The Whisperer

by Donato Carrisi

  “As far as we can tell, you spent your childhood and much of your adolescence in an institution run by priests,” Boris went on cautiously.

  Feldher stared at him suspiciously: like the others, he wondered what the cops were leading up to. “The best years of my life,” he said mischievously.

  Boris told him what had brought them there. Feldher seemed pleased to have been told the facts before they were made public.

  “I could make a lot of money telling the papers this stuff, couldn’t I?” was his only comment.

  Boris stared at him. “You try that and I’ll arrest you.”

  The smile vanished from Feldher’s face. The officer leaned towards him. It was an interrogation technique, Mila knew it too. People speaking to one another, unless bound by particular emotional or intimate relations, always tend to respect an invisible boundary. In this case, however, the interrogator was approaching the interrogatee in order to invade his personal space and make him feel uncomfortable.

  “Mr. Feldher, I’m sure you think it’s pretty funny to welcome the cops who come to see you, giving them tea you’ve probably pissed in, to enjoy their faces as they sit there like morons with glasses in their hands without having the courage to drink.”

  Feldher said nothing. Mila looked at Boris: she wondered if that had been a good move, given the situation. They would find out soon enough. The officer calmly set the tea down on the table and went back to staring the man in the eyes.

  “Now I hope you’d like to tell us a bit about your stay in the orphanage…”

  Feldher looked down, his voice a whisper: “You could say I was born there. I never knew my parents. They brought me there as soon as my mother spewed me out. I was given my name by Father Rolf, he said it belonged to someone he had known, who’d died young in the war. Maybe that crazy priest thought the name had brought lousy luck to the other guy, so it might bring good luck to me!”

  The dog outside started barking again and Feldher broke off to shout at it: “Shut up, Koch!” Then he turned back to his guests. “I had more dogs many years ago. This place was a dumping ground. When I bought it, they assured me it had been drained. But every now and again stuff comes up: shit and various kinds of filth, especially when it rains. The dogs drink that stuff, their bellies swell up and after a few days they croak. Koch’s the only one I have left, but I think he’s on the way out, too.”

  Feldher was rambling. He didn’t like going back with them to the places that had probably shaped his destiny. By talking about the dead dogs he was trying to negotiate with the officers so that they would leave him in peace. But they couldn’t relax their hold.

  Mila tried to be convincing when she said, “I’d like you to make an effort, Mr. Feldher.”

  “OK: shoot.”

  “I’d like you to tell us what you would connect with the image of ‘a smile among the tears.’”

  “It’s like that stuff psychiatrists do, is that it? A kind of free association?”

  “Something like that,” she agreed.

  Feldher started to think about it. He did it melodramatically, staring at the ceiling and with one hand scratching his chin. Maybe he wanted to give the impression of helping them, or maybe he had worked out that they couldn’t charge him with “failure of memory,” and he was just playing around with them. But then he said, “Billy Moore.”

  “Who was that, a friend of yours?”

  “Oh, that kid was extraordinary! He was seven when he arrived. He was always cheerful, always smiling. He immediately became everyone’s mascot…At that time they were about to shut the place down: there were only sixteen of us left.”

  “That whole institution for so few of you?”

  “The priests had gone too. The only one left was Father Rolf…I was one of the oldest boys, I was fifteen, more or less…Billy’s story was incredibly sad: his parents had hanged themselves. He had found the bodies. He hadn’t screamed or gone for help: instead, he’d got up on a chair and, holding on to them, untied them from the ceiling.”

  “That kind of experience marks you for life.”

  “Not Billy. He was always happy. He adapted to the worst. As far as he was concerned everything was a game. We had never seen anything like it. For us, that place was a jail, but Billy paid us no attention. He had an energy, I don’t know how to put it…he had two obsessions: those damned roller-skates that he used to ride up and down the empty corridors, and football. But he didn’t like playing. He preferred to stand on the sidelines doing the radio commentary… ‘This is Billy Moore from the Aztec Stadium in Mexico City for the World Cup Final…’ For his birthday we did a whip-round and bought him this tape recorder. It was amazing: he spent hours and hours recording stuff on that thing and listening to it over again!”

  Feldher was going on a bit now; the conversation was derailing. Mila tried to bring it back on its original track. “Can you tell us something about the last few months at the institution?”

  “As I’ve told you, they were about to close it and us boys had only two possibilities: either get adopted or end up in other institutions, like care homes. But we were grade B orphans, no one would take us. It was different for Billy, though: they were queuing up! Everyone immediately fell in love with him, they all wanted him.”

  “And how did that end up? Did Billy find a good family?”

  “Billy died, miss.”

  He said it with such disappointment in his voice that it sounded as if the fate had been his own. And perhaps in a way it had been, as if the boy had represented a kind of ransom for the rest of his friends. The one who could have made it, in the end.

  “How did it happen?” asked Boris.

  “Meningitis.”

  The man sniffed, his eyes gleaming. He turned towards the window, because he didn’t want these two strangers to see him so vulnerable. Mila was sure that once they had left, Billy’s memory would go on floating around him like an old ghost in that house. But with his tears, Feldher had won their trust: Mila saw Boris taking his hand away from his holster. He was harmless.

  “Billy was the only one who got meningitis. But being afraid of a pandemic they cleared us all out of that place in a flash…stroke of luck, eh?” He struggled to smile. “Well, they granted us a reprieve, they certainly did that. And the shithole was closed down six months earlier than predicted.”

  As they were getting up to leave, Boris asked again, “Did you ever see any of your classmates again?”

  “No, but a few years ago I did run into Father Rolf again.”

  “He’s retired now.”

  “I was kind of hoping he’d kicked the bucket.”

  “Why?” asked Mila, imagining the worst. “Did he hurt you?”

  “Never. But when you spend your childhood in a place like that, you learn to hate what you remember because you’re there.”

  A thought much the same as the one expressed by Boris, who found himself nodding involuntarily.

  Feldher didn’t walk them to the door. Instead he leaned over the table and picked up the glass of cold tea that Boris hadn’t drunk. He brought it to his lips and drank it down in one go.

  Then he stared at them again, defiantly: “Have a nice day.”

  An old group photograph—the boys who had lived in the orphanage just before it was closed—taken from what had once been Father Rolf’s office.

  Sixteen little boys posed around the old priest, only one smiling at the lens.

  A smile among the tears.

  Eyes bright, hair tousled, one incisor missing, a visible grease stain on his green pullover, displayed as if it were a badge of honor.

  Billy Moore rested forever in that photograph and in the little graveyard next to the orphanage church. He wasn’t the only child buried there, but his grave was the loveliest. With a stone angel spreading its wings in a protective gesture.

  After listening to the story from Mila and Boris, Gavila asked Stern to get hold of all documents relating to Billy’s death. The officer
complied with his usual zeal, and when they were confronted with the papers they were immediately struck by a curious coincidence.

  “In the case of potentially infectious diseases like meningitis, the health authorities must be informed. The doctor who received the report from Father Rolf is the same one who then drew up the death certificate. The two documents have the same date.”

  Goran tried to think this through: “The nearest hospital is twenty miles away. He probably didn’t even take the trouble to check the identity.”

  “He trusted the priest’s words,” added Boris, “because priests don’t usually tell lies…”

  “Not always,” thought Mila.

  Gavila had no doubts on the matter: “We’ve got to exhume the corpse.”

  The snow had started falling in small, hard grains, as if to prepare the ground for the flakes that would come afterwards. Soon it would be evening, so they would have to get a move on.

  Chang’s gravediggers were at work and were using a little bulldozer to dig the frost-hardened ground. As the team waited, no one spoke.

  Chief Inspector Roche had been informed about the developments and was staving off the press, which had suddenly whipped itself up into a state of great excitement. Maybe Feldher really had tried to speculate on what the two officers had told him without giving too much away. Besides, Roche always said, “What the media doesn’t know, they make up.”

  So they had to get a move on before someone decided to fill that silence with some well-crafted nonsense. It would be hard to deny everything.

  There was a dull thud. Finally, the bulldozer had touched something.

  Chang’s men climbed into the hole and started digging by hand. A plastic cloth covered the box to slow down its decomposition. It was cut away to reveal the lid of a small white coffin.

  “It’s all rotten here,” said the medical examiner after a quick glance. “If we pull it up, we risk breaking everything. And this snow is messing everything up,” added Chang, speaking to Goran, from whom he awaited the final decision.

  “Fine…open it up.”

  No one had expected the criminologist to organize an exhumation on the spot. Chang’s men stretched a tarpaulin over the hole, supporting it on poles like a big umbrella, to shelter the site.

  The pathologist put on a waistcoat with a lamp on the back, then went down into the hole beneath the eyes of the stone angel. In front of him, a technician with an oxyhydrogen flame began to melt the zinc soldering of the coffin and the lid began to move.

  How do you wake up a child who’s been dead for eighteen years? Mila wondered. Billy Moore would probably have deserved a short ceremony, or a prayer. But no one had the desire or the time to do it.

  When Chang opened the coffin, Billy’s wretched remains appeared, still wearing what was left of a first communion suit. Smart, with a clip-on tie and trousers with turn-ups. In a corner of the casket were the rusted skates and an old tape recorder.

  Mila remembered Feldher’s story: He had two obsessions: those damned roller-skates that he used to ride up and down the empty corridors, and football. But he didn’t like playing. He preferred to stand on the sidelines doing the radio commentary.

  They were Billy’s only belongings.

  Chang slowly began to cut away parts of the fabric of the suit with a scalpel and, even in that awkward position, his movements were quick and precise. He checked the state of conservation of the skeleton. Then, turning to the rest of the team, he announced: “There are a number of fractures. I can’t be one hundred percent certain about when they happened…but in my view this child definitely didn’t die of meningitis.”

  16.

  Sarah Rosa brought Father Timothy into the mobile unit’s camper, where Goran was waiting for him with the others. The priest still looked anxious.

  “We have a favor to ask you,” Stern began. “We urgently need to talk to Father Rolf.”

  “I told you: he’s retired. I don’t know where he is now. When I got here six months ago I only met him for a few hours. Just long enough to do the handover. He explained a few things to me, he gave me a few documents and the keys and then he left.”

  Boris turned back to Stern. “Perhaps we ought to speak directly to the Curia. Do you happen to know where they send retired priests?”

  “I’ve heard there’s a kind of rest home.”

  “Could be, but…”

  They turned back to look at Father Timothy.

  “What?” asked Stern.

  “I seem to remember that Father Rolf planned to go and live with his sister…Yes, he told me she was more or less the same age as him, and she’d never married.”

  The priest seemed pleased to have made a contribution to the investigation at last. And he had managed to offer the help he had previously denied.

  “I’ll talk to the Curia, if you like. Thinking about it, it shouldn’t be too hard to find out where Father Rolf is. And I’ll probably think of something else.”

  The young priest seemed calmer now.

  Then Goran said, “It would be a great help to us, and we would avoid a lot of pointless publicity about what’s happening here. I don’t think the Curia would mind.”

  “I think you’re right,” Father Timothy agreed.

  When the priest left the camper, Sarah Rosa turned back to Goran, visibly vexed.

  “If we’re all agreed that Billy’s death wasn’t an accident, why don’t we put out a warrant for Father Rolf? He clearly has something to do with it!”

  “Yes, but he wasn’t responsible for the murder of the little boy.”

  Mila was struck by the word “murder,” which Goran was uttering for the first time. Billy’s fractures might be indications of a violent death, but there was no proof that anyone else had been involved.

  “And how can you be so sure that the priest isn’t guilty?” Rosa went on.

  “Father Rolf only covered the thing up. He came up with the story of Billy’s meningitis, so that no one would risk delving any deeper for fear of infection. And then the outside world did the rest: no one cared about those orphans, you can see that too, can’t you?”

  “And the orphanage was about to close anyway,” Mila added.

  “Father Rolf is the only one who knows the truth, that’s why we have to question him. But I’m worried that if we put out a warrant…well, we still mightn’t find him. He’s old, and he might be determined to take this story to the grave.”

  “So, what do we do?” Boris was impatient. “Should we wait for the priest to get in touch?”

  “Certainly not,” replied the criminologist. Then he returned his attention to the plan of the orphanage that Stern had brought back from the local land registry office. He pointed out an area to Boris and Rosa.

  “You have to go to the eastern pavilion. You see? The archive is there, with all the files on the boys who lived in the orphanage until it closed. Obviously we’re only interested in the last sixteen children.”

  Goran handed them the group photograph with Billy Moore’s smile. He turned it over: on the other side were the signatures of all the little boys in the picture.

  “Compare the names: we need the one with the only missing file…”

  Boris and Rosa looked at him, puzzled.

  “How do you know there’s one missing?”

  “Because Billy Moore was killed by one of his schoolmates.”

  In the same group picture that showed Billy Moore smiling, Ronald Dermis was standing third from the left. He was eight. That meant he must have been the institution’s mascot before Billy arrived.

  For a child, jealousy can be reason enough for wishing someone dead.

  When he left the orphanage with the others, the bureaucracy had lost track of him. Had he been adopted? Unlikely. He might have ended up in a care home. It was a mystery. Almost certainly, the hand of Father Rolf was behind that gap in information.

  It was absolutely necessary to find the priest.

  Father Timothy had assur
ed them that the Curia was taking care of it: “His sister died, and he asked to be reduced to lay status.” So he had left the priesthood. Perhaps it had been his sense of guilt for covering up a murder, perhaps it was the unbearable discovery that evil can be very well concealed even by the appearance of a child.

  The team was troubled by this and other hypotheses.

  “I still haven’t worked out whether I should launch the manhunt of the century, or wait for you to deign to come up with some kind of reply!”

  The plasterboard walls of Roche’s office trembled at the sound of his voice. But the chief inspector’s anxiety bounced off Goran’s stubborn calm.

  “They’re chasing me for the story of the sixth child: they say we’re not doing enough!”

  “We won’t find her until Albert decides to give us a clue. I’ve just had Krepp on the line, he says that crime scene’s clean as well.”

  “At least tell me if you think Ronald Dermis and Albert are the same person!”

  “We’ve already made the same mistake with Alexander Bermann. For the time being I wouldn’t rush to hasty conclusions.”

  Roche wasn’t used to taking advice about how to conduct his cases. But this time he accepted it.

  “But we can’t sit here waiting for that psychopath to take us wherever he wants to. We’ll never save the girl that way! Especially given that she’s still alive.”

  “There’s only one person who can save her. And that’s him.”

  “Do you really expect him to hand her over, just like that?”

  “I’m just saying that at a certain point he might want to make a mistake himself.”

  “Damn it to hell! Do you think I can live on hope while those people out there just want me to look ridiculous? I need results, Dr. Gavila!”

  Goran was used to Roche’s temper tantrums. They weren’t directed at him in particular. The chief inspector had them with the whole world. It was a side effect of the job: when you’re too high up, there’s always someone wanting to drag you down.

  “I’ve taken a ton of crap over the last little while, and it wasn’t all directed at me.”