The Devil's Sanctuary (32 page)

DANIEL TOOK
the two pills the guard was holding out to him, along with a small plastic cup of water. His head was aching and his tongue felt rough and unpleasant, like a foreign body in his mouth. He hoped the pills would alleviate his physical discomfort and ease the terror and claustrophobia that were slowly building up inside him.

The pills had the precise effect he had hoped for. His senses dulled to a pleasant lack of interest and he had almost fallen asleep again when the guard returned to lead him to a shower room to have a wash. Everything seemed to be happening in slow-motion.

We’re underground; we’re underwater, he thought as he glided along the corridor, freshly showered and dressed in the same black and white tracksuit as the other patients.

His body and thoughts alike seemed to be swimming about.

A skinny figure with a shaved head was walking ahead of him. Like Daniel, he was being led by a guard. The man was moving jerkily and kept stopping to comment on his surroundings.

“Nice, quiet place, this. But it’s too cramped. Ought to be made a bit wider.”

He stopped and slapped the walls. His guard waited patiently. Daniel and his guard were forced to stop as the man blocked the corridor.

“And those ugly people in there,” the skinny man snarled, pointing at one of the round windows containing a man’s contorted face and a fist banging soundlessly against the glass. “I can’t stand to look at them anymore. Get some better looking ones instead. Some decent chicks. That would be better. Wouldn’t it?”

He turned toward Daniel. It was Tom, the violent wood-carver. He smiled broadly before the guard pulled him away.

Then Daniel was back in his cell again, and a short while—or possibly a long while—later three people were standing in the doorway. Doctor Fischer, the Indian doctor, and a man in jeans and shirtsleeves who Daniel didn’t recognize at first because he wasn’t wearing his baseball cap.

“Good morning,” Doctor Fischer said. “I hope you slept well. We’re just going to take some samples from you. You can stay lying down. Please roll your sleeve up. You’ll hardly notice, Doctor Kalpak is very good. I’ll be right back, I’m just going to show Mr. Jones out.”

The Indian doctor stroked the inside of Daniel’s elbow with two silky fingertips before sinking the needle into a vein. It felt warm and tickly as the blood ran out into a small tube that Doctor Kalpak was holding.

Several tubes of dark, almost black blood had been filled and stacked in a little stand by the time Doctor Fischer returned. The Indian doctor sealed the tubes, put a bandage on Daniel’s arm, and withdrew with a discreet bow.

“Doctor Kalpak is my personal surgeon. Incredible dexterity. His sister plays first violin with the London Symphony Orchestra,” Doctor Fischer said.

“Who was the other man?” Daniel asked.

“Mr. Jones, you mean?”

“Yes. Is he a doctor too?”

“He’s one of Himmelstal’s biggest sponsors.”

Daniel sat up. The pills had made him calm and unafraid.

“He’s American, isn’t he? There are rumors that he’s from the CIA.”

Doctor Fischer shrugged his shoulders.

“There are lots of rumors in the valley.”

“And most of them have turned out to contain a degree of truth. What is this place? What are you going to do with all the people you’ve got locked up down here?”

“Help them.”

“Help them?”

“Yes. And not just the people
here.
My goal is to help all people.”

Daniel almost laughed out loud. Doctor Fischer really was well and truly mad.

“How?”

“I’d be happy to explain it to you, Daniel. But I suggest we move to my little abode. Now that Doctor Kalpak has taken those blood samples, there’s nothing to stop you having a bit of breakfast. I haven’t actually had time for any myself yet. How about some tea and toast back at my room?”

Daniel, who would have given anything to get away from the stinking cell, if only for a short while, gratefully accepted the offer.

Doctor Fischer adjusted the velvet curtain in front of the steel door and switched on the lights in his cozy little room. The corridor with its hermetically sealed cells immediately seemed completely unreal, even though they had only just come from there.

At the doctor’s insistence Daniel sank into the same wing chair he had sat in the evening before, and as the doctor toasted some bread and laid the little table he got a strong feeling that he must have fallen asleep there in the chair and that the events of last night and that morning had been a nightmare. But his black and white tracksuit and the bandage from Doctor Kalpak’s blood tests told him otherwise. In spite of the pills he felt alert and tense, and he had trouble swallowing the toast with rhubarb jam that Doctor Fischer prepared for him.

“I like inviting my patients in for a cup of tea and a chat. Well, not all of them, obviously. But patients like you, Daniel.”

Daniel glanced toward the curtain on the left-hand side of the room, which, if his memory served correctly, concealed the door through which they had come the previous evening. Leading to the official tunnel network. That was right, wasn’t it?

“I always appreciate having someone intelligent to talk to. Now eat, my friend. Is something troubling you? Ah, the door over there. You need both the code and a magnetic key card to get out that way, and there’s usually a guard nearby. So you can drop that idea. You take your tea without milk, don’t you, if I remember rightly?”

Doctor Fischer poured some milk into his own cup of tea and stirred it.

“There’s nothing else in it,” he said, gesturing toward Daniel’s untouched cup. “You’ve had all the medication you need for the time being. I hope I got it right. Balanced and harmonious, but clearheaded enough to hold a decent conversation.”

And, as if he were sharing a secret with Daniel, he leaned forward and said in a low voice, “Do you know, I’m not really terribly keen on psychotropic drugs. Too primitive and clumsy. In the future we’ll be using much more finely tuned methods.”

Daniel took a cautious sip of his tea.

Karl Fischer nodded happily, cleared his throat, and said, “Well, as you’ve seen, there are a lot of different research projects under way in Himmelstal. The idea was for us to work on a number of fronts until we found the causes of psychopathy and how it could best be cured. You know about one of the projects, the one based on Doctor Pierce’s Pinocchio model, where the psychopath is viewed as a wooden puppet that is almost but not quite human. As you’ve no doubt realized, I don’t subscribe to Doctor Pierce’s puppet theory. Is a psychopath any less human because he doesn’t have a conscience? Well, that obviously depends on how you define the concept of humanity.”

“What project are you working on in there?” Daniel interrupted, not terribly interested in definitions of any sort.

Doctor Fischer leaned back in his armchair and went on calmly. “You think I’m being too philosophical? The fact is that philosophy, medicine, and psychiatry are getting closer and closer to one another. Why has evolution equipped human beings with a conscience?”

Daniel couldn’t tell if this was a rhetorical question or if he was expected to answer it. To hurry things along, he chose the latter interpretation.

“To restrain aggressive and egotistical impulses. Without a conscience we would kill one another and wipe out our species.”

“Would we?” Karl Fischer exclaimed, pretending to be shocked. “Do rats have consciences? Do snakes?”

This time Daniel decided to stay quiet.

“Hardly. A conscience isn’t essential for the survival of a species. So why do we have one?”

Daniel didn’t respond. Karl Fischer wasn’t remotely interested in having a conversation. He just wanted an audience.

“Presumably,” the doctor went on, with a dramatic pause designed to keep his audience on tenterhooks as he calmly sipped his tea, “presumably it arose so that the strongest member of the tribe wouldn’t eat the others’ food. The survival of the group was more important than that of the individual, and hungry, pleading looks became triggers for unselfish behavior. In this primitive form the conscience wasn’t much more than an animal’s reaction to the whimpering of its young. A sort of instinct, an inner voice. But human beings, unlike animals, have the capacity to
resist
their inner voice. As a result, they have also been equipped with a means of limiting their behavior that they alone possess: guilt. A thermostat that kicks in whenever someone deviates too far from the program. That probably worked perfectly well in the Stone Age. But today? Do we live in tribes in the middle of a wilderness, Daniel? No, we are individuals who interact and compete in a marketplace. Conscience and guilt are no more essential to our survival than having an appendix. The truth is that we would manage perfectly well, and probably much better, without them. As a species, I mean, of course. Certain
individuals
would naturally not survive, but of course that’s the price you pay for evolution.”

He drank some more tea and Daniel took the opportunity to interject. “If I understand you correctly, Doctor Fischer, you’re not actually interested in
curing
psychopaths? You regard their lack of a conscience as an
advantage
?”

“It’s true that I don’t look at psychopaths the same way as the other researchers here in Himmelstal,” Doctor Fischer agreed, nodding solemnly. “To continue in terms of evolution: Psychopaths aren’t a throwback to some earlier, more primitive state, as some people believe. Quite the contrary. The reason why this deviation occasionally arises is precisely the same as with other deviations: Nature is testing out new models. If they are functional, they survive and give rise to more of the same model. The fact is that the number of diagnosed psychopaths in Himmelstal increases with each passing year. When Himmelstal was first established we had to go out and actively seek study material. Today we are drowning in applications from every country in Europe. We can only accept a fraction of the cases that people want us to take. So, from an evolutionary perspective, the psychopath model is very successful.”

“I can’t see any evolutionary advantages to an increase in the number of murderers, rapists, and thieves,” Daniel protested.

“No, there are no advantages to that, you’re quite right there. Himmelstal is overflowing with impulsive, violent idiots. Because the majority of psychopaths don’t just lack a conscience. Unfortunately they also lack patience, perseverance, and self-discipline, which renders them useless in most contexts. As plenty of Mafia bosses and terrorist leaders have had cause to regret. Their dream is the controllable psychopath. Emotionless, but unshakably loyal to his employer. Unafraid, but cautious when necessary. Intelligent, but without any independent creativity. In short: a robot. You can imagine how useful someone like that would be in certain situations.”

Karl Fischer paused and looked intently at Daniel, as though to check that he was keeping up with his reasoning. Daniel nodded solemnly and said, “Is it possible to create someone like that?”

Fischer threw out his hands.

“Maybe.”

“Is that why Mr. Jones is here? Are you working for the CIA?”

“That’s certainly what the CIA believes, yes,” Doctor Fischer said with a chuckle. “Americans! They’ve got it into their heads that I’m creating human missiles that they can use in one of their never-ending wars. And as long as they keep pumping money into Himmelstal I have no intention of disabusing them of that notion. We would never have been able to expand to the extent that we have without their money. Take my own research department, for instance.” He gestured toward the curtain covering the door they had come through. “That would never have been set up without Mr. Jones’s generous donations. Which is why I have to put up with him scampering about like a rabbit in the tunnels down here. I let him see some of the experiments and send him the occasional confidential report. Naturally, he has no idea of what I’m really doing. He thinks I’m taming monsters. Which is completely wrong. My project is much bigger than that.”

“What is your project?”

“The happy human being. A world without suffering,” Doctor Fischer said with a modest shrug of the shoulders.

“Wow. And how are you going to achieve that?”

“Most people’s unhappiness is caused by the fact that they have more emotions than they need.”

“So you want to shut off people’s feelings?” Daniel exclaimed. “You want to turn everyone into psychopaths? Is that what your project is about?”

In spite of the pills he felt so worked up that he could hardly sit still.

Karl Fischer put a firm hand on top of Daniel’s and said, “Let me finish. I don’t want to shut anything off. I just want to lower the volume.”

He gave Daniel’s hand a light squeeze and smiled reassuringly before he let go and continued. “When I was a student I did a rotation in a psychiatric clinic, and I was astonished at the amount of guilt exhibited by the patients. Often utterly pointless guilt. Guilt about things they couldn’t possibly have had any control over. Guilt about things it was too late to do anything about. Painful emotions, and completely unnecessary. The more I listened to these patients, the more surprised I became. Because I myself had never experienced anything like that, it fascinated me. All that angst. All that suffering. People with healthy, functioning bodies who could have been absolutely fine if it weren’t for all those
feelings.
”

He spat out the word as if it had a bad taste.

“But isn’t it our feelings that make us human?” Daniel protested with a lump in his throat.

“And who decides what a human being is? Is it something that’s fixed forever? ‘Man is a rope tied between beast and Superman,’ as dear old Nietzsche put it.”

Daniel opened his mouth to comment, but Doctor Fischer went on quickly. “Is there some sort of law that says that mankind must always suffer? In my practice I would prescribe medication to suppress anxiety as a temporary reprieve. A bandage on the wound. But I don’t just want to apply bandages. I don’t want to smooth things over. I want to
remove
the source of the evil. Imagine that, Daniel: that we can remove evil forever. Wouldn’t that be fantastic?”