15 DECEMBER 2005
A TEMPLE GONG woke Anna from a dreamless sleep. She silenced the alarm and padded over to the window. A mass of low clouds was rolling in from the North Sea and she felt the chill, even in the centrally heated room. She called up the front desk and reserved a bicycle, then she showered, dressed for the weather and went down to breakfast.
A long buffet table was set up at one end of the dining room. Anna was ravenous after skipping dinner. She walked the length of the buffet, filling her plate with prosciutto, pastrami, smoked salmon and oily herring with horseradish. She piled on soft cheeses and thick slices of black bread, ignoring as she did so the surprised glances of other guests. She imagined them whispering: Where does she put it? Does she have hollow legs?
Above the bar at the end of the great room the trompe l’oeil stage curtains now framed a slide show, showing black-and-white photos of Scheveningen in the late nineteenth century. Anna attacked her plate of food, pausing from time to time to watch the projected images of ghostly, languid women in ankle-length dresses floating under parasols along the Strandweg, mostly accompanied by narrow-shouldered men in bowler hats and boaters. Others rode by on bicycles and in carriages. Fishermen mended their nets or trimmed the triangular sails of their flat-bottomed herring boats. On the beach, barefoot children gave donkey rides to the sailor-suited kinder of the aristocracy.
All these folk, Anna realised, even the youngest children, must surely be dead by now. Their orderly world was gone, too. She wondered how many of the children were Jews? Did they grow up in this pleasant city only to be wiped from existence during the Nazi occupation? She pulled out her notebook and wrote: The past is not a foreign country. The icy blade of memory keeps it close.
The Kurhaus was Scheveningen’s last grand hotel, and within its walls an attempt was being made to create a simulacrum of the old world. Waitresses in trim grey uniforms and orange silk scarves glided between the tables with silver coffee pots. She called on them three times to refill her cup before it was time for her to go.
•
Anna was hit by chill air the moment she wheeled her bicycle outside. On the closed skating rink, a man in felt shoes was sliding around, using a steel-bladed rake to scrape loose ice into a neat pile to shovel off the edge. She wrapped her scarf around the lower half of her face and tracked cautiously across the damp marble forecourt, where she found Pierre already waiting with his own vintage machine.
‘Buongiorno,’ she called.
‘Ciao, bella, I was about to text you.’
She rolled her bike up beside him.
‘Have you had breakfast?’ she asked. ‘They have quite a spread there.’
‘I stopped for an espresso,’ he said, patting his diminished paunch. ‘Best to avoid old habits. Shall we go?’
Anna sensed that Pierre was being artificially jolly, but he was avoiding eye contact and she wondered if her revelations last night had stirred old and deep grievances. She touched his arm.
‘I’m sorry, Pierre.’
He leant over the handlebars and looked up at her. ‘It’s one hell of a secret to keep all these years,’ he said. ‘A bit of a shock, is all. God knows what Rachel will make of it. But, look, I know you’re determined to get in and speak to Katich, and I’ll do what I can to help you.’
‘Thanks.’
‘My advice, for what it’s worth …’ he said, pausing for emphasis. ‘Don’t do it. Go back to Sydney.’
‘Can’t do that,’ said Anna. ‘I have to confront this. I need to hear from him what he says about these charges. I’ve got to know what happened. I just have to know. We thought he was dead, Pierre. He was meant to be dead.’
‘Yeah, I figured you’d say that. You were always bloody relentless. That hasn’t changed. Come on, then,’ he shivered. ‘Brrr, it’s way too cold to hang about here. Let’s go see where they’ve got him locked him up. It’s not far.’
Pierre launched himself expertly into the traffic and Anna followed, wobbling at first until she got the feel of the unfamiliar gears. It was still heavily overcast, but the rain held off. They put their backs to the sea and crossed the tram tracks, heading into the suburbs of Scheveningen.
Anna warmed up as they pedalled though quiet neighbourhoods of solid brick houses with attics in their red-tiled roofs. The inner streets were cobbled and bracketed by corridors of leafless elms with antique lampposts standing at regular intervals. Two horses clopped towards them and the riders steadied their mounts as the bicycles passed.
‘See up ahead?’ said Pierre. ‘That’s the prison.’
Anna rode up alongside him. Shielded on its fringes by prosperous neighbourhoods, Scheveningen prison had been virtually invisible until they abruptly encountered its high outer wall.
‘I can’t believe they built it here.’
‘It’s been here for a long time,’ said Pierre.
He dismounted next to the wall. Strung along the top, high above them, Anna could see strands of electrified wires. Every hundred metres or so there were swivelling surveillance cameras set to cover every inch of the wall.
‘Ah, this is what I was looking for,’ said Pierre.
He had stopped in front of a bas-relief set into the wall, depicting haggard men and women chained to a gnarled tree and ringed by barbed wire. A date, 1940–45, had been etched below it.
‘It’s a memorial to the Dutch resistance fighters jailed here during the occupation,’ Pierre explained. ‘The famous “Soldiers of Orange”. Older folk still call it “The Orange Hotel”. Most of the suspects had a short stay—they were tortured, then taken out into the sand dunes and shot.’
‘No Jewish memorial?’ asked Anna.
‘No. You’ll find the locals aren’t so keen to talk about that side of things. They want us to believe the Anne Frank mythology—that kindly Dutchmen hid all the Jews away in secret rooms. But I’m sure you know a bit about this.’
Anna nodded. Pierre was right: a higher percentage of Dutch Jews were killed in the Holocaust than any other country in Western Europe, seventy-five per cent.
‘It should be a national scandal,’ she muttered.
‘Eichmann loved Dutch efficiency,’ said Pierre. ‘Like I said, they don’t exactly embrace the dark side of their history.’
Dutch efficiency. That had been the most shocking revelation for her as she researched her family’s history. In 1942, the mayor of The Hague ordered his bureaucrats to scour the city’s records to locate all ten thousand Jews registered as living there. Only a lucky few escaped being rounded up. The vast majority were brought here, to this very prison, where they were processed and then packed onto Dutch trains heading east.
Anna was silent as they rode around the perimeter until they came to the first break in the wall, a massive steel gate with the address 1256 Stevinstraat, and a small sign: Penitentiaire Inrichting Haaglanden.
‘In-rish-ting means institution,’ said Pierre. ‘As in, the Penitentiary Institution for the region of Haaglanden. For such a wealthy city, the outer boroughs are surprisingly some of the poorest in the country. There’re lots of migrants locked up here, a lot of Muslims. It’s a pretty tough regime.’
Anna was puzzled. ‘I don’t quite get the set-up. How do they keep those inmates separate from the war crimes unit?’
‘The war criminals are in a prison within a prison,’ said Pierre as he climbed back on his bike. ‘Come on, we’ll ride around to the front and you’ll get a better idea.’
They cycled almost a kilometre up the busy Stevinstraat, with the prison on one side and the wild dunes on the other, until the wall took a right-hand turn, and they followed it around into another quiet street of neat houses, some built right up to the wall. A few hundred metres further along they came to an old fortified entrance that she recognised from the news footage. It resembled the gatehouse of a seventeenth-century castle, with two stone towers standing on either side of a great wooden gate; each tower was buttressed and topped with a crenulated battlement.
‘This I know,’ she said. ‘It’s where the reporters do their pieces to camera.’
‘Yeah. From that raised roadway.’ Pierre pointed up at it. ‘When they first brought Milosevic here, this whole street was chock-a-block with satellite trucks. But you see how it is? The gate and the wall block out everything. Some of the big networks rented houses on the other side of the road and put cameras up in the attics to see over the wall—from up there you can actually see the top floors of the war crimes unit. But all the prison windows are blocked, so it was a waste of money, really.’
They climbed up to the raised street, from where Anna could see the roofs of larger buildings inside the complex.
‘See the metal roof slightly higher than the others?’ said Pierre. ‘That’s it. It’s four storeys high. Someone once asked the commandant how secure it was to keep Milosevic inside a normal prison, and he explained that if Milosevic managed to escape from the war crimes unit he’d find himself still in prison and among the general population of criminals. Not much of an incentive for him with all the Muslims locked up in there.’
‘My problem is how to break in, not out,’ said Anna, wondering for the first time if this was the closest she would get to Marin Katich.
‘You know they don’t allow journalists inside,’ said Pierre. ‘You’re going to have to find another way.’
She noticed a malicious glint in his eye.
‘Go on,’ she urged.
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Oh, come on. What is it?’
‘Well, they do allow conjugal visits.’