The Whisperer

by Carrisi, Donato

  For that reason, Goran always had on the wall of his lecture theater a black-and-white picture of a child. A chubby, defenseless little man-cub. His students saw it every day and always grew fond of the picture. When—more or less towards the middle of term—a student summoned the courage to ask him who it was, he challenged them to guess. The answers were extremely varied and fantastical. And he was amused by their expressions when he revealed that the child was Adolf Hitler.

  After the war, the leader of the Nazi movement had become a monster in the collective imagination, and for years the countries that had emerged victorious from the conflict had been opposed to any other vision. That was why no one knew the photographs from the Führer’s childhood. A monster couldn’t have been a child, he couldn’t have had any feelings other than hatred, or a life like that of his contemporaries who would later become his victims.

  “For many, humanizing Hitler meant ‘explaining’ him in some way,” Goran would tell his class. “But society insists that extreme evil cannot be explained, it cannot be understood. Trying to do so means trying to find some kind of justification for it.”

  In the task force van, Boris suggested that the creator of the arm cemetery should be called “Albert,” after an old case. The idea was welcomed with a smile by everyone there. The decision was taken.

  From that point onwards, the members of the unit would refer to the murderer by that name. And day after day, Albert would acquire a face. A nose, two eyes, a life of his own. Everyone would imbue him with his own vision, rather than seeing him only as a fleeting shadow.

  “Albert, eh?” At the end of the meeting, Roche was still weighing up the name’s media value. He moved it around on his lips, he tried to catch its flavor. It could work.

  But there was something else that tormented the chief inspector. He mentioned it to Goran.

  “To tell you the truth, I agree with Boris. Holy Christ! I can’t force my men to pick up corpses while a crazed psychopath is making us look like a bunch of idiots!”

  Goran knew that when Roche talked about “his” men he was really referring to himself. He was the one afraid of coming away without a result. And he was always the one who feared that someone would talk about the inefficiency of the federal police if they couldn’t arrest the culprit.

  And then there was the question of arm number six.

  “I thought I wouldn’t disseminate the news of the existence of a sixth victim for the time being.”

  Goran was disconcerted. “But how will we find out who it is?”

  “I’ve thought of everything, don’t worry…”

  In the course of her career Mila Vasquez had solved eighty-nine missing-person cases. She had been awarded three medals and a great deal of adulation. She was considered to be an expert in her field, and was often called in to help, even by other forces.

  That morning’s operation, in which Pablo and Elisa had been freed at the same time, had been called a sensational success. Mila had said nothing. But it annoyed her. She would have liked to admit all her mistakes. Entering the brown house without waiting for reinforcements. Underestimating the environment and the possible traps it contained. She had put both herself and the hostages at risk by allowing the suspect to disarm her and aim a gun at the back of her neck. Finally, not preventing the music teacher’s suicide.

  But none of that had been mentioned by her superiors, who had instead stressed her merits as they were immortalized by the press in the ritual photographs.

  Mila never appeared in those snaps. The official reason was that she preferred to protect her own anonymity for future investigations. But the truth was that she hated having her photograph taken. She couldn’t even bear to see her image reflected in a mirror. Not because she wasn’t beautiful, quite the contrary. But at the age of thirty-two, hours and hours of training had stripped her of every trace of femininity. Every curve, every hint of softness. As if being a woman were an evil to be eradicated. Even though she often wore male clothes, she wasn’t masculine. There was simply nothing about her that suggested a sexual identity. And that was how she wanted to appear. Her clothes were anonymous. Jeans that weren’t too tight, worn trainers, leather jacket. They were clothes, and that was that. Their function was to keep her warm or cover her up. She didn’t waste time choosing them, she just bought them. Lots of them were identical. She didn’t care. That was how she wanted to be.

  Invisible among the invisible.

  Perhaps that was also how she was able to share the district changing room with the male officers.

  Mila had spent ten minutes staring at her open locker as she ran through all the day’s events. There was something she had to do, but her mind was elsewhere at the moment. Then a stabbing pain in her thigh brought her back to herself. The wound had opened up again; she had tried to staunch the blood with a tissue and sticky tape, but it hadn’t worked. The flaps of skin around the cut were too short and she hadn’t been able to do a good job with needle and thread. Perhaps this time she really would have to consult a doctor, but she didn’t want to go to hospital. Too many questions. She decided she would put on a tighter bandage, in the hope that the bleeding would stop, then try again with new stitches. But she would have to take an antibiotic to avoid contracting an infection. She would get a fake prescription from one of her contacts who gave her information every now and again about the new arrivals among the homeless at the railway station.

  Stations.

  It’s strange, thought Mila. While for the rest of the world they’re only a place you pass through, for some they’re a terminus. They stop there and they don’t leave again. Stations are a kind of ante-hell, where lost souls congregate in the hope that someone will come and collect them.

  An average of twenty to twenty-five individuals disappear every day. Mila knew the statistic very well. All of a sudden these people vanish without warning, without a suitcase. As if they had dissolved into nothing.

  Mila knew that most of them were misfits, people who lived off drugs and dodges, always ready to sully themselves with crime, individuals who were constantly in and out of jail. But there were also some—a strange minority—who at some point in their lives decided to vanish forever. Like the mother who went shopping at the supermarket and didn’t come home, or the son or brother who boarded a train never to reach their destination.

  Mila’s belief was that each one of us has a path. A path that leads to home, to our dear ones, to the things we are most bound to. Usually the path is always the same; we learn it as children, and each of us follows it for the whole of our lives. But sometimes the path breaks. Sometimes it starts again somewhere else. Or, after following a series of twists and turns, it returns to the point where it broke. Or else it remains hanging there.

  Sometimes, however, it is lost in the darkness.

  Mila knew that more than half of those who disappear come back and tell a story. Some, though, have nothing to tell, and resume their lives as before. Others are less fortunate; all that remains of them is a mute and silent body. Then there are the ones you never hear about again.

  Amongst those there is always a child.

  There are parents who would give their lives to know what happened. Where they went wrong. What act of negligence produced this silent drama. What happened to their little one. Who took their child, and why. There are those who question God, asking what sin they are being punished for. Those who torment themselves for the rest of their days in search of answers, or who die pursuing those questions. “Let me know at least if he is dead,” they say. Some end up wishing it was so, because they want only to weep. Their sole desire is not to give up, but to be able to stop hoping. Because hope kills more slowly.

  But Mila didn’t believe the story of “liberating truth.” She had learned that by heart, the first time she had found a missing person. She had felt it that afternoon, after bringing Pablo and Elisa home.

  For the little boy there were cries of joy in the district, festive car horns and
parades of cars.

  Not for Elisa; too much time had passed.

  After saving her, Mila had brought her to a specialist center where social workers had taken care of her. They had given her food and clean clothes. For some reason they’re always one or two sizes too big, Mila thought. Perhaps because the people they were meant for wasted away during those years of oblivion, and had been found just before they vanished away entirely.

  Elisa hadn’t said a word all that time. She had allowed herself to be looked after, accepting everything they did to her. Even when Mila had told her she would bring her home, she had said nothing.

  Staring at her locker, the young officer couldn’t help seeing in her mind the faces of Elisa Gomes’s parents when she had turned up with Elisa at their door. They were unprepared, and even a little embarrassed. Perhaps they thought she would be bringing them a ten-year-old child, and not that fully grown girl with whom they no longer had anything in common.

  Elisa had been an intelligent and very precocious little girl. She had started talking early. The first word she had said had been “May”—the name of her teddy bear. Her mother, however, would also remember her last one: “tomorrow,” the end of the phrase “see you tomorrow,” uttered in the doorway before she went off for a sleepover at a friend’s house. But that tomorrow had taken too long to arrive. And her yesterday was a very long day that showed no sign of coming to an end.

  In her parents’ minds Elisa had gone on living like a ten-year-old girl, with her bedroom full of dolls and Christmas presents piled up around the fireplace. This was immortalized like a photograph in their memory, imprisoned as if by a magic spell.

  And even though Elisa had returned, they would go on waiting for the little girl they had lost. Without ever finding peace.

  After a teary hug and a predictable emotional outburst, Mrs. Gomes had brought them in and offered them tea and biscuits. She had treated her daughter as you would treat a guest. Perhaps secretly hoping that she would leave at the end of the visit, letting her and her husband return to the sense of deprivation that they had come to find so comfortable.

  Mila had always compared sadness to an old cupboard that you’d like to get rid of but which ends up staying where it is, and after a while emanates a certain smell that fills the room. And over time you get used to it and you end up being a part of the smell yourself.

  Elisa had come back, and her parents would have liked to shake off their own mourning, and give back all the compassion bestowed on them during those years. Never again would they have a reason to be sad. How much courage would it take to tell the rest of the world about their new unhappiness at having a stranger walking around the house?

  After an hour of civilities, Mila had said good-bye, and she had felt as if she had noticed a plea for help on Elisa’s mother’s face. “Now what do I do?” the woman cried mutely, terrified about coming to terms with this new reality.

  Mila too had a truth to confront: the fact that Elisa Gomes had been found purely by chance. If her abductor had not felt a need to enlarge the “family” by taking Pablito as well, no one would ever have known what had happened. And Elisa would have remained closed away in that world created for her alone, and for the obsession of her jailer. First as a daughter, then as a faithful bride.

  Mila closed the locker on those thoughts. Forgetting, forgetting, she said to herself. That’s the only medicine.

  The district was emptying, and she felt like going home. She would have a shower, open a bottle of port and roast chestnuts on the hob. Then she would sit and look at the tree outside the sitting room window. And perhaps, with a bit of luck, she would go to sleep early on the sofa.

  But as she prepared to reward herself with her usual lonely evening, one of her colleagues appeared in the changing room.

  Sergeant Morexu wanted to see her.

  A gleaming layer of damp covered the streets that February evening. Goran got out of the taxi. He didn’t have a car, he didn’t have a driving license; he let someone else bother about taking him where he wanted to go. Not that he hadn’t tried driving, and been rather good at it. But it’s inadvisable for someone accustomed to losing himself in the depths of his own thoughts to sit behind the wheel. So Goran had given up.

  Having paid the driver, the second thing he did after setting his size nines on the pavement was to take from his jacket the third cigarette of the day. He lit it, took two drags and threw it away. It was a habit he’d formed when he had decided to give up smoking. A kind of compromise, to trick himself about his need for nicotine.

  As he stood there, he met his image reflected in a shop window. He stopped to contemplate himself for a few moments. The untidy beard that framed his increasingly weary face. His glasses and his tousled hair. He was aware that he didn’t take much care of himself. But the person who did had given up the role some time before.

  The striking thing about Goran—everyone said—was his long and mysterious silences.

  And his eyes, huge and piercing.

  It was nearly dinnertime. He slowly climbed the steps. He went into his apartment and listened. A few seconds passed and, when he got used to that new silence, he recognized the familiar, welcoming sound of Tommy, who was playing in his room. He went towards him, but only observed him from the door, without having the courage to interrupt what he was doing.

  Tommy was nine. He had brown hair, he liked the color red, basketball and ice cream, even in winter. He had a best friend, Bastian, with whom he organized fantastical “safaris” in the school garden. They were both in the scouts and that summer they were going to go camping together. Lately they hadn’t talked about anything else.

  Tommy looked incredibly like his mother, but he had one thing of his father’s.

  A pair of huge, piercing eyes.

  When he became aware of Goran’s presence, he turned and smiled at him. “It’s late,” he said.

  “I know. Sorry,” Goran said defensively. “Did Mrs. Runa leave a long time ago?”

  “She left to get her son half an hour ago.”

  Goran was annoyed: Mrs. Runa had been their nanny for some years now. She should have known he didn’t like Tommy being left at home alone. And this was one of those little inconveniences that sometimes made the business of getting on with life seem impossible. Goran was finding it difficult to resolve everything on his own; the only person who possessed that mysterious power had forgotten to leave him the book of magic spells before she left.

  He would have to talk to Mrs. Runa and perhaps even be a little harsh with her. He would tell her to stay in the evening until he came home. Tommy became aware of his thoughts, and his face darkened. So Goran suddenly tried to distract him, asking, “Are you hungry?”

  “I ate an apple and some crackers and I drank a glass of water.”

  Goran shook his head, amused. “That’s not a proper dinner.”

  “It was my snack. But now I’d like something else…”

  “Spaghetti?”

  Tommy clapped his hands at the suggestion. Goran stroked his head.

  They cooked the pasta together and set the table; each had his own tasks and carried them out without consulting the other. His son was a quick learner, and Goran was proud of him.

  The last few months hadn’t been easy for either of them.

  Their lives risked unraveling. Goran tried to hold the scraps together and make up for absence with order. Regular meals, precise timetables, established habits. From that point of view, nothing had changed from before, and that was reassuring for Tommy.

  They had learned together to live with that void, but when one of them wanted to talk about it, they talked about it.

  The only thing they never did anymore was say her name. Because that name had left their vocabulary. They used other ways, other expressions. It was strange. The man who was concerned about christening every serial killer he came across no longer knew what to call the one who had for a time been his wife, and had allowed his son to “dep
ersonalize” his mother. She could be a character in one of the fairy tales he read to him every evening.

  Tommy was the only anchor that still kept Goran bound to the world. Otherwise it would only have taken a moment to slide into the abyss that he explored every day out there.

  After dinner, Goran went and hid in his study. Tommy followed him. It was another ritual. Goran sat in his creaking old chair and his son lay belly down on the mat, resuming his imaginary dialogues.

  Goran studied his library. The books of criminology, criminal anthropology and legal medicine were beautifully displayed on the shelves, each one with its damask spine and gold blocking. Others were simpler, more modestly bound. They contained the answers. But the difficult thing—as he was always telling his pupils—was finding the questions. These books were full of disturbing photographs. Wounded bodies, tortured, martyred, burnt and dismembered; all rigorously sealed in shining pages, annotated with precise captions. Human life reduced to a cold study.

  That was why, until a short time before, Goran had not allowed Tommy to touch the books in the library. He worried that his curiosity would get the better of him, and that by opening one of those books he would discover how violent life could be. Once, however, Tommy had transgressed. He had found him lying, as he was now, flicking through one of those volumes. Goran still remembered him lingering over the picture of a young woman fished from a river, in the winter. She was naked, her skin purple, her eyes motionless.

  But Tommy didn’t seem at all disturbed, and rather than shouting at him, Goran had sat cross-legged beside him.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  Tommy had considered impassively for a long time. Then he had replied, diligently listing all the things he could see. The tapering hands, the hair in which frost had formed, the eyes lost in who knows what thoughts. In the end he had begun to fantasize about what she did for a living, about her friends and where she lived. Then Goran became aware that Tommy noticed everything in the photograph except one thing. Death.