The Dinner by Herman Koch

Author:Herman Koch
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781848873827
Publisher: Hogarth
Published: 2012-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

25

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.

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