“I’m sorry…”
Mila gave a start. The two officers were watching her from the door.
“There’s a locked door back here.”
Mila was about to order them to knock it down, when she heard Goran coming into the apartment and calling his son: “Tommy! Tommy!”
She walked towards him. “He isn’t in his room.”
Goran was desperate. “What do you mean he’s not there? Where is he?”
“There’s a locked room over there, did you know that?”
Confused and anxious, Goran didn’t understand. “What?”
“The room is locked…”
The criminologist froze…“Did you hear that?”
“What?”
“It’s him…”
Mila didn’t understand. Goran pushed her aside and headed quickly towards the study.
When he saw his son hiding under the mahogany desk, he couldn’t hold back his tears. He bent down under the table and hugged him tight.
“Dad, I was scared…”
“Yes, I know, my love. But it’s all over now.”
“Mrs. Runa went away. I woke up and she wasn’t there…”
“But I’m here now, isn’t that right?”
Mila was still standing in the doorway, and had put her pistol back in her holster, reassured by what Goran was saying as he crouched under the desk.
“I’ll bring you your breakfast now. What would you like to eat? Are doughnuts all right?”
Mila smiled. The terror was past.
Goran said again, “Come here, let me pick you up…”
Then she saw him coming out from under the desk, struggling to his feet.
But he wasn’t holding a little boy in his arms.
“I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. Her name is Mila…”
Goran hoped his son would like her. He was often a bit shy with people he didn’t know. Tommy didn’t say anything, he just pointed at her face. Then Goran looked at her more closely: she was crying.
The tears came unexpectedly, from who knows where. But this time the pain that had provoked them was not mechanical in origin. The wound that had opened up was not in her flesh.
“What’s up? What’s going on?” Goran asked her, acting as if he was really holding a human weight in his arms.
She didn’t know what to say. He didn’t seem to be pretending. Goran really thought he was holding his son in his arms.
The two officers who had joined her in the meantime watched them, stunned and ready to intervene. Mila nodded to them to stop where they were.
“Wait for me downstairs.”
“But we aren’t…”
“Go down and call the Department, tell them to send Agent Stern. If you hear a gunshot, don’t worry: it’ll have been me.”
The two policemen reluctantly obeyed.
“What’s happening, Mila?” Goran’s voice sounded helpless now. He seemed so scared of the truth that he couldn’t react in any way. “Why do you want Stern to come?”
Mila brought a finger to her lips, to keep him quiet.
Then she turned round and went back to the corridor. She headed towards the room with the closed door. She fired at the lock, shattering it into pieces, then pushed the door.
The room was dark, but they could still smell decomposition gases. There were two bodies in the big matrimonial bed.
One big, the other smaller.
The blackened skeletons, still wrapped in scraps of skin that fell like fabric, were melted in a single embrace.
Goran walked into the room. He smelled the smell. He saw the bodies.
“Oh, my God…” he said, unable to understand who those two corpses in his bedroom belonged to. He turned towards the corridor to keep Tommy from coming in…but he couldn’t see him.
He looked back at the bed. That little body. The truth descended on him with ruthless force. And then he remembered everything.
Mila found him by the window. He was looking outside. After days of snow and rain, the sun had started shining again.
“This was what Albert was trying to tell us with the fifth little girl.”
Goran said nothing.
Her breath was glass that shattered each time she tried to draw air into her lungs. “Why?” asked Mila, in a faint voice that broke in her throat.
“Because, after she left, she came back to this house. She hadn’t come back to stay. She wanted to take from me the only thing I had left to love. And he wanted to go with her…”
“Why?” Mila repeated, unable to hold back the tears that now flowed freely.
“One morning I woke up and heard Tommy’s voice calling to me from the kitchen. I went and saw him sitting in his usual place. He asked me for breakfast. And I was so happy that I forgot he wasn’t there…”
“Why?” she begged.
And this time he thought hard before answering: “Because I loved them.”
And before she could stop him, he opened the window and threw himself into the void.
41.
She had always wanted a pony.
She remembered tormenting her mother and father to let her have one. Without thinking that where they lived there wasn’t even a proper place to keep one. The courtyard at the back of the house was too small, and beside the garage there was barely a strip of land where her grandfather had his vegetable garden.
And yet she insisted. Her parents thought that sooner or later she would tire of that ridiculous whim, but every birthday and in every note to Father Christmas there was always that same request.
When Mila emerged from the belly of the monster to come home, at the end of her twenty-one days of prison and three months in hospital, she found a beautiful brown and white pony waiting for her in the courtyard.
Her wish had been granted. But she couldn’t enjoy it.
Her father had asked for favors, had persuaded his few acquaintances to get a good price together. Her family certainly wasn’t rolling in money, and they’d always had to scrimp and save at home. It was chiefly for economic reasons that she had stayed an only child.
Her parents couldn’t afford to give her a brother or sister, so they had bought a pony. And she wasn’t happy with it.
So many times she had imagined finally getting that present. She talked about it all the time. She imagined cuddling it, putting colored bows in its mane, brushing it properly. Sometimes she forced her cat to undergo similar treatment. Perhaps that was why Houdini hated her and stayed away from her.
There’s a reason why children like ponies so much. Because they never grow, they’re immortalized by the enchantment of childhood. An enviable condition.
In fact, after she was freed, all Mila wanted to do was grow up all at once, to put a distance between her and what had happened to her. And, with a bit of luck, she might even be able to forget.
But the pony, having absolutely no chance of growing, represented an unsustainable pact with time as far as she was concerned.
When she had been pulled, more dead than alive, from Steve’s stinking basement, a new life had begun for her. After three months in hospital to recover the use of her left arm, she had had to regain trust in the things of the world, not only with everyday life in her house, but also with the routine of her emotions.
Graciela, her very best friend, with whom she had celebrated the blood-sisters rite before disappearing into the void, now treated her strangely. She was no longer the one with whom she always rigorously shared the last chewing gum in the pack, the one she wasn’t embarrassed to pee in front of, the one she had “French-kissed” to practice for when the boys came. No, Graciela was different. She talked to her with a fixed smile on her face, and she was worried that if it went on like that her cheeks would soon start to hurt. She tried to be pretty and nice, and had even stopped teasing her, when until recently they’d called each other things like “stinky old cow” and “freckly slut.”
They had pricked their index fingers with a rusty nail so that
they would always be friends, because no boyfriend would ever come between them. And instead it had taken only a few months to dig a trench that no one could fill.
If you thought about it, that prick in her finger had been Mila’s first wound. But it had caused her more pain when it had healed completely.
“Stop treating me as if I’d just come back from the moon!” she had wanted to shout at everyone. And that expression on people’s faces! She couldn’t bear it. They turned their heads to one side and pursed their lips. Even at school, where she had never excelled, her mistakes were now indulgently tolerated.
She was tired of other people’s condescension. She felt as if she was in a black-and-white film, like the ones they showed on TV in the small hours, in which the earth’s inhabitants have been replaced by Martian clones, while she had been saved by staying in that strange lair.
Then there were two possibilities. Either the world really had changed, or after twenty-one days of gestation the monster had given birth to a new Mila.
No one around her mentioned what had happened. They let her live as if suspended in a bubble, as if she was made of glass and could explode into pieces at any moment. They didn’t understand that all she wanted was a bit of authenticity after all the illusions she had been subjected to.
Eleven months later Steve’s trial had begun.
She had waited for that moment for a long time. It was in all the newspapers, on all the television news programs which her parents wouldn’t let her see—to protect her, they said. But which she watched in secret as often as she could.
Both she and Linda had been supposed to testify. The public prosecutor counted much more on her, because her terrified fellow prisoner still defended her tormentor. She had started demanding that they call her Gloria again. The doctors said that Linda suffered from serious mental problems. So it was up to Mila to get Steve put away.
In the months after his arrest, Steve had done everything he could to appear mentally ill. He had made up ridiculous stories about hypothetical accomplices that he said he had only obeyed. He was trying to convince the world of the story that he had used with Linda. The one about Frankie, his evil associate. But that had been disproved as soon as a policeman had discovered it was only the name of the turtle he had had as a child.
But people had swallowed the story anyway. Steve was too “normal” to be a monster. Too much like themselves. The idea that there was someone else behind it all, someone who was still mysterious, a real monster, paradoxically reassured them.
Mila had arrived at the trial determined to put all the blame on Steve, paying him back for the harm he had done her. She would make him rot in jail, and for that reason she was also willing to play the part of the poor victim, which she had obstinately refused to perform until then.
She sat in the witness box, facing the cage in which Steve was held in handcuffs, planning to tell everything without ever taking her eyes off him.
But when she saw him—in that green shirt buttoned up to the neck, too big for him now that he was little more than skin and bone, with his hands trembling as he tried to take notes on a pad, with his hair that he had cut himself, which was now much longer on one side—she felt something she had never expected to feel: pity, but also rage for that wretch, precisely because she felt sorry for him.
That was the last time that Mila Vasquez felt empathy for anyone.
When she had discovered Goran’s secret, she had wept.
Why?
A memory lost somewhere inside her told her that those tears had been tears of empathy.
Suddenly a dam had burst somewhere, releasing a surprising range of emotions. Now she even thought she was aware of what other people felt.
Like the time Roche had come onto the scene and she had been aware of his intense feeling that his days were numbered, because his best man, the pinnacle of his task force, had given him the worst kind of poisoned bait.
Terence Mosca, on the other hand, had seemed caught between joy about his certain promotion, and unease about his motivation.
She was clearly aware of Stern’s perplexity as soon as she crossed the threshold of that house. And she immediately knew that he would roll up his sleeves to bring some order to this horrible case.
Empathy.
The only person for whom she could feel nothing was Goran.
She hadn’t fallen into Steve’s snare as Linda had: Mila had never believed in Frankie’s existence. Instead she had fallen for the illusion that a little boy, Tommy, lived in that house. She had heard about him. But she had also heard his father phoning his nanny to check that he was all right and to say good night to him. She had even believed she had seen him as Goran was putting him to bed. All things that she couldn’t forgive herself for, because they made her feel a fool.
Goran Gavila had survived a forty-foot fall, but now he was caught between life and death in an intensive care bed.
His house was guarded, but only on the outside. Only two people walked around inside. Special Agent Stern, who had put his resignation on ice for the time being, and Mila.
They weren’t looking for anything, just trying to put events in chronological order, to find answers to the only possible questions. At what point had a calm and balanced human being like Goran Gavila brought his murderous project to fruition? When had the impulse of revenge been unleashed? When had he begun to turn his rage into a plan?
Mila was in the study, and she heard Stern inspecting the adjacent room. He had carried out many searches in his career. It was unbelievable how revealing the details of someone’s life can be.
As she was exploring the refuge in which Gavila had formed his theories, she tried to remain detached, taking note of the details, the little habits that might accidentally reveal something important.
Goran kept his paper clips in a glass ashtray. He sharpened his pencils straight into the wastepaper basket. And he kept a picture frame on his desk, with no photograph in it.
That empty frame was a window on the abyss of the man Mila had thought she could love.
Mila looked away, for fear of being swallowed up by it. Then she opened a drawer in the side of the table. In it was a file. She picked it up, and put it on the ones she had already looked through. This one was different, because it seemed to deal with the last case that Gavila had dealt with before the story of the missing little girls had come to light.
Apart from the documents, it contained a series of audio cassettes.
She started reading the contents of the papers; she would listen to the tapes if it seemed worth it.
It contained the correspondence between the director of a prison—one Alphonse Bérenger—and the public prosecutor’s office. And it concerned the peculiar behavior of an inmate who was identified only by his prison number.
RK-357/9.
The subject had been found, months before, by two policemen, wandering at night, alone and naked, in the countryside. He had immediately refused to supply his personal information to the public officials. An examination of his fingerprints had revealed only that he had no criminal record. But a judge had sentenced him for obstructing the course of justice.
He was still serving his sentence.
Mila picked up one of the audio cassettes and looked at it, trying to imagine what it might contain. The label showed only a time and a date. Then she called Stern and quickly summed up what she had read.
“But listen to what the prison director writes…‘Since the moment he set foot in the penitentiary, inmate RK-357/9 has never shown any sign of indiscipline, and has always respected prison rules. The subject is of a solitary disposition and reluctant to socialize…Perhaps for that reason no one has been aware of one particular trait of his, which has only recently been noticed by one of our warders. Prisoner RK-357/9 wipes and rubs with a piece of felt each object with which he comes into contact, he collects all the hairs that he loses each day, he polishes to perfection the sink, the taps and the toilet each time he uses them.�
� What do you think?”
“Hm, I don’t know. My wife is obsessed with cleanliness.”
“But listen to how it goes on: ‘We are plainly dealing with someone with a mania for hygiene, or, more likely, an individual who wants at all costs to avoid leaving behind “organic material.” We therefore seriously suspect that prisoner RK-357/9 has committed a particularly serious crime and wants to prevent us from taking his DNA to identify him.’…See?”
Stern took the piece of paper from her hands and read it. “This was November…Didn’t they eventually learn something from his DNA?”
“It would seem that they couldn’t oblige him to take the test, or take it against his will, because that would have violated his constitutional freedoms…”
“So what did they do?”
“They tried to collect some skin or hair with surprise inspections in his cell.”
“Did they keep him in solitary?”
Mila ran through the papers for the passage where she had read something on the subject. She found it. “Here it is, the director writes: ‘So far the subject has been sharing his cell with another recluse, which has certainly helped him in his task of mixing up his own biological traces. Thus our first measure since discovering his habit has been to remove him from this social setting and put him in isolation.’”
“So, did they manage to take his DNA or not?”
“Apparently the prisoner was cleverer than they were, and always left his cell perfectly clean. But then they noticed that he was talking to himself, and put a bug in the cell to understand what he was saying…”
“And what did Dr. Gavila have to do with it?”
“They asked him his expert opinion, I don’t know…”
Stern thought for a moment. “Maybe we should listen to the cassettes.”
On a little table in the study there was an old tape recorder that Goran probably used to record his verbal notes. Mila passed one of the cassettes to Stern, who walked over to the machine, put it in and was about to press play.
The Whisperer Page 40