasts, hat off, the jet-black hair hanging loosely, it looks dyed, so black it’s nearly blue. Could be a wig. Certainly. Next photo, the panties have come off, she sits on that chair with her legs spread, she …

Again he shoves the laptop away from him and flops back onto the mattress. Why in God’s name does he even want to know the truth? Monday, when he’s back in Enschede, he’ll unsubscribe from the site and never give it another thought. Unfortunately, that is just not how he is. For a while he stares up at the wooden blades of the ceiling fan. Your mind’s in a muddle. Maybe Tineke was right. It’s that business about Wilbert, it’s paranoia. Be realistic. The chance that Joni resembles that girl is thousands of times greater than that it’s actually her. Everybody has a double, there might be 100 of his own walking around. Smooth-skinned girls are a dime a dozen. He sits up and brings the computer back to his lap. The plastic underside is hot. Turn it around — you owe it to her to turn it around. Look for evidence to the contrary.