Chapter 3

..............‘Psssht’ and the second can pops open, this time without wetting his hand. The pressure in there seems to have dropped, too. His fatigued legs feel like spaghetti now, over-cooked spaghetti that is. After the narrow escape he now is an escapee; inside his heart feels relaxed. But his head, his head is being filled with ever more exhilaration of finally becoming a winner. ‘Cheers, Freddy!’, and Walter toasts heavenwards to the very flamboyant and very dead beermagnate. The stuff tastes delicious: ice-cold, bittersweet and wet, very wet. Freddy H. had become filthy rich of it, and must have been able to buy or lease a nice spot Over There. Money supposedly opened all doors, did it not?

No, Walter knew he was not an idealist. For idealism was full of blind spots. So they can suit it themselves, because, well, that is what they would do anyway. They. Man. You. Yeah, ‘youmanity’ seemed rather fond of suffering. All what humans needed was one type of ‘ism’. Or another: terrorism, communism, globalism, capitalism, fascism, Nazism, nihilism, materialism, pragmatism. A closer look and mainly opportunism remained. All these phenomena were pure, uncut ‘religionisms’. No more than solipsistic dishes, drenched with romantic sauces of absolute righteousness. Religions themselves, they had a knack for that, too, as if having the right to be right at all costs. But religions and all the other isms were marred by the same type of intolerance with regard to dissenters. As always, the duel seemed black against white. But mixed together the most likely colour to appear wasn’t grey, but red. Sticky, dead blood-red red.

Yet, fair is fair, he was not immune to a few isms, either. His problem was the riddle which couldn’t be answered satisfyingly. What to do against forces as disproportionate as the Youman History? Next to nothing, he has been inclined to think for too long, except for a little bit of talking, complaining, cursing and if need be praying. And, oh yes, one could demonstrate. Vote every few years. But that wasn’t much more than a ritual game of musical chairs. Or, nearing your wit’s end, the opposite option: you committed one or several murders. Or, completely at your wit’s end, you ended your own life...Everything only went in direct opposition to the enormous whirlwind. The same primal wind that made those cursed windmills spin round and round. This endless merry-go-round did not allow honest profits, because the vortex was sucking it all in. In his eyes, nothing more then technical evolution, in his eyes these windmills were abstract generators that provided every next generation with more energetic and more evil power-mad humans. If Nero was a sadist, what about Hitler! If Catherine the Great was a maniac, what about Stalin? If Saddam was both, what about his two sons?

For more than just some time he had been suffering deeply from paralyzing fatalism. But this fatalism was gone now, to undergo a complete metamorphosis into another ism. Barely an hour ago he had ignited a two fronted war. This arson, hopefully hardly extinguishable, was committed at an international tax consultancy. This fairly small, very successful partnership bearing the name of Holla and Pruijn was accessory to a number of large drops of virginal blood. Black and bold titles had screamed at the amazed readers. But the partnership had won the infamous Keyser-case after which the Public Prosecutor had closed the files. Next, please! Even though there were plenty rumours about the production of and trade in kiddie porn, all they had charged him with was tax evasion...A bit like the FBI had done with Al Capone, once, but that mobster got sentenced… The ism he now suffered from was easy to label: pure idealism. But wasn’t fighting injustice practically the same thing as idealism?

The train now makes the comforting sound of reaching its top speed, something like a monotonous lullaby. A few months ago he had stumbled across an old magazine in the library archives in his hometown. It had been a gold-vein full of information, waiting to be mined. This Robert Keyser was his sought after eighteen-carat enemy! Earlier Pieter, alias Nose, sort of in between acquaintance and friend, had informed him that this issue supposedly had been completely confiscated. For what? Well, for Nose being a journalist who used to hack his way in to get the info he needed. So the magazine he worked for had to face libel charges and had to withdraw it from the shelves. What a coincidence! Apparently some provincial librarians had overlooked the one and only magazine he had miraculously found...Even Google no longer produced any hits. As if the article had never existed...

Then he takes another swig beer, a bit too greedy and too fast. Absently he smears the spilt beer of his dripping chin. Scrutinising the material he studied the three parts of the equation. One: Holla & Pruijn had won the long drawn-out tax case. The alleged amount involved had as many as 8 zeroes in withheld return, asset, and value added taxes, made possible via H & P’s tax routes. Two: Nose’s hacking had revealed illegal a no cure, no pay remuneration, which meant a hefty part in the shareholding of Keyser’s mysterious mother company, had landed in the hands of H & P. Three: the stubborn rumours about the production of and trade in kiddie porn. That equates to Keyser and the partnership being in this together: where there’s smoke in general there must have been matches.

Suddenly he wakes out of his reverie. The first part of the return-journey has been completed. The Intercity slows down and approaches the now sleeping city of Utrecht. He doesn’t so mutch as fear the police; all he dreads is losing this now private train compartment. Then the long nighttrain jostles and starts to increase speed: no intruders! With a smile on his face he gulps down the rest of his beer and dissolves into thought once more. Robbie Keyser, what a smooth operator! He had been too damn lucky. The right man at the right location at the right time… Risen to finally become a porn-tsar! Not a porn-star, mind you! Ceasar, Keyser, tsar. He had started his operations in the sixties with a single whorehouse, near the Belgium border.

Alas for times and manners. Nabokov got his infamous Lolita published some ten years earlier? How corny and outdated the opening line sounded now: ‘light of my life, fire of my loins’. The Russian author had to flee from his own country being ‘undesirable’. Although Vladimir lived, wrote and taught in the USA he had to find a publisher in France who dared touch his book…The sex-magazines from those bygone days were getting flashier colours; they were becoming more flesh-like…Pretty soon R.K. had realised that his customers, by definition an international clientele, were interested in some additional visual support. They were all too willing to take a few two-dimensional naked young ladies home. Who was K. to refuse the wishes of these horny men? So soon he turned into smuggling hot Scandinavian merchandise. All the wankers were welcome to it...

That both loathed and worshipped sixth decennium got kick-started somewhat later in the Netherlands, ‘the sixties’ being an English invention after all. After some incubation time the country on the other side of the Channel was ripe for a whole lot of hippy, happy, and rather stoned flower power love. He, Jan Cremer, he came, saw and won with his outrageous ego bestseller: all about is own dick, a lot of tits and pussy and all that flesh that meshed together. The Rolling Stones outperformed the Beatles. Of course, songs about love were sweet, but singing about satisfaction was provocative. The skirts shrunk ever further, crept up even more. Eventually they became miniskirts and all the magazines zoomed in. In Playboy, sex-magazine nr 1, the girls all had nice breasts, with cosy furred pussies. It didn’t take long for the competition to pop out of the woodwork. The new magazine was juicier, including pinkie pictures; in it the hairy triangle was clipped back to a virginal image. This brazen Penthouse soon had another competitor as well: Hustler. In here the exposed ladies inserted live and synthetic members into their now completely bare openings of lust. Summarizing one could say the revolutionary status of Playboy evolved into the commonplace, deemed suitable reading for parlours and waiting rooms. All that in measly ten years! Along came a Dutch movie called Blue Movie, which had been a true blue movie: no more telling, yet all the more showing.

Sex, drugs and rock and roll: all what’s left of that era, really. The European sexmag-market shot upwards. All people like Keyser had to do was to grow with the flow. He had bought some photographic equipment and arranged the use of a printing press. After that he had started building on his much required network. The two-dimensional intimate act had become his core business now. A quickie had been replaced by mutch shorter apertures. Those shuttertimes caused a welcome reproduction of his harem of whores.

What could further his career even more? A whole lot of things: literature, film, emancipation, the pill, the condom, abortion even, the ever progressing deterioration of the Church. But Keyser’s biggest financial success was due to the video recorder. Messing about clumsy tapes was no longer necessary. Porn-movies packaged in handy plastic containers: all you had to do was shove it in...If the sixties were for starters, the seventies provided the main course. Taboos are also to be considered. One after another bit the dust, like a tumbling set of hedonistic dominoes. To name but a few: homosexuals, lesbians, group-sex, partner-swapping, sex with animals, in darkrooms or at a parking lot; all of that and a lot more. Sex had become a means of exchange and a drug in itself. An ever bigger chunk of all this action was videotaped by Robert’s ever expanding company.

Nowadays sex-fairs had become cultural events! You could take your mom there, along with your daughter…and get your clits pierced…three for the price of two…with some tattoo on your ass to boot. Sex rampant on billboards and advertising in general, pumped into popmusic and ploughed back on MTV. One of the last taboos is probably to remain a taboo forever, but some mediareports were more then just ominous. What they described was downright scarifying. Members of parliament, teachers, judges, ambassadors, priests, pop stars were getting caught by the dozen. And those who got caught were only the tip of the iceberg. The last taboo still standing was sex with little children.

Looking back the exchanges of the purchase price and the forbidden fruit had been the biggest part of ‘the problem’. Until Internet exploded, that is. These kinky and brute humans were quite shy, actually. Being and staying anonymous was a mandatory precondition. After a little creative banking the tricky problem of money-transfers was solved. After that via Internet the demand for this taboo kind of porn increased. Tenfold? Thousandfold! Recently the FBI had dismantled a Russian website, of which all members were paying members. A quarter of a million paying members, to be exact. Was this bizarre figure a printing error, perhaps? No, the numbers matched with the letters. The sheer size of the business had become grotesque, absurd even…

Then the train slows down yet again. Home! Shower! Sleep! The trip has gone by in one short rush. The hour long trip home seemed to have taken but one minute. At the same time years had passed by. Time, who knew how to work his way around its mystic properties? Shortly after he has exited the station he is back on automatic pilot. No-one to be seen, a world made out of stone. In a very slow slow-motion he cycles towards his small but cosy apartment. This was a very different ride than the ride before! Now he passes through a pitch-dark South-park and suddenly he notices the semi-visible, endlessly long white finger. It is pointed at the stars, towards Heaven. County hall! This superb concrete colossus was clearly visible ever since they had added a couple of megawatts halogen lighting. The column of illuminated whitish mist against the deep black night feels like the appropriate final scene of the surrealistic film he was living in. No, this wasn’t light-pollution! According to him this huge beam was a literally enlightening art-form. Not as if God pointed an accusing finger at the earthlings. On the contrary, it seemed as if the earthlings messaged a code to Him. Yahoo, here, down here is where we are! Don’t You bloody dare forget about us…