The Whisperer (17 page)

Mila didn’t know what to say, startled as she was by such a personal revelation. Boris guessed.

“You don’t have to say anything, don’t worry. In fact, I don’t even know why I told you.”

“Sorry, but I’m not a very expansive person. Many people think I’m cold.”

“Not me.”

Boris was looking at the road. The traffic was going slowly because of the ice that still covered the tarmac. The exhaust fumes hung in the middle of the air. The people on the footpaths walked quickly.

“Stern—may God always keep him the way he is—managed to track down a dozen ex-inmates of the institute. We’ll be dealing with half of those. He and Rosa will be looking after the others.”

“Only twelve?”

“In the area. I don’t know exactly what the doctor has in mind, but if he thinks we can get anything out of it…”

That morning they interviewed four of the former orphanage boys. They were all over twenty-eight, with more or less the same criminal pedigrees. Orphanage, reform school, jail, conditional release, jail again, probation. Only one of them had managed to wash his hands of it all thanks to his church: he had become pastor of one of the many Protestant communities in the area. Two others lived on handouts. The fourth was under house arrest for dealing. But when each of them spoke of their time in the institution, Mila and Boris noted a sudden agitation. They were people who had gone on to know prison, real prison, and yet they would never forget that place.

“Did you see their faces?” Mila asked her colleague after the fourth visit. “Do you think something bad happened in that place?”

“It was no different from others like it, believe me. But I think it’s something connected to his childhood. As you grow up, experiences slide off you, even the worst ones. But when you’re that age memories really imprint themselves on your flesh and don’t go away.”

Every time they told—with all due care—the story of finding the corpse in the laundry, the interviewees merely shook their heads. That obscure symbolism meant nothing to them.

At around midday, Mila and Boris stopped at a café where they quickly had some tuna sandwiches and a couple of cappuccinos.

The sky was heavy now. The weathermen hadn’t been mistaken: soon it would start snowing again.

They still had another two orphans to meet before the weather got too bad and stopped them from going back. They decided to start with the one who lived furthest away.

“His name’s Feldher. He lives about thirty kilometers away.”

Boris was in a good mood. Mila would have liked to take advantage of that to ask him more about Goran. He aroused her curiosity: it didn’t seem possible that he had a private life, a partner, a child. His wife, in particular, was a mystery. Especially after the phone call that Mila had caught the previous evening. Where was the woman? Why wasn’t she at home looking after little Tommy? Because “Mrs. Runa” was there instead? Maybe Boris could answer her questions. But in the end, not knowing how to introduce the subject, Mila gave up.

When they got to Feldher’s house it was almost two in the afternoon. They had tried to call ahead to say they were coming, but the recorded voice of a telephone company had told them the number was no longer available.

“It looks like our friend isn’t doing very well,” Boris had remarked.

Seeing where he lived confirmed this. The house—if you could call it that—was in the middle of a field of rubble, surrounded by the carcasses of automobiles. A red-haired dog, which seemed to be rusting slowly like everything else, welcomed them with raucous barking. Soon afterward a man of about forty appeared in the doorway. He was wearing only a filthy T-shirt and jeans, in spite of the cold.

“Are you Mr. Feldher?”

“Yes…who are you?”

Boris just raised his hand with his card: “Can we talk to you?”

Feldher didn’t seem too pleased by their visit, but he beckoned them in.

He had a huge belly and his fingers were yellowed with nicotine. The interior of the house looked like him: filthy and chaotic. He served cold tea in unmatched glasses, lit a cigarette and went and sat down on a creaking deck chair, leaving the sofa to them.

“You were lucky to find me. Usually I’m working…”

“Why not today?” asked Mila.

The man looked outside: “The snow. No one takes on laborers in weather like this. And I’m losing a whole load of days.”

Mila and Boris held the tea in their hands, but neither of them drank. Feldher didn’t seem to take offense.

“So why don’t you try to change your job?” Mila ventured, to pretend an interest and establish contact.

Feldher snorted. “I’ve tried! Do you think I haven’t tried? But that went all to hell too, like my marriage. That whore was after something better. She told me every damned day that I was worthless. Now she’s a two-bit waitress and shares an apartment with two tramps like herself. I’ve seen it. It’s managed by the church she’s joined. They told her even a good-for-nothing like her has a place in heaven! What do you think of that?”

Mila remembered that they had passed at least a dozen of those new churches along the road. They all displayed big neon signs showing the name of the congregation and also the slogan that summed them up. For a few years they had been proliferating around here, welcoming converts among those laid off by the big factories, single mothers and people disillusioned by traditional faiths. Even though the various denominations liked to seem different from one another, what they had in common was their unconditional adherence to creationist theories, homophobia, opposition to abortion, the affirmation of the principle according to which each individual has the right to bear arms and complete support for the death penalty.

It would be impossible to know how Feldher would react, Mila thought, if she had told him that one of his fellow inmates at the institute had become a pastor in one of those churches.

“When you arrived I mistook you for two of them: they come here to preach their gospel. Last month that whore I used to be with sent a couple of them here to convert me!” He laughed, showing two rows of rotten teeth.

Mila tried to move away from the conjugal theme and asked casually, “What did you do before your laboring jobs, Mr. Feldher?”

“You won’t believe it…” The man smiled, glancing at the filth that surrounded him. “I’d set up a little laundry.”

The two officers tried not to look at each other so as not to show Feldher how interesting this statement was. Mila couldn’t help noticing that Boris let his hand slide to his hip, revealing his holster and gun. She remembered that when they got to this place their mobiles had no signal. They didn’t know much about this man, and they had to be careful.

“Have you ever been in jail, Mr. Feldher?”

“Only for small misdemeanors, nothing that would keep an honest man awake at night.”

Boris visibly made a mental note of that information. He stared at Feldher, making him uneasy.

“So what can I do for you,
officers?
” said the man, without concealing a certain irritation.

“As far as we can tell, you spent your childhood and much of your adolescence in an institution run by priests,” Boris went on cautiously.

Feldher stared at him suspiciously: like the others, he wondered what the cops were leading up to. “The best years of my life,” he said mischievously.

Boris told him what had brought them there. Feldher seemed pleased to have been told the facts before they were made public.

“I could make a lot of money telling the papers this stuff, couldn’t I?” was his only comment.

Boris stared at him. “You try that and I’ll arrest you.”

The smile vanished from Feldher’s face. The officer leaned towards him. It was an interrogation technique, Mila knew it too. People speaking to one another, unless bound by particular emotional or intimate relations, always tend to respect an invisible boundary. In this case, however, the interrogator was approaching the interrogatee in order to invade his personal space and make him feel uncomfortable.

“Mr. Feldher, I’m sure you think it’s pretty funny to welcome the cops who come to see you, giving them tea you’ve probably pissed in, to enjoy their faces as they sit there like morons with glasses in their hands without having the courage to drink.”

Feldher said nothing. Mila looked at Boris: she wondered if that had been a good move, given the situation. They would find out soon enough. The officer calmly set the tea down on the table and went back to staring the man in the eyes.

“Now I hope you’d like to tell us a bit about your stay in the orphanage…”

Feldher looked down, his voice a whisper: “You could say I was born there. I never knew my parents. They brought me there as soon as my mother spewed me out. I was given my name by Father Rolf, he said it belonged to someone he had known, who’d died young in the war. Maybe that crazy priest thought the name had brought lousy luck to the other guy, so it might bring good luck to me!”

The dog outside started barking again and Feldher broke off to shout at it: “Shut up, Koch!” Then he turned back to his guests. “I had more dogs many years ago. This place was a dumping ground. When I bought it, they assured me it had been drained. But every now and again stuff comes up: shit and various kinds of filth, especially when it rains. The dogs drink that stuff, their bellies swell up and after a few days they croak. Koch’s the only one I have left, but I think he’s on the way out, too.”

Feldher was rambling. He didn’t like going back with them to the places that had probably shaped his destiny. By talking about the dead dogs he was trying to negotiate with the officers so that they would leave him in peace. But they couldn’t relax their hold.

Mila tried to be convincing when she said, “I’d like you to make an effort, Mr. Feldher.”

“OK: shoot.”

“I’d like you to tell us what you would connect with the image of ‘a smile among the tears.’”

“It’s like that stuff psychiatrists do, is that it? A kind of free association?”

“Something like that,” she agreed.

Feldher started to think about it. He did it melodramatically, staring at the ceiling and with one hand scratching his chin. Maybe he wanted to give the impression of helping them, or maybe he had worked out that they couldn’t charge him with “failure of memory,” and he was just playing around with them. But then he said, “Billy Moore.”

“Who was that, a friend of yours?”

“Oh, that kid was extraordinary! He was seven when he arrived. He was always cheerful, always smiling. He immediately became everyone’s mascot…At that time they were about to shut the place down: there were only sixteen of us left.”

“That whole institution for so few of you?”

“The priests had gone too. The only one left was Father Rolf…I was one of the oldest boys, I was fifteen, more or less…Billy’s story was incredibly sad: his parents had hanged themselves. He had found the bodies. He hadn’t screamed or gone for help: instead, he’d got up on a chair and, holding on to them, untied them from the ceiling.”

“That kind of experience marks you for life.”

“Not Billy. He was always happy. He adapted to the worst. As far as he was concerned everything was a game. We had never seen anything like it. For us, that place was a jail, but Billy paid us no attention. He had an energy, I don’t know how to put it…he had two obsessions: those damned roller-skates that he used to ride up and down the empty corridors, and football. But he didn’t like playing. He preferred to stand on the sidelines doing the radio commentary… ‘This is Billy Moore from the Aztec Stadium in Mexico City for the World Cup Final…’ For his birthday we did a whip-round and bought him this tape recorder. It was amazing: he spent hours and hours recording stuff on that thing and listening to it over again!”

Feldher was going on a bit now; the conversation was derailing. Mila tried to bring it back on its original track. “Can you tell us something about the last few months at the institution?”

“As I’ve told you, they were about to close it and us boys had only two possibilities: either get adopted or end up in other institutions, like care homes. But we were grade B orphans, no one would take us. It was different for Billy, though: they were queuing up! Everyone immediately fell in love with him, they all wanted him.”

“And how did that end up? Did Billy find a good family?”

“Billy died, miss.”

He said it with such disappointment in his voice that it sounded as if the fate had been his own. And perhaps in a way it had been, as if the boy had represented a kind of ransom for the rest of his friends. The one who could have made it, in the end.

“How did it happen?” asked Boris.

“Meningitis.”

The man sniffed, his eyes gleaming. He turned towards the window, because he didn’t want these two strangers to see him so vulnerable. Mila was sure that once they had left, Billy’s memory would go on floating around him like an old ghost in that house. But with his tears, Feldher had won their trust: Mila saw Boris taking his hand away from his holster. He was harmless.

“Billy was the only one who got meningitis. But being afraid of a pandemic they cleared us all out of that place in a flash…stroke of luck, eh?” He struggled to smile. “Well, they granted us a reprieve, they certainly did that. And the shithole was closed down six months earlier than predicted.”

As they were getting up to leave, Boris asked again, “Did you ever see any of your classmates again?”

“No, but a few years ago I did run into Father Rolf again.”

“He’s retired now.”

“I was kind of hoping he’d kicked the bucket.”

“Why?” asked Mila, imagining the worst. “Did he hurt you?”

“Never. But when you spend your childhood in a place like that, you learn to hate what you remember because you’re there.”

A thought much the same as the one expressed by Boris, who found himself nodding involuntarily.

Feldher didn’t walk them to the door. Instead he leaned over the table and picked up the glass of cold tea that Boris hadn’t drunk. He brought it to his lips and drank it down in one go.

Then he stared at them again, defiantly: “Have a nice day.”