Sanctuary

by Luca D'Andrea

  And even though this was madness – Voter Luis used to say there were no wild pigs or boars in the area (but had Voter Luis really uttered those words? Sometimes Keller’s mind was such a muddle . . .) – he discovered that the Voice had not lied to him.

  His faith was rewarded.

  Lissy returned, her body scratched, her trotters covered in mud, her teeth chipped as though she had fought a pack of wolves – but pregnant. Three months, three weeks and three days later, as is the norm for pigs, Lissy gave birth to a female. Another Lissy. With more spots, larger, hungrier. And more intelligent. Because, the Voice explained, she was more like her father than her mother.

  When the old Lissy died, Keller lit a funeral pyre with blue flames in her honour and, barely holding back his tears, read out a passage from his Bible: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but Lissy abideth forever.”

  From that day on, the Voice was always with him. It would urge him not to lose heart whenever anguish seemed about to crush him, and would make him laugh whenever he needed to. It would dictate new, dazzling versions of the Scriptures that filled him with inspiration. It would suggest ways to make the winters pass more quickly, carving wooden toys or putting together increasingly imaginative Vulpendingen. One day, as Keller was feeding Lissy her slop, the Voice made a request that alarmed him. His initial reaction was to shake his head and try to ignore it. In other words, he convinced himself he had misheard.

  In time, the Voice grew more insistent and, fearful of such vehemence, Keller accused it of mocking him. It should stop now. This constant buzzing prevented him from concentrating on his duties as a Bau’r. The Voice burst out laughing. And it began to pester him, night and day, relentlessly.

  The Voice changed.

  It became deep, hard as flint stones scratching against one another, making his teeth vibrate and his gums bleed. Keller resorted to every available means to silence it. This was impossible, he discovered. Even blocking his ears with beeswax or eating handfuls of poppy seeds was no use.

  Screaming like the Wehen, the Voice told him that he had to do it for Lissy, that it was his duty to obey, because he was both a man of faith and a murderer seeking redemption. Or had he forgotten that? Keller’s hands were stained with Lissy’s blood. The damnation of hellfire awaited him. Or did he doubt the Word of the Bible as well as the Voice? Did he not understand that Lissy was hungry and that it was up to him to feed her?

  Having asked this final question, the Voice disappeared. At first, it was a welcome relief. Simon was able to sleep and rest. He looked after the maso, Lissy and the other pigs in the sty. He carved more animals and went hunting.

  But without the Voice, the maso was an empty shell, the mountain a desolate heap of stones. He began to find the solitude oppressive. The fire in the Stube reminded him of Lissy’s face. No, he thought, the Voice was not a consequence of madness. The Voice was mystery and miracle. And he was a man of faith. He believed in miracles and mysteries. He stopped doubting, and the Voice returned.

  The solitude vanished.

  Keller complied with the Voice’s request. Not just once, but always. He did whatever the Voice asked whenever it commanded him. He began to kill. Killing made him feel one step closer to redemption.

  But that was not the reason he killed.

  He killed in order to satisfy Lissy’s hunger. And Lissy was always hungry.

  49

  By a strange quirk of fate, it was Herr Wegener who had given him Carbone’s number.

  Carbone told him that, in among the villa’s telephone records, he had found the number of a gynaecologist in Merano. And putting two and two together . . .

  At first, when the Trusted Man explained the reason for his visit, the gynaecologist (a white moustache, a bald pate between two tufts of curly hair) lost his temper.

  How dare he waste his time?

  The Trusted Man made him change his mind. It did not take long.

  The doctor remembered Marlene, who, as far as he knew, was called Brigitte Egger, since that was how she had introduced herself to him. A very beautiful woman, and very happily pregnant. She had even confided over the telephone the name she had decided to give the baby.

  “Don’t tell me. Klaus.”

  “How did you know?”

  “The trout in the Passer told me. Do you have anything else for me, Doctor?”

  He had to insist a little, but not too much.

  The doctor handed him Marlene’s file. The state of her pregnancy (everything normal) and her destination (a clinic in Switzerland).

  Pregnancy. Theft. Escape. Clinic.

  Marlene had bought herself a safe haven, the Trusted Man thought. Not a bad idea. Nobody knew she was pregnant. Nobody would think of looking for her in a clinic.

  Having left the surgery, the Trusted Man made a call. Pretending to be the gynaecologist, he asked after his patient. He used the name Marlene had used to sign the doctor’s papers: Brigitte Egger.

  The Trusted Man had no idea who this Brigitte was – a relative? a friend? a made-up name? – but took note of it for any future investigations. Best not to neglect anything.

  Frau Egger had not shown up at the clinic yet. Perhaps something had happened to her? The Trusted Man reassured the secretary that everything was alright.

  He said goodbye, wiped the receiver with a silk handkerchief and hung up.

  Something had happened. But what?

  There were still a few pieces of the puzzle missing. For example, the gynaecologist had sworn over and over again that he had nothing to do with the clinic. Even Carbone had never heard of it. So either it was chance (except that the Trusted Man had long ago stopped believing in chance) or Marlene had an accomplice. Or, if not exactly an accomplice, then someone with enough money and connections to help her one way or another.

  Who and why?

  Finding out would take him a step closer to his target. And so he set off for Switzerland.

  Most of the roads had been cleared, but snow ploughs were still operating on some stretches, and the Trusted Man had to wait, listening to dull music on the car radio. It was a tiring journey, from Merano to Val Venosta, the Reschen Pass, the Swiss cantons.

  He stopped just once, to refill, and chatted with the petrol station attendant about the rapid rise in the cost of petrol.

  “It’s because of the financial crisis.”

  “They say it’ll be over soon.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  Nobody believed it. They had a good laugh.

  When the Trusted Man took out his stuffed wallet, the attendant stopped being polite.

  Despite exceeding the speed limit – something he rarely did – the Trusted Man got to the clinic just seconds before it closed its doors to visitors. He politely persuaded the woman at reception to let him in. He only needed a few minutes. It was an important matter.

  “Extremely important, you understand?”

  Now, sitting and leafing through a magazine, he was doing just what would have been expected from a man like him: discreetly checking the watch that protruded from his sleeve cuff as he turned the pages.

  He was not reading the articles but admiring the photographs, fascinated by how casually they would skip from the picture of a little girl burned by napalm to an advertisement for a personal hygiene product. Then he grew bored with this game and passed the time thinking about does and vixens.

  Wegener, Carbone and even Gabriel the dress designer had formed the wrong opinion of Marlene. All described her in more or less the same terms: a frightened doe who had gone crazy. Now that he possessed more information, he had a more precise portrait of Marlene.

  This was not the whim of a young woman who had suddenly come into money, but the actions of a mother trying to protect her own cub (from what? from Wegener’s money?). The more the Trusted Man thought about it, the more convinced he was that their description had been misleading.

  Marlene was no doe. She was a vixen.
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  And hunting a vixen required cunning, time and patience. Vixens have sharp teeth and are far-sighted. They can smell danger several kilometres away.

  Hunting a vixen was—

  “I’m Doctor Zimmerman.”

  The Trusted Man stood up and shook hands with a short man wearing tortoiseshell glasses that made him look like a know-it-all sixth-form pupil.

  “If you’d like to follow me . . .”

  The doctor’s office had walnut panelling and smelled of pipe tobacco. The Trusted Man wasted no time. He placed Marlene’s file, which he had purloined from the gynaecologist with the moustache, on the desk.

  “Your wife?”

  “I only want to know who paid for the room.”

  “Didn’t she?”

  “Just tell me who paid. It wasn’t Frau . . . Egger, since at the time the booking was made, it would have been – how shall I put it? – impossible for her to raise the required sum without prompting questions.”

  Zimmerman crossed his legs and tapped his front teeth with his index finger. “Are you from the police? Is the young lady a criminal?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a relative?”

  “No.”

  The doctor got to his feet. “In that case, you’re wasting my time and yours. Our clinic is well known for its privacy rules. Have a good evening.”

  Had he not been hunting a vixen, the Trusted Man would have tried to reason with this skinny man with the thick, myopic lenses, but he was tired, and Dr. Zimmerman’s tone was getting on his nerves.

  He took a pair of steel pliers from his leather bag. Not a tureen of soup or a portion of spicy chicken wings – one of his specialities – but a pair of steel pliers and a plastic bag containing ice and three fingers: index, middle and ring finger. The ice had partly melted and pink-coloured water had formed at the bottom of the bag.

  “I was sorry to cut them off. They belonged to an artist. Art is one of the few things of any value in this world. I see you have a beautiful reproduction of “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Picasso is too violent for my taste, but I suppose you must have chosen it because you, too, like art. Don’t you think there’s something unique about artists?”

  The colour had drained from Zimmerman’s face. “You . . .” he began, then stopped when he saw the Trusted Man start to screw the silencer onto the barrel of his gun.

  “Unfortunately,” the Trusted Man continued, “you are not an artist. For all your fine qualifications, you’re not even a real doctor. Doctors are useful. But you’re not an artist or a doctor. What do you do for a living? You administer. You’re a bureaucrat.”

  The Trusted Man pointed the gun at the little man’s head. Then he lowered the barrel to his stomach.

  “How many bureaucrats are there in the world?”

  50

  Herr Wegener’s shoes were lined, warm and elegant. He had had them made to measure by a craftsman in Florence, who had put his mark on them with a red-hot iron, just like in the Middle Ages. He had paid an arm and a leg for them. Inside them, his feet were dry.

  Wegener was no longer skin and bones. He was a fully fledged man. Over forty-two years old, not twelve. And he was about to become a father. The thought of it made him dizzy. Father: it was like the beginning of a prayer the words of which he had forgotten years ago.

  And yet, sitting in the silver-haired lawyer’s office, he felt as if he were still twelve, still barefoot, hungry and alone. And, what was worse, still defenceless.

  “The Trusted Man can’t be stopped.”

  “Marlene is . . .”

  “Nobody can stop him.”

  “. . . pregnant.”

  The lawyer looked away. He plucked a cigarette from the drawer and brought a large, bull-shaped lighter close to it, the flame emerging from the animal’s nostrils. “I understand,” was his only comment.

  “She’s expecting a child. My son. If he kills her—”

  “The Trusted Man—”

  “—he’d be killing my son.”

  “—has never made a mistake. Never.”

  Wegener would not give up. “There must be a way of communicating with him.”

  “The voicemail.”

  “Apart from the voicemail.”

  The lawyer was about to respond, but Wegener continued, swallowing his words, hunched forward, his hands clutching the edge of the desk like a castaway.

  “The contract doesn’t necessarily have to be annulled. That’s not what I’m asking. The contract will remain valid. He just has to find her and hand her over to me. Postpone the date of her death. Wait until she gives birth, then kill her. If it’s a question of money, I’ll pay.”

  Irritably, the lawyer crushed his barely smoked cigarette in a crystal ashtray. “Even the Consortium can’t stop the Trusted Man. You don’t understand. The man won’t stop until he’s fulfilled the contract. That’s the way he works.”

  “I’m just asking him to make an exception . . .”

  The lawyer pushed a button, and one of his bodyguards looked into the room.

  “Trust me, Wegener, it’s for the best. This child” – he gave him a pitying look – “wouldn’t be any good for a man like you. It would distract you from your duties.”

  “My—”

  “Remember the reason you’re still alive.”

  Wegener did not offer his hand, but stood up and left.

  As soon as Georg saw him come out, he started the engine of the Mercedes.

  Wegener did not speak once during the ride. As soon as he got back to the villa on the Passer, he shut himself in his bedroom, took the 9-mm automatic out of his belt and put it down on the mattress. Then he threw open the window and let the cold air rush into the room. He sat down on the edge of the bed and started thinking.

  About an empty chair and a bowl of soup, a long, long time ago.

  51

  Too many, Zimmerman had to admit. Truly, too many. The world was full of bureaucrats. Half the passengers on any scheduled bus spent half their lives dealing with official stamps, permits needing signatures, paperwork. The other half consisted of people who would have been only too happy to hang them from the first available tree.

  It did not take Zimmerman long to work out how much he was worth in the grand scheme of things. It’s easy to replace a bureaucrat, even one as scrupulous as he was.

  And so he immediately came up with a name. The question had hardly been uttered when there it was. Zimmerman even wrote it down on a sheet of letter-headed paper, in block capitals to be sure it was legible.

  Lorenz Gasser.

  The man who had paid Marlene’s expenses in advance. The Vixen’s accomplice. A name that did not mean anything to the Trusted Man.

  This is going to take time, he thought as he inserted the tokens into the payphone, one by one.

  There were other files in his doctor’s bag – the results of the last few days’ research and of Carbone’s tips – that needed careful study. They were bound to yield something. Or else he would find another way.

  That was how it always was.

  There were three messages on the voicemail. All of them were from Herr Wegener, begging him to annul the contract or suspend the operation until after his son was born.

  The last message was just a long, exhausting sigh that ended with a sob cut off by the sound of the line being disconnected.

  The Trusted Man cleaned the receiver with his silk handkerchief, hung up and left the telephone box.

  The air was heavy with damp. It was probably going to start snowing again.

  Lorenz Gasser, he thought.

  52

  They had always been poor, since before the war.

  The only luxury item in the Wegner (no e) household was a chair, a wedding present carved by one of the best craftsmen in the Passeier Valley. There were flower patterns on the back, and at the top a heart had been carved out, through which, when his father was sitting there, weary but cheerful, young Robert could see his shirt.


  But the luxury lay not in the carving, but in the upholstery, which was red.

  That chair, at the head of the table, was the only one they owned that was upholstered. His mother was truly obsessed with the seat cushion in its red covering. Once, over dinner, his father had suddenly burst out laughing (Herr Wegener couldn’t remember why, only that his father had thrown back his head, a full glass of wine in his hand, spilling some of it on his shirt) and some spots of wine had ended up on the red material. His mother had gone crazy.

  Literally.

  She had screamed, her eyes bursting from their sockets, practically throwing her husband off the chair, pushing him and hitting him with the cloth she had started using to rub and rub, terrified because, as is well known, wine stains are hard to remove.

  Thinking back on it, it was the only time he had ever seen her truly angry.

  From then on, that otherwise quiet, shy woman had made her husband put a white cloth on the seat cushion whenever he sat down. It had made both father and son snigger, but in secret.

  There was nothing funny about the cushion on the luxury chair. They both knew it, and that was why it was impossible to restrain their hilarity. Young Robert enjoyed this complicity. Sometimes, when his mother had her back turned, his father would give him a little smile and pretend to tip the contents of his glass over himself, and young Robert could barely stop himself from laughing. He shared a secret with his father.

  Then war broke out, and the war changed everything.

  Now, years later, Wegener understood why his mother had been so obsessed with that chair and its wretched upholstery. That cushion was a symbol, the symbol of something which even they, for all their poverty, had been able to obtain.

  Well-being.

  It must not be damaged, it must not get dirty. Not a breadcrumb, not a single spot. Because – although this was something Wegener understood only many years later – the red cushion represented the hope of a better future.

  This was what Wegener was thinking about, with his head in his hands and the automatic lying on the bed.