“It means that the universities had started denying him funds.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Grünwald’s academic credibility began to come crashing down in ’83. There were many attacks from the universities.”
“Innsbruck?”
“Innsbruck, Vienna. Two papers from the University of Berlin and one from the University of Verona.”
“How come?”
“The important question is: who was Oscar Grünwald really?”
“A geologist and paleontologist,” I replied.
“Correct, but reductive. Oscar Grünwald,” Mike’s voice had taken on the boring cadence of someone who was reading, and I did my best to transcribe everything he said, “was born in Carinthia, in a suburb of Kla—”
“Klagenfurt.”
“That one. October 18, 1949.”
“In ’85, he was thirty-six years old.”
“Thirty-six years old, with two degrees and a research doctorate. Paleobiology. He was good, let me tell you.”
“Good?”
“A genius, in my opinion.”
“What do you know about geology and paleontology?”
“I’ve learned a lot in the last couple of days. The real question is: how much do you know?”
“I know geology’s the study of rocks and paleontology’s the study of fossils.”
“Have you ever heard of the Permian?”
“It’s the period of the great extinctions, isn’t it?”
And it was also the deepest stratum of the Bletterbach. The pieces of the puzzle were starting to come together.
“The Permian was roughly between 250 and 290 million years ago. In that period, there was the greatest mass extinction in the history of the world. Almost half of all living species disappeared. Half, Salinger. Doesn’t that send a shiver down your spine?”
“Yeah, a big one.”
“There are various theories about what happened. An increase in cosmic radiation, which means they ended up like hamburgers in a huge microwave, a decrease in the productivity of the seas, an inversion of the magnetic poles, an increase in the salt level of the oceans, a decrease in oxygen, an increase in hydrogen sulfide in the atmosphere caused by bacteria. Then there’s my favorite, the one that everybody knows.”
“The asteroid?”
“A huge, wonderful, apocalyptic bowling ball that hit the planet and almost split it down the middle. Hollywood to the nth degree. And without any body doubles, partner. But Grünwald soon got tired of these studies.”
“Why? Did you manage to find out?”
“The chronic lack of funds that’s afflicted big brains like him since time immemorial. Grünwald wasn’t the kind to sit still. He wasn’t content with formulating theories.”
“He wanted proof.”
“Except that in paleontology, finding proof is a little bit expensive. Nobody gave him enough money to organize his research trips. I know I shouldn’t say this, given that he’s a guy I don’t even know, but I quite like him. Who doesn’t like a madman? Except he should have been a screenwriter, not a scientist, believe me.”
“Why?”
“All those who study the Permian ask themselves: ball of fire or mega earthquake? Farting micro-organisms or volcanoes in heat? But Grünwald asked himself a much more interesting question. Why did some survive and others not? Genetics? Luck? And so we arrive at the theory of ecological niches. That’s the theory that brought about his downfall.”
“What the hell are they?”
“Physical places affected by the apocalyptic conditions of the Permian but in a version that was kind of softer, allowing the species living there to escape the cataclysm. They slaughtered him.”
“How do you mean?”
“Grünwald’s theory was that there might still be places today where it was plausible that biological specimens that didn’t evolve but survived the great mass extinctions were still alive.”
“Didn’t evolve but survived? And still alive today? Jurassic Park without all that stuff about the toads and the DNA?”
“Exactly.” I could see him shaking his head sadly. “He had a research post in Innsbruck and they fired him. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with him. No more papers, no more books.”
“How did he earn a living?”
“As a geologist. He organized trips to the Andes, where he had a few local contacts. He worked as a consultant, and even earned a bit of money as a tourist guide or a street vendor. He got by on what he could find. Then, in ’85, he vanishes.”
“Didn’t anybody look for him?”
“Not as far as I know,” was Mike’s curt reply.
I thought about Brigitte. About her album of Evi’s triumphs.
“Evi Baumgartner,” I muttered.
“Pardon me?”
“Evi Baumgartner,” I repeated, staring at a bird of prey, perhaps a falcon, drawing slow spirals in that day’s clear sky.
“Who’s she?”
“If you look at the papers that demolished Grünwald’s academic credibility, I’m sure you’ll find her name.”
And a motive.
I heard Mike tapping on the keyboard of his computer.
“Nothing.”
I’d been a fool. “Try Tognon,” I said, remembering that this was Evi’s official surname.
Another burst of gunfire.
“Bingo. University of Innsbruck. And not one of the papers that demolished our friend’s credibility, but the papers that all the others drew on. Who is this Evi?”
“One of the victims of the Bletterbach.”
“What did you say?”
“I said she was one of the victims of the Bletterbach. The story I’m trying to reconstruct.”
Mike muttered something. More noise of fingers moving frenetically over the keyboard.
“Is that written with c and h at the end?”
“Bletterbach? Yes, why?”
Mike imitated the baritone voice-overs on film trailers. “A major twist, partner.”
“Will you stop playing the fool?”
“I’m not playing the fool. You’re bang in the middle of an ecological niche.”
“Impossible. That kind of stuff is science fiction.”
“Oh, yes?” Mike said. “Let me give you a short rundown on our friend Grünwald’s book. Alto Adige has its own microclimate. In theory, it should have a continental climate, but it’s in the middle of the Alps. So no continental climate. But since it has the Alps, then the climate should be Alpine, right? Wrong. The Alps protect it from winds from the north, the Alps protect it from the influence of the Mediterranean, but the Alps don’t dictate the climate of the region, they create a different one: a microclimate. Which, as a point of information, Grünwald considered the primary condition for the development of an ecological niche. And now hold on to your hat, because this is really funny.”
“Shoot.”
“In Alto Adige, there are varieties of ginkgo plants that became extinct in Europe hundreds of thousands of years ago. Yet there they are, under the Dolomites, making nonsense of our scientific beliefs, and they’re in good company. For example, the nautilus. In theory, it became extinct 400 million years ago. In Alto Adige, they’ve found fossil remains going back to 200 million years ago.”
“Are you telling me that while the nautilus was extinct in the rest of the world, here it was still swimming around for another 200 million years? Science fiction, Mike.”
“No, ecological niches. I’ve checked this out.”
“But—”
“Listen. In one of Grünwald’s last papers, there was a mention of the Bletterbach. In a magazine halfway between The X-Files and Doctor Who. You know, the kind that predict the end of the world every two weeks.”
My heart beat faster. “And?”
“Grünwald had identified the Bletterbach as one of the possible sites in which living biological material that had survived the Permian could be found. A very specific sp
ecies. And I’m not talking about a little fish like Nemo, dammit. I’ll send you a scan.”
I waited until my cell phone emitted a beep.
I looked.
And sat there staring at the screen open mouthed.
A kind of scorpion with a mermaid’s tail. An elongated body covered with a shell that made it look like a lobster. I had never seen anything so hostile.
That was the word that came into my mind at that moment: “hostile.”
Seven letters.
“What the hell is it?”
“Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae. Forgive my pronunciation.”
I tried to imagine the kind of world that could have hosted a creature like that. A planet swarming with monsters devoid of any emotion beyond an urge to hunt, a world that God decided one fine day to sweep away.
Mike continued. “A gigantic ancestor of our modern spiders, or rather, of scorpions.” Something lit up in my brain, but when I tried to grab it, it had already faded. “An arthropod. But a marine arthropod. It lived in water. It was two and a half meters long. The claws were 50 centimeters long.”
“And Grünwald was convinced that one of these things was still alive and living in the Bletterbach?”
“Under the Bletterbach. He talks about underground caves and lakes. That thing lived in fresh water. And it was a predator it was best to keep well away from.”
I almost didn’t hear this last comment of Mike’s. Siebenhoch, I was thinking.
Its old name was Siebenhöhlen. Seven caves.
“Are you still there, Salinger?”
“Do you have pen and paper?” I croaked. “There’s someone else I’d like you to investigate: Hermann Kagol. He’s a local businessman.”
“When did he die?”
“I talked to him yesterday. I want to know everything you can find out about him. Concentrate in particular on what he’s worth.”
“Is he rich?”
“Stinking rich.”
“But what’s this guy got to do with Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae and Grünwald?”
“Thanks, Mike.”
* * *
The interior of the land registry in Bolzano was pleasantly lit and very modern. Luckily for me, the staff were very kind, even when I tried to explain what I needed.
I had to wait half an hour, which I spent trying to get what Mike had discovered about Grünwald into some kind of perspective. The man had certainly had some weird theories. Things better suited to a movie than to the stuffy world of academia.
I realized that Grünwald was the only protagonist of this story I didn’t have a photograph of. I imagined him as a kind of mad scientist, dressed like a mixture of Indiana Jones and a nineteenth-century bureaucrat, only much more awkward. I don’t know why, given that this was a man who had conducted research in the Andes, but I couldn’t see him coping with a steep rock face: I saw him more as a guy who tripped over his own feet, maybe with a bow tie around his neck.
Clearly, Grünwald had been a man obsessed with his work. He had sacrificed everything for his theories. Mike hadn’t mentioned any wife or girlfriend. The fact that he had vanished from one day to the next without anybody becoming suspicious suggested a social life that was close to non-existent. A lone wolf with one sole purpose. Finding the ecological niches and thereby redeeming his lost honor.
I shook my head in bewilderment.
Obsessed enough to kill the woman who had destroyed his career? Maybe. What was the meaning of that telegram? Had Evi wanted to go down into the caves under the Bletterbach to refute Grünwald’s theories once again, and had Grünwald been unable to bear yet another humiliation?
Maybe the sweet Evi had actually been a bitch, blinded by her rapid rise in the academic world and eager to confirm how ridiculous Grünwald’s theories were, just to show off to the big shots at the university?
I couldn’t see her like that, not with those limpid eyes and with everything I’d been told about her. On the other hand, I told myself as I paced back and forth along the corridor of the land registry, people always speak well of the dead.
There was another possibility.
Maybe Evi, who loved the Bletterbach so much and knew it better than anybody else, had had second thoughts. Maybe she had realized that Grünwald’s theories about ecological niches weren’t so crazy after all and had decided to explore the caves under the Bletterbach, hoping to find evidence that would restore Grünwald’s academic credibility, which she had helped to demolish.
It was certainly a possibility.
But giant scorpions from the Permian?
Come on, now.
And yet . . .
I had a fleeting vision. The photographs Max had shown me, the ones taken at the scene of the crime. The amputations. The twisted, broken arms.
The wounds.
The decapitation of Evi.
Could those horrible mutilations have been caused by the half-meter-long claws of the Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae? What if . . .
A voice brought me back to reality.
The assistant who led me to a kind of reading room with a very high ceiling had a beard that tumbled down over his shirt and eyes concealed behind big glasses. He pointed me to an ugly but functional metal desk on which lay several piles of folders.
“Good luck.”
I sat down, making my ribs creak. I sighed. And started reading.
* * *
This is what I discovered: the Bletterbach Visitors’ Center was opened on September 8, 1990. The work had gone well and without dis-ruption.
The design had been entrusted to a highly regarded Austrian architect, who in bringing the project to fruition had tried to “preserve the natural beauty of the location, while combining it with modern technology and functionality”—whatever that meant.
I didn’t find Evi’s report. It wasn’t there. Or rather, it was mentioned in the index to the file, but someone had taken it. And I knew perfectly well who that had been.
Nevertheless, increasingly puzzled, I checked the rest of the documentation from top to bottom.
One year after Evi’s report, in 1986, a geologist named Dr. Rossetti brought out a counter report, a much longer and more structured one, demonstrating—to cut a long story short—that the Visitors’ Center was a more than feasible project.
In particular, Dr. Rossetti suggested, “There is no risk of landslides, given that the upper stratum of the site is composed of granite materials that adapt well to the capacities of the structure presented for review by Kagol Construction.” Four cows transformed into an empire.
In ’88, there was a third report, compiled by an engineer named Pfauch, again favoring the construction of the Visitors’ Center. It was an exact copy of the one produced by Dr. Rossetti two years earlier. Strange, I told myself.
Something about the fact that two favorable reports had been presented within a couple of years of each other aroused my curiosity. I rushed to the municipal library.
I wanted to figure out the reason for all that effort.
* * *
By the time I got there, I was out of breath and starting to get a migraine. Not even half a kilo of aspirin could have got rid of the pain.
It didn’t stop me. What I had discovered at the land registry had been mouthwatering.
I filled in request forms, waited, discovered that my phone was out of battery, waited some more. At last I got down to work. More pages of my notebook, more notes.
For once, though, answers.
In ’86, a few months after signing off on the report in favor of Hermann Kagol’s project, Dr. Rossetti had been arrested. A nasty case of bribery.
You wanted to build a huge seventy-story hotel on a sandy beach, a place where sea turtles reproduced? All you needed was a few tens of millions of lire and Dr. Rossetti was the man who would do what you wanted.
Rossetti’s arrest must have put a spoke in the wheels of Kagol Construction, and so Hermann, finding himself in a difficult situation financially, had had to turn to
another expert, the engineer Andreas Pfauch.
I couldn’t find any stain on this man’s résumé, no bribes, no shady deals, but I felt justified in asking myself a question.
When he produced this crucial final report, Pfauch was ninty-three years old. Could a near-centenarian really be considered reliable? Anything was possible, even that monsters with shells and claws lived in the Bletterbach, but the story reeked to me of fraud.
I said goodbye to the staff of the library and set off for home. Along the way I stopped at a pharmacy. My migraine had become a miniature Permian.
* * *
I don’t remember anything about the ride from Bolzano to Siebenhoch, only the darkness and the wild stream of my thoughts. I didn’t concentrate on the road, only on Hermann Kagol, the Visitors’ Center, and what had happened to those poor young people.
I had remembered a detail that Mike had discovered while investigating Grünwald, one that hadn’t struck me at the time. Now it assumed quite a whole other significance.
When Grünwald had been cut off from the academic world, cut off above all financially, how had he managed to earn his crust? Among other things, Mike had said, by doing consulting work. And what kind of consulting work could a geologist do?
Risk assessments.
Poor Grünwald. There were no monstrous creatures under the Bletterbach. The real monsters lived above the Bletterbach, they walked on two legs and didn’t have claws.
I even hazarded a guess that Evi, driven by a sense of guilt, had entrusted the report on the feasibility of the Visitors’ Center to Grünwald, to help him make ends meet, simply putting her own name to it. That way, working together, they had ruined Hermann’s plans. Which would also explain Grünwald’s mysterious disappearance so soon after the Bletterbach killings.
Mike would have said that this part of the theory was a bit shaky. Above all, I had no proof. But that was a detail I could remedy by digging further. The main point remained.
The report had cost Hermann a lot of money. Of that there was no doubt.
And then what had happened?
Hermann had waited for the right moment, and luckily for him the self-regenerating storm had provided an ideal cover for the murders. He had killed Kurt, Evi, and Markus. Then he had gotten rid of Oscar Grünwald.
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