Flowers over the Inferno, page 22
“Do you have any idea what these might be?” she asked Hugo Knauss, taking off the gloves.
“No, Superintendent.”
“Are you sure? Someone in the valley with questionable hobbies, perhaps?”
“You mean with an interest in racist cults? Certainly not.”
So he’d made that connection, too. Teresa had a feeling everyone in the room must have thought the same thing.
“Would you even tell me if there was?”
“What exactly are you suggesting?”
“I never suggest, Chief Knauss . . .”
“Superintendent?” said De Carli as he walked in, interrupting their exchange. When he saw what they were looking at, he stopped and stared, forgetting what he’d come in to say. “Is that what I think it is?” he said.
“Who can say?” Teresa answered. “If you have any dazzling insights on the subject, please do share.”
“All I have for now is a report to hand in. It’s the interview with Lucia’s father.”
He placed the file on the desk. Teresa leafed through it distractedly.
“I don’t want that man going home any time soon,” she said. “The girl can be placed in her grandparents’ care for a few days.”
“We have enough to charge him, Superintendent. Besides, he’s already run away once, and he might do it again if we let him go.”
“Let’s hope the judge agrees with you.”
She didn’t mention that she’d already spoken to Judge Crespi herself and obtained his assurance that the man would not be allowed near his daughter for a while. He would need the support of the social care services first, to help him repair a bond he’d been on the verge of destroying—along with his own life.
Teresa looked at her watch and recalled how Roberto Valent’s had been tied to the effigy’s arm the wrong way around. She still hadn’t figured out what that meant. There were only a few hours left now until dawn, when they could get started with the search. They just had to hope the weather worked in their favor. Meanwhile, no one had been able to rest: the thought of little Markus in the killer’s hands made it impossible to catch even a moment’s sleep.
She read through Dante Kravina’s statement again, with her head in her hands and her back seizing up in pain.
“A lack of facial expressions,” she muttered, reviewing the description of the killer Lucia’s father had provided.
Marini approached her. “Are those his words?” he asked De Carli.
“More or less. Anyway, it was clear what he meant. He’d been pretty disturbed by it.”
“Lack of facial expressions, imitative behavior, and difficulties with language,” Marini summarized, reading through the report.
Teresa lifted her head up to look at him. He looked like he’d been gripped by a particularly interesting train of thought.
“Does that sound familiar?” she asked, not really expecting an answer in the affirmative.
He gave her a surprised look as if he were the first to doubt what he was about to say.
“The case of child number thirty-nine,” he said.
Teresa didn’t understand.
“Child number thirty-nine?” she repeated.
Marini sat down next to her and began typing something on the computer keyboard.
“I’ve been reading a psychology handbook,” he said. “There’s a lot of useless stuff in there, but this one really got to me because it’s just . . . so improbable. To think that it actually happened—it’s unbelievable. Here it is! Johann Albert Wallner,” he said, reading out a newspaper headline.
Teresa felt dizzy. Wallner, she thought. Like the name inscribed on the Hippocratic seal.
“Who is he?” she asked.
“A psychiatrist who was struck off for an illegal experiment he conducted almost forty years ago,” Marini replied. “Wallner,” he muttered, looking at the Nazi-era artifact they’d found. “His father was Wolfgang Wallner, a medical officer in the SS. The medal must have something to do with his profession.”
“Perhaps it’s a graduation gift,” Teresa suggested, counting the years in her head. She tried to remain calm and control her breathing, but it was proving difficult. How was it possible that she of all people—someone who had read everything there was to read when it came to psychology—had no recollection of this case? The article on the screen before her suggested that the case of child number 39 had made an enormous impact, enough to be included in the handbook Marini was reading.
Did I simply miss it, or has my mind already erased the memory?
“What experiment is this?” Knauss asked.
“A really quite twisted test on the effects of maternal deprivation, conducted just a few miles across the border,” Marini explained. “Wallner got the idea from a study conducted by René Spitz. But he went much further.”
“What did he do?” asked De Carli.
“He was the director of an institute that looked after orphans. He ordered the nursery staff who took care of the infants to withhold any kind of maternal care from their charges. The children weren’t referred to by name, but only by the number attached to their cots. This was known as ‘de-personalization.’”
“Is that even legal?” said Parisi.
“Definitely not,” Marini replied. “But Wallner and his collaborators didn’t mind. The nurses weren’t allowed to speak to the children or even to make eye contact. They wore a hood with two holes for their eyes so their facial expressions wouldn’t be visible.”
Everyone held their breaths for a moment. All eyes were on the hood now.
“The infants were fed and washed regularly, but deprived of any other form of care,” Marini went on. “Soon they began to exhibit the first symptoms of this ‘treatment’: insomnia, rejection of physical contact, wasting away, delayed development of motor functions, and an absence of facial expressions. All except one: the child in cot number thirty-nine. This infant stayed alert and did not waste away. On the contrary, he continued to grow. Wallner thought he had found in him the ‘Father’ as theorized by Freud: a natural leader equipped with an extraordinary inner strength.”
“What became of the children?” De Carli asked.
Marini scrolled down to the end of the webpage he was reading from.
“A nurse who had recently been hired told the authorities about Wallner, and the police stormed the institute. The children were rescued and within months their symptoms began to fade until they disappeared altogether. But Wallner managed to get away, and he took with him the child from cot number thirty-nine, his greatest discovery.”
“What was the child’s name? Does it say?” Teresa asked, trying to control the tremor in her voice.
“Andreas Hoffman. Wallner and the child were never found. Agnes Braun, Wallner’s closest collaborator, was put on trial and sentenced to twenty years in prison. When the institute opened again, Magdalena Hoos, the young woman who had alerted the authorities, was hired to work there again. The police later learned that Wallner had been obsessed with Nazi theories of eugenics.”
Andreas. Teresa finally felt she had a connection with him.
“Poor kid. I wonder what happened to him,” said De Carli. Marini swore and Knauss looked down at his trousers, picking at them compulsively.
Teresa regained her composure and looked at them all incredulously.
“Don’t you see?” she said. “It’s him. The child who disappeared is our killer.”
She got to her feet, her agitation making her forget her aches.
“He paints his face white because identification is the most primitive form of love, and all he saw every day were the white ceiling of his room and a white hood. At first the different ways he’s interacted with people made me think he must suffer from some form of multiple personality disorder, but on the contrary—he has no personality to speak of, at least not in a clinical sense. He imitates the people he meets, in a sort of neonatal phase he’s never overcome. It’s his way of communicating.”
Teresa finally understood why Andreas’s psychological and behavioral profile had always seemed so incoherent: their basic assumptions had all been wrong.
“His case doesn’t follow set patterns because on a psychological level, it’s as if he’d never been born,” she said. “So our usual tools of psychological analysis won’t work on him.”
“He’s able to form relationships with children, though,” Marini noted.
“Yes . . . But to understand how and why he does that, we need to find out how he survived,” said Teresa. “Did he have a home? Someone to keep him company? What happened to his abductor?”
“Maybe Wallner ran away and left him behind. Or maybe . . . maybe he was here all along, hiding god knows where, for decades,” said Parisi. “He may well be dead now, but the result of his experiment has survived. But what do you think triggered Andreas Hoffman’s fury?”
Teresa thought of how the killer had stopped the teenagers in the forest, and the animals they had seen fleeing while they had been collecting evidence.
“His territory has been invaded, and that’s thrown his world off balance,” she said. “It has pushed him down the mountain, like the startled deer we saw the other day.”
“What invasion?”
Teresa studied the map on the wall and pointed at the area where the new ski resort was being built.
“This invasion. The machinery and the construction workers. The clearing of trees. The inspections. We need to limit the search to this area, starting from the northern side, which is harder to reach and more thickly forested. We’re looking for a shelter of some sort.”
“There’s only rocks to the north and north-west. I don’t think we’ll find him there. To the north-east you have the Osvan quarries. It’s a barren landscape there, with no trees and no cover. Only loose boulders,” said Knauss. “There’s nothing there.”
“What kind of quarries?”
“Rock, and lead and zinc mines. But it’s like a desert now. The vegetation hasn’t grown back yet.”
“We’ll use those markers as the perimeter for our search,” said Teresa.
“There’s just one thing I don’t get,” said Marini. “Why did he take the youngest of the Klavina kids, Markus, and leave his older brother at their father’s mercy?”
Teresa had her own theory about that.
“Because Mathias never actually admitted to his friends that his father beats him. But he did voice his concern about what might happen to his little brother.”
“But the killer could have just murdered the father and freed them both.”
Teresa looked at the fading darkness outside the window. Just a little longer until she could go out to look for the child and a killer who now was, in her mind, the first entry in a long list of victims.
“He’s changed his modus operandi drastically,” she said. “The sight of the baby must have awakened something in him. Perhaps there are still traces of his peers from the institute somewhere in his subconscious. He can remember them crying. He can remember the nights they spent together, listening to each other’s breathing.”
Teresa took off her glasses and immediately stuck one of the temples in her mouth to tensely chew away at.
“He can remember his first life, now,” she said. “And he wants it back.”
-60-
20 September 1993
It is with great regret that I must conclude the time has come to terminate this experiment.
I believe this to be the case because in the current circumstances, I am no longer able to guarantee my own safety. I am referring, primarily, to the survival of the Alpha. My most extraordinary discovery is also the thing that might put my life at risk, a fact that fills me with great sorrow.
The subject has lived beyond my most optimistic predictions for his lifespan, and I now find myself in an increasingly difficult position with regards to managing his captivity.
I ask myself what would happen if he were to become fully aware of my presence and the conditions I raised him in. It is a question I do not wish to find out the answer to.
As for subject Omega, though he does not constitute a problem, he has now outlived his usefulness.
The solution lies in their next meal.
-61-
Day dawned over the valley, bringing a clear morning with it. Teresa sighed with relief as she saw light spreading through a clear sky; it bode well for their search. She’d managed to sleep in half hour snatches interleaved by bleak thoughts that made her shudder in the dark, her heart in her mouth. It had been difficult to stay put, to bide their time. It was even harder, now, to be forced to direct the search operations from the bottom of the valley. She wished she was up in the forest, doing the searching herself instead of having to rely on the artificial eye of a drone. The memory of how they’d chased down Lucas Ebran was exhilarating. She had felt alive, useful, her body and mind still working properly, performing their duties. That was no longer something she could take for granted, and yet she still felt the urge to throw her body forward in search of clues, to use every bit of energy she had left until she could stretch out her hand and reach for the child.
But which child? It occurred to her that there were two of them involved in this case.
Now that she knew how this story of abuse and death had begun, she could finally see the truth about who Andreas Hoffman was: a victim himself who had somehow survived and lived in this world despite everything he’d been through. Teresa had tried to imagine what his life might have been like to draw up a new profile for him, but neither statistics, nor research, nor her experience could come to her aid now, perhaps because no other creature like Andreas had ever existed in the world. No one had helped him learn the skills needed to adapt to life—yet somehow he had done it anyway, developing his own tools instead. She wondered what they might be. His mind was unborn, and yet it was active in its own way.
He had lived a life without love.
The air ambulance was waiting on the flat expanse next to the construction site for the new ski resort, ready to retrieve the baby as soon as it was found. Two more search and rescue helicopters were already circling the area. Hugo Knauss’s men had set off at first light to clear the way. An army detachment had arrived and was preparing to comb through the woodland that stretched halfway up the mountain. From that point onwards, expert mountaineers from various law enforcement agencies would have to take over the search. The Austrian police had also been alerted and the border was being closely monitored.
The search parties, with their sniffer dogs at the leash, were preparing to set off; the plan was for them to move forward in an arc, as if it were a hunting expedition. Teresa was becoming increasingly concerned about the weapons they were equipped with. Of course they wouldn’t fire any shots until they were sure the child was safe—but what would happen after that?
Teresa saw Gardini and Ambrosini approaching. They were escorting a woman, the mother of the abducted child. She was holding a piece of cloth against her chest and made straight for Teresa as soon as she saw her. It was an encounter that could no longer be avoided.
Gloria Sanfilk’s eyes, swollen from crying and full of misery, looked straight into Teresa’s. Teresa was surprised by the strength she could discern beneath the surface of the woman’s despair.
“He’s alive,” Teresa heard her say. It wasn’t a question, but a warning to Teresa that she mustn’t dare—not even for a moment—think otherwise and give up.
“I’m sure of it,” the woman said.
Teresa looked for her husband but couldn’t see him.
“He isn’t here,” said Gloria, reading Teresa’s thoughts. “I won’t take him back, I won’t let him near us again, but you have to bring me my child back.”
She handed the cloth she’d been carrying to Teresa. It was a baby’s romper. Gloria placed it inside Teresa’s hand, squeezed it between hers, and raised it to her own face to breathe in the scent of her baby, inviting Teresa to do the same. It wasn’t for the dogs, she had brought it for Teresa; she wanted to make sure that the woman who held her son’s fate in her hands would feel the child’s smell on her as if it were her own baby.
Take my place, she was saying. Take my place and bring him back to me.
Teresa nodded. No words were necessary.
Ambrosini walked up to them and put his arm around Gloria’s shoulders, gently leading her away.
Marini came over.
“It’s impossible to predict how the killer might react,” he said, eyeing the forest.
“You should call him by his name,” Teresa murmured—more to herself than to her young colleague. “No one else has ever done that for him. He’s never even done it himself.”
Marini’s expression shifted.
“I think I understand what you mean, now,” he said. “I can’t help but see him as a victim either.”
He paused then, before uttering the question no one else had had the courage to ask her: “Do you think he’s going to hurt the child?”
Teresa had spent all night thinking about that. She hoped she’d found the right answer and not just the one that made her feel better.
“Not on purpose,” she said. “He is the ‘Father’ who protects his people, the Alpha; the kids from the village are his tribe, though they don’t even realize it. Still, we mustn’t forget that the hands that are holding that baby now are the same hands that ripped Roberto Valent’s eyes out.”
