The Double
Page 30
Frantic now, he grabbed the door and attempted to wrench it open, but Thierry clamped him by the arm. It was insanity to dash out into the dark, but he had to get to the clinic fast. One of the chalets must be on fire. How had it happened? Was anyone hurt?
The moment they jerked to a stop, he yanked open the door and began to run. Smoke was thick in the air. On the other side of the bank of trees, flames crackled and spat. He tried ringing Ursula again, but dropped his phone when he caught sight of her running towards him, her hair streaming loose.
‘It’s Vidor. He’s in the tower.’
Gessen unlocked the gate, and she stumbled into him, gasping for breath. There was a fire in the library. He must have started it and then locked himself in the tower.
‘And the others?’
‘Everyone else is safe. I had Jean-Claude evacuate all the patients and staff to the swimming pavilion.’ She touched his hand. ‘Fernanda’s okay. It was her barking that alerted Security. She must have sensed something was wrong. Hélène’s taken her in.’
He grabbed her arm and together they ran up the path. As they burst out the other side of the trees and the manor house came into view, Gessen stopped short, then dropped to his knees. The whole building was in flames. Great sparks flew upwards to the starless sky. He raised his arm to shield his face from the heat.
‘We have to get him out.’ But the words died in his throat. Far too late to do anything. Vidor must have doused the place with the diesel fuel stored in the cellar for emergencies. As the heat grew and the inferno roared, the windows in the tower shattered and shards of glass rained to the ground. Flames leapt out, greedily licking the air. He sank into the snow.
‘Why did he do it?’ Gessen’s words were lost in the roar of the fire.
Revenge, retribution, annihilation? They would never know.
‘I sat with him in his room while he ate dinner,’ Ursula said. ‘He seemed subdued, but…’
The flames leapt higher and Gessen looked away.
‘He asked after Hélène,’ Ursula said, her voice catching in her throat, ‘and we spoke for a few minutes of trivial things.’ She started to babble, and he squeezed her hand. ‘Then he wished me a happy life. Before I left, he asked me to count the number of sandpipers in the painting on the wall. When I told him there were ten, he smiled. ‘Just as I thought,’ he said, before lying down on the bed and closing his eyes.’
Huddled next to him in the snow, she shivered. ‘What made him do it?’
Gessen shook his head. The man, a chimera of two psyches, who’d fought every attempt to parse his thoughts and character, would forever remain a mystery. Perhaps he could imagine no other recourse. Unmasked as an imposter, his life and career destroyed. Accused of one count of murder. Possibly responsible for two more. Trapped in a web of his own creation, Vidor had left no avenue for escape. Transforming himself back into Malik Sayid, a wounded young man, imprisoned in time, was impossible. The other option, moving forward in disgrace, stripped of his academic credentials and everything he’d worked for, meant a life sentence of ridicule and pain.
Unless… a disturbing thought came to him as the cinders rained down. Unless Vidor started the fire as a cover for his escape. No identifiable remains would be found in a conflagration of this magnitude.
Sheikh mat. The king is dead.
How simple it would be for the man to disappear into the void where no one would find him. The chance to start anew must have been too seductive to ignore. L’appel du vide. So easy to answer the call, and having consigned both Vidor and Malik to the flames, why not drag Gessen with them into the fire? After reducing to ash the life’s work of the man who’d destroyed him, he would rise from the flames like a phoenix and create a new life.
What better revenge than this, for daring to disturb the mysteries of the mind?
62
Zurich, Switzerland
21 May 2009
From the window of his office on the eastern edge of the city, Gessen looked up at the sound of a passing car. His new suite of treatment rooms was located on a quiet, tree-lined street with little traffic, though he had yet to get used to the sound of tyres on the macadam. The office was small, with just enough space for himself and an assistant, and a view of the distant mountains, so there was some consolation in that. He’d moved into the building a week ago, and rather than sleep in his office, he’d also rented a furnished flat nearby while he looked for something more permanent.
After the fire had razed much of the clinic to the ground – only the swimming pavilion and two of the chalets were left untouched – he had no other recourse but to transfer his remaining patients to another facility. Hélène was staying on in her home, fortunately spared from the fire, and had gladly offered to keep Fernanda with her until he was settled. He missed the dog to an absurd degree, even though he understood she was likely happier in familiar surroundings. She was getting on in years and the move to the city might be too much for her.
The insurance company were dragging their feet on paying the claim, having declared they were not legally obliged to pay since the fire had been ruled as arson. Gessen could take the company to court, but his lawyer said the fees would be costly and he would likely lose. Even if he were to win, he didn’t have the heart to rebuild in the same location. The view and isolation had been ideal for a certain kind of individual, but perhaps it was time to find other ways to help his patients heal from their troubles, while living in the world.
The lawsuit from Ismail’s father was settled out of court, and a great deal of money paid out by Gessen’s insurance company. A pointless exercise, he felt. All the money in the world wouldn’t bring Ismail back, nor ease his guilt and pain from the loss of such a vibrant young man. As for Hisham, another promising young student, and possibly one of Vidor’s victims, an email from Farzan Rahimi had informed Gessen of his fate.
During the spring thaw, a body had washed up on the shores of the Cam, several miles north of Cambridge. Forensic evidence revealed that it was Farzan’s friend Hisham, the student from the rival group in Vidor’s department, whose lab notebook was stolen. He’d been dead for several months, if not longer. Drowned, apparently, following a blow to the head. The man in Copenhagen, Ismail, Hisham. Possibly Vidor Sovàny. A quartet of death’s in Vidor’s wake. How many, Gessen wondered, had come before?
After he’d dealt with the authorities and provided support and job placements to the shell-shocked staff, Gessen, bewildered and exhausted himself, hadn’t known quite what to do. ‘Take some time away,’ Hélène had urged during the few days he’d stayed in her home and been too busy with the police and paperwork to grieve what he’d lost.
Uncertain of how to move on from the wreckage, he’d followed Hélène’s advice and made a pilgrimage to Jung’s former residence in Küsnacht, now a museum, seeking the great man’s counsel. While walking along the lake, he was reminded of Jung’s injunction on how to approach the second half of life. By ignoring the script of his youth and beginning again.
Startled by the sound of a door slamming shut in a gust of wind, he turned to study the framed painting that hung on the wall near his desk. It was the second painting created by Vidor – or possibly Malik – in his art therapy session with Isabelle. Two dark figures, one in sunlight, the other in shadow, faced each other on opposite sides of a deep ravine. In the distance, barely visible, a lone creature, perhaps a bird, or some mythical beast, hovered on the far horizon. A message or story Gessen has yet to decipher. But one day it would come to him, if he looked at it long enough, and with an open mind.
Having confronted – and survived – the prophecies of that long-ago fortune teller, who’d warned him about a dark knight, a gold ring, a monstrous secret, it was time to lay the past to rest.
High time, indeed, for a change.
But it wasn’t until he arrived at Zurich airport and scanned the departure board that he’d decided where to go. A flight for Buenos Aires was departing in two hours. C
oincidence or fate? On impulse, he’d bought a one-way ticket. It was time to discover, or rediscover, the place of his birth. How long he planned to remain there was impossible to say, but enough time, he hoped, to pacify the panicked yearning in his soul. Normally attuned to his own moods and desires, everywhere he turned in recent months had seemed like a dead end. The catastrophic loss of his clinic, the sole pillar around which he’d constructed his life, had left him adrift in place and time.
Perhaps, by strolling through the streets of the Argentinian city, he might reconnect with the child he’d left behind, and learn to forgive himself for the sins of his father he’d been helpless to prevent. Though our lives are an accident of birth, our fate is in our hands. A sentiment he repeated often as a form of solace. We do not choose our parents, or the debt they’ve bequeathed us. But we can, if we choose, create something better and finer from the ash heap of the past.
* * *
Two weeks later, back in Zurich and refreshed in spirit, if only marginally wiser from his rendezvous with the past, a stack of mail awaited his attention. Gessen made an espresso from the little machine he’d purchased in a local shop and savoured the rich taste as he flipped through the envelopes. A letter from abroad sent to Les Hirondelles contained a postmark from a month ago. It must have languished in the post office in Saint-Odile until someone thought to forward it to his new address in Zurich. After reading the letter, he opened the window wide to let the spring air blow through the room, pausing for a moment to study the faces of the pedestrians in the street.
There was no sign of a furtive, middle-aged man slipping around the corner. But for the rest of his days, Gessen would be on the lookout for a spectral figure with a watchful air. Holding his breath in anticipation of a sign from his mysterious double, hovering in the wings, waiting to be king.
* * *
Astrid I. Olsen, MD, PhD
Committee Chair, Søgaard Prize for Excellence and
Innovation in Neuroscience
Copenhagen, Denmark
15 May 2009
Dear Dr Gessen,
Regarding your letter of 21 January 2009, I was very sorry to learn about the unfortunate passing of Vidor Kiraly. How terrible to hear he perished in a fire at your clinic in Switzerland. In my capacity as chair of the Søgaard Prize Committee, I am writing to you in connection to some disturbing information the Committee received at the end of last year. I would have contacted you earlier, but we first wished to undertake a thorough investigation of the allegations made against Professor Kiraly.
A few months ago, I received an anonymous letter that was posted from London. The author of the letter suggested that key data supporting the ground-breaking research published by Professor Kiraly’s laboratory may have been stolen from another research group at Cambridge.
Having awarded Professor Kiraly with the highly competitive Søgaard Prize for the research in question, the Committee was duty-bound to investigate. We take accusations of impropriety and theft very seriously, and so created a sub-committee to explore the authenticity and ownership of Professor Kiraly’s data, fully aware that rivalry between scientists is not uncommon, and that the anonymous letter may have come from someone with the intention of stirring up trouble.
I will spare you the details of our lengthy inquiry into this matter. Suffice it to say, we left no stone unturned, and have regretfully corroborated the allegations of data theft. Following a unanimous vote, the Committee has formally rescinded the prize awarded to Professor Kiraly at Rosenborg Castle in October of last year. We are currently considering other scientists to nominate as a replacement.
Our efforts to recover the prize money have been complicated by Professor Kiraly’s death. Our attorneys have recently learned that the prize money of one million euros was transferred from Professor Kiraly’s account at Barclays Bank in London to an unknown location. Most likely to an offshore account. We learned of the transfer when Professor Kiraly’s housekeeper, a Mrs Magdalena Bartosz, came forward to confess that she received a letter from Professor Kiraly in December. Inside the letter was a sealed envelope addressed to Kiraly’s bank manager that she was instructed to hand deliver. She claims not to know what was in the letter, but we can only surmise it was instructions for the transfer. The bank has informed us that, in the absence of convincing evidence of criminal activity, they will not breach their policy on the confidentiality of international transfers.
So, it seems that the money is gone, and unless Professor Kiraly speaks to us from the grave, we have given up hope of any chance to recover it.
Sincerely yours,
Dr Astrid I. Olsen
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the many people who assisted in the making of this book.
My brilliant agent, Charlotte Seymour, for her continuing support and enthusiasm, and the entire team at Andrew Nurnberg Associates.
The talented crew at Legend Press in the UK, with a special thanks to Lauren Parsons for her keen eye for language and instinctive feel for what makes a good story.
Rosie Jonker at Ann Rittenburg Literary Agency in the USA for looking after my interests on the other side of the pond.
Jason Donald and Amy Butcher for insightful suggestions on an early draft of the manuscript.
Shamala Hinrichsen, Ginny Rottenburg, and Allie Reynolds for their always cheerful camaraderie and writerly friendship.
And finally, to the kind librarian, whose name (alas) I have long forgotten, for introducing an eager young reader to the wondrous stories of Vladimir Nabokov.