The Devil's Sanctuary (24 page)

THE LIBRARY
was silent and deserted. There was no one else in sight except for the librarian. Daniel went up to the counter.

“I’d like to read something about falcons.”

The little bald man adjusted his glasses and led him over to one of the shelves.

“Here.
The World of Birds of Prey,
” the librarian said, handing him a large book with a golden eagle on the cover. “Anything else?”

“That’s all, thanks. This was exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for your help,” Daniel said, turning to leave.

“Nothing about the Second World War? We’ve got plenty of interesting books here.”

Daniel stopped. Someone had told him that the Second World War was something of a passion for the librarian. In his apartment in the village he had maps pinned with the positions of German and Allied troops, and he kept a careful eye out for any new books published on the subject and made sure that the Himmelstal library had as good a selection of books on the topic as any university library.

Daniel also knew that the little bald man had another passion: garroting innocent people with nylon thread. He was said to be very skilled at this difficult art, and his murder weapon of choice was easily accessible in the shop selling fishing supplies in the village.

“The Second World War is always interesting, of course,” Daniel therefore replied amenably. “What would you recommend?”

“Oh, there’s so much to choose among. Follow me, I’ll show you,” the librarian boasted. He hunched his shoulders and screwed his eyes up mischievously, making his steel-framed glasses bounce.

Daniel followed him hesitantly in among the bookcases, glancing over his shoulder toward the door. How much longer were they going to be on their own in there?

The librarian was talking about his favorite subject but was soon drowned out by a shrill siren, followed by a dull rumble that made the shelves shake. The same trembling that Daniel had felt a short while before down in the valley, but much stronger.

“What was that?” he asked.

“They’re blasting,” the librarian said calmly as he searched with his finger along the spines of the books. “On the building site.”

“They’re building something new?”

The librarian nodded.

“A residential complex. Right at the top of the hill. Six floors. Single- and double-room apartments. Balconies with views of the valley. I’m thinking of applying. I’m not happy in the village. Do you live in the village?”

“No,” Daniel said, and to avoid having to say where he lived he quickly added, “When’s it due to be finished?”

“Next summer. But it might only be for new arrivals. Another two hundred are going to be coming next year.”

The librarian climbed up onto a stool and peered at the books on the top shelf through his reading glasses.

“Two hundred?”

“Yes. Himmelstal is expanding. Have you read this, about the British secret service?”

He climbed down from the stool with the book in his hand. Daniel just wanted to take it and go, but the librarian started to tell him what it was about and was soon sounding so enthusiastic that he might have been trying to sell it to Daniel instead of just lending it out. He was so eager that his bald head was shiny with sweat. Daniel regretted arousing this passion and was worried that if it got strong enough it might awaken the librarian’s other obsession.

He didn’t calm down until he saw Pablo, a former thug from the Madrid underworld, wander in and sit down with some motorcycle magazines as if he owned the place. Pablo was known for his brutality, but at least he was a witness, and the librarian was as scared of him as Daniel was, if not more so. The Spaniard’s arrival was like a bucket of cold water over the little man’s overheated senses, and his voice sank to a whisper as his eyes grew uncertain and fluttering.

Daniel breathed out. The world of birds of prey. A sparrow relieved when an eagle chases away a hawk.

“Thanks very much. I’ll take these home and start reading,” Daniel said quickly. “Oh, one more thing. You seem so well informed. I saw some guards down by the rapids. It looked like they were searching for something.”

“Yes,” the librarian said, nodding solemnly.

“Is it… Has a resident gone missing?”

“Oh, no.” The librarian smiled. “The guards don’t bother to search for residents.”

He glanced toward the Spaniard and lowered his voice to a whisper: “It’s one of the hostesses.”

“The little dark-haired one?”

Daniel hadn’t seen her for a while and had been wondering where she’d gone.

The librarian nodded almost imperceptibly. This was a subject he didn’t want to talk about.

“Thanks again for your help,” Daniel said. “I’ll bring the books back as soon as I’ve finished them.”

“Keep them as long as you need them,” the librarian said with a generous sweep of his hand. “I’ll come and find you if anyone asks for them. You live in one of the cabins, don’t you?”

Daniel muttered something vague that could have been either a yes or a no.

“I need to know where my best friends are, after all,” the librarian said with a smile. “The books, I mean,” he explained, pointing at the books under Daniel’s arm.

That night Daniel dreamed of Father Dennis’s snow-white angels floating high above Himmelstal. He was up among them, as weightless and free as they were. The valley lay below him, green and fresh, with the winding river and the little village. The bell in the church was ringing and the sound rose up to them, crisper and clearer up in the air.

Then he suddenly noticed that the angels were no longer white, but dark. They’d turned into big birds of prey, circling round and round as they peered down at the valley floor. Thick yellow pus was running through the valley now instead of water, and the birds weren’t looking for mice or smaller birds but for the huge white maggots crawling around on the grass.

Of course, that makes sense, Daniel thought in the dream. He felt strangely calm, as if the unpleasant things he was seeing didn’t upset him at all but merely confirmed his suspicions.

And the crisp ringing wasn’t from the church bell—how could he have thought that?—but the little bells that were tied to the birds’ legs with leather straps.

At the same instant he realized something else, and the thought was so strong that it wrenched him from sleep.

He lit the lamp in his little alcove, pulled his cell phone down from the shelf, and sent Corinne a text message.

“I THINK
I know how it works,” Daniel said in a low voice as he leaned over the table.

They were sitting in the restaurant on the first floor of the main building. They had just finished their dinner of venison fillet with wild mushrooms.

The waitress came over to their table with a tray. She poured them coffee and left a plate of chocolate macaroons—the same sort that Gisela Obermann had offered him in her room.

When the waitress turned away another memory popped into his head: Max had slapped her on her broad backside. At the time, about a month before—was it really no more than that?—Daniel had still believed Himmelstal was a luxury clinic and that the broad-hipped waitress was some decent woman from an alpine village. Now he knew that she was from Holland, and that she had lured her husband into the bomb shelter of her parents’ villa, barricaded the door, and left him to starve to death inside while she watched television upstairs.

“How, then? Who brings the drugs in?” Corinne asked once the waitress had disappeared into the kitchen.

“Someone who can get into the valley and drop it off without any hassle with electrified zones, guards, or sniffer dogs.”

“And who might that be?”

“Falcons.”

She looked at him skeptically as she dabbed at her mouth with her napkin.

“On one of my first days here I met a man with a tame falcon,” Daniel went on quietly.

“Adrian Keller,” Corinne said, pouring some milk in her coffee.

“You know him?”

She nodded. “He lives in an isolated cabin at the far end of the valley. He used to be a thug for the Colombian drug cartels. Utterly ruthless. He’s supposed to have spent several years living with an Indian tribe in the jungle. He keeps to himself, never sets foot in the village or clinic grounds. He’s got a load of traps set out. Only the van from the shop and the guards making their morning and evening checks ever go out there. And even they hardly dare get out of their cars. Yes, he’s got falcons. He hunts with them. The clinic management let him because it seems to mean so much to him. He’s obsessed with his falcons and hunting. Sometimes that’s what you have to do, Gisela says. Channel the evil into a harmless hobby.”

“Possibly quite a lucrative hobby? The other evening I read that the Allies used falcons during the Second World War, to bring down German carrier pigeons. It didn’t work very well because the falcons couldn’t distinguish between German carrier pigeons and Allied ones and killed them all indiscriminately. But it struck me that falcons might be able to carry things themselves. They’re trained; they always return to their master. Let’s suppose Keller has a contact outside, and that the falcons fly over the mountains to the contact, who ties a little parcel to their leg before they fly back.”

Daniel sounded enthusiastic, but Corinne shook her head.

“The clinic management have actually looked into that possibility. They’ve spoken to falconers and ornithologists. They all say the same thing: It’s impossible. Falcons are useless at carrying messages and objects. They don’t work as carrier pigeons. Their speed and sight is vastly superior to other birds, but they haven’t got the same brilliant sense of direction that pigeons have.”

“Oh,” Daniel said, disappointed. “It was just a thought. Have you got a better theory?”

Corinne opened her mouth but thought better of it.

“We’ve got company,” she said, nodding toward the door.

A group of four people had just walked in and were being led to a reserved table by the window. Daniel recognized Doctor Fischer, Doctor Pierce, and the Indian doctor who hadn’t spoken during the meeting. The fourth man was wearing a baseball cap. Daniel couldn’t recall ever having seen him before.

“Probably a visiting researcher,” Corinne said. “There’s a load of them here at the moment.”

“The ones watching us from the safari van?”

Corinne nodded.

“But presumably this one wasn’t happy with that. He wants to see the animals get fed,” she said bitterly. “That’s always popular. It’s just a shame for him that we’ve already finished. If he’d come ten minutes earlier he could have watched us devouring a deer.”

Daniel glanced at the man in the baseball cap, who was studying the menu intently.

“He seems more interested in his own food,” he said, then went on in a lower voice: “What were you about to say? About how the drugs get in?”

“We’re in a clinic, aren’t we? Clinics have drugs. And psychiatric clinics have drugs that affect the mind. I think the answer’s there somewhere.”

“From the clinic? You think the staff are dealing drugs? Or are they being stolen by a resident?”

She shrugged.

“It could be the staff, or it could be residents. Or it could be both of them, working together.”

“But I’ve heard that you can buy cocaine here. That’s hardly psychiatric medicine,” Daniel pointed out.

“They’re always getting deliveries of legal drugs. If there are a few illegal drugs hidden among them, maybe no one would notice.”

“In that case the staff have to be involved. Do you suspect anyone in particular?”

“No. It depends what their motives are. Money’s the usual one, of course. But you can imagine other reasons why someone would want to bring drugs into the valley.”

“Such as?”

“Academic greed. Brian Jenkins, the red-haired sociologist, might as well pack his bags and go home if there were no narcotics in the valley. His study of the effect of narcotics on the social structure here would be completely pointless and he’d lose his funding.”

“Couldn’t he just change the focus slightly? Himmelstal before and after drugs?” Daniel suggested. “Any other motives?”

“Love,” Corinne said. “Psychopaths can be extremely charming. It’s not impossible to imagine a resident having an affair with a hostess. Or a nurse.”

The group by the window had gotten their wine. They drank a toast, and the man in the baseball cap, who was evidently American, told a funny story that made the others laugh.

“The hostesses always work in pairs,” Daniel pointed out. “To stop anything like that happening. And the nurses are never alone with patients either.”

“In theory, yes. But not in practice, as you know. You must have been on your own with a nurse at some point when you were being treated for those burns. And who knows what you and Gisela got up to in her office.”

Daniel smiled.

“You’re right,” he said. “It’s a possibility.”

But he still didn’t want to let go of the idea of falcons flying in and out over the mountains, completely free and unchecked.

As soon as they got outside Daniel could tell that something had happened, or was about to happen.

The park was full of the special vibrant atmosphere that he had come to recognize during his time in Himmelstal. There were small groups of people standing around in the darkness, talking rapidly in low voices. An electric cart pulled up over on the path, and Father Dennis stuck his head out like a timid but curious animal peeping out of its burrow.

Then there was the sound of an engine on the road. The crowd of people was lit up by headlights, and a van drove into the clinic grounds at high speed and stopped outside the care center. Staff in white coats came streaming out of the building toward the van.

“Go away. There’s nothing to see,” the guards shouted, pushing back the residents who were gathering around the vehicle.

A stretcher was lifted out and carried quickly toward the door of the building. As it went past, Daniel had time to see its occupant: an unconscious young man with handsome features and a large wound to his forehead. The blanket covering his body was stained with blood.

“Raped. Found in the woods,” someone whispered.

“He’s a fucking idiot,” someone else snorted.

“Is he alive?”

“Looked like it.”

Father Dennis was approaching from the electric cart in full regalia. He stopped at a respectful distance from the others, crossed himself, and muttered a quick prayer. With his floor-length vestments flapping around his legs he hurried back to the cart and disappeared in the direction of the village.

The stretcher had been carried into the care center and the van drove off. The crowd dispersed, everyone heading off home. The performance was over.

“God, he was only a boy. A teenager,” Daniel said, upset.

Corinne shrugged her shoulders.

“Everyday life in Himmelstal. The worst thing is that you get used to it. At the start I thought it was terrible. Now I’m just glad it wasn’t me. And you start to worry what it might lead to. If someone’s going to want revenge. Sometimes an event like this can unleash a whole chain of violence. But this was probably just an ordinary sex attack. Nothing else will come of it.”

Daniel clenched his fists.

“I’m getting out of here,” he said in a hoarse voice. “This is worse than a madhouse. Worse than prison. I’m going to talk to Karl Fischer tomorrow.”

“You can always try. Thanks for dinner, by the way. It’s a long time since I ate in the restaurant. It’s no fun going up there on your own, and I haven’t had anyone to go with before now.”

“I’ll walk you home,” Daniel said.

“You don’t have to.”

“Yes I do. There’s no way you’re walking down to the village alone.”

“If you walk me home, then you’ll have to come back on your own afterward. It’s better for me to go now, while there are other people heading in that direction. I won’t be alone. Good night, and thanks for this evening.”

She gave him a quick hug, then hurried to catch up with the group heading down the slope. A few yards behind them she slowed down and followed them at that distance down toward the village. She was surprisingly brave, Daniel thought as he watched her go.

“Have you two been to the restaurant? Smart move.”

Daniel turned round and discovered Samantha standing by some bushes, smoking. She’d probably been there for a while, but there had been so many people around that he hadn’t noticed her. Now she was the only other person left. She wasn’t wearing any makeup and was dressed in loose jeans and a polyester tracksuit top. With her short hair, she looked like a teenage boy hanging around a street corner waiting for his gang to show up.

“What did you say?”

“I said it was smart of you to choose the restaurant. You’re avoiding the bierstube, aren’t you? I’d never drink beer if she was serving it.”

“Who?”

Samantha took a long drag on her cigarette and peered at him slyly through the smoke. She tilted her head, jutted out her elbow in a contrived posture, and dangled her hand.

“Ding-a-ling,” she said slowly.

Corinne was still doing her performance as a shepherdess, but it had been a while since Daniel had seen it. He thought about her taut, muscular body and her lightning reflexes when she was hitting the punching ball. Her secret, strong side, a long way from Samantha’s mocking parody.

He turned his back on Samantha to walk off to his cabin but changed his mind. A sudden curiosity, impossible to contain, made him ask: “Why wouldn’t you drink beer if she was serving it?”

“Because of what she did.”

“What did she do?”

“You don’t know?”

Samantha leaned against the lamppost, looked out into the darkness, and pretended to think.

“Hmm. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you. Maybe I’d spoil your idyllic image of the little shepherdess?”

Daniel understood that she was actually desperate to tell him. He waited.

“Okay,” she said eventually. “She poisoned little children.”

“You’re lying.”

“She was a pediatric nurse. She put something in their bottles.”

“She wasn’t a pediatric nurse. She was an actress.”

“To start with, yes. She got pregnant, then had a miscarriage, and couldn’t get pregnant again. After that she was obsessed with babies. She got a job in a maternity ward. Did a lot of overtime. Knitted blankets and clothes for the babies. Was always there, never took any breaks. When the kids started dying like flies there was an investigation. She managed to kill nine kids before she got caught.”

Daniel gulped. He thought about what Corinne had said: What she missed most in the valley was children.

“But what the fuck,” Samantha said with a shrug. “What is it Father Dennis always says in those e-mails?
We shouldn’t sit in judgment.
Quite right. You’re not sitting in judgment, are you? Me neither. But I wouldn’t drink any beer served by her. That’s not a judgment. That’s just self-preservation, pure and fucking simple.”

She took a last greedy drag on the cigarette, then tossed it into the bushes and glided off across the lawn.