The Dinner (17 page)

That was the plan. That had been the plan before I reran the broadcast of
Opsporing Verzocht
and saw the white tennis shoe.

The next step I took simply on a hunch. Perhaps there was more footage to be found, I thought to myself. Or rather, perhaps the missing footage, accidentally or not, had ended up on another site.

I clicked onto YouTube. The chances were slim, but it was worth a try. In Search I typed the name of the bank to which the ATM machine belonged, and after that the words ‘homeless’ and ‘death’.

No fewer than thirty-four hits appeared. I scrolled down past the little screens. On all of them, the opening frame was more or less the same: the heads and knitted caps of two laughing boys. Only the accompanying titles and the brief description of the clip itself were any different.
Dutch Boys
[name of the bank]
Murder
was one of the most straightforward.
Don’t Try this at Home – Fire Bomb Kills Homeless Woman
was another. Each and every one of the clips was extremely popular – the counter showed that most of them had been viewed thousands of times.

I clicked on one at random and watched again, albeit in a choppier, edited version, the throwing of the desk lamp, the garbage bags and the jerrycan. I looked at a couple more. In one montage entitled [name of the city]
Hottest New Tourist Attraction: Set Your Money on Fire!
, someone had added canned laughter to the images. Each time a new object was thrown at the homeless woman, a wave of laughter followed. The laughter reached a hysterical climax when the lighter was thrown, and ended with thundering applause.

Most of the videos did not include the shot of the white tennis shoe; they stopped right after the flash of light and the boys running away.

Looking back, I don’t know exactly why I clicked on the next video too. It didn’t look any different from the other thirty-three. The opening shot was roughly the same: two laughing boys in knitted caps, although here they were already picking up the office chair.

Perhaps it was the title,
Men in Black III
. Not a jokey title for starters, not like most of the others. But it was also the first and, as I found out subsequently, the only title that did not refer to the events shown but indirectly to the culprits themselves.

Men in Black III
began with the throwing of the office chair, then came the garbage bags, the lamp and the jerrycan. But there was an essential difference. Whenever both or either of the two boys came into reasonably sharp focus, the film slowed down. And every time that happened you heard ominous music, more a sort of zooming tone, a deep, gurgling noise that is associated primarily with submarine and shipwreck disaster movies. As a result, all attention was focused on Michel and Rick, and less on the throwing of the things they had found beside the tree.

Who are these boys? the slow-motion images, in combination with the doomsday music, seemed to ask. What it is they’re doing, we know by now. But who are they?

The zinger came all the way at the end. After the flash and the slamming door, the screen went black. I was getting ready to click to the next video, but the time line at the bottom of the screen showed that
Men in Black III
lasted a total of two minutes and fifty-eight seconds, and that we were now only at two minutes and thirty-eight.

As I said, I had almost clicked away. I wasn’t expecting anything more than for the screen to remain black for another twenty seconds – the music had swelled again, the only thing left would probably be credits, I figured, nothing more than that.

How would this evening, our dinner at the restaurant, have proceeded, had I indeed quit right then and there?

In ignorance, that was the answer. At least, in relative ignorance. I could have lived on for a few more days, or maybe a few weeks or months, in my dreams about happy families. I would only have needed to hold my own family up for comparison with my brother’s for the space of one evening; I could have seen how Babette tried to cover up her tears behind her tinted glasses and how joylessly my brother wolfed down his meat in a couple of bites. Then I would have walked home with my wife, I would have placed my arm around her waist and, without looking at each other, we would both have known that the happy families really were all alike.

The screen shifted from black to grey. You saw the door of the ATM cubicle again, but this time from the outside. The quality of the images was a lot worse, like the resolution of the camera on a cell phone, I realized right away.

The white tennis shoe.

They had come back.

They had come back to record what they had done.

‘Holy shit!’ said a voice off-camera. (Rick)

‘Aw, yuck!’ said a second voice. (Michel)

The camera was now pointed at the foot end of the sleeping bag. The cubicle was filled with a bluish haze. Excruciatingly slowly, the camera panned up along the sleeping bag.

‘Let’s go.’ (Rick)

‘At least it doesn’t smell as gross here any more.’ (Michel)

‘Michel … come on …’

‘Come on yourself, go and stand beside it. You have to say
Jackass
. At least then we’ve got that.’

‘I’m goin’ …’

‘No, asshole! You’re staying!’

At the top of the sleeping bag, the camera stopped. The image froze there, then faded to black. In red letters, the following text appeared on screen:

I waited a few days. Michel went out often, but he always took his cell phone with him, so the chance presented itself only today – only this evening, right before we were to leave for the restaurant. While he was fixing his tyre in the garden, I went to his room.

I had actually assumed he would have deleted it. I was hoping, praying, that he had deleted it. Somehow I also hoped that, having seen the images on YouTube, I had now seen everything – that they had stopped there.

But that wasn’t the case.

It was only a few hours ago that I saw the rest.

‘Michel,’ I said to my son, who had already turned to leave, who had said that it didn’t make any difference, ‘Michel, you have to delete those films. You should have done it a long time ago, but now it’s really important.’

He stopped. Again he scraped his white Nikes through the gravel.

‘Aw, Dad,’ he began. It seemed as though he was going to say something, but he only shook his head.

In both videos I had seen and heard how he pushed his cousin around, and sometimes even snarled at him. That was precisely what Serge had always insinuated, and would doubtless repeat tonight: that Michel was a bad influence on Rick. I had always denied that; I had always thought it an easy way for my brother to duck his own responsibility for his son’s actions.

But since a few hours ago – in fact, since much longer ago than that, of course – I knew it was true. Michel was the leader of the two: Michel called the shots, Rick was the subservient goon. And, deep in my heart, that division of roles pleased me. Better that than the other way around, I thought. Michel had never been pestered at school; even then he’d gathered around him a whole crew of submissive friends who wanted nothing more than to be around my son. I knew from experience how parents could suffer when their children were bullied. I had never suffered.

‘You know what would be even better?’ I said. ‘For you to throw away that whole cell phone. Somewhere where they’ll never find it again.’ I looked around. ‘Here, for example.’ I pointed at the little bridge over which he had just come cycling up. ‘In the water. If you want, we’ll go buy a new one on Monday. How long have you had this one, anyway? We’ll just say it got ripped off and we’ll renew the subscription, and on Monday you’ll have the newest Samsung, or a Nokia, whatever you want …’

I held out my hand, palm up.

‘Do you want me to do it for you?’ I asked.

He looked at me. I saw the eyes I had been seeing all my life, but also something I would rather not have seen: he looked at me in a way that said I was getting worked up about nothing, that I was just a fussy, worried father, a worried father who wants to know what time his son will be coming home from a party.

‘Michel, this isn’t about a party or something,’ I said, faster and louder than I’d meant to. ‘This is about your future—’ Another one of those abstract terms: the future, I thought, and I was sorry right away that I had said it. ‘Why the hell did you two put that footage on the Internet?’

Don’t swear, I admonished myself. When you start swearing you sound like those second-rate movie hams you hate so much. But I was almost screaming now, anyone at the door of the restaurant, anyone close to the lectern or the cloakroom could have heard me.

‘Was that cool, too? Or tough? Didn’t that make any difference either?
Men in Black III!
For God’s sake, what were you two thinking?’

He had put his hands in the pockets of his jacket and bowed his head, so that I could just barely see his eyes beneath the edge of the black knitted cap.

‘That wasn’t us,’ he said.

The door of the restaurant swung open, there was laughter and a group of people came outside. Two men and a woman. The men wore tailored suits and had their hands in their pockets, the woman was wearing a silvery, almost backless dress and carried a matching shoulder bag.

‘Did you really say that?’ the woman asked, taking a couple of unsteady steps in her high heels, which were silver as well. ‘To Ernst?’

One of the men pulled a set of car keys from his pocket and tossed them in the air. ‘Why not?’ he said: he had to stretch his arm out to catch the keys again.

‘You must be crazy!’ the woman shrilled. Their shoes squeaked on the gravel as they passed.

‘Which of us is still in any state to drive?’ said the other man, and all three of them burst out laughing.

‘Okay, wait a minute,’ I said, after the threesome had reached the end of the gravel path and turned left towards the footbridge. ‘The two of you set a homeless person on fire and then you film it. On your cell phone. Just like with that alcoholic at the subway station.’ I noticed that the man who had been smacked around on the platform had now become an alcoholic. In my words. Perhaps an alcoholic really did deserve to be smacked around more than someone who drinks two or three glasses a day. ‘And then suddenly it’s right there on the Internet, because that’s what you guys want, isn’t it? For as many people as possible to see it?’ Had they put the alcoholic on YouTube as well? it occurred to me then. ‘Is that alcoholic on there too?’ I asked right away, for good measure.

Michel breathed a sigh. ‘Dad! You’re not listening!’

‘I am listening. I listen too much. I—’

Again the door of the restaurant opened, a man in a suit came out and looked around, took a few steps to one side so that he was beside the entrance but out of the light, and lit a cigarette. ‘Goddam it,’ I said.

Michel turned around and walked to his bike.

‘Michel, where are you going? I’m not finished yet.’

But he kept on walking, he pulled a key out of his pocket and stuck it in the lock, which sprang open with a bang. I looked quickly at the man smoking beside the entrance.

‘Michel,’ I said, quietly but urgently, ‘you can’t just walk away from this. What are we going to do about it? Are there more of those films I haven’t seen? Will I have to see them later on, on YouTube first? Or are you going to tell me now whether—’

‘Dad!’ Michel spun around and grabbed my forearm; he yanked it hard and said: ‘Now just shut up!’

Stunned, I looked into my son’s eyes. His honest eyes in which – there was no use denying it – I now saw only hatred. I caught myself glancing to one side as well, at the smoking man.

I grinned at my son; I couldn’t see it myself, but it must have been a stupid grin. ‘Okay, I’ll shut up,’ I said.

Michel let go of my arm; he bit his lower lip and shook his head. ‘Christ! When are you going to start acting normal?’

I felt a cold stabbing in my chest. Any other father would now have said something like,‘Who’s acting normal here? Huh? Who? Who’s acting normal?’ But I wasn’t a father like all other fathers. I knew what my son was getting at. I wished that I could put my arms around him and press him against me. But he would probably push me away in disgust. I knew for certain that a physical rejection like that would be too much, that I would burst into tears right there and wouldn’t be able to stop.

‘Oh, buddy,’ I said.

I needed to stay calm, I told myself. I had to listen. I remembered now that Michel had said I wasn’t listening.

‘Okay, I’m all ears,’ I said.

He shook his head again. Then he pulled his bike resolutely from the rack.

‘Wait a minute!’ I said. I kept a hold of myself, I even stepped to one side, as though I didn’t want to get in his way. But before I knew it I had my hand on his forearm.

Michel looked at the hand as though some strange insect had landed on his arm, then he looked at me.