The Angel Maker (34 page)

After the class had wandered over to the highest point in the Netherlands, where, according to Brother Thomas, the three border posts represented people’s desperation for something to hitch themselves to in life, they climbed back into the coach.

‘Now we’ll be driving to La Chapelle,’ said Herr Robert. ‘To Calvary Hill. Brother Thomas will give us its history.’

‘At the end of the eighteenth century’, began the monk, ‘a boy named Peter Arnold lived here. He suffered from epilepsy and one day he bought a figurine of Mary in the market and hung it from an old oak tree . . .’

‘Victor, are you paying attention?’ Herr Robert, who had taken a seat beside him, nudged the boy.

‘Hung it from an old oak tree,’ Victor answered mechanically.

The geography teacher nodded and went back to listening.

‘. . . was cured of his epilepsy. That is why the Clare Sisters had a chapel built right beside that oak tree. A few years later another miracle occurred. Frederik Pelzer, a boy about your age, was abruptly cured of his insanity after his parents went to the chapel to pray for him. The nuns then decided to build a convent and a mental institution next to the chapel, to save even more unfortunates.’

Unfortunates. Most of the words had gone right over Victor’s head, but that word snagged him like a fish hook. He hadn’t heard it since he had left the institution.

Let us pray for the unfortunates. That was the way Sister Milgitha would begin the prayer when they were brought to the chapel. The unfortunates - that was them, the patients.

The cogs in his brain began to turn, in the cadence of a litany.

Marc François.

Fabian Nadler.

Jean Surmont.

Every name called up a face.

Nico Baumgarten.

Angelo Venturini.

Egon Weiss.

He saw Angelo Venturini placing the pillow over Egon Weiss’s face.

Let us pray for Egon Weiss, who has exchanged the temporal for the eternal.

So that his soul may find peace.

Are you praying for Egon? That’s good. Then he’s sure to find peace.

God giveth and God taketh away, Victor.

He saw Sister Marthe turn her back and walk away. She walked as if she were bearing a heavy cross.

 

Victor was found in the convent’s churchyard. He was on his knees before a headstone, hands folded.

It was at the Sixth Station of the Cross that it had dawned on Herr Robert that Victor was no longer with the other students. Nobody knew how long he’d been gone. Nobody had missed him.

Brother Thomas and Sister Milgitha were the ones who found him. The convent’s abbess clapped her hands to her mouth when she caught sight of the boy.

‘Do you know him?’ the monk asked her.

But she shook her head.

‘No, I don’t know him,’ was her reply. ‘I’ve never seen him before. He must have been lost.’

Then Brother Thomas took the boy by the arm and led him away. Victor meekly went with him.

 

He hadn’t been lost. The place where they found him was simply as far as he’d got.

 

Dr Karl Hoppe was reading the newspaper after breakfast when his son came into the kitchen. The boy poured himself a cup of milk and stood hovering by the sink.

‘When did you take me out of the institution at La Chapelle?’

It was a double whammy: the very fact that Victor had suddenly asked him a question, and then of course the question itself.

‘What did you say?’ the doctor asked, outwardly unruffled. He turned a page of the newspaper and hoped Victor would not have the guts to ask the question again.

But he did.

‘Institution?’ the doctor heard himself say. ‘What gave you that idea? You’ve never been in an institution.’ He did not look up as he said it.

‘But wasn’t I . . .’ began Victor. ‘The sisters . . .’

‘No, Victor, you were not!’ said the doctor, raising his voice. Slapping his paper down on the table, he jerked up his head. ‘If I say you weren’t, then you weren’t! I’m the one who should know!’

His son dawdled a bit longer, evidently mulling it over, and then turned on his heel. As he did so he let go of his cup of milk. He didn’t hurl it down on the floor; no, he simply turned round, let the cup fall from his hand and walked away.

Karl Hoppe sat there for a moment, frozen, as if nailed to his chair. Then he jumped up and ran after his son.

 

When Victor returned to his boarding school a few days later, he found, unpacking his suitcase, a file with his name on it. In the upper right-hand corner was printed ‘Sanatorium of the Convent of St Clare’, followed by an address in La Chapelle. The file didn’t contain any letters, just an index card with some dates on it and a couple of black-and-white photographs.

Victor stared at the photos dispassionately, as if seeing them through the eyes of a doctor who has already seen this many times before.

Then he studied the card. Each date was followed by one or more words. ‘Feeble-minded,’ it said in a couple of them. ‘Can speak. Unintelligibly, alas,’ he read. Then he read the last line. ‘Discharged,’ it said, preceded by a date: 23 January 1950.

Seeing that date did shake him, however.

 

Rex Cremer immediately sensed something was afoot. Prior to the meeting his colleagues on the faculty had started avoiding him, and whenever he tried to engage anyone in conversation, the answer was curt or unresponsive. They’d have to change their tune soon enough, he thought to himself.

When the vice chancellor had called the meeting to order, Rex took the floor and passed around the photos of the six-day-old embryos. He felt slightly uncomfortable claiming they were mouse embryos, and his discomfort grew when nobody said a word. He noticed some of the faculty looking at the vice chancellor, who cleared his throat and said, ‘We cannot take anything for granted any more. We understand that you want to support Dr Hoppe, but there is too much at stake to let matters simply take their course.’

‘But . . . the photographs speak for themselves, surely?’ said Rex, hearing Victor’s voice in his own.

‘This isn’t about the photographs,’ said the vice chancellor, ‘Not in the first instance.’

Rex swallowed. He wondered if the vice chancellor knew he was lying about the photos. The thought made him shudder. It was just beginning to dawn on him that he had made a terrible mistake. The events of the past few days had disconcerted him. He had started doing things he’d never have done before; things that would never even have occurred to him.

The vice chancellor took advantage of Cremer’ s silence. ‘There is going to be an inquiry. We have set up an international scientific commission, which is to investigate whether Dr Hoppe has . . .’ - the vice chancellor hesitated briefly - ‘whether Dr Hoppe has been making things up.’

Making things up. It was one of the worst things a scientist could be accused of. And the very fact that an investigative commission had been set up without Rex’s knowledge meant that they were having doubts about him too. That set his mind reeling. Could it be that it was all indeed a sham and that he hadn’t been able to see it because he did not think Victor capable of such a thing? Could it be that Victor had taken advantage of his belief in him? Rex tried to sort it out in his head, but the vice chancellor was still droning on, as if reading a declaration.

‘The investigation will focus, first and foremost, on the cloned-mouse experiment that is being disputed by Dr Solar and Dr Grath. Dr Hoppe will have to give a demonstration of his method, and the commission will check to see if the claims he makes in the article in Cell are corroborated by his actual research data.’

The research data were a muddled labyrinth in which only Victor would be able to find his way - Cremer knew that. Besides, Victor would refuse to demonstrate his technique, for he was bound to consider the entire investigation a waste of time. Rex knew that too. And yet he made a split-second decision not to say anything. The commission members would just have to see for themselves how difficult it was to work with Victor Hoppe. Then they would understand that even he, as dean, had had no say in the whole affair. It might even be to his advantage if the commission did conclude that the whole thing was a sham. Then he could simply make it plain that he’d had nothing to do with it - that Victor had planned and executed the entire thing all by himself.

‘What do you say, Dr Cremer?’ asked the vice chancellor.

The dean was still staring at the photographs, wondering how he could ever have allowed himself to be swept along like that. He remembered his excitement when Victor had shown him the photos, but also how shocking it had been to find out that they were human embryos. And he had done nothing - taken no action. Not even when Victor had shown him what the child would look like at birth.

‘Dr Cremer?’ The vice chancellor’s voice startled him out of his musings.

Rex looked up and, putting one hand to his chin, said, ‘Yes, I do think it’s important for us to find out if anything has been misrepresented. ’

 

When Victor found out that there was to be an investigation into his activities, he went straight to the vice chancellor to submit his resignation. The vice chancellor told him that that would be interpreted by the outside world as a confession of guilt. If Victor was convinced that he had done nothing wrong, then it would be best to wait for the outcome of the investigation. To Victor, the very fact that there was to be an investigation was a sign of their lack of confidence in him, but the vice chancellor assured him that the probe was not intended so much to uncover lies as to shine a brighter light on the truth, and so refute Solar and Grath’s criticism. Once Victor had thought it over, he decided he could live with that, and said nothing more about resigning.

He did insist on absenting himself while the investigation was being conducted, because he couldn’t bear to watch strangers messing with his life’s work. When the vice chancellor asked him if he wouldn’t agree just once to give a demonstration of his methods, he replied that it was all clearly described in his article, and that the rest was a question of technique, which meant practice, practice, practice. He considered himself entitled, therefore, to keep his technique a secret, in order to prevent others from taking credit for it. The vice chancellor objected, saying that he was not making the commission’s task any easier. But Victor craftily turned the tables on him by answering that it would give them the opportunity to demonstrate their own competence.

 

In his conversations with the commission members Rex Cremer minimised his own role in the affair. He granted that as dean he should have exerted more control, but in his own defence he argued that, when he had been hired, Dr Hoppe had insisted on complete independence. He had made frequent attempts to find out more about Dr Hoppe’s methods, but the latter had never agreed to divulge details. If that was so, the commission wanted to know, why had Cremer not asked more questions? Cremer told them that Dr Hoppe had managed to fob him off each time with his claim that it was just a matter of technique. One of the commission members asked if he still believed that was true. ‘No,’ he said. And reiterated it.

 

The inquiry had been in full swing for a month when Cremer received a phone call at home from Victor, who had been staying away from the university and had returned to Bonn in the interim. He wasn’t particularly surprised that Victor was calling him out of the blue; he expected that Victor wanted to find out what progress the commission had made with their investigation.

‘Victor! It’s been a while,’ he said in a neutral tone. He was determined to keep his distance.

‘I need your help,’ said Victor, coming straight to the point.

‘Victor, the commission is still investigating. I can’t tell you anything. I don’t know anything. They’re just doing their job, and—’

‘It isn’t about the commission,’ Victor replied firmly. ‘I’m not bothered about that.’

Rex was startled, but also wary. He wasn’t about to let himself be talked into anything again. ‘What’s it about then?’ he asked, trying to keep his voice as light as possible.

‘The embryos,’ said Victor.

Rex let out an audible sigh. ‘OK, what’s the matter with the embryos?’ he asked, but quickly caught himself. ‘Which embryos?’

‘The clones. My clones.’

‘Victor, I don’t know if I can—’

‘Rex, I need your help!’ was the desperate cry.

Rex was flabbergasted. He had never heard Victor sound like this. He was always so self-confident, and had never even asked for advice, let alone help.

‘What’s the matter, then?’

‘There are four of them . . . There’s going to be four . . .’ Victor blurted out. He was talking so fast that it was even more difficult to understand him than usual. ‘Four, don’t you understand? It’s too many! It wasn’t what I—’

‘Calm down, Victor!’ shouted Rex, but then was appalled at his own tone. Taking a deep breath, he said, ‘I’m trying to follow what you mean.’

He knew perfectly well what Victor meant, but had no idea what he thought of it, nor if he ought to believe it. When Victor had shown him the pictures of the five embryos six weeks ago, he had told him that he’d introduced all five into the woman’s womb in the hope that at least one would implant itself. Rex had thought it rather a large number - standard procedure was two to four embryos, at least in the case of in vitro fertilisation. Now it looked as if only one of the embryos had been rejected, and the other four had implanted themselves and begun to develop. If it were true and everything took its normal course, then there would be a quadruple birth. Four clones in one go. If it were true. But he didn’t believe it. And, what was more, he wanted to have nothing to do with it.

‘I don’t see the problem, Victor,’ he said dismissively. ‘Four out of five embryos. I’d call that a success.’