It was then that she started consulting psychoanalysts. Some of them couldn’t give her any answers, others told her that the therapy would be long and difficult, that they would have to do a fair amount of digging to find her “emotional roots” and work out where the flow of emotions had been interrupted.
They had all agreed on one thing: they had to remove the block.
She had been in analysis for years, without ever getting anything out of it. She had changed doctors frequently, and would have gone on to infinity if one—the most cynical, to whom she could never be grateful enough—had not clearly told her: “Grief doesn’t exist. Like the whole range of other human emotions. It’s just a matter of chemistry. Love is just a question of endorphins. With a syringe full of pentothal I can take away all emotional demands. We are all nothing but machines made of flesh.”
Finally she had felt relieved. Not satisfied, but definitely relieved. She couldn’t do anything about it: her body had gone into “protected” mode, as happens to certain electrical devices when there’s a power surge and they have to preserve their own circuits. That doctor had also said that there are people who, at a given moment of their existence, feel a great deal of grief, too much, far more than a human being can bear in a lifetime. And at that point, either they stop living or they become desensitized to it.
Mila didn’t know whether to see her desensitization as a piece of luck, but it was thanks to it that she had become what she was. A seeker of missing children. Healing the suffering of others compensated her for what she would never feel. So her curse had suddenly become her gift.
She saved them. She brought them home. They thanked her. She grew fond of some of them and they sought her out and asked her to tell their story.
“If you hadn’t been there to think of me…” they said to her.
And she certainly couldn’t reveal what that “thought” had consisted of, the same thought for each child she tried to find. She could feel anger for what had happened to them—as for child number six—but she never felt “compassion.”
She had accepted her fate. But she also asked herself a question.
Would she ever be capable of loving someone?
Not knowing how to answer, Mila had emptied her mind and her heart long ago. She would never have love, a husband or a boyfriend, or children, or even an animal. Because the secret is to have nothing to lose. Nothing that anyone could take away. That was the only way she could enter the minds of the people she was searching for.
By creating around herself the same void as they had around them.
Until the day she had released a boy from the clutches of a pedophile who had abducted him just to have a bit of fun over the weekend. He was going to free him after three days because, in his sick mind, he had “borrowed him.” He didn’t care about the state into which he had thrown the boy’s family and his life. He justified himself by saying he would never have hurt him.
And what about everything else? What did he call the shock of the abduction? The imprisonment? The violence?
It wasn’t a desperate attempt to find a legitimation, however feeble, for what he had done. He really believed it. Because he was unable to imagine his victim’s feelings. In the end, Mila knew: the man was the same as her.
From that day onwards she had decided she would no longer allow her soul to deprive itself of the fundamental measure of others and life that was compassion. Even if she couldn’t find it within herself, she would provoke it artificially.
Mila had lied to the team and to Dr. Gavila. In fact, she already had a very clear awareness of what serial killers were. Or at least one aspect of their behavior.
Sadism.
Almost always, at the bottom of a serial killer’s behavior there were marked and deeply rooted sadistic components. Victims were seen as “objects” from whose suffering, from whose use, they could draw a personal advantage.
The serial killer manages to feel pleasure through the sadistic use of his victim.
Often the killer is unable to attain a mature and complete relationship with others, who are degraded from people to objects in his eyes. Violence then is his only contact with the rest of the world.
I don’t want the same thing to happen to me, Mila had said to herself. The idea of having something in common with those murderers, who were incapable of pity, filled her with repulsion.
After the discovery of Anneke’s corpse, as she was leaving Father Timothy’s house with Rosa, Mila had promised herself that she would make what had happened to that child indelible in her memory. So at the end of the day, while the others were going back to the Studio to sum up what had happened and put the results of the investigation in order, she had taken her leave for a few hours.
Then, as she had done many times, she had gone to a chemist’s. She had bought what she needed: disinfectant, plasters, cotton wool, a roll of sterile bandage, needles and surgical thread.
And a razor blade.
With a very clear idea in her mind, she had gone back to the motel, to her old room. She hadn’t checked out, and was still paying for it with this very occasion in mind. She drew the curtains. She only left the light on beside one of the two beds. She sat down and emptied the contents of the little paper bag onto the mattress.
She slipped off her jeans.
After pouring a little disinfectant over her hands and rubbing it in, she soaked a wad of cotton wool in more of the same liquid and dabbed the skin of her inside right leg. Further up was the wound that had already healed, produced by her earlier clumsy attempt. But this time she wouldn’t make a mess of it, she would do it properly. With her lips she pulled off the tissue paper around the razor. She held it tightly between her fingers. She closed her eyes and lowered her hand. She counted to three, then stroked the skin on the inside of her leg. She felt the blade sliding into the living flesh, and running along it, creating a warm aperture.
The physical pain erupted with a silent roar. It rose up through her body from the wound. It reached its apex in her head, cleansing it of images of death.
“This is for you, Anneke,” Mila said to the silence.
Then, at last, she wept.
A smile among the tears.
That was the symbolic image of the crime scene. Then there was the far from trifling detail that the body of the second child had been found naked in a laundry.
“Might the intention be to purify creation in a flood of tears?” Roche had wondered.
But Goran Gavila, as usual, didn’t believe in those simplistic explanations. Until then, Albert’s model murderer had proved too refined to lapse into such banality. He considered himself superior to the serial killers who had come before him.
At the Studio the weariness was already palpable. Mila had come back from the motel at about nine in the evening, with red eyes and a slight limp in her right leg. She had immediately gone to lie down in the guest accommodation and rest for a while, without unmaking the camp bed or even taking off her clothes. At about eleven she had been woken by Goran talking on his mobile in the corridor. She stayed motionless, pretending to be asleep. She guessed that the person at the other end wasn’t his wife, but a nurse or perhaps a nanny. At one point he called her “Mrs. Runa.” He asked her about Tommy—so that was the boy’s name—whether he had eaten and finished his homework, and whether by any chance he had thrown any tantrums. Goran murmured a few times as Mrs. Runa brought him up to date. The conversation ended with the criminologist promising to pass by the house the following day, to see Tommy again at least for a few hours.
Mila, curled up with her back to the door, didn’t move. But when Goran started talking again, she felt as if he had stopped on the threshold of the guest room, and that he was actually looking at her. She could see part of his shadow projected on the wall in front of her. What would happen if she turned round? Their eyes would meet in the gloom. Perhaps the initial embarrassment would make way for something else. A mute dialogue. But was that really what Mila really
felt she needed? This man held a strange attraction for her. She couldn’t say what the appeal was exactly. In the end she decided to turn round. But Goran wasn’t there anymore.
A little while later she went back to sleep.
Mila…Mila…
Like a whisper, Boris’s voice had slipped into a dream of black trees and endless roads. Mila opened her eyes and saw him beside her camp bed. He hadn’t touched her to wake her up. He had only called her by name. But he was smiling.
“What time is it? Did I sleep too long?”
“No, it’s six o’clock…I’m going out, Gavila wants me to interview some former inmates of the orphanage. I was wondering if you felt like coming with me…”
Boris’s embarrassment told her that it hadn’t been his idea.
“Fine, I’m coming.”
The young man nodded, grateful that she’d spared him any further urging.
About a quarter of an hour later they met up in the car park outside the building. The car engine was already turned on and Boris was waiting for her outside it, leaning on the bodywork with a cigarette between his lips. He was wearing a worn parka that reached almost to his knees. Mila had on her usual leather jacket. When she was packing she hadn’t predicted that it would be so cold in these parts. A timid sun peeping through the buildings had begun to warm the piles of dirty snow in the corners of the street, but it wouldn’t last much longer: a storm was predicted for that afternoon.
“You should cover yourself up a bit, you know that?” said Boris, glancing anxiously at her clothes. “It freezes here at this time of year.”
The inside of the car was warm and welcoming. A plastic cup and a paper bag rested on the dashboard.
“Warm croissants and coffee?”
“And all for you!” he replied, having remembered how greedy she was.
It was a peace offering. Mila accepted it without comment. With her mouth full she asked, “Where are we going exactly?”
“I told you: we have to listen to some of the people who used to live at the institute. Gavila is convinced that the arrangement of the corpse in the laundry wasn’t just a spectacle meant for us.”
“Perhaps he’s calling up something from the past.”
“The distant past, if he is. Places like this stopped existing almost twenty-eight years ago. Since they changed the law, abolishing orphanages once and for all.”
There was something pained in Boris’s tone, which he immediately voiced: “I was in a place like that, did you know that? I was about ten. I never knew my father, and my mother couldn’t bring me up on her own. So they parked me there for a bit.”
Mila didn’t know what to say, startled as she was by such a personal revelation. Boris guessed.
“You don’t have to say anything, don’t worry. In fact, I don’t even know why I told you.”
“Sorry, but I’m not a very expansive person. Many people think I’m cold.”
“Not me.”
Boris was looking at the road. The traffic was going slowly because of the ice that still covered the tarmac. The exhaust fumes hung in the middle of the air. The people on the footpaths walked quickly.
“Stern—may God always keep him the way he is—managed to track down a dozen ex-inmates of the institute. We’ll be dealing with half of those. He and Rosa will be looking after the others.”
“Only twelve?”
“In the area. I don’t know exactly what the doctor has in mind, but if he thinks we can get anything out of it…”
That morning they interviewed four of the former orphanage boys. They were all over twenty-eight, with more or less the same criminal pedigrees. Orphanage, reform school, jail, conditional release, jail again, probation. Only one of them had managed to wash his hands of it all thanks to his church: he had become pastor of one of the many Protestant communities in the area. Two others lived on handouts. The fourth was under house arrest for dealing. But when each of them spoke of their time in the institution, Mila and Boris noted a sudden agitation. They were people who had gone on to know prison, real prison, and yet they would never forget that place.
“Did you see their faces?” Mila asked her colleague after the fourth visit. “Do you think something bad happened in that place?”
“It was no different from others like it, believe me. But I think it’s something connected to his childhood. As you grow up, experiences slide off you, even the worst ones. But when you’re that age memories really imprint themselves on your flesh and don’t go away.”
Every time they told—with all due care—the story of finding the corpse in the laundry, the interviewees merely shook their heads. That obscure symbolism meant nothing to them.
At around midday, Mila and Boris stopped at a café where they quickly had some tuna sandwiches and a couple of cappuccinos.
The sky was heavy now. The weathermen hadn’t been mistaken: soon it would start snowing again.
They still had another two orphans to meet before the weather got too bad and stopped them from going back. They decided to start with the one who lived furthest away.
“His name’s Feldher. He lives about thirty kilometers away.”
Boris was in a good mood. Mila would have liked to take advantage of that to ask him more about Goran. He aroused her curiosity: it didn’t seem possible that he had a private life, a partner, a child. His wife, in particular, was a mystery. Especially after the phone call that Mila had caught the previous evening. Where was the woman? Why wasn’t she at home looking after little Tommy? Because “Mrs. Runa” was there instead? Maybe Boris could answer her questions. But in the end, not knowing how to introduce the subject, Mila gave up.
When they got to Feldher’s house it was almost two in the afternoon. They had tried to call ahead to say they were coming, but the recorded voice of a telephone company had told them the number was no longer available.
“It looks like our friend isn’t doing very well,” Boris had remarked.
Seeing where he lived confirmed this. The house—if you could call it that—was in the middle of a field of rubble, surrounded by the carcasses of automobiles. A red-haired dog, which seemed to be rusting slowly like everything else, welcomed them with raucous barking. Soon afterward a man of about forty appeared in the doorway. He was wearing only a filthy T-shirt and jeans, in spite of the cold.
“Are you Mr. Feldher?”
“Yes…who are you?”
Boris just raised his hand with his card: “Can we talk to you?”
Feldher didn’t seem too pleased by their visit, but he beckoned them in.
He had a huge belly and his fingers were yellowed with nicotine. The interior of the house looked like him: filthy and chaotic. He served cold tea in unmatched glasses, lit a cigarette and went and sat down on a creaking deck chair, leaving the sofa to them.
“You were lucky to find me. Usually I’m working…”
“Why not today?” asked Mila.
The man looked outside: “The snow. No one takes on laborers in weather like this. And I’m losing a whole load of days.”
Mila and Boris held the tea in their hands, but neither of them drank. Feldher didn’t seem to take offense.
“So why don’t you try to change your job?” Mila ventured, to pretend an interest and establish contact.
Feldher snorted. “I’ve tried! Do you think I haven’t tried? But that went all to hell too, like my marriage. That whore was after something better. She told me every damned day that I was worthless. Now she’s a two-bit waitress and shares an apartment with two tramps like herself. I’ve seen it. It’s managed by the church she’s joined. They told her even a good-for-nothing like her has a place in heaven! What do you think of that?”
Mila remembered that they had passed at least a dozen of those new churches along the road. They all displayed big neon signs showing the name of the congregation and also the slogan that summed them up. For a few years they had been proliferating around here, welcoming converts among those laid o
ff by the big factories, single mothers and people disillusioned by traditional faiths. Even though the various denominations liked to seem different from one another, what they had in common was their unconditional adherence to creationist theories, homophobia, opposition to abortion, the affirmation of the principle according to which each individual has the right to bear arms and complete support for the death penalty.
It would be impossible to know how Feldher would react, Mila thought, if she had told him that one of his fellow inmates at the institute had become a pastor in one of those churches.
“When you arrived I mistook you for two of them: they come here to preach their gospel. Last month that whore I used to be with sent a couple of them here to convert me!” He laughed, showing two rows of rotten teeth.
Mila tried to move away from the conjugal theme and asked casually, “What did you do before your laboring jobs, Mr. Feldher?”
“You won’t believe it…” The man smiled, glancing at the filth that surrounded him. “I’d set up a little laundry.”
The two officers tried not to look at each other so as not to show Feldher how interesting this statement was. Mila couldn’t help noticing that Boris let his hand slide to his hip, revealing his holster and gun. She remembered that when they got to this place their mobiles had no signal. They didn’t know much about this man, and they had to be careful.
“Have you ever been in jail, Mr. Feldher?”
“Only for small misdemeanors, nothing that would keep an honest man awake at night.”
Boris visibly made a mental note of that information. He stared at Feldher, making him uneasy.
“So what can I do for you, officers?” said the man, without concealing a certain irritation.
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